♻️ Success is a Cycle (& Sometimes That Sucks)

Amelia Hruby [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients. Hello and welcome or welcome back to Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. I am the founder of Softer Sounds podcast studio. And on this show, I share stories, strategies, and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity, energetic sovereignty, and no or minimal social media presence. We are currently wrapping up season three of Off the Grid. This is the penultimate episode of the season, and today, I'm really excited to hop on the mic solo to talk to you about one of my favorite topics, success.

Amelia Hruby [00:01:09]:
Before we dive into that, I, of course, want to remind you that this podcast is paired with a pretty awesome free resource. It's called the leaving social media tool kit, and it includes the three tools that I use to leave social media and start my business without it. Inside, there's a five step plan for leaving any social media platform, my list of 100 ways to share your work off social media, and a creative marketing experiments database. Those tools pair with the first four episodes of the show. So if you're brand new here, grab the toolkit at offthegrid.fun/toolkit, and then head back to our very first episode so you can get all the goodness and all the teaching that I have to offer in those early days and present days. And then you can meet me back here for our conversation about success.

Amelia Hruby [00:02:05]:
So if you're a long time listener, thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. As we near the end of season three of the show, I am just so grateful for everyone who tunes in. This season, we've seen our weekly episode numbers really go up to or even surpass a thousand downloads the first week each episode comes out, which makes us a small but mighty show. In the grand scheme of things, we're not out here doing big bucks with the advertisers. You're not gonna hear a Squarespace partnership on this here podcast. But I share that because it does feel like meaningful to me.

Amelia Hruby [00:02:44]:
We're also coming up on 100,000 downloads overall, which honestly surpasses some of my wildest fantasies when I started this show, that it would ever grow that much. And I get a little choked up thinking about it. I'm just really excited for what else is to come. And again, really, really grateful that you're here listening and that you've been a part of it. I mean, if you press play today, you are one of those almost 100,000. And I find myself a little bit speechless for how much that means to me.

Amelia Hruby [00:03:21]:
I think that that's actually a nice reflection to take us into this episode because today's episode is all about success and what I've learned about success in my first three years of full-time self employment and many more years of part-time self employment. And this episode is also really a weaving of all of the conversations that I've had this season. We've had so many amazing guests on, and I think that if I hadn't had those conversations with them, I wouldn't have been thinking about these themes. So I will shout out some of those guests throughout today's episode, but I also really invite you to go back through the season. There is not the single skippable episode in it, in my opinion, and I don't take that lightly because I am an episode skipper, y'all. Like, I tend to not listen to a whole podcast. I really just cherry pick my faves, but I work really hard to make sure that every episode of Off the Grid is well worth cherry picking. So without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into today's episode, Success is a Cycle.

Amelia Hruby [00:04:38]:
Okay, my friends. As we head in to this conversation about success, I want to invite you to take a brief pause and check-in with yourself about how the word success makes you feel. When you saw the title of this episode, when you pressed play, when you're hearing me say success, success, success over and over again right now, what does that bring up for you? Does it bring up excitement, stress, fear? Did you hesitate to play this episode? Did you smash play as soon as you saw it on your phone or in your podcast player? What does the idea of success bring up in your body right now? How are you relating to it these days?

Amelia Hruby [00:05:31]:
I wanna open us there because I do think that success can be a very personal thing and a very activating topic. And what we're gonna do in today's episode is really reframe success. We're gonna talk about what I don't think success is, and then tell you what I do think success is. And then at the very end of the episode, I'm gonna share my personal definitions of success. One that I wrote when I launched Softer Sounds that has just been such a guidepost for me. So stick around to the end if you wanna hear that.

Amelia Hruby [00:06:08]:
But now that we've checked in with ourselves, I'm gonna invite you to take one deep breath with me, inhaling together and exhaling together. Let's release anything we're carrying into this conversation about success, and I'm gonna kick us off by giving away my whole thesis at the beginning as I often do and telling you that today, I wanna argue that success is not about goals. So let me start by breaking that down. I think that in our society, when we think about success, we have a sort of mountainness image of success. And it's like, "I'm at the bottom of this mountain, way down here. I wanna be at the top of it, way up there, and I need to set some goals and work really hard to get myself from down here to up there in X amount of time. And once I do that, I'll be a success." Right?

