86. How to Break Through Your Own Glass Ceiling
Have you ever noticed that just when things start going really well, something suddenly falls apart? A fight starts, motivation disappears, an opportunity gets turned down, or life feels harder for no obvious reason. In this episode, I’m talking about why that happens and how it’s often not a coincidence or a mindset failure, but a self-protective pattern that kicks in when success starts to exceed what feels familiar.
I introduce a powerful concept from Gay Hendricks’ The Big Leap that explains how we unconsciously upper limit ourselves. When we begin experiencing more success, ease, money, or joy than we subconsciously believe we deserve, our nervous system looks for ways to bring us back to what feels safe. That can look like self-sabotage, creating unnecessary drama, turning down aligned opportunities, or knocking ourselves down just as things start to expand.
In this episode, I share personal examples and real client stories to help you recognize where upper limits might be showing up in your business, relationships, or daily life. You’ll learn how to spot these patterns in real time, why awareness alone can be transformative, and how to stay with growth instead of retreating from it. If you’re ready to break through your own glass ceilings and allow yourself to receive more of what you actually want, this conversation will change how you see success.
Ready for clarity and a simple action plan to get your business started? Schedule a free 1-hour consultation with me here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
What upper limit problems are and how they show up as self-sabotage in your daily life.
Why we unconsciously create obstacles when experiencing financial success or abundance.
How to recognize upper limiting behaviors in real-time (with specific examples from business and relationships).
The connection between your past experiences and the glass ceilings you've created for yourself.
Practical strategies to break through your own upper limits: naming it, sitting with discomfort, and repairing patterns.
How expanding your capacity to receive goodness is the key to breaking through limitations.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by Gay Hendricks
Episodes Related to Breaking Through Your Glass Ceiling:
62. Why You Avoid Setting Big Goals (& How to Stop Playing It Safe)
81. From Employee to Entrepreneur: Overcome the Corporate Habits Holding You Back
Full Episode Transcript:
I want this to be the year that you break through your own glass ceilings. I want this to be the year you have more success and joy and ease and fulfillment and all the things than any year before. And unfortunately, strategy won't override an upper limit problem. Hard work won't override it, motivation won't override it, but expanding your capacity to let the goodness in absolutely will.
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. Happy New Year. This is my first episode of 2026, episode 86 of the podcast. We're going to break 100 this year. How exciting. The start of the year has so much energy and momentum baked into it, and I just want to say, let's ride that momentum throughout the entire year and create real change in our day-to-day. Let's start building the thing that will bring meaning and fulfillment into our careers and step into being the parent and human we want to be. This is the year.
Today, I want to talk about a concept that comes from a book that has quickly become one of my favorite books to gift clients. It's a book a dear friend and old coworker gave me when I was officially leaving corporate and going all in on my business. A shout-out to Dr. Sai. And honestly, I'm a little embarrassed to say this, but I left corporate years ago and only recently read this book. And now that I have, I'm kicking myself because it was just so good. I really wish I would have had these mindset shifts way earlier in my entrepreneurial journey. But also, I mean, I think I read it at exactly the time and place when I was ready to see it and hear it and receive it.
What I want to talk about today is something I know every single person listening has experienced. This isn't just about business. This is about being human. And it has to do with how we limit ourselves, how we hold ourselves back from more money, more joy, more love, more success, even when those things are available to us.
The book that I'm talking about is called The Big Leap, and it's by a man named Gay Hendricks. And it's all about how we upper limit ourselves or hold ourselves back from growing and expanding. And usually, we do it unintentionally, so we don't even know that it's happening. We self-sabotage when we start to experience a level of money or ease or love or success that's greater than what we subconsciously believe we deserve.
At some point in our lives, we all developed a kind of internal set point, how good things are allowed to be for each of us. And when life starts to exceed that set point, our nervous system freaks out, and our brain freaks out. Let's be honest, it's always freaking out. So we do something, oftentimes completely unrelated to the task at hand or the issue at hand, but we do it to knock ourselves back to what feels familiar. And I'll give a ton of examples of this so you can really see how this might be showing up in your life. But this is the new glass ceiling, the one that we create for ourselves.
