This topic might seem a bit controversial.

Because if you scroll through Instagram you will see a lot of self-help, self care and mental wellness content – and rightly so. I am the biggest fan of that.

I full subscribe to taking breaks and the anti glamorization of burning yourself out.

The challenge I have with this, is that there’s a lack of context. The business coaches who are talking about six figure months and working 12 hours a week, did not just get there when they first started their business. The people who now have ease and can travel and are digital nomads and are encouraging you to sign up for their programs that can get your time and freedom back – They had a hustle season.

They probably nearly burnt themselves out.

For example: Getting to a point where you are high on the schedule with the best ride times (best being subjective to whatever you would decide at your studio is an ideal time slot), this probably didn’t just happen when you joined the team. It’s more likely that you had to sub a lot, and practice more, and promote yourself more on social media.

Or that you had 6:00 AM slots up the wazoo, as I did, and had to earn it a bit. And as somebody who’s been in business for nearly 15 years, and I’m just now a full-time entrepreneur, and have built up a network of people who now come to me with projects – I *finally* don’t have to hustle as hard.

There’s some real talk here – any business owner, any entrepreneur, any person who’s in a leadership position in corporate will tell you that there’s going to be times where you have to hustle. Where you have to put in extra hours, where you have to put in time that doesn’t make sense to everybody else. Any entrepreneur who’s reading this who’s established will fully understand what I mean.

This could look like working on your website at night, or staying after class and recording reels or saying yes to things when you’re tired. It could also look like going to the gym when you don’t feel like it, or going to bed early and skipping out on social events or a late night Netflix binge because you know you have to be up early to teach or to work on a project before you start your 9-5 job. There has to be a level of work that is above the average to get you to that big goal.

And that is the best advice I can give somebody who is wanting to get to a level that they haven’t been yet.

But let’s back up for a minute – The glamorization of hustle season isn’t something I agree with because the reality is it sucks sometimes.

It’s not fun. It’s not fun to take on jobs you don’t really feel like so that you can afford to do something else. There’s a saying about entrepreneurship where it’s like, “you’re going to work harder than anybody else so you can live a life that only others can dream of” – Unknown. And I think to an extent that’s kind of true.

And to give different examples, so that no matter who you are you can try to relate: Pregnancy. It’s going to be a tough time for some.

Nine months of gestation of getting ready to give birth to have this amazing new human in your life this is a bit of a hustle season. It is a short amount of time where you are going to do more. And go through challenges physically, mentally, emotionally.

When I was starting my career in corporate, my first year of my creative communications diploma was harder than my bachelor’s degree (and honestly harder than my Masters Degree).

It’s a full time, two year creative communications, public relations major. We learned everything from broadcast journalism to writing to advertising to PR. That season of my life was incredibly challenging because I had to pay for school, I had to work my job, I had to go to school full time and I had to write papers.

But that was a season of my life that I knew would set me up for success for the rest of it.

Was it easy? No.

Did I drink my green juice in the morning? No.

I often woke up frantic being like, *holy shit, I have an exam in five minutes*.

But in my second year, my goal was to get a job before I graduated. This is something you could do as a student, and getting a full time job while going to school was the ideal situation – and something that would give me an edge on my competitors and on my resume.

So I took every single internship/opportunity possible to be able to do that (even unpaid jobs – which I do not glamorize, but also know that it’s necessary sometimes to gain the experience that you need).

I valued the experience way more than I did the paycheck that would have come with it. To put this into perspective, some of those internships were Future Leaders in Manitoba, which I ended up winning an award with years later. This was in 2011, and I won the Future Leaders of Manitoba award in 2019.

I also had an internship with the Winnipeg Jets which required me to be at games for sometimes 4 hours when I knew I had to be at school the next day. But being in the press box at these games gave me the experience to be recruited to work for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers – another professional sports organization.

And ultimately become the Director of Community Relations, which lead me to winning another award. And these internships kept compounding interest of my experience and my wins.

And then I got a job with the Winnipeg Humane Society.

Before I graduated, I met my goal. Because I knew I had to hustle.

