Are you hustling in your creative business?

And if you are, did you start your creative business with the hope that you’d be working all day every day?

For most people, the answer is probably no. So we want to share some of our experiences with the hustle mentality and help you take a look at whether you are hustling yourself toward success or burnout.

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Is Hustle worth it?

Kayla began building the ​Ivory Mix Stock Shop while working a 9-to-5 interior design job. Her most creative hours in the early morning were spent on Ivory Mix before heading to her day job. She would occasionally work on her business for an hour or so in the evenings, and she often devoted a day on the weekends to Ivory Mix, as well. All of this was in addition to being a mom of 3.

Did this schedule hustle her toward success or burnout? Both actually. It was undeniably hard to juggle all of the time and energy demands, but given the opportunity to do it all over again, Kayla would probably choose to do just about the same as she did. The changes she would want to make would be paying to learn about certain topics faster instead of trying to do everything for free and hiring help sooner.

Or is Hustle just a badge you wear?

Once Kayla made the switch to working in her own business full time, she surprisingly found herself feeling a lot of guilt about not having to work all day, every day in order to create income. And this guilt led her to work more than was healthy, again bringing her to the point of burnout. However, as she began to take breaks, she discovered that her business didn’t fail. She had set the right systems in place to guarantee income even when she wasn’t in front of her computer. In this way, she learned that her value was greater than just the time she spent on growing her business.

Since this mindset shift, Kayla has worked on instituting a planned no-work day during her week. This allows her to have the time to focus on her kids, do self care, go places she wants to go and spend time with family and friends.

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Crystal was hustling big time in the world of human resources and recruiting. She worked for a call center that serviced several large corporations, and 10-12 hours days were not uncommon. After burning out in this lifestyle, she wanted to have more flexibility and time with her kids.

That’s when she decided to start ​Crystal Clear Creative Studios ​and make her passion for photography into a professional pursuit.

Once Hustle is turned on, how can you turn it off?

However, when Crystal made this transition, she found that it was difficult to turn “the hustle” off. She felt like she had to be working all the time and always jumping into the next project in order to be successful. But what she actually learned is that burnout is a choice. By simplifying and setting good expectations for herself and with her clients, she became even more successful without the stress.

Crystal also instituted a system of half-days where she would spend the first half of the day on her business and the second half with her kids to have more balance in her life. And even though her kids are older now and she’s able to spend more hours working, she still tries to balance work hours with other activities that let her brain rest, recharge her batteries or stoke her creativity in order to bolster her business productivity.

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Protect yourself from Hustle Burnout

After our experiences, here are a few key practices we recommend for avoiding burnout and protecting your time and energy:

1. Listen to your body.
2. Prioritize self care.
3. Delegate where you can.
4. Know your zones of genius and niche down into them.
5. Stop doing things that no longer serve you or your goals.

What Next?

And if you’re really ready to abandon the hustle mentality and feeling overwhelmed, we encourage you to lean in and look at our Creative Boss Society, where we can offer you many more ideas and a lot of support for doing this. We had over 90 founding members join us this month, and after only 2 weeks, here’s what one of our members had to say:

“I’ve been struggling with coming up with an idea for my future products, and just listening to that Live mentoring session gave me so many insights into how I can develop a waitlist for my product while working on the actual product itself in the future!   Thank you for creating this society and for keeping it SO affordable too.”

We want you to ask yourself if you are fully committed to doing what it takes to move past having no clue where to begin or not following through on your own plans. Would you like to actually start growing your unique offer, attracting your ideal leads and making more sales instead? If the answers are yes and yes, head over to the ​Creative Boss Society membership page​ to learn more about how you can get the mentoring, accountability and support you need for sustainable growth!