Ep 179: Why Smart, Capable Women Lose Power the Moment They Enter “Growth Mode”
Episode Summary
Why is it that right when you’re ready to tackle a new level of revenue, visibility or leadership, it can feel like you’re taking two steps back, instead of moving forward steadily?
If you’re a smart, capable woman stepping into a new level of business or leadership, this episode names the subtle power shift that often happens right when growth begins—and why it can leave you feeling unmoored, overly focused on outside opinions, and disconnected from your own authority. You’ll hear why this isn’t a confidence or strategy problem, how it quietly shows up as effort increases and results slow down, and what actually restores momentum when nothing seems “wrong” on the surface.
In this episode, you’ll gain:
Insight into why entering a new level of growth often feels disorienting for high-achieving women—and how to recognize the exact moment your power starts subtly shifting
Awareness of the early signs that you’re in “growth mode,” so you can course-correct before effort increases and momentum slows
A simple lens you can use immediately to reclaim authority, make decisions faster, and feel potent again—without adding more to your plate
Press play to understand why this phase of growth isn’t a failure—and how learning to wield your power differently is what allows expansion to feel expansive again, not heavier.
Who This Episode Is For
This episode is especially helpful for women entrepreneurs who:
Feel less confident or decisive while scaling their business to a new level
Notice overthinking, second-guessing, or delaying decisions during business growth
Have moved from multiple six figures toward seven figures and feel unexpected resistance
Find themselves consuming more strategy, courses, or AI tools instead of leading
Want to regain momentum and leadership clarity without overhauling their business model
Core Concepts in This Episode
Growth Mode (Why Business Feels Harder at the Next Level)
Growth mode is the phase entrepreneurs enter when expanding into a new revenue level or leadership identity. It often feels disorienting — not because something is wrong, but because capacity is increasing. Without awareness, this stage can trigger doubt, overlearning, and authority shifts.
Power Diffusion (The Hidden Cause of Slowed Momentum)
Power doesn’t disappear — it diffuses. Power diffusion happens when decision-making authority shifts outward to mentors, marketers, peers, or tools instead of remaining embodied. This leads to slower execution, more difficult decisions, and diluted brand clarity.
Authority Leakage (Why Strategy Stops Working)
Authority leakage occurs when you quietly downgrade your own leadership and treat external tools, trends, or validation as more powerful than your perspective. When authority leaks, even strong strategies underperform.
The Power Lens (A Leadership Recalibration Tool)
A way of interpreting business challenges as signals of where power is concentrated or leaking. Instead of asking, “What strategy do I need?” the power lens asks, “Where has authority shifted?” This reframes overconsumption, indecision, and comparison as structural power dynamics.
Consuming vs. Creating (A Scaling Warning Sign)
One of the earliest indicators of power diffusion is increased consumption of advice, content, and strategy — paired with decreased creation and leadership expression. Reversing this pattern restores entrepreneurial momentum.
Power Deficit vs. Strategy Problem
Most high-achieving women entrepreneurs do not have a strategy problem. They have a power deficit — a temporary fragmentation of decisiveness, internal authority, and energetic coherence. When power consolidates, strategy accelerates.
Key Takeaways
Insight into why entering a new level of growth often feels disorienting for high-achieving women—and how to recognize the exact moment your power starts subtly shifting
Awareness of the early signs that you’re in “growth mode,” so you can course-correct before effort increases and momentum slows
A simple lens you can use immediately to reclaim authority, make decisions faster, and feel potent again—without adding more to your plate
Full Episode Transcript:
In this episode, you'll discover why smart, capable women lose power the moment they enter growth mode.
Welcome to The Uncommon Way, where high-achieving women entrepreneurs and leaders pitch the rule book 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, welcome back to The Uncommon Way.
Today's episode is so near and dear to my heart. I wish that I had understood it when I was struggling with clarity for two decades, trying to figure out what I was really here to do and how to turn it into a business. And I wish I had understood it in this specific way I'm explaining it to you when I decided to scale from multiple six to seven figures in my business. But at least now, I get to save you a ton of time and angst if you're going through anything similar yourself.
In this episode, you will learn why entering a new level of growth often feels disorienting for high-achieving women and how to recognize the exact moment your powers start subtly shifting. You'll also learn the early signs that you're experiencing this growth mode phenomenon, so you can course correct if necessary before effort increases and results slow down. And you'll also get a simple lens you can use immediately to reclaim authority, make decisions faster, and feel potent again without adding more to your plate. There is a very specific moment in a high achiever's journey where everything starts to feel harder. Not because she's doing something wrong, but because she's entered growth mode. You see the distance between where you are and where you want to be, and the first thing we become aware of is a knowledge gap. Why haven't I gotten there yet? What's it going to take to get there? What do I have to do? So you start picking up more courses here and there, maybe watching more webinars than you used to.
