Episode Summary
Do you ever catch yourself looping through “what if” thoughts — what if things go south if I scale back my hours, or try doing this differently, or stop doing something that used to work well?
These thoughts feel responsible… but they’re actually draining your power and keeping you from the impact, income, and confidence you’re meant for. In this episode, you’ll learn a specific tool to stop “what if” thinking from dictating your next move — and instead, turn uncertainty into clarity and momentum, no matter what’s happening in your business.
Inside, you’ll discover:
The hidden mental loop that keeps even high achievers second-guessing their decisions — and how to break free from it instantly.
A simple reframing technique to reclaim your personal power whenever fear, doubt, or overthinking strikes.
How to use meaning-making to create results on your terms — so you can move forward with calm confidence, even when things feel uncertain.
Press play now to learn how to take your power back from “what if” thinking — and start leading your business (and life) from clarity instead of fear.
Episodes Mentioned:
Ep# 107: How to Overcome the Fear of Letting Go and Facing Negative Consequences Using ‘Flexible Frame’: a Strategy for High Achieving Women Entrepreneurs’ Deep Fear
The Uncommon Way is your go-to resource for mindset mastery, strategy, and power moves tailored to ambitious women entrepreneurs and leaders ready to break the mold and lead with confidence. This top female business coaches podcast covers leadership coaching for women, business growth strategies, and the female entrepreneur mindset to help you craft magnetic messaging, attract your ideal clients, clarify irresistible offers, and leverage your secret sauce to stand out authentically.
Each episode from top-ranked women’s business coach Jenna Harrison addresses common pain points like overwhelm, decision fatigue, entrepreneur burnout solutions, and the guilt of stepping back from hustle culture. Jenna shares tools to streamline your business systems, cultivate powerful habits, and delegate with intention—all designed to help you reclaim work-life balance and boost your freedom.
Dive into transformational mindset shifts and energetic alignment that empower you to become the powerful force you were meant to be—creating aligned growth, breakthrough clarity, and unapologetic success. Whether you’re a female entrepreneur building impact, a leader navigating change, a woman founder scaling your organization, or a business coach for women entrepreneurs, The Uncommon Way equips you to design a business and life that reflect your true vision. Leave behind imposter syndrome, overworking, and people pleasing. Embrace clarity, confidence, and unapologetic success.
Work with Jenna
The Clarity Accelerator Mastermind — If you want to be surrounded by other visionary entrepreneurs while rapidly aligning your business to the conditions and strategies that let you thrive and excel naturally, this intimate mastermind will stretch you into your next level. Schedule your call today here or visit this page to find out more.
Private Coaching — If you’re craving the highest level of support, strategy, and partnership to create all the freedom, impact, and success you’re designed for, this is the space for it. Schedule you call today here.
Social Media
Find Jenna on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theuncommonway/
Full Episode Transcript:
Do you secretly feel like if you aren't working constantly in your business, or at least stressing
constantly in your business, that everything will fall apart, and therefore you should
have been more responsible, then this episode is going to rock your world.
Welcome to The Uncommon Way, where high-achieving women entrepreneurs and leaders pitch the
rulebook and design success on their own terms.
I'm your host, Jenna Harrison, a top-ranked business coach sharing business growth strategies,
mindset mastery, and power boost to help you attract ideal clients, leverage your unique
genius, and scale with freedom.
Let's dive in.
Welcome back to The Uncommon Way.
I'm recording this from my new office in Spain.
So for those of you who've been around here for a while, you know that this project is
a year in the making.
It's years in the dreaming, but one year in the making because a year ago we were visiting
here in Mallorca and decided that we were going to make it our home, and now it is.
So I'll tell you about that more in a personal episode, tell you how it's going here, but
today I'm going to share something from a recent coaching call because it's something
that everyone needs to hear.
In this episode, you will gain visibility on the common thought loop that keeps you
overworking, over-stressing, and playing small in life.
You will vastly increase your personal power with just one shift in how you think.
