705: Not Every Hobby Needs to Be a Hustle

Maybe it's happened to you, that thing that you love, your hobby, your passion. Oh, maybe it was writing or coaching. You tried to make money off it. You tried to transition it into a side gig or maybe your main gig. And then it got hard and then you felt behind like you, you weren't doing good enough. And then one day you even realized you no longer even like that thing you used to love. You killed it. You killed the passion. Oof. Let's talk about how sometimes the things we love should just stay things we love. No hustle, no hacks, no trying to build it or share it or any of that. Just kept, kept for us. We're going to talk today about honoring those things we love by giving them the space they need, taking our hands off them, taking all the pressure away and why you need things like that in your life and you should never ever try to transfer them into something, force them into something that aren't what they're meant to be. Let's find out if you've got something like that right now and what you can or should be doing with it so that it stays something gorgeous inside your heart. Flow dreaming still kinda woo Woo is just what it sounds like. An escape into the world of woo. Also a ride into you and how to feel happier, wiser and more self aware in every way. It's your ultimate journey into personal growth and inner power. We'll explore ideas like how your energy self influences the kinds of opportunities you encounter, or how your personal growth can drive your business growth, or even how that feeling of being stuck is really always coming from something else. We just have to figure out what. That's right. We're a dash of woo woo. A sprinkle of self care, a heap of problem solving and pattern busting, and a giant cup of encouragement. We're going to relight so much passion, purpose, self love and confidence in you that you practically stagger. I'm Summer McStravik, your host and welcome to Florida. Slow dreaming, still kind of woo woo. Ah, my friends, we have been on a bender of self discovery topics the last few episodes. I hope you're enjoying them. I love the freedom of being able to go off in all these different directions, talk about all these different thoughts. Yes, they're always infused with an energetic emotional component, a component of flow, a sort of spiritual component. Right. A personal growth. Because that's who I am down deep in my core. So we're going to do that again today as we talk about things that are hobbies and things that are work and sometimes they really need to stay out of each other's way. Caveat. You hear those birds? Yeah, right there. I tell you, my garden, my property, is just awash in birds right now. I've even got two red tailed hawks that I think have nested close by because I see them in the same tree, and they have a very distinct, distinctive sound. So if you hear birds, if you hear sounds of dogs moving around, if you hear cats purring, this is the office that I've created. And I know I should shut all the windows and doors and keep myself buttoned up tight in the heat, but frankly, again, my podcast is something I love, and I'm gonna do it the way I love it, which means you get to hear a little bit of the environment that I do it in, which is a perfect segue into our topic today, which is, do you have something you love? Do you have something. Okay, here, Here? Of course, you're like, yeah, duh, Summer, I have something I love. People are always saying to us, build a career around something you love. Do what you love, do what you love. It's a mantra. It's like a handed down in our society. And so we take these things that we enjoy and we say, well, now, I should do them as a career, I should monetize them. I should do them full time. But what people don't really talk about is maybe if I did it full time, I wouldn't enjoy it anymore. Maybe if I tried to monetize it, it would be filled with pressure and I'd be criticizing myself to a degree that I don't do now with it. These are really important questions and really important for you to ask them of yourself. I'll give you some examples. You all know I've worked with thousands of people over the last 20 years in case you don't, because I said, you know, but maybe you don't. Maybe this is your first or second or third time listening. I have been working for 20 years taking people into what I call their flow, showing them this sort of divine, guided direction, this flowing energy of their future, teaching people how to create, how to program and become their future selves, how to manifest, how to get in touch with their own inner guidance and so forth, right? Radically changing people's directions and lives in this work. And one thing that I have seen happen many times over is this. Someone will say, well, I always was good at blah, blah, blah. In fact, I've got someone like this now. She's great at numbers. She's great as an accountant. She hates it. She hates it. But she's built her whole career around it, and she's good at it. And people are always asking her, can you do more? She's like, summer, I have no shortage of people asking for me to work for them. The problem is, I don't want to. We have this discussion. Just because you're good at it doesn't mean you're under any obligation to do it. Sometimes we think because the universe blessed us with a certain skill, we have to do it. You don't. You actually don't. But sometimes the universe, life has blessed us with a talent, a joy, a pursuit. You're like, I love pickleball. I love pickling. I love training dogs and dog sitting. I love reiki. I love hypnotherapy. I love designing landscapes, Right? The list is endless. All of