🌻 3 Ways I’m Gently Reinventing My Work Right Now
Welcome to off the grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients. Hello. Hello, and welcome to off the grid. I am your host, Amelia Ruby, and this is our podcast. My podcast, your podcast, our podcast, all about sharing your work online without relying on social media.
Amelia Hruby:Happy July, my friends. I don't know about you, but I am very happy to be easing in to the summertime. For me, it's really July when I feel that, like, peak of summer energy. And then by August, it's totally gone again, and I'm just, like, flattened by the heat, and I can't do anything. So July is when I am out here making moves, hopping in the pool, enjoying my summertime, and I hope you might feel the same way.
Amelia Hruby:Although if you're one of our lovely listeners from the Southern Hemisphere, I know it is not summer for you. So seasonality is specific to where we live, which actually gets me into the topic of today's episode. So I have not done very many solo episodes this season. I've really been saving my behind the scenes updates for the clubhouse members. You can pop over there for just $5 a month if you wanna hear how I'm thinking about my business this year.
Amelia Hruby:But it just felt like it was time for me to come back here on the public pod and tell you a little bit about what I'm thinking and what I'm doing this summer. So I wanted to share this episode that I'm calling three ways I'm reinventing my work right now in honor of what I have kind of deemed my paradigm shift summer. Now a paradigm is a model or a very, like, clear example of something. I often think of it as like a whole way of thinking, a framework that clarifies how the world works or how something works in the world. And for me, what I have realized time and time again this year is that my paradigm for how business works, how online business works, how my business works has been in need of some polishing, shifting, fine tuning, radical adjustment.
Amelia Hruby:Basically, the way I've been doing business, even though it was so intentional, it was so suited to my talents and my joys and my needs. It just still wasn't working for me anymore. And so as I've been heading into the summer, I was like, okay, we are shifting the paradigm at Softer Sounds this summer. We are shifting the paradigm in my home office. I am shifting the paradigm of how my work day looks, of how my work relationships function, of how my website looks even.
Amelia Hruby:Like, I'm really trying to bring this sort of clarifying energy to everything I'm doing in my business. At the same time, summer is not the season where I'm like pushing myself to do hard things. So I let myself hold the sort of paradoxical belief of like, okay, this summer I am shifting paradigms and it's going to be super easy. What if this work doesn't have to be hard? What if bringing through a new paradigm for my business, a new way of working doesn't have to be a laborious process?
Amelia Hruby:What if I can really usher it through with ease and grace and joy and pleasure? And so that's what I'm focusing on this summer, and I wanted to bring you into that process a bit by sharing three ways that I am gently reinventing my work right now. Now before we get there, I do wanna let you know that I have a little class coming up. It's happening July, and it's called opt out, how to quit Meta, Google, or Amazon with ease. Because again, the whole spirit I'm bringing to this summer is how can I make big moves through simple, soft, spacious, easy actions?
Amelia Hruby:And it occurred to me that breaking up with big tech is something that many, many, many off the grid listeners tell me they want to do. And then typically they say it to me and they say something like, but, oh my gosh, it's gonna be so hard. I have no energy for that. Who has time for this? It's such a big thing.
Amelia Hruby:It's so much work. Like, I just get the litany of overwhelm that comes with the idea of quitting any of these major platforms, whether they be social media or Amazon Prime or Google Suite, like, whatever it is, it feels really overwhelming to take steps toward breaking up with those tools. But what if it could be pretty simple? What if it could be relatively straightforward? What if we could do it together?
Amelia Hruby:That's the whole premise for my life right now and for this class that I'm teaching. So again, opt out is a ninety minute class and three q and a support sessions where I will guide you through mindset shifts, step by step processes, and curated lists of alternate tech tools that will help you stop relying on these big tech companies and the big tech billionaires that we know are harmful to people and the planet. So if you're interested in that work and you might wanna do it with me this summer, you can head to the show notes to learn more about opt out. I would love to see you there live, or the recordings are included with class, and we will have a little Discord server so you could move through the material asynchronously if you need to do it on your own time. And also, if you're listening when this episode comes out, there is an early bird discount code for a few more days.
