EP 205 - The Identity Tax: Making Next-Level Decisions Before the Evidence Arrives

If you have ever made a significant business decision, a hire, an investment, a structural shift, and then spent weeks wondering if you moved too fast, you are not dealing with a strategy problem. You are dealing with an identity gap, and your nervous system is registering it as a genuine threat. This is what an identity shift in business actually feels like from inside it, not from the resolved, polished place, but from the messy middle. In this episode, Jessica shares what she has been living through for the last four months: building an entirely new infrastructure, COO, in-house team, launch manager, replicable systems before the revenue arrived to justify it. And why the discomfort of that gap is not a red flag. It is a frequency signal.

Jessica names what she has actually done this year in terms of growth and expansion: hiring a COO, transitioning her OBM into a client-facing role offering build-with-you and build-for-you services, building an in-house team including podcast producer, designer, VA and ads capacity, investing in a launch manager, expanding AI integration, and building replicable systems across the whole business all before the corresponding revenue landed to confirm it.

She introduces the concept of the identity tax: the discomfort you pay before the results arrive. She names the specific nervous system mechanics of what happens when your survival identity, the part wired to link safety with certainty, is asked to operate from a frequency it has not lived yet. She draws on her Clear, Align, Leverage framework to show why identity upgrade must precede infrastructure investment, not the other way around.

She shares the lived texture of the last four months: the 3am questioning, the moments of looking at investment going out while income had not yet matched it, and what she returned to again and again. She also shares the personal story of how her experience with agoraphobia and panic disorder taught her that the only way through discomfort is through it and why the same principle applies in business.

She closes with the question: is it uncomfortable because it's wrong, or is it uncomfortable because it's next? And an honest, warm invitation to women who are in that gap right now and want support that holds identity expansion and strategic execution simultaneously.

The Identity Tax: What It Is, Why It's Inevitable, and Why It Means You're on Track

There is a specific kind of discomfort that comes with making next-level decisions before the evidence arrives to back them up. It is not garden-variety nerves. It is not imposter syndrome in the conventional sense. It is something more specific, and once you understand what is actually happening in your nervous system when you make that kind of decision, the experience changes completely.

Jessica calls it the identity tax. The gap between the decision you have made and the revenue, the results, or the external confirmation that has not arrived yet. It is the wobbling you stand in while the strategy plays out. The 3am questioning. The moments where the investment is going out and the income is not yet going up, and your whole body is pulling the alarm.

Here is why that alarm is pulling: your survival identity, the part of you that learned to link safety with certainty is being asked to operate from a frequency it has never lived. Your autonomic nervous system registers the gap between your current reality and your next-level decision as genuine danger. Not metaphorically. Not in a woo sense. Literally, the gap reads as a threat.

This is why "just believe in yourself" does not cut it. This is why vision boarding your way through a multi-six-figure hiring decision feels hollow. It is not a mindset problem. It is a frequency problem. Your body is living in the revenue you have, while your decisions are being made from the revenue you are building toward. That gap is the identity tax. And it is unavoidable&

Ready to go deeper?

→ The Scaling Ceiling Diagnostic (Free)

Find out exactly what's bottlenecking your next big aligned move in just 5 minutes.

→ Access the Vault here

 My complete business rebirth vault - 10 programs, frameworks, and backend tools for rebuilding your business from identity to income. 