our individual passions. Sometimes, though, our passions are there because. Think of them like a little valve, a little steam valve. The little. The little hole on some of our pot lids, you know, that lets the steam out because otherwise it'll just boil over and steam up and overflow on the stove. You got that little, little hole that lets the steam out. Sometimes our hobbies, our passions are just like that little hole. We love them because they let the steam out. We love them because there's no pressure on them. We love them because we don't have to sell that painting to feed ourselves. We love them because we can practice our healing on a friend. And we don't have to worry, did they like it? Did they not? Are they going to pay me? Are they going to refer me? You see, all of those thoughts are not the things we love. Are they going to like it? Are they going to pay me? Are they going to refer me? Can I build a business? Typically, we actually don't like those thoughts. So when we do something we love and suddenly we apply all those kinds of thoughts onto it, you can see exactly where this is going. So I want to turn on its head. This whole concept that your side hustle should become your main hustle. Your hobby should become your side hustle. Sometimes your hobby is just your hobby. Your joy is just your joy. The minute you take something you love and start applying the pressure on it, support me, feed me, validate me, get clients for me, get hired by someone for this. The whole texture of it changes. It changes for many of us. Now, of course, this is not a blanket statement. Maybe you are a great artist and you're like, summer, there's just nothing else I want to do. In my life, I just want to create my art and sell it. Then create your art and sell it. As long as you still enjoy creating the art, you may end up not liking the other parts of it. Selling it, figuring out who's going to buy it, dealing with customers, dealing with galleries, dealing with, you know, online print on demand places for it. You may not enjoy any of that other stuff, but I want you still enjoying your art. I would like you to be thinking right now as you're listening, am I doing that with anything in my life? Is there something that I keep pressuring myself like, you really should do that. You should really start that. You should really sell that. You should really. You should really. Maybe you're not doing it because at heart you don't want to make it have to be different for you than it already is. Because maybe it's already fulfilling the extent of what it should be fulfilling in you. And when you're shoulding like I should do, I should do, what you're saying is, it should do more for me, I should do more with it. Maybe not. Maybe not. I was working with another client recently, and again, she's got this hobby she wants to pursue, and she's got her real work, her regular daily work. And her regular daily work has slowly been driving her absolutely insane. She is so over it. She's so done. She's like, I am so done with this career, and yet I, you know, I need it to support me. And I'm supposed to be showing up harder and my boss was telling me that my performance and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I asked her, I'm like, you know, maybe you're trying to get too much satisfaction from one and not enough satisfaction from the other. Instead of transitioning from a job you hate to a hobby that you want to grow into something big and putting that pressure on you to make your hobby do that for you. Maybe instead we should be shifting how you're feeling about the role of, of each thing in your life. Maybe this job, job that you're doing, its role is to give you something that's relatively easy. I mean, you could do it. That's partly why you're so bored there. It's so easy for you. Maybe your role now is to do that, get a nice, fat, lovely paycheck and simply create more time for yourself to do the thing that's fulfilling to your soul. See, many of us think that our jobs should be 100% fulfilling to our soul. Our jobs are supposed to do all these crazy different things for us, right? They're supposed to pay us well, keep us safe and secure, give us our health insurance if you're in the U.S. give us our retirement. They're supposed to fulfill us and make us feel happy and like a job well done and satisfied. They're supposed to give us our friend group. I mean, we load them up. But what if jobs don't need to do all that? What if jobs just need to fulfill a certain few core things and do them really well? What if instead you're asking other parts of your life to step in and fulfill? I need to feel creatively engaged. I need to feel validated by my peers. All that can be done with your amazing and fabulous hobby. The key here is a lot of us let our jobs take over our lives and we don't leave any room for those other pieces to fulfill us. If you're working 60 hours a week, if you're working 40 hours a week but still driving an hour back and forth 50 hours, you're cutting down the time that you could be receiving that good, yummy payment from your hobby. So maybe a little recalibration is in order. Maybe you can stop asking your job to be the be all, end all of everything for you. Imagine if you did this to a relationship. Let's say you have a partner. And you say to your partner, okay, you've got to be my provider. You've got to keep me safe, you've got to make me feel good about myself. You've got to be my best friend. Okay, so far, yeah, this is feeling good, right? You've also got to be my parent. You've got to be my daughter, you've got to be my girlfriends that I go out with. You've got to be my old school friends. You