116. It’s Always Working: How to Reduce Mental Drama and Build Your Business
One of the biggest things that slows moms down in business usually isn’t a lack of strategy. It’s the mental drama that happens when we start worrying, second guessing ourselves, and deciding that what we’re doing isn’t working. When we believe we’re failing or falling behind, it can drain our energy, motivation, and confidence.
In this episode, I share a mindset shift that has helped me and many of the moms I work with stop spiraling when things don’t go according to plan: it’s always working. This doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine or ignoring information. It means recognizing that we only see one small piece of what’s happening and choosing to believe that every experience is giving us information, moving us forward, or teaching us something we need to know.
I walk through how this belief can change the way you approach your business, from networking events that don’t immediately lead to clients to strategies that don’t create the results you hoped for. We also talk about how this mindset applies beyond business and can help you move through difficult seasons of life with more trust, hope, and self compassion. If you’ve been feeling stuck, frustrated, or like nothing is working, this episode will help you look at your circumstances from a different perspective and keep taking the next aligned step forward.
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:
Why mental drama, overthinking, and second guessing can slow down your progress in business.
How the belief “it’s always working” can help you approach challenges with more trust and confidence.
The difference between ignoring problems and seeing challenges as information.
How to stop viewing unexpected results as proof that you’re failing.
Why you only see one small piece of what’s happening in your business and life.
How this mindset shift can help you stay motivated and keep taking action when things feel uncertain.
How to use “it’s always working” as a tool to reduce stress, eliminate energy leaks, and move forward.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
What if one of the biggest reasons your business feels so hard has nothing to do with strategy? And everything to do with one sentence your brain keeps repeating. I think one of the biggest things that is slowing moms down in business isn't lack of strategy at all. It's mental drama. It's all the time we spend worrying, second guessing ourselves, and deciding what we're doing isn't working.
Today, I want to share one mindset shift, a mindset one-liner that has helped me plug one of the biggest energy leaks that I see in myself and with the moms I work with.
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. Today I want to talk about a concept that's slightly similar to episode 106. If you haven't caught that episode, it will be a good one to check out after this, if you like this one. It's another one of those mindset one-liners that you can keep in your back pocket that will help you shift your energy immediately when you pull this tool out of your toolbelt.
These types of episodes that I do, the ones that you can digest quickly, immediately apply to your life, and carry with you, are always the best received. So this is one of those episodes to take in and to start applying, and it's going to be simple. A simple tool that you can use today.
I was working with a client today, and we were talking about creating efficiencies in her business. There's a huge opportunity for her to make more money, sign more clients, and really expand her business in a meaningful way. And her brain was telling her, "I need to be more efficient first. I need to set up better systems in the foundational part of the business before I go adding in anything else or taking advantage of any opportunities." And I told her that the efficiencies she's looking for are 99% in mindset and mind management.
What I'm talking about today is one piece of that. It's one piece of mind management where you can really become more efficient with the work you're doing, what you're building, and how quickly you're building it, because this one belief eliminates so much of the mental drama that holds us back. The more mental drama we eliminate, the faster we will go in our business. The more likely we are to actually start the business. The more likely we are to keep building it.
Throughout our day, it is so important that we feel good and energized. Now, we're not going to feel good and energized all day every day. That's impossible. But there are so many times when we're worrying about things, when we're second guessing ourselves and our decisions, when we're overthinking. And in all of that, we're wasting a ton of time and energy. These are energy leaks. And sometimes we just need one mindset shift that plugs one of those leaks.
What I'm going to talk about today is one of the biggest energy leaks that I see, not just in business, but in life. It's something that I've struggled with myself. And the work that I've done with my coach has really helped me open up this piece. It's helped me see business in a much more exciting and fun way. And honestly, it's paid dividends in my productivity, in my excitement towards the business, and ultimately in the results I'm able to create.
The phrase I want to dig into today, the mindset one-liner is: It's always working.