→ Explore working together

Connect with me on Instagram

@jessica.read.co

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to the Fck Yes Frequency. The podcast where strategy meets energetics and your business gets to feel like a full body yes. I'm Jessica Read, frequency first business mentor for the woman building a sustainable, scalable, and sexy business grounded in her unapologetic self-expression, authority, and embodied leadership. Let's drop into the episode. There is something I wanna talk to you about today that I haven't seen much conversation about in the online space with this level of honesty, and that is this making next level decisions before you have the evidence or the revenue to back them up and not just making those decisions, but then also taking the steps into these decisions is one of the most identity confronting things that you will ever do in business, and that is not because you know everything is wrong or the investment doesn't make sense or you shouldn't be doing this. But because your nervous system does not give a sh*t about your five year vision when it is looking at your bank account right now, and you are having a stress response and an emotional attachment to that. And for the last, where are we? End of March as I record this. So the last three and a half months. Really, since November last year, four months now. This has been my lived reality, so I wanna talk to you about this because I'm coming out the other side of it. I've been in it. I'm still in it to some capacity, and I think that it's one of the most important things that I could share with you. Because as you know, when we are building our empires, our strategy must keep moving forward. Our business has to keep going. It needs momentum. And simultaneously to that, you are a human growing your business, whose identity is continually being challenged, who is going to have her deepest fears exposed. Who is going to have to face the trauma responses that come up in her body, because that's what it's taking for you to step forward and grow. So from this messy middle of building the business, taking the next level step, making the next level decision, and taking the next level steps before the reality and the evidence of the thing that you're building towards is fully there, that can be a really scary place to be. Exciting but scary. So that is what today is. It's less of an episode, more of a transmission. I wanted to share. It is me telling you what it actually feels like and why the discomfort that you are sitting in, if you are in this place, right now might actually be the most important data point that you have in your whole business. So, let me tell you a little bit about what I've done this year, over the last couple of months in terms of growth and expansion. There was some things I identified, as we always do, really through my Frequency First Diagnostic that were bottlenecking my business and my growth. And so, what I needed to do was expand the way that I had set up my team. I needed to expand my use of AI, which I was already using really quite well to be honest, but have really expanded that. So I bought on a COO, I moved my OBM, who was doing a phenomenal job and actually probably one of the hardest conversations to initiate for me from a leadership level. But then one of the most exciting and rewarding conversations, and I could probably tell you a little bit about that in a minute, was to have that conversation. But we hired a COO. I moved my then OBM, now client success person, into a role that is a very client facing that actually leverages her skills even more so than I possibly could by having her hide in the back end of my business. So we've brought on this amazing client support, additional coaching support within my mastermind. Oh, so she's not even support by the way. She does full, build with you inside of the mastermind. She offers with me a build for you service tier for our backend existing clients, which meant that we refined all of our onboarding experiences from scratch. We have upleveled all of our experiences. We are offering a next level, really personalized level of detail when it comes to supporting you and your business and your goals and bringing people into our world. It's really exciting. We built out our in-house team. So podcast producer, designer, VA, in-house ads capacity. I invested in a launch manager, not because I didn't know what I was doing, but because there is a level that is in my vision. There are people that I deeply, deeply want to impact through my Frequency Rebirth Program and through everything that I'm doing that I honestly wanted support with. We've been building more replicable systems across the whole business, and as I said, brought in, I've brought in a lot more AI, which I think I might even do a whole episode on how I'm using the AI, because no, we're not doing the open claw. We're not having it, you know, run every aspect of the business. We're not doing that at this point. There are things that I'm not comfortable yet to bring in to do that. But there are a lot of things that we are using it for, to streamline, to ensure brand quality, to save me hours and hours and hours and hours to save my training with my team. Hours and hours and hours. Like everything. There's so many different things. All of this required me to invest in platforms, to invest in people, to invest in training. And you think about when that process of that growth is happening. We've invested in the team and we are doing all of these things, and we've built these onboarding processes and these systems ready for what we are now launching. So last month we started with the first launch of the Rebirth Program. And now we are analyzing that, working with a launch manager ready to get it out again to optimize what we did. But I couldn't have done any of that. Well, I could have, but I would not have looked the same, in the same way of scaling. And so now I'm starting to see the evidence. Now the revenue is starting to justify everything that I have built, but what I had to sit in first was this in-between, of knowing that I am in a building phase, and that building phase doesn't always have one. The direct revenue straight away. And two, because we're building things to actually hold it. And two, that it took a lot from me in terms of challenging my