You start really paying attention to what everyone else is doing in order to get where you want to be. You start delaying decisions to make sure that you're going to be doing everything right. And when you do take them, they just feel heavier. And ultimately, you subtly downgrade your own authority. Now, this isn't a failure of confidence or competence, right? It's a power shift, and it's incredibly common. Now, a beginner's mindset can be really useful when entering a new phase, right? There's definitely value in learning and observing, and trying new things on. The issues come when A, you're staying there too long, and B, you're believing that these things will make or break you. When no, those things are just tools. So there's a difference between being open and being unmoored, like completely adrift and just kind of lost. And you can feel that in your body. There's a saying I love, which is, it's the wizard, not the wand. The wand is a useful tool, but at no point does the wizard see the wand as all-powerful. If the wand gets lost or broken, the wizard improvises. He grabs a twig or he uses something else to channel his power. The power is still his. If you're feeling unmoored right now, a little out of it, not feeling as powerful as you know you can be, you're not alone. I have definitely been there. Every entrepreneur has been there. Some just don't talk about it. I remember the exact moment I decided to scale to seven figures. I was sitting in my office chair in Pennsylvania, staring at my screen, and I just had this flash of, it's time. What brought it on was something really simple, but kind of monumental for me in my business. A client had just done something successfully on her own, something I'd always needed to guide people through before. And I had worked on the training, the way I taught it, I'd refined this worksheet, and I really cared about making it something people could do for themselves. And when she sent it back completed, I remember thinking, she got it. And right then, seven figures didn't just feel possible, it felt right. Like, I can scale the work that I want to be doing in the world in a way that feels right to me. Up until then, I was very happy at multiple six figures. I had a steady income, amazingly cool clients, and I'd done a lot of work to detox from hustle and separate my identity from how hard I worked or how much I made. Life felt really good. I mean, yes, I was still trying to tweak this process I'm talking about, but if it didn't work out, if I just stayed a one-to-one coach with really, you know, an intimate mastermind, that was still an amazing business, and I was good there. But now, after that one switch, I was like, okay, it's go time, right? This was my signal. And energetically, everything lined up in my life, too. My neurodiverse son, who had been undiagnosed and unmedicated before then, he finally had a care regimen that made life feel manageable. And those of you who've been there, you can feel me on this one. Like, I had capacity now, right? And I also had the means, and I was ready. And then, something shifted. I entered growth mode. And I can see it clearly now, but at the time, I didn't have language for it. I started doing all the things that I'd overheard seven-figure business owners talk about. I didn't do it consciously; it just kind of happened. You know, I hired the ops manager, I focused on SOPs, I turned my attention to cold traffic. And over time, I became someone who didn't feel like me at all. I mean, I outsourced my certainty to bro marketers who told me I needed to completely change my positioning, change my podcast title, everything, because this is what works for cold traffic. I eroded my profit margin with all sorts of support. I abdicated leadership, and I let my ops manager assign tasks without any oversight. I mean, one day I looked at what a VA was actually doing, and realized she was listening to every single podcast episode, taking notes for show notes, and making sure the editing was perfect. And that is not what I had asked for. And definitely not what I wanted to be paying for. And that's when it clicked. This wasn't just inefficiency. It was actual leakage. Leakage of money, leakage of authority, and leakage of influence and power. Even my brand felt diluted. You know, podcast listenership declined, email opens dropped, the resonance just wasn't there anymore. But the worst part, by far, was the feeling that I didn't know what to do. Like I was needing something outside of me, you know, the market to change, or the guru to come, or the strategy to finally become clear in order to fix things for me. And that potency that I had had before when my business was humming along, and I knew I can create whatever I want. That power had become scattered, right? And nothing had gone wrong exactly. I was just moving into new ways of doing business. But what was a problem was that I had quietly handed my power to the idea that someone else must know better. And here's what I've realized. Power doesn't disappear. It gets diffused. What I did maintain through all of this, thankfully, was deep trust. I trusted that I was being guided. I trusted that abundance would continue. Even it didn't come through the most logical business path. I trusted that I would find my way through. And I could manage my mind. I was not spiraling in self-criticism. I had the emotional capacity to hold uncertainty and disappointment, you know, without collapsing or something, and regressing. And I was able to, in my daily life, to move back to joy and pleasure in this new life that we were creating here. Honestly, my clients were more freaked out than I was. They could see the numbers in the mastermind decline, and they would ask, how are you okay? But I was. I wasn't telling myself I was a bad coach or a bad business owner, and I knew clarity would come. And it did. What I understand now, and what I want to share with you on this podcast, is that when I started implementing these practices, everything shifted again. Clients came in, direction clarified. And the way that I'm scaling now, no one else told me to do it in this way. In fact, I've had very successful coaches, multiple seven-figure coaches that I've been working with over the past year, I've had them actively disagree with some of the choices that I'm taking now, and some of the positioning methods and messaging that I'm talking about. And that's fine, because they're not me, right? They don't have my business. My coaches are thought partners, right? They help me arrive at my conclusions. Sometimes the greatest clarity comes from hearing a perspective and knowing, no, that's not it, right? Or that's not quite it. Which brings me to something I'm seeing more and more, which is women outsourcing power to ChatGPT.
