Why Reacting to Business Problems Instead of Analyzing Them Is Keeping You Stuck | EP 35

It's early morning, you haven't had your coffee yet, and a message comes in that makes your stomach drop. Something went sideways overnight and before you've even opened your laptop, your brain is already spiraling. Whose fault is this? Is it me? Do I need to fix everything right now? Dana knows this feeling intimately. She describes sitting with the weight of a client's stalled Pinterest results before she'd even looked at the account, already absorbing the problem emotionally, already running through a mental checklist of everything that could be wrong, already exhausted before the workday began. That moment of emotional absorption before analysis? It's not a personal flaw. It's one of the most common and quietly costly patterns in entrepreneurship. And this episode is about breaking it.

Dana takes an honest look at how entrepreneurs, especially those building solo or with small teams, handle problems when they arise in their business. She talks about why problems feel so personal when you're the one who built the thing, how blame (both outward and inward) keeps you spinning without actually solving anything, and what it actually looks like to shift from reactive to analytical. Drawing from her own client work and research on leadership burnout, Dana walks through a practical toolkit

What to Listen for in This Episode:

1. The difference between feeling responsible and feeling personally implicated. Caring about your business is not the same as making every business problem about your worth as a person. 

2. Blame is a holding pattern, not a solution. Whether you're pointing the finger outward (at a client, a contractor, the algorithm) or inward (I should have caught this, I knew better), blame keeps you busy without moving you forward. 

3. You might be solving the symptom, not the root cause. The Five Whys technique; originally developed by Toyota, is Dana's go-to framework for getting underneath what's actually driving a recurring problem. When you keep asking why, you often find that the real issue isn't the client complaint or the drop in traffic. It's a process gap, a communication breakdown, or a system that was never built to last.

If you're the one solving every problem in your business, it might be worth asking: is that a sign of strong leadership or a system that was never designed to work without you? 

Transcript

You're listening to Entrepreneur Encounter, the podcast where soft skills meet real talk for creative business owners who are building with purpose. I'm Dana, a Pinterest marketing strategist and agency owner helping wedding pros and creative entrepreneurs get seen without burning out. And I'm Sarah, a business and team strategist who helps small teams and podcasters communicate clearly, lead with empathy and grow sustainably. Together, we're unpacking the messy, side of entrepreneurship.

from boundaries to burnout, leadership to listening, so you can build a business that actually fits your life.
Something went wrong in your business this week. Maybe it already happened or maybe you're in the middle of it literally right now. And if you're anything like me, your brain probably did one of two things the moment it happened or currently right now. It either went straight to whose fault is this? And maybe that person was you or it went to I have to fix everything right now and I don't even know where to start that decision like

paralysis, so to speak. And here's what I want to offer you today. Both of those reactions are completely understandable and they're also the two things that are most likely to make the problem worse because the real skill of problem solving, the one nobody really teaches you when you're building a business, isn't about finding fault or moving fast. It's about solving the right thing at the right level.

without it consuming your entire being or your entire mind. For those that are new here, I'm Dana. I am one half of the entrepreneur encounter duo. And today we're going to slow this down together. I want to tell you about a morning I had about two years ago, a client had sent me a message that their Pinterest results had completely stalled out. And before I'd even had my coffee, was already deep in my own head. Was it something I missed?

Was it the strategy not working? Was it their content? Was it the algorithm? Was it their website? I was already carrying this problem like it was mine to solve alone, and I hadn't even opened their account yet. I was just running through the motions of like checking things in my head of what to look for. And honestly, that's what we do. We absorb problems emotionally before we even understand what the problem actually is. And then we wonder,

why we're exhausted mentally. Today, we're changing that pattern. Before we get into it, I do want to name why I think this topic matters so much right now, especially for creative business owners and entrepreneurs who are in the early to mid stage of building something on their own. When you're running your own business, problems land a lot differently. There's no


buffer. There's no department to hand things off to as if you were working a regular nine to five. When something goes wrong, it often feels like it went wrong because of you because most of us are just a one woman show, a one man band. And that personal charge, that feeling of responsibility mixed with a little bit of shame or worry makes it really hard to think clearly or to remove that emotion or feelings from the facts.

