Are You Doing Your Greatest Work with Dr. Amanda Crowell

The Soloist Life

Dr Amanda Crowell, author of “Great Work: Do What Matters Most Without Sacrificing Everything Else”, tells us how to get to the work we were most meant to do:

How to get off the “productivity roller coaster of doom” to make the time for your Great Work.

Why your health and happiness make your Great Work flow easier—and how to optimize for them.

A few questions to consider if you haven’t quite figured out your Great Work (hint: the threads are already there).

A framework to catalyze your Great Work from simply a motivating vision to specific day-to-day actions.

The role of identity in keeping you from—or rushing you to—your Great Work.

LINKS

Dr. Amanda Crowell Website | Book | LinkedIn | Instagram

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Dr. Amanda Crowell is a cognitive psychologist, speaker, podcaster, author of Great Work, and the creator of the Great Work Journals.

Amanda's TEDx talk: Three Reasons You Aren’t Doing What You Say You Will Do has received more than a million views and has been featured on TED's Ideas blog and TED Shorts. Her ideas have also been featured on NPR, Al Jazeera, The Wall Street Journal, Quartz, and Thrive Global.

Amanda lives in New Jersey with her husband, two adorable kids, and a remarkable newfiepoo named Ruthie. She spends her days educating future teachers, coaching accidental entrepreneurs, and speaking about how to make progress on Great Work to colleges and corporate teams.

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00 - 00:26

Amanda Crowell: If I showed up unprepared for a consulting meeting, they should fire me. I did it wrong. I picked the wrong thing. But you can't allow that truth to be the fear that keeps you racing against the clock to do every single thing perfectly, because you cannot allow yourself to ever do perfectly passable work because in your heart of hearts you knew it could be better. That is a prison of your own making.

00:30 - 01:10

Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist Women where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton and today I'm here with Dr. Amanda Kroll, who is the author of Great Work, Do what matters most without sacrificing everything else. She is a cognitive psychologist, speaker, podcaster, and creator of the great work journals. Amanda's TEDx Talk, 3 Reasons You Aren't Doing What You Say You Will Do, has received more than a million views and has been featured on Ted's Ideas blog and Ted shorts. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, 2 adorable kids, and

01:10 - 01:27

Rochelle Moulton: a remarkable new fee poo named Ruthie and we're all about the pets here. And she spends her days educating future teachers, coaching accidental entrepreneurs, and speaking about how to make progress on great work to colleges and corporate teams. Amanda, welcome.

01:28 - 01:30

Amanda Crowell: Thank you for having me.

01:31 - 01:32

Rochelle Moulton: We finally made it happen.

01:33 - 01:36

Amanda Crowell: I know. It's just like that these days.

01:36 - 01:56

Rochelle Moulton: I hear you. Well, I discovered your book, Great Work, and I knew you had to come on the show, so thank you for joining us. It is so full of great wisdom for soloists in the expertise space, I almost didn't know where to start. So how about with a definition? So Amanda, when you say we want to do our great work, what do you mean exactly?

01:57 - 02:32

Amanda Crowell: That's such a good question. So great work, most simply described, is the work that matters the most to you, which almost sounds like a cop out. It's like, yeah, but what is it? But it really is the definition. It is my experience of people that everybody has something inside of them that has been brewing since birth, some issue that they care about, some industry that they're drawn to, some big idea that has sparked light in them. And it's not that it's 1 true love, but it's more like a way of being in the world that can

02:32 - 03:06

Amanda Crowell: shift and change. Like you write this book and then you start that podcast and then you do this job and then you start that team and it can shift and grow with you as you grow. But there's a golden thread almost that ties it all the way through that marks it out as your great work. What's interesting about your great work is that it's often the thing, tragically, that we don't get to. It's the thing that in a world of commitments and expectations, we often spend time saying, oh, I will write my book when I'm retired,

03:06 - 03:38

Amanda Crowell: or I'll get there later when the kids are grown. And we never really prioritize it because we continue to prioritize the expectations, the external demands over our great work. And so the book and my work is to help people figure out how to do that great work now without, make, because 1 thing that will happen is people will be like, how, okay, I'm going to add my great work to my life and I'll change nothing else. And then you get on what I like to call the productivity roller coaster of doom, which is where you're just

03:38 - 03:51

Amanda Crowell: very burned out and you're doing too much and you're stretched too thin and you think I never should have done my great work. But there's just skills and strategies to make it possible to do your great work without sacrificing your health and happiness

03:52 - 04:26

Rochelle Moulton: Well, I now have a new phrase the productivity roller coaster of doom Yeah, I think a lot of people can relate to that kind of on that topic So in the opening of the book, you tell a series of stories about your own health challenges that forced you down this path of managing your work and your life and your stress better. And I was struck by how after you went through all the time management tools, including David Allen's getting things done, which I also like, you realized that you were productive but not, and I quote, more

04:26 - 04:34

Rochelle Moulton: relaxed, grounded, and joyful. So, Will you talk some more about how we can let our happiness matter?