Amelia Hruby [00:07:14]:
I think this is so often how we think of it. It's like, "I'm here. I wanna be there. I'm gonna get myself there with the help of goal setting and hard work. And then once I get there, that's success." It's quite literally a finish line. We expect a trophy at the end, and we anticipate a huge flood of positive feelings that will come when we achieve the success that we've set out to achieve.

Amelia Hruby [00:07:42]:
And I think for many of us, the clue that this narrative of success is wrong, that it doesn't actually work that way, the clue is that we achieve a major success. We hit a milestone in our life. We work really hard and we get something we really, really want, and then that flood of positive feelings never comes. And that's our clue that this is not the game. Maybe success isn't what we thought it was. Maybe it's not about climbing these mountains, running these races, getting to the finish line, getting the trophies, checking off the box, getting the certificate, the degree, finding ourselves on the other side of that milestone.

Amelia Hruby [00:08:26]:
I can tell you from my own personal experience, I put seven years of my life into grad school, wrote a dissertation, got my PhD, and then at the end, mostly felt empty inside. And in my head, the narrative was, isn't this what I've been working toward for seven years? Shouldn't I feel awesome about achieving it? Shouldn't I know I'm successful now? And I literally felt nothing. A little bit of malaise, some confusion, disappointment, but I certainly didn't feel like a success.

Amelia Hruby [00:09:01]:
And so I think in our society, success has become conflated with achieving goals. I really think that SMART goals, to use the acronym, have had a lot to do with this, from just me surmising, but this idea that if we can set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound goals, then we will accomplish all of our goals and be a success, I think that's a big part of it. And I think that for many of us, we think that if our goals are smart enough and we keep accomplishing them often enough, then we will be a success, and we will feel like a success, and other people will see us as a success. And it's never just about the one success.

Amelia Hruby [00:09:48]:
Because once we are a success, then we need to set a bigger goal, a better goal, faster, stronger, smarter goals to continue being a success. We have to keep moving the goal post over and over again. That's how it becomes this whole road map of goals, and the finish line gets so far off. And once we get there, there's another one. There's also a piece here about who sets or determines those goals, because sometimes our goals are intrinsically motivated. We want something, and we go after it. But often, I think that we pick up goals from our cultural context and the scripts that we see other people living.

Amelia Hruby [00:10:29]:
I mentioned grad school. Academia is a script. I'm meant to move from undergrad to a master's program to a PhD program, do research, write a dissertation, get my PhD, go into a postdoc, get a associate professorship, move up the ladder, get tenure, etcetera. That's a road map. That is a series of goals that just keeps going and going and going and going. And theoretically, if I'm on that path and keep moving down it, I'm a success.

Amelia Hruby [00:11:00]:
That whole script was created by other people and given to me as a 22 year old as something that I should want and be doing and a way to achieve success. And I did it for a while. It wasn't until I got the PhD that I was like, oh, no, no, no. This roadmap is not for me. This is not my script, not my path. I'm stepping off this. I'm doing something else. And many people perceive that as a failure. In my dissertation defense, I was told that it was a shame I was not continuing on this path.

Amelia Hruby [00:11:37]:
I talked about this in a different context in my season two episode on the online business growth escalator. There, I shared how I realized that I was on the path or the script of online business success. I had launched my business. I got my first clients. I grew my list. I hit my first five figure month. I kept growing. I hired my first contractor, etcetera, etcetera. I was on this path, the script of online business success, and eventually, I paused and looked around, and I was like, this doesn't feel good. I'm not enjoying myself. I'm pushing too hard. I'm going too fast. And that's because I was operating on the script of what it meant to be successful in online business.

Amelia Hruby [00:12:25]:
So I kept going that direction until I kinda woke up to what I was doing and realized that I wanted off that escalator with that metaphor that I was using. And when I stepped off that escalator, I realized that I needed to redefine success for myself. Because when I had left the grad school script, I pretty quickly jumped to the self-employment script or the online business script. And I was just on a different path. It's like moving from one highway to another. I was on I-80, and then I was on I-90. Or if we go back to the idea of success as climbing a mountain, I just went to a different mountain.

