In this episode I explore why tutors can feel uncomfortable when their work starts to feel easy. Sumantha challenges the belief that success must come with exhaustion, introducing the idea of the “suffering tax”. She explains how ease can actually be the result of thoughtful planning, experience and well-designed offers, and why tutors should allow themselves to rest when the hard work has already been done.
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👋🏽 Hello! I'm Sumantha McMahon, and I've supported over 100 tutors and education business owners.
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I've noticed a lot of tutors get uncomfortable when something turns out to be easy. Not when it goes badly, but when it goes really well, when a session just comes together without any preparation, for example, or a month's income arrives without the usual scramble, or a client says something really lovely about a piece of work that, you know, took you about 20 minutes to produce. And instead of feeling pleased, there's this small unease, a sense that you might be getting away with something.
Sumantha (:
I had a conversation recently that showed this perfectly. One of my one-to-one clients was in the middle of a sales phase. All her materials were made, everything was out, the inquiries were coming in, like discovery calls were getting booked, and it was just going really well. So she came to one of our weekly one-to-one sessions and she asked me, What shall I do next? And I told her, Well, take a break, take a rest for a couple of weeks. And she found that really unnerving.
Sumantha (:
She sort of felt relieved, but she found it unnerving. She found it uncomfortable because in her head, there should always be something to work on. And here I was telling her the correct next move was nothing, you know, enjoy the sales period, you know, spend time with the people who are booking calls with you. But the reason she could rest is actually the main point here. We spent the first three months doing the difficult, impactful work. In fact, sometimes it's not even difficult. The point is we always start with the most impactful work.
Sumantha (:
Building the offer, getting the positioning right, making the materials. That work was done. She was heading into a phase where actually she could relax a little bit after the sales, she could focus on boarding, she could focus on growing her audience, nurturing, and there was just plenty of time to think about it now. So the ease wasn't a sign that she had stopped working hard. It was the result of the hard work arriving at the perfect time. And that's what I think we get wrong about this.
Sumantha (:
We treat easy as something suspicious, when usually it's a symptom of something that's just really well designed. The session goes smoothly because you've taught the material 40 times and refined it each time. The month works because the offer is priced correctly and the diary isn't overstuffed. The 20-minute piece of work is brilliant because you have 20 years of judgment sitting behind it. None of that is getting away with anything. That's the return on everything that came before.
Sumantha (:
There's an inherited belief underneath this, and I call it the suffering tax. The idea that reward has to be paid for in exhaustion and enjoyment comes later, once you've suffered enough to deserve it. Teaching trains you into it particularly well. Nobody in a school ever got praised for finding their workload manageable. So if something feels easy this week, just try leaving it alone. Don't add to it to make it feel more substantial. Don't go looking for the thing you must have missed. You're allowed to work less and you're allowed to find things easy.
