251: Stop Letting Your Mood Run Your Business

You can be doing all the right things in your business and still feel like you're running out of air.

Not because your strategy is off or the market is broken. But because somewhere along the way, the thing you built stopped feeling good to be inside of. The work became a task. The content became a checklist. And you've been white-knuckling through it, wondering why nothing seems to land the way it used to.

Joy isn't a luxury you earn after the work is done, it's the engine. And in this episode I'm sitting with the question a lot of high achievers are quietly avoiding: where did the joy go, and what does it cost you when it's missing?

This episode gets into: 
– why your mood is shaping your business whether you acknowledge it or not 
– what the Alex Hormozi and Tony Robbins conversation revealed about identity, fulfillment, and the ceiling we hit when work is our only source of both 
– the bubble metaphor that might make you uncomfortable in the best way 
– a simple calendar test to run this week to start creating more oxygen in your life and business

By the end of this, you'll have a real gut check on where you're at on your own joy-o-meter, and one concrete thing you can do about it this week.

EPISODE LINKS & RESOURCES:

The Tony Robbins x Alex Hormozi interview (still on Spotify at time of recording)

Last week's Hint of Hustle episode #250 on staying out of The Bitter B Trap (go back and listen if you missed it!)

👀 My favorite all in one platform for running an online business is ON SALE! Get 50% off all Kajabi plans for twelve full months with my special affiliate link. This is for both new customers AND anyone who's been away. Offer ends June 2nd.  Check out the FIVE new products they dropped this month and snag your discount here.

___________________

🔗 Grab the latest FREE resources: https://heathersager.com/start

🔗 Browse all episode shownotes: https://heathersager.com/blog

📣 Work with Heather  → click here to explore programs and coaching.

📧 NEWSLETTER: Get notified about future episodes plus weekly fire in your inbox each Friday, JOIN HERE.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theheathersager/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathermsager/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/HeatherSager

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW

If this episode hit home, I'd be so grateful if you...

Transcript

Heather (00:12)

Hey friend and welcome back to another episode of the Hint of Hustle podcast. It's your host Heather Sager and today we're here to talk about joy, happiness, fulfillment, all the bubbly warm stuff before you tune out and be like, Heather, I want the business. I want to talk about making business more fun, but also helping you feel more joy in your day.

I know you know the feeling, right? When you work so hard or you're going so fast, it's almost like you drain the life out of yourself. Whether you're chasing your next goal in your business or you're pursuing your health goals or whatever it is you're going on. If we go too hard for too long, what I find is things stop becoming enjoyable. And when we're not enjoying the work we do,

It's hard for other people to be excited to want to work with us. I'm going to say that again. When we lose the joy in what we do, it makes it really hard for other people to want to work with us. Because when we're joyful, when we're happy, when we're passionate about the work that we do, when we don't feel resentful or drained from it, right?

when we're truly like, ah, this is so fun. There's this magnetic quality about us that other people are just drawn to. I know you know this to be true, but today's episode is my gut check for you of saying, where are you at in your own joy-o-meter? If you were to look at like, you know, one of those barometers, like temperature outside, right? Hotter the better. Maybe not, I don't know. But if you were to look at it as a barometer, where are you at right now when it comes to your life and specifically in your business? How...

Do you feel? And I know this might be a weird question right now because I know the world has been very weird the last 18 months. Well, honestly, it's the last seven years if we really think about it. We've been through a lot of ups and downs. I wonder, does your mood impact your sales? Does your mood impact your business strategy? Does your mood impact your newsletter or your

content. And chances are that it does, right? We're humans, we're people, we have feelings, we have emotions. I like to think that I have matured in the way to be able to handle my feelings as I'm navigating many of this with young children right now. But the truth is, we're all just frickin toddlers. And we are oftentimes dictated by our moods. And here's the thing, we can either complain about that, and try to make it not true. But I'm just a fan of just work with what you got.