Amelia Hruby [00:13:08]:
But I was still following these paths that other people had determined. I was still on these roadmaps. I was just hitting the milestones. I was defining success by achieving those goals that were predetermined and laid out for me. And so at this juncture in my life and in my business, I've come to realize that success is not about goals, at least not for me. And that doesn't mean I don't set goals. I actually do. I set goals every quarter and every year in my business.

Amelia Hruby [00:13:40]:
But achieving those goals isn't what brings me success. I have detached the goals and the scripts and the paths from what success means to me. So if success is not about achieving a goal, what is it? I think that success is a feeling. And I think it's the feeling that what you're doing and how you're being are in alignment with what you want, which sounds very simple, but in practice can be pretty challenging to achieve. Success for me is when my actions and my attitude align with my desires, when the things I'm doing and how I'm being align with what I want.

Amelia Hruby [00:14:36]:
And in all honesty, my whole life is about trying to find and maintain that alignment. And sometimes, I've got it and other times, I do not. And that's because if success is a feeling, then like all feelings, it's impermanent. It's fleeting. Success is not one and done. It's not something we have forever. Just like joy or grief or lust or sadness, we don't get to have feelings forever, and that's the power of them. That's the pleasure of feelings. It's in how they change and they flow and in how they change us in the process.

Amelia Hruby [00:15:21]:
So, again, I don't think success is about achieving a goal. It's not a finish line. It's not a trophy. It's a feeling. It's a feeling of alignment, I think even a feeling of satisfaction. Success for me is about being satisfied with where I am in my life in the present moment, knowing that that's always going to change. And that change piece is part of why I titled this episode Success is a Cycle, because success is something that we find and we feel, and then it changes, and we have to, or we get to, find it and feel it again. And this is very much in opposition to what our culture, specifically our white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal culture tells us about success.

Amelia Hruby [00:16:14]:
We have this narrative I started with. Like, I'm down here. Success is up there. I need to set my goals, go up, up, up in a linear way. And once I get there, I'll be a success, except, wait, hold on, I gotta keep going up. Now I gotta get to the next "up there." And this is the capitalist model of growth, that everything should be up into the right forever, particularly our profits. And I think that even if we're pretty good about realizing this isn't how life works, maybe we know that life is not about being happy and just getting happier and happier and happier and happier forever. But I think even if we know that in the context of our life and our general emotions, I think that often in our businesses, we take on this up into the right trajectory unconsciously, or at least unintentionally.

Amelia Hruby [00:17:05]:
So many of us believe that we should be increasing our revenue and income year over year over year over year, and we set that as the definition of success in our businesses, like de facto definition of success. I'm guilty of doing this myself. I certainly have raised my revenue goal every year that I've been in business so far. And, I talk a big talk about how I'm going to lower it, but I really have to stay in conversation with myself about when is that gonna happen. It's so easy to just stay on the expectation of an upward trajectory, to demand that of ourselves and our businesses. And that's why it can feel so bad when our business doesn't grow or plateaus or makes less money than the previous year.

Amelia Hruby [00:17:56]:
I talked to Jen Carrington about that this season. We talked about income fluctuations and how money can go up and down and how we don't have to make that mean something about our business or our success. It is so normal for there to be fluctuations in revenue and income in your business, But it's also so devastating because it can feel like or be interpreted as a failure.

Amelia Hruby [00:18:25]:
So if success is a cycle, that means that failure is a cycle too. And I think that success and failure are part of the same cycle. We're circling, we're cycling, we're looping between and among them. And rather than dreading or avoiding or hating that, I think that we can embrace it. I can't promise you much on this podcast, but I can, I think, promise you that there will be times that your business is doing awesome, and there will be times that it is doing less awesome and probably sometimes where it's doing outright bad. And I think it's possible to find the feeling of success during all of those times. Because, again, I don't think success is a goal. I don't think success is about achieving milestone after milestone on this script or road map that people decide we should want. I think success is about finding that alignment between what we're doing, how we're being, and what we want.

