12 Years of Working Better, Not Less

I love being a coach. It means people ask me to help them do things that matter to them. Sometimes I help them get a book published, or repair a broken relationship, or discover what they actually want in life.

Sometimes I help people break habits, or make habits, or stop saying horrible things to themselves. Some of my clients write more email because they worked with me, and others write less. Some use our sessions to make an important decision, or defang a lethal anxiety, or figure out what to say about themselves on their website.

It never gets old, this helping people maximize life. I celebrated my 12-year anniversary of being a coach full time this October. But something has changed lately. Maybe it’s always been this way, and I was blind to it, but I’ve noticed a decided shift in the expectations of my clients, and it’s become unignorable to me lately.

We want to work less, not better.

As a coach, it’s my job to extend the humans I work with. After a session with me someone should walk away with more of something… more energy to work, more insights for achieving their goal, more reality and clarity where it’s needed. In a way it makes sense that people would be hiring me to make their life or work easier right? 

But something goes horribly wrong when we over-focus on making our work lives easier.

When easier is the goal, we naturally want to delegate more, think about things less, and automate everything. Since I’ve developed some robot-programming skills to go with my curious questions, I’m often hired by busy business people who want help doing just this. 

• Help me leverage my virtual assistant.
• Help me build my email list.
• Help me eliminate tasks by automating things.

On the surface, those three things can be part of making space to do our best work. It’s a great goal for those who need more time to do the big valuable things. Automating, delegating, and straight up ignoring the noise and busywork can free us up to create unique value, get ahead in our work, and find real fulfillment.

But it doesn’t always work.

We often fill the space created by offloading projects to a personal assistant, with more shallow work. The automated processes we set up don’t reduce the amount of work being done, they just escalate the volume. More fuzzy commitments, and expanding expectations crop up, and the dust never settles. 

“Spinning plates” as we call it in my family can feel like a powerful activity. But in our love affair with moving faster and “not getting bogged down,” when do we ever get down to working hard?

The Problem with “Work smarter, not harder.” 

The problem with focusing only on “working smarter not harder” is that we forget that hard work is awesome. It’s in the hard work that we experience fulfillment, engage meaning, and acquire the great-sleep-inducing exhaustion of giving something our all. 

We actually need to work hard -- to expend serious effort -- in order to experience meaning and fulfillment. We need to exhaust our true capacity in order to feel satisfaction and peaceful rest. Authors like Cal Newport call this Deep Work, and entrepreneurs often think about this as “creating real value.”

For most of us, the type of deep work Cal Newport describes is not what we’re doing during the work day. Deep work is mentally taxing, sometimes physically taxing or painstaking in some way. It’s working with focus, excellence, and skill.

Wow, SKILL. When’s the last time you really felt SKILLED at what you were doing? Skilled in your relationships, your ability to communicate through email or marketing messaging, skilled in consistently producing quality work?

As a coach, probably the most valuable thing I do is help people organize their life and their thinking so that they can really give themselves to the meaningful work and relationships in their lives. 

Indeed, working hard isn’t enough in itself; many of us are overworking, giving too little care to the ease and rest in our lives. But simply trying to rest doesn’t solve our problems.

We need to work better. Not more, not less, but better.  

If you’ve been feeling drained, burnt out, or disengaged from your work lately, just keep in mind that less work isn’t always the answer. And easier work doesn’t always allow you to reach your potential.

To all the incredible humans who have hired me as their coach in the past 12 years, I want to say thank you. You’ve been brave and authentic and resilient in your efforts to enrich the world around you through your work, to heal your communities by strengthening relationships, and honoring the Wild + Brave spirit inside of you that it meant for incredible things.

All my best,

Coach Morgan