Welcome to Episode #241 of the Own Your Best Life Podcast.

For the last several years, I came to an important realization that has fundamentally changed my every day experience for the better. It was the realization that my deepest goals are not to be an empire-building, full-time entrepreneur nor was it to be a high-powered corporate leader. 

My deepest goal is to have my quality of life feel internally free, fully expressed, financially secure, deeply impactful, and emotionally alive. This is why today’s podcast on what would it take to become work optional is going to help you consider how letting go of work and seeing it as a choice can change your life.

It sounds cliche but it took letting go of the work identities that I was trying so hard to fit into to become the most successful I have been at both. I had struggled with thinking I needed to leave corporate to become a full time entrepreneur to be happy and successful or vice versa – to commit to the corporate track more fully to achieve and get promoted to the highest levels there. But something was holding me back from going down only one of these routes fully. 

That something was thinking that my happiness would be found in a single path alone. To be in an ashram somewhere on a mountain top disconnected from the world or to be in the world feeling stuck on a hamster wheel. Neither the spiritual hermit, entrepreneur nor corporate identity was the solution because each one of them is making one version of an identity better than the other. 

I wouldn’t escape burnout through another job alone. I would still have to answer questions about what it takes to be successful and if I’ve done enough if I was meditating all day or with my kids. I know this because I’ve tried and I realized that we take ourselves everywhere we go.

For me specifically, the future is less about leaving the professional world of corporate or entrepreneurial work but more about becoming a new model of leadership inside and beyond it.

I was in high school when I remember asking my mom “why do we work if money doesn’t really matter?” I was thinking through the process of becoming someone who worked and was wrestling with the idea of how we work for money. She replied, “Because we need money in this world we live in.” While that helped rationalize the way we spend our time, one of the main reasons I am so passionate about this work is because we spend so much time working and we want to know if it really matters. These questions never go away because they are meant for us to answer them.

Then I spent my mid-30’s and early 40’s answering those questions. Figuring out my gifting – my calling. The love to be remembered. How to make a good living and also live with more health and fun.

Once I figured out what my gifts were and how to make a living with those gifts in more than one way, I started helping others do the same. I made real changes to how I worked and what I worked on. I created multiple options for future happiness. I started seeing how work was a choice. I focused less on the tangible deliverables at work and more on spirituality. Meaning, purpose and contribution. 

As a result, I stopped feeling like I wanted to quit my job and I enjoyed my work again. Sunday scaries disappeared, my corporate training & development work thrived with the highest performance ratings and my coaching business also became consistent and stable. I have multiple income streams, care immensely about the impact my work has and spend my time on my calling without sacrificing my health or family. I feel financially secure and safe.

This is work-optionality in its full technicolor paradox. The optionality of work actually creates better outcomes.

This is why work-optionality is so important. It’s not just about why we are doing what we’re doing nor is it just about the amount of money that we need to never work again.

Instead, this is really about how much freedom we feel around our work. It’s all of these things combined. Do we feel like we have financial safety, choices and options? Do we feel a sense of agency? “What would it take for you to become work optional?” is the question that has a real answer.

This month of June, we’re going to dive into a Work Optional Challenge where we’re going to help you create more freedom, clarity, and optionality in the way you work and live. If you’ve been thinking about joining coaching, now is the time.

I’ve been coaching on this topic but we’ve never done a full on sprint-like challenge to create it and I’ve heard many of you asking me to help you accelerate the process of figuring out what’s next. To build a personal brand and to not be so tied to one place, organization and person so that you have options. It’s perfect for this grounded Taurus new moon energy we are in.

Week 1 we’ll come up with the freedom number and get clear on financial security and what you need. Week 2 we’ll identify your dream work and get super specific. Week 3 we’ll create the options so that you commit to it and actually do the thing whether it’s create an offer or a side hustle. Week 4 will be your 90 day plan moving forward.

This is your time to listen to that intuitive nudge and do something with it. If you’ve been feeling like “this isn’t it” and you want to get more free and become work optional, this is your chance.

If you join Spiritual Achiever coaching now, you can join the challenge in June and have access to join us in the work. This isn’t about quitting your job right now. This is about creating options, freedom and doing better than you’ve ever done in your work in the process. 

Spiritual Achiever coaching is my year-long transformational coaching experience for professionals who want clarity and capacity while being coached at the highest level.

You can learn more or start a conversation at:
www.mayempson.com/contact

Start Here: Free Training

👉 Watch the free training:
STAND OUT AND LEAD – How to use spiritual and high-performance strategies to achieve time and financial freedom.

Apply for Coaching

Ready to live a life that feels as good as it looks?

📞 Apply now at www.mayempson.com/contact
Risk-free: If you don’t start seeing results in your first month, you’ll get your money back.

Want to know more about what happens when you join?

1. When you join Spiritual Achiever® Coaching you’ll be supported for a full year: Career Revelation Academy: A 5-step career change process (if you have a job you want to stay in, I’ll show you how to love it even more) that can launch you into your next career chapter in 30 days.
2. 2x/month group training and coaching on Spirituality, Achievement, Earth Energy and Harmony. You’ll know how to design your days for breakthroughs, create a personal brand and community, lead yourself and others through change, become more physically and mentally fit, reduce stress and reinvent what’s possible in this next chapter of your life.
3. Discover your Leadership Strengths and Branding Workshop: Increase your awareness of what makes YOU different from others and how to become even better at your genius zone.
4. Your Best Year workshop: Create your one year plan and design this next year, no matter what time of the year it is.
5. Your Next 5 Years one-day virtual retreat: Vision what’s possible 5 years from now and break out of your old routines so you can step into new habits, behaviors and routines.
6. Tickets to all in-person Spiritual Achiever retreats (discounted rates): Highly immersive and intimate gatherings where we spend time in nature, experience energy work, eat and move well – all while making big decisions and committing to what’s next for us.
7. Monthly 1:1 Coaching Sessions: To help you break through obstacles, define your individual path, and to work on both strategy and mindset.