101. What It Actually Looks Like to Start Before You Feel Ready

What would you do if you stopped waiting to feel ready? So many of us think we need more clarity, more time, or more confidence before we begin. But that quiet waiting keeps us stuck, watching others move forward while we stay in place.

In this episode, I share what it actually looks like to start before you feel ready. I walk through how this shows up in real life, why your brain resists it, and what shifts when you stop trying to get everything lined up ahead of time. This is not about taking big, reckless action; it is about understanding how progress really happens and why waiting for readiness is slowing you down.

If you’ve been sitting on an idea, second-guessing your next move, or telling yourself you’ll start when things feel clearer, this conversation will help you see your situation differently. You’ll start to recognize where you might be holding yourself back and what it could look like to move forward from where you are right now.


If you’ve been waiting for confidence, clarity, or the “right time” to start a business, join my FREE webinar, You Don't Need to Feel Ready to Start. It's happening on Thursday, April 30th, 2026, at 3 pm ET. Click here to register.


What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

  • Why waiting to feel ready is keeping you from moving forward.

  • What it really means to start before you feel ready.

  • Why clarity and confidence come after you take action, not before.

  • The difference between thoughtful action and waiting too long.

  • What starting looks like in real life, even when things feel uncertain.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

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  • Ready for clarity and a simple action plan to get your business started? Schedule a free 1-hour consultation with me here

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Full Episode Transcript:

Most moms I talk to don't feel ready to start a business. They think they need to feel confident and clear before they take action. Like once they know exactly what they're doing, then they'll begin. But what I've seen over and over again is that's just not how it actually works. So in this episode, I want to show you what does work and what starting before you feel ready actually looks like in real life.

Welcome to How to Quit Your Job, the podcast for moms ready to ditch the nine-to-five and build a life and business they love. I’m your host, Jenna Rykiel. Let’s go.

Hi mom friends. This is episode 101 of the How to Quit Your Job podcast. If you've been thinking about starting a business, but you keep feeling like you need just a little bit more before you begin, whether that's more clarity, more confidence, more experience, more certainty or reassurance, you are very much not alone. I work with so many moms who have been incredibly successful in their nine-to-five careers and still feel completely unready to start something of their own.

Because they're moving from a world where there was structure and direction into one where there are just so many unknowns. And what I see over and over again is this belief that once I feel ready, then I'll actually start. But what I've learned from my own experience and from working with all of my clients is that we've actually been taught readiness all wrong. We think readiness is aligned and looks like confidence and clarity and certainty. But really, those are the things that get built after you start. They get built during the process of taking action, not before.

Now, if you've been here for a while, listening to this podcast, this idea, I can only assume for you is not brand new. I've talked about this a lot on this podcast. But what I realized is I've talked about the mindsets, the fears, the hidden challenges. I've talked about the brain, and I haven't actually shown you what this looks like in real life.

What it looks like to start and take action when you don't feel ready. What it looks like when it's messy and uncomfortable. What it looks like when you're truly figuring it out as you go. I talk about the importance of it, but I don't really, or I haven't actually shown you what that looks like with examples. And once you actually see that, it becomes so much easier to take a step forward, even today, even right now.

So I want to share a few real life examples from myself and my clients because I think this is where this really starts to click. Because starting before you feel ready, it doesn't happen all at once. It doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel triumphant. It happens in small moments. It happens even though we feel uncomfortable, and sometimes it happens with us without us even knowing it. But it happens in moments. And the first moment of this thing happening, this starting before you feel ready, is usually the hardest one.

When I first started my business, I knew I wanted to be a coach. Now, I didn't know that my entire life. I was lost in my career, unsure what I was doing, unsure how it all fit together. I had a background in mental health and was in a corporation and that felt disconnected and messy.

But after learning about coaching, it felt like such a natural fit for me. Right? It was really this combination of my background in mental health and counseling and then my experience in corporate leadership where I was already supporting and developing people. I was already coaching people, so I knew coaching was a good fit for me.

But even with that, I didn't feel ready to be a coach. I had so much self doubt. I had never started a business before. I didn't know the first thing about getting clients. I didn't know how to make money outside of corporate. And I kept thinking, I just need a little bit more before I get started. More knowledge, more credentials, more preparation. That's actually why I went back and then got my business degree. I got an MBA. It's also why I got a second coaching certification. And looking back now, those weren't bad things, but they weren't what was going to make me feel ready.

Because even after those things, even after graduating from my MBA, even after the second coaching certification, I still didn't feel ready. I remember feeling so overwhelmed because I had this desire to help women in a meaningful way, but I had no clarity beyond that. I had no niche. I had no plan. I had no idea what I was actually doing. But I did want to start. I knew that much. I wanted to start. I wanted to leave the traditional nine-to-five.