04:35 - 05:11

Amanda Crowell: Oh wow, what a great question. And I want to give a lot of props to productivity tips and tricks, you know, like you can get this. The story goes that I totally maxed myself out and then was able to create a semblance of work-life balance by using, getting things down and other like productivity tools and tricks. And it was a really great learning experience for me. I learned a ton. I was able to do, as they say, a lot more without getting burned out. But there was this missing undertone, this current of, I was still mostly

05:11 - 05:50

Amanda Crowell: beholden to the external expectations of deadlines, multiple clients. I've always had multiple jobs. And there was this feeling of like Now I'm doing so much more But I didn't make any space for my great work. I just did more of what was expected of what was default I wasn't necessarily exerting a lot of influence on my own life. And that just felt like it was this impossible game where the more I gave to these expectations, the more I was doing and I was getting accolades and I was doing well and I was making more money, but

05:50 - 06:24

Amanda Crowell: like my life, my feeling of my life wasn't changing. And what happened to me very specifically was that I actually got everything I wanted. I got this book deal that I really was like a lifelong dream of mine. I was totally booked with coaching clients. I was you know really enjoying my work at the School of Education where I teach. You know everything was going great but I was so at capacity all the time that I ended up, there's a thing that happens in very stressed out people, which I think describes most of us. If you

06:24 - 06:57

Amanda Crowell: have an injury, like a traumatic, but that's a more dramatic word than I really mean, like I fell hard on my foot. Sometimes if you really will fall hard, it triggers all the inflammation in your body. And I had this massive, just because I hurt my foot, I had a massive full body autoimmune flare up. No 1 really knows why. It wasn't diagnosed as like rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia is the other 1 that they thought it might be. It wasn't those things. And yet every single joint in my body was inflamed and it was hard to

06:57 - 07:31

Amanda Crowell: climb the stairs. It was quite the wake-up call actually. And I was like, Why did I do this? Why did getting what I want trigger my body's most complete shutdown? And it was just a moment where I was like, Okay, Amanda, what are you doing here on this planet? Are you gonna achieve and strive and drive yourself and just collect accolades that you don't have any time to enjoy? Or are you going to not do that? And you know, it felt like a choice. But really, at the end of the day, I couldn't survive what I

07:31 - 08:05

Amanda Crowell: was doing to myself. I was making my own body attack itself. And I had this pivotal moment where I was like, okay, I guess that's it for me. I'm just not gonna do, I didn't have the term great work yet, but I'm just not gonna do my great work. I'm just gonna give up and I'm gonna like, just reach my classes and just try to enjoy the way things are. And what shocked me, it was truly shocking, was the minute that I took the steps necessary. I said no to the extra things I was doing. I

08:05 - 08:37

Amanda Crowell: closed down some clients that I was working with. I was still working with a consulting company that I had, we used to be full time with, and now it was just like a part time consultant. I stopped doing that. And I added things to my life that made me more relaxed and happy. I started riding my bike again and healed what had become a somewhat strained relationship with my husband and just really kind of became a relaxed and more, I don't know, joyful version of myself. And what truly shocked me was that was when my great

08:37 - 09:14

Amanda Crowell: work took off. As a recovery project, I designed these great work journals that have become like a foundation of the work that I do with clients and I really love it. My own sort of whole person time management system. I wrote the book, Great Work, I launched the podcast. And I found that people are more interested and willing to work with me. And Everything just exploded into the space that I had created by not doing everything all the time for everyone anymore, but instead doing what really matters and making sure that I never got. I now

09:14 - 09:46

Amanda Crowell: think of my resilience or my like bounce back ability. That's something that I manage almost the way people manage their budgets. I watch it, I keep track of it, I make sure that if I'm doing something really heavy loaded early in the week, I don't do it later in the week. If I start to get sight, you know, noticing my own triggers, then I build more resilience into my life again, because I just now realize that great work, the work that really matters, not like checking boxes off on a list, but The work that really matters,

09:46 - 10:14

Amanda Crowell: it happens because of your resilience and despite hustle. That's what I really learned. That if you wanna do great work, you stop hustling and you actually build your resilience and you create space for creativity and communication and critical thinking and collaboration, which are the things that create amazing world-changing art and ideas and products and whatever else it is that you're doing speeches, books, blog posts, podcasts.