Amelia Hruby:So if you sign up by July 4 and you use the code get free, you can take $25 off registration, which means class will only cost $50 USD, which honestly, I don't know about you, but if I could feel like the deep relief that comes with the alignment between my values, my actions, and my tech tools for only $50, I would 100% do that. Of course, I'm a little biased. It's my class, obviously. But I hope to see you in class. Head to the show notes for all of the info.
Amelia Hruby:And now let's dive in to this episode about three ways that I am gently reinventing my work right now. If you happen to be new to me, if you happen to be new to off the grid, welcome. I'm gonna give you a quick recap of what my work has been so that you can understand how it's changing. I launched my podcast studio, Softer Sounds, in July 2021. The studio grew from my years of freelance audio editing, and I kind of formalized that and turned it into a production studio.
Amelia Hruby:You can hear more about that journey in my conversation with Sarah Jutra about freelancing. And over the next few years, Softrasound's really grew. It went from being a one person endeavor to now I have three contractors, an assistant producer, an editor, and a writer. And, you know, last year, the studio grossed over 6 figures in revenue. So it really went from a one person practice that was making me a few thousand dollars a month to something much bigger over the past four years.
Amelia Hruby:Alongside growing softer sounds, in spring of twenty twenty two, I launched off the grid, this year podcast. In the first season, Off The Grid was just an experiment. I was making some episodes trying to figure out what people might wanna hear from me. And at the end of that season, I taught a three day workshop called The Refresh. I kind of repeated that whole thing again the next year, and then I launched the interweb in 2023, the clubhouse in 2024, and now off the grid is a whole ecosystem of the show and different offerings.
Amelia Hruby:I teach classes as you heard about opt out at the start of this episode. So now in summer twenty twenty five, I run two full time businesses, essentially, from my one little laptop in my little office in Lincoln, Nebraska. So a lot has changed, and much of that has changed very intentionally. I wanted to grow softer sounds. I wanted to grow off the grid.
Amelia Hruby:But, also, some of that has been a bit at, like, the whims of the universe, and it's also being impacted by the state of the world right now. So something that has happened this year is that business at Softer Sounds has scaled back pretty dramatically. In spring of twenty twenty three, we had, like, 24 active clients, I think, something like that. And this spring, we had about seven. So I'm really seeing, like, a big reduction in our podcast editing work, and there are a lot of reasons for that.
Amelia Hruby:I think one of them is the rise of AI powered podcasting tools that are making it easier than ever for people to DIY their shows. I think another is the contraction in the economy that has people just pulling back on their spending, and podcast editing gets kind of cut out as a not so necessary cost during tighter seasons. And I also think it's declined because I just haven't had the mojo to like be pitching clients, be out there, be, like, really enthusiastically courting new business. And the first couple years of Softer Sounds, that's what I was doing. And now I'm just kinda hanging out, seeing what lands in my inbox, and it's been enough to keep the studio going, but not quite enough to keep it at the size it's been or with the size of team that I have had there.
Amelia Hruby:Simultaneously, while there's been that sort of contraction and softer sounds, off the grid has been growing a lot. At the end of last year, I had the opportunity to be on the biggest podcast I've ever been on and probably will ever be on, which was we can do hard things with Glenn and Doyle. And that brought a lot of new people to the show at the start of this year. And so the interweb is bigger than it's ever been. The clubhouse is bigger than it's ever been, and these episodes are getting more listens than they ever have.
Amelia Hruby:And I have really been trying to ride that wave to follow that momentum, but also noticing that it's been hard. Like I said, I'm running essentially two full time businesses under one umbrella, and that has been challenging. So that's kind of your update on what has been happening and why I'm landing here in July 2025 telling you about my paradigm shift summer and really craving a gentle reinvention of my work. Now I call it a gentle reinvention because this is not some big like before and after radical change, everything's different sort of thing. That's not my vibe in general, and I just don't have the energy for that this summer.
Amelia Hruby:Like, who does? I wanna be in my tiny backyard kiddie pool situation. I don't wanna be like working hard at reinventing my business. So when I say I'm gently reinventing my work, what I mean is that I'm trying to sort of uproot some of the old beliefs about what my business had to be and how I had to show up in it. And even some of the newer beliefs, the things that have kind of crept in as I've seen what works because I've noticed that sometimes the success of my business sort of quote unquote proves something to me that I don't really wanna be the case.