And for those of you who are coaches or do any kind of coaching in life, which actually
everyone does, whether it's with your children or employees or bosses or sometimes friends
and family, you'll walk away with a powerful and easy technique to help create massive
epiphanies and new results.
Now I've toyed with the idea before of taking excerpts from coaching calls and placing them
here so that you can all hear it in action, and that is actually a very, very effective
way to really help people decide if you're the coach for them.
But I've always held back because I want my clients to feel like it's a fully private
area and they can be completely vulnerable and let it all hang out.
I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say, you know, maybe this isn't
a business coaching topic, but the thing on my mind is, and really there is no separation,
we don't separate life from business because everything affects everything.
So instead of playing recordings, what I'm going to do is just tell you the story and
paraphrase the story from my point of view.
So I was on a call with a client and was saying, well, I don't know if you've heard me talk
about my client, Allie, who had a really fantastic launch and throughout the whole process she
was out snowboarding and wasn't even looking at her results.
She'd always had a goal of reaching 500 members in her membership, but had been around 450
and just couldn't really break through that last level.
And in this launch, she ended up blowing past that goal.
I think it was 550 or something, 545.
And when my client heard that, she said, yeah, but you know what I think about when you say
that is, but what if the launch hadn't gone well?
What would that have meant?
Now I hear similar questions to this so often at each stage of business, right?
If I take my foot off the gas a little and then I lose sales, what would that mean?
But if clients get disappointed or they don't get the results, what does that mean?
But if I lose followers or my audience gets angry or I'm no longer respected, then what
does that say about me?
Or what does that say about this decision or this way I've been working in my business?
And as a coach, you always need to listen to what your client is saying, of course,
but you really need to listen to what they are not saying.
Because that's going to highlight the limitations of their beliefs and their understanding.
And when my client asked me that question, what would it mean if the launch had flopped
while the other client was out snowboarding?
The thing she's not saying, the deep underlying belief is, I believe it can only mean one
thing.
As if everyone around could look at this objectively and all agree.
Sally was irresponsible and out planning and it's her fault for being so silly because
obviously you can't have a successful launch that way.
Now this is why we need coaches to help us see what we're not seeing, because we will
never on our own see it.
This is why I will never be without a coach because I'll never be outside of my own brain.
As much as I try, damn it, I will never be outside of my own brain.
And even a brain surgeon can't do surgery on herself.
So here's what you can do if you notice that someone you're coaching or speaking to is
trapped in a fixed frame of meaning like this.
I had her walk through what other meanings Allie might have come up with if, you know,
that launch were less successful than anticipated.
Not everyone is able to just spit out other ways of thinking about a topic, right?
Sometimes you will be in that position where your brain has gone into gridlock and you
just cannot see beyond that one meaning that probably you were brought up to believe.
But in this case, she did.
She was like, well, if I were her, I guess I could think maybe my expectations of how
many people would buy were off.
So there was nothing actually wrong with the launch, it was just my expectations.
Or maybe there was something else wrong with the launch and it really had nothing to do
with the snowboarding.
So I said, okay, so it sounds like the question isn't what would it have meant?
But what might she have chosen to make it mean?
Knowing that she is the only one, ultimately, who can create that meaning for herself.
And we talked about that for a bit and then I gave her some possibilities that she hadn't
thought of yet because that type of thinking is new.
And when you're not used to thinking a certain way, your brain is not just going to come
up with it automatically.
After all, we are not taught to work wise or not harder.
Of course, hustle culture seems to be increasing.
It seems to be endemic.
I'm seeing it here and believe it or not, even in Spain and certain places.
But also, I was reading, I get this, I have this thing called the baby app, and I got
it when my son was a newborn, but they still send me emails every week or so talking about
my child's stage of development based on his age.
And there was one article that came out recently, maybe some of you moms, if you're on it, you
saw it too.
But it was talking about gifted children.