One example of these upper limit stories. So I didn't realize I had a money upper limit for a long time. I had created my own limit and glass ceiling that I thought I deserved money-wise. When I was in grad school, I was in a Master's in Counseling program, and my plan was to become a counselor, a mental health counselor. And at the time, the average salary was about $40,000. Somewhere along the way, I mentally decided, that's just my lot in life. I'll never make more than $40,000. And it didn't even feel negative. I'm somebody who lived simply, I saved money, I basically saved every single penny I earned. I didn't indulge much. I didn't shop. So $40,000 a year for salary felt fine to me.
And then my career took a turn, and I ended up in corporate. And that ceiling, that $40,000 ceiling, was broken pretty quickly. My first job was $50,000 base salary. And that grew with promotions and raises. And by the time I left corporate, I was easily making six figures. So logically, you'd think, okay, she broke the money limit, there's no money limits here. But when I started my business, that's when these limits really reared their ugly head. So for the first few years of my business, I made $40,000 like clockwork. Once I saw it and realized it and connected the dots, it was almost laughable. Not $30,000, not $50,000. The first few years, every year was $40,000. My old identity and the limits were still running the show. I worked through this with my coach before I ever read The Big Leap, which was such an abundant breakthrough. There's nothing like breaking through a financial glass ceiling that you unintentionally set for yourself.
But what really surprised me after reading the book recently was how this upper limit still shows up in very sneaky ways. I realized that I find ways to knock myself down a peg when me or my family are experiencing financial success. So whenever my husband and I talk about money, and I see this pattern within myself now. So whenever we talk about money, and we do monthly financial check-ins, so it's pretty often that we're talking pretty deeply about the numbers and about money.
But when things are going really well, like we're exceeding our goals, we're able to buy things, we are able to take trips, whatever that means, like when the conversation is abundant, we almost always get into an argument that night. And it's rarely even ever about money, the argument itself. It's like when money feels abundant, I knock us down a peg by picking a fight about something totally unrelated, the most stupid things. And I know I don't even have to explain, you know what I mean. But the pattern is uncanny. And that I realized is myself upper limiting.
Like so many things, awareness is truly the first step of this entire concept. So after reading this book, my husband and I started calling these moments and patterns out in real-time. Just knowing the concept exists has us looking at our life differently, not with blame, but with responsibility. So we started seeing that in some ways, we are unknowingly creating obstacles. And that means we can also stop creating them, which is really empowering.
Now, when I pick a weird trivial fight after our financial check-ins, I'm able to go to him after the realization and say, hey, remember that upper limit thing? I guess when we talked about finances earlier, it felt like it was expanding my upper limit, and that argument was an upper limit thing. I have literally gone up to him and told him that now since we understand this concept and we've read the book. And you don't necessarily have to read the book to grasp this concept and to notice it in your life. Use these examples, use this podcast, use this conversation as a way to step into that awareness.
So whether we see it in the moment to be able to prevent fights or self-sabotage or whatever our patterns are, or if it allows us to remedy and repair or take action in ways that benefit us after the fact, looking out for these habits and patterns is game-changing. I see upper limiting behaviors constantly with my clients, and that's part of the reason that I know it's happening to everyone who's listening in both obvious and indirect ways.
I had a client starting an interior design business. She had a few smaller virtual clients, and she's a mom of four, basically a single mom during the week. So very limited time. And her and I brainstormed and landed on this idea that if she created one in-person client a month, it would be a big time investment, but it would cover her financial goal each month. You know, we envisioned it together, even down to her imagining herself bringing the client their favorite coffee and making it this incredible experience for the client. It was such a fun conversation, so energizing. And she said if I had just one of these a month, I'd be completely set.
So a few weeks later, she comes to our weekly coaching session and says, Jenna, I got a DM from someone an hour away asking if I could do an in-person service. It would be a big project. And immediately, without even responding, me responding, she starts listing all the reasons that it wouldn't work. And I had to stop her and say, what do you mean? This is exactly what we talked about. Her instinct was to shut it down, to run from the exact thing she said she wanted. And that is upper limiting.