Why don't we just work to be in a better mood? Now, if you were around last week, last week's episode, we talked a lot about staying above water versus below water in the bitchy, the bitchy, bitter trap, bitter bitch trap. I don't remember what I called it exactly, right? But we talked a lot about that. So if you missed last week's episode, go back, shout out. We have surpassed 250 freaking episodes on this podcast, which seems so wild and so awesome to me. Side tangent, when I started this show,

I had made the promise to myself that if I'm going to do this, I'm going to commit to do it every single week, day in and day out. And I did that consistently for three, four, five years? I can't remember. All the way of plowing through 200 episodes without taking a break. And then the last 18 months, it's been kind of on and off again relationship, but we are back on baby. But it's wild to think that it's been so long, but actually connecting the dots on that random tangent and today's topic. If I were being super authentic with you, which I...

I always am. I always keep it real around here. I had lost the joy in my podcast. My podcast had become a task that had to be done every week on the calendar. once it became a task that I had to do, it sucked the life out of it. And so I grit my teeth and I did it for a while. And granted, I did it. I still did it well. But there was something about the joy wasn't there. It wasn't f-

fun anymore. It didn't feel like a creative outlet. It didn't feel like something that I wanted to do. I get sometimes in business, we're going to have to do things that we don't want to do, just like with anything. Like I didn't want to get my ass up this morning at 530 and get dressed and go to the gym. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to do all the burpees this morning. I didn't want to run sprints at the end of my workout, but I wanted the result of it. So hear me very clearly when I say this, when I say your mood,

we don't allow our mood to dictate our choices on whether or not we're going to do something, right? We know what we need to do to get to the results with what we want. But if we let our mood affect our attitude as we do those things, that's when you start realizing the experience that you have and the quality of what you do and the results of it, those are shaped. We're shaped by our moods. Said differently,

our feelings around the thoughts that we're having in our experience, that's what really shapes the outcome. We can't, I'm gonna go on a side tangent here of like a mindset coach, but we can't control what happens in our lives. We can't control the events, but we can control how we react to them. And we can control that through thinking through what we think about those actions. Last week, we talked a lot about asking more empowering questions. Same event happens.

But asking an empowering question around what opportunities this creates for me is much different than why does this always happen to me? The questions you ask and the way you talk to yourself changes your reality. If you missed last week's episode, just for the 70th time, go back and listen to it. Your thoughts and how you talk to yourself and to others, it changes your reality. So if you're unhappy with how things are going, start talking differently about what's happening and you'll notice that.

But what happens is once we start thinking about things differently and talking differently, you'll notice it starts impacting your mood. So coming back to today's topic around joy and happiness, I really want you sitting with this idea this week. Where am I finding joy in my life and in my business? That's first question. Where do I really experience joy? On a daily basis, if you're not experiencing joy, that is a red flag that we really need to talk about.

On the other side of it is where in my life outside of my business, where am I finding fulfillment and joy? These are questions that I really get good at asking yourself. And here's why this topic came up for me this week. I don't know if you've seen Alex Hormozi. So I just, I don't, I don't really follow him much. I mean, I know he exists and I know a lot of people are obsessed with him, but I, I just, I don't not like him. just am not a loyal, obsessed follower. I just don't, I have no idea what he does.

Well, I know what he does, right? I know his books. I've read one of his books, but all that to say, I don't really follow him. But this week on threads, after the cheesecake, Cheesecake Gate, I don't know if you've been following that. That's hilarious. This last week, after Cheesecake Gate, the next thing that came up was everyone was talking about Alex Hormozi deleted his episode with Tony Robbins from his podcast. And I see this and I'm like, I didn't even know that.

Alex Hormozi had Tony Robbins on his podcast, but I was curious. like, I want to see the interview now. So side note, I don't even know if this was like a brilliant PR move that maybe got leaked from Alex's team. I have no idea whether or not the episode was actually deleted, but people were talking about why Alex deleted this interview between him and Tony Robbins. So what do I do? I go Google Alex Hormozi and Tony Robbins, and I find a link to the interview, which was still on Spotify.

And I watched the entire interview yesterday as I'm cooking and doing things around the house. And what was interesting, the speculation around, if you didn't know it, right, Alex had Tony Robbins on his podcast months ago, I think it was like five or six months ago. And it turned into a coaching conversation, right? Where say what you want about Tony Robbins. He is one fricking phenomenal coach. He's a phenomenal speaker. There's a lot of things that you can learn even from people that you do not like.

you can still learn a hell of a lot from them, right? Either learning what not to do that doesn't resonate with you, that's just as good of a teacher as learning what you do like and resonate with people. So I'm a big fan of learning from people who are different from me, learning from people who do different kind of business for me, even learning from people that I don't like very much. I can still learn a ton because it tells me a lot about what I value and what kind of style I want to have and how I can be more impactful in the world. So side note, Tony Robbins.

