The Entrepreneur's Identity Crisis: From Workaholic to Leader - The Transition No One Prepares You For

  You do not develop big ideas when you're running a hundred miles per hour, you know, working 80 hours a week. I talked about being uncomfortable. The discomfort for me was the idea of being lazy as old melody calls it. And it's hard because society rewards visible effort, like hard work, long hours, stress, exhaustion.

It's what people applaud, but the most impactful work usually happens behind the scenes. We have to start measuring our productivity by impact and not just by our effort. Hello, business human. Are you a misfit? A person who wants to make a difference in this business world? Are you one of the unconventional?

The visionaries, the quiet innovators, the heart centered leaders, the purpose driven, the community builders, the givers, then you are my people. I used to think business was a secret formula to be discovered and followed, but now I know it isn't a set of rules. It's an exciting, creative adventure, and I want to be on that adventure with you.

I am your lady of business, Melody Edwards. Welcome to the Business Misfits Podcast. Hello, BizFit. It is I, Melody, your lady of business. And today I'm going to talk about the identity crisis that no one prepares you for as a recovering workaholic. It's that painful transition from being the worker bee, from being the hustler, to being a leader.

I think it's a lie that we're sold that you have to work really hard and only after you've worked really hard to get to where you want to go, then you can stop working hard because that's the goal, right? The goal of working hard is to stop working hard. So many of us work as if retirement or your business operating without you or you're selling your business is the finish line.

midlife crisis it was end of: 2012

That's just the way it goes with a lot of us entrepreneurs. And what I hadn't considered is what it would feel like the minute I signed those papers. Giving ownership over to somebody else. I lost my identity because that was my entire identity. It was business, business owner. And it dawned on me, Oh my God, if I'm not a business owner, what am I?

And it turns out I was a stay at home mother, which turned out to be the hardest job I've ever had. But. Originally, the intention was, you know, that I had worked really hard. I was burned out. My husband had just graduated from engineering school. And my husband, Matt said, now's a good time for you to go and do the things that you've always wanted to do, like your art and your music, the creative things.

And it sounded really good to me and it's what I wanted. And, and again, the minute I signed the papers, I didn't know who I was. Or why I existed in this world. It's kind of a little joke at this point, but it wasn't a joke at that time. I went into a very serious depression. I felt very resentful towards my husband because I felt like he had tricked me into being.

A mother and a wife, which is what I was already, but then it became that I was only a mother and a wife. That's how it felt. And before I had signed those papers, I had thought I'll become a business coach. I can help other business owners, or I could put out a book. There are all sorts of ideas that I had.

But again, the minute I signed the papers, I lost all my confidence. I had put so much of myself into that thing that I didn't. know how to be anything else. That's why I call myself a recovering workaholic because it's an addiction and it is something I will always go back towards because it's easy. I always default to busyness.

It's what I was raised to do. It's what makes me feel good because I'm checking boxes. Workaholic is the only socially acceptable form of addiction. If you really think about it and it is an addiction. Try to get a workaholic to stop working. Even when you're home, if you're a workaholic, you're going to find a thing to do.

Whether it's like a house project or planning your next vacation. There's always something, do you know what? It's much easier than thinking. Which is the other side of that transition that i'm going to talk about i always say thinking is hard and my coach sam told me no mal you're a really good thinker it's not that the thinking is hard it's the focus that's hard but what i meant when i said thinking is hard is to really develop as a leader to develop as a business owner or just in the game of business you have to always be learning and growing right.

And there's a surface level to that, and then there's a deeper level. And that's what I want to talk about today. What is that transition that gets you from that busy person to a strategic thinker on the highest level? When we start our careers, All we have is our ability to work. We don't have any experience yet.

So we make up for that in hard work, especially in the service industries where I came from. Your value is the time that you put in working. But this becomes a problem as you try to grow beyond that because you have conditioned yourself. At the time, I remember that I linked my busyness to success. If I am not busy, am I even important?

