How to Stop Feeling Guilty for Wanting More. A Mindset Reset for Women Entrepreneurs

If you’ve ever thought, “I don’t even know what I want anymore,” or “I know what I want, but I’m scared to say it out loud,” this episode is for you.

So many women entrepreneurs aren’t held back by strategy. They’re held back by guilt. The moment you choose what’s right for you, someone close to you has an opinion… and suddenly you start shrinking, explaining, apologizing, and making your dreams smaller so other people can stay comfortable.

In this episode, Maggie breaks down why that guilt shows up, how the “good girl” conditioning impacts ambitious women, and what it actually looks like to own your choices without burning relationships down or abandoning yourself.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why many women struggle to admit what they truly want (and how people-pleasing sneaks into your goals)
• The difference between wishing and deciding — and why real decisions create momentum
• How the invisible load and mental labour impact women’s energy, confidence, and risk tolerance
• What pushback can look like when you start growing (even from people who love you)
• How to stop treating guilt like a compass — and start treating it like a signal you’re breaking an old pattern
• Calm, firm language you can use when someone doesn’t agree with your choices

Maggie’s personal stories in this episode:

• The year she chose to wait, prepare, and reapply to an elite university program (even when her dad disagreed)
• The decision to divorce her first husband — and what it taught her about choosing truth over comfort

You are allowed to want what you want. You are allowed to build wealth. You are allowed to be ambitious. You are allowed to choose a life and business that fit you.

And when you live in alignment, you show up as your best self. As a leader, business owner, partner, and mother. The people who truly love you for who you are will appreciate that version of you.

Ready to stop shrinking?

If you’re ready to get clear on what you want, lead with confidence, and build a business that supports your life (without guilt running the show), book a complimentary consultation here - https://www.stairwaytoleadership.com/

We’ll talk about where you are, where you want to go, and what needs to shift so you can grow without abandoning yourself in the process.

