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Ever wish you had a mentor to help you become who you were meant to be? Crystal Ware is redefining what it means to become your best self, in business, life, and love and sharing everything she she knows to get YOU there faster.
Are you stuck? Feel like you are meant for more but not sure how to breakthrough? Every week, we will explore all of your questions on building a path to true happiness, achieving success and creating our dream life. Brick by brick, we will work through the issues and mindsets that keep us stuck, dive into finding our passion and how to take ACTION. Clarity (vision) + Confidence (Owning your worth) + Courage (to live life on your own terms and become your own CEO) propels you to your destiny. And the good news it: its all within you!
Each week, host, Crystal Ware, will bring you all of the practical wisdom to grow every aspect of your career and life including mindset, vision, goal planning, social media management, financial acumen and so much more. You'll also meet top business leaders, entrepreneurs, mompreneurers and innovative thinkers who invested in themselves and found their way success and happiness by leading on their own terms.
You were made for more, so start living like it today. Join us as we take action, grow together, and get inspired to reach for your dreams.
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Get Clear with Crystal Ware podcast, the place where we get clear on our goals, own our worth, and learn to be the CEOs of our own lives. I'm your host, Crystal Ware, lawyer and former Fortune 500 corporate leader. Who found the confidence to say goodbye to a lucrative career and start my own business.
Now I'm opening up the playbook and sharing everything I've learned to get you there faster. It may not be easy, but it will always be worth it because you are made for more. So put on your big girl pants, jump on board and let's reach for the stars. Are you ready to get clear?
Crystal Ware: Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of get clear with crystal where I am your host bringing you super information today on what the biggest challenge facing millennial women is today. This is so important to us. So tune in, focus and get [00:01:00] ready to learn a lot and maybe we can peel back some of those layers of what's going on.
To improve our lives, improve our careers, and make better choices going forward. So without any further ado, let me tell you what it is. The biggest challenge facing millennial women today is hustle culture. Hustle culture. It's out there all the time. Rise and grind. What are you doing? Work hard.
Work hard. Play hard all of those kind of slogans that are kind of like stamped on our head that we have essentially grown up with Those are the things that are keeping us trapped Keeping us from living our most fulfilled lives From building a career that really balances and aligns with where we are in the seasons that we are in our lives life.
So what exactly is hustle culture?it's in the news everywhere. We see the, you know, [00:02:00] topic, the title in all kinds of articles on the news, probably from your HR people sending out information. So what is it? It's pretty simple that it's just a mindset of working hard. logging lots of long hours in order to drive success.
Even though this has been talked about in regards to, you know, kind of all of corporate America, but specifically when it comes to women, this has been talked about it. When I was, looking and kind of getting my thoughts together for this podcast. I found articles going back to the early 2000s talking about this and the impact it has on corporate America in general, and specifically on working moms and women.
So this is not a new phenomenon. We've known this was a problem. We've known this was an issue yet. We cannot get there. Past it and move forward and my question is why you know, I had to [00:03:00] know why this is like You know the resounding question that's in my head. It's like why why does this the way it is?
Why does something work the way it does? Why can't we change something? And so that's why I wanted to talk about it today because even though it's been around even though we know it's a problem we can't still fix it. It's like a really systemic issue You That has permeated through the culture, through, are very existent and how we were built and how we were raised.
And here we are in a detrimental environment that we cannot overcome. So where did even hustle culture come from? Because pre 1930s, there was really no standards on working hours and working time and how that worked for people in factories and offices. And then the government came out with kind of this standardized 40 hour work week as a protection to employees.
That is where it originated. And then of course, when we put [00:04:00] in a rule, there's always exceptions to every rule. So there was ways to get around it. Was somebody a, a contractor? Were they independent laborer? Et cetera, et cetera. But the true hustle culture that we know today stemmed from the tech revolution in the 1990s and early 2000s.