This exact same thing happened with a client who does operations for small businesses. So her and I talked about transitioning her rates from hourly to packages because it's impossible to scale with hourly rates. And that would allow her to hire more people, create better results for her clients. And so, you know, we had this whole brainstorming and workshop session on shifting her business so that she could help clients launch, she could have packages for them to create the results rather than her doing hourly work.
And then a client she had that she had been working with wanted to launch a really big project, like year-long massive launch. Basically an entire new business, and it would need to be at least 40 hours a week of operational planning and execution. And without skipping a beat, she came to the coaching session wanting thought partnership on how to politely decline without ruining the client relationship. She said, I just don't have time to do that. And I had a mini heart attack. I said, what are you doing? This is the best opportunity to start scaling your business and create a proposal that moves into packages, a full launch package. Her brain felt so uncomfortable with the prospect of her business growing into exactly what we had envisioned that she immediately thought to say no to the opportunity.
And now listen, of course, saying yes to things like this, there are problems that need to be solved once we say yes to this type of expansion. But they are much better problems for us to solve. It's much more fun to solve the problem of strategies to create more value for clients in a limited amount of time versus the problem of just finding clients and figuring out if people are even interested. We solve that problem too, of course. But when we have an opportunity to make more money, to grow our business, to step into a more strategic role and to step into a more strategic role and hire out the actual like execution pieces, we have to be aware of our upper limiting behaviors that are trying to self-sabotage those opportunities.
The other really interesting thing about this example is along with our conversation about changing the business, we were also talking about her role changing. So at the time, she was doing both strategy and execution. So she would create an entire strategy around marketing plans, but then she'd actually execute that marketing plan. And she really wanted to move into just the strategy. That was the piece that she really loved, and she wanted to hire a team of VAs to do the execution. And so this wasn't even just about the identity and structure of the business. This was her identity and her stepping into this bigger version of herself. And it was scary, and her brain immediately wanted to tell her no. Her brain immediately wanted to stop the expansion and not allow that to happen. And I'm so glad that we were able to workshop it together and make sure that she not only said yes to that opportunity and created the proposal, but now we can solve this problem of how she shifts her business into something bigger.
And once you see these patterns in your life, you start noticing them everywhere. There was another personal example where my husband had recommitted to the time management process that I actually teach my clients. And so on days that he uses it, he's on fire. And one day he was texting me all day about how productive he was, how good he felt, how much he had done. And that same day, he had to be home at 3:30 for childcare, something he's never late for. He's a man who's often not on time for things, but he's never late when it comes to childcare and his kids. And that day, he was 15 minutes late. And later that night, it was so clear that he had such a great day that somewhere unconsciously, he sabotaged it. He knocked himself down a peg.
I see this in myself too, especially with my kids. If I have one of those amazing work days, like great calls, new clients, like I'm feeling inspired, that evening without fail, something will happen mostly with my oldest son, Adley. He'll have a meltdown, or say or do something mean. And I used to see it as unrelated to me, but now I for sure see that it's usually something I created to step back into the comfort after too many wins in one day. Simple things that expand like me rushing him or losing patience too quickly or even sometimes like instigating things that I know he's sensitive to. It's like when life feels really good, we subconsciously create moments to remind ourselves that it's hard. And once you see it, I promise you, you can't unsee it.
So what do we do with this information? This isn't about fixing yourself necessarily, but it is about expanding your capacity to stay with good things, to allow yourself to celebrate, to allow yourself to feel all the goodness, all the joy, all the success, allow it. When you notice yourself pulling back and sabotaging and creating chaos or finding all the reasons that something won't work, I want you to ask yourself, is this an upper limit problem?
So whenever something's going wrong in life, just allow that to be a first line of defense to ask yourself, could this maybe be an upper limit problem? And from there, I want you, no matter what the answer is, I want you to take responsibility without shame and name it. Name it to tame it, they said. Just like my husband and I do now, call it out. Say to yourself, this feels like an upper limit pattern. This feels like a way that I'm sabotaging myself or I'm creating drama or I'm creating chaos so that I can feel comfortable in the discomfort. I am holding myself back from something, some sort of expansion. Just name it.
