On Getting Harder to Find

The Rewards of the Anti-Hustle

One of my practices over the past year has been to slow down and become less visible and less available.

I have made two specific changes. After training myself to feed the algorithms, I have stopped writing for social media except when I have something I want to say in a specific environment. I have also drastically reduced my availability on and decreased ease of access to my public calendar.

My reasoning was two-fold.

1. Having a public calendar accessible without friction increases the percentage of people who book time and never make any further contact. This has been true for my whole coaching career. It’s a cost of doing business. One way I reduce no-shows is asking potential new clients to invest a little more effort into getting my support.
2. Writing for social media shapes what I write. It places everything I write in the context of hustle culture and selling myself. It subtly influences the topics I will address and the language I use. I wanted to disrupt myself and speak more courageously about questions and less confidently about answers. I wanted to use language poetically and metaphorically, even jargon and technical terms. And I wanted to stretch myself into writing more soulfully and with more willingness to engage with writers and thinkers who discuss human truths in explicitly spiritual and theological terms.

I have noticed several things that have occurred during this time in terms of the clients I attract and the work I write.

Good things. Things I had previously been trying hard to make happen in other ways that emerged simultaneously with this shift but that I cannot clearly attribute directly to the changes.

But, most of my work is like that.

Ripples of spaciousness, consciousness, effort, and intention that pass through me into parts of the cosmic, human and more than human, interdependent system that I am part of. And then, later and in surprising ways, ripples that emerge from the mystery, showing signs of my actions as part of their source material.

There’s a sneaky deep way my work impacts the world. And a mysterious way that my conscious mind is as likely to block the effectiveness of that work as it is to enable it unless I let go of my desire to “make an impact” and simple notice that I am having impact.

Noticing that I am having impact seems to shift the impact I have. It increases accountability and responsibility for my action. But, and this is huge, letting go of the responsibility to make a specific impact result allows me to co-create impact with the whole universe in a dance of interchange with the seen and the unseen.

By trying less hard to make connection and shifting my focus to recognizing the connections that already exist, I have become more connected, more seen, and more positively impactful.

This is deeply weird to my conscious ego and deeply soothing to my soul.

Becoming less performative has helped people see me.