Amelia Hruby [00:19:37]:
And that's why for me, defining success has always started with figuring out what I want. I feel like in almost every conversation I've had this season, this has come up. I'd say specifically in my conversation about how much is enough with Nicole Antoinette and about embracing shifts in your business with Yarrow Magdalena, we talked about getting in touch with what you really want starting from that place. And that requires shedding so many of these cultural scripts, and it requires doing a lot of healing work in my experience.

Amelia Hruby [00:20:13]:
I had to do a lot of inner child healing work and some particularly inner teen healing work to figure any of this out, to even start to get close to knowing what I want. But once we know what we want, then we can do the work of aligning our actions and attitudes with that. And that, I think, is the path to success in online business or in anything.

Amelia Hruby [00:20:37]:
So if this episode was gonna come with some sort of how to, which it really doesn't, sorry. This one's a thinker, not a doer. But really, I think that the lesson that success is a cycle is all about figuring out what you want and pointing yourself in that direction. That is literally what I do every day in my business and in my life. And honestly, I feel successful most of the time. Not all the time. I definitely still get hooked in and activated by a low revenue month or by having fewer clients than someone I'm comparing myself to, or by all sorts of things. But when I can really return to that alignment with what I actually want, I often find that I already have it.

Amelia Hruby [00:21:34]:
And again, I think the feelings of success and satisfaction are close cousins, at least in my experience. So I promised you that at the end of this episode, I would share my definition of success and how I'm working with it right now. And at any given time, I'm probably juggling a few definitions of success in different areas of my life. What it means to feel success in my relationships feels different than in my business, than in my family, than in my domestic projects. There can be layers to this. But I do have a working definition of success in my business and what it feels like, and I thought that I would share it here with all of you.

Amelia Hruby [00:22:23]:
So my definition of success is a list of seven things that I want at any given time and that I want to be bringing into my life through my work at Softer Sounds and on this podcast. So here are those seven things: I want to feel energized and inspired by my work. I want to have enough money for life and fun and the future and community. I want ease and pleasure in my day-to-day. I want cool collaborations and partnerships. I want regular time off for travel, rest, and joy. I want to take care of my body, and I want to feel abundant and generous. That's it. It's a lot, but it's it. And I wrote that definition of success three years ago now.

Amelia Hruby [00:23:18]:
And I think that why it still feels so present and so true is because I really tapped in to the truest things about what I want. I didn't get caught up in SMART goals. Nothing about that list is particularly specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, or time bound. It's a list of my deepest desires for my work. And when I orient myself toward those things, that's when I find success. And sometimes I'm making a lot of money, and sometimes I'm making a lot less money. And sometimes I have a ton of clients, and sometimes I have no clients. And sometimes the podcast gets a thousand downloads in two days, and sometimes it gets a hundred downloads the first day.

Amelia Hruby [00:24:06]:
And none of that has anything to do with whether or not I feel success. It may cause me to go into a spiral of sorts, but that's something I can work on. That's where I get to use all of my regulation techniques and I get to return again and again and again to my actions and my alignment with my desires. So I guess if I was going to give you a takeaway for this episode, to do a task, so it can be a doer and a thinker, I invite you to work on your list of what you want and to make that your definition of success. And I'd invite you to really try to get underneath the desires. Notice what desires present themselves, like, I want to make six figures next year, and then ask why. And keep asking why until you feel like you've gotten to something that's really true.

Amelia Hruby [00:25:13]:
So to use that example of six figures again, that probably was on one of my early lists of the Softer Sound's definition of success. But when I really got underneath of it, what I actually wanted was some of these other things that ended up on the list. Why did I want six figures? Because I want enough money for life and fun and future and community. I want enough money for ease and pleasure in my day-to-day. Because money is also just a proxy, right? We don't typically want money just to have dollars and cents. We want money for all the things that it will bring us.

Amelia Hruby [00:25:49]:
So for your definition of success, I invite you to write that list of what you want and get closer to those things. And as you write your list of what you want, I invite you to keep asking yourself why, and then to trust yourself when you find what's true. As I wrote my definition of success, I would work on a draft and then I'd pause and I'd let it digest for a bit and then I would read it out loud, and I'd record myself reading it out loud. And I'd listen back and I'd ask myself, does this sound true? When I hear it in my own voice, does it sound true? And I could tell when it didn't. There was something about embodying it in my voice that helped me get to those kernels of truth, that helped me really connect with what I want and why I want it.