So it makes us reactive instead of just responsive. And here's the thing that I want you to take from this. There's actually a lot of research on this. A piece from WellHub on leadership burnout describes leaders as emotional shock absorbers. Everything hits them first. And when that happens repeatedly without any real framework for processing it all the way through, you get exhaustion.

Are we surprised here? I don't think so. You get reactive decision-making. You get leaders who are working incredibly hard, but solving the same problems over and over again. So what we're covering today is really about four things. First, why we absorb problems emotionally and what's actually happening when we do. Second, how to move from blame to analysis.

which sounds simple, but is generally probably one of the harder skills in business to learn. And it's something that I am still in full transparency learning myself. Third, how to find the root cause of a problem instead of just treating the symptom that's yelling the loudest. And fourth, and this is maybe the part I'm most excited about is how to actually teach your team to solve problems.

instead of escalating everything up to you because if you're the only one solving problems, that's a problem in itself. Let's start at the very beginning. Why do problems feel so personal when you're leading a business? Part of it is just wiring. When you care deeply about your work, which most of you listening do, otherwise you wouldn't be building this business in the first place, every problem carries a kind of identity weight.

And if the launch didn't go well, it's not just a launch issue. It starts to feel like a me issue. If a team member drops the ball, you might feel like it reflects on your leadership. If a client is unhappy, something tightens in your chest before you've even read the full message. There's actually a name for this in leadership research and writers on leadership burnout have called it the sandwich pressure. You're being pushed from the top by results.

and from the side by your team's needs and you become the thing absorbing all of that. And that's not sustainable for the long term. But here's something I've had to learn the hard way. And that's absorbing a problem emotionally and solving a problem are two completely different activities. And you really cannot do both at the same time. The real issue usually isn't that you care too much. It's that there's no separation between feeling responsible

and feeling personally implicated. Those are very different things and the moment you can feel one without the other, your problem solving gets dramatically clear. So here's an example from my own work. I had a client whose Pinterest account wasn't gaining traction. Month two, month three, it still felt pretty flat. And I noticed something in myself. Every time I opened their dashboard, I felt this low hum of anxiety.

And because of that anxiety, I kept making small tweaks, changing one pin, adjusting a board description, switching up a keyword. There was lots of activity, but it wasn't actually diagnosing anything. I was just moving things around to feel like I was doing something. That anxiety was driving my behavior, not genuine analysis. And it wasn't until I paused and said, okay, what is actually happening here? Not how do I feel about it?

but what is the data actually telling me? Then I found it. Their content itself was the issue. Their pins were beautiful, but the images weren't optimized for Pinterest search. That was it. One root cause. Once I found it, the fix was clear, but I'd spent almost a month solving around it instead of solving it directly. So here's the reflection question for you today.

Think about a problem you're currently navigating in your business. Just one. Don't go down the laundry list of things that are wrong. Just pick one problem. And when you think about it, where does your attention go first? To what's wrong? To what caused it? To who caused it? Or to how you feel about it? Just notice it, and we'll come back to that later on. Okay, so now we've established that absorbing problems emotionally slows us down.

Now, let's talk about the specific version of that, which I think is most common blame. Blame goes in two directions outward. Someone else caused this a contractor, a client, a platform algorithm, mostly the algorithm. I'm just kidding or inward. I should have caught this. I knew better. This is what happens when I try to grow too fast and both feel like they're doing something useful like

If I can just identify the source, I've made progress. But blame in either direction is actually a holding pattern because it keeps you busy without you actually moving forward. Harvard Business School actually has a useful framing for this, and this research on root cause analysis talks about what they call the failure to ask why syndrome. And it's the tendency to not systemically investigate.

what actually caused the problem and instead just react to the surface level issue. And when leaders do that repeatedly, obviously the same problems will keep coming back. So what does this shift from blame to analysis actually look like in real time or real practice? It starts with one move that sounds incredibly simple and is actually surprisingly hard. Describe the problem in factual terms without interpretation.

