EP20: Want to Work Sustainably? Shift Your Focus from WHAT to HOW.
In this podcast episode, I invite you to explore a different way of thinking about sustainable work—one that focuses not just on what we do, but on how we approach it. Too often, we focus on the labels, the tasks, the job titles, and the outcomes. But if the way we work leaves us drained, disconnected, and constantly pushing for more, can we truly call it sustainable? I’ll share my personal journey of breaking free from corporate conditioning and how I’ve been learning to work regeneratively—with joy, rest, and connection at the centre.
I also offer you a playful challenge: what if you let go of the need to figure out exactly what your work should be and instead focused on how you show up every day? I’ll suggest a few simple but powerful regenerative habits you can try, whether you work for yourself or in a more traditional environment. These habits are about creating space for creativity, reflection, and life-giving work—a stark contrast to the constant corporate drive for efficiency and output.
If you’re feeling stuck in your career or craving a deeper connection to nature, community, and purpose, this episode might just offer the shift in perspective you need. Tune in, try a regenerative habit, and let me know how it goes—I’d love to hear from you!
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Full Transcript
Alisa: “Today I want to draw our attention to how we approach regenerative work, how we do that work, how our working day unfolds. I'd like to talk about decorporatising the way that we work and untangling from the pervasive thoughts and paradigms that a highly corporate work environment leaves with us. And finally, I would like to offer you regenerative work habits that perhaps you might choose to focus on as your goals for the year ahead, rather than the typical what goals, the attainment goals, the achievement goals. Perhaps we have an opportunity instead to think about regenerative habits in our work.
So many of you who regularly listen to the podcast will know that for the 13 years or so preceding regenerative work life, I was an entrepreneur. I founded and ran my own business and I had a very strong drive to work. The work that I did was in the climate tech space, it was purpose-led. It very much for me came from a place of passion and a drive to have impact and make change. But with hindsight, I can see that the way in which I worked was very much aligned with the extractive capitalist system.
And in fact, it was that realisation that ultimately led to me choosing to step away from the climate tech sector because, well, I believe there is powerful… innovation or ingenuity, perhaps is a better word, happening in that space. And while I know that there is an awful lot of passion behind the entrepreneurs and the companies, the startups in that space, the paradigm is still very much work as hard as you can, be as productive and as efficient as you possibly can. Do it. As fast and as hard as possible. Give it everything. Sacrifice. Grow until you burn out.
And that drive is something that I still feel. It's become a habit for me, really. When I think of work, that is the sort of mindset that I default to. It feels natural to me to fill almost every waking moment with either work or thoughts of work. And for a long time, I really felt that that was a gift because I loved the creativity of it, I loved the problem solving, I was happy and grateful to have work that I cared enough about to want to devote so much time to. But it's also a fundamentally unsustainable way of being.
And when I launched Regenerative Work Life in September, and there was a shift in my personal life. My youngest children had started school, so suddenly I had time every day for work. And I really felt the compulsion to fill that time and to find more time. And I could feel it expanding almost in a way that felt beyond my control. And slowly but surely things started to shift back to a much more conventional and when I say conventional, I mean corporate way of working.
I found myself at my desk. I found myself very much focusing on organisation in my work, working through specific tasks, building a weekly rhythm and really pricing consistency. And of course there are positives in all of those things. None of them sound, as I say them, kind of, you know, that they're going to be, I don't know, innately overwhelming or stressful. But the problem is that the more I tried to maximise the time that I had, do as much as possible, make it as efficient as possible, I realised that it left no space for the way of working that I had been exploring before I started, to quote myself, taking my business seriously.
In the period before I took my business seriously, which is to say the period before I had the idea for regenerative work life at the beginning of last year and then did all the preparatory work before launching it, in my kind of playful exploratory period before that, I was experimenting with many different ways of working and some of the best ideas and insights and breakthroughs that I had in that time came from highly unconventional ways of working. Ways of working that in fact felt so marginal that I wouldn't even necessarily have consciously conceived of them as work time. The boundary was very blurred between what is work, what is play, what is me just flexing my creativity, what's me just going for a walk.
In fact, speaking of walks, I can give you one example of what I mean by these highly unconventional ways of working because it's a memory that really stands out to me, which is at a time when I wanted to think about different ways of coaching. I was doing quite a sort of generalised coaching, life coaching, I suppose, at the time. And I wanted to be more conscious in choosing the kind of work and the kind of people that I was working with. And I was just really rolling this idea around of the changes that I might be able to make, how I could be more conscious in my coaching work.
And I took a walk along a seawall. I was in place, in fact, I can't remember why I was there, possibly for something that one of my children was doing. And I took a walk along the seawall. It was not an area I knew well. And that meant that I really had a lot of sort of pure curiosity to see what was there, to discover what was around the corner, to be surprised and delighted as I came across a very old kind of wreck of a boat or I found a bench that was perfectly positioned. And as I was walking along, this idea just came to me of play invitations for coaching of choosing people that I was really inspired by in my local area and inviting them to a kind of play date around coaching and doing that coaching out in nature, in the wild.
And as I walked along, the idea came to me to choose a kind of sitting spot at regular intervals along this walk. So I would walk along and then I would discover a little clearing in the grass verge side of the seawall and I would nestle down in it and look out the water and I would just wait and then the name of the person that I wanted to invite just kind of dropped in for me and it happened each and every time I found somewhere to sit down along this walk. I think I got back to the car and I wrote the names down and in the subsequent days I invited these people. I think almost all of whom said yes, and I had these beautiful experiences of coaching in a park, coaching in a woodland, coaching on a flower field, and it laid these wonderful kind of seeds for me finding my way into regenerative coaching.