Also, if you're still in the moment of the good thing happening, another really great breakthrough is just to allow yourself to feel it. Okay, practicing staying with the feeling instead of running. So many of us feel uncomfortable in the midst of successful moments. We see it all the time when we get a compliment and we immediately want to belittle it instead of just receiving it. We always want to invalidate something or we always want to have a comment about, you know, if somebody's like, oh, I love your hat. We're like, oh, I got it at a thrift shop, or it's my sister's, I'm just borrowing it. Like we can't just receive the compliment. Right? We do this constantly. So similar to learning to just kind of like receive good news and receive good feelings, there's so much growth with just allowing the feeling of joy or success and also the discomfort to be there, okay, and just sit with it.
If you're in a situation where the moment has passed and you're retrospectively noticing that it was a way that you're self-sabotaging or you're noticing a pattern, repair it. Okay, whether that's calling it what it is with your partner, rethinking your decision to say no to a client, or creating a plan to bust through that upper limit the next day, whatever it is, make sure that you do your due diligence and figure out how you can shift, and there's still always still time to create more abundance.
I want this to be the year that you break through your own glass ceilings. I want this to be the year you have more success and joy and ease and fulfillment and all the things than any year before. And unfortunately, strategy won't override an upper limit problem. Hard work won't override it, motivation won't override it, but expanding your capacity to let the goodness in absolutely will. Your ability to receive, to let things be good, to stop knocking yourself back down, to stop self-sabotaging, all those things we are doing without noticing. I want you to notice them, I want you to resist them, I want you to stop doing them as much as possible.
So as you head into the new year, I want you to keep asking yourself, where am I limiting myself? Where do I have upper limits? What glass ceilings have I created? And maybe even exploring the discomfort. Why does that glass ceiling exist? What is it about $40,000 that keeps me stuck? And when I looked into it and explored it and tied it back to my experience in grad school, it made so much sense. So explore those upper limits. I want you to ask yourself what actions can I take today or this week to stop getting in my own way? Try to catch those blind spots, the moments where your brain is eager to keep you safe, but it's also keeping you small. And I promise minimizing the damage that we do to ourselves in moments where we feel our upper limit is being challenged can add so much joy and success to our lives. And you don't need a business or a job transition to do that. You can start making those changes right now so that this year has fewer arguments, more revenue, less tantrums, more abundance, all the things. That's a shift you can make right now because I know that it's happening in unintentional ways to everybody who's listening.
So let's make this year so magical. Not just because you started the business and you're doing the thing, but because we stopped sabotaging ourselves and making life harder than it had to be.
If you're having trouble recognizing moments in your life that could be upper limit patterns, trust me, they are there. You are human. So get a second unbiased opinion on it. That could be really eye-opening. I offer a free one-hour consultation to podcast listeners. So you can go to mom.jenna.coach/strategy or check out the show notes, jenna.coach/86 for a link to schedule. And we will talk about making this year the year you create change. And make sure that you aren't limiting yourself along the way.
Click the follow button so that you never miss an episode. I release one every Wednesday morning, and these topics and action items will absolutely move you forward this year. Change is possible, and it's happening this year. Okay? You've got this, Mom friends. I will 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.
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. Happy New Year. This is my first episode of 2026, episode 86 of the podcast. We're going to break 100 this year. How exciting. The start of the year has so much energy and momentum baked into it, and I just want to say, let's ride that momentum throughout the entire year and create real change in our day-to-day. Let's start building the thing that will bring meaning and fulfillment into our careers and step into being the parent and human we want to be. This is the year.
Today, I want to talk about a concept that comes from a book that has quickly become one of my favorite books to gift clients. It's a book a dear friend and old coworker gave me when I was officially leaving corporate and going all in on my business. A shout-out to Dr. Sai. And honestly, I'm a little embarrassed to say this, but I left corporate years ago and only recently read this book. And now that I have, I'm kicking myself because it was just so good. I really wish I would have had these mindset shifts way earlier in my entrepreneurial journey. But also, I mean, I think I read it at exactly the time and place when I was ready to see it and hear it and receive it.