And so there were two things that I did before I felt ready that honestly felt terrifying and awkward at the time, but ended up being huge turning points and momentum for me. The first one was this really small moment. I was out on a walk one day and I saw a sign outside of a building that said volunteers wanted, and it was outside of a single parent housing coalition. I had never noticed this building before, this organization before.

And I had been wanting to get more involved in the community. So I went home, I looked it up, and I saw they were actually looking for people to teach life skills classes. And I remember thinking, coaching is the best form of life skills. So I decided to send an email. Just one email to the director of volunteering. And in that email, I offered to donate free coaching to the residents.

And I remember sitting there writing that email feeling like I was going to throw up. I both didn't want them to say no, but I also didn't want them to say yes, because if they said yes, then I would have to figure this out. And I felt like a complete imposter. I felt like I was actually lying to them as I was reaching out. Like they were going to find out that I wasn't a real coach yet. But I still, against all of my resistance and all of the thoughts I had to not send the email, I still sent it. I sent it before I really felt ready.

And when they responded and said yes, my heart dropped. I remember thinking, oh my gosh, they believed me. Now I have to actually do this. And they asked me to create a flyer. I had never made a flyer before. It was terrible, truly terrible. But that was the first step, not because I felt ready, but because I took one small action. I sent one email after I had an idea. I sent an email that felt really uncomfortable, really awkward, really terrifying, and I did it anyway.

And that one step led to over 60 hours of coaching. It didn't lead to any money, right? I was donating hours, but it led to confidence, it led to experience, it led to me actually understanding the value of what I could offer firsthand. And it gave me my first glimpse of, huh, maybe this could actually work. And that's part of what I want you to see here. Starting doesn't look like having it all figured out or feeling really confident or feeling really good about what we're doing. It looks like one small step that feels way bigger than it should.

Let me give you another example because I see this with myself in taking action, but I also see this all the time with my clients. I was working with a mom who had so much talent. She had ideas, she had skills, she had experience, but she didn't feel ready to commit to starting a business. She kept saying, I need to figure it out first. I need to have an offer. I need to have clarity. I need to be clear on how I talk to people and what I talk about.

And thankfully, she said yes to coaching so we could actually work through this. But every week in our sessions, we would come back to the same conversation. She wanted certainty before she took action. And finally, I challenged her to do something really simple. I said, what if you just text a few people in your network, a few of your friends, safe friends who support you no matter what?

And not a full offer, not a big announcement, but just a few messages to people in your life about what you're thinking about doing. And she resisted even that for a while, but then she did it.

And those few texts changed everything. Her friends were super excited about her ideas. They immediately thought of people who needed her help. She didn't even have an offer yet. And people were already interested in sending people her way for what she was potentially going to offer. And what really shifted wasn't just the response, it was her energy. Because once she got some of this positive feedback, she started having more conversations. She brought it up casually with a neighbor on a walk, and then that neighbor needed her services.

And all of these things, all of these opportunities in her business that she felt like didn't exist yet, all of these opportunities came from one small step that she took before she felt ready, that she took before she had everything figured out. And this is what happens when you take action before you feel ready. You don't suddenly get clarity, but you do get momentum.

And I would argue too that you get clarity through the process of taking action. It's not immediate. It doesn't just all of a sudden happen, but in every conversation that she had, she got clearer and clearer about what she wanted to do and how she wanted to talk about it. It gave her so much momentum.

The next example is really about this piece of business that I think we don't talk about enough, but it's the what happens after you start. Because starting before you feel ready does not mean that everything clicks into place immediately. It actually means things are messy for a while. And there's this pattern that happens where we keep going in and out of wanting clarity in a certain spot in our business and needing it to be messy before we find the clarity, before we find the momentum.

And what I mean by that is we start a business and then there's different things within the business, whether that's marketing or selling or product development or developing multiple offers. There's always new things coming up in our business after we start. So there's the hurdle of starting before we feel ready, but then there's all the mini starts that need to happen within the business before we feel ready.

And a good example of this in my own business is webinars. Now, webinars are a normal part of what I do now. But when I first started, I felt completely unready. I didn't know how to plan one. I didn't know how to promote one. I didn't know how to get people in the room. I didn't even feel like I had anything really valuable to say. And I remember thinking about all the pieces, like the tech and the emails and the sign up and feeling so overwhelmed.

But instead of waiting until I felt ready, because honestly thinking back, like there was never ever going to be a moment where I felt ready to lead a webinar and teach and support people in a group setting. But instead of waiting, I took a small step. I reached out to a company that hosted webinars and I asked if they needed speakers. It was a company like I had attended a few of their webinars. I saw entrepreneurs leading those webinars and I just reached out and I asked if they needed speakers.

