Episode Summary
Ever get the feeling that no matter how hard you work, the thing secretly holding your business back might be … you?
Many women entrepreneurs feel driven by a cycle of overwork and frustration, thinking the right strategy, hire, or software will finally free them. But what if the real reason you’re not getting the results you want is a hidden pattern you can’t yet see—and breaking it is the difference between staying stuck and finally creating the business you actually want?
In this episode you will discover:
How to identify if you’re getting in your own way and whether or not that is the problem you need to be focusing on in your business
3 breakthroughs that stop you getting in your way so you can have the business you really want
The neuroscience-backed reason why insight alone rarely changes behavior—and what does.
Press play now to shift from “Why is it always like this?!” to your own clear path to success.
Resources Mentioned:
Clarity Accelerator: Schedule a call with Jenna about joining the Clarity Accelerator--the same mastermind that we talk about in this episode--to unlock your inner genius, streamline your strategies and offers, and dial in the inner world that lets you work smarter, not harder.
https://www.theuncommonway.com/schedule
Find Jenna on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theuncommonway/
This podcast dives into the potential of balancing a business and life without sacrificing revenue or impact. It helps women business owners and mompreneurs overcome overwhelm, decision fatigue, and the guilt of working less and stepping away from hustle culture while increasing leadership, strategic decision making, alignment and delegation / team building. Learn to build powerful habits and mindset, embrace smarter and higher vibration work methods, and master time management by streamlining tasks, implementing business systems, and even prioritizing self-care. We explore efficiency and energetics, productivity and filling your cup, automation and where to personalize your efforts … all to reduce overworking, and finally take time off—without the fear or shame—whether that is with high-ticket offers, scalable offers, or passive income. Say goodbye to imposter syndrome and people pleasing while running a small business: It's time to shift your mindset, reclaim your work-life balance, and thrive!
Full Episode Transcript:
Jenna Harrison: (0:00 - 0:22) It's a fact of life that often we are the ones getting in our way. Today, I'll show you how to identify when that's happening, and three breakthroughs that move you past this and into the business you really want. Welcome to the three-day workweek, helping women entrepreneurs run profitable, meaningful businesses in just three days a week if they like, without stress, guilt, or sacrificing growth.
(0:22 - 0:32)
I'm your host, Jenna Harrison, sharing practical strategies, mindset hacks, and even some woo to help you work smarter, leave early, and find true balance. Let's dive in. Welcome, welcome back.
(0:33 - 1:26)
I'm Jenna Harrison, and in this episode, you are going to discover how to identify if you are getting in your own way, and so that's the problem you need to be focusing on in your business, and if so, three breakthroughs that shift you out of that and into the business you really want, and the neuroscience-backed reason why insight alone rarely changes behavior and what does. So yes, welcome back to another truth-telling episode, where I give you the hard truth and nothing but the truth to help you cut through the noise, focus on what actually moves the needle for your business, and get you living in alignment with the uncommon life of your choosing, the one that is really meant for you. I want to tell you a story today about a woman named Lindy, who is experiencing something I am sure you can relate to.
(1:26 - 1:47)
Lindy is a woman with very big dreams. She has a strong desire to do something very meaningful in her life, and lots of smarts, and a very strong work ethic. I have a feeling this is sounding familiar, and she brought me on as her coach so she could get help and an outside perspective on this big problem she was up against.
(1:48 - 2:09)
She was stuck and couldn't grow because, frankly, she just didn't have time. But this episode is not about creating more time. It's about identifying when it's true that what's really getting in your way is you, no matter how that might be showing up, and no matter what appears at first glance to be the problem.
(2:10 - 2:43)
First, though, let me backtrack a bit and tell you her story. See, Lindy had grown up in the Midwest in a time when towns were really bustling, and she has memories as a little girl of bumping into neighbors on Main Street, and having an ice cream cone, and strolling along, and going about life, and just this wonderful community aspect. But fast forward to now, and many of those same small towns are just really dead when you drive through them.