identity. It challenged my money beliefs, it challenged my discomfort looking at things coming out, coming out, and the income not going up yet. I had to hold the long term vision through this whole process. And I think that somewhere in my body because I knew in that knowing that I have. That my business could not grow into what it was meant to become if I was still operating, like the version of it that existed. Even just last year. The infrastructure had to be built, the capacity had to be created, the container had to be ready to hold the growth. We haven't just planned. You know, for four people, 10 people, 20 people, we have made sure that what we are implementing can hold the growth as it goes, as it grows. We are building for the long term and I am making decisions not from current circumstances. And you know that when you do that, it is really f*cking uncomfortable. So when we do this, no one is going to tell you, but I will. This feels like a threat even when you know it is right. Even when the strategy is so sound. Even when every part of your intellectual brain is on board with what you are doing, your body is likely going to read this move as danger, and depending on what kind of influences you have around you outside, only you're investing in this, when you are gonna make the money back on that, can you afford those things? This is what we need to talk about, okay? Because here is what is actually happening in your nervous system when you make a next level decision. Before the income matches it and before the evidence is fully there yet. Your survival identity. The part of you that learn to link safety with certainty is being asked to do something that it was actually never wired for. It is being asked, you act from a frequency that it hasn't lived yet. And that is genuinely threatening to the nervous system, not metaphorically, not in a woo sense. Literally, your autonomic nervous system registers the gap between your current reality and the decision that you are making, and it pulls the alarm. And this is why when we say things like, just believe in yourself. You've got this. It just doesn't cut it. This is why simply just vision boarding your way through a multi six figure hiring decision feels really unsupportive. Now, this is not you with a mindset problem. This is a frequency problem at its finest. Your body is still living in the revenue that you have while your decisions are being made from a revenue that you are building towards. And that gap between like that space between your current reality and the next level decision, I call that identity tax. It is the discomfort that you pay before the results arrive. It's that, if you can see me, if you're listening, you're just hearing me make weird noises, but if you can see me, it's like the wobbling, you know that you are standing in while this strategy is playing out. It says moments where you wake up at three o'clock in the morning and you start questioning everything that you're doing. Oh my God, should I be doing this? I sat in the sauna like it was only a couple of weeks ago. I was just sitting in that like, this is the in-between, and I just sat there and I was like, I'm just gonna sit in this. I'm going to give it the space that it actually deserves because I want you to hear this and know. That this is actually exactly what is required. Because if you get to these feelings of discomfort and then you back away and you make your different decisions, you are not going to be making the decisions of growth. The next level of your business cannot be built by the current version of your identity, right? This is just physics. If you wanna lead a business that operates at a different frequency, you have to become that version of yourself that can hold that before the external proof arrives to confirm it. This is why we do the internal work and the external strategy simultaneously at the same time, and this is what separates from the women who plateau at certain levels of success to the ones that can actually break through it. It's not, how amazing their strategy is. It's not, the investment in the financial sense. It's the willingness to hold an identity that hasn't been confirmed yet, and that is genuinely one of the hardest things that you'll ever do. The hard thing isn't deciding whether you're gonna invest in this next level thing and finding the money for that. That's not the hard thing. The hard thing is challenging the identity that would've never let you spend it to begin with. Oh, and staying there, I wanna be really honest with you about what this felt like for me. Because I honestly think that we do each other a disservice when we only share these stories from that fully resolved place. When everything is all neat and tidied up, we can say, look, it's all worked out with a smile. Mine's still working out, and I know that there are going to be a lot of road bumps and a lot of pivots along the way. But I also know that without those mistakes, I don't learn. Without that trial and error, I'm not gonna actually learn and end up in what is the most embodied for me. For me, the stretches of the last like sort of four months and holding this next level identity has been genuinely hard. There have been moments where I've looked at the investment that I've made in my team and in my systems and the infrastructure of this business, and I have literally just been like, oh my God. Start questioning, oh, did I move too fast? No, actually I've been building to this for the last five years. This is the next step. This is the bottleneck being removed, and I wasn't ready for this last year, but I am now. So there have been moments in this gap between what I'm building towards and what's actually landing in my bank account that have been really, really loud. And those moments I've had to come back to the same thing over and over again. And that thing was me coming back to my inner knowing me, proving to myself that the decisions that I'm making are worth trusting that I am well supported. I have an amazing team that I can turn to. I have the most amazing peers that I have been. Some of them I have been doing business alongside for the last five years. They know me. I have the most amazing mentors. I am well supported. I trust my knowing. I trust my decisions. I have been teaching myself over the last few years to trust my