What I want to talk about today is something I know every single person listening has experienced. This isn't just about business. This is about being human. And it has to do with how we limit ourselves, how we hold ourselves back from more money, more joy, more love, more success, even when those things are available to us.
The book that I'm talking about is called The Big Leap, and it's by a man named Gay Hendricks. And it's all about how we upper limit ourselves or hold ourselves back from growing and expanding. And usually, we do it unintentionally, so we don't even know that it's happening. We self-sabotage when we start to experience a level of money or ease or love or success that's greater than what we subconsciously believe we deserve.
At some point in our lives, we all developed a kind of internal set point, how good things are allowed to be for each of us. And when life starts to exceed that set point, our nervous system freaks out, and our brain freaks out. Let's be honest, it's always freaking out. So we do something, oftentimes completely unrelated to the task at hand or the issue at hand, but we do it to knock ourselves back to what feels familiar. And I'll give a ton of examples of this so you can really see how this might be showing up in your life. But this is the new glass ceiling, the one that we create for ourselves.
One example of these upper limit stories. So I didn't realize I had a money upper limit for a long time. I had created my own limit and glass ceiling that I thought I deserved money-wise. When I was in grad school, I was in a Master's in Counseling program, and my plan was to become a counselor, a mental health counselor. And at the time, the average salary was about $40,000. Somewhere along the way, I mentally decided, that's just my lot in life. I'll never make more than $40,000. And it didn't even feel negative. I'm somebody who lived simply, I saved money, I basically saved every single penny I earned. I didn't indulge much. I didn't shop. So $40,000 a year for salary felt fine to me.
And then my career took a turn, and I ended up in corporate. And that ceiling, that $40,000 ceiling, was broken pretty quickly. My first job was $50,000 base salary. And that grew with promotions and raises. And by the time I left corporate, I was easily making six figures. So logically, you'd think, okay, she broke the money limit, there's no money limits here. But when I started my business, that's when these limits really reared their ugly head. So for the first few years of my business, I made $40,000 like clockwork. Once I saw it and realized it and connected the dots, it was almost laughable. Not $30,000, not $50,000. The first few years, every year was $40,000. My old identity and the limits were still running the show. I worked through this with my coach before I ever read The Big Leap, which was such an abundant breakthrough. There's nothing like breaking through a financial glass ceiling that you unintentionally set for yourself.
But what really surprised me after reading the book recently was how this upper limit still shows up in very sneaky ways. I realized that I find ways to knock myself down a peg when me or my family are experiencing financial success. So whenever my husband and I talk about money, and I see this pattern within myself now. So whenever we talk about money, and we do monthly financial check-ins, so it's pretty often that we're talking pretty deeply about the numbers and about money.
But when things are going really well, like we're exceeding our goals, we're able to buy things, we are able to take trips, whatever that means, like when the conversation is abundant, we almost always get into an argument that night. And it's rarely even ever about money, the argument itself. It's like when money feels abundant, I knock us down a peg by picking a fight about something totally unrelated, the most stupid things. And I know I don't even have to explain, you know what I mean. But the pattern is uncanny. And that I realized is myself upper limiting.
Like so many things, awareness is truly the first step of this entire concept. So after reading this book, my husband and I started calling these moments and patterns out in real-time. Just knowing the concept exists has us looking at our life differently, not with blame, but with responsibility. So we started seeing that in some ways, we are unknowingly creating obstacles. And that means we can also stop creating them, which is really empowering.
Now, when I pick a weird trivial fight after our financial check-ins, I'm able to go to him after the realization and say, hey, remember that upper limit thing? I guess when we talked about finances earlier, it felt like it was expanding my upper limit, and that argument was an upper limit thing. I have literally gone up to him and told him that now since we understand this concept and we've read the book. And you don't necessarily have to read the book to grasp this concept and to notice it in your life. Use these examples, use this podcast, use this conversation as a way to step into that awareness.
So whether we see it in the moment to be able to prevent fights or self-sabotage or whatever our patterns are, or if it allows us to remedy and repair or take action in ways that benefit us after the fact, looking out for these habits and patterns is game-changing. I see upper limiting behaviors constantly with my clients, and that's part of the reason that I know it's happening to everyone who's listening in both obvious and indirect ways.
