#109 - Women Aren't Burnt Out - They're Underpaid

Women aren’t burnt out — they’re underpaid.

In this episode I'm sharing a powerful reframe on burnout, income inconsistency, and why so many women feel exhausted inside their businesses.

You’ll learn the difference between true burnout and structural exhaustion, the four levels of a sustainable marketing system, and how to build revenue infrastructure that actually supports you.

If your business only moves when you’re pushing it, this episode is for you.

💥 Join me Tuesday, Feb 24th at 7pm ET for a new Masterclass - Build the Systems That Pay You Back - REGISTER

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Transcript

 Did you know that in the United States, women still earn, on average around 82 cents for every dollar earned by a man, and that women hold less than 30% of senior leadership roles globally. And yes, progress has been made and yes, things are changing. And of course this episode is dropping on February 17th, which is the Chinese New Year, and we're entering this powerful year of the fire horse.

It's been forecast by. Astrologers and people who know more about this than I, um, to be a year of big action taking, just really moving into momentum. And so I suspect a lot of women are gonna step up this year into leadership roles, probably in numbers, never before seen. However, it's still 2026 and it's kind of exhausting to realize how much invisible labor women are still carrying.

Because we are socialized to give first, right to serve generously, to stay humble and to work harder to achieve the same financial and status goals as men. So, and this is happening, even when we're building our own businesses. Many of us are still overgiving. We are overdelivering and underearning. And so, and this is not even to mention the insane amounts of systemic focus on our appearance, body dysmorphia and surface level criticisms that women have been enduring since literally the beginning of time.

So that's why today I wanna talk a little bit about burnout and kind of qualifying it, because what I see is not a lack. Of discipline. It's definitely not laziness. Um, it's a lack of systems that support the end goal and being a part of systems that don't favor women to begin with, right? Or the general lack of systems within your business that are designed to get you paid.

So we're gonna talk about burnout. I will present to you what I think can be the antidote to burnout, and we're gonna talk about building systems that help you get paid. All right, pull up a seat and let's do this. Hey there. Welcome to the Mindset To Market Podcast, your go-to space for practical tools and solutions to the everyday challenges of being a creative and soulful entrepreneur living in a material world.

I'm your host Debra Smith, a holistic business coach and marketing strategist with 17 years of experience. I help my clients bust through mindset blocks and learn daily marketing practices that balance personal wellness with financial growth and impact. I'm here to offer you support with creativity, mindset, practical how-tos, and getting into imperfect messy actions so you can experience daily breakthroughs as you grow.

If you're a purpose-driven entrepreneur building an online business, you're in the right place. Let's dive in.

Hey there. Welcome back to Mindsets Market. Thank you so much for being on the journey with me and for listening. Um, I wanna shout out everybody who messaged me or shared episodes 1 0 7 and 1 0 8, the my two part interview with Mickey Agarwal. I got a ton of feedback and messages. You guys, that means the world to me to hear from the listeners is like, it's like piercing through this bubble and there's other people on the other side.

So you know, when I'm creating this content, I'm thinking about you and how I can bring on guests and have conversations and, and share content that's gonna actually help you. So thank you for all the messages. If you haven't yet listened to those episodes, I highly recommend it. Mickey is other levels of inspiring in her work.

Um. To create sustainable businesses. And so yeah, go check it out. Um, okay, let's talk about today's topic. Burnout. I think most women are not burnt out. They're underpaid. And I'm basing this a lot on my own personal lived experience, but truly the statistics also back this up. The data backs it up. They're underpaid financially under supported structurally, and we are over responsible for holding everything together.

In this at the same time. And so, and for women of color, by the way, I wanna acknowledge who are navigating both gender inequity and systemic racism that is baked into these capitalist systems. The structural burden is even greater and even more dire. And so it's not, we often will refer to ourselves as burnt out.

I do this all the time. I'm like calling myself out as I tell you this. And, but I have personal empirical data to know that there's a difference between actually being burnt out and just simply not getting compensated for the work you're doing. So for a really long time, I was saying I'm burnt out. I thought I needed better boundaries, more discipline, and more focus inside my online business.

But then I remembered what it was like in the early days of running my juice bar. So talking about back in 2008, 2009, like the first couple of years in business when I was getting up at four o'clock in the morning to go pick up truckloads of fresh produce. Personally driving my own vehicle to go pick up, uh, the food from like Hunts Point or some big giant produce warehouse or.

Farmer's markets and then managing eight to 10 hour days with multiple citywide activations, like teams of people in multiple different popups. The juice truck was driving around, you know, commercial kitchen space being run to produce deliverable products and events happening. And then I'd get home, you know, on an average day by like seven or 8:00 PM in time to eat something, take a shower, go to sleep, do it all over again the next day.