Because bus busyness is an ego boost. We crave that dopamine hit of checking the boxes on the task list on the busy list. That's why emptying our inbox feels so good because it's giving us instant gratification. But you have to wonder, am I moving my mission forward or am I just sending emails? And most of the time you're just sending emails.

It's an illusion of productivity just because we're working hard doesn't mean that we're doing the right work. And that's why administrative busywork is easier to measure in many ways. Like. We know how to measure that kind of work, but we don't know how to measure the internal work that we have to do as well as the thinking work that's harder to measure big ideas.

I think they they take a lot of time and it takes a level of discomfort to develop them. You do not develop big ideas when you're. Running a hundred miles per hour, you know, working 80 hours a week. I talked about being uncomfortable. The discomfort for me was the idea of being lazy. As old melody calls it.

I think of people who aren't doing something as being lazy. The fact that I sit in front of a computer all day and do quote unquote work. And don't always know what that work is. It just is like we're recycling work and it's never ending. I used to go out in the field and actually do things with my body and have like accomplished something visible at the end of the day.

Now, most of my work is coming up with ideas and figuring out how they could work and then figuring out how to delegate it to the right people so that it can work. And. How to measure that and just how to grow the company. Like these are all bigger things. How do I grow myself as a leader? We have to start measuring our productivity by impact and not just by our effort.

And it's hard because society rewards visible. Effort, like hard work, long hours, stress, exhaustion. It's what people applaud, but the most impactful work usually happens behind the scenes. And that's why we have these CEOs who are making so much money. And we look at them and we're like, how can they possibly be worth that much money?

Well, The way that they're thinking and making decisions and taking action. First of all, it's like a highest level of pressure, but also their understanding and their ability to solve problems and see opportunity is on a different level than most of us. And they're very practiced and disciplined at that.

Another reason why I think we love being busy is because it keeps us from the existential loneliness that we don't want to feel. What happens when you stop? Like, do you stop ever? And not because you're exhausted, do you just stop? Busyness keeps us from facing the deeper questions about our lives and our existence.

The silent fear is, if I stop working, what am I even here for? I know. That I will always default to work until I retrain my mind, until I create ways to stop that from happening, I will always default to work a lot of times. It's through the help of my executive assistant. One of their jobs is to make sure that I have space.

For the deeper work that I'm meant to be doing and we carve that out into my calendar, because if I don't have that space and sometimes have babysitting involved to keep me on task and on track with that, I will default to the 500 other little tasks that won't move any needle forward, but they'll make me feel like I did something.

So there's a shift that needs to happen. The workaholic in us thrives on hustling, but to. Become an actual leader. It demands something else. That's why hustling harder does not work when you're in charge. Leadership is all about decisions, vision, delegation. It is not about hustle. So you're supposed to go from being a hardworking person to suddenly being a delegator, a thinker, a strategist, and just stop doing the things like that's a really hard ask.

For people and it's the hardest part of of leadership I think is letting go of being the one who does the work and then as I became a new leader, I still got stuck in that micromanagement game instead of actually truly leading because leading is really tough. It is hard. You have to be thinking on a whole different level.

Micromanaging is easy. You're just telling people that they're doing it wrong. And then you're showing them your way is better, but it doesn't help people to think for themselves. Thinking on their own is the goal, right? As employers, I think our ideal employee is going to be proactive, self motivated, you know, a creative thinker, they're emotionally intelligent.

They have good critical thinking skills. They're basically. Us, but we're entrepreneurs. We are kind of like an anomaly and thinking that we can just hire an employee to be that person and that they're just also going to manage themselves and everything will be cool. That's very rare. You can grow people to be that kind of person and they should have the, some of those innate traits to begin with, but your role becomes.

Leading alongside people to encourage them and to support them as they take on those steps towards their growth and towards becoming leaders themselves. The real terrifying truth of it all is that your natural talent is capped. By your refusal to stop working think about that my natural talent my creative talent my melodyness sparkly brain stuff is capped by my refusal to stop working because hustling was my strength and now it's my biggest limitation.