And the email felt so awkward. I actually didn't even expect a response, but they said yes. And I did the webinar. And honestly, it was not great. It was messy. It was kind of boring. No one interacted. I felt like I was just talking to myself. No one even came on camera. And I remember finishing it and thinking, ah, that did not work. I didn't even tell people in the webinar or at the end of the webinar how they could work with me or learn more about me.

There was a part of me that thought, maybe this just isn't for me. But then they invited me back, this company. and I did another webinar, and it got better. And even though I didn't get clients from any of those first webinars, I got something more important. I got experience, I got clarity, I got confidence. I learned what worked and what didn't. And that's what allowed me to eventually create my own webinars and actually feel grounded in doing them.

And I also want to share too, because this just came up in a conversation with someone this week, but it was those webinars that actually led to this podcast. And you never quite know how something is working in the background. But when I did those webinars, I had so many people in the room reach out to me not about working with me, but reach out to me about my voice. And they said that I should do ASMR videos or I'm not sure if I'm getting that acronym right, but they said I had a soothing voice and they liked listening to me.

So then I thought in my mind, there's two main reasons why people don't start a podcast. They think they won't be consistent with it and maybe don't have enough to say or share. That's the first reason that most people don't do it. The second reason is that people don't like the sound of their voice. And I'm a normal human being, so I also did not like the sound of my voice.

And it was interesting because these people reaching out to me, strangers that I didn't know, commenting on my voice made me realize that, oh, well maybe I could start a podcast because I don't like my voice, but it sounds like there's feedback that other people do.

So it's just a funny reflection of I did these webinars. On the surface, they didn't work, right? They didn't lead to clients. They didn't feel good. I didn't feel ready to do them. And yet, now I can look back in hindsight and see how important they were to my entire business trajectory. But the other common theme of this is that starting before you feel ready does not mean it goes perfectly. Actually, the exact opposite. It means it goes so imperfectly and messy, but it also means you are able to learn and adjust and grow as you go.

If we zoom out, this is what starting before you feel ready actually looks like. It looks like taking one step, one small step that feels terrifying. It looks like doing things before you feel qualified, offering services before you really know the results that people will get. You need to start somewhere. It looks like messy action, imperfect action that doesn't go as planned and that requires you to pivot and change and do things differently the next time. And it looks like building confidence because you keep going.

So if you're listening to this and you're realizing that maybe this is me, maybe I am ready even though it doesn't feel like it. Maybe you're thinking, I don't actually need more time or more credentials or more clarity to start. Maybe I just need to be willing to take that first step, even if it feels messy, even if it feels uncertain.

I want to invite you to an upcoming webinar that I have at the end of this month. It's completely free, and it's called You Don't Need to Feel Ready to Start. Inside that webinar, we're going to go deeper into all of these concepts.

So if all of these examples feel like they've opened up Pandora's box, they've unlocked something for you, we're going to continue looking at them. We're going to look at what's actually keeping you in that waiting place, like what's getting in the way of you feeling ready to start. We're going to talk about why readiness feels so important even when it's not required, how we've been conditioned, especially as women, especially as moms. And we're going to talk about how to start taking aligned steps in a way that feels doable for you.

Aligned steps doesn't mean that you go from no business to hosting a webinar. It doesn't mean that you go from no business to starting a YouTube channel where you're videoing yourself and marketing yourself through videos. It's really aligned steps that feel doable to you in this moment. As a mom who's maybe working full-time, as somebody who has a lot on their plate, we're going to talk about really tangible, actionable steps that are within your grasp.

Because what I found is once you really understand this piece and you start to see how it applies to your own life, like where are the places that you are waiting, but you're actually more ready than you think, it starts to open everything up. You start taking action. You stop overthinking and spinning in your head. You stop waiting for this magical perfect time and you start creating momentum in a way that feels so good. There's so much energy that can be found in taking action. When we're stagnant, when we're not taking action, when we're stuck, that doesn't feel good.

So if you know you've been in that space of waiting and overthinking, or if you feel like you just need a little bit more before you begin, this webinar is going to be for you. So you can go to the show notes, jenna.coach/101 to sign up, or you can go to mom.jenna.coach/ready.

And I would love to see you there to take this information deeper, for us to be able to talk even more honestly about what you're waiting for and how to feel confident taking action before you actually feel ready. Because remember, you don't need to feel ready to start. You just need to be willing to take the first step, and then I promise the next one will reveal itself. And you will start blowing your own mind with what you're capable of.

All right, mom friends, take care of yourself this week. See you next week.

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. If you want to learn more about how I can help you stop making excuses and start making moves, head on over to www.jenna.coach. I’ll see you next week.

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