Welcome to Meaningful Work Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy, and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Camargo people here in Sydney, Australia. In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work.
Way too many people are strangling their joy because they’re still operating under this dichotomy, this delusion that work equals dirge and play or holidays equals fun. That there is this black and white dichotomy between generosity, service, authenticity, integrity and earning money or that work is somehow not meant to be enjoyable or easy. And while I think it’s, um, you know, a little delusional to think that, you know, all I need to do is wake up in the morning and feel good and feel in flow. And then the money will rain down on my head. I’d love that to be the case, but I haven’t yet found a money tree.
I do worry, interesting choice of words. I do worry because worry is another way that we throttle our joy, right? And what saddens me immensely is seeing people where on the outside looking in, everything is working in their favor. They are privileged. They have assets. They are safe and secure. They have businesses where everything is going well where, you know, the plan is being enacted, where things are fairly straightforward, and yet they are miserable and they are denying themselves joy.
Now, I think it’s important to make joy a KPI because I believe that we are joy seeking creatures, that this is our state of affairs for as long as humans have been around for the thousands and thousands of years. God knows how many years. I am not an anthropologist. It’s a lot more than several thousand. For as many years as humans have walked this earth, we have been pleasure seeking creatures. Yeah. We, we look for pleasure. We move away from pain and we move towards pleasure. So to deny this, to somehow introduce this dichotomy that, you know, work is dirty and that joy and play and fun is frivolous and therefore not serious and therefore not work.
What are we doing? We’re deliberately making work bad, right? We are sacrificing and sabotaging ourselves at the altar of, you know, Protestantism or wherever this came from. So some of the ways that we do this is this idea of you have to earn the right to a break. You have to earn the right to a reward. And even the idea of a reward, right? Like people talk about, you know, I’m going to have a cheeky wine. Ooh, would you like to have a cheeky wine? Should we reward ourselves with a slice of cake? Like it’s strange language, right? If you want to bleed and glass of wine or a slice of cake, go ahead and take it, go ahead and have it. Have it already. Life is, you know, life is for living really.
So what I am proposing is that we, we use joy, we use joy throughout our day to power and motivate us. Yeah. That rather than focusing on the stick all the time, rather than focusing on this kind of threat, you know, we have to endure work, we have to do the boring stuff, we have to do the difficult things. And then maybe perhaps we might earn the right to a reward or we might earn the right to rest or take a break. That instead we start every day and we pepper our days, we power our days with joy and that we power business. Yeah. And in this way, we can reconcile these old dichotomies of love, all money, and instead work for love and money.
So how do we do this from a practical perspective? How do we do this from a practical perspective? First, we start with the joy list, otherwise known as the fridge list. Now I first heard this idea from Sarah DeGraff and I haven’t spoken to Sarah DeGraff for a number of years, but I absolutely loved this idea and I have taught hundreds of business owners this idea ever since. Grab yourself a piece of paper and a pen and write yourself a joy list and then put it on the fridge.
Your joy list is at least 10, if not 20 or more things that are low cost and accessible. So, um, going to Buenos Aires and learning the tango is a bucket list item, not a joy list item. It needs to be accessible and it needs to be ideally free, if not low cost. And it can be things such as, so for me, it’s pottering around with my house plans.
You know, checking on them, ordering them, diddling around, propagating them, you know, pulling off the dead leaves, reporting them, and generally, generally enjoying their company. Generally enjoying my houseplants company. Uh, it can be having a cup of tea in the sun out the front of my house where the sun is in the afternoon. The sun in the morning is at the back of my house. The sun in the afternoon is in my driveway and at the front of my house. Uh, it’s lying in the pool. It is going to Bunnings and spending some money on, you guessed it, more plants. It is going to a cafe that I don’t typically go to down the street in my neighborhood. It is perhaps going rock climbing down the road, a couple of suburbs away, or maybe going to a dance class and I might need to cross the Sydney Harbor bridge for that one. So it’s a little bit, a little bit less accessible, but, but not impossible. Not, not inaccessible. So whatever these things are, you’re going to write a list and you’re going to commit to doing them every single day.
Now, oftentimes these morning routines that the overachievers, the type A personalities love to talk about. These morning routines are oftentimes way too complicated and time consuming. It’s like, you know, a half an hour of this and then half an hour of meditating and then this and then that it’s like multifaceted layered takes too long.
You know, I want you to think about the really accessible stuff that you will actually do the five minutes of stretching rather than the 40 minute yoga class. Yeah. Or the 40 minute yoga YouTube video. It is the, you know, the 10 minute meditation rather than the hour long meditation. You know, it is the stuff that you will actually do that will fill you with joy. That will put you in a better mood. Dancing, for example, how often do we feel better after dancing? And yet we never ever do it or singing. Same thing again. So I want you to think about peppering this throughout the day, beginning of the day, on the hour, every hour, certainly at lunchtime, always having a lunch break, end of the day, evening, yeah, you’re not earning it because what we’re doing here is we are disconnecting our self-worth from our productivity.
And in our capitalist society, we have been taught that our self-worth is commensurate with our productivity that only when we are productive, do we earn the right to a reward or rest or a break. Yeah. So I want you to imagine that every single morning you wake up in the morning and you lose energy, you are losing joy. And rather than thinking about yourself as a vessel to be filled, I want you to imagine yourself as a leaky vessel with holes to be plugged. So considering that we start the day with a full tank of energy, where do we start to lose that energy. Where do we start to lose that joy? What things do we touch? Where we start to, you know, start to aggravate us. And you know, I’m like a really great common example is traffic, right? You get stuck in a traffic jam and then all of a sudden, you know, it’s really easy to lose your cool, easy to lose your, your joy.