He, this conversation, Alex had like a handful of, not even questions. He just had five words written down to be able to navigate this conversation. And it turned very quickly into a coaching conversation, except for it wasn't actual coaching. The role of a coach, I am a coach. This is what I do. The role of coach isn't just to tell you a bunch of information, right? This podcast side note, I'm not coaching you on this podcast. This is like a full on Heather Sager servant. Like I am, I am sharing with you ideas to inspire you to go out and do what you want. But a true-

Coaching is this idea of discovery and decisions. That's what coaching is. It's creating the container for discovery and then decision making. Discovery is exploring your own thoughts as the client, your own thoughts. The coach asks you questions to take you down different roads, but the goal is for you to come up with your own options and then guide you to help you make a confident decision.

Because that's what most leaders suck at, right? We're not bad at brainstorming. We're not bad at thinking things, right? We think a lot of things. The gap is we suck at making fast decisions. And if you want success, make faster decisions. Fail faster, as we talked about two episodes ago. Learn from it and keep moving. And that's how you're successful. But coming back to it, this conversation between Alex and Tony, it was not a coaching conversation. It was Tony ⁓ sharing a lot of thoughts, opinions, ideas.

with a handful of questions here, but it's definitely if, I don't know if you use Fathom for your recordings on Zoom, that's what I use right now. And Fathom is like my AI note taker. And what I love about it is it always tells me as I'm in a coaching conversation, what percentage of the conversation I've spoken. And I have this own little internal game when I'm on coaching calls is to keep my contributions below a certain percentage. Now you'll notice there's a big difference when I'm, well, you would notice this because you don't see

my fathom, but there's a significant difference in the percentage of conversation when I'm on a consulting call versus a coaching call. And I do both in my business. Consulting is where I ask questions to better understand the client and then I'm taking my experience and what they've shared with really good questions and I'm giving them my expert advice. Consulting is where I am like an advisor in your business, personalized to what you're doing going on, but I map my experience.

and give you my guidance that's different than coaching is it's really not about what I know at all. It's all about me asking great questions to get you doing it. Right. So in this conversation, Tony probably talked 90 plus percent of the interview and I really enjoy listening to Tony Robbins speak his cadence. I'm always curious around his storytelling. He's got a lot of vocal variability. So I learn so much.

I mean, he's one of the most, if not the most successful personal development dudes of all time, right? I can learn a ton from that. So I'm listening to it, right? And I enjoy hearing him speak. And what I'm reminded of is when you interview people who have a shit ton of experience, it's going to be less of a conversation and more that you are unlocking the floodgates of their wisdom and knowledge in the world. And that's what happened on the episode. Tony shared a lot.

But what came out of it and the reason why it speculated that they deleted the interview is it turned into a coaching conversation where Alex became a little vulnerable, where he flat out said, I don't remember what in his words, but he had been using business for years as his version of happiness. Like he got all of his happiness, created outlets, any kind of fulfillment came from business. And quite frankly, he worked all the time because he didn't know what to do differently. And Tony essentially, hi.

handed it to him that like, dude, you can say all day long that you're doing this altruistic thing around that identity, but the truth is you haven't found something outside of work to actually experience that fulfillment. Tony actually suggested maybe he explore having kids, there's all these other things that came up with it. But it really got me thinking this week around how we wrap our identities into our career. And that's really what I want to talk about with you. Now, if you're a listener to this show, I know

that you have already started doing the work to unravel that identity tangle, right? Whether you have, like me, made the leap from a corporate career into entrepreneurism because entrepreneurism, is that even a word? Who the fuck knows? Okay. But into this, you know, running your own business space or if you're freelancing or whatever else, if you've made that shift like me, you've already tried to untangle someone else's calendar dictating your schedule. Know what I'm saying? Now,

Maybe if you're like early me when I started my business, I didn't really fully understand that. So I shifted from being employed by another person to moving into becoming a full time speaker, to then not only having one boss, having a bajillion bosses because all the event contracts were then dictating my schedule. So I realized, that's not what I want.