have got to be my mentor and my professional guide at work. You have got to be. Your partner would be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. There is no way I can be every role to you. You'd say, but you're my partner. You're supposed to. No, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not. And in fact, if I try to be all that to you, I'm going to fail at most of it. And you know what's going to happen? You're going to get fed up with me, you're going to get frustrated with me, you're going to get bored of me, you're going to get angry at me. You're going to be mad that I can't fulfill all of those things. You see, it's funny when we put it in that light, right? Like, I'd never ask. My partner does certain things. They have a. There's boundaries right around what we get from the person who loves us and whom we love. We need to do the same thing with our jobs. There's boundaries. You get X from me, I get Y from you, and that's it. Now I know it's a different way of looking at things than where we're kind of trained to. It's sort of like, you know how other cultures make a differentiation between romantic love and what families are choosing. Like, it's the families who get married. No, it's romantic love. It's whoever I want. And screw the families. Like, there's this. There's a cultural divide there between these two ways of thinking. And yet they're both right in their own way, and they're both wrong in their own way. True, we do marry each other's families. True, we should love and tolerate and enjoy the person that we're with. I'd like you to think about your work, your job, your career the same way. What role can it do for you? Can you take the pressure off to fulfill everything? Maybe even the pressure is, I want to see how far I can go, what I'm capable of, but my job just isn't rewarding that. They have me stuck, plateaued. They don't see any more value. I'm not growing. You're like, it's important, summer. Because I do this. 40 hours of my week. It's the most of my life. Like, I getcha, getcha. Is your job fulfilling your needs? Is it paying your bills? Do they like you? Is it, on balance, a healthy place to be? And maybe your answer is, yeah, yes to all that, but, yes, but go. Aha. Let's turn your focus over here. Can you enroll in a nice course in the evenings? Can you spend your weekends doing xyz? Can you take a week off for a retreat into the hobby or fascination of your choice? Can you start letting these other things fulfill you? The same way that sometimes I just need to go out with my girlfriends, have a happy hour and talk? Right. I don't ask my husband to do that. I mean, we go out and we talk and we have a happy hour, but it's different. I get different needs met. Maybe your hobby just needs to be the release valve for you. Maybe the squeezing you've been doing on it be my main thing isn't really what it needs to be. Because what happens if it becomes your main Thing, then what's your release valve, you say? Ah, well, Summer, you know, ideally, I don't need a release valve if I'm happy doing everything of this thing. But the thing is, usually when we turn our hobbies into jobs, we end up doing things around hobby we do not want to do. Do you really want to be shipping, you know, your. Your Etsy things all over the world, spending hours a day fighting with the post office? Do you really want to be sweating it out that you didn't charge this client enough and then they didn't pay? Now you got to chase after them? Do you really want to be doing that? Maybe not. So today, I guess it's kind of an eye opener, right? It's like a. It's sort of like. Sort of like a shower thought type of episode. Oh, my gosh. Speaking of which, you know, we haven't done in a while is a real shower. Thoughts? Okay, today's shower thought. Totally off topic, but fun. Okay. I came across a meme recently that said somebody else's parents probably used you as a bad example for their kids. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, they probably did. Oh, my God, really? But probably. It's funny because we think that if you're a parent, you're gonna relate. If you're a kid of a parent, which is everybody, you're probably gonna relate. As parents, we sweat over things that we do wrong. We sweat over situations we could have handled better. We sweat over our children doing things that we don't approve of or getting in trouble, our own personal failures, our lack of being an ex, our losing our temper, the time that we did not spend with them when we could have so many things. And we think, oh, gosh, our kids are gonna. I hope they're not ruined because of this. I hope I did well enough. The funny thing is, though, I've had these conversations with my parents. My mom will say something like, well, I always thought I should have, blah, blah, blah, and I wish I had. And I've looked at her, you know, as an adult, right? And said, what are you talking about? Like, I never even noticed that. You know what? I never even needed that. But do you remember that time when you. Blah, blah, blah, and she's like, no, I have no memory at all of that. And I'm like, well, that was devastating for me. That changed everything. I needed that and didn't get it, you know? And the look on her face is horrible. Like, how can I, A, have screwed that up and B, not have realized it for 40 years. But that's what happens. I'm very clear that right now, with my own kids, I am doing something like that. There are things that I sweat over that I think I'm not doing as great at as I should as a mom, that they are going to be like, what are you talking about? I have no idea. And there's going to be something 30 years from now