(2:43 - 3:20)
Yeah, everybody's at home, you know, there are people living there, but they're in their houses, and there's no actual nucleus where people can congregate. And she had realized that the thing that had changed was that there was no longer an anchor point on Main Street that would draw people in enough to then have other businesses open around it, and that anchor point was the supermarket. Now, when Walmart came along, all of the mom-and-pop supermarkets closed, and she could see how that correlated to other businesses closing, and eventually, the crumbling of the community.
(3:20 - 3:50)
Really, people were having to drive half an hour in some of these towns to go get their groceries, rather than being able to not just buy them five minutes away, but also see so many of their friends and neighbors, and just interact and feel that sense of community. And her vision really was to roll out her current two supermarkets throughout the country. Again, she had big dreams.
(3:51 - 4:13)
But when I first talked to her, she said, there's no way I'm going to roll out more supermarkets. I wish that I could be working on the big vision of the business and the big strategy that needs to happen, but I'm out here, like she called it, putting out dumpster fires. There's always something erupting that I have to step in and take care of.
(4:13 - 4:34)
Maybe there's some staffing issue. Maybe I'm cleaning up an aisle because, you know, there's some mess or somebody knocked some glass jars over, and all the green beans spilled out. I'm working on scheduling.
I'm looking at inventory. I'm just doing all the things. There's no way that I have time to really step into this vision.
(4:35 - 4:44)
And of course, that wasn't the business Lindy wanted. She didn't leave her great job in Chicago or Minneapolis. I'm drawing a blank now.
(4:44 - 5:01)
But she didn't leave that to now be all stressed out all the time, running around, have even less time with her kids, be working with her partner. And of course, they're squabbling because there's all different things going on. They both have to manage and juggle.
(5:01 - 5:19)
And just so tired by the time she would finally lay her head on her pillow. Let alone having a moment to just breathe. And the reason I'm sharing this is because so many of you out there are caught up in this same situation like Lindy was.
(5:19 - 5:43)
But there's something that's like preventing you, that's holding you back from getting to that bigger vision that you desire. And the pain that you're in because of it is real. Or let's say you have a coaching business where you really want to bring on a team that can help you with the day-to-day operations and free you up to write this book that you have inside you.
(5:43 - 5:58)
You've been longing to write it. And you know that's going to be the thing that captures so much interest and attention and really just skyrockets your visibility and allows you to help so many more people. Because I just don't trust them not to mess it up.
(5:58 - 6:19)
And I really have to be in there doing it myself. And it's in the same way that Lindy was really pointing outwards at everything going on as a source of her problem rather than turning that lens around to herself. And what I want to do in this episode is highlight how important it is not to stay in this kind of status quo.
(6:20 - 6:27)
Not to continue doing business this way. Because that kind of gridlock serves no one. It doesn't serve you.
(6:27 - 6:34)
It doesn't serve your clients. It doesn't serve the world at large. And it can linger for years.
(6:34 - 6:53)
You know, I've been doing a podcast tour and appearing on different podcasts talking to different business owners. So as I'm talking to them, I can just see how there are these unexamined assumptions they have that have created this whole way of thinking around their business in which this is the way it has to be. Right? This is how business is.
(6:54 - 7:12)
So I want to help you learn to not only identify when it's happening to you, but move past it. So that you don't find yourself 10 or 20 years from now talking about how this is just the way business is and always has been. And you're still just scratching the surface of your potential.
(7:12 - 7:45)
Because when you change that, that's when you get to step in to deciding how you want your life to be, how you want your business to be, rather than letting the world happen to you. So really, the first step, the first breakthrough is when you have an uncomfortable conversation with yourself, where you stop looking to the outside circumstances, and you turn that lens back on yourself. And you say, what if I am the common denominator here? Now, I am not saying that you are always the problem.
(7:46 - 8:18)
Many times there are circumstances beyond our control that are just really bad luck or poor timing, and it has nothing to do with you creating that for yourself. But after nearly a decade of working with over 100 women, bringing in close to a million dollars in coaching revenue, in which no matter what the client has come to me for, we invariably end up working on mindset as well. Because it's what guides every decision, every action.
