The Uncharted Path - Ep. 03: Why Your Successful Business Still Feels Heavy

Welcome to The Uncharted Path podcast!

If you’ve ever felt like your business looks successful on paper… but behind the scenes you’re exhausted, stuck, or quietly questioning “is this really it?”  this episode will hit home. I pull back the curtain on my own journey from corporate burnout to building a business rooted in both strategy and energetics, and the wake-up call that changed everything. I unpack the three patterns keeping so many female founders capped, overwhelmed, and disconnected from their true capacity for growth. This is the beginning of redefining success: where your business gets to feel expansive, sustainable, and actually fun again.

Show Notes
In this episode, I share:
[00:39] My journey from physical therapy to corporate burnout to entrepreneurship, and the moment I knew something had to change
[02:56] How I found myself repeating the same burnout patterns I was seeing in other successful founders
[06:08] The first major pattern: playing small and how “realistic goals” can quietly cap your growth
[09:16] The second pattern: operating from a degraded identity and how subconscious beliefs sabotage success
[12:43] The third pattern: broken operations and why most systems either overwhelm, restrict, or fail to truly support growth

Key Takeaways
- "Realistic” thinking can be the very thing limiting your next level. Your vision has to be bigger than your doubt.
- Your identity and subconscious beliefs are quietly driving your business results, whether you realize it or not.
- Burnout isn’t a badge of honor but rather a sign your business is out of alignment with how you’re meant to operate.
- Sustainable success comes from integrating strategy, systems, and energetics, not choosing one over the other.

Resources and Next Steps
1. Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker
2. Subscribe so you don’t miss upcoming episodes on strategy, energetics, and soul-led business growth.
3. If this episode hit home, please rate & review the show. It helps more CEOs find their playground.
4. Come hang out on Instagram: instagram.com@tracylynnmurray and LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tracymurraycreativeservices, or visit tracylynnmurray.com

