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The Blue Sofa: Beyond Strategy — Leadership & Growth for Female Founders
The Blue Sofa is a podcast for female founders building, scaling, and leading businesses that grow beyond them.
Hosted by Mia Poulsen, these conversations explore business architecture, sales systems, founder leadership, growth psychology, and what it really takes to build a business that can make money, support your life, and grow beyond constant founder dependence.
This is not surface-level business advice. It’s a sharper conversation about what sits underneath growth, how a business is built, how sales actually work, where growth ceilings come from, and what the next stage of business really asks of the founder.
If you’re a female founder looking for stronger thinking, more honest insight, and a business that is built to grow well, welcome to The Blue Sofa.
New episodes drop every week.
The Blue Sofa: Beyond Strategy — Leadership & Growth for Female Founders
Transformational Leadership Part 3: The Growth Paradox: Why You Block What You Want
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You say you want growth.
More revenue.
More visibility.
More scale.
You set goals. You make plans. You decide that this is the year.
Then you notice a pattern.
You stall on the moves that would actually change things.
You delay sending the offer.
You hold back from being seen.
You complicate decisions that could be simple.
On the surface, it looks like procrastination or self sabotage.
Underneath, something else is happening.
In this episode I explore the concept of Immunity to Change, based on the work of Harvard psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, and translate it directly into the world of founders and entrepreneurs.
Immunity to Change explains why very intelligent, self aware people can say they want one thing and consistently do something else.
Inside the episode, we walk through:
- Why intelligent founders unconsciously resist the next level, even while declaring they want it
- What “competing commitments” are, and how they quietly cap your revenue and visibility
- How hidden assumptions distort your business decisions and keep you circling the same strategies
- Why you cannot out strategize a protection system that is still operating underneath your goals
If you have been stuck at the same level despite “doing everything right”, this conversation will help you see why growth keeps stalling at the exact point it would start to change your identity, capacity, or sense of safety.
Growth does not usually fail because of effort.
It fails because of structure.
Not only the external structure of your business, but the internal structure of your beliefs, commitments, and protections.
My intention with this episode is to give you a clear, grounded way to understand your own resistance, without turning it into a moral flaw, so you can start working with it instead of fighting against it.
New Masterclass:
If this episode resonates, you will also want to be in my masterclass, Break Your Revenue Ceiling, Without Pushing Harder, where we look at the structural side of your revenue in the same clear way.
Here is the link: https://thesoulfulempress.com/optin-the-revenue-ceiling