85. Best of 2025: Powerful Reminders to Help Build Your Business in 2026

What if the key to finally starting your business isn't about having more time or the perfect plan, but about shifting how you see yourself? This special holiday episode brings together some of the most powerful reminders, moments, and insights from past episodes into one beautifully wrapped bundle of reminders and tools that have helped so many listeners throughout the year.

​Today's compilation features breakthrough moments about identity shifts, pricing confidence, and finding hidden time in your already full life as a mom. From understanding that your first business version doesn't have to be your forever version to recognizing that thinking like a CEO actually creates the business (not the other way around), these insights cut through the noise of traditional business advice.

​You'll discover practical ways to move from employee brain to CEO thinking, learn why small, consistent actions compound over time, and understand how to use competition as market research without getting stuck in comparison. Most importantly, you'll hear exactly why 2026 can be the year you'll always remember as the year you started your business.


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 business is an experiment, and your first version won't be your forever version.

  • How to shift from all-or-nothing thinking by evaluating what worked, what didn't, and what to do differently.

  • How to find hidden time by looking through a lens of abundance instead of scarcity.

  • Practical ways to use competition as market research without getting stuck.

  • What a rampage of appreciation is, and how it quickly shifts your emotional state.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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  • Abraham Hicks

  • Digital Freedom Productions

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Full Episode Transcript:

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Hi, mom friends. Welcome to this special holiday episode of the show. As we wrap up the year and settle into the rhythm of the season, I wanted to give you something a little different.

Today's episode, my wonderful podcast team at Digital Freedom Productions put together a best-of collection, which features some of the most powerful moments and insights and conversations from all the past episodes of How to Quit Your Job. I want you to think of it as this beautifully wrapped bundle of the reminders and tools that have helped so many of you throughout the year, all in one episode.

I hope you enjoy this compilation and that it inspires you going into the new year to make 2026 different. I want 2026 to be the year that you never forget because it's the year that you actually started the business. The year that when people ask you, when did you leave corporate and start your business? You'll always be able to call on and say 2026.

You are capable of making that happen. I've seen it too many times before for that not to be true. Follow the podcast. Take me with you into 2026 so you have guidance in your ear whenever you need a little bit of inspiration or direction.

Enjoy the episode and as always, 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.

The beauty of entrepreneurship is that you get to pivot, evolve, and grow. Your business can grow with you, and it absolutely should grow with you. It should look different on day 365 than it did on day one, right? I see so many moms approaching this decision like it's a do-or-die moment. Like they need to create the perfect business right out of the gate. But your first version doesn't have to be your forever version, and it actually won't be, right? And that's okay. That's normal. That's how it should be.

Remember what I said earlier about testing things out for 3 months? That's because business is an experiment. Life is an experiment. You try things, you learn, you pivot. Sometimes you pivot ever so slightly, sometimes you pivot completely. But the important thing is you can't pivot if you're standing still. So here's what I want you to do. Take all of those expectations that are swimming around in your brain between your ears rent-free, right? All the expectations about choosing something that's right, about saying no to other passions, about being stuck forever. And I want you to set those expectations aside just for now.

Instead, ask yourself, what's the next logical step? Not the perfect step. The one that makes sense right now with what you know right now, with the time and resources you have right now. That path that gives you energy and has some earning potential, let's make that your next step. Not your only step, not your forever step. Just your next step, just something that you can explore and experiment with.

Taking that step will teach you things about yourself and your business that you could never learn from just thinking about it. When you stay in your logical brain and are thinking about all the what-ifs and trying to understand the problems and solve the problems before you even get there, we need to step out of that logical part of our brain and start doing. I promise it will open doors you can't even see right now. It will create opportunities you couldn't have planned for.

Unfortunately, just because you've created the LLC doesn't mean you all of a sudden know what you're doing and start seeing yourself as a business owner. Just because you have the LLC doesn't mean you've become a business owner. It takes time and intention to actually shift your identity. For me, I remember finally feeling like a real business owner, not when I got my LLC, that just felt like paperwork, but the first time a client had a breakthrough and thanked me for helping her see her own potential. That moment changed how I saw myself and my work.

