132. Stop The Belief Leaks

You can time block, batch, audit your calendar, and still hit Friday with that sinking feeling that you’re behind. That mismatch isn’t a motivation problem or a planning problem. It’s a belief problem, and it quietly taxes your week in ways most high-performing business owners never name out loud.

We follow the hidden question running under your work day: “Can I pull this off?” When the answer wobbles, it changes how you price, how long you sit on decisions, how much you over-edit, and whether you go after the opportunity you say you want. I break down three specific “belief leaks” that steal your hours and your revenue: the second lap (rereading and reworking for reassurance), the quiet discount (negotiating against yourself before the client even responds), and the parked decision (waiting to feel ready while the cost compounds).

Then we build the fix the way I’ve had to build it in my own life: with structure. You’ll get practical tools for better decision making and real productivity that survives low-confidence days: keep receipts so doubt can’t erase your evidence, make key decisions only on clear days and execute when you’re wobbly, and use a one-review finish line so you ship work without feeding perfectionism. We also talk about imposter syndrome with a grounding stat from KPMG that puts your doubt in context and helps you stop treating it as proof.

If you want more output without more hours, press play, try one tool this week, and tell us which leak you’re closing. Subscribe, share with a friend who feels behind, and leave a review so more women can build businesses that don’t run on white-knuckled effort.

Thanks for listening! 

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Transcript

The Hidden Reason You Feel Behind

SPEAKER_00 0:15

So have you been working constantly and you feel like every single week you're ending up feeling like, oh my god, there's still so much work to do, or I'm so behind, and you've done everything. You feel like you've done everything. You've audited, you've time blocked, you've batched your content, you've tried to like have different themes for different days. We've done this together, right? Some of it helps, and yet sometimes there's still this feeling on a Friday of being behind that feels so out of alignment with the effort that you just put in to the week. And today I want to talk to you about what is lying underneath all of that, and that is belief. Because whether you believe in any given moment that you can pull something off is actually dictating how you make your decisions, how you're moving through your life, through your business. Um, and when that answer wobbles, because it does, it just gets wobbly, it there's a cost there. It's costing you hours, actual hours, and it's doing it right now this week. So by the end of today's episode, I really want you to have a handle on the three places that belief is leaking out of your week. I want you to be able to spot them and then reel it back in. How do you get those hours back? I'm also going to share with you a number that will kind of show you that the doubt you're feeling puts you in really good company. So, welcome back to the Create Your Day podcast. I'm your host, Jen Cody. I am your unofficial business therapist, and let's get into it.

Rebuilding Belief With Structure

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Okay, so I want to start today by talking to you a little bit about my own personal experience with belief. And as some of you know, I had to restart my life, right? I had to actually make a change, make a pivot, rebuild from nothing. And it happened that I needed to do all of this when I was operating from a place of no belief. I had zero self-esteem. I did not think I was capable of pretty much anything. I I can't really point to a light, a time in my life where I felt lower than I did at this moment. But I had no choice, right? I had to move forward, I had to move through this part. So for me, I felt like, okay, how can I find the belief that I need in order to get through the day, in order to bring what I'm trying to accomplish into the world? And I needed that belief to have something solid to stand on. And for me, that was structure, systems. What are the things that are that can be proven, that have, that are measurable? Because then I'm not necessarily asking people to believe in me as a person. I'm asking them to believe in what I can educate them on, what I can provide for them. Doing that, having that structure and solid ground allowed me to build back the belief in myself. And I'm sharing this with you because I know how hard this feels from the inside. I have been there. And for years, I allowed my lack of belief to cause me to freeze. And I filed those moments under like, I'm being careful, I'm being thorough, I just have really high standards, I need things to be perfect. But then I started watching my clients do this same thing. And these are smart, capable women, experienced women. And I'm watching this pattern everywhere, and I'm realizing, wait a minute, there's a price tag on this pattern, and it's not just a financial one. So that's the conversation I really want to have today. Every single decision that you're making in your business and your life, it passes through that quiet question before anything reaches your books, reaches your calendar. And that question is, can I pull this off? That question is running like an undercurrent underneath everything that's happening. And your answer to that question changes moment to moment, right? But where what that answer is, is how you decide what your pricing is going to be, how fast you can get things out, how long do you sit on decisions? Are you or are you not going to raise your hand for that opportunity you've been waiting for? Belief is what's driving that. And this gets sneaky because the people that I work with specifically are very high functioning. And you all look super capable from the outside. You've built something real. There's clients, there's revenue. So when that belief dips, it's so easy for us to think, I'm being more diligent. This is not a belief issue. And so what do we do? I'm gonna read this one more time. I'm gonna price this a little bit lower. I'm gonna do a little bit more research before we commit to anything. And every single one of those on their own sounds great, responsible, right? But that's the disguise. If you stack all of that up across a week, do you see the gap between how hard you work and what actually the output looks like, what's actually shipping?