(8:18 - 8:44)
Our brain, after all, is what determines everything that we do. And after all this, I can tell you that 8 or even 9 times out of 10, this is the hidden saboteur that is keeping women from creating the uncommon life of their choosing. Not their busy schedules, or their underperforming employees, or their wishy-washy clients.
(8:44 - 9:06)
And this, that fact alone, is just so... Ugh. Right? Because it can keep you stuck without you even realizing that you're in it. Here you are, banging your head on the wall, comparing your current reality to your dreams, and thinking, ugh, I should be way closer by now.
(9:06 - 9:11)
I'm working so hard. I've been at this for a while. It's not that I'm just starting out.
(9:11 - 9:44)
Or maybe you are starting out, but you're looking at and hearing about other people who were starting out and blown past you with their results. And it's like, what do they know that I don't know? You're racking your brain trying to compare. Is it that she's a better writer? Or more creative? Maybe she's more magnetic or prettier than I am? What gives? But you see how all of those thoughts I just mentioned are a symptom of that same external focus? Thinking it's about, it's you looking outside.
(9:45 - 10:31)
You're trying to look outside of yourself, gather data from out there to solve the problem, rather than being like, hmm, what is my role in this? If you just heard my voice go, I was like tapping my chest as I was talking. What is my role in this? And by now you might be thinking, okay, if there are things going on I'm not happy about, and I'm willing to bravely have the hard conversation with myself and look at taking responsibility for what's going on, because otherwise you'll just be wasting your time and money and solving for the wrong thing. Like Lindy had already tried other things, she'd invested in expensive inventory management systems and several other things to try and help the situation.
(10:32 - 11:04)
Just like maybe you find yourself thinking the solution is, oh, I need to, whatever, invest in Facebook ads, redo my website, learn to overcome objections, invest in fancy project management software, which don't get me wrong, all have their place. And I'm not saying you're never going to work on those or that there's not room for actual skill building and bringing in smart technology, of course. And you lean into them with a very different energy.
(11:04 - 11:28)
When you don't think that your whole business is dependent on you, having that, you recognize that those are just the tool set you are choosing out of many different options that you could choose to create a next result from a really clean place. When your mindset is stuck, your strategy doesn't matter. You've got to make sure you're solving for the root issue.
(11:28 - 11:41)
Then what's the next step? The second breakthrough is when you realize that this is a recurring pattern. It's not a one-off circumstance. It's something you've seen for yourself again and again.
(11:41 - 12:01)
That is the key that lets you know if you need to work on something about your mind rather than on something tactical in your business or something strategy related in your business. Because this main issue coming up for you is something that's happened again and again. And you will feel a recognition when you think about that thing.
(12:01 - 12:16)
You'll feel a sagging of your shoulders and like, oh, that again. It's the kind of thing that almost doesn't surprise you when it happens. You're so used to it happening that you're kind of like, of course, and now this.
(12:16 - 12:37)
And those are the most energy-draining, demoralizing parts of business and life when you're feeling that weight and it's put you into that victim state of something that you can't change. So first, you want to turn the lens on yourself. And then second, you just want to confirm.
(12:37 - 12:52)
Is this a pattern? That's your next breakthrough. Sometimes it's a pattern that seems like outside occurrences or circumstances, like what I've been describing here with Lindy. But other times, it's a pattern of behavior that you see in yourself.
(12:52 - 13:17)
Maybe it is over-functioning, where you spin into overdrive when you get stressed. And you know that that's when you start dropping balls and the quality of your work declines and you start snapping at the people you love. Maybe your fears and doubts repeatedly run the show and they block you from doing the things you know you need to do in order to grow your business or step back from your business, depending on where you are.
(13:17 - 13:31)
Maybe you have a pattern of overthinking and uncertainty. And as much as you love to move through life decisively and powerfully, you just can't seem to do so. If you have a recurring pattern in your life, get help for that right away.