Now, this might sound naive. It might even sound like a flat out lie, depending on what you're trying to do right now. And I want you to hang on. Stick with me here. Because I want to talk through this in a way that helps you really lean into it and helps you to see the value of believing that it's always working.
This isn't about pretending everything is okay when it isn't. It's not lying to ourselves. It's recognizing that what we see and understand in our life and business is only one layer of what's actually going on. When I say it's always working, I'm talking about everything. I'm talking about the business, I'm talking about the strategies you're employing, I'm talking about things with your kids, relationships, life.
But because I'm a business coach, of course, most of how I'm thinking about this and the examples are coming from business, because this is where I see moms get really caught up in whether or not something is working, and I see it holding them back. But it's everything in life. We can become really tied to one specific result. If we don't get that result, we immediately decide that something's not working. Sometimes even when we get that result, we still come up with ways that it isn't working.
It's really easy to get down on ourselves. It's really easy to lose motivation in the business when we see things as not working. I want you to imagine going through your workday, banging your head against the wall because you feel like you're trying so many things and nothing's working. Maybe you feel at a dead end because you've tried everything. You're feeling frustrated, maybe incapable. All those yucky, sticky feelings come from believing in some way that what you're doing isn't working. And those sticky, yucky feelings, they don't feel good. They don't make business fun. They don't make it exciting. They don't make it motivating.
I want to give you a specific business example. Let's say that you want to sign a client. You want to create revenue and grow your business. You decide to go to a networking event. You spend two hours getting there, meeting people, having conversations, and you leave without signing a client. Nobody there is your ideal client. Nobody seems interested in what you're offering. You could immediately decide that networking isn't working. And that belief that networking isn't working leads to you feeling frustrated. It leads to wanting to avoid networking events. It leads to feeling lackluster and unmotivated because you invested your time and energy and didn't get the result that you wanted. It didn't work.
Now, I want you to imagine the exact same networking event, same conversations, people, outcome, nobody signs, nobody accepts your offer. But this time, you leave believing, it's always working. I just don't know how it's working yet. That shift leaves you feeling energized. It leaves you feeling like it was a good use of your time. It leaves you feeling motivated to do more in your business. Nothing about the event changed, just one belief changed.
Now, I want to make an important distinction because I think this matters. Believing it's always working doesn't mean we ignore information. It doesn't mean we keep doing something forever just because we want it to work. We still need to be strategic and we need to pay attention. But instead of seeing a result we don't like as proof that we're failing, we can see it as information.
Sometimes what isn't happening is telling us exactly what we need to know. And that's very different than believing nothing is working. Here's the piece that's helped me the most with this. As humans, we only see one sliver of what's really happening. We only see what's right in front of us.
If we go back to that networking event and think about it, let's say you leave knowing nobody booked a consult. Nobody bought your offer. Nobody even asked for your contact information. But what you don't know is that maybe someone went home thinking your business was really interesting. Maybe they just didn't know what questions to ask or what to say in the moment. A few days later, they're talking to someone in their network who's struggling with the exact problem you solve and they say, "Oh my gosh, I actually met someone who specializes in just that. I need to put you in touch with her." We don't know that conversation happened. We don't know the conversations people are having after they listen to our podcasts. We don't know the people we've impacted with something we've posted. Sometimes it's a conversation over wine with a friend that leads to an opportunity and we just can never trace it back to that moment.
We only see one sliver. There are so many conversations and so many wheels turning that we simply don't have access to. Believing that it's always working helps us stay in a place of self-trust and belief. It helps us stay energized enough to keep taking action. And honestly, that's why this mindset has become important to me personally as well.