Amelia Hruby:Like, you know, maybe I noticed that when I worked more, I made more money, but I don't really wanna function that way anyway. So my goal for this gentle reinvention is to make more of those beliefs visible to myself, maybe to you along the way, and use that surfacing, that unveiling, that releasing of those beliefs to make some changes that hopefully will have me in better alignment by the fall. Why do I say I wanna be in better alignment? Well, I haven't been loving my day to day in my business this year. It's been challenging.
Amelia Hruby:There have been moments where I have really felt that, like, a synergy, that, like, excitement, the propulsion, the momentum, and I'm like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love doing this. And there have been many more moments where I'm kinda like dragging my feet to my desk, trying to make myself respond to the client, trying to make myself look at my inbox.
Amelia Hruby:And, you know, I'm very in tune with my energy day to day with how I'm feeling about the business day to day. And I've had kind of two noticings. One is that I would like to feel more excited about my work more often. And the other is that I would like to be spending less time working. I'm spending significantly less time working than I was two or three years ago.
Amelia Hruby:Early days of Softer Sounds, I was definitely working forty or fifty hour Like, it was a full time job in the traditional corporate sense. And now that probably looks more like thirty hours a week. I'm definitely taking more time off. I'm able to travel without taking my laptop. I'm never feeling like I'm, like, in the grind, but I still want a different relationship to coming to work each day.
Amelia Hruby:And I think that that's what I want to realign. It's like my relationship to the business needs some realignment. My relationship to my workday needs some realignment, and the business itself needs some realignment. I think I've added some things or made some changes or overbuilt something, overcomplicated something that doesn't need to be the case, and we can clear all that out. So hopefully that recap and the clarity of my intention helped you see where we're coming from.
Amelia Hruby:And now what am I gonna do? What is paradigm shift summer really gonna look like? Well, I'm kind of thinking of this through the lens of three s's. I want to make everything in my creative ecosystem more simple, more specific, and more spiritual. Those are my three s's.
Amelia Hruby:Simple, specific, spiritual. I selected those because they feel like what is needed for me right now. I think my business has gotten a little too complicated. Did you hear me say earlier that I'm running two full time businesses under one umbrella? That's a little complicated.
Amelia Hruby:And so that's why I've chosen simplicity. I also think that with the growth of my audience this year, I've started operating like what I do is kind of for everyone and it's not. So I want to be more specific. That's why I chose that value. And then I've been in conversation with a few friends recently who reflected back to me that when I started Softer Sounds, it was a deeply intuitive and ritualized process.
Amelia Hruby:I was lighting candles and pulling tarot cards and, like, really embedded in my spiritual practices. And that has almost entirely disappeared from how I'm functioning in the day to day of my work at this point. So that's why I selected spiritual as the third value that I want to re embed in my business this summer. So again, the three ways that I am gently reinventing my work right now are that I'm making everything more simple, specific, and spiritual. Now let's go into each one of those and talk about, like, how I'm actually doing that.
Amelia Hruby:Right? So so far, what I've tried to model is noticing how has my business changed and evolved over the four years of its existence, and then noticing what is not feeling right and not working anymore. What are the values I want to recenter myself in? And now that I have those, what are some actions I can take to bring those to life? So let's start with simplicity.
Amelia Hruby:How am I going to make everything more simple or simpler if we wanna be grammatically correct about it? Well, for this one, I'm looking at maybe three things. The first is my business model, especially at Softer Sounds. So when I started my podcast production company, I was moving out of that freelance life where people just emailed me, and then we talked, and I wrote them a proposal, and then we kinda went from there. I was moving away from that, and I really wanted to have a super structured business.
Amelia Hruby:I was like, it's gonna be structured. It's gonna be systematized. It's gonna make my life so easy. So I set up a series of packages for podcast production services and podcast editing services. And when people came to the business, they could purchase one of three tiers of a package.
Amelia Hruby:Essentially, you could do just podcast editing, podcast editing and show notes, or podcast editing, show notes, and graphics. And I loved that structure for a while. It worked really well for me, especially when people were really excited to invest in their podcasts. But what I've noticed over the past year or so is that most of my clients, the ones I love, the ones I wanted to continue working with, really needed more flexibility in how we designed our work together. I used to make people pay for four episodes at a time.
