6 Rules for Building the Life That You Want

Episode 41 closed out Choose Courage's 2025 season with Vivianne solo, no guest, just six rules pulled from a year of watching two broken stories collide: corporate loyalty that no longer holds up its end, and an entrepreneurship industry selling escape as a vision board. This post pulls the six rules, the exercises attached to each one, and the thirty-day plan that ties them together. Note: this post may have affiliate links and we donate 100% of those funds to non-profits and a children's group home🫶🏾 

Something broke in 2025 that most people still have not said out loud. Companies posting real profits cut thousands of jobs anyway and called it a strategic decision. People who did everything the old contract asked of them, the degree, the ladder, the fifty-hour weeks, got a laptop wipe and two weeks of severance for their trouble. If you are trying to design your life around the assumption that loyalty gets rewarded, this was the year that ended the assumption for good. Vivianne built six rules out of watching that collapse happen at the same time the hustle industry kept selling quitting your job as a matter of willpower and a vision board. Neither story was honest. The six rules live in the gap between them.

The Two Stories About Work That Both Turned Out To Be Wrong

The corporate loyalty story assumes a social contract that stopped existing a long time ago. Your employer was never loyal to you in the way the word implies, and the stability you thought you had was maintained exactly long enough to keep you productive. The entrepreneurship story has its own problem. It sells starting a business as liberation from risk, when what it actually offers is a different, more honest relationship with risk. Vivianne spent 2025 in rooms on both sides of this, watching people get laid off after doing everything right, and watching the same people get told that the fix was simply following their passion. So the six rules that follow are not a pitch for quitting your job. They are a way of seeing your current situation clearly enough to make a strategic move instead of a desperate one, whether that move happens inside your job or eventually outside it.

Rule One and Two: Treat the Job Like a Loan, Then Make the Side Thing Real

The first rule reframes the whole relationship. Your job is a loan, not a career, and the goal is to stop paying interest on it. A bank does not expect your loyalty. It gives you capital, you use it to build something, and you pay it back with as little extra as you can manage. Vivianne argues your employer should be held to the same transactional clarity. They give you a paycheck, benefits, skills, and access. You give them your time and expertise. That is the whole deal. The interest you are paying past that, the guilt over leaving on time, the evenings and weekends handed over for free, is optional, and most people pay it anyway.

The practical version of this is a quarterly inventory: what skills is this job teaching you that transfer, what relationships could become clients or referrals later, what market research are you absorbing for free every time a customer complains, what resources (software, training, mentors) can you access now that you would have to pay for on your own, and how much are you actually saving toward the transition. Do that audit four times a year and the job stops feeling like something happening to you.

The second rule is where most people quietly fail themselves. A side project that costs nothing, that nobody outside your immediate circle knows about, that you describe as "just exploring," is not a side hustle. It is a hobby, and hobbies are fine, but they do not build an exit. A real side hustle should scare you a little, because you have put money into it, told people about it, and made a decision you cannot easily reverse. When Vivianne started HmntyCntrd, she turned down easy corporate money specifically because taking it would have let the fear stay comfortable. The fear was not a warning sign. It was evidence the thing was real. If your project has cost you nothing and could disappear tomorrow without anyone noticing, that is worth being honest about, not defensive about.

What Corporate Teaches You To Doubt About Your Own Skills

Rule three names something specific about how corporate environments train self-doubt. Vivianne has coached people who manage million-dollar budgets and lead teams of twenty, who then tell her they are not ready to start a basic consulting practice. They will present to a C-suite without flinching and then freeze at the idea of a LinkedIn post about their own expertise. She lived a version of this herself. At Salesforce, she was good enough at her job to end up on a first-name, FaceTiming basis with C-level executives, and she still felt guilty that her real energy was going somewhere else, into the thing she was quietly building toward leaving. What finally moved her past it was not a credential. It was starting anyway, in public, and watching it hold up.