which is why I created my own stages and I became a speaker in my own way, creating my own platform, sharing things on social media, running my own workshops. I'm a professional speaker, I host my own stage, right? And I still do paid speaking, but I've changed the business model. All this to say, you've most likely done some of the identity work. And when I say that, it's you recalibrating who you are in this world and how you find success and how you show up. You're probably spending...

as much as you can time outside of your business, right? You're trying to think about how can I be more present with my family? How can I be outside more? How could I have more hobbies? And I don't know what questions you're exploring, right? But you've probably, you're probably not in the Alex Hormozi seat. You're not trying to become like the next empire. If you're listening to the Hint of Hustle podcast, you are not trying to have your business consume your life, right? You are not subscribing to that idea.

doesn't mean that you don't want the financial like bliss from that. It's just you don't find your work as your source of identity anymore. But it brings up the question is, how do we rewire ourselves, right? Because if you resonate with the idea hustle, and you do listen to the show, I know that you like to work, you enjoy your work. And as much as we say, we want to find things outside of work and have more space outside of work.

On last week's episode, I had shared that even sitting down with my 11 year old last week, we were playing UNO, I still found my brain coming back to business. I had been brainstorming some things before him and I sat down and he's like, hey mom, you want to play cards? But my brain was still moving over into business. Even when we have a very robust, very present, very fun and exciting life. I don't know that I would call any of those things my life.

I have a really good life. My watch keeps telling me, wow, you got a really amazing sleep score. The other day I ran my menstrual cycle. This is TMI, but hey, most of you are all ladies. So I ran my menstrual cycle through Chatshub.et and it's like, wow, you are really consistent. have, and side note, that was not, to be me. I used to have cycles that would be like 76 days or we don't even know when it's coming. Side note, that was a big issue with me, fertility. was so difficult to get pregnant with my first.

I had a miscarriage and then it was so difficult to get pregnant again. Like it was really, really hard. That was me 10 years ago. But to now I have a very low stress, very cool life. But would I say that I am unlocked experiencing the vitality of joy every single day? No, I don't feel like I have unlocked that level 10 power yet. And in fact, I'm having a lot of fun exploring what that looks like. But

The mental image I want you to think about right now is imagine yourself in a bubble. literally, have you ever seen those big giant bubble bouncy ball things that people can climb into and then like run through a field and it's like human soccer, but you are the ball? I've always wanted to do that, but also I'm mildly claustrophobic. So that also sounds like a nightmare. So let's move from that. But I want you to imagine you're in a bubble and you can barely extend your own arms.

I want you to imagine this right now. You're in it. Even hold your hands up a little bit so they're like your hands are above your shoulders, but like chicken wing your arms. So your elbows are pinned to your sides. Got that right now? If you're watching on video, you can actually see me ridiculously doing this, but I want you to imagine your arms are kind of pinned down. Your hands are free. You're pushing against the bubble, but you can't go very far. I want you to imagine you can move just a little bit more and imagine this as you experience

experiencing the highs of joy and laughter and fun. And I want you to think about how far can you reach? How much do you experience joy? When do you and how often do you laugh from your belly? Do you are you fully present in the moment? Are you just absolutely with the person that you're with enjoying that moment? Or do you find yourself

slinking back and feeling contained, feeling tight. And what I mean by contained and tight, right? It's not necessarily, it doesn't feel constrictive, but it doesn't feel like you can breathe. I don't know if this is resonating with you a lot, but in my head, this is really making sense. And it describes a lot how I felt for years. And I find like I'm finally like pushing that balloon or bubble

outward and I'm starting to experience how do I gain fulfillment and joy outside of my work. And I bring this up because even like me when you make it so your schedule is working just 13 hours a week or whatever the time is that you work maybe it's 20 hours a week maybe you work full-time in your business but how much are you expanding your thinking about your business beyond that?

And is that impacting your joy in your life? Is it impacting your ability to be present and fully work on your health when you're out on your walks? Is it all business or are you listening to things that are enjoyable or having a phone call with a friend or with one of your siblings or your parents if they're still around, right? How are you bringing more joy in your life? And what I find is joy creates this lightness, this vibrance about you.

that when you feel fulfilled in your life, in who you are, in your relationships, in your health, it only makes you more magnetic in business. And I know you know this to be true, but I just wonder, I just wonder right now how constricted in the bubble you are.