Amelia Hruby:They had to pay before we started editing, and that worked really well to support the studio financially. But now many of my clients, just their cash flow was so tight, and so I wanted to be a little more flexible. I wanted to acknowledge that, like, I had great relationships with these people. I knew they would pay, but I could invoice them at the end of the month. And so I've really shifted the model from being so, like, structured and systematized back to being much more flexible and low key.
Amelia Hruby:And I'm kinda functioning like that freelancer I used to be again, but it feels easier because now I've built a business around myself, and I've built reputation and a value system around myself that really kind of resolves a lot of the struggles I had when I was freelancing the first time. So that's one way things are getting more simple, a shift in the business model. As a result of that shift, another change that I'm making, another reinvention is that I am scaling back my tech stack at Softer Sounds. So when I built a business that really needed, like, structure and systematization, I invested in all of these different tech tools that cost me hundreds of dollars a year. Like, they worked really well when the business looked a certain way, but now I feel like I'm paying for tools that just, like, do more than I really need.
Amelia Hruby:And so I am scaling back my tech stack. I am, you know, opting out like my class suggests of certain beliefs I have about, like, what it means to be a business and the fact that I even need a tech stack to begin with. Right? So I'm planning to move toward tools that are more like one time payments or super low cost. Because when I look at my business expenses, I'm investing, like, $500 a month in different software spend.
Amelia Hruby:And some of that is unavoidable. Like, I'm not moving my site off Squarespace, but some of that I can change. Like, I don't really need all of the functionality of Dubsado anymore. I don't necessarily need the, like, extra tool that puts the podcast player on the website in a certain way. Like, I want to cancel a number of subscriptions and then move to tools that are quickly becoming my new favorites, like TidyCal or Breeze Docs.
Amelia Hruby:These are all, like, free or one time payment tools for setting up your calendar and taking payments or getting contracts signed. And I think that that is a more simple approach to the tech I'm using in my business and suits the sort of like scaling back that I'm doing with the model. And the fact that, like, finances are tired this year, and I'd like to be spending less money in general. So that's what I'm doing to make everything more simple. I am scaling back my business model from super structured systematized studio to flexible freelancer again, and I am clearing out my tech stack.
Amelia Hruby:I am canceling a bunch of tools and using less expensive, simpler ones. And then where this kinda becomes more of a paradigm shift is I am trying to make my offerings more simple. I'm hoping to streamline them by asking myself a deceptively simple question, which is, can I actually stop doing the things I don't like doing? Because as my business has grown and I worked with clients, and those clients very well, meaningly ask me if I could do things to support them, the things that they need done and are happy to pay me to do, I've often said yes. I'm like, yeah.
Amelia Hruby:I'll make videos of your podcast, or, yeah, I'll redesign your Notion workspace for you or, yeah, I can probably just like write up a quick email for that. All of those asks are perfectly valid, and the fact that I said yes is fine. But I have just found myself more and more over the past year or so doing things that I don't really like doing. And even though I put out there, like, Softer Sounds is audio first studio, and we don't do video, I'm doing more and more video. And I definitely have this mindset of, like, I need to make money.
Amelia Hruby:And if this is what people will pay me for, I'll do it. But I wanna sit with this question more of can I stop doing the things I don't like doing? What would that look like in my business? Like, would immediately go away? What would go away over time?
Amelia Hruby:And could it be really simple? Because I do feel like there's this way where I have built a business with the sort of like shoulds I've been told. Right? Like, you should have three tiers of the services, and people will most often buy the middle one. This is sort of like a business truism.
Amelia Hruby:But I'm like, what if I just did audio editing and I didn't do anything else for people? I don't know if I'm gonna do that anytime soon. And if you're a client listening to this, don't worry. I'm not dropping your show notes or your video support or anything like that. But I think that this question is gonna lead me toward more simplicity in my business.
Amelia Hruby:So that is the first gentle reinvention. I am making everything more simple by simplifying my business model, simplifying my tech stack, and simplifying my offerings. Check, check, and check. Okay. Let's move on to our second value, our second gentle reinvention, and that is that I am making everything in my business more specific.
