125. What My Marriage Taught Me About Blaming Yourself

I spent years in a marriage where I believed I was the problem. Not organized enough. Not remembering the right things. Not meeting some invisible standard no matter how hard I tried. I went to bed apologizing and woke up promising to do better. And it was never enough.

It took me a long time to realize: I was never going to be "enough" inside that system. Because the system wasn't designed for me to succeed. It was designed for me to keep trying.

I see the exact same pattern in entrepreneurs every day. Brilliant, capable women who are working harder than anyone around them and still going home feeling like they're falling short. Blaming themselves for chaos that isn't their fault.

In this episode, I'm sharing what my marriage taught me about why your business feels so hard, the three lies overwhelmed entrepreneurs tell themselves on repeat, and a quick diagnostic you can run on any fire in your business to prove to yourself that the problem is structural, not personal.

If you've been carrying the weight of "what's wrong with me," put it down. This one's for you.

Thanks for listening! 

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Transcript

Welcome And A Raw Origin Story

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Create Your Day podcast. My name is Jen Cody. I'm your host, and I am so happy you're here today. We are going to start off a little bit raw, a little bit vulnerable, going a little deep, getting personal. Um, yeah, gonna just share some things with you guys that you may or may not know. So I spent years in a relationship where I believed that I was the problem. Like I was the issue. If we had an issue in our relationship, I was led to believe that it was me. And this was not because there was some dramatic, obvious thing that I can point to. It was much quieter than that. It was these like thousands of small moments of being told that I was falling short in some way. And different ways, you know, sometimes it was that I was not organized enough. Sometimes it was that I should have remembered something that I didn't remember. Um, there was this invisible standard that I felt I could never quite reach. And trust me, it was not for lack of trying. Oh my God, did I try? I would lie awake at night and try and figure out like, what can I do differently tomorrow? What can um how can I approach this so that what seems to not come naturally to me in any way, how can I make it come naturally to me? And I spent a lot of time apologizing. I made a lot of changes, and none of it ever seemed to be enough. And it took me a really long time to realize that I was never going to be enough inside of that relationship. And if we look at that relationship like a system, right? That system was not designed for me to succeed, it was designed to keep me trying. And I see that all the time in the work that I do. So we would we approached it from this place, uh, or I approached it from this place of I just need to be better, I just need to be different in order for this to work, for this to be successful. And that was never going to happen. And it took me a really long time to understand why, and that's what I'm gonna share with you today. Because a lot of you out there think that in your life and in your business, you are the problem and you are not. Your systems are the problem. So if you have ever looked around at the chaos around you and thought, what the heck is wrong with me? I want you to stay with me. And I know some of you are driving, some of you are walking, keep doing those things. But if you are somewhere where you can uh take a note, grab something to write with, I'm going to give you a quick test that you can run that may change how you see things. So I'm gonna start off by describing to you what your Tuesday looks like, or what your Thursday looks like, or honestly any freaking day that ends in a Y. You wake up with a plan, right? You've got important things to do on your list, and this is the day that you are finally going to get ahead of it. Only by 9:30, someone has a question and you're the only one that can answer it. And then at 10:15, you look over there and there's a little bit of a fire happening that you need to go put out. By noon, you've been pulled into four different conversations that were not on your calendar for that day, and you really haven't touched anything that you thought you were going to get to by lunch. So by five o'clock at night, you're exhausted, you're frustrated, and you're looking at the same exact to-do list that you started with. And what is the voice in the back of your mind saying? If you were better, it wouldn't be like this. I know that that's true because you tell me all the time. I just need to be better. And I want to talk about that voice because that voice is absolutely lying to you, and that voice tells you three things all the time. I hear these three things every single day, and I'm telling you right now, all three of them are lies, lies, lies, lies. Okay? The first thing, I just need to be more disciplined. You know what? Get out of here. You do not need to be more disciplined. Most of you woke up before six o'clock in the morning today. You showed up, you pushed through the day that tries to literally eat you alive. Discipline, not your issue. The issue is that nothing in your business is designed to protect that time. You need a system that decides what reaches your desk and what doesn't reach your desk. What's the process that lets your team handle something without having to loop you in? Or if you don't have a team, what's the process that makes it easier for you to repeat tasks and automate tasks? You need some structure that's going to separate what's urgent from what's important. So when these things don't exist, of course your day gets hijacked. And it has nothing to do with willpower or discipline. It has everything to do with infrastructure. Okay, so that is a lie. Get it out of your head. Lie number two, everyone else has this figured out. I hear this all the time. Why do they know what they're doing? Well, they, this fictitious they on Instagram, on LinkedIn, whoever it is that you're comparing yourself to, I'm gonna tell you right now, there are two options of what's happening in that person's life. That person's business that looks so much more successful than yours, there's