Rejecting the hustle and getting comfortable with microscopic progress

How I'm dismantling my long standing hustle habits and getting comfortable with focusing on tiny progressions instead of big wins.

Ever since I was in my second year of University I’ve had a side hustle. That’s over 12 years of grafting away in every spare moment of my day, sacrificing evenings and weekends to ‘make things happen’ and constantly being glued to a computer screen.

As my health started to become a little more trickier to manage and as I got older and more in tune with how I want my life to play out, I’ve started to dismantle the ideas around hustling and the beliefs about success that come with it.

It’s been a little over a month since I launched The Slow Marketing Club and I’ve been surprised this last week how uncomfortable I feel around not spending every spare second trying to make it a success.

My intention for the next few months is to try and find my people. To find those that want to be able to run their own businesses or creative side-hustles, but who don’t want to burn themselves out trying to manage their marketing.

I’m not interested in making money from it right now and luckily I don’t have to. With a steady marketing agency job, financially I have the freedom to take things at a snail’s pace, but that pace is very new to me. I don’t know how to go slow in business, it’s something I’m very much learning as I go.

This was one of the main reasons I started the Slow Marketing Club though. I wanted to find a way that I could have my own business, but that forced me to slow things down and work a lot more intentionally. What better than a business that revolves completely around slow business?

I have no choice but to practice what I preach and so it means that I’m learning a lot of lessons in real time.

I recently wrote to the members of The Slow Marketing Club newsletter (which you can sign-up for here if you think it might be your thing) about my ever changing relationship with using social media marketing. As much as I wanted it to work for me, I started to feel the familiar social fatigue that comes with always shouting in order to be heard in an overcrowded room.

I much prefer sitting down on a Sunday and writing these posts. To just take the time to talk about what’s going on with me, both personally and in my business. I love sitting down on a Tuesday morning when I’m not working my 9-5 job and writing my bi-weekly newsletter or creating a free workbook or resource for the subscribers of my mailing list.

I want my business marketing to feel more like an event. Something I can enjoy and really get into a flow state with.

But, once again the worry about whether I’m spending enough time and energy on building this business creeps in. It’s like as soon as I make efforts to slow down and find a better balance, my brain races on ahead and creates even more noise to fill in the silence.

I feel guilty for not churning out blogs for my website or freebies that people can download. That’s what I did with my last business, Energetic Tarot, and all that happened was I built a mailing list of nearly 4000 people, most of whom had just wanted a free guide or workshop and very few who wanted to actually spend money with my business.

Right now I find myself in this weird limbo, where I know that hustling and increasing those subscriber or follower numbers doesn’t make a successful business, but also feeling guilty for not trying harder to reach a wider audience.

Whenever those thoughts come creeping in, that tell me I’m slacking, being lazy, not trying hard enough to build the life I want, I have to remind myself that the whole point of building a slow business… is to do it slowly.

I’m working on focusing on the tiny progressions I see from the work I am doing. Whether that’s a new subscriber every month, or 2-3 more visits to my website compared to the previous month. I want to be able to see success in the minute moves forward rather than waiting to celebrate only when those big dream goals have been achieved.

It might mean working on my own beliefs around what slow really is and being open to being uncomfortable with the pace I’ve chosen to go at, but if that’s what it takes then I’m ready for the challenge.

Cat x