And that's where the scary part of everything is. That's where the scary change needs to happen. You have to shift at that point of understanding that you have to stop working and you have to start thinking. This is a hard topic because I'm still struggling with this. And I probably always will. One of the reasons for that is that I am not an overly confident person in general.

I tend to think. About myself in a different way than maybe I'm perceived. And so even though I'm confident that I'm a very smart person and that I have great ideas, what I'm not confident about is my resiliency all the time, because I'm an emotional person. My emotions go up and down. And I think this is true for a lot of business owners, entrepreneurs, like we struggle with.

Mental health issues, think about that sparkly brain, visionary mania of creativity and ideas and that energy, you know, it ebbs and flows and on the other side of that are days and days where I just don't have anything. I don't have anything to give. I don't have any energy to create and I accept that, but it doesn't mean that it's easy.

So I really cherish the days when I do have that energy to create and innovate and come up with cool ideas. But the other side of that is being, um, consistent for a team that can be very hard because that's also, you know, mind stuff that you have to deal with. You have to be a higher level of you for a team because they need you to be at your highest level and we don't always feel it, right?

Like we are human beings. We don't always feel it. I'm self deprecating a lot and I'm not sure why that is. It's just my way of being and I'm working on that. But I realized recently that. I tell people in my company a lot, Oh, I'm, I'm not good at marketing and sales. And that's not true. Actually, it's an area of weakness for me because I never was trained to understand digital marketing.

I understand it now on a much higher level, but I always, for all my other businesses that were local businesses, I always did organic marketing. So I never had to learn all of that stuff. I didn't have to worry about it because organic was natural for me. And now it's different. All this to say that. My team who, when they hear me say, you know, offhanded comments like, Oh, I'm so bad at marketing and sales.

Well, what are they going to think? They're going to think, Oh my God, am I going to have a paycheck? Right. When I get in front of them and I talk to them about. The vision, I can sell that vision because I believe in it fully, and I know we're going to be successful and I know that we're closer than we've ever been.

So I have to be really careful in my journey as a leader to not be too human. They want me to be human, but they don't want me to be too human because they're thinking about themselves too, and rightfully so. All of this is energy, you guys, it really is. There's a secret that no one tells you, which is that there is no done.

There's no final done. We are always chasing the next things in that cycle of busyness. We have to train ourselves to celebrate the progress. And it's hard sometimes because as idea people, we don't look at the past. We're looking at the present what's wrong, what can we fix? And then the future, where can we get to, and we forget how far we've come.

If you haven't read the book, the gap in the game, I highly recommend it because. Basically what it's about is we're wired to focus on what's left undone instead of focusing on what we've accomplished and so measuring from where you started which is the gain is way more powerful than measuring from your ideal the gap it's a mental shift that you.

Have to make, but it can transform your relationship with how you view success. And it really is just a mindset and something that you have to do every day. This is part of the mentality that we have to shift the idea of what success is. The thing that's hard about growth and becoming a leader, the way that I want to become a leader is that there's never going to be a point where I feel like I'm good enough.

I will always need to be looking deeper. I want to be the wisest version of myself. I think that's kind of the goal is I want to be an evolved human and I want to be an involved leader and I don't see that coming to a point where I suddenly am like, okay, I'm done now I'm evolved. I don't think that's going to happen.

The, the older that I get, the more I realize. That wisdom is all about seeing what you don't know. Whereas when I was younger, it was definitely seeing how much I knew. And I think of my kid who's 15, he does know a lot because he watches a lot of YouTube. He knows way more than I ever did and probably know now, but.

He doesn't have experience. He hasn't lived a life yet. And so just knowing something is very different than having experiential knowledge. And that's what really leads to wisdom, right? Being able to come to a point where you're able to say, I don't know much. Actually, there is so much more to know in this world instead of letting the ego guide us.

What are we really working for, by the way, let's think about it, and let's take money out of it, because how much is enough, I don't know, I think there's definitely a point where you reach enough, but there are all sorts of things we tell ourselves that are the reason why we're hustling. I'm doing it till I make a million dollars.