that they're going to say, you know, what I really needed, you know what you never did, you know what? You said that one time. And I'm going to say what? I have no idea. What we think and what our kids think will never precisely line up. And you will screw up in ways that you never realize, and you will do things perfectly wonderful in ways that you thought you actually screwed up. And yes, I think other parents have judged me for sure, but I don't even know about what. Again, the things I think they probably have judged me on may not be the things they actually are judging me on. And it's a blessing and a curse, right? Because on the one hand, you kind of would like to know what's, you know, you don't want to come across poorly, but on the other hand, kind of glad. I don't know, because if I did, then I'd be tempted to change. If I changed, I don't really know who I'd be changing for. I'd be changing for some other parents. Why would I change myself for them if something I'm doing for my kids feels right for me? So think about that, huh? I know I'm whipping you all over the place in today's episode, but I thought that was a very interesting shower thought. All right, let's return briefly, your hobby. Can you just kiss and hug your hobby now? Can you just. Oh, let's go back to it. I want to leave you today with a small assignment. Your assignment is this. Look at a hobby that you have. A passion, a dream, something you've been noodling around in your mind saying, I want to do this. I want to become this. I want to make money off this. I want to shift my career toward this. Have a what I call a come to Jesus moment with it hobby. Are you fulfilling me? Am I already liking you, loving you? Or am I constantly looking at you and saying, you're not good enough until you support me? You're not doing enough for me. I'm not doing enough for you until I grow you, make you bigger, make you make money for me. It's kind of pushy, isn't it? Imagine if you had a friend and you said, I love you every time we're together. It's so amazing. You fulfill something in me versus a friend that you said. But we need to do something bigger and better. And if we don't, you know, we need to make money together, we need to do this. Your friend may be like, no, not really what I'm interested in. Maybe that's your hobby. Play with this. Maybe this shift in career is to a different career than your hobby. Something you're good at, that you can stand tolerate doing something that gives you some mild sense of joy, an accomplishment, right? Something that you can manage to spend your days doing. You don't hate it, you're not stressed out about it. It feels good enough. It's fulfilling its role of paying your bills, making sure you can retire. Do you need to ask for that extra layer from it or not? Do you need your partner to be your partner, your parent, your best friend, your child, your sister? Do you need them to fulf fill all those roles? Positively fascinating, isn't it? All right, well, today we didn't talk too much in the woo woo realm, but we will and we do. As you know, you never know what you're gonna get each episode. I love the fact that you have a stretchy and open mind that you're willing to pursue all these different thoughts about yourself, because that's really the point of this. Some of them are spiritual and woo woo. And some are just straight up, hey, what's going on with you? Do you know you do you know you do you want to know you. And that's why we're here, and that's why we're talking. And I hope that's why you're flicking on this podcast as you're cooking your dinner or doing your workout or taking your walk or driving someplace. Because when you end it, as in right now, you're thinking. And that very feeling of self observation gives you this beautiful pleasurable sense of growth. Right? Growth. In fact, you might even think of self growth, personal development, this podcast as your hobby. You do not need to take it any further. It's fulfilling exactly what it needs to fulfill. Anyway, that's my hope. With that, I'm gonna remind you guys that you can get all of my past episodes of this podcast. Apples, itunes. There are hundreds, 10 seasons the first 10 years. All those episodes are locked up behind the wall of the subscription, which by the way, you get for free. There's a free trial and then it's only $2, 99 cents a month my friends. I could not even buy a Starbucks Coffee for $2.99. I made it to so cheap. I made it for you. So if you want to go in and dig back because I have to support, you know, being able to offer this subscription, but I made it for you. Go back so many years of riches of jewels to just suck on like a like a little candy, hard candy in your mouth. So go grab those and enjoy yourself. I hope too to see some of you in ME school. In fact, I've got a word about ME school happening right now. MI school is happening and it only happens once a year. This year we're starting in September and it is a wild and wonderful ride. In fact, last year more than half of the students were taking it for their second or third time. Which is crazy. What it tells you is that one MI school is epic for learning how to awaken or accelerate your intuition, learning to manifest at a richer, deeper level and for creating those long standing desires, making those things in your life finally real. And two ME school works. It just works. So head on over to flowdreaming.com meschool. We are registering you right now. I really hope to see you as part of our MI School class and one of the next people on this planet to graduate into their next level self. Again. Just head on over to flowdreaming.com meschool and learn all about it.