The Three Places Belief Leaks

SPEAKER_00 5:37

So let's name the three places where these leaks happen. I want to see if you recognize yourself in any of them. I'd be shocked if you didn't find yourself in at least one.

The Second Lap Reassurance Trap

SPEAKER_00 5:47

So the first one is what I call the second lap, and that is like a second pass. I'm gonna just look over this one more time. The work is finished. That pass exists to soothe you, it's not to improve your work. So when you're rereading an email for the fourth time before you decide to finally send it or you're rebuilding a slide deck that no one questioned, these are things that don't have to happen. They are wasting your time. So there's a way to find out if that's what you're doing. I want you to ask yourself, what specifically am I looking for with this second pass? If you can name it, if there is a number you have to verify or a section that was flagged for you, that's real editing, and that means there's a target. But if your honest answer here is I just need to feel more sure, then that's the second lap, and you are only rereading for reassurance. And I can tell you right now, reassurance does not live in that document. The math here is painful because one hour of work quickly becomes three, four, five. Multiply everything you produce in a week, and for a lot of women I work with, that second lap alone is costing you five to eight hours every single week. That's a full workday, and you're spending it trying to buy a feeling that is not in the document you're reading. Okay? It's not gonna, you're not gonna find it there. So let's move on to the second

The Quiet Discount You Give Yourself

SPEAKER_00 7:15

leak. And this is the quiet discount. Think about your last proposal that you made from real numbers. You calculated your cost, your time, your value, the math gives you a number. And then, like 10 seconds before you're about to send the proposal, doubt sneaks in, right? And it gets the last word. So what do you do? Shave off 10%, 15%, toss in like a different bonus to think that you can justify the number that you were already justified in charging. Nobody has asked you to do this. The client hasn't even seen the first number. You're negotiating against yourself and you're alone and you're in the dark and you're lost. The problem here is no spreadsheet is ever going to catch this leak because that discount happens before the number ever became official. So when you look at your books, they will tell you what you earned, but they're never going to tell you how that measures up against what you almost charged. So if you're pricing from a place of math and then sending from a place of fear, even if you do that three times a year, you already know. I bet you have a number right now, loud and clear, that what this is costing you. Now let's go to the third leak, and this is the most expensive one and the quietest, but this is called the parked decision.

Parked Decisions That Compound Costs

SPEAKER_00 8:35

If you think about having to hire someone, maybe you've researched a bunch of people, um, maybe you found someone and there's an offer that's been like sitting in a folder ready for them, or maybe there's a price increase that you calculated, but you never actually told your clients that you were going to raise your prices. You're doing this because you're waiting to feel ready, and that sounds prudent, but ready is a feeling, and feelings never arrive on schedule. So the decision winds up parked, and parked decisions are expensive. They are billing you by the second, and the revenue that that offer would have made, the um hours that the hire would have taken offer played for you, all of that is compounding negatively because you decided never to move forward. And I care about this one so much because there's pain point number one for almost every woman I work with is that they are the single point of failure in their business. So every parked hire, every parked system, and every parked decision keeps them being that single point of failure longer. And the doubt that caused the decision to get parked to begin with is the same doubt that keeps the whole business running through you. So we've discovered three leaks: the second lap, the quiet discount, and the parked decision. But

Why Extra Hours Never Fix This

SPEAKER_00 9:58

now let's talk about what we're actually gonna do about it because this is we we can't just let things go when we get to this point. And working harder is never gonna fix this. And I want to get to that first because I know who's listening here, and your instinct when you feel behind is to work harder, it's to add hours. White knuckle your way through every hard season and just outwork it. This is part of why you've built what you've built, and it is has its place. But these leaks, they laugh at extra hours. If you're adding 10 hours to a week with these leaks running through it, the leaks are going to scale right along with any added hours that you put in there. So more work to run those second laps on, right? Like more proposals to discount and more decisions to just park there because you're not confident enough to move on them. So we're gonna talk about some fixes, and every fix I'm about to give you is structural because belief rises and falls, and that happens to everybody. You can't schedule your way out of belief or lack of belief. What you can do is build for it. Because my goal for you is to have a business where if you have a low belief on Tuesday, it doesn't cost you anything because there's structure that helps you decide how to keep going. You're here because you know that there is a better way, and I promise there really is. So we're gonna talk about at least in this perspective, what are the three things you can do? The

Keep Receipts When Doubt Gets Loud

SPEAKER_00 11:31

first one is I want you to keep receipts because doubt doesn't have a great memory. And as soon as it starts to get loud, it overpowers you and it only shows you the risk. But if you start to keep receipts, open up your phone today and just start keeping a running list of decisions that have worked for you. The clients that said yes, the prices that held at the price that they were meant to be, um, an offer that filled up really quickly, a scary email that somebody responded to positively, just one line for each thing with dates attached. And then when your doubt gets really loud, you can refer to this. It takes 30 seconds, and this evidence is going to beat an hour of spiraling that would have happened if you couldn't look back on this evidence. There's a real reason why this works. Affirmations ask you to argue with doubt using feelings, and doubt will always win that argument because doubt is dirty and wobbly, and receipts are data. They're specific, they are yours. There's no comeback for a dated list of things that have already happened. So you want to kind of keep that armor in your phone, in a notes app, and start it today with like three entries. Let it get stronger every single week. Just keep feeding it, keep your receipts, they will come in handy.