I had a client starting an interior design business. She had a few smaller virtual clients, and she's a mom of four, basically a single mom during the week. So very limited time. And her and I brainstormed and landed on this idea that if she created one in-person client a month, it would be a big time investment, but it would cover her financial goal each month. You know, we envisioned it together, even down to her imagining herself bringing the client their favorite coffee and making it this incredible experience for the client. It was such a fun conversation, so energizing. And she said if I had just one of these a month, I'd be completely set.
So a few weeks later, she comes to our weekly coaching session and says, Jenna, I got a DM from someone an hour away asking if I could do an in-person service. It would be a big project. And immediately, without even responding, me responding, she starts listing all the reasons that it wouldn't work. And I had to stop her and say, what do you mean? This is exactly what we talked about. Her instinct was to shut it down, to run from the exact thing she said she wanted. And that is upper limiting.
This exact same thing happened with a client who does operations for small businesses. So her and I talked about transitioning her rates from hourly to packages because it's impossible to scale with hourly rates. And that would allow her to hire more people, create better results for her clients. And so, you know, we had this whole brainstorming and workshop session on shifting her business so that she could help clients launch, she could have packages for them to create the results rather than her doing hourly work.
And then a client she had that she had been working with wanted to launch a really big project, like year-long massive launch. Basically an entire new business, and it would need to be at least 40 hours a week of operational planning and execution. And without skipping a beat, she came to the coaching session wanting thought partnership on how to politely decline without ruining the client relationship. She said, I just don't have time to do that. And I had a mini heart attack. I said, what are you doing? This is the best opportunity to start scaling your business and create a proposal that moves into packages, a full launch package. Her brain felt so uncomfortable with the prospect of her business growing into exactly what we had envisioned that she immediately thought to say no to the opportunity.
And now listen, of course, saying yes to things like this, there are problems that need to be solved once we say yes to this type of expansion. But they are much better problems for us to solve. It's much more fun to solve the problem of strategies to create more value for clients in a limited amount of time versus the problem of just finding clients and figuring out if people are even interested. We solve that problem too, of course. But when we have an opportunity to make more money, to grow our business, to step into a more strategic role and to step into a more strategic role and hire out the actual like execution pieces, we have to be aware of our upper limiting behaviors that are trying to self-sabotage those opportunities.
The other really interesting thing about this example is along with our conversation about changing the business, we were also talking about her role changing. So at the time, she was doing both strategy and execution. So she would create an entire strategy around marketing plans, but then she'd actually execute that marketing plan. And she really wanted to move into just the strategy. That was the piece that she really loved, and she wanted to hire a team of VAs to do the execution. And so this wasn't even just about the identity and structure of the business. This was her identity and her stepping into this bigger version of herself. And it was scary, and her brain immediately wanted to tell her no. Her brain immediately wanted to stop the expansion and not allow that to happen. And I'm so glad that we were able to workshop it together and make sure that she not only said yes to that opportunity and created the proposal, but now we can solve this problem of how she shifts her business into something bigger.
And once you see these patterns in your life, you start noticing them everywhere. There was another personal example where my husband had recommitted to the time management process that I actually teach my clients. And so on days that he uses it, he's on fire. And one day he was texting me all day about how productive he was, how good he felt, how much he had done. And that same day, he had to be home at 3:30 for childcare, something he's never late for. He's a man who's often not on time for things, but he's never late when it comes to childcare and his kids. And that day, he was 15 minutes late. And later that night, it was so clear that he had such a great day that somewhere unconsciously, he sabotaged it. He knocked himself down a peg.
I see this in myself too, especially with my kids. If I have one of those amazing work days, like great calls, new clients, like I'm feeling inspired, that evening without fail, something will happen mostly with my oldest son, Adley. He'll have a meltdown, or say or do something mean. And I used to see it as unrelated to me, but now I for sure see that it's usually something I created to step back into the comfort after too many wins in one day. Simple things that expand like me rushing him or losing patience too quickly or even sometimes like instigating things that I know he's sensitive to. It's like when life feels really good, we subconsciously create moments to remind ourselves that it's hard. And once you see it, I promise you, you can't unsee it.