A friend recently told me I was going to launch this offer, but ChatGPT talked me out of it. And I remember thinking that would never happen to me. I would never let ChatGPT override something my body and intuition are telling me is right. Although, like I've just mentioned, I have been in places where I wasn't even checking in with my intuition. I wasn't even having this new idea to then get it shot down. I was just sourcing everything externally. And then there are the clients who won't move forward until ChatGPT confirms it's a good idea. We don't want that either. And this is what I'm leading up to. Most high achievers do not have a strategy problem. That's why no tool, including ChatGPT, can give you a fail-safe strategy. What they have is a power deficit. And power, as I'm talking about it, it shows up as decisiveness, as internal authority, as a sense of command, commanding your surroundings, commanding your business, and this kind of energetic coherence. When power is intact, when it's focused and utilized, strategy works faster. Any strategy works faster. And you naturally find the ones that are most resonant for you. But when your power is fragmented, no strategy sticks. So pay attention to this for yourself. Like, look for signals, early warning signs, if you will, that this is happening. It may be that you ask for opinions that you don't even actually want, but you're just getting the information from everyone around you. Or you delay decisions that you already know the answer to. Maybe you don't want to take that step, or that's going to be painful, or you still just don't quite trust that it's the right thing to do and you want that validation. Another one is that you feel busy, but you don't feel potent. Maybe you have this feeling of constantly just like spinning your wheels and getting nowhere. You can't actually gain traction and achieve momentum. You might notice yourself consuming more than you're creating. You might notice everyone else's language seeping into your own. And you might notice that you keep preparing instead of leading. The sooner you catch this kind of stuff, the less momentum you lose. Now before we wrap up, I want to introduce something I'll come back to often on this podcast. Let's call it the power lens. It's simply a way of looking at familiar business and leadership challenges, not as things to fix or optimize, but as signals about where power is either concentrated or quietly leaking. Once you start seeing your business through this lens, a lot of things that used to feel confusing become surprisingly clear. So instead of asking, what should I be doing differently? You know, what do I have to do? How can I figure this out? I just want you to notice what's happening with your authority. So let's take just one of the things I mentioned before, consuming more than you're creating. Now on the surface, you're just thinking, I need more information. But the power lens interpretation of that is that power has shifted outward, right? Authority is being borrowed instead of embodied. And you can restore that sense of command with one clean shift. Just ask yourself, well, what would I create this week ifI trusted that my perspective were already sufficient? And once you see it that way, the next step isn't about effort. It's about returning to a place where you command the situation. This is the kind of recalibration I'll be guiding you through again and again, because power needs maintenance and even amplification when you're expanding. So everything that I'll be sharing with you going forward, the tools, the practices, the way I think about business and leadership, it comes from what allowed me to reassemble my power as I talked about earlier. So in future episodes coming in 2026, we'll be talking about things like how to compress the time it's taking you to make decisions and building businesses that respond to you rather than you always jumping through hoops to try and keep up with your business or push your business along. We'll talk about commanding your time, commanding your focus, and the kind of leadership that magnetizes your audience and your clients and your team. If you take one thing from this episode, I'd love for it to be that when smart, capable women enter growth mode, it's natural to look outward for a moment. That doesn't necessarily mean you've lost confidence or lost your direction. You're just sourcing information to stimulate your own new ideas and perspective, and that's necessary to get you somewhere where you've never been before. But when that outward focus lingers or you undermine your own authority with someone or something else's, like chat GPT, your power naturally diffuses. Decisions slow down and everything requires more effort, and things that used to feel fluid start to feel really heavy.
That isn't a strategy problem. It's a power dynamic, and the work isn't to drive yourself harder, you know, and make yourself better or smarter or more disciplined. And power starts to return the moment you come back into commanding your decisions, your attention, your authority, even situations in your life. That's where real growth begins to feel like good again, you know, like expansive again. All right. Now, if you have not listened to last week's episode about the no offer offer I have going on for December only, I really recommend that you do that. I don't expect to be offering anything like this again, ever, as I've just described in this episode, I have big plans for 2026. So this is a really, really great time to move on this, if you actually want to move on this. And if you did listen to the last episode that you just forgot, this is your friendly reminder. I did receive one question, which is, can I set this up now, but use it in 2026? Because I've got so much going on with the holidays. And the answer is absolutely yes, but we do need to get it scheduled and decided right now. Because in 2026, I am hitting the ground running. I have so much prepared. I'm really excited to share with you. All right, my friend, that is it for today. Remember, training your mind to think uncommonly unlocks a whole new level of impact and possibility.
I'll talk to you next time.
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.
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