I'm working hard now so I can have freedom later. We convince ourselves that we're sacrificing for our family. I'm doing this for my family. But did you ask your family if they wanted you to do that? Have we ever actually asked them what they want from us? Most people want. our attention. They don't want us to work harder and get more.

I think really we're working so hard so we don't have to have that existential crisis, right? When I think of people in my feeds on social media, You can usually tell the people who are Zen and you know who the hustlers are. They're always doing the hardest workouts, 75 hard. They're going to have the perfectly clean house.

They're going to be working long hours. It's all busyness. And it's all to avoid stillness, I think. And it's interesting because I go back and forth on this idea. On the one hand, I think stillness is so important. Everybody talks about being present, but that stillness, being in this moment, really existing, just existing.

We have never had a better time in history to just exist. And on the one hand, when I'm saying that, I'm like, yeah, but we have only this short limited amount of time to accomplish everything that we want in this world. But what do we really want? And why? If we have such a limited time in this world, and we've created these goals for ourselves of, you know, collecting money, working hard, being a productive citizen, when people are on their deathbeds.

Those aren't the things that they're talking about. Those aren't the regrets. The regrets are, I wish I had spent more time with my kids or my family. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Those are all the things people talk about. They have no reason to lie about it. Right? When I think about those kinds of entrepreneurs who are the hustlers, success is the discipline.

So they're disciplined. We define discipline. With work, not with thinking, and we fill every moment so that we never have to confront what's actually missing. There's the meditation side of it, the being still being present, enjoying this life that we have been given that is so rare. And especially in America to be born into this country, our level of wealth, of capacity, of knowledge, everything we could not have.

Wish to be born at a better time. Why would we want to sit still? I think there's a lot of value in that. Stillness forces us to think, which is terrifying. And when we feel the mental resistance, we have to listen to that. That's a sign from our brain. The mental resistance that we feel when stepping away from work is a signal. It is not a flaw. If you feel like stepping away, Is impossible for you.

That's probably a sign that you need to do it more. That might be the best thing that you could do for your business. Not just grinding through more tasks. We have to redefine success. Are we working towards impact? Am I moving towards the life that I want? Or am I just checking boxes off my task list? It's not about more things to do. It's about taking the time to learn, to think. The shift from being a workaholic to thinking is an intentional action, but we have to know what success looks like for us, and it needs to be something that.

Is meaningful in my view, it can't just be based on money. Let's go back to my story where I sold my company and I reached the point that I had been dreaming of, which is to be able to stop doing the work, but something was missing, you know, success without struggle can feel wrong. If you're used to hustling, I learned to thrive in chaos and stress.

That's what makes us good entrepreneurs. We're good at. Dealing with the chaos and the stress of business. But I do believe that true emotional growth actually requires a level of internal discomfort and, and quiet and thoughtfulness. And it's not just about reading a book. You really can't fight or flight your way through life forever, because that's where burnout lives.

Oftentimes we feel lost without the hardship and we tie ourselves. To that struggle our self worth to that struggle and when we don't need to struggle anymore. That's when we really start to struggle I have a theory backed up by data that entrepreneurs are great at entrepreneurship because as kids we were great at managing chaos change trauma and we just kind of extended it into adulthood and the addiction To the struggle is real.

We idealize the stories of the people who started off with nothing and became successful, right? Hardship in the business world is worthiness. So if we're not struggling, are we doing enough? You know, if I'm not fighting for it, did I even earn it? There's so much cultural glorification of exhaustion and we wear it like a medal.

of time, the last time was in: 2020

I immediately started another business. I suddenly had freedom. I hadn't thought it through all the way, but when I got the space, I was like, Oh, you don't want to go through a year of depression again. You've done this before we're starting a business. And that's how I started home service VA. Of course, there's a lot more that went into it, but part of that driver to start it was pieces, difficult.

I wish it wasn't. I personally feel there's a reason why a lot of people have midlife crises at the very same time that they're generally reaching a point in their professional life that they have long been striving for. You have to learn how to create purposeful structure after success so that you don't feel lost or adrift.