Amelia Hruby [00:26:40]:
And I think that as much as everything changes and success is fleeting, I think that's why this definition of success still rings so true for me even more than three years after I wrote it. And I don't really anticipate rewriting it anytime soon. I can't imagine what I would change or improve about it right now. So success is not about goals. It is a feeling, and it is a cycle, which means that success and failure will arrive in turn, and we can choose or allow ourselves to flow between them without making that mean so many things about who we are and what our business is. Instead, we can find the feeling of alignment between our actions, our attitude, and our desires, and steep ourselves in that satisfaction.

Amelia Hruby [00:27:38]:
As one final note for this episode, I just wanna say that I know that so many small business folks have been perhaps on the failure side of the success cycle recently. We've seen so many beautiful businesses close, so many creators stop making their work at least publicly or in a paid capacity for a period of time. We've seen so many people really going through the hardship of, A, all the painful things happening in our world right now, and B, the pretty dramatic shifts happening in online business. And this episode is not here to say, "Oh, it's just about your mindset and change your mindset and you'll be successful. You'll get everything you want." I don't live by a manifestation doctrine. It's not really my thing. I'm way too much of a Capricorn rising for that.

Amelia Hruby [00:28:38]:
What this episode is intended to do is help really center us in our deepest desires and shake off all of those scripts and prescriptions for what we should want so that we can get in touch with what we actually want and start working toward those things. And that doesn't mean we immediately get them. That doesn't mean we immediately have everything we want, but I think that there can be a lot of pleasure, and you can find the feeling of success in the process of moving toward those things that we want.

Amelia Hruby [00:29:12]:
So again, success is not about achieving a goal. It's not about having a thing. It's about being in this process of knowing and moving toward what we want, and many of my most favorite people that I've met through this show and through Softer Sounds over the past few years, honestly, quite a few or many of them have closed their businesses, but they're still so clearly in the process of finding and moving toward what they want. And sometimes that does look like shutting down a business, and there can be a lot of sadness and grief in that. I think that sadness and success can live side by side. We can be sad and satisfied.

Amelia Hruby [00:29:56]:
So again, this isn't about manifesting whatever you want by writing a list of what you want and then you'll just have it. It's about crafting a life where you're oriented toward those things you want and you find pleasure, ease, satisfaction, joy, and sadness, grief, stress even, in the process of moving toward those things. Some of my most successful days are my stressful days sometimes, and that's okay. I embrace that. So I hope that this episode has served you in some way, whether you are feeling like you're in a particularly successful moment of your business, or you're struggling to understand what's happening right now. Perhaps you feel like you're failing. Perhaps success feels really far away. I just invite you to remember that it's all part of the same cycle.

Amelia Hruby [00:32:23]:
Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Off the Grid. It's been a real pleasure to explore these ideas with you today. And if you do write your own definition of success, if you make a list of the things that you really, really want, I hope you'll send it to me. You can email me at hi@softersounds.studio or you can send me a voice note through SpeakPipe. I'll put that link in the show notes. If you wanna read your definition of success, your list of what you desire out loud to me, I welcome that. I will receive it, mirror it back to you, and hold that space for you to really feel it and find it.

Amelia Hruby [00:31:36]:
Next week, I will officially open the Off the Grid Clubhouse that I have been sneak peeking, previewing for you for the past few weeks. So stay tuned to your podcast feed and your email inbox to get an announcement about how you can join the Clubhouse this summer because next Wednesday will be our final episode of the season before we take a break for two plus months while I regroup, reconvene, and prep for season four. So the Clubhouse will be open all summer. Stay tuned to learn how to join it next week. Stick around for the final episode of season three. It's gonna be a good one. And until next time, I will see you off the grid and on the Interweb.

Amelia Hruby [00:32:59]:
Thanks for listening to Off the Grid. Don't forget to grab your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at offthegrid.fun/toolkit. This podcast is a Softer Sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Kaitlyn Carter of Making Audio Magic, and our logo is by n'Atelier Studio. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby, and until next time, I'll see you off the grid and on the Interweb.