The Conscious Hustle
Crafting Success With Presence

In today’s newsletter, we’ll tackle the challenge of creating more creative output without force and hardship, but with alignment and flow – harnessing the power within you for sustainable performance and excellence.

As a corporate leader or an entrepreneur leading your mission, ensuring you stay in alignment and consistently taking inspired action is vital to your success and overall life satisfaction and fulfilment.

Many of us ambitious people sacrifice our health, our relationships, and our overall quality of life in the pursuit of career and business success. The result is external success: your company achieving 7 or 8 figures in revenue, your multiple 6-figure salary with huge bonuses, but you’re spending 80 hours a week hustling with your health deteriorating and relationships suffering,

Is that really your definition of wealth or success? What if you could achieve all that external success from a place of alignment, flow, and joy?

That’s true leverage.

In today’s article, I share:

The Old Paradigm of Performance

There have been times in my career where I was stuck in the office at 11 pm wondering why I work so hard to get so little in return.

As I build my business there are times where I haven’t been getting the results I wanted, and I question if I’m working “hard enough”.

Then there have been times when I’m on a walk and the article writes itself. I sit down to work in the early hours of the day and feel like I’ve accomplished a day’s worth of work. Clients and collaborative opportunities have come to me with no forced action – things just seem to happen.

I always get curious about this. In the former, what paradigm was I living in?

“The harder I work, the greater the output.”

But my life experience continues to prove that wrong.

As I Google the definition of hustle, here’s what pops out: push roughly; jostle. obtain illicitly or by forceful action.

Imagine your working life of 30 to 40 years of consistently pushing and taking “forceful action”? No one will sit there on their deathbed wishing they had taken more forced action in life. Or living a life of “force”.

Hard Work vs Easy Work

There are people who preach the hustle culture of working hard and achieve great results. And there are also people who preach the work of “ease”. They focus on the easy and also get results.

It can be confusing. What do we do?!

Here’s my take: both hard and easy are created in language and are subjective terms. Your “easy” can be someone else’s “hard”.

Ultimately, our own life experience will teach us what works and what doesn’t work. And we will get in life what we believe in life.

That’s why you have people who have achieved success by working ‘hard’, and those who have achieved success working ‘easy’ or effortlessly.

True Leverage

Definition of leverage is vast but one most relevant in life and work outside of finance is: use (something) to maximum advantage.

When we sit down and work for a few productive hours and create output that the average creates in a week – that’s leverage.

When you feel like you’re not working, but the energy is flowing through you and you’re creating your desired output – that’s the ultimate leverage. There’s no work. It’s all allowing the energy within you to be expressed through you like a child playing.

Allowing the words to write. Allowing the conversations to flow. Allowing the slide decks to be created. Allowing your business plan to come to you (many times by your potential customers/clients).

So, how can we maximise this true leverage on a daily basis?

The Conscious Hustle

This is a term I use to describe the work pattern of a creative, mindful, and high-performing leader. Those who are determined to “get shit done” and yet do so with maximum energetic leverage and remain in flow.

The Conscious Hustle is a way of allowing the energy within you to work through you. It’s inspired action and it feels satisfying. It’s “working” but in a conscious and deliberate way. Not doing ‘hard work’ for the sake of it to make you feel worthy to receive the rewards.

At the same time, it’s not just sitting there and meditating all day hoping results will land on your head. It is a way of connecting with your greatest leverage (your inner energy) and channeling it into the physical form. From formless to form.

It doesn’t feel like “work”. Someone from the outside would look at you, the Conscious Hustler, and they may think you “work hard” but deep down, you’re having fun playing with projects you’re obsessed about.

The “Hustle” in the Conscious Hustle

I still include the word “hustle” in the conscious hustle because maintaining alignment does require “work” or more so discipline. It requires you to keep your mind, body, and spirit in check.

This may mean:

These are all changes that may not be easy initially. But once you achieve a state of alignment (which is a moment-to-moment practice) then you achieve a place where the work flows through you.

5 Step Process For The Conscious Hustle

For example, here’s my 5 step process as I wrote this article:

Science For The Skeptic

This might sound a bit “woo-woo” to some of you, but the scientists amongst our community might appreciate visiting some of Professor David Hawkins’ work.

In exploring the concept of alignment and sustainable performance, Professor David Hawkins, in his book ‘Power vs. Force,’ distinguishes between power, derived from higher states of consciousness, and force, associated with lower levels.

Hawkins utilises a scientifically calibrated scale of consciousness to explain how individuals operating at higher consciousness levels, like acceptance, reason, and love, inherently wield true power— a power that enhances life without exerting force.

Conversely, lower energy states such as guilt or fear are linked to force, which ultimately proves unsustainable and self-defeating. Aligning our actions with higher consciousness levels, as advocated by Hawkins, can lead to greater fulfilment and success, fostering a state where influence is achieved effortlessly and ethically.

One Reflection For Today:

What one step from the Conscious Hustle framework can I implement on my most important project, today?