And if you have any children, this one is probably the one that you notice the most. Cause every time I try to ask my children, well, what happened? What is the problem? You get their interpretation first without any facts. we want to go from not this client is impossible to this client has sent me three messages in the last week expressing frustration about deliverable timelines. Not my launch totally failed.


but I had 300 people on my wait list and only 14 converted. That's a fact. Now I have something to work with. The conversion rate is the problem. That's specific. That's a smart problem and it's solvable. So because when you say the launch failed, the problem feels enormous and permanent. When you say I had a 4.6 conversion rate on my warm audience, now I'm asking a different question.

What's typical for this kind of launch and where in the funnel did we lose people? Those are answerable questions. I work with a lot of creative business owners who come to me convinced that Pinterest just doesn't work for them. I have heard that numerous times actually, probably too many for me to even count. And when I look at their account or I look at their industry, the issue is almost always one of about four things. They don't have a consistent posting schedule.

Their images are not optimized for search, their boards are too vague, or there's a disconnect between their pin and what they're actually selling. So their pin content doesn't match their website. So the platform isn't broken. There is a specific nameable issue. And once we're able to name it, it stops feeling like a verdict on this marketing platform doesn't work for me. We can make it work for you. So.

The thing about blame, especially self blame, is that it actually keeps you stuck in the problem emotionally and that sometimes is really hard to get out of. And analysis gives you something to do that isn't just spiral out of control into I'm to blame, I can't do this. So the question goes from what went wrong in a vague sense to specifically what happened when, how often and where's the pattern.

So here's the reflection question for this section. Is there a problem in your business right now that you've been describing in emotional or interpretive language? Words like failing, impossible, broken. What would it look like to describe the same problem in one or two specific factual sentences? Try it. Literally, I want you to pause this episode right now and write it down. I will wait.

All right, so we've gotten out of the blame loop. We've described the problem clearly. Now the question is, how do we actually find what's causing it? Because here's the thing, most of the problems that feel really big and recurring in your business aren't actually about the thing you're looking at. They're about something upstream from it. A client emails you frustrated, that's a symptom. The root cause might be that your delivery timeline wasn't clearly communicated upfront.

Fix the communication and the frustrated emails should stop. A team member keeps missing deadlines. That's the symptom. The root cause might be that they don't have a clear picture of priorities. So when two things compete, they're guessing. Fix the clarity and the deadline start holding. My favorite symptom, or not my favorite, but one I identify often, your Pinterest traffic keeps dropping. Symptom.

The root cause might be that your content is beautiful, but it isn't keyword optimized. So Pinterest doesn't know how to show it to those looking for your solutions to their pain points, the inspiration, the motivation. So fix the SEO strategy and the traffic starts recovering. There's a tool that I love for this and it comes from manufacturing of all places, but it's incredibly useful for a small business leadership.

and it's called the five whys. It was developed by Toyota in the 1930s and it's exactly what it sounds like. When a problem shows up, you ask why five times, each answer revealing a deeper layer of the cause until you get through the thing that's actually driving it. That process is going to be linked in the show notes, but here's how it might look in a real business scenario.

So let's say your client inquiry rate drops suddenly. Why did our inquiry rate drop? Fewer people are reaching the contact page on our website. Why are fewer people reaching the contact page? Website traffic is down overall. Why is website traffic down? We stopped publishing consistent blog content two months ago. Why did we stop publishing blog content? Our content writer left and we hadn't built a system to replace her. Why didn't we build a backup system?

We assumed that she would stay and we never documented the process. And there it is. The root cause isn't we need more inquiries or even we need to fix our website. The root cause is a process gap, an undocumented system that depended on one person staying indefinitely. Fix that and you've actually solved something durable. If you want to try this yourself, MindTools has a free really readable breakdown of the FiveWise technique. And like I said earlier, I'll link it in the show notes.