only two options of what's happening. Either they're quietly drowning and you just don't know it, or they have the systems and the infrastructure built that you don't have built yet. That's it. Those are the only two options because what I'm gonna tell you right now is very important. So listen up. Nobody is born knowing how to run a business. No one. It is not intuition, it is not talent, it is infrastructure. Nobody teaches that part. If you go online right now, you can find classes on every single thing when it comes to running a business, how to get clients, how to market yourself, how to sell yourself, how to sell your product, everything, right? What about here's how to build the thing that holds all of that together so that it does not kill you? That's what I do. That's what I want to teach you, right? Because you can have all of the skills that it takes to run a business. Um, some of that is intuition, strategy, intuitive 100%. Even marketing, intuitive for a lot of people. And if it's not intuitive for you, you can take a class on it, you can learn it. But once you have all of those moving parts, what do you do with them so that they don't eat you alive? That is where the infrastructure comes into play. Then the last lie is again, something we all hear all the time. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this. Okay, stop it. If you built a business, so I want you to think about that. Have you gone from an idea to actually generating revenue with that idea, having actual clients, having an actual thing that exists in the world, then guess what? You're already cut out for this. And the fact that it's hard does not mean that you're failing. It just means you've outgrown the way that you run things. You need a new way to run things, and that's not failure, it's growth. Failure and growth can feel tragically very similar when they're happening, but they are very different things. And listen, I know how deep this goes. I spent years inside of a relationship where I believed that the reason things were not working was me. Years of going to bed thinking, if I could just be better tomorrow, if I could just try harder, if I could just be a different person, then things would be better. And you know what was worse? That it was also years of someone else confirming to me, yes, you are the problem, and I need you to be different. And then one day I realized, wait a minute, it's not me. It can't just be me. What I'm operating in, this relationship, is never going to let me win. Because no matter how hard I work, no matter how hard I change, no matter how many times I apologize, the relationship itself was broken. It was not meant for us to survive it. And when I finally stepped out of that and I started building my life in a way that made sense to me, with the structure that I needed, with the boundaries that I needed and the infrastructure, everything changed. And it had nothing to do with becoming a different person. It was because I stopped trying to succeed inside of a framework that was working against me. So for a lot of you, even though it's not a relationship, your business is doing the same thing to you right now. And your business obviously is not malicious, but it is missing pieces. And those missing pieces can make you feel like you're the problem. And you're not. So what I want to do is really prove this to you right now. So I'm going to give you a way to test it. I don't want you to just take my word for it. I want you to see it for yourself so you can write these questions down. I want you to stop and think about the last thing that you had to take care of, the last fire you had to put out, right? Like the last little bit of chaos that required you to step in. When was the last time something went sideways? You had to drop everything to fix it. So just think about that for a moment. Hold that in your mind. And now you're going to ask yourself these three questions. So the first one is, has this ever happened before? And if the answer is yes, what I find is when I talk to people about this, and I'm like, oh, does this happen to you a lot? They're like, yeah, I mean, I just can't believe that no matter what happens, we just have terrible luck when it comes to XYZ. Yeah, hello, this is not bad luck. This is a pattern. If it is happening over and over again, that points to systems. That doesn't point to bad luck. If the same type of problem keeps showing up over and over again, you don't have a discipline problem. You have a prevention problem. You need to be able to put something in place to stop it from happening. Okay? That's the first question. The second question is: did you have to be the person specifically to fix this issue that stepped in? So if nobody else on your team was able to handle it, and yes, I know not everybody has a team. So if you don't have a team and everything just naturally requires you, that still is not a sign that you're indispensable. Because all that you're proving is that the knowledge required to put this fire out to fix this chaos lives here in your head, right? I'm holding my head right now for those of you who aren't watching me. Um all the knowledge lives between your ears. So when there's no documentation, there's no process in place, there's no framework, no one could ever step in and do it for you. But even for yourself, if you don't have a team, how do you know what can be automated if everything has to live inside your head all the time? You need to be able to get it out. And that does take a system, even if there's not a team there. So I don't want you to get held up on that because a lot of people hear me say, you know, your team, your team, and they're like, oh, this doesn't apply to me. Oh, no, no, this all applies to you. Because as you're building a business, eventually, guess what? As you get more and more and more successful, that team is going to come. So if it's not there yet, all you're doing by doing this work now is setting yourself up for future success because the systems are there already. And then the third question that you're going to ask yourself is if this chaos that you had to take care of pulled you away from something, which most likely it did, did it pull you away from something that was more important? And let's let's take a minute to define that because we see a lot of the work that we do as being really important. And