(13:32 - 13:49)
Because these don't just drive your behavior, they drive your outcomes, your results. They infiltrate the way you show up, the decisions you make, and the way you see the world. And the longer you remain the puppet in the show rather than the puppeteer, the longer you suffer the consequences.
(13:49 - 14:22)
Now for you, that might look like squashing your most brilliant ideas and overthinking before they've even seen the light of day. Or making yourself sick because you're so stressed all the time that your immune system is completely suppressed. Or getting all weird in sales moments because all you can think about is what if this doesn't work? For Lindy, she was stressed, exhausted, and didn't feel like she had the energy to pour into that store even one more day, let alone start rolling out other stores.
(14:23 - 14:40)
And so of course she wasn't rolling out your stores across the nation and reviving all of those areas and small towns that so desperately need it. And becoming silly rich, I'm sure you can imagine. So instead I asked her to fill in the blanks on this sentence.
(14:41 - 15:10)
If only I could just fill in the blank, then I could fill in the blank. And guess what she said? If only I could just get out of the weeds, then I'd finally have time to focus on the bigger picture strategy. So I'm going to pause a moment because she revealed a lot right there, and you can reveal a lot for yourself by asking yourself this very question.
(15:10 - 15:45)
She had been thinking that there were all of these other things outside of her control that made it impossible for her to move forward. When we started to talk, she realized that this was all part of a bigger pattern, keeping her from this dream of impacting small town America, and specifically keeping her from being able to do the big strategic thinking that she needed to do, the higher level thinking. She already knew that's what she needed to do if she ever wanted to achieve her dreams.
(15:46 - 16:08)
She just wasn't doing it. And so in that very sentence, we revealed both where a part of her brain felt most comfortable and wanted to stay, which was in the weeds, and what a part of her brain wanted to avoid, which was becoming the strategic thinker. This is not about logic, y'all.
(16:08 - 16:23)
This is about deep patterning, subconscious patterning. That doesn't have to be logical. I see that so often with women who really want to create that business that lets them go, huh, job well done, go me.
(16:24 - 16:39)
And the good news is they are just a few breakthroughs away from that. Once they realize, wait, I am being cleverly distracted from the real issue. This is about me and not really about today's brush fire.
(16:40 - 16:59)
And then they realize, wait, I can clearly see that this is a pattern. And then they realize, wait, I know exactly what feels scary to my brain and therefore why I've been using this pattern. It's because it keeps me in what I know.
(16:59 - 17:28)
The hard truth that Lindy was finally able to see clearly and freely admit to once the blinders were off is that she was scared to death of having to think strategically, of having that responsibility, and from being found out that she just wasn't very good at it. This is a woman who had excelled her entire life. She was a local girl who went off to the big school and worked at the big deal corporate job and now had come back to make this grand difference.
(17:28 - 17:52)
It's so much safer to say, oh, it's just impossible to juggle everything on my plate than it is to say, I tried to do this, but I suck at it. And as soon as I start meeting with all the vendors and investors and whomever else I'll need to make this vision a reality, they're going to be giving each other side-eye and chuckling behind my back and being like, yeah, right. Dream on, baby.
(17:53 - 18:04)
I mean, why change when your brain's getting all the dopamine hits from everyone around saying, oh, Lindy's trying to do the right thing. Oh my God, look how hard she works. Wow, I admire her.
(18:05 - 18:37)
But if she actually had the time and could make the big moves her business needed and then failed at it? Ugh. Now, on the one hand, if you were in Lindy's position, you might be tempted to just shake yourself. Are you kidding me? I have been doing all this cleaning and having these late nights and being stressed out by these dumpster fires to myself? Are you fucking kidding me? What is wrong with me? But my friend, we all go through this.
(18:38 - 18:59)
Despite what you hear in the shiny origin stories that you hear on podcasts or that you see on Instagram, every entrepreneur has been through this. And in fact, it's necessary to create real change. Entrepreneurship pulls it out of you, and your business succeeds as you work through your crap.