sacral. To trust that I have still got the energy. Thereafter, I've ridden my emotional wave, trust that knowing, that deep body level certainty that I came into these decisions from. That one that is saying to me, Jess, this business needs to be ready to hold the growth before the growth arrives. You need to be ready to hold the growth before the growth arrives. And the last thing that I wanna deal with is have what I want to come in or at least the next level goal to come in and have everything collapse underneath me. One of my biggest income strategies is retention, and that comes from people's experience with me. And that starts way back from before they even come into my world. But when they come in, like, we wanna make sure that these experiences are making them feel so seen and so like they belong. I like to give onboarding experiences like no one else. That is important to me. My channel of intimacy drives the way that I run my business, so I have had to choose to stay in this gap and I've chosen it before. Not at this level, but at other levels. I've chosen it again and again, even when my nervous system was telling me, you know, pull back. Which again, one of the things that I teach and it's so important, and we do this really, really deeply in the Frequency Program, is let's discern between what is a stretch out of our comfort zone and fear that is coming with that, and what is actually genuinely misaligned for our next step. We can tell the difference between that. What is a survival identity leaving my business versus the most genuine, highest intentions, even if those intentions lead me to a mistake, this is the hard work. Not just the hiring, the managing of the people, not just the financial investment and oh my gosh, the time and energy investment that comes with all of these builds. And then of course, me being me, I was like, I'm gonna onboard these new people and bring new people into my business, and then I'm gonna launch the 200 podcast episode. Or I didn't, you know, timing of that is what it was. And we're gonna do a charity drive at the same time and we are mid-launch. Whoops. So, you know, that was fun for everybody coming in. The energetic investment. Look, I just wanna remember that you are choosing this. I'm choosing this. This is the hard work. This work is the hard work. Every morning you wake up and you make the same decision again. I am building this from the frequency of who I am becoming, not from the fear of where I am now, not from my current circumstances. And that doesn't mean, by the way, reckless spending. Work with your mentor, work with a financial advisor, make smart decisions for your business, but those decisions aren't always gonna be your current circumstance. And you have to be okay with that, that daily embodied recommitment is what I mean when I talk about leading from your next level identity. Not a one time decision, but something that you practice over and over and over again. Now, I wanna bring this into your strategy as well, because this isn't just a feelings conversation. This is a business conversation. And you know that I run these sequential, there is a sequence to how business grows sustainably. And in my methodology, I talk about it as layers. Front end offer positioning, sales process, daily execution systems, building systems before foundations are working is one of the most expensive mistakes that you can actually make. Expensive in money. Yes, but more than that. Expensive in your energy. So what I have learned this year is that that identity upgrade has to proceed the infrastructure investment, okay? You can't build the team your next level business needs while you are still emotionally operating from the business that you have. The hiring will feel too big. The investment will feel unjustifiable. This is why we have clear in my core foundational framework, clear, align, leverage. If we are not clear on where we are going, we cannot build toward it. We take blind steps down a pathway that feels good. This doesn't mean we don't still respond in the moment if we're sacral or that we don't pivot. It doesn't mean any of that. But we need to be clear on who our next level self is, what internal experiences she wants to have. Otherwise, you are not gonna be able to justify. You are not gonna be able to hold yourself in these big, scary decisions. You will keep second guessing, you will keep unconsciously making yourself small in the decisions underhiring, over controlling building structures that are designed for the business that you are now instead of the one that you are becoming. And I see this pattern all the time with women that I work with. I hear it in the way that they talk about the decisions that they are circling. I could probably scale faster, but I wanna do it right. I wanna invest in a team, but I know, I need the money there first. I wanna build the infrastructure, but I'm not sure that I'm ready. And I hear you. But I also wanna offer a reframe. What if doing it right requires making the decisions that feel bigger than who you currently think you are. Because if you are making, you know, it's the same thing. If nothing changes, nothing changes that. That goes for this too. That goes for what part of you is leading your decisions. What if readiness isn't something that you arrive at? But that's something that you actually build by putting one foot in front of the other. And acting from the frequency of the woman that you are becoming before the external world has confirmed her yet. The money that you are waiting for before you invest it might be waiting for the version of you who's already made the investment. And I know that sounds confronting. And I'm not saying, you know, throw your P and L out the window and make a chaotic financial decision just in case you know you're an accountant listening to me being like, what the f*ck, Jess? No, no, no. That's not what I'm saying. I am saying the strategic logic and the identity work are not separate conversations. They are the same conversation. Your business will grow to the capacity of the identity, holding it not beyond. Okay, so what I wanna tell you, from where I am now standing and starting to see it, the infrastructure that I have built is holding. It has been worth every little bit of financial investment, of time investment, of energetic investment. The