And when we talk about that and we think about it, it kind of makes sense, right? Like digitization was changing the landscape of our lives, of the work of corporate America at such a speed that things were being done at And there was a true sense of urgency for the people working in tech. Like I've got to get out my new technology.
I've got to get out this new platform. I've got to be the first to, you know, hit this target or to launch a new product because the faster, the first to market, the bigger market share, the more chance you are going to have. to get funding, to [00:05:00] keep growing your idea, to keep growing your company. So it totally makes sense why this small sector of people were out there doing this and going hard.
One, they loved and were excited and intrigued for a lot of times by what they were doing. There was a team kind of environment to it that we're all in this together, we're building something new that's revolutionary that can change the world. So there were all these dynamics that like made it the perfect microcosm for hustle culture to come out.
But then as we had the internet and everything and social media was exploding, These entrepreneurs started sharing their stories. Okay. And they were talking about what their schedules were like and like how they had to get up super early and what they were doing and what they were living on, which was like coffee and cigarettes and what their life was like, which made Normal people think maybe if I do that, I can be 10 percent more successful.
I can be 25 percent more successful. [00:06:00] Maybe that's what it takes to build my own business. And I'm not saying that that's never the case, but when it comes to being in corporate America, And even for entrepreneurs, it just doesn't always have to be the case. And some of you guys listening, if you've been around for a while, moving out in the working world, especially working moms, you may remember the name, Marissa Meyer, Mayor Meyer, whatever, however you say it.
She was. One of the first tech CEOs to come on board and the time when she was given the job of CEO of Yahoo, she was one of only 42 Fortune, 1000 CEOs that were a woman. 42 out of 1000. Okay. That is momentous. That is huge. Way to go. Let's clap for her. Let's cheer for her. Let's be super excited for her.
What wasn't cool is that she set the [00:07:00] standard as well for this unsustainable working woman. She went back to work after two weeks. She built out a nursery, which most of us cannot do at their corporate office so that she could be somewhat present. And she had publicly declared that she often worked 130 hours a week, 130 hours a week.
I mean, it's these kinds of things that are creating this hustle culture and this perception and this view of what a successful woman that we should aspire to be like are doing to get to that position. It's creating unsustainably high standards, people working at a frenetic pace and putting too, too many demands on our own shoulders throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout your life.
That is just totally detrimental [00:08:00] to working women. There is no sense of balance in that. And not only that, when you're working 75, 80 hours, and then you come home and you have a. second shift. I, I call it, that's when my, my, my second job starts, right? Then you're taking care of the family. You're taking care of your husband.
You're taking care of your children. You're taking care of the dog. You're taking care of the home, all the other things. And that does not to say that you don't have a super supportive spouse. I wrote about it on LinkedIn recently about how amazingly supportive my husband was and without him, I could not do many of these things.
But let's be real. No matter how supportive your spouse is. More than 50 percent of the work is usually going to fall to you as the mom, as the wife, and that's your second shift job. So you have all of these going things going on and it is completely and utterly untenable for a [00:09:00] happy and balanced life.
We need to find a way to peel back that onion, figure out why we and you personally are being burdened by this. What is it that you have been fed as a sack of lies to make you think that you need to work that hard and that diligent and that frenetic and give yourself these unattainable high standards for yourself in every facet of your life to be successful because It's just not possible.
And I do believe that we can have it all. And I think that to some degree I've been an example, but I have also caused myself to burn out. And I know I talk about this pretty frequently and I'll say it again. Many of the things that I talk about are things that I have struggled with. I have gotten to the other side and I want to understand more about what caused me to get there.
How could I [00:10:00] improve it? And how can I help other women? For improve it, recognize it, get beyond it faster. So I myself have suffered from these, you know, high standards. I mean, I remember when my first child was born and I went back to work after eight weeks and then it, Oh, all of a sudden it was, coming up upon his first birthday and I wanted to be Princess Mommy, which, you I do love doing stuff like that, but it's not like my, totally my jam.
some women really get into that kind of stuff, decorating, creating parties. I mean, I do like it, but I like more the idea of showing up and it looks good than me actually doing it. But for his first bar party, I mean, I made sugar cookies from scratch, which took me three days after work to bake the cookies, then make the icing and then make the little surfboards and surfers that were like custom cookies.