10:16 - 10:50

Rochelle Moulton: In sort of an odd way, the gift of your health experience is that you learned that you now manage your bounce back ability, your resilience. And I love to think that we don't all have to go that far. I know. I mean, sometimes we do. But if we can, you know, start to dial that back and really recognize, there's a quote from the book that kind of gets to this point, great work flows better when we are healthier and happier. Yeah. Yeah. And I just love that because I think sometimes we think it's supposed to be

10:50 - 11:05

Rochelle Moulton: a grind. This is mostly an anti hustle crowd that's listening to this. It's kind of an anti bro hustle. Yeah, it is about being healthy and happy and then having more capacity to do the things that are really meaningful to you.

11:05 - 11:10

Amanda Crowell: Yeah and doing them faster and more creatively and with more success really, which is the best part.

11:11 - 11:27

Rochelle Moulton: Yeah so of course the big question that lots of us ask ourselves is what is our purpose, What is our great work? I mean, if a listener hasn't quite figured it out yet, like where do you suggest they start with the 4 essential pillars that you talk about?

11:27 - 11:56

Amanda Crowell: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think that, you know, for people who are book readers, I think chapter 2 of the book is a great exploration of that piece by piece. But the top level of it is that your great work has always been with you. So a lot of times we think we don't know what our great work is, but the truth is we're just not believing what we're hearing from inside of ourselves. So there are questions that you can ask yourself like in the book there's like a little list of them it's like

11:56 - 12:26

Amanda Crowell: what what has always been true like ever since you were a small person like what has always interested you what has always captivated your interest what makes you think could I possibly do that, like let that be the first spark of it, but then there's also questions like you can find it through the opposite of that, which is like what isn't working in your life right now. Like that can point the way out of the things that maybe would be great work for other people but aren't for you. And like what feels missing. I think the

12:26 - 13:04

Amanda Crowell: most interesting question actually that helps you discover what your great work is, is when you have an experience of like full body jealousy. And when somebody has an accomplishment and you just think to yourself, why isn't that me? Why didn't I do that? Why haven't I set myself up for that too? Like I could do that and it doesn't mean that you're begrudging somebody their accomplishment, but instead it just points the way towards something that we feel deep inside ourselves would bring us a great amount of joy that we could be great at that could be

13:04 - 13:32

Amanda Crowell: part of our contribution to the world. There's lots of different tips and tricks and stuff like that you can do an audit of the work that you have done. This is a great 1 that people can do without any more information which is like write down each and every place that you've either worked or projects that you've worked on depending on the kind of work that you do and Write down the parts about each job that you really enjoyed and loved and what you enjoyed and loved about it And then look across your history and you

13:32 - 14:03

Amanda Crowell: once you make your great work visible to you, it'll pop out like a neon sign. Like, here I am. This is what I am. And it's there. I've never met anyone. I have a lot of people who tell me, I understand that some people have great work, Amanda, but I just don't. I just really don't. And I just don't believe it. I don't believe it because I've had hundreds of conversations with people and it all it really this the vast majority of people just don't believe that what they are hearing inside themselves is like good enough

14:03 - 14:36

Amanda Crowell: for great work or like that they have the education or the expertise or the connections possible to do to get involved in what it is they're hoping to do. They're hoping to do. And so it's more a question of learning how to believe in what you're hearing and then giving yourself the tools and the time and the patience to figure out how to do it piece by piece, which is the other half of the book. First half of it's like, what is great work? And the second half is like, how do we actually do it? Well,

14:36 - 14:46

Amanda Crowell: it's that question of value, too, because I think a lot of times what comes naturally to us, we discount. Because we think it comes like this to everyone.

14:47 - 15:24

Rochelle Moulton: But I don't have enough fingers and toes to count all of the people I've met in my life who have a unique skill that I just revere. And they don't see it because it's there inside the bottle, right? They just can't see it. So it's sometimes I think what's helpful too is, is when you listen to yourself, but you also listen to things other people who you respect, say, when it's good, ignore the bad stuff. But when it's good, there are some clues in there into the things that you do that really Impact and matter to

15:24 - 15:27

Rochelle Moulton: other people that I think we can pay attention to sometimes.

15:27 - 15:56

Amanda Crowell: Yes. That's a really great point You can actually go on a you can tell them I was listening to a podcast and the author of the book said that I had to, so now I have to. You know, go to 3 or 5 people that you just really value and say like, what are the 3 skills that you would say are my...