I'm going to get just that, pretty personal and pretty vulnerable because this has impacted not just business, but also other things in life that feel heavy and hard. My husband and I, we have two kids. We have always wanted to have four kids. I'm not exactly sure why, but that was always our number. And we've been trying for over a year at the time of this recording to have a third child. And it just hasn't happened. We've been going through the fertility process, and honestly, it's been a bit of a shock. I think when you already have kids, you kind of naively assume everything will continue according to plan. And that just hasn't been our experience.
This is all very personal and current as I'm recording this, so things may change. I mean, hopefully they change. It's really easy for me to look at this season and decide things aren't working. My body's not working, the fertility treatments aren't working, the advice from my health coach isn't working, medicine isn't working. It's really easy to decide mentally that it's just not working. And the amount of stress and anxiety and guilt and shame that comes with thinking that things aren't working is really heavy.
What I've been so grateful for with my coach, because we coach through everything. She's not just a business coach. I hired her as a parenting coach when I was going through rough spots in parenting, and now she's my everything coach. But what I've been so grateful for with my coach is that she opened me up to another possibility. To a lighter way of moving through the world and thinking. That maybe things are working and maybe I just don't know how they're working yet.
Now, that doesn't erase grief, it doesn't erase disappointment, it doesn't guarantee a certain outcome. It doesn't mean there won't be surrender somewhere along the way. That's not what I'm saying. What it changes is my head space. It changes how I experience today. When I choose to look at this season through the lens of it's always working, I feel lighter. I have more trust, I have more hope. Not because I know what's going to happen, because I don't. But because I no longer feel like I have to solve something that I can't possibly solve today.
It's also not my job or our job to figure out why something that feels hard and heavy is actually working. It's not my job to dig into how something's working. My job is much simpler. My job is to keep showing up, to keep taking the next aligned step, to keep trusting myself, to keep living my life, and to believe that things are working. And honestly, I think that's true in business too, right? There are so many times when something feels like an utter failure, it feels heavy. A potential client says no, we invest a ton of time and energy into something and we don't get the results we wanted. It feels like a step backward. It feels like proof that what we're doing isn't working.
And then six months later, a year later, sometimes years later, we realize it was actually the catalyst that led us exactly where we needed to go, exactly where we needed to be. The hard part is that we don't get to know that in the moment. We don't get to skip ahead. We only get to know and understand today. And today, we get to choose the story we're going to believe. We get to either believe that nothing is working or we get to believe that it's always working, we just might not know exactly how it's working in this moment.
Now, I do want to make one distinction because I think it's really important. Believing that it's always working doesn't mean we keep doing the exact same thing forever and expect different results. We still want to be thoughtful and strategic.
For example, if I'm posting on social media, it's taking a ton of time, and I have never signed a client from social media, I'm not going to tell myself, "Well, social media is always working, so I'll just keep doing exactly what I'm doing." Instead, I can ask, "What is this showing me?" Maybe social media is working because it's showing me my people find me somewhere else. Maybe it's pointing me toward networking or referrals as a more important strategy to invest time in my business. Maybe it's pointing me toward finding partnerships.
I hope you see that distinction, right? It's not about forcing one strategy to work because we believe it's always working. It's about trusting that every experience is giving us information. Every experience is moving us. Every experience is helping us to become the person that we're meant to become, the person that has a successful business, the mom who is able to get back the time and energy and prioritize their family.
That headspace that we get from believing that it's working is the important thing. The headspace is so much more useful than believing nothing is working. Because when I believe nothing is working, I stop showing up, I hesitate, I second guess myself, I carry around so much more mental drama, maybe even shame and guilt, and self-loathing, depending what the scenario is when I believe it's not working. But when I believe things are working, even when I don't know how, I'm much more likely to put my best self into developing my business, developing myself, creating the next chapter, whatever that is in life.
And I think that's why this matters so much. It isn't because this one belief magically changes our circumstances. It doesn't magically create the outcome that we want in our family planning. It's important because it changes our energy. It changes how we show up in our day-to-day. It changes whether we keep going, whether we keep trying.