So all of these things added up to this path of success that started with a bit of hustle and grind with a bit more effort than normal

And for all the spin instructors reading this right now – something I share a lot with my Instructor Magic students is when I first started teaching, I was at the bottom of the hierarchy. I was teaching at a studio that I didn’t love. It wasn’t a studio that I was in love with as a rider and I couldn’t make it work at the studio I was in love with.

So I took a job where I would get the most experience and a ton of rides. I also wanted to align myself with certain people in history who were working there. Which lead me to have the opportunity to teach at Wheelhouse in Winnipeg, which is where I am now.

But I was teaching 6:00 AM classes, twice a week. I had one evening slot, maybe one weekend slot. It was a lot and I was going to school in my master’s program and I was working full time.

And there were times where I was like, “this is not fun to say no to things”. Like friend hangouts or to sleep in. But the experience outweighed the immediate satisfaction of having those other things.

So when people say rest, recover, relax, say no to things – I completely agree, but there are going to be times when you need to just go, you need to put in the work, you need to grind it out. And it’s not going to be something that everybody in your life understands.

They’re going to see you being really busy and talk to you about it. And you’re going to feel like you’re disappointing people. You’re going to feel like you’re letting them down when you can’t make it to certain things because you reprioritized your business.

Entrepreneurship is difficult for people to understand if they aren’t in it. And teaching spin is even more difficult for people to understand if they’re not in that world.

Opening up a brick and mortar business is going to be harder for some people to understand who’ve never done it before. They’re going to let us try and keep you safe. They’re going to say things like, “go get that corporate job”, “are you sure, this is risky?”, “This seems uncertain… This is unstable”.

But you have to be able to put the blinders on and realize that your hustle season is going to be for a certain time, and the reward season is going to come. The literal awards will come. The lack of needing to worry about everything in your business will come. Having people who you’ve hired to do the jobs you don’t no longer want to do will come. The better times slots at your studio will come.

All of those things will come, but you cannot expect them to come day one.

You have to plant the tree to get the fruit. You have to trust that if you keep showing up day after day, willing to put in a little bit extra work, it’s going to happen. But you have to be consistent. You have to be willing to hustle. You have to understand that a certain amount of grind is going to take place and it might feel lonely at times, but your dream is so worth it.

But how can you make sure your hustle season doesn’t take over?

This is the cycle of hustling and resting. And there’s three things that can help you make sure you’re not burning yourself out from hustling all the time:

This involves bringing people on to your team. That’s one way to get out of the hustle season – outsourcing things you no longer want to do.

Another thing is booking in intentional vacations or time off. For entrepreneurs it can be really, really hard to stop because we love what we do for the most part. But building a team or outsourcing can allow you to do this.

The third thing is celebrate. There has to be some time where you celebrate too. And celebrating will feel lonely sometimes because you’re going through this really intense experience, whether it’s teaching, going through training as an instructor, or creating a new business… and only the people who are in that, or who’ve done that will get what you have gone through.

Finally, I will say that to make a hustle season, like really worthwhile...

I have started tracking my wins. And so before I even celebrate them, I track what my goal is.

I’ve been able to increase my audience by a significant amount in the last two months. And I knew what my goal was. So I wasn’t just like, “Oh, I added 1500 new followers.” I know that my goal was ‘X’ and I exceeded that by like 900. So my metrics are showing me what I’ve achieved so that I don’t lose sight of how much I’ve already done when I am in the work – because it can be really easy to continue to run the race without actually looking behind you and saying, “wow, I didn’t realize I came this far.”

So that is my off the cuff hustle seasons are required to get what you want. Rant.

In short, your hustle season can lead to your CEO season.

And your CEO season is filled with a lot more grace, time freedom, and abundance in every which way.

But it does require you to hustle a bit to get there.

So I’d love to hear your feedback on this post.

I hope that for those who are in their hustle season right now and are maybe having friends and family don’t really understand, you feel validated.

I want to remind you to track your goals, celebrate your wins and take time off as well, to make sure that you have the energy to go into your next phase of hustling, whatever that looks like.

I want to validate that it can be lonely, whether you’re a parent, an entrepreneur, a spin instructor, or an aspiring one. Whatever your goal is, not everybody’s going to understand it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.

Thanks so much for reading through this, friend. If you love this post, please share it (and tag me on Instagram).

And a reminder. Yes you can.