Amelia Hruby:So as I mentioned before, as the audience for off the grid has grown, I have felt some pressure to be for everybody. And some of that pressure has been internal, and some of it has been external because I get emails from people who, you know, aren't business owners but love off the grid and, like, want me to do more general public stuff. Or, you know, I wrote a book this spring that will be coming out in the fall, and I had this idea in my head that, like, this is a book for everybody. Everyone could love this book. It's gonna break through, and I will make it mainstream.
Amelia Hruby:And I had to be like, no. Because in the process of writing the book, when I put that pressure on it, I was like, I don't know how to write anything for everybody. I am not a mainstream kinda girly. Like, that is not my vibe. I like to be a weirdo.
Amelia Hruby:I like to be a bit of a freak. I like to do things in a sort of, like, offbeat on the margins way. I just always have either by necessity or choice. So this sort of pressure to mainstream to be for everybody manifested in this general anxiety and disease. And that's why I need to make everything more specific.
Amelia Hruby:That's why I want to make everything more specific. And my guiding question for this is how can everything I create or sell be for someone? Like, a specific person that I have in mind. And sometimes that person is me, and sometimes that person is somebody in the interweb, and sometimes that person is someone I know elsewhere or a peer or a friend, but I'm really trying to narrow in on who is this for, and what problem does it solve for them. And this has really helped me with my book process.
Amelia Hruby:You know, when I was really struggling with writing the book and feeling really insecure and uncertain about it, I had a really illuminating conversation with my friend Grace where I realized that I was thinking of this book as kind of like a golden retriever, like man's best friend. Everybody loves them. Very cute. Little puppy flopping around. But I'm not a golden retriever.
Amelia Hruby:My book's not a golden retriever. We're way more of, like, a black cat slinking through the house, and people who love cats love cats, and they're gonna love this book. And those who don't, it's okay. It's just, like, not for them. And so again, this gentle reinvention is about making everything more specific, allowing myself to be even more true to myself, allowing myself to release this idea that the things I do should be for everyone.
Amelia Hruby:That's the big paradigm shift here. Nothing's for everyone, and I need to redesign some of my thinking around this or my feeling or my actions around this. And in terms of a few specific things I'll be doing to make everything more specific, well, I think that what this might look like is actually returning to my personal website, ameliafrubee.com, and seeing how I can really show up there, not as a sort of, like, conglomeration of all the things I've ever done, because right now my personal website is just kind of an about page with a long list of stuff on it, but more as like an integration of everything I've done. I've started thinking of calling myself a social media critic, which I think I am. And that's way more specific than how I refer to myself now, which is writer and podcaster.
Amelia Hruby:Those things are true. They are roles that I take on. They are the mediums that I use, but what I do is be critical of social media. And I think that the more specific I can be about the what I do, not just the how I do it, will really benefit me and my businesses. So ameliaruby.com, check that space.
Amelia Hruby:Over the summer, I think I will be reimagining what it looks like, and that's how I'm making everything more specific. And finally, my third value, the third ethos that I am gently reinventing my work around is that I'm making everything more spiritual. Now this has already kind of snuck in through the other two. When I talk about being more genuinely myself or when I talk about, you know, the lessons I've learned about not being for everyone or not overcomplicating things, like, those are also spiritual lessons. And I think that how this will look in my business will begin with what I mentioned earlier, where I want to bring back the daily, weekly, monthly rituals in my business.
Amelia Hruby:I want to do my monthly money magic ritual again instead of just like haphazardly categorizing transactions in QuickBooks while I'm in line at the grocery store. I want to light a candle at the start of every week and pull a few tarot cards to see what might come through for me. I want to be communing with my business spirit again. I want us to go on walks together. When I started Softer Sounds, I did a really kind of intensive ancestral ritual, and I went to a number of cemeteries around where I live to convene with my literal ancestors.
Amelia Hruby:And I think it's time for me to get back to that. I haven't been to any of those cemeteries in, like, three years, and I think the ancestors can tell and I can tell. So I want to bring back those spiritual practices. Now if you're listening to this and you're like, Amelia, I don't even have spiritual practices. How would I make my business more spiritual?
Amelia Hruby:Well, one, it's a question of do you want or need to? And two, there are some great episodes of the podcast here. You can go back to our Halloween time episode from last year where Bridget, Cecily, and Ash offered us three magical rituals for our businesses. I will be listening to that again as I step into this more spiritual era of my work. You can also listen to my episode with Sarah of Hawthorne Tarot about radical imagination, or you can go back to my episode with Pascal about cultivating creative resilience, or my chat with Megan Leatherman about sacred labor.