So this week, I want you to notice every time your brain tells you this isn't working. No matter what it is in life, whatever it is, I want you to recognize and notice when your brain tells you it's not working or nothing's working. And before you blindly believe it, before you let yourself spiral, just answer back with one sentence. Maybe I just don't know how it's working yet. Maybe that conversation was working. Maybe that networking event was working. Maybe this season of life, no matter how hard it is or how much pain it comes with, maybe there is a way that it is working. Maybe it's all working in ways that we simply can't see from where we're standing today.
And if believing that helps you eliminate just a little bit of mental drama, if it helps you plug just one of those energy leaks, then I think you'll find yourself showing up differently. Because the more mental drama we eliminate, the faster we go and the more fun it is as we go. Not because life suddenly gets easier, but because we're no longer spending so much time fighting the story that nothing is working. Maybe it is. Maybe you just can't see it yet.
Okay, moms, I will talk to you next week. Keep taking action. Trust me. It's always working.
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.
Today, I want to share one mindset shift, a mindset one-liner that has helped me plug one of the biggest energy leaks that I see in myself and with the moms I work with.
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. Today I want to talk about a concept that's slightly similar to episode 106. If you haven't caught that episode, it will be a good one to check out after this, if you like this one. It's another one of those mindset one-liners that you can keep in your back pocket that will help you shift your energy immediately when you pull this tool out of your toolbelt.
These types of episodes that I do, the ones that you can digest quickly, immediately apply to your life, and carry with you, are always the best received. So this is one of those episodes to take in and to start applying, and it's going to be simple. A simple tool that you can use today.
I was working with a client today, and we were talking about creating efficiencies in her business. There's a huge opportunity for her to make more money, sign more clients, and really expand her business in a meaningful way. And her brain was telling her, "I need to be more efficient first. I need to set up better systems in the foundational part of the business before I go adding in anything else or taking advantage of any opportunities." And I told her that the efficiencies she's looking for are 99% in mindset and mind management.
What I'm talking about today is one piece of that. It's one piece of mind management where you can really become more efficient with the work you're doing, what you're building, and how quickly you're building it, because this one belief eliminates so much of the mental drama that holds us back. The more mental drama we eliminate, the faster we will go in our business. The more likely we are to actually start the business. The more likely we are to keep building it.
Throughout our day, it is so important that we feel good and energized. Now, we're not going to feel good and energized all day every day. That's impossible. But there are so many times when we're worrying about things, when we're second guessing ourselves and our decisions, when we're overthinking. And in all of that, we're wasting a ton of time and energy. These are energy leaks. And sometimes we just need one mindset shift that plugs one of those leaks.
What I'm going to talk about today is one of the biggest energy leaks that I see, not just in business, but in life. It's something that I've struggled with myself. And the work that I've done with my coach has really helped me open up this piece. It's helped me see business in a much more exciting and fun way. And honestly, it's paid dividends in my productivity, in my excitement towards the business, and ultimately in the results I'm able to create.
The phrase I want to dig into today, the mindset one-liner is: It's always working.
Now, this might sound naive. It might even sound like a flat out lie, depending on what you're trying to do right now. And I want you to hang on. Stick with me here. Because I want to talk through this in a way that helps you really lean into it and helps you to see the value of believing that it's always working.
This isn't about pretending everything is okay when it isn't. It's not lying to ourselves. It's recognizing that what we see and understand in our life and business is only one layer of what's actually going on. When I say it's always working, I'm talking about everything. I'm talking about the business, I'm talking about the strategies you're employing, I'm talking about things with your kids, relationships, life.
But because I'm a business coach, of course, most of how I'm thinking about this and the examples are coming from business, because this is where I see moms get really caught up in whether or not something is working, and I see it holding them back. But it's everything in life. We can become really tied to one specific result. If we don't get that result, we immediately decide that something's not working. Sometimes even when we get that result, we still come up with ways that it isn't working.
