~by Haley Lynn Gray~
The best advice a mentor ever gave me was simple: lean into who you really are, and what brings you joy.
It sounds soft. It turned out to be one of the most practical pieces of business advice I’ve ever received.
Why it was hard to hear
I’m an engineer with an MBA. I like data, systems, and things that can be measured.
I’m also, honestly, quite woo. I’m deeply intuitive. I notice things I can’t always explain, and I often know something is right or wrong before I can articulate why.
For a long time I treated those as contradictory. The analytical side felt like the professional one — the part I was supposed to lead with. The intuitive side felt like something to keep quiet about in a meeting.
So I spent years presenting half of myself, and working hard at the parts of the job that suited that half.
What happened when I stopped
When I started taking the advice seriously, I noticed something I hadn’t expected.
The work that made me happiest — the pieces I’d have done for free, the ones where hours disappeared — were also my highest-productivity areas. Not occasionally. Consistently.
The more I leaned into them, the better the business did. And the more I leaned into being both the engineer and the intuitive one, the better my decisions got — because I was using all of the information available to me instead of dismissing half of it.
Why joy and performance travel together
This isn’t just a nice coincidence. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying what he called flow — the state of being fully absorbed in something that stretches you just enough. His research found that people in flow tend to do their best work and also report some of their most satisfying experiences.
In other words, the work you find most absorbing and the work you do best are frequently the same work. Joy isn’t a distraction from productivity. For a lot of people, it’s a reliable signal of where their productivity actually is.
Both, not either
I’d particularly say this to anyone who, like me, has been keeping a part of themselves out of the room.
Intuition and analysis aren’t opposites. Good intuition is largely pattern recognition built from experience — your brain noticing something before your conscious mind has caught up. The research on when to trust your gut suggests it’s most reliable in areas where you have real experience and regular feedback. Combined with data, it’s a genuine advantage, not an embarrassment.
The best decisions I make use both: the numbers tell me what’s happening, and my intuition tells me what to look at more closely.
What this means if you run a business
Here’s the part that makes it practical rather than just philosophical.
As an owner, you get to design your own role. Nobody hands you a job description. Which means you can deliberately shape it around the work where you’re both happiest and most valuable — and hand off the rest as the business grows.
A business run by an owner doing what they’re genuinely best at usually performs better than one run by an owner grinding through everything, including the things that drain them.
How to find yours
For two weeks, keep a simple note at the end of each day:
- What gave you energy? The tasks where time flew and you felt capable.
- What drained you? The ones you put off, dreaded, or finished exhausted.
Then look at the patterns. The energising list is almost always where your real value to the business sits. The draining list is where to delegate, automate or stop.
An honest caveat: you can’t drop everything that drains you straight away. Some of it genuinely has to be done until you can afford to hand it over. But you can start moving in that direction on purpose, instead of assuming that work is supposed to feel like a slog.
The short version
Stop hiding the parts of yourself that don’t fit the picture you think you’re meant to present. Notice what brings you joy, because it’s probably pointing at what you do best.
It took me far too long to believe that. I’m grateful someone told me — and I’m passing it on.