Alright, similarly, it's easy to think that becoming a mom happens in a moment, right? But just because you're all of a sudden holding that baby after 36 hours of labor doesn't mean we've fully shifted into that identity. For most of us, if not all of us, we still very much feel like we have no idea what we're doing. And the truth is, both motherhood and business success happen in very small moments, small daily moments of growth. Whether you're learning to pitch your services, set boundaries with clients, or show up on social media, it all takes time and practice.

Here's a simple truth that I hope liberates you. I want you to stop taking yourself so seriously and just pick a number and go from there. So whether it is picking a number based on the what's too high, what's too low, let's find something in the middle, whether it's looking at the actual results that you get for people and figuring out for yourself, if they went into a store and saw that result on the shelf, how much would they pay for that result? For my clients, if they walked into a store and saw a complete business with its first few paying clients in a box on the shelf, they would pay a lot of money for that, right? That is the outcome. That is the result that I'm providing for clients or that I'm helping clients get to.

So finding out what is the outcome, what is the value of that outcome, and really being intentional about pricing that way, or arbitrarily working back from your goals and figuring out a sweet spot based on what is the number that you want to achieve in your business and how many clients do you need to work with in order to get to that number and finding a sweet spot based on the services that you provide.

Resolution questions prompt immediate action. They move you from analysis paralysis to implementation. So instead of, why am I stuck? Asking, what's my next best step? And when we're feeling overwhelmed by all the marketing strategies available and all the things we know we could be doing in our business, instead of asking a question like, why is marketing so complicated? We could ask ourselves, what single marketing action would create the biggest impact this week? This allows you to focus energy on high-leverage activities instead of scattered efforts trying to do it all.

Instead of asking the question, what if I fail again? You can ask, what specific action can I take today to move forward? So those are power questions. When you consistently ask questions and apply the power method to your business challenges, you'll find your focus shifting from problems to solutions, limitations to possibilities. And the transformation isn't just in your thinking, it shows up in your results, in your revenue, in your resilience as an entrepreneur, okay? It gets you out of your head and out of that funk and into forward motion.

Bottom line, don't try to get inspiration for your business by looking around and seeing what's in the market. Start with the creativity of your own beautiful brain and what differentiates you, which is your beautiful brain and your experiences, to actually settle in on a potential idea. And then once you have an idea, then we'll talk about how you can best research the market. But at least initially, stay away from getting inspiration from faceless businesses on the internet. It often backfires.

Now that you have your business idea, and maybe you came to this episode with one or even a fully baked business, this all applies to no matter what situation you're in because it's important that you understand your competition and it's never too late to understand competition in a new way. What we want to do now is use competition as market research. You want to get a lay of the land, but, and this is important, from the lens of a scientist doing research. I want you to understand the numbers and other people in your industry offering similar services or products.

One of my clients started an event space for kids' birthday parties. This idea came to her because she saw a need that wasn't being met in her community. She heard moms constantly complaining about the amount of work that went into giving their kids a memorable birthday experience, and she realized there weren't any great spaces in her area that were curated for kids' parties.

She also thought about her interests and skills, something I always recommend people do at the beginning of trying to figure out their business, and she was always being asked by friends to help them decorate and, you know, other tasks in their parties. So it was a beautiful marriage. This business of hers is a beautiful marriage of her interests, skills, and a service that people were willing to pay for.

But here's where competition comes in that's important. It's important that she did her due diligence after understanding her own business idea and what differentiated her to see if there was competition in the area that were hot spots for kids' parties. In her case, there weren't. But choosing a location or even thinking about what she could offer to be unique from what's out there could be a critical step.

For instance, maybe in her research of competition, she saw that there actually was a venue, a Chuck E. Cheese, which we all are somewhat familiar with, right? So let's say that there was a Chuck E. Cheese in the vicinity. There wasn't, but let's say that there was. That doesn't necessarily mean she shouldn't open her business. It just means that she has to be different from Chuck E. Cheese in the experience she brings to kids' parties. But the only way to know how her business or your business will stand out is to know what competition is already in the space, so then you can think about how you can be different.

The business you start now, during the hardest phase of parenting, will be perfectly positioned to scale once your schedule opens up, once you can spend more time on it. You have everything you need to start building a business that works with your life as the primary caregiver of your family. It doesn't have to look like anyone else's journey. It doesn't have to follow traditional timelines or conventional wisdom about how businesses get built.