It's really easy to get down on ourselves. It's really easy to lose motivation in the business when we see things as not working. I want you to imagine going through your workday, banging your head against the wall because you feel like you're trying so many things and nothing's working. Maybe you feel at a dead end because you've tried everything. You're feeling frustrated, maybe incapable. All those yucky, sticky feelings come from believing in some way that what you're doing isn't working. And those sticky, yucky feelings, they don't feel good. They don't make business fun. They don't make it exciting. They don't make it motivating.
I want to give you a specific business example. Let's say that you want to sign a client. You want to create revenue and grow your business. You decide to go to a networking event. You spend two hours getting there, meeting people, having conversations, and you leave without signing a client. Nobody there is your ideal client. Nobody seems interested in what you're offering. You could immediately decide that networking isn't working. And that belief that networking isn't working leads to you feeling frustrated. It leads to wanting to avoid networking events. It leads to feeling lackluster and unmotivated because you invested your time and energy and didn't get the result that you wanted. It didn't work.
Now, I want you to imagine the exact same networking event, same conversations, people, outcome, nobody signs, nobody accepts your offer. But this time, you leave believing, it's always working. I just don't know how it's working yet. That shift leaves you feeling energized. It leaves you feeling like it was a good use of your time. It leaves you feeling motivated to do more in your business. Nothing about the event changed, just one belief changed.
Now, I want to make an important distinction because I think this matters. Believing it's always working doesn't mean we ignore information. It doesn't mean we keep doing something forever just because we want it to work. We still need to be strategic and we need to pay attention. But instead of seeing a result we don't like as proof that we're failing, we can see it as information.
Sometimes what isn't happening is telling us exactly what we need to know. And that's very different than believing nothing is working. Here's the piece that's helped me the most with this. As humans, we only see one sliver of what's really happening. We only see what's right in front of us.
If we go back to that networking event and think about it, let's say you leave knowing nobody booked a consult. Nobody bought your offer. Nobody even asked for your contact information. But what you don't know is that maybe someone went home thinking your business was really interesting. Maybe they just didn't know what questions to ask or what to say in the moment. A few days later, they're talking to someone in their network who's struggling with the exact problem you solve and they say, "Oh my gosh, I actually met someone who specializes in just that. I need to put you in touch with her." We don't know that conversation happened. We don't know the conversations people are having after they listen to our podcasts. We don't know the people we've impacted with something we've posted. Sometimes it's a conversation over wine with a friend that leads to an opportunity and we just can never trace it back to that moment.
We only see one sliver. There are so many conversations and so many wheels turning that we simply don't have access to. Believing that it's always working helps us stay in a place of self-trust and belief. It helps us stay energized enough to keep taking action. And honestly, that's why this mindset has become important to me personally as well.
I'm going to get just that, pretty personal and pretty vulnerable because this has impacted not just business, but also other things in life that feel heavy and hard. My husband and I, we have two kids. We have always wanted to have four kids. I'm not exactly sure why, but that was always our number. And we've been trying for over a year at the time of this recording to have a third child. And it just hasn't happened. We've been going through the fertility process, and honestly, it's been a bit of a shock. I think when you already have kids, you kind of naively assume everything will continue according to plan. And that just hasn't been our experience.
This is all very personal and current as I'm recording this, so things may change. I mean, hopefully they change. It's really easy for me to look at this season and decide things aren't working. My body's not working, the fertility treatments aren't working, the advice from my health coach isn't working, medicine isn't working. It's really easy to decide mentally that it's just not working. And the amount of stress and anxiety and guilt and shame that comes with thinking that things aren't working is really heavy.
What I've been so grateful for with my coach, because we coach through everything. She's not just a business coach. I hired her as a parenting coach when I was going through rough spots in parenting, and now she's my everything coach. But what I've been so grateful for with my coach is that she opened me up to another possibility. To a lighter way of moving through the world and thinking. That maybe things are working and maybe I just don't know how they're working yet.