It takes about 10 minutes to read and even less time to use. So one important note about this, when you're doing the five Y's, the answer to each Y should never be a person. It should always be a process, a system, a communication gap, a structure, because the goal isn't accountability in the punitive sense. The goal is understanding. As Atlas's engineering team puts it, and I love this framing,

People aren't the root cause. The conditions that allow the problem to happen are the root cause. So the reflection question here, think about a problem you've solved in your business in the last few months. Did you solve the symptom or did you solve the root cause? How do you know and has that problem come back yet? That's something I would love to hear from all of our listeners. So please make sure that you share that answer with us.

in comments on social media or email us directly. Okay, so this last section I think is most underrated in conversations about leadership. We talk a lot about how to solve problems, but we don't talk nearly enough about how to get out of being the person who solves every single problem. Especially if you have a team, whether even a small one or even just one contractor and problems consistently get escalated to you, that's worth looking at.

because there are two possibilities. Either your team doesn't feel empowered to solve the things on their own, or they don't have the framework or the clarity to know how. And both of those are actually things that you can address directly. Research on root cause analysis in organizations makes a point that I think applies directly to small business leaders too. And that's when leadership, the question from who made this mistake to

what in our system allowed this to happen? Something shifts for the entire team. People stop being defensive and they start getting more curious about what's going on. And it's that curiosity that actually drives improvement overall. So here's a practical shift that you can make this week. The next time a team member brings a problem to you, instead of solving for them, which I know may be difficult,

Try asking three questions before you offer a solution. First, what do you think is causing this? Second, what have you already tried or considered? And third, what would you do if I wasn't available? These questions do something very important. They communicate that you trust the person to think on their own. They also give you information about what their capacity actually is.

So you can coach into that rather than just patch the hole yourself. And I wanna name something here too as well that might feel a little uncomfortable. Sometimes when we solve everything ourselves, it's not just because we're the leader, it's because solving things ourselves feels faster or easier. And it gives us a sense of control when things feel uncertain. And this one hits a little close to home for me.

We've come to define our value as leaders by how much we're needed. And that's worth sitting with for a while. Because problem solving is a skill that you can build in yourself, but it's also a culture that you can build in your team, however big or small the team is. And the leaders who are able to do both, who think clearly and also grow thinkers around them, they're the ones who get to build something sustainable.

and successful long-term, not just something that works while they're watching it. So the reflection question for you here is when your team brings a problem to you, what's your default response? Do you solve it or do you ask questions? And is your current default serving you and your team well? Okay, so let's land this somewhere you can actually use this week. The core thing I want you to take from today

Problems are not verdicts. They're not proof that you're not cut out for this or that your business is broken or that something failed. They're just information and your job as a leader is to read that information clearly without the static of blame or panic and respond from that clarity. Strong leaders solve problems without carrying them alone. They feel the weight of something going wrong and then they set that weight.

down long enough to actually take the time to look at it and understand it. So your action item this week on top of the reflection questions is to take one problem you're currently sitting with in your business, something you've been avoiding or spinning your wheels on or something that you have noticed keeps coming back again and again. Write it down in one or two specific factual sentences.

No emotion, no interpretation, just what is actually happening. Then ask yourself, why five times? And see where you land. You might be surprised how quickly a big, vague problem becomes a small, solvable one. And that is the question I want to leave with you today. Wherever you are right now, it's just a starting point. So thank you so much for spending part of your Friday with me today. This show exists because

Sarah and I believe in soft skills. The way we think, the way we lead ourselves and our teams, the way we respond when things get hard matter just as much as the strategy that we are following, maybe even more. If today's episode gave you something useful, I'd love if you would share it with another entrepreneur or business owner in your life. Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do for someone you care about is to send them this episode that makes them feel

a little less alone in the hard parts. And if you want to keep going deeper on topics like this, leadership, clarity, and the real work of building something sustainable, our newsletter is where I share the ideas and questions that don't always make it into the episode. So you can find the link in the show notes. We'll be back next Friday. Until then, be patient with yourself when things go sideways. That's not a sign you're doing something wrong. It's just a part of being a business owner. We'll see you next week.

You can now follow us on LinkedIn at entrepreneur encounter.

Thanks for spending time with us today. If something in this episode gave you a fresh perspective, share it with a friend or send us a DM. We love hearing how these conversations land with you. And if you're curious about how Soft Skills can support your next season of growth, we each have more resources to share. You can find Dana on Instagram at danas.desk.nc for Pinterest strategy and intentional marketing. And Sarah.

at UR Rembert for team development, business leadership, and podcast support. Until next time, keep leading with purpose and growing with intention.