Moms do it differently, and what I've learned is that's a beautiful thing. Your business can be built in nap time and Sunday mornings. It can start with problems you notice in your daily life. It can grow slowly and steadily alongside your family's changing needs, and it can be exactly what you need to reconnect with parts of yourself that feel dormant right now.

The beautiful thing about starting now, even if it feels imperfect, is that small consistent actions compound over time. The business you start today will be completely different a year from now, and that's exactly how it's supposed to be.

Let's talk about shifting away from the all-or-nothing thinking and what you can do, like how you can put all of this into practice so that you can catch yourself and really move away from the trap. What I recommend always is a simple process that I've talked about before on this podcast, which is evaluating the nuances of every effort and action you're taking. After every effort, whether it's a sales call, a social media post, or a full launch, ask yourself three questions.

What worked? And remember to celebrate what worked and don't skip it, because knowing what worked allows you to see things as a success even if the big picture feels like a failure. So that's number one. That's the first question. What worked?

Second question, what didn't work? Ask yourself that without judgment. These are just facts. What didn't work? That helps us get so much closer to figuring out what does work. And what will I do differently next time? That's it. That's the practice. When you build this into your business rhythm, you retrain your brain to look at results as information and data instead of evidence of failure. You give yourself permission to learn.

You will find that in any given effort, there's a wealth of things that worked. There's lots of things that didn't work, and there's always room for doing things differently the next time to get better and better every single action.

So then how do we find time for ourselves when it already feels impossible? And this is one of the first things that I tackle with clients because if we can't create space for micro moments of care, we'll never have the capacity to create a business or make any meaningful change that we want in our life. So we start by learning to truly see time differently, okay? To see it as abundant. Every mom's situation is unique, but this pattern is universal.

There's always going to be hidden time when we start looking through a lens of abundance instead of scarcity. I've said it before on this podcast, but when we say we have no time, we will always find evidence to support that, which shuts down any possibility of finding time to create change, the change that we really want to see or the goals that we really want to achieve. When we say we do have time or even if we say it's possible that I might be able to create some time, just that little bit opens the door to find evidence for more time.

I also want to offer that part of creating time for yourself is deciding that you are important and that your needs are important, even when it feels like they're not. When you take care of yourself, you are a calmer, more present version of you. I know when I'm running on empty, I'm distracted, I'm snappy, and kind of lame, not fun to be around, okay? My kids can feel it. But when I fill up my own cup, even in small ways, even if that means missing out on something or saying no to something, everything feels lighter.

So what is a rampage of appreciation? This is a technique from Abraham Hicks, and it's used to shift your emotional state, your mindset, your perspective, and it's meant to do that quickly. So you pick one specific subject, like I talked about, maybe it's your job, but maybe it's your partner or your kids or your business, your home, your body, your time, whatever it is.

And then you write down all the reasons you appreciate that thing, and you don't stop until you fill the page. I don't want reasons it's perfect, okay? Not reasons you should appreciate it, just real things, big or small, it doesn't matter, but just that are already there. And as you write, something shifts, your brain changes channels. You will start to focus on the things that give you energy, not just focusing on things that drain you. So have one page, one topic where you write your chosen topic at the top, fill the page, don't analyze or filter, just let it flow. It honestly might be awkward at first, but if you keep going, clarity will open up.

So often, we try to build businesses from our employee brain, the version of us that is used to structure and approval and waiting and overthinking and trying to be perfect. And that is natural because that is how we're conditioned. But when you make an effort to really shift into your CEO identity, you start making choices from a grounded confidence and clarity instead. And this is how we step out of corporate conditioning and into a new way of thinking.

And it's a deeply transformative practice because it reconnects you with the identity that can actually build the business and life you want. Okay? We think we need to create the business before we can think like a CEO, but in reality, it works the other way around. Thinking like a CEO is what creates the business, and that shift requires intention and reflection and a willingness to see what you're carrying from your corporate life so that you can really consciously step into the entrepreneur and CEO you are becoming.

As you take these ideas into your week, I want you to give yourself permission to grow into that CEO, but grow into her slowly, okay? This isn't about getting it perfect. It's about practicing new ways of thinking and leading yourself one intentional moment at a time.

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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84. End-Of-Year Reflection: Why It Matters and 3 Ways To Prepare for the Year Ahead