And I actually did experience real, mental, emotional, and physical burnout. After a few years of that system, obviously I had to hire help and start, you know, shifting into a better system. But later on down the road, when I pivoted to running my online business in an entirely virtual and digital business model around 2019, when I, you know, really shut down the juice bar and all the different activations, the type of exhaustion that I was feeling was really different because I was still figuring out.

How to automate everything, how to set up systems that were scalable, and I was tired and I was frustrated, but it wasn't from doing too much. It was from doing all of that work, but not getting paid because when I was hauling in thousands of dollars a day during the years, the early years of the juice truck, it's like, yes, I was tired, but I didn't really care that much because I was getting paid.

When you're in an endless cycle of working. All the time and creating content and reaching out to people and trying to do sales messaging and launching products, and you're not getting reciprocated at the level that you can afford to live your life. That becomes, that's. A different type of exhaustion.

And so what I realized is that I wasn't burnt out this in this second iteration of a business. I was underpaid. I wasn't making enough money, and I don't just mean that financially either. I actually felt like systemically things were not necessarily working in my favor. But once I started to view it through the lens of like, would I be this frustrated if I was also making really good money, it was clear to me that it wasn't.

That I'm burnt out. It was that I didn't have a system supporting the work that I was doing. So I was working hard, but I did not have a system that would work for me. And so many women that I talk to have the same situation. They are willing to put in the work and they're, they are putting in the work, but the system either doesn't exist inside their, their business, or it's not set up in such a way that it actually makes things easier and become sustainable.

And then of course, scalable. So the problem is that more effort does not necessarily equal a structure. It's just more effort. And so most women that I talk to you about this, they say they're showing up consistently. They have created a content plan and it's. It's something that they're acting on, right?

They're taking action. They care deeply about their client. They care deeply about their customer, their audience. They're putting in the time to be generous and serve generously. So inside their coaching programs, inside their content in general, they're giving a lot, right? But still their income is inconsistent.

And when income is inconsistent, that your nervous system never fully relaxes, you know, you can never really calm down because you're not quite sure you're gonna make. The quota that you have for bills, for rent, for just general needs, not having a cushion. Right. That's, that's stressful. And so you don't have a confidence problem.

You literally have a nervous system, uh, you know, an unregulated nervous system because you're not earning enough money. And this can be solved at the foundational level. So. One of the things that, it took me a while to do this. I'm not gonna pretend this was like an overnight success, but about three years ago, I, I still felt like I was, you know, pedaling really fast, but not building any actual sustainable speed within my business.

And so I took a lot of time to step back and audit what I had going on and look at where they were. Cracks in the foundation. And by doing that, not only did it make it so much more profound, what I'm actually teaching and working with my clients, but it it, I turned the corner on how my business is working financially and that, and it makes a huge difference.

Trust me, when you start earning money, you can breathe and you. Again, a relaxed nervous system and you can sit back when you have, you know, audience growth happening in an automatic way when you're not, while you're not sitting at your desk, and when you can be having sales come through while you're still like, you know, when you're on vacation or when you're not necessarily clocked in, it makes a big difference.

So if your business only moves when you are actively pushing it, which is what I did for many, many years, then you don't actually have a system in place that supports you. You have more effort. And all that efforting is, is exhausting, right? So that could actually lead to burnout. So I wanna introduce to you this idea that every sustainable marketing system has four levels to it.

There's the foundational level, okay? And at the foundational level, you are making core decisions about your business. This is gonna be where you are deciding things about your personal brand identity, setting up your core values, deciding what you want your signature offer to be. So that's gonna be the thing that you are known for.

The thing that you can sell over and over and over again in some variation or iteration. And then of course, your lead generation in your sales systems. That's all. Sitting at the foundational level, and then you have audience, right? So level two is gonna be audience building, audience growth, and. If your foundations are not in place, building an audience is gonna be a heavier lift because your messaging will not be attracting the right people.

So if you've ever started doing growth Audi, uh, list growth, and you have like all kinds of different people on your list, like people, like some people that you knew from college and some people that you know, came to an event that you'd had and some people that got on your list for some, a freebie that you were testing out and it sort of feels scattered and all over the place.

When you tighten up your foundational level and you have clarity on exactly what you're selling and the messaging that goes with that, the audience level gets a lot easier because you're attracting the right people because you know exactly what to say. So level two is building an audience. Level three is converting members of your audience to leads.

So generating leads who are genuinely interested in what you sell, who are aware of the problem that they have, and aware that you have a solution, right? That's a good lead. Somebody who's problem aware and knows that you provide an offer that solves their problem and are curious, what is your offer?