we're not wrong. However, when you think about the hierarchy of what's what supersedes what, right? Like if I'm doing A, how do I know if B is more important or less important? Everybody's business is different. However, there is work that we all need to be making time for that we don't naturally work into our calendar right away until we realize it and then we prioritize it. And that is focus time, strategy time, strategic work. Like if those things are not happening because you're so focused on putting out the fires and focusing on the chaos, those are more important. So if you were supposed to be doing something like that, and instead you're answering this urgent email or having an urgent phone call that could have either waited or have been handled by someone else or by an automation, it's not your fault. It's just that there's no filter, right? There's no filter between if all the noise is going on over here, what's the filter that that noise goes through so that only some of it reaches your desk? If everything is getting through, nothing important is getting done. So those are the questions I want you to ask yourself. And do you see what happened just now? We were able to take just one moment, right? We just started off with me asking you to identify one time this week that you had to step in for chaos. And we were able to trace it back to the fact that there is a structural gap. It is not a character flaw, it has nothing to do with discipline. It is a structural gap. You are missing a system that prevents these things. You're missing the process to document things, a filter to prioritize things. That's it. That is the whole thing. You are not undisciplined, you're not a bad leader, and you are not less capable than that person that you're following on social media. You're running a business without the structure that it needs. The best news about that is that it's fixable, right? Okay, now you know you've proven it to yourself with your own evidence that the chaos in your business is not you. It's a missing system. So this is great news. Structural problems have structural solutions. You're not trying to fix a personality flaw, which is much harder to fix. You're trying to build something that just doesn't exist yet. It's a very different project, and this is one that actually works. So I want to be honest with you about something. The exercise that you just did, it showed you one fire, one pattern, and that is powerful. But the reason that a lot of people stay stuck here is that they can't see one problem. They can't see the full picture. They fix one thing and then another thing breaks over here. They put out one fire, two more pop up on the other side. So it's like this game of whack-a-mole because you're reacting to individual symptoms instead of looking at the entire system. So, what you actually need is a way to step back and see all of this at one time. What is working? What's broken? What's confusing to you? What's missing? How do you look at the full landscape? Because when you can see the whole picture, that's when you stop guessing. That is when you can stop reacting and you can start making decisions from a place of clarity instead of a place of panic. And I didn't have that for a lot of my life. I certainly didn't have it in my marriage, and I didn't have it in my first business. I was always dealing with the fire that was right in front of me. I could never see if there was a pattern behind it, never mind seeing like what that pattern actually was. And that kept me stuck for years. I was smart enough and I was working hard enough, but I could not see clearly enough. And when you can't see clearly, doesn't matter how hard you work or how smart you are, you're not funneling that intelligence and energy to the right place, realizing that is what changed everything for me. It wasn't about putting in more effort, it wasn't about getting better strategy. It was just clarity. It was real, honest, full picture clarity around what is actually happening in my life. And that's what I want for you. I really want you to have that clarity as well. So if something in the last 20 minutes or so made you think, okay, maybe it's not me. I want to tell you about something that I'm doing. I'm going to be hosting a free live workshop. And it's called From Chaos to Clarity. And in that workshop, we are going to do exactly what I just described. I want to be able to give you what I call a chaos map. And basically, it is a full diagnostic tool that's going to show you everything at once. So you're not going to see one fire, you're going to see the whole picture. You're going to be able to see what's working, what's broken, what's missing, what's confusing, all of it on one page in real time. And I'm going to walk you through it. So this is not a webinar where I'm going to like talk at you for an hour. It's real work. I want you to be able to leave the workshop with something tangible. I want you to have a clear picture that you've probably never seen before. So it might be a little intimidating. But I can tell you that most of the women who've done this exercise with me tell me that it's the first time they have been able to feel calm in months because once you see it, it stops being so scary and it starts looking fixable. So I'm also personally going to check out the work that we do during that and give you some feedback. So if you would like to be there with me, I'd love to have you. You can head over to solutionsforscale.com slash workshop wait list. I will also put the link in the show notes. And whether you come to the workshop or not, I definitely want you to take one thing from today, just one, and that is to stop blaming yourself. You are not disorganized, you are not undisciplined, and you are certainly not behind. I don't want you to be thinking that you are less capable than those people that you compare yourself to. You are a person who has built something so real, and that chaos that you're feeling is just your business telling you that it's ready for more structure. That's it. You are not the problem, you never were. I promise you. So thank you for being here. Um, I hope this information was helpful to you. Take it, go out there, create your day in the best way possible. Until next time, go out there, take care of yourself, take care of each other, and I will see you next week. Thank you so much.