(18:59 - 19:15)
I've seen it over and over again. And so when you identify something like this, you need to say, good, now I have a clear issue to work on. Now I can get down to solving it rather than continuing to live in the situation I've been living.
(19:16 - 19:42)
You hire a coach or you get a mentor who's been there themselves and you pick their brain. Or if you want, you can just cross your fingers and listen to a bunch of podcasts and hope it just naturally resolves without having to actually do uncomfortable work or take any time or without having to invest money. Because after all, you should be able to figure it out for yourself, right? Which always makes me scratch my head, because even a brain surgeon can't do surgery on herself.
(19:43 - 19:58)
And trying to see things in new ways and see the tricky tactics and patterns and distractions your brain will come up with from inside the very brain that's creating them. I mean, I don't know. I personally choose the one of the first two.
(19:59 - 20:29)
I always have a coach to help me and I seek out mentors whenever I can as well. I want people who will help me zoom past and keep performing at my highest level. I surround myself with colleagues who are also working on themselves so that I can see that it's possible, so that I can learn from people who've gone through what I'm now going through, and I can also deepen into the new knowledge I've created by sharing it with others.
(20:30 - 20:41)
Other women who are just now starting to work on that thing that I worked through. Working on your brain is a lot like working on your body. You need to put in the reps.
(20:41 - 20:49)
You need to put in the right reps in the right way. I'm a person who has done decades of yoga. I have an extremely strong core.
(20:50 - 21:12)
And if I'm on my own at the gym, I'll do a lot of core work and leg work because it's easy for me. It feels right in my body when I'm doing it. But work on those super small muscles in my upper body where I'm lifting a little bag of nuts or something, and yet somehow I'm all tired? No.
(21:13 - 21:27)
No, thank you. Right? I will only do that stuff with a trainer, let alone identifying which muscle I need to work on. I remember once my back was hurting, and then the physical therapist was like, oh, no, no, no.
(21:27 - 21:38)
It's your left glute that's the problem. I'm like, huh? How is that even related? Which is the same thing I have people ask me. Because this is my area of expertise.
(21:38 - 22:00)
And so it makes sense to me, I'll assign a client something to focus on or do in their business, and they'll be like, but wait, wait, wait. How is that related? Or aren't I supposed to X, Y, Z? Right? Didn't you tell me six months ago that I should be working on this? And yes, in that moment. But now you've got your glutes firing the way they need to be.
(22:00 - 22:25)
And what we need to be working on now is this part over here, because that's what's going to set you up perfectly later to hit that goal over there. So many business owners try to work on something up here, metaphorically, I'm like holding my hand in the air now, without realizing it's not going to create the results they want unless they first work on this other piece over here. Now, often we can work on things in tandem.
(22:26 - 22:37)
For instance, mindset. Really, we should always be working on our minds. They are the single greatest asset and are our single biggest revenue potential.
(22:38 - 22:49)
Single biggest. So that's why in my programs, with the curriculums that I have, I always have mindset training at the beginning of each module. In the Clarity Accelerator, it is set up perfectly.
(22:50 - 24:08)
The training is always related exactly to the things that tend to trip people up when they're working on that specific part of their business. Whether it is clarity on your next level zone of genius that's ready to be unleashed into the world now, or how exactly that's going to determine the next moves that you're making, or if it's refining who your best clients really are, whatever it is, I have seen the issues and the objections and the self-sabotaging beliefs that tend to appear as we consider these different aspects of our business and as we move forward in the deeper and deeper declaration of what we're really about and what we're going after and how we're going to get there. Because look, if your deeper operating system is telling you to always be a nice person, but what's called for in your business is to stop letting people take advantage of you, then when it comes time to do the actual doing of that, such as having the tough conversation or whatever it may be, your brain is going to come up with objections, right? Because it wants to bring you back into what you know to be true, what has worked for you, and that is being a nice person, even if it's to your detriment, even if it's sabotaging your business.
