Own your worth, lose the hustle!

The first time I heard someone use the word “hustling” in the business world, I thought that’s interesting, what exactly does “hustling” mean?

Like most people, I’ve become quite friendly with Google to help me understand words and phrases. So here’s what Google said about the word hustle . It comes from the Dutch word hutselen which means “to shake or shove”. It could also mean “to sell aggressively” which is the context in which my business associate used it.

This got me thinking about how hustling has become part of our lives especially on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Intagram etc. These platforms have opened the door to a world of hustle like never before. Celebrity hustle has created a culture of it’s own, “ aggressively selling” everything from products, stories, status updates and pics.  It’s easy to get caught up in this culture on social media and fall into the hustle because it’s everywhere, in your face, 24/7.

But we are not only at risk of getting caught up in the hustle on social media platforms or in business. There’s another kind of hustle which I’m starting to see in my coaching practice as I coach and mentor more and more women.

This hustle is underpinned by our beliefs about our worthiness and it drives the way we show up in our relationships across the board. Although it appears to be evident in boss/co-worker relationships, it seems that it is more prevalent in romantic relationships, parenting and friendships.

Hustling in relationships is done unconsciously without us even knowing that we doing it. When we believe that we are not enough or unworthy, we hustle for our worthiness.

In the dance of hustling for our worthiness, we over-give, we perfect, we compete, we people-please, we compare, we perform and we constantly trying to prove that we are enough.

Worthiness is our birth-right. But somewhere between the day we were born and today, we’ve learnt that in order to have value and worth, we must appear to be perfect in all things. And because perfection is an unattainable goal the hustle begins and the dance keeps getting faster and faster.

If you are in a situation where you are ‘hustling” for your worthiness, chances are that you are pointing a finger outward and blaming someone or something for “making” you feel unworthy. You’re looking outside of yourself for someone or something to make you feel worthy when your access to worthiness can only be found inside of yourself.