So I want you to think about, okay, well, it’s not just about how do I fill myself with joy without, you know, this, this need to perform in order to get it. And how do I stop joy from leaking? I want you to think about deliberately bring joy into your business and into your, the way that you deliver your services, the way that you market your business, the way that you interact with your clients, because make no mistake, your enthusiasm and your joy is one of your biggest business assets. If you are, as the boss, the biggest business asset, then inside of yourself, your attitude, your joy, your enthusiasm, which is the closest thing I know to charisma, your presence, this is your biggest strength. These are your most valuable gifts.
So, what can you do to bring this in deliberately into your business? What can you do to make your business more enjoyable? Not just for you, but for your business. You know, if for example, you love karaoke, why wouldn’t you take out clients for karaoke? Why wouldn’t you get your clients together at the end of the year or in the beginning of the year or in the middle of the year and take them out for karaoke?
If you want your clients to enjoy fine wine and champagne. Why not give it to them as gifts? Yeah. You can of course choose not to work with clients that, you know, one of the, one of the kind of green flags that I’m looking for when I’m, when I’m interviewing clients or considering working with clients is, you know, does this per is this person joyful? Is this person going to fill me up? Is spending time in company with this person?
You know, making me feel better than I was before. And no doubt your clients and my clients are doing the same to us, right? They’re also interviewing us. And I’ve no doubt that I’ve gotten many jobs over the years, not because I’m the most qualified, not because, you know, I’ve got the best expertise, but because I was the most easy to get along with that counts for a lot. Because that’s our time, right? That’s the time we spend and our time is precious. So what can you deliberately bring into your business that is going to fill your cup? Yeah, and how can you do it in a way that’s quirky, that’s memorable, that’s different, that’s unique, that’s interesting, that’s worth talking about?
Now, of course, one of the things that we do to strangle our joy, one of the best ways that we, you know, that we use to strangle our joy is a couple of things. The biggest one I would suggest is worry. Worry is a pointless undertaking. Yeah. Worry can be super useful if we actually use it. Yeah. It can be super useful to get us to employ a lawyer, review contracts, change terms and conditions, change client processes, mitigate against the worst case scenario. If we’re using our worry to be proactive, then yes, it has a purpose, but otherwise is the biggest way that we actually strangle our joy because what are we doing with worry?
We are putting energy and focus into what we don’t want to happen and what we focus on expands. So the other thing that is excellent at strangling our joy is our rigidity. And perhaps one of the parts of ourselves which is most rigid is our ego, yeah, our identity. And where this oftentimes is most clear and obvious is when you use phrasing such as I like this, I don’t like this. I’m I, I am this. I am not this. I’m good at numbers. I’m not good at numbers. I don’t like money. I’m not good at sales. I’m not a sales person. You know, I don’t like marketing. I’m not a marketer. I’m not a writer. Whatever, whatever phrasing that we’re using over and over again.
Either to ourselves or we’re saying it out loud to others where we’re identity, they’re like identifying statements. This is, is where it’s most obviously our ego talking. Yeah. It’s really easy for us to become over identified and rigid in how we, we think and how we process our reality. Yeah. And this is where, uh, we strangle our joy.
So the opposite is also problematic. And what that looks like is business owners, and I’ve had plenty of conversations with business owners who’ve mistaken being emotional and being flighty and being flaky with being in flow. And these are different things. So over and over again, I’ve met business owners, I’ve spoken with business owners who believe that things need to be kind of straightforward and easy in order for them to be right and for, you know, that to be the decision and the direction that they’re moving into. And in this way, they’re getting confused. They’re conflating enjoyment and perhaps spontaneity with, you know, something that’s more important than it actually is. Because there’s a difference between enjoying something momentarily and, you know, doing it for a living. There’s a difference between me enjoying eating Twisty’s chips and wanting to eat Twisty’s chips every day of the week, right? I thoroughly enjoy eating Twisty’s for a short period of time on occasion. If I ate Twisty’s every day of the week, I don’t think I’d like it. I don’t believe I would like it.
So we’ve got to divorce this kind of idea that we oftentimes have, which is this romantic idea of like, okay, you know, we’ve, we’ve kind of swallowed the whole online business, entrepreneur propaganda hook line and center, and we’ve decided that business is all about long lunches and you know, interesting conversations and deep and meaningful best, best business buddies and conferences and exotic locales and flying first class and private jets and all of this stuff. We’ve, we’ve confused this propaganda, this marketing propaganda with, you know, what is right or what is the direction that we’re wanting to head in. Yeah. Because oftentimes joy is a cup of tea in the sun.
Joy is fleeting. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable. Yeah. Joy is not happiness because happiness is a hell of a lot harder. You know, happiness is like the 10 year retrospective. You know, I look back and realize I was happy over that period of time. Joy is the handstand on the grass, you know, with the smell of lavender in your nose.
Joy is a cup of hot coffee on a cold day with the rain outside on the window. You know, joy is finishing a really good book and feeling, you know, absolutely fantastic, um, you know, like your imagination has expanded and you’ve got this whole host of new friends from, you know, inside the pages of the book. Joy is fleeting. But the other thing about joy is it’s powerful. It’s powerful and it’s accessible. It’s an everyday thing that we are all able to tap into. And it is the fuel that powers people and people power business.
Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or has you changing the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favor and write me a short review? Your podcast review means so much to me and it helps other values-based business owners just like you to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.