Transcript

 If you're a woman entrepreneur and you ever thought, "I don't even know what I want anymore," or, "I know what I want, but I'm scared to say it out loud," this episode is for you. Because for so many women, the biggest thing holding us back isn't strategy. It's the moment we choose something that's right for us and someone we love doesn't like it. And then so often we do what we've been trained to do. We shrink, we explain, we apologize. We even make our dreams smaller so that other people can stay comfortable. We sacrifice what we want so that other people seem happier, so that we can make others happier, even though it's not true. So today we're talking about how to know what you want, because for so many women, we don't even acknowledge what we want. We're scared to even think about what we truly want. We'll also talk about how to stand behind what you want, how to make decisions on what you want and own them, and how to handle the pushback without burning your relationships down and without abandoning yourself. I find I coach my female clients on this a lot, and I think it's especially real for women entrepreneurs because we're building something that doesn't fit into the traditional good girl script. Me, myself, I was raised and conditioned to be that good girl, right? I was one of the best, if not the best student in my primary school and in high school. And, I wanted to do well. Yes, I was ambitious and I wanted to learn, but partially it was the high performance was expected from me, and going, getting an education was expected from me. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, I wanted it, but when I think about even my dad, who's been most of his life an entrepreneur and fairly successful- For me and my sister was conditioning us to get a good education, get if anything good corporate job, and ideally probably marry well. And by well, he meant into a wealthy family or with a man who would be the provider for the family. But that's not what every woman truly wants. A lot of us, myself included, we want freedom. We want to make impact with our skills and what we're passionate about. We do want financial security and independence on our own. And it doesn't mean that we don't want to be in a happy relationship, but relying on somebody else to provide for us, it's not a dream for every girl. We want to create wealth. We also want to be moms that are present in kids' lives. We want to be good partners, daughters, and friends. But it doesn't mean that we want to be those things and at the same time do it in a way that society expects us to do, if there was only one right way to do it. Because we definitely don't want to feel like we have to earn all of that or earn our worth through exhaustion by pretending that we're the perfect mom who, cuts fruit for our kids' lunch in funky shapes and it takes half a day while we're running the business, while we're, looking perfectly for our partners and have an abundant social life, right? Because that's what society expects us to do. And for most of us, trying to do it all that way is overwhelming and unachievable. And because of it, a lot of us shrink. And a lot of us compromise very often our professional lives or our dreams for impact, for wealth, for financial independence so that we can fit into the perceived perfection of a mom or a partner or whatever that is. Because society has a really weird relationship with ambitious women, right? When men want more, they're driven, they're ambitious, they're, somebody to look up to. But when women want more, we're labeled too much, too intense, too pushy, too materialistic, too ambitious. A lot of us women, we learn to want what's acceptable, or we learn to dim our ambition and dim our dreams and explain it that we don't wanna be materialistic. We'd rather be great moms, as if one- as if wanting wealth and independence is materialistic. I don't think that is. Or that as if that didn't allow us to also be good moms on our own terms. And then even when we finally admit what we want, so often guilt shows up the second someone close to us reacts. And I'm creating this podcast because very recently I coached a couple of my clients on that guilt and how to deal with it and how to navigate personal relationships, because when their spouses or people close to them see them enjoying themselves in their businesses, making an impact and feeling fulfilled and creating a life that they want, not even excluding the partners, but having a great time during their business hours while their partners are working, and somehow the partner, freaks out about it or doesn't feel comfortable with it, the first thing that shows up is guilt and not pride. One of my clients said, "Maggie, you should probably do a podcast about it." So here we go. I'm doing a podcast about it. So let's start here. If you don't know what you want, first of all, you're not broken. It doesn't mean you're unmotivated or you're not ambitious, or that you're bad at decisions. You've likely just spent years being rewarded for being agreeable, for making everybody happy, for being helpful, for being the one who makes it work, and you didn't consider your own needs. And I was there when my kids were little, and I was a mom of a toddler and a baby, and at some point- I realized that I lost myself, that everything I was doing was about my kids and the family and so on, but I wasn't taking care of my own needs. As I say I wasn't even on the list. And what that led to is me losing myself and not even being the best mom that I could be, the way I thought I could be for my kids, or even a partner for my husband. That was because I wasn't catering to my own human needs and filling my own cup so I can show up the best to the world for myself and my family and other people that were important to me. So we're conditioned not to ask ourselves, "What do I want?" But to ask, "What makes sense? What will people approve of? What, what am I supposed to do or should do? What society expects me to do? What is the responsible choice, a choice that won't rock the boat for anybody, that won't upset anybody?" And then one w- day, we actually wake up, and maybe we look successful on paper or on Instagram or on Facebook, but at the same time, we feel disconnected, right? We don't feel fulfilled. We feel like we don't know who we are anymore because we've been living a life that's been programmed by other people. A lot of that is done subconsciously, and we're conditioned, and we th- we take it as truth that's the way it's supposed to be. And it's not like other people do it on purpose. Like, all the people in society have been conditioned one way or the other. But that's why we sometimes wake up and we're like, "That's not how I wanna live my life." Or, "That's not what I wanna be doing with my life 100% of the time. I don't feel fulfilled." So I actually have a few questions that I want you to sit with and honestly answer without judgment, without worry of what people would think. This is just for now a theoretical exercise that you can journal about and you don't have to show anybody, so don't pre-judge, pre-edit those answers. Just let yourself answer with 100% honesty. So if nobody could judge you if nobody had any thoughts, at least for the next 24 hours, what would you choose? for