And saying how so often we want to be careful to say, oh, you're in this class because you're
so smart or because you're really gifted, because then they can feel like if they fail
that, oh, what if I'm not as smart as everyone thinks I am?
I actually experienced that exact thing for myself when I was growing up.
So the app suggested instead that you say to them, you're in this class because you
worked harder than everybody else.
Now I see where it's coming from, right?
It's coming from Carol Dweck's seminal work on fixed versus growth mindsets.
However, what we are also unconsciously doing is teaching our children that working harder
is the key to their success.
I of course want to teach my child that working wiser is the key to his success and choosing
his priorities and where he wants to focus his effort and which talents he wants to develop
and which ones he really doesn't.
But that's not how I was brought up.
I was brought up that hard work pays off, and you probably were too.
So some of the meanings that I suggested were, what if she had made it mean that she just
hadn't learned to do it yet in that way?
She hadn't learned to have a successful launch while she was also letting herself go to the
slopes each day for a little bit.
So what if there is no one right way to run your business?
I know this freaks out my clients who are doctors and lawyers because they are like,
no, there must be a textbook to tell me how to do this.
And there isn't so scary.
I was speaking with someone the other day, a lawyer, and she was saying, yes, it's like
I am building the plane while it's flying and not letting it crash.
I'm like, yep, you are doing it right.
So if there's no one right way to do things, then maybe doing things with less hustle is
just a skill that you need to master rather than an irresponsible way of doing business
or the lazy way or whatever word your inner critic wants to use.
Some people might feel a little prickly about creating a more leaned back business, but
what you may not realize is that if you can do this, you can do anything.
You've learned to mold reality to what you want it to be.
You've learned that what your mind tells you isn't necessarily true and that you have power
to create your uncommon way just with your mind.
If you understand how to manage your mind and you've learned the skill of creating
results, any result, because while I love having a coach to help me see what I'm not
seeing and help me with little light bulb realizations, oh, those are so fun, aren't
they?
The real reason I have a coach is because I want to be continually growing my power,
my personal power, and we forget that the only person who decides meaning is us.
We totally give our power away when we slip into fixed frames of meaning.
We give it back to our parents or our teacher or magazines or the news or whoever's criticizing
us or whatever part of our brain happens to be criticizing us rather than cultivating
our power.
So if this is you, if you know that you too would have heard Ali's story and then in
the next instant a part of you would have felt that danger signal and said, oh, that
sounds risky because what would it have meant if the launch had failed?
Then mental agility is the number one skill you need to learn because it affects literally
every decision you make and everything you do.
Imagine the difference between someone believing there's one specific meaning about snowboarding
during a launch and then having low numbers and someone who doesn't.
The first person probably goes into a shame spiral and then ends up creating even lower
numbers and a far less pleasing life.
The other person rolls up their sleeves and gets to work.
Think about how it affects person A's stress levels, how they then write copy, how they
then show up for their clients, how their personal relationships look, how their health
starts to look, what kinds of clients they call in when their underlying vibrations are
fear and scarcity.
Think about how that accumulates over time versus person B who's moving forward confidently
and calmly like a boss and the positive results that you can create in all of those same categories.
Someone worries about the one way they might mess up if they change rather than all the
ways they're currently messing up by not changing, by not thinking outside of the box.
But not you.
You obviously are called to do things differently or you wouldn't be here listening still.
So if you've ever thought about how you wish this podcast were two-way so that you could
have me reflecting back what you are not seeing and you could ask me questions directly
and get my mentorship directly and I could teach you to manage your mind and show up
more powerfully.
Oh, and of course, we'd also create some kick-ass messaging like we did for Ali and
her lunch that allowed her to go out and snowboard.
Then I invite you to be part of our world here at The Uncommon Way.
I'll teach you how to create the life you want and the business you want rather than
to keep repeating the patterns that currently exist.
Okay friends, in this episode you learned to upend fixed-frame meaning to create more
personal power and a far more exciting, self-directed life.
I hope you enjoyed it.
And now I am off to the beach.
Talk to you next week.