Amelia Hruby:There's a lot of great magical spiritual resourcing on the podcast feed, And we also have classes on that inside the interweb. So you could join the wait list to get in there this summer and come to class, explore with us, deepen your spiritual practice inside of your business. And that is what I will be focusing on. I think the deeper paradigm shift here for me is that when I think of working on my business, I tend to think of like hard work. It's very like seven dwarves like hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work.
Amelia Hruby:Here we go. Okay. Maybe not so much like that, but that's kind of me when I get out of bed every morning. And instead of perceiving it as hard work and effort, I would like to flip that on its head and imagine it as like a softening and leaning back. And I want to remember that business isn't just about, like, the strategies I build in my brain.
Amelia Hruby:It's also about the intuition I cultivate that makes decisions for me, the messages I channel perhaps, the spirits I call in. There are many different forms of spiritual practice, but I think that I want to shift this paradigm for myself where it's not that I'm working hard and thinking of the most brilliant strategies, but I'm actually like relaxing and receiving the messages and the needs that come through. Because some of those messages and needs, like, they come directly from all of you listening. Right? Like You, dear listener, may land in my inbox with exactly what my business needs this summer, and I welcome that.
Amelia Hruby:And I will be in this more spiritual receptive mode so I can actually receive it. At least that's what I'm working on. So those are the three ways that I am gently reinventing my work this summer. I am stepping into this new paradigm where everything is more simple, specific, and spiritual, I am releasing some of the beliefs I've had about business such as that everything needed to be systematized and embedded in complicated tech tools, or that everything could be for everybody and I should appeal to them all so that I can be a mainstream success, or that working hard with my big brain was the best way to guarantee guarantee a certain revenue or metric in my business. We're releasing all of that in favor of making everything more simple, more specific, more spiritual.
Amelia Hruby:And I guess when I say we there, I should speak from the eye just for myself. That is how I am reinventing my work this summer. You, dear listener, may in fact need the opposite of what I need. Your business may need a few more systems, may need to get a little more complicated. It may need to be a little more general.
Amelia Hruby:Maybe you, like, hyper niched and you're like, actually, this isn't working. I'm too specific. And maybe you have really been tuning in and cultivating your spiritual practice, but you're like, in fact, what I need is a business strategist because the tarot cards, they are not guiding me anymore. Right? So I am sharing what I am doing for my paradigm shift this summer.
Amelia Hruby:The ways that I am gently reinventing my work in the hopes that by the fall or the next year or the upcoming years, my business will be more aligned with where I am right now, with what I need, and with what all of you need, with what the community needs. Because the business is just where we convene together. It's a vessel for those transactions and transformations. Okay. I think that is all I have for you today.
Amelia Hruby:I have really enjoyed returning to the mic for this solo episode. And if you've enjoyed it, there are so many more ways that you can hear from me more often. I invite you into the Off The Grid Clubhouse, which is our paid podcast and newsletter on Substack. I'm doing a lot of sharing there this summer, so come on through. Hear more about my business, more about my book, more about the marketing experiments I've been doing this summer, including clear financial details on how they've been going.
Amelia Hruby:I don't really talk about that on the public feed anymore, but I do share it in the clubhouse. Or if you want to meet other amazing off the grid listeners, maybe your business needs more connection or more referrals or more visibility. You can find all of that inside of the interweb, which is our annual membership for launching, growing, and reinventing your business beyond social media. And if your tech stack plays into any of this, if you want to paradigm shift how you approach big tech companies and what you quote, unquote have to do online, I do invite you to join me in opt out, which is happening July, and you can find out all about that in the show notes. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of off the grid.
Amelia Hruby:And for now, I am gonna sign off and go get in the pool. I hope you do something equally soft, sweet, and supportive for yourself. And until next time, I will see you off the grid. Thanks for listening to off the grid. Don't forget to grab your free living social media toolkit at offthegrid.fun/toolkit.
Amelia Hruby:This podcast is a softer sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Caitlin Carter of Making Audio Magic, and our logo is by Natalia Studio. I'm your host, Amelia Ruby. And until next time, I'll see you off the grid and on the interweb.
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