your life and your business. What would you want your business to look like and your life to look like? If you couldn't use the word should, but truly want, what do you want in terms of your goals, professional goals and personal goals? And I want to say something clearly that wanting money, wanting financial freedom, time freedom, wanting ease and support in your life, none of that makes you materialistic or shallow. It makes you honest because most people want that, whether they admit it or not. I recently ran a free event, Back to Basics Simplify Your Road to the first 100K. One of the participants, when I asked her that question, she honestly answered, you know what, Maggie, I just want to make money for my family. I want to create a financial independence. That's what I want. And I was like, yes, girl, good on you. And that's a great realization and being honest with yourself because at least now you can figure out the simplest path to get there and not try to please the society or think how you should run a business, what you should do, or whether it's this bad, this is better or that. You can just think, okay, what's the easiest, simplest way for me to get there? And then there's another layer here that matters. We, as women, we often carry an invisible load, unpaid care work for our kids, our aging parents, other people in our life, emotional labor. So the mental load of anticipating everybody's needs, what everybody's wants. And unfortunately, a lot of it thousands of years of social programming. UN Women actually highlight that on average, women do about two and a half times more unpaid care and domestic work than men. And that's not a small thing. That affects your energy, your time. It affects your nervous system, your stress levels, and even your ability to take risks. So when women entrepreneur says, "I'm tired," and I see that in my clients, it's rarely just about the business. It's also being the default person, the default planner, the emotional container, the organizer, the housekeeper, whatever. So when then you are that default person all the time for many years for many people around, then choosing yourself can feel selfish, and I definitely felt that in the beginning when I started choosing myself, when I started, allocating some time for meditation or stretching or deep breathing, even though I was doing it so I can show up better as a mother or partner, so I didn't lose it on my kids on Thursday night, because by then I was exhausted and couldn't take even the smallest whining or smallest challenge from them. But I still, in the beginning, felt guilty. So know that if you've never done that, if you've never chosen yourself, it can feel selfish in the beginning, even if that's the exact thing that actually makes you a better leader and mom and a partner, and that's definitely not the reason to stop or abandon that. Because if you coach yourself, or I can coach you on that, and you continue to put yourself first so that you can show up as your best self, your highest-performing self, not only for yourself, but also for people around you, you and them will be so much better for it, and you will also find more joy and fulfillment in your life altogether. So now let's talk about the moment that you do get clear on what you want and you decide on it. You make a true decision, and what is a decision? Decision is the commitment to making it happen. When we truly decide what we want, usually what follows is action towards that, right? We start moving. When we only wish, wishes very often don't... are not followed by action. Decisions are. So let's just say you start moving, and then someone close to you pushes back And sometimes that pushback is obvious, right? They express their dissatisfaction with whatever you're doing or criticize what you're doing, or sometimes it's more indirect, when there's some jokes or a cold shoulder or some weird questions out of nowhere, or a comment like, "Must be nice," or, "Are you sure this is realistic?" Here is what I want you to understand. When you change when you go after what you want, the... and you haven't done that before, that creates the change to your environment as well, right? So people around you might react because suddenly they see you confident, you standing behind what you want, and they get scared that you will outgrow them. So they will think about how you changing affects them and might be threatened by it. Or they might feel judged even though you're not judging them, or your new boundaries inconvenience them. Or they're just attached to that other version of you that was just catering to all their needs and forgot about yourself. Or, like sometimes in my client cases, they just don't understand entrepreneurship. If they're coming from traditional j- job background and now you're becoming an entrepreneur and you're becoming successful, they don't understand that life and how that happens because it happens very differently than, let's say, having a government job or a traditional nine-to-five. So when that happens, many women business owners collapse here because they interpret other people's discomfort and reaction to their success as a sign that they're doing something wrong. And of course, that could be farther from truth, the truth. This is just people around you dealing with a change that you created, and as human beings, we're all averse to change, and we need a little bit of time to adapt to it. You're not doing anything wrong. You're just creating change for people, and they will need time and maybe a little bit of your support to go through it and then get on with it in a way. And I wanna share two personal examples from my life, because I think it'll show you the dynamic very clearly. After my high school back in Poland, I wanted to get into a very elite program at a known old Polish university. And there were only 40 spots in the entire Poland, so the first year I tried, I passed the entrance exam, but they weren't... the score wasn't good enough or high enough to get one of those spots. So then I made the decision that felt right for me in my gut. I decided to wait a year, to stay home, help my mom, do some volunteer work with my dance group that I belonged to and prepare, so learn heavily so then I can try those exam again, pass them better, and get in. My dad did not like that decision. My parents were divorced, but my dad was always present in our life and lived very close to where we lived with my mom, and he did not like it, right? He wanted me to either pick a different program or go to w- work full-time, because at that time in Poland, you didn't really have options like today in North America, where students can work part-time and everybody will adjust to their schedule. So It would be really difficult for me to, A, find a job, and even if I did, it would have to be full-time job, so for them, them preparation, I thought would be hard at that time. So we fought about it, because my dad was not on board with it, but I stuck to my ground. I told him, "You know what? This is what I want, and I'm gonna do it that way, because I think it's the best for me, and if you don't like it, so be it. I'm still going after it." I didn't have the perfect picture spreadsheet to justify it. I followed my intuition. I knew I really had clarity