capacity is there, the team is extraordinary. The systems are working. There is momentum building in this business that I could not have created if I had waited to feel ready before I built it. Now that doesn't mean the hard part is over, but it means that the hard path was worth it in ways that I am now beginning to get to see, fully see the evidence of. So hear this, please. The discomfort I described earlier. The wobble, the fear, the doubt, the 3:00 AM questioning the identity tax that you are paying. It doesn't mean that you've made a bad decision. It means that you've probably gotten it right, follow the discomfort. Discomfort in the direction of your next level is not a red flag. It's a frequency signal. So the women who make it to the next tier of their business aren't the ones who waited until that discomfort went away. They're the ones who learn to move inside the discomfort. You've gotta go through it to get through it. It's the biggest thing I learned from acrophobia and panic disorder. How terrifying that was. You're saying the only way to actually overcome the panic disorder and the agoraphobia, the actual fear of panic, like the very real disorder or fear of panic within my body. The only way to get through that is to get through it, to step outside of this house and actually intentionally try and give myself a panic attack to then deal with that differently, to lead from a different way. Oh my God, terrifying. The only way through it is to move through your discomfort, lean in to lead from the knowing. When your nervous system was pulling you backwards, have that discernment. And when I was talking about this with someone, this just last week around their growth, there was a part of it that was a mental discipline. Okay, I'm uncomfortable. I need to move forward anyway. There was also a trauma part that was coming forward for her too. We need to be able to discern that. Not everybody has something that they need to heal and work through in order to move through the discomfort. Some people have to work through something and bring a level of safety to their nervous system for a particular event or a particular memory that is replaying before they can move through the discomfort. That's the discernment. This is leadership, not the polished content ready version that you see, but the real version. So if you are sitting with a decision that feels bigger than who you currently think you are, maybe it's a higher, your next level investment, a whole business pivot, a systemic shift in how your business operates. Whole new model, I don't know. But I want you to sit with this question. Is it uncomfortable because it's wrong? Or is it uncomfortable because it's next? Because those are two very different feelings, and learning to tell him apart is one of the most powerful skills that you can actually develop as a CEO. I love that conversation. Do you know, I actually recorded a reel. I was probably about a five minute reel on this topic when I was sitting in the sauna and I was in the middle of it. And, I recorded this reel and talked, and it was so honest. It was so raw, and I couldn't replicate the words if I try. And the Bluetooth was attached to the sauna, and it recorded not one sound. So I was like, right, we have to talk about this in a podcast. Now, if this has landed somewhere very real within you, if you are sitting with a next level decision that maybe you've been circling for weeks or months, or maybe you are right in that gap between where your current identity is and the business that you can see yourself building, please know that this is an initiation to move through. The gap is not you doing it wrong, being behind. It's actually a sign that you are ahead, a sign that your vision has already expanded beyond the identity that built your current results. That's really f*cking exciting. That's actually incredible, even when it's uncomfortable. So then the question becomes, what kind of support do you have inside of that gap? Because I know from this year, from everything that I've built and hired and invested in and held, you don't have to navigate the identity expansion and the strategic execution as separate things. You don't have to go to one person for the nervous system work and another person for the business strategy. You do not have to choose between depth and results because that is the work that I do inside private mentorship. So if you are a woman who is building something significant, if you are in that season of scaling faster than your identity has caught up with, and you want support that holds both the frequency work and the strategic execution simultaneously without having to sacrifice one for the other or pause your building in order to do your personal growth. Or have your personal growth bleed into your business? I would love to have a conversation. Right now, there is an opportunity to come into a private mentorship with me. I don't take many of these because it is intimate, it is high touch. It is not handholding, but like a private mastermind. It is built for the woman who is done choosing between her depth and her success. And if that feels like a full body yes, then come and find me. My DMs are open. You can head to the link in the show notes, but even if it's not you yet, I hope that today has given you something real, something that you can sit with and return back to because you are not lost in that gap. You are just building something that's bigger than who you've been and that is the work. Now there are ways that I can support you through this. They are all linked down in the show notes, so go and have an explore over there and I will see you over on the next episode. As always, share this with your business bestie who you know is in the gap or on the edge of the gap or needs to make the choice to step into that gap, go and encourage her. Let her know that this is real. Share this episode with her and I will see you all on the next one. Bye for now. If this episode awoken something in you, good. You are ready to lead from your f*ck yes frequency, and you'll find ways to go deeper in the show notes. And before you go, I would be so grateful if you could leave a review and share this episode with someone who you know that is done leading their business from survival and ready to create and live in overflow. See you on the next one.