Search & Replace S03E11: Milena Regos

Milena Regos, the founder of Unhustle, discusses her journey from chasing material success to realizing the negative impact of the hustle culture on her health, relationships, and overall fulfillment. She shares her realization that her identity was tied to her work and how she decided to redefine her success and reclaim her time. Milena explains how adopting new habits, such as taking breaks and working in a state of flow, helped her establish a balance between work and leisure. She realized the importance of defining one’s own success and promoting a holistic approach to life and work. Find out how Milena aims to create a movement and community that encourages individuals to pursue a healthier and more fulfilling path on Search and Replace. 

More about today’s guest:

• Get to know Milena Regos at unhustle.com.
• Connect with Milena via her Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. 

Explore these related stories:

• Explore Milena Regos’ podcast, The Unhustle Podcast, for those looking to make space for what truly matters and create sustainable success. 
• Get on the Unhustle newsletter to stay informed. 
• Find articles from Milena Regos on Medium. 
• Learn more about the toxic impact of hustle culture on your mental health. 
• The BBC’s Megan Carnegie investigates hustle culture and the end of rise-and-grind. 
• Kristin Wong, from the New York Times, highlights how to add more play to your life. 
• Discover what it takes for busy professionals to make a change for the better by constantly re-evaluating your evolving feelings and priorities, and adjusting your work and life choices accordingly. 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Announcer: Support for the following podcast is provided by the user experience specialist at Johns and Taylor. More information follows this episode. 

[00:00:10] Joe Taylor Jr.: What if you discover that the hustle you use to build your career needs to be switched off? I’m Joe Taylor, Jr. This is Search and Replace.

Milena Regos grew up in Bulgaria, but still found herself attracted to the American Dream at a young age. 

[00:00:34] Milena Regos: As a first-generation immigrant and a female, we fall into that path of trying to have it all, trying to have the career, the family and everything. 

And so I actually have a long term marketing career. I came from Bulgaria to create this American dream and have it all. And I was chasing a lot of material success in my eyes, that was what success meant. Until one day I woke up with what I call the hustle hangover, which is realizing that, you know, I have the brain fog and the digestive problems, and my marriage was not exactly where I was spending a lot of time and energy. I was more married to my business than I was married to my Australian mate. And we love each other and we just weren’t exactly spending a lot of time together. So that made me realize that what I’m doing isn’t exactly what was making me fulfilled and happy.

[00:01:29] Joe Taylor Jr.: Melena is experiencing more of these realizations even as she’s spending her time working with some very recognizable clients. 

[00:01:36] Milena Regos: Madonna was one of my clients and I was at the grand opening of her health club in Toronto. And I was actually hanging out with this super creative guy, he goes by bus Mr. Brainwash, but he does, like, pop culture graffiti and he was hired to do one of the walls. And I found myself really drawn to him because of kind of his, he was really into his craft. He was very engaged with what he was doing. It looked like he was having a lot of fun, even though he was working long hours.

At some point in time, he asked me, who are you without doing? And it really hit me. I was like, my whole identity, my whole life, I was linked to this, to what I was doing for work. 

And so on the plane back home, I started thinking. I did a little life outed and I realized that my, my health, my love life, relationships, and play and fun. Were really in the red work and money, you know, I wasn’t like a millionaire, but I was making okay money to pay my bills, you know, working crazy long hours. And so I realized I was misaligned. I was discontent with that status quo. 

That led me to rethink my life, redefine my success, reclaim my time, and go in the opposite direction of hustle culture, which is what I call unhustle.

[00:02:46] Joe Taylor Jr.: Because Milena realized that hustle isn’t exactly a switch you can flip off overnight, she explains the approach she’s taken to shifting her mindset. 

[00:02:56] Milena Regos: There is a commitment and there is a practice. And the practice is where I’m still doing. Right? And was this really the right path? Absolutely. 

Now of course, just like everybody, there’s fears, there’s self-doubt, there’s procrastination. But having the tools in your toolbox allows you to, kind of, bounce back a lot faster than before. 

So there’s some simple practices, rituals, habits that we can incorporate in our busy days to give us that space. Even like the power of the pause, right? Even like taking just a few minutes to sit and breathe and connect with your heart, and get your heart to sync with your mind and establish that hard brain coherence. Just the simple things of working in a state of flow, doing the deep work instead of, you know, constantly jumping in and out of your email multiple projects. 

So I’ve changed quite a bit the way I work, knowing when to call the day a victory and move on to rest and recovery. Taking some really good breaks throughout the day in between projects so I can reassess. 

[00:04:00] Joe Taylor Jr.: As Milena honed her approach to what she calls unhustle, she recognized her drive to help other people achieve similar goals in their own lives. She also knows that there are plenty of other life coaches on the market who aren’t quite as honest or as effective as she’d like to be. 

[00:04:17] Milena Regos: It was a selfish act leading to starting this not just as a reason for just me being, I’m just gonna do it as a coach and coach people and just take all the money. But I wanna do it as a community effort and as a movement and as a revolution that takes us in a healthier area in the world. 

And so it’s a holistic approach. It actually first starts with what’s the life you wanna have? How do you define your success? What are your values? What, where do you find purpose? And then taking them on that journey to redefine life, to look at their career holistically and to look at their leisure time because it’s something very, very important that we can gain a lot of energy from, and it actually helps us with disconnecting from work. 

Once we have the three parts together, we can make a path together as to how we’re gonna move into that direction. But it really starts with the individual. 

The whole reason I wanted to start on hustle and that’s why position it is an unhustle movement and community, is because I wanted to connect with like-minded people. I felt that there’s a different way of going about how we live and how we work, and I wanted to say, Hey, let’s do this together. Let’s have fun, and let’s make the changes that we wanna make the change in the world for our children and for our businesses, and for the planet. 

[00:05:34] Joe Taylor Jr.: Milena broadened her definition of success, and she’s sharing that with the world. 

[00:05:39] Milena Regos: Being successful is what I want people to be. But how you define that, success is more than just the title. It’s more than just the job. And if you want to be the best at what you do, if you want to be a high performer, then you need to learn the art of and hustling because you will be able to do it better. You’ll be able to do it with more focused and clear mind, and you’ll be happier along the way and you’ll be able to do it for longer. You’ll be healthier. 

So, all of these things lead to the same place. It’s, like, yes, you can have a career. Yes, you can be very effective at what you’re doing, and no you don’t have to work 20 hours a day in order to do it. 

[00:06:17] Joe Taylor Jr.: That’s Milena Regos, founder of Unhustle. We’ve got links to Milena’s work in our show notes and on our website at searchandreplace.show.

Also in our show notes, is this the end of Rise and Grind? The BBC’s Megan Carnegie investigates a growing number of people trading their 4:00 AM bulletproof coffee for extended rest and recovery. 

Plus, the New York Times Kristin Wong highlights ways that many of us could use some extra downtime. Whether it’s playing with kids or pets, or even taking some trips, that heaven forbid, we don’t share on social media. 

All that and more in our show notes and on our website at searchandreplace.show. 

Today’s episode was produced by Nicole Hubbard with help from the entire Podcast Taxi team. I’m Joe Taylor, Jr. 

[00:07:05] Announcer: This has been a Podcast Taxi radio production. 

Support for Search and Replace is provided by Johns and Taylor, user experience specialists serving media and technology companies that want their websites to work. Learn more about how top performing businesses eliminate barriers between customers and their goals. At www.makethewebsiteworkforme.com.