Are you freaked out where sales are coming for? Are you freaked out because SEO has changed and people are now searching things in ChatGPT or Claude or whatever else and you don't know how to make sure that you're in there? Do you feel like you're gonna miss this window of AI? Do you feel like the trust recession, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, do you feel like that is chokeholding your potential clients and so you just have to do whatever to make sure that you survive in this business? Does it feel like you're running out of air?

that you are sprinting harder than you've ever sprinted, but you are not seeing the traction from it. Maiden, I invite you to sit back for a moment and ask yourself, at what point does the law of diminishing returns jump in? If you've never listened to or heard of the idea of the law of diminishing returns, there's this point where the effort that you put in, it's not giving you any additional gain. It's only just dwindling the results that you're getting.

And I just wonder if you were to reduce and simplify as much shit as possible in your business so that you could put some energy into your health, into your relationships, into your environment, things that are going to create oxygen in your life so you can be more present, have more joy. I just wonder what impact that would have on your business. Now our logical brain says, if I back up on my business, if I back down, things are going to slow down, but I just wonder

If you had to remove shit from the busy work in your business, how much oxygen would be created? Which by the way, did you know for fire to burn, the number one thing that it needs is oxygen. You need oxygen for the flames to catch and fuel forward. Where are you suffocating your own business by your mood, by your sheer volume of how much you have on your plate at all the time?

Can we add more capacity into our day, into our business, into our life by doing less and focusing on more joy? I have a bajillion other things that I would love to say on this, but I feel like this is a really beautiful wrapping point. And also I'm looking at the clock and I need to jump on a client call. So I'm going to leave you with this to sit with. It's a little bit of a different episode because I posed the idea. I'm not necessarily giving you any solutions on this one. The main challenge of this episode is I want to get you thinking.

Where are you finding joy? And if you feel constricted and you're not getting that joy, what could you cut out of your week? Like this next week, go to your calendar and look. Of my responsibilities, is it bringing me joy? Is it bringing me sales? If you can't answer yes to either of those questions, get it off your plate. For the next week, for the next two weeks, can you cut down any busy work shit? Even if it's thing you've committed to, you can always get out of it.

You might have to tuck your tail between your legs, but can you remove things off your plate to create more space? Not for you to fill it with more busy work, not for you to hustle more, not to launch another funnel, not for those things, but to add things to your calendar that are going to help you expand and feel joy. More joy, more magnetism. As Legally Blonde Elle Wood said, ⁓ exercise creates endorphins.

And happy people just don't kill their husbands. You know exactly that part in movie where I'm talking about? I want you to thinking about this. When you find more joy, whether it's exercise, your hobbies, spending time next to a fire with your spouse, find more endorphins in your life and happy people, people want to work with them. If you want to be more magnetic in business, stop bitching about what's not working. Start bringing more joy and share some of that joy with your audience.

People want to work with people who are happy, fulfilled, and satisfied in their work, even if you're not a life coach, even if you're not selling a certain lifestyle. People want to see that the person they're working with is living a life that they would want to live. I think that's a really good test is if you're looking at learning from someone, ask a question, would you want to trade places with their lives? And most people, if they're like, oh, I wouldn't want to be that person, they're probably not going to learn from that person.

I want you thinking about how can you bring more joy if for anything just to make your life 3 % better, 5 % better, 10 % better, because hell you only get one of these things. So you might as well make it a joyful one. Okay, friend. I hope that's the message you needed this week. Bring more joy to your day. And as always reach out on Instagram. I'd love to hear from you what resonated and how you're choosing more joy in your life. Reach out at

the Heather Sager ⁓ on Instagram. And as always, make sure that you're signed up for my email list so that you get my weekly fiery golden rambles in your inbox each Friday. This last week, it was a good one. I'd love to resend it to you if you missed it. I talked about the difference between significance and feeling special and what you need to be thinking about in terms of how that translates to how you could make your audience feel to be more connected to them.

So I'm always sharing different insights of things that I'm learning. pay it forward to my audience. So if you're not on my newsletter, if you go to my Instagram at the Heather Sager, one of the links has joined my newsletter. So make sure that you go check that out. Otherwise I'll be back in your inbox next week. Until then go hint your hustle off. I don't know. I need an outro. For now, just go do some fun shit. Okay, Brent, talk soon. Bye.