But somehow, since launching that regenerative coaching business, It's almost like I've acquired the belief that that kind of playful exploration or playful way of working belonged to a period before and that now it would somehow be an indulgence or a distraction and there just isn't time for it in my weekly schedule.
So let's take a look at the kind of thoughts that you might be able to hear behind what I'm describing. Thoughts like, I need to be productive, I need to be efficient, I can't mess around, I need to take things seriously now, I just don't have enough time. None of these are true. And none of these are regenerative thoughts. These are conditioned thoughts that probably have their roots way back in the Industrial Revolution, and that are now central tenants of extractive capitalism. These are the beliefs of corporate culture and you can see that their influence is profound. You don't have to have worked in big corporate to feel the pull and the power of corporate thinking.
And reconditioning, is that the right word? Deconditioning, detangling, reimagining ways of working takes time. I have never worked for a corporate and I have been consciously decorporatising for nearly two years and yet this still shows up. And here's the thing… It doesn't matter how regenerative your work is on paper. If the way that you do that regenerative work or run your regenerative business isn't regenerative. If the how, the day-to-day lived experience doesn't feel regenerative to you. And in this sense, what I mean by regenerative is, is it giving you life? If your work isn't giving you life, it isn't regenerative. It is not sustainable. I don't care what it is that you do, if the how is not aligned with joy and integrity and connection and rest, perhaps, whatever really are fundamental needs for you, then it's not sustainable.
And yet our focus is almost always on the what. We ask, what should I do with my career? What work can I do that will make an impact? What job can I find that will give me this sense of purpose? And this isn't our fault because it's how we are taught to think. We're taught to think in labels and attainment and which box we might fit into.
And I think there is comparatively little value placed in how we work. And that's why I really want to draw our focus there today. How do we approach work regeneratively? I'd like to invite you to take a moment to consider if what I'm sharing is true for you. Is it true that you are more focused on the what of your work than the how? And just as a thought experiment, if I invited you to work only on changing how you work, and if I invited you to forget for a while about what it is that you do, what would that be like? What feelings would come up? Is there a resistance to that idea? Focusing wholly on how and letting the what take care of itself.
I think this line of questioning really matters. I would go so far as to say that this is where the real change happens in the how and that the what will follow in its own time. Because the how is what holds the inner work that we need to do, the work of consciousness, the deconditioning. The how is where we break deeply entrenched patterns and find new ways of being. If each of us can make shifts in how we work that take us away from the paradigm of maximum efficiency and constant productivity and all the stress and overwhelm and burnout that come with that, if together we can find new ways of working that bring us joy and enrich our lives and the lives of all of the living life around us, then I believe we can see a kind of regenerative revolution in the world of work. And of course, hand in hand with that comes real change in our lives.
Okay, so let's bring this to the here and the now. If this concept connects with you, how can you put this into practice? Well, as I'm recording this, we are at the start of the year and many of us feel compelled to set goals around this time. So I would like to invite you to think about setting habit goals, choosing perhaps just one regenerative work habit and focusing on incorporating that into your work life.
What do I mean by a regenerative work habit? I'm going to share some examples with you and before I do I want to acknowledge that incorporating these into your work is much easier if you work for yourself as I do. And if you don't feel that you have the freedom to try these things in your work, that's good information that you can act on when you're ready and if you're not ready to act on it then simply choose whichever habit feels most accessible to you. Start small if you need to or come up with one of your own that feels compatible with what your work life looks like now.
Okay, here's the list that I kind of spontaneously prepared and let each one kind of spark the idea for the next. See if any of these feel inviting to you.
Taking a short walk before you begin work each day (or at any point in the day that suits you). Working in different spaces.
Working on paper.
Having periods of your work when you are completely disconnected from technology.
Embracing cycles in your work, for example, not booking meetings when you know that you'll be menstruating.
Taking proper breaks for food or rest.
Making big decisions or doing big thinking out in nature.
Incorporating activities that bring you joy into your work day. (For me, one of my favourite ways to do this is to bake bread throughout the day. So it's a process where you, you know, you have to, let's say you make the dough and you need to leave it to rise. And so I'll go and work for an hour and a half, whilst the dough rises, then I'll come and I'll knock the dough back. I'll leave it for a little longer while I'm working, I'll bake it. So all through the day, I can move between my work and baking bread. And that's a really wonderful feeling for me).
You might also try working at unconventional times that feel like they align with your natural rhythm, or perhaps working far less than you think you're supposed to. Saying no far more than feels comfortable.
These are just some starter ideas for you. And interestingly, as I wrote this list, I could feel the limit to what I was able to conceive of as possible for a regenerative habit. But as we commit to these kinds of habits, I believe our imaginations will expand to see even more possibilities, entirely novel ways of working that truly sustain us.
I hope that you have enjoyed playing with this idea with me and I would genuinely love to hear about your experiences, to hear other habits that you come up with, what you've tried, what it's been like incorporating them. You can email me at alisa@regenerativeworklife.com. I always love to hear from you and I will always reply.
And if you would like to learn more about my work and perhaps how you can work with me then visit my website regenerativeworklife.com. Thank you for listening and I will see you back here next week.