Decide On Clear Days Only

SPEAKER_00 12:57

The second fix is making decisions on a clear day because everything in your business should only get decided on those days. Your pricing, your offer, your calendar, your minimums, your criteria for your next hire. All of that should be done with clarity so that when you have a day that you're really feeling low and that belief is down here, you don't have to worry because you have a plan. And the plan was made by a really clear version of you. Someone who had the full picture, the math that was going to work, the version of you that reads it on a doubtful day has less information and worse information than the woman who wrote it. And you need to believe in that woman who wrote it. And this is the same reason if you think about like a pilot that's flying, right? When the weather gets bad, they have a checklist. They don't just figure it out and improvise. That checklist was written in calm conditions by someone that was thinking clearly. That is who you want on your side when a decision has to be made. So this is a one-rule fix, and it's very simple. On clear days, you can revise the plan. On doubtful days, you are only allowed to execute. Okay? Doubt doesn't get a vote on pricing. Doubt was not in the room when the plan was made. And if you can commit to that, that structure will carry you on the days that belief won't. That is what the structure is for. Okay, the third fix. One review.

One Review Then Ship It

SPEAKER_00 14:30

This one is gonna kill the second lap. Okay. It only works if you decide to see the finish line before you start. So before you even open the document, what's the finish line? This gets one pass, one edit, and then it's going. Set a timer. When the timer ends, the email goes. Okay. The order you do this in matters. So you have to decide the finish line first while you're still really clear. Because if you decide like halfway through, that then you can start negotiating with doubt. And like I said before, that brings feelings in, and we're not here to talk about feelings. We're here to get things done. So over time, I love this part. Every single time that you do this review once and send it out, and the world keeps turning, and your clients say yes, and the email lands fine, you're generating a receipt for the first fix. So these fixes are gonna feed each other. Done and delivered builds belief faster than perfect ever could because belief follows evidence. And actually shipping that output is how you manufacture evidence. So I know I said three, but we're gonna do one little bonus. And

Say Doubt Out Loud

SPEAKER_00 15:44

this this could actually be an important one. So I want you to say the doubt out loud to someone. This could be a friend of yours, a coach, um, anybody. But doubt does its best work in isolation. That's like three o'clock in the morning in your head, laying awake, unwitnessed. When you speak your doubt to someone else, it shrinks right away. Right away. And borrowed belief is a legitimate business tool. I have built an entire community around this. You know, like it is a strategy that works. When you are in good company and you can say things out loud, it takes their power away. Right? It really does. So, in the very beginning of this, remember I promised you

The Imposter Syndrome Number

SPEAKER_00 16:28

a number. I'm gonna tell you about a study that KPMG did with women executives, senior, accomplished women who are running the place. 75% said that imposter syndrome was showing up in their careers. Three out of four women at the very top are sitting in imposter syndrome. I want you to think about what that means. The doubt in your head is not evidence about your ability, and it never was. If it were, it would fade as soon as you got more capable. And the data actually says that it climbs the ladder right next to you. So you're becoming more capable, and doubt is right next to you the whole time. So I want you to let the am I good enough question go. Look at the room that you're in, look at the people around you. The live question is how much of your capability actually reaches your business? That is like a plumbing question. Where are the leaks? Build the structure. Let more of what you've already got come through for

Build Structure So Capability Flows

SPEAKER_00 17:32

you. So hopefully, all of that makes sense, and you're able to see that even though doubt and belief and lack of belief is running the show for us so often, it's okay. It's okay for us to um take the time that we need to build the structure that our belief needs to stand on. And that's really the takeaway I want you to have today, because belief that's lacking usually happens at the moment when you need it most. Like you need to make that next move. So putting that structure in place, going through those leaks that are that you're experiencing and figuring out the fix for them. How does that fix tap into your life? That's what's going to change everything. So I hope this was helpful for you. I

Listener Feedback And Closing

SPEAKER_00 18:22

would love to hear from you. And, you know, let me know if there was anything else that we could have been discussing today that would have been helpful. Um, how I would love to hear like how you're taking this into the world and what are the changes that you're getting as you're implementing this into your life and into your business. So take this info, go out there, create your day in the best way possible. And until next time, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and I will see you back here next week. Bye.