Okay. Instead of buying them, I made them and then, had a three tier birthday cake and I carved a [00:11:00] shark out of a watermelon for his, beachy themed, actually his birthday is today when I'm recording this. So he has a summer birthday. And that was just a fun theme and I wanted to go all out since it was my first child's first birthday.
It stressed me out to high heaven to spend my evenings after coming home from a long day of work when I just wanted to hang out with my baby to do all of these things. But that is it. the kind of world we've been living in. And we don't step back to pause long enough to say, why am I doing this? Is this really filling up my cup or is it draining me?
Okay. And it's this hustle culture and it starts with Recognizing, recognizing the patterns, recognizing the habits, recognizing how we're saying yes. When we should say no, all of these things, it starts with recognizing. Once we recognize what the problem is, then we can work on solutions and how to pull ourself back out of [00:12:00] those kind of habits.
the burnout rates have been skyrocketing over the last 20 years, and especially after COVID. And what's even more interesting is that burnout rates have experienced quite a gap between burnout for women and burnout for men. And why is that? Because then we have all these other biological yearnings and or duties that amount to this second shift, this second job that we come to at the end of the day.
When we get home and we have all these other Responsibilities and or things that we want to do, you know, I want to cook for my family Those are things I don't want to offload necessarily to other people I want to sit and have dinner at the dinner table and I want to talk to my family I mean those are things that I don't want to get out of So how can we really move forward, especially when we're in this world where despite knowing that this is an issue, despite knowing that the rates of burnout [00:13:00] and all that this can cause, we still have people out there talking about it.
I mean, Elon Musk, you know, he's of a different nature, but he talks about how he works 80 plus hours a week. Even Kim Kardashian talks about it honestly of And her sisters are always asking her, why are you always working, Kim? Why are you always working? In fact, I think that might be like a little song or a theme or whatever you want to call it on Tik Tok and Instagram with her voice and people asking, why are you always working, Kim?
So that is out there in our everyday lives. And then we have Alex and Layla Hermosi who just talk about the grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. And listen, there is a facet of truth there. So I don't want to diminish that. And the facet of truth there that we all need to really understand and get at is that when we do something repeatedly, we will get better.
And the better at it we become, the [00:14:00] more success we will see. But what that does not mean is that we need to do it overnight, that we are not building Roman one day. So we can keep doing the repetition. We can keep learning and growing and seeing how our business, our career, our lives evolve without doing that from 7am to 7pm.
And that is the distinction that I really want everybody to take in today. Okay. So what are some other things that we can do to make changes in our lives? We can focus on innovation over grinding. Right? You can do the repetitions and think about how can I do this better? What can I bring to this? An example of this that I think is really tangible, that's easy to understand, Is I think about, this girl I follow that I like who coaches people on how to, what's the [00:15:00] word?
sell stuff on Amazon, be an Amazon seller, not an affiliate, but actually sell a product. And that's what she often tells people is like, what is out there that's common that people need all the time, like a toilet paper holder. And what's one thing that you can do to improve the toilet paper holder that would make it unique and sell more.
and be practical for people. Okay. So thinking of innovation, like how can you do your job 10 percent better with less effort? What can you work on on the front end to make the back end smoother for years to come? It's these kinds of little things that are going to make much bigger difference in your life, in your day.
than just grinding away. Okay, then finding a purpose and a passion over just doing something that you don't love for money and success. When you're working on something like I'll go back to these tech, you know, now billionaires who were working in the [00:16:00] 90s and early 2000s. that really pushed this hustle culture forward.