So what do we do with this information? This isn't about fixing yourself necessarily, but it is about expanding your capacity to stay with good things, to allow yourself to celebrate, to allow yourself to feel all the goodness, all the joy, all the success, allow it. When you notice yourself pulling back and sabotaging and creating chaos or finding all the reasons that something won't work, I want you to ask yourself, is this an upper limit problem?
So whenever something's going wrong in life, just allow that to be a first line of defense to ask yourself, could this maybe be an upper limit problem? And from there, I want you, no matter what the answer is, I want you to take responsibility without shame and name it. Name it to tame it, they said. Just like my husband and I do now, call it out. Say to yourself, this feels like an upper limit pattern. This feels like a way that I'm sabotaging myself or I'm creating drama or I'm creating chaos so that I can feel comfortable in the discomfort. I am holding myself back from something, some sort of expansion. Just name it.
Also, if you're still in the moment of the good thing happening, another really great breakthrough is just to allow yourself to feel it. Okay, practicing staying with the feeling instead of running. So many of us feel uncomfortable in the midst of successful moments. We see it all the time when we get a compliment and we immediately want to belittle it instead of just receiving it. We always want to invalidate something or we always want to have a comment about, you know, if somebody's like, oh, I love your hat. We're like, oh, I got it at a thrift shop, or it's my sister's, I'm just borrowing it. Like we can't just receive the compliment. Right? We do this constantly. So similar to learning to just kind of like receive good news and receive good feelings, there's so much growth with just allowing the feeling of joy or success and also the discomfort to be there, okay, and just sit with it.
If you're in a situation where the moment has passed and you're retrospectively noticing that it was a way that you're self-sabotaging or you're noticing a pattern, repair it. Okay, whether that's calling it what it is with your partner, rethinking your decision to say no to a client, or creating a plan to bust through that upper limit the next day, whatever it is, make sure that you do your due diligence and figure out how you can shift, and there's still always still time to create more abundance.
I want this to be the year that you break through your own glass ceilings. I want this to be the year you have more success and joy and ease and fulfillment and all the things than any year before. And unfortunately, strategy won't override an upper limit problem. Hard work won't override it, motivation won't override it, but expanding your capacity to let the goodness in absolutely will. Your ability to receive, to let things be good, to stop knocking yourself back down, to stop self-sabotaging, all those things we are doing without noticing. I want you to notice them, I want you to resist them, I want you to stop doing them as much as possible.
So as you head into the new year, I want you to keep asking yourself, where am I limiting myself? Where do I have upper limits? What glass ceilings have I created? And maybe even exploring the discomfort. Why does that glass ceiling exist? What is it about $40,000 that keeps me stuck? And when I looked into it and explored it and tied it back to my experience in grad school, it made so much sense. So explore those upper limits. I want you to ask yourself what actions can I take today or this week to stop getting in my own way? Try to catch those blind spots, the moments where your brain is eager to keep you safe, but it's also keeping you small. And I promise minimizing the damage that we do to ourselves in moments where we feel our upper limit is being challenged can add so much joy and success to our lives. And you don't need a business or a job transition to do that. You can start making those changes right now so that this year has fewer arguments, more revenue, less tantrums, more abundance, all the things. That's a shift you can make right now because I know that it's happening in unintentional ways to everybody who's listening.
So let's make this year so magical. Not just because you started the business and you're doing the thing, but because we stopped sabotaging ourselves and making life harder than it had to be.
If you're having trouble recognizing moments in your life that could be upper limit patterns, trust me, they are there. You are human. So get a second unbiased opinion on it. That could be really eye-opening. I offer a free one-hour consultation to podcast listeners. So you can go to mom.jenna.coach/strategy or check out the show notes, jenna.coach/86 for a link to schedule. And we will talk about making this year the year you create change. And make sure that you aren't limiting yourself along the way.
Click the follow button so that you never miss an episode. I release one every Wednesday morning, and these topics and action items will absolutely move you forward this year. Change is possible, and it's happening this year. Okay? You've got this, Mom friends. I will 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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