Transcript

00:00 Hello, my soul CEOs, and welcome back to the next episode of the Uncharted Path podcast, the podcast for the doers, the dreamers, and disruptors.
00:14 I'm your host, Tracy Murray, and let's get into it. Today, I want to talk a little bit about where my backstory originated from and And some of the big realizations that I came to that other people… Founders were also having that I've seen across the board and how this impacts you.
00:39 So, if you've listened to that original first episode or you've seen my interview on another awesome podcast, the Digital Marketing Podcast, check out the Mentor with Danny Gavin, then you know that my background originally started in healthcare as a doctor of physical therapy.
00:59 And I had that moment of the career that year looked great on paper and about six months into it, I had that inner panic of, nope, can't do this.
01:15 This is not, nope, this isn't going to be it. Not what I signed up for. Um, is this really it?
01:21 Cause I can't do this for 40 hours for the next 40 years. And if you've ever had that, that thought, you know, how unsettling it is and how it just, kind of, spins your world, right?
01:39 And it's hard to find your footing, your foundation. Um, so myself, when I had that and tried to, of course, like so many do, stuff it down, and it kept getting bigger and bigger and then there it got to point where you got to address it.
01:55 I was like, great, I know what I can do because I love the operations side of things. I'm going to climb that corporate ladder.
02:04 In short, you know, that did not work. I'm not cutting it. Out for corporate. Anybody who is all the accolades to you, I hold you in such high regards.
02:17 It was not the life for me. So I ended up. I ended up after COVID deciding to go out on my own as a freelancer and moved over the course of several years from a virtual assistant to online business manager.
02:40 I to a fractional integrator and COO and business coach and always had one foot in the love of operations, one foot in the love of marketing, which is why the integration worked so well.
02:56 Starting to know it's a little bit of a theme of the bringing things together because we're going to be talking about bringing together operations and what I call energetics.
03:07 But I was deep in the weeds of businesses and helping founders. Bring their vision to life and running the operations and developing the teams and building the systems and the processes and all the like nitty gritty granular stuff, right, as well as the big picture direction.
03:27 And my thing, that's a full story, right? Sounds good? Would sound good, but nope. I ended up repeating the same pattern myself that I was seeing in so many of the founders, and I'm sure what you're able to feel as well of the overworking and under-creating, the being stuck, uhm, working so many hours
03:57 feeling like that creative capacity wasn't there. Feeling weighed down and, you know, if you've felt that too, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
04:08 And I looked around and so many of these digital founders were here too. They were at six figures, things looked good on paper, their business looked successful, but they were burning out.
04:26 And my personal breaking point happened to come after a, uh, annual physical, you know, get the blood work back, thinking everything was going to be oh, yay, yippee, skippy, everything looks good.
04:39 And, uhm, not so much. My numbers basically read STRESS with a capital S. And my… more stress here and more stress there and adrenal burnout.
04:51 And, oh, boy. If that doesn't change, you're headed for a life of all the chronic inflammation and chronic things that come along with it.
05:02 And, uhm, I already have… If you don't know, I have celiac disease, which is an autoimmune condition, so stress could trigger more.
05:11 And it was like, no, this… this is not a path that I'm willing to go down. We need to make a change here.
05:19 And… You know, I, like I said, I saw so much of that reflected with female founders out there and wanted to help change that path.
05:36 That they didn't have to keep going down that same path. And at the same time, behind the scenes of everything, I was learning so much reading all the books, taking all the courses, learning about energetics, semantics, all the things.
05:54 And, you know, all of this kind of coalescing into that one point kind of looked at everything.
06:08 And realized three core issues kept coming up to the surface across founders as well as what I was seeing, you know, those patterns that I was getting stuck in myself.
06:24 And the first was plain, small, and realistic, like the, the, oh, what would be realistic to create? What would be a realistic goal?
06:37 And, you know, we'll get into it down the road. I like SMART goals, they have their merit when it comes to, like, tangible planning for the business, but that are that realistic in, what is it, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound, that are are, can put a cap on your business so
07:02 , so quick that doesn't need to be there. And everybody was plain small. And then I heard this story of a business owner who was.
07:12 Wasn't going to play small, who wanted to create a business around teaching people how to tap into their intuition through meditation and through tapping into themselves.
07:27 And instead of. Instead of, you know, playing small and realistic and what everybody else does, of maybe creating some meditation soundtracks, maybe a YouTube channel or a library or some kind of course And she and broader and ended up creating this membership program that goes based on the lunar cycle
07:57 , that on the new moon there's certain meditation sounds. There's meditations that drop on a full moon, other things happen, and there's, um, coaching involved, there's intuitive sessions involved in this much bigger thing and in an area that a lot of people would be like, oh, that's super woo, how can
08:18 you have a, you're not going to have a multi, you know, six-figure business doing that. It's like, yeah, yeah, absolutely you can.
08:26 You just have to take those guardrails off of playing small and constantly looking at the most realistic thing. You know, another thing, and this has become a bit of my personal mantra and owe it to Samantha Scully for when I heard her say it, uhm, maybe like four months ago and it has stuck with me 
08:48 ever since. is delusion over doubt. Your delusion of your success and your wouldn't-it-be-amazing-if vision has to be bigger than the doubt.
09:03 And we are going to discuss how to make it bigger than the doubt. So that was number 1, playing small and being stuck in that what's realistic, uhm, mindset.
09:16 Number 2 is operating from a degraded mindset. Identity, and what I mean by this, and we'll get into more of the identity piece, but when you, your mindset, which is a lot more complicated than just saying, oh, your mindset, because it is not just about, like, thinking positively.
09:39 It's subconsciously how our brains are wired, how human psychology works, how we can leverage that instead of just being a byproduct of it.
09:50 But when you're operating from that, that kind of degraded, stuck-in-the-limiting-beliefs identity, that was problem number two that I was seeing.
10:03 And a really good example of this, I forget what it book it was exactly. I'll have to think about it, and I'll let you know.
10:12 But it was a story of, oh, it may have been the book Secrets to a Millionaire Mindset. Now, I'll make sure to list all of these in the show notes.
10:23 And, so, um, talking about a gentleman that he worked with who would do great in business, that things would be successful, his company would be thriving, and then every time he edged close to, I think it was breaking through that seven-figure barrier, he would do something, make a decision, uhm, get
10:45 stuck in all of this busy work, or chaotic things would happen that would drop his business back down by several hundred thousand, and then he'd have to build it back up up, and he'd build it back up again, back to where it was successful, almost ready to break through, and the same thing would happen
11:03 again. And, through their sessions together, realized that, growing up as a child, he constantly had constantly saw his father's business go up and down, and every time they would have a lot of money, life would be great, they would be going on vacations, getting things, uhm, there'd be no financial 
11:28 problems. worries. Inevitably, something would happen, and then they would have to give up things, sell things, move, uhm, live trying to make ends meet.
11:41 Every time, shortly after getting that financial success. So, turns out he had wired, the way the subconscious brain works, had wired into his brain that large amounts of money aren't safe, and large amounts of money aren't financially safe.
12:00 stable. So, then, naturally, every time he was starting to hit that certain success threshold, all the things would start to happen, and we'll get into why that happens and how it works in the brain and where your brain starts to chase shiny object syndrome, that you know aren't good decisions, things
12:23 like that. But that was number two, this degraded identity and these limiting beliefs coming out and dictating. Where you were going, what the business looked like, what life looked like, instead of leveraging that for your success.
12:43 And then number three was operations were a one of three things. Either non-existent and everything was scattered, over-engineered, and it was so documented down to how to turn the doorknob.
13:04 and walk in the door that there wasn't room to move and adapt, or was so focused on telling people what to do versus how to think.
13:17 And there is, I think, I know I keep saying what we'll get into this, but we'll get into this. I think that's a big mistake that SOPs make and that mindset around documenting processes and pulling the tribal knowledge out of a founder's head is, it's one thing to know the steps of and what to do, but
13:38 really the core of what we want to get to is team members who know how to think. So, once again, these were the three big issues that I kept seeing of SOPs.
13:52 So, team members who have stuck in the realistic planning, operating from that degraded identity, and not having strategic operations.
14:05 This pulls into, if you listened to the first episode, if not, then go back, listen to it, introduces quite a few things.
14:12 I talked about the three core pieces that we want to put in place of that vision and alignment with it, the mental, physical.
14:24 um, emotional capacity and the systemized infrastructure. These issues plug directly into that, and that's the basis of everything that I do.
14:40 I do now in everything that I teach, and it comes back to what I shared about business should feel like play.
14:50 You should be able to be that creative visionary, so I always focus. on helping women build these insanely successful businesses that feel really good, too.
15:06 You know, I've been on the inside of the businesses and the operations and- helping to build the systems and support the growth to 6 to 7 figures in revenue, coach teams, driven, you know, major clarity for founders.
15:24 And if you're seeing yourself in all of this, this is is exactly what we are going to start unpacking in this podcast is how to get out of playing small, how to step into that identity of who you need to show up as to be a 7 figure.
15:44 CEO, and then how to have the strategic operations that allow your business to be sustainable and scalable and actually built for