of what I wanted to do, and I was willing to sit with the discomfort of the disagreement with my own dad and just go for it. And what happened was eventually, with time, my dad accepted the choice. After I started following through with it and he saw that, first of all, I was spending time learning. I was preparing, I was actually going to lessons in history and English, that was key subjects that I needed to pass exams on he get on with it. The year after, I not only passed the exams really well, but I also had a plan B, and I got into two programs that I wanted that I could choose from. He got completely on board, and not because I forced him, but because I stick to my decision and I stayed steady long enough for him to catch up to it. The second example is even more personal. This was when I decided to divorce my first husband. It was my decision because, not because he was a bad person. He's a very good man, but I wanted more from our marriage. We grew apart, and our relationship wasn't going in a direction that I wanted out of marriage, and it wasn't going to go that way because, whatever conversations we had, it just wasn't happening. So when I told my parents that this was the decision, my dad didn't agree, it was out of love and concern for me, but also because he liked my husband, and he was connected to my husband's family, so he was thinking like, "Oh, how am I gonna look now? My daughter is, divorcing." And that's definitely not a common thing for a woman to decide to leave, especially in my more traditional dad's mind. So again, we had a huge fight about it, and it got so intense that my dad almost cut contact with me. We almost stopped talking. Thankfully, that didn't happen, and I credit my stepmom to that, and also, unfortunately, at that time, my grandfather passed away, so my dad's father, and that sort of kept us in touch through, the grieving and the whole situation. But again, I stayed behind my choice because it's my life. I am the one living that life. I am the one living the consequences of my decisions, and I want those decisions to be the best for me and what I believe is the best for me, and not live the life that my dad would like for me, because that's not what I want, and he's not the one living it. I didn't make myself smaller to keep the peace. I didn't betray myself just to keep my dad comfortable. And then, again, later on, when I remarried with my current husband, I build a family. We have kids, and my dad is on board because he loves his grandchildren to death. Now he loves his second son-in-law, and he- we have a great relationship. So the point is, if I had chosen comfort, his comfort over my truth, over what I wanted, I would have kept life that I wouldn't be happy in, and it wouldn't have worked anyways. Here is what I would like you to take out of this podcast. As a woman entrepreneurs, we are going to make choices that other people don't understand, that your partner might not get, your parents might not get, your friends might not get. And it doesn't mean that those choices are wrong. It just means you are growing as a leader, you're growing as an entrepreneur, and that creates change in you, and through that, a change for the people around you. But your job is not to shrink, but your job is to stand behind your choices. Really own your choices. Know what you want, know why you want it, and own it, and then work through the relationships that matter that somehow get affected by it. And not because you want them to be affected negatively or you planned for it. It's just how other people in those relationships react to those choices, right? Because when you grow, it does affect people around you. they're dealing with a better version of you, more confident version of you, but also different for them. It might be a version of you who is more decisive, who now knows what she wants, who sets boundaries, and they're not used to it. But it's okay. They can get over it, and you can help them through it as well, through conversations, time. Because you wanna stop treating guilt like a compass. Guilt is not always a sign that you're doing something wrong. Sometimes it's actually a sign that you're breaking a pattern. You're breaking some societal conditioning that we've been put into that we believe is truth, and that's the only way to live your life or behave, and that's not true. So you can help people around you understand your choices or at least understand that you made them and you're not changing your mind. "I hear you, I understand your concern, and I'm still choosing this because I think that's best for me." Or, "I understand this is new for you, and I'm not asking you to agree with it, but I'm asking you to respect my choice." Or when guilt shows up, what you can tell yourself is that, "Okay, guilt is here, but this matters to me, and I'm not gonna be available to feel the guilt forever about it. I'm just not available to drown in guilt." And for people around you, you don't have to force them to agree with you. You don't have to convince them and over-explain. You can just stay consistent with your path, communicate, have conversations when they're ready to have constructive and calm conversations, not fights, and you can hold steady. Hold your boundary. Because over time, people will just change. It requires time, and some people need more time than others. My dad is one of those people. But very often they'll come on board. Don't trade your dream life away for somebody else's comfort because you can't make them c- happy. They might feel comfortable in the moment, but then there will be something else that creates discomfort in them. We are responsible for our own happiness So here is what I wanna leave you with be-before we finish this podcast. You are allowed to want what you want. You're a free human being. You were born free with your own free will, and you get to decide what you want. Nobody should impose it to you. You're allowed to build wealth, you're allowed to be ambitious, and allowed to choose a life that fits you, and run a business the way fit. And what I truly believe is, like, when you live a life that you want, you chose, you decide, you show up as your best self. You become a better leader, you become a better person, a business owner, and ultimately a better partner, a better mother, friend, auntie, because you're not resentful, you're not depleted, you're not living in quiet regret and guilt that you are compromising what's important to you for others. You're living actually in alignment of who you are and who you're meant to be. And I also truly believe that people who truly love you for who you are, they will appreciate that version of you. They will love that version of you, and they will be happier and better for it because you will be an inspiration and example for them of how a life can be lived. So if you're listening to this and you know you're ready to stop shrinking, and if you're ready to get clear on what you want and build a business and life that you love, lead with confidence either when other people have opinions, I can help you. Book a complimentary consultation through the link in the show notes, and we'll talk about where you are, where you truly want to go, and what needs to shift so you can get there. I hope to talk to you soon. Bye.