They loved what they were doing. They were passionate about it. When you love something and are passionate about it. Now I would still argue that you need a break, but you're not going to feel so burnt out or like you're working. Oftentimes people get stuck in a high paying job that they don't really love or feel interested in because they want the title.
They want the money. They want the accolades or whatever. Strip that away, find what you love, find your purpose and your passion, and then put boundaries on your schedule and be realistic about what you can actually accomplish in your workday. This has become harder with people working from home. I also struggle with this when your computer is just right there open all the time and available and you're like, Oh, I just have one more thing to do.
No, you need to put serious boundaries on your time and realize that you also have a life. And life is meant to be lived. [00:17:00] And one, another thing that I alluded to was, despite what social media would tell you, Rome was not built in a day. Rome was built over 20 or 30 years. So, play the long game. Know that you are putting in effort and you are showing up and you are being disciplined and determined and, you know, diligent in your efforts for your business, for yourself, for your growth, for your job.
Those are the things that you can do on a daily basis over the long term that's going to lead you to the success that you want to see without hustle culture. You can do that from 9 a. m. to 5 p. m. Stop effing around on your phone, on social media, whatever, looking at YouTube, use your time wisely. And play the long game and then talk about choosing a comfortable salary, a comfortable lifestyle over trying to maximize, you know, what is more is more really [00:18:00] necessary.
Are you good with where you are, how your life is, and then maybe you don't need to do more. Maybe your nine to five is all that you need to do and do it really, really well. And then the other thing I would say is revel in your time off. That includes your evenings, that includes your weekends, and God, you better be taking your vacations.
I mean, If I was to say anything that I really do, I'm not for more government intervention and action, but I think we should have a minimum standard of three weeks off with working up to six to seven weeks off. And with that, you can live a really comfortable life, get recharged, get rejuvenated, and actually create a culture where you're taking your vacation and you're making sure to take at least a full week every single year, okay?
Americans don't always do that and we really need to focus on that. So those are the things and how you can get [00:19:00] out of it, but just being aware. You're not alone. There are many women out there that are struggling with this, that have ambitions, that want to grow, that want to be successful, and don't know how to reel it in because this is what we're being fed.
And sometimes we're in a, a corporate environment that also feeds into that. And honestly, I did not know that that existed out of law firms. I mean, we've known for years that law firms were like, you know, Law firms in Wall Street were like sweatshops for, highly educated people, basically. but outside of that, you didn't really see that until this digital revolution.
And now we see it. It's kind of like this pervasive issue that we've got to come to terms with. We have to value ourselves. We have to value our time. We have to value our lives. No one else is going to put the importance on that, that we will for ourselves. It is incumbent upon us to do that. And then as a leader, it's incumbent upon you to teach [00:20:00] other girls and young ladies and women that work for and around you.
Even if you have to coach up, you know, coaching up for somebody that's a superior or coaching a superior, up to somebody that's older than you and saying, you know, how can we do this better? How can we make lives more balanced, more frictionless? But being aware, in my opinion, that's the biggest challenge facing millennial women.
I think it makes it hard for women to appropriately start a family, cure for a family when, you know, you're expected to be slave labor and working hard and, you know, going and girl bossing in your 20s and 30s, right? I think that is the hugest issue. You have all these pressures. And then with social media, we're thinking we have to look perfect from head to toe every day.
Right. We have to make these Pinterest parties for our children. We have to be a perfect spouse, all these things. And then tie that in with the hustle culture of work. It's just not sustainable. I think [00:21:00] that is where we've really done a disservice for women and girls in our communities and going forward and what biology tells us.
that we need to be doing versus what we should be doing versus what we want to be doing. So focus in, figure out where you can carve back, where you see yourself, you know, really draining on that. And if you have the ability to change that in your own culture at work or your own business or whatever, do it, work on that.
Okay. What else do you want to hear from us? What are you struggling with? What challenges are you having till next time? We'll see you later. Keep getting clear. Keep living your life. Keep building your dreams. [00:22:00]