Now, that doesn't erase grief, it doesn't erase disappointment, it doesn't guarantee a certain outcome. It doesn't mean there won't be surrender somewhere along the way. That's not what I'm saying. What it changes is my head space. It changes how I experience today. When I choose to look at this season through the lens of it's always working, I feel lighter. I have more trust, I have more hope. Not because I know what's going to happen, because I don't. But because I no longer feel like I have to solve something that I can't possibly solve today.
It's also not my job or our job to figure out why something that feels hard and heavy is actually working. It's not my job to dig into how something's working. My job is much simpler. My job is to keep showing up, to keep taking the next aligned step, to keep trusting myself, to keep living my life, and to believe that things are working. And honestly, I think that's true in business too, right? There are so many times when something feels like an utter failure, it feels heavy. A potential client says no, we invest a ton of time and energy into something and we don't get the results we wanted. It feels like a step backward. It feels like proof that what we're doing isn't working.
And then six months later, a year later, sometimes years later, we realize it was actually the catalyst that led us exactly where we needed to go, exactly where we needed to be. The hard part is that we don't get to know that in the moment. We don't get to skip ahead. We only get to know and understand today. And today, we get to choose the story we're going to believe. We get to either believe that nothing is working or we get to believe that it's always working, we just might not know exactly how it's working in this moment.
Now, I do want to make one distinction because I think it's really important. Believing that it's always working doesn't mean we keep doing the exact same thing forever and expect different results. We still want to be thoughtful and strategic.
For example, if I'm posting on social media, it's taking a ton of time, and I have never signed a client from social media, I'm not going to tell myself, "Well, social media is always working, so I'll just keep doing exactly what I'm doing." Instead, I can ask, "What is this showing me?" Maybe social media is working because it's showing me my people find me somewhere else. Maybe it's pointing me toward networking or referrals as a more important strategy to invest time in my business. Maybe it's pointing me toward finding partnerships.
I hope you see that distinction, right? It's not about forcing one strategy to work because we believe it's always working. It's about trusting that every experience is giving us information. Every experience is moving us. Every experience is helping us to become the person that we're meant to become, the person that has a successful business, the mom who is able to get back the time and energy and prioritize their family.
That headspace that we get from believing that it's working is the important thing. The headspace is so much more useful than believing nothing is working. Because when I believe nothing is working, I stop showing up, I hesitate, I second guess myself, I carry around so much more mental drama, maybe even shame and guilt, and self-loathing, depending what the scenario is when I believe it's not working. But when I believe things are working, even when I don't know how, I'm much more likely to put my best self into developing my business, developing myself, creating the next chapter, whatever that is in life.
And I think that's why this matters so much. It isn't because this one belief magically changes our circumstances. It doesn't magically create the outcome that we want in our family planning. It's important because it changes our energy. It changes how we show up in our day-to-day. It changes whether we keep going, whether we keep trying.
So this week, I want you to notice every time your brain tells you this isn't working. No matter what it is in life, whatever it is, I want you to recognize and notice when your brain tells you it's not working or nothing's working. And before you blindly believe it, before you let yourself spiral, just answer back with one sentence. Maybe I just don't know how it's working yet. Maybe that conversation was working. Maybe that networking event was working. Maybe this season of life, no matter how hard it is or how much pain it comes with, maybe there is a way that it is working. Maybe it's all working in ways that we simply can't see from where we're standing today.
And if believing that helps you eliminate just a little bit of mental drama, if it helps you plug just one of those energy leaks, then I think you'll find yourself showing up differently. Because the more mental drama we eliminate, the faster we go and the more fun it is as we go. Not because life suddenly gets easier, but because we're no longer spending so much time fighting the story that nothing is working. Maybe it is. Maybe you just can't see it yet.
Okay, moms, I will talk to you next week. Keep taking action. Trust me. It's always working.
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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