(24:09 - 24:26)
The problem is we don't see it when we're in it. It always sounds like a perfectly logical reason to not do the thing we need to do or not do it in the way we need to do it. Now, the good news is that once you are onto yourself, you can create change.
(24:27 - 24:45)
Lindy did. I have this iconic moment of her stuck in my head where she was telling me about it. Now remember, this is the woman who was in her oldest clothes because she never knew what she was going to have to get into at work, cleaning up green beans in the supermarket aisle.
(24:46 - 25:26)
Fast forward several months and she's wearing this very elegant but powerful sleeveless black top, seeing herself as the strategic visionary thinker she is because, of course, you don't get into a business like that creating that kind of vision without being that way. It's just that for several reasons, things that had happened throughout her life, she had never come to think of herself in that way and had never given herself a chance to think in that way. Once she actually created the space to do so, it was so funny because she just offhandedly referred to like, well, obviously I can't do that because I'm the strategic thinker here.
(25:26 - 25:41)
I'm the one that needs to be thinking about this next thing coming down the road and she'd just be rattling this stuff off to me as if she had always thought that way. It is a beautiful thing to see. Now you can hear her tell her story herself in an early episode of this podcast.
(25:42 - 25:55)
We're going to link to it in the episode description. Go take a listen because when we're growing a business, anyone's growing a business, we really need to just hear, hey, this happens to everyone. No big deal.
(25:55 - 26:15)
What separates out the people that move forward the fastest from those who stay stuck are the ones who can spot it the most quickly. Either they spot it or someone spots it for them. And of course, if you're having someone help you spot it, then you also want to make sure they understand the science of brain change.
(26:15 - 26:40)
Hopefully the latest neuroscience-backed methods that have been shown to create the most effective change using the whole brain because of course back in the day, all we had was therapy, right? We'd go to therapy for 20 years and hope we saw some sort of measurable result. As we know now, insight alone rarely changes behavior. There's a default mechanism that keeps us repeating the past.
(26:40 - 27:13)
And that operating system directs all of our perceptions, our preferences, our decisions, our desires. But nowadays we can test tactics and then we can go look at them in an fMRI and actually see the brain changing, which is such a gift and a blessing and is allowing more and more women to move into the 2.0 or the 3.0 version of themselves. You know, if someone in the future is listing out the greatest milestones or breakthroughs of mankind, womankind, this is going to be on there.
(27:14 - 27:31)
How we learned that we have so much power to reinvent ourselves and create change with our minds. Our brains are not only malleable, they are self-malleable. And this is the most useful work in our lives, not just for business owners.
(27:32 - 27:48)
Because no matter what you do, you can't outwork a belief system that is wired against your success. You can't diet your way to skinny if your brain is wired against it. You can't hustle your way to ease if your brain is wired against it.
(27:48 - 28:28)
You can't save your way to wealth if your brain is wired against it. Which is why this is such an important topic and why in this episode, I've helped you identify if you are getting in your own way, if that's the problem you need to be focusing on in your business. As evidenced by patterns you just can't seem to get away from, I've shown you the three breakthroughs that shift you out of that and into the business you really want, which are that you realize there's a pattern, and then you realize what the pattern is and what exactly your brain is trying to avoid.
(28:29 - 28:52)
Isn't this stuff fun? I think this stuff is so fun. I get so excited talking about what's possible, especially when it comes to these identity pieces. And once you realize it is possible, then of course you know that every hour spent grinding through resisting change is a tax you pay for not rewiring your brain.
(28:52 - 29:15)
All right, my friend, thank you so much for listening. I hope it has given you a lot of clarity on what's going on in your business right now, whether or not it truly is about you getting in your own way. And if you liked this episode, please share it with a friend, somebody that you think would also like it and that you think could use this little bit of perspective today.
(29:15 - 29:37)
Have a great week, and let's talk again on Tuesday. Thanks for joining us here at The Uncommon Way. If you want more tips and resources for developing clarity in your business and life, including the Clarity First strategy for growing and scaling your business, visit theuncommonway.com. See you next time.