Like, they're, they're dabbling in your content. They're listening to your, you know, podcast. They're checking out your landing page, your sales page. Those are leads. And then of course, the final level is sales. And we wanna be able to convert leads to sales. And so le if level one, if foundations inside your business is weak, then everything above it is gonna feel heavier and be misaligned.

So most of us try to fix income problems at level four, right? So we try to do different sales tactics, different sales strategies, and it is true that most of us, um. Could do a better job at sales and have better sales messaging, better sales strategy, and better sales systems in place. That's almost always true, but if you have a problem at the foundational level because your signature offer is not clear.

Or perhaps the positioning of how you solve the common problem for your audience isn't clear. Or if the structure of how a lead can easily find out details of your work and how to pay you with little to no friction and move through that process. If that's unclear, then all the sales strategy and all the messaging strategy in the world will be wasted because you have a foundational level problem.

So we have to look at. The basic foundations before we start trying to tweak things in sales, you know, and developing leads. And even at audience growth level. So when we're talking about avoiding burnout with our online marketing, we're talking about having a strong foundation in place, a strong signature offer in place.

And so let's pause right there for one second. What does it mean to have a strong signature offer in place to avoid burnout by having a system to, to sell and share your signature offer. In my mind, there are four really clear ingredients in this. It's that your offer solves a clear and urgent problem, that has a simple process that a customer can move through to get the result that they desire.

That it's very much aligned with who you are at your core value level, and it's sustainable. It's something that you can deliver over and over again when you have that in place inside your signature offer. Your marketing really does start to get easier and it starts to feel lighter. Without that, it's gonna feel like a lot of guessing.

It's gonna feel like, you know that throwing spaghetti against the wall that people always talk about, so. If you're listening to this and you're thinking, I am not sure that my signature offer is clear, or if you feel confused about what a signature offer could look like for your business, or if you have a really great signature offer, but it's not yet converting the way that you want it to.

Then I do wanna invite you to a special live training. Next Tuesday, February 24th at 7:00 PM Eastern. I'm gonna host a training that's called Build the System that pays you back. And in this training I'm gonna be walking you through the four levels of structure for your online marketing system, the four ingredients in detail that create a high converting signature offer, and what many traditional funnels fail to do.

And I'm also gonna be sharing what it looks like to build a revenue infrastructure. So this is literally the antidote to burning out. It's having clarity on a signature offer that lives inside of your business, that you can easily create a system around a system that's gonna do some of that heavy lifting for you.

So if you're tired of guessing, if you're tired of that, like. Not really sure what I'm doing, throwing spaghetti against the wall with my marketing. Please come because you will walk away with some really concrete ideas about how you can tighten that up. And you can work this year, this week, this month on creating an easier pathway for your customer to find out about that offer in leads to sales.

So the link is in the show notes. Um, please click it or if you see me on social media, um, just DM me the word system and I will message you back and send you the link. So as we wrap this up, I wanna come back to where we started from. Yes. The broader systems have not always been built in women's favor.

We still earn less on average, we still hold fewer leadership roles, and we still carry invisible labor in our homes, in our workplaces, and inside our own businesses. And again, for women of color navigating these systems and also systemic racism, it's a lot heavier. And so that has got to be stated. Um, it's not imagined, and it's not something that you're just, you know, you're not crazy, right?

It's structural. But here's what I also know. When you choose to build a business, you are no longer just participating in someone else's system. You're building something for yourself. You are building on your own, and your business doesn't have to replicate these old patterns. This is where we get to exercise choices and use our creativity.

It does not have to depend on us over functioning. It does not have to reward you only when you exhaust yourself. And so you can build a structure with clarity and you can build infrastructure that pays you back. So before you call yourself burnt out again, I want you to pause and ask yourself, am I exhausted because I'm incapable, or I am.

Am I exhausted because my business doesn't yet have a structure that's supporting me in the way that I want it to. And again, I, my argument here is that most women are not actually burnt out. They're underpaid and undersupported by the systems that preexist these moments that we're in right now. But, you know, over efforting without the right foundation.

But the great news and the most important thing that you should take away from this is that this is something that we can change and that we are changing. So that's, that's. That's the gold, right? We're we're changing this. And again, if you are ready to build a system that supports you instead of drains you, then I'd love for you to join me on Tuesday.

Let's stop recreating these old patterns and start building businesses that actually work for us and. My final thought for you friend, is that I'm so grateful to have you listening and on this journey with me. Thank you for sticking with me and thanks again for all the feedback that I've been getting, and I look forward to seeing you next week.

And until then, may you be vibrant.