And I'm defining success as just reaching the thing that you have long sought after. So how do you go from being a task doer to a leader or to a visionary? I've been using the word leader a lot because I know not everybody feels a kinship to the word visionary, but I do. I think of my brain as being Sparkly, as many of you know, and I feel like when it's given the space to do it, it comes up with the most magical things.

I love the imagination of a child and that's what I strive for in my brain. And so how do we do that? How do we move from just being a workaholic who's keeping our list of tasks to giving ourselves the space to dream and to think bigger and to become the leaders that we really seek to be. You have to identify.

The things that only you can do versus what others could do for you, you know, there's an art to letting go and it's very difficult to do it without micromanagement, but you have to build transparent accountability systems that allow you to step back. And trust the people that you have delegated to, to see your vision.

And part of that comes down to you. You have to grow as a communicator. You have to grow in the way that you approach people and their work. There's all sorts of changes that have to come. And you also have to measure what matters, and this is hard. How do you move beyond time based productivity to impact based metrics?

How do you track strategic progress when results aren't immediate? You know, how do you create feedback loops that validate your strategic direction? Well, this is all the thinking that I'm talking about, all that hard work. It is hard because It takes you in directions that you haven't had to think about before.

Now, business is a repeat cycle of systems. So it's not hard to go out and replicate things from somebody else's company, but most entrepreneurs are too stubborn to just take what has already been created because we want to make it our own. Of course. And I wish that I had understood this when I was deep in my workaholic phase.

There's a difference. Between doing something valuable and being a valuable person. How can you start separating your worth from your work? You have to start looking at non work values and strengths. You have to create identity anchors. Meaning, do you have hobbies? Do you have friend groups? What do you do outside of work?

It can't just all be about that. And I say, this is somebody who understands the joy of problem solving, right? Like being an entrepreneur is all about solving problems and we love solving problems and creating solutions, but you have to find different sources of fulfillment in your life. I'd like to challenge you, and maybe this is no big deal for people who are listening to this.

Maybe this is already your jam, but this is still a challenge for me. Can you sit still for one hour without feeling guilty? I still need to challenge myself every day. To stop chasing the next thing. Sometimes I literally stop in the middle of a busy week and say, what am I doing? Is this moving us forward at all?

Did I get stuck in the task loop again? Am I actually enjoying this? Most of the time when I'm feeling like that, I'm not enjoying it. I've been building for so long and I want to see the finish line. What does the finish line mean for me? Well, it means. Financial freedom, a business that is successful to me, looks like a business that's doing a really good job at helping people.

I want us to have an impact in people's lives and in people's businesses. I think success means that I can travel and see the world and meet new people and do that with my family. And my friends, that I can get back to my woodworking, that I can write more music. I don't want to have to do anything. I just want to do what I want to do.`

I wanted to understand what is actually moving me towards impact and what is just busy work. And I am not even close to that point yet. This was a lot of philosophy. I don't know that I'll ever be a. Recovered workaholic, but I will always be a recovering workaholic because I just want to keep that present in front of me.

I want to be reminded often that my default is probably always going to be to keep busy. But when you keep busy, you're missing the opportunity to grow in a way that we can't when we're just hustling all the time. So this is the challenge. Can you be uncomfortable doing nothing? What happens if you stop chasing the next thing long enough to actually enjoy what you've built right now?

And what does success even mean to you? I hope this was helpful. Listen, Bisfit, if you believe in the mission of this podcast, I need you to like and subscribe right now. Pause this, go find the podcast, you might already be there, which is easy, just go like and subscribe. And if you really, really believe in it, and you want Bisfits to unite and change the whole business world, please rate it.

Rating is the best way to get the word out to attract more like minded misfits like you and me, so that we can overthrow the takers of this world who currently dominate the business universe. I know I sound like I'm some courageous lady of business. I am not. I can't do this alone and I don't want to. I need you.

And we need a coalition of fellow Bisfits. So do it now. The quicker we take action, the quicker we can change our business world. Now let's go do great things and I will see you next week.