The exercise she offers is a capability audit: list what you actually do, not your title, and price each skill as if someone hired you to do only that. The number is almost always higher than the salary attached to your role. The gap between having the skill and offering it to someone else usually is not a missing certification. It is a missing decision.

Turn the Frustration Into the Blueprint

Rule four flips how you're supposed to relate to what annoys you at work. Every inefficient process, every policy that makes no sense, every moment you think why don't they just is information, not just irritation. Vivianne kept a running log of these moments while she was building HmntyCntrd. Sitting through a research approach she found dehumanizing was not wasted time. It was her clarifying, in real time, what her own consulting practice would refuse to do. Most people spend that same frustration complaining to a coworker or scrolling job listings for somewhere marginally less dysfunctional.

Employment feels stable because you are not the one making the decisions. That does not make it safe. It just means you are not in control of the risk you are already carrying.

The frustration log runs for thirty days: what happened, what value of yours it violated, whether the problem is unique to your company or common across the industry, what a better version would look like, and whether anyone would actually pay to have it solved. The best businesses rarely come out of an innovation lab. They come out of someone who got frustrated enough, and specific enough about why, to build the alternative.

The Risk Was Never Optional, Just Hidden

Rule five is the one Vivianne says gets argued with the most. Entrepreneurship is not riskier than employment. It is just honest about the risk that was already there. In 2025, profitable companies in tech, media, and financial services cut thousands of positions that had nothing to do with those companies struggling. Employment feels stable because someone else is making the decisions on your behalf, and you can tell yourself that not being in control is the same thing as being safe. It isn't. Entrepreneurship feels riskier because you can see the decisions you're making. Visible risk can be managed and adapted to as it happens. Hidden risk waits until it is too late to do anything about it.

The exercise is a side-by-side list: every risk of staying employed (layoffs, reorgs, a boss who leaves, skills going stale while you do the same job for another decade) against every risk of building something of your own (financial loss, public failure, working harder than you do now). Neither list is short. What changes is which risks you actually get to manage.

Work Like a Consultant, Then Build a 30-Day Plan

The sixth rule is about posture more than strategy. An employee measures their worth by how much the company needs them and absorbs work outside their job description to prove it. A consultant shows up to deliver what was agreed to, documents their impact, keeps a boundary around their hours, and treats their identity as separate from any single client's outcome. You can hold an employee title and run the consultant version internally: define your actual deliverables, track your wins for your own record rather than a performance review, set one boundary without apologizing for it, and describe what you do in terms of the value you create instead of the title on your badge.

Vivianne turned all six rules into a four-week plan for anyone who wants to run this without blowing up their current life. Week one is the loan inventory and an honest audit of the risk you're already carrying by staying employed. Week two is the fear audit on whatever side project exists or half-exists, followed by either committing to it for real or admitting it's a hobby. Week three is the capability audit paired with the frustration log, so you're naming both what you're worth and what you're uniquely positioned to fix. Week four is the consultant mindset shift in practice: document your impact, set the one boundary, start separating who you are from what your badge says. None of it requires quitting anything. It requires deciding to stop pretending the job is neutral ground.

If you have a mortgage and kids and can't imagine taking on more risk right now, Vivianne's answer isn't to ignore that. It's that those responsibilities are exactly the reason to take this seriously, in strategic and not reckless ways, because your kids are watching what you model as security whether you mean for them to or not. And if you're worried about failure, the actual shape of failure is smaller than the story you've built around it: you try something, it doesn't work, you learn what didn't work, and you're still here to try the next version.

If you've already decided something in your work life has to change but you don't know what you're building toward yet, that's the exact gap Prototype Your Purpose in 30 Days was built to close. It's a free guide that walks you through a month of small, deliberate experiments instead of one big leap you're not ready to take. Get the guide here.

Originally aired as Episode 41: 6 Rules for Building the Life That You Want on the Choose Courage Inc. podcast.