5 Books to Help You Stop Striving and Pursue Your Goals with Ease
If you're a Hustle Sanely Squad babe, chances are, you're working toward some major goals 💃🏻 Well as you know, I'm here to help you hang up the striving mentality and embrace pursuing your goals peacefully!
Keep reading this post to learn:
⋒ 5 books I recommend to help you stop striving toward your goals and pursue them with ease
First, what is striving? Striving is struggling to achieve something. You have an unhealthy tunnel vision which skews your perception of what you’re working toward and also causes you to block out really important stuff like uhhh your mental health and the important relationships in your life.
Let’s set the scene here:
Striving looks like:
Feeling like the only way to accomplish your goals is to run fast and hard. Striving usually ends in burnout, overwhelm, exhaustion or all of the above. When you do accomplish the goal, you are not as excited as you thought you’d be because you either 1. Were putting your identity in the accomplishment so you feel unfulfilled because no goal should have the privilege of owning your identity or 2. You’ve got no one around you to celebrate with because you were so eyes on the prize about what you were working toward that you unintentionally removed yourself from showing up for the important people in your life, hurting them and destroying relationships that really do mean something to you.
Pursuing your goals with ease looks like:
Knowing that working toward your goals is a part of life but not all that life is about. It means choosing to work at a sustainable pace toward your goals, which helps you create consistent progress, without sacrificing your mental health and rleationships. You feel grounded as your pursue the goal and when you accomplish it, you are happy and get to celebrate with your loved ones but you know that this goal does not define you as a person. You are living your life well, integrating the goal into your life rather than making the goal the center of your world.
I’m on a personal journey to pump the brakes on striving -- I call myself an ex-workaholic because the last few years have looked like leaning into a slower pace. It’s definitely NOT my nature to operate slowly (I’m a GO GO GO kinda gal) and I’m far from perfect at this but I do believe that we all have the ability to learn how to slow our pace and live from a more purposeful place. To pursue our goals healthily and happily.
These 5 books have really helped me shed striving and embrace a more intentional approach to working toward my goals and I wanna chat about them with you:
01. The Next Right Thing by Emily P. Freeman
The blurb on the front of the book says: A simple and soulful practice for making life decisions
This is one of the best books I’ve read in a miiiiiinute! Probably because it hardcore hit home with my current season. Emily is a self-proclaimed “soul minimalist” and let me just tell you, as someone who is currently trying to simplify my work life because of how full it feels, this read was incredibly welcomed and I was like a sponge as I took it in.
Emily’s writing style is kind and soft and reading it was a giant exhale for my soul that I didn’t realize I was holding in.
The pages are peppered with personal stories that really tug at your heartstrings and make you feel seen and each chapter is rounded out with a prayer and an action step...and hello! The Hustle Sanely Squad is all about action steps, am I right?
02. Growing Slow by Jennifer Dukes Lee
The blurb on the front says: Lessons on un-hurrying your heart from an accidental farm girl
Jennifer is someone who I chat with via Instagram sometimes and let me just tell you she has such a warm spirit and heart of gold. I read through Growing Slow with my best friend in May and HOT DANG did it convict me in the best way. I’m stoked to read it again this fall with the Hustle Sanely BFF members and do the bible study together too - more on that in a minute.
My mission, through Hustle Sanely, is to teach you how to live a peacefully productive life and pursue your goals without sacrificing your mental health and relationships and the message of this book rings so true to that.
So often, we get caught up in the WHAT we are pursuing that we forget to be mindful of the HOW -- in the sense that we are barreling through life like a bull just trying to hustle, go, and achieve when instead embracing a “growing slow” way is sustainable and leaves us feeling at peace.
03. You are the Girl for the Job by Jess Connolly
I read this one a few years ago and it’s one of those books that will stay in constant rotation in my life. I have a feeling I’ll be reading this one again later this year because Jess has such a way of cheering you on in such a raw and real way. Her writing makes you feel like she is walking with you, hand on your shoulder, through the dark and low places. She is a friend in the pages.
The blurb on the front of this one says: Daring to believe the God who calls you
I’m not kidding you when I say that I have at least half the dang book underlined because it spoke so deeply to my soul. I read it, for the first time, when I was a brand new business owner and felt very ill-equipped for the job at hand.
04. Atomic Habits by James Clear
The first 3 books I’ve shared are all similar in the sense that they are faith-based and written by women. This one does not go in that box, lol.
I read Atomic Habits a few years ago and it’s really stuck with me. I’ve talked about it on the show before but it’s worth mentioning again because it really does present as such a solid reminder that SMALL steps matter a whole lot. A lot of us feel the need to go big or go home (can relate) but that is not a sustainable way to live. It involves lots of massive energy shifts which cause us to crash and burn.
The little blurb on the front is: Tiny changes, remarkable results. An easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones.
I feel like this book really gained traction during 2020. I saw it EVERYWHERE and I think a big part of that is because 2020 really forced us all to pump the brakes and assess our lives and the pace at which we are living them.
05. Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Glover Tawwab
Something that I used to hardcore struggle with was setting boundaries. And that struggle caused me to live a place of striving because I always felt the need to be everything to everyone. Well I saw someone on Instagram share this graphic about boundaries so I clicked it and was introduced to Nedra and wow her Instagram is straight gold. She’s a therapist and really only shares graphics that help you create healthy relationships with yourself and with others. When I realized she had a book all about boundaries I added to my Amazon cart immediately!
If you enjoyed this post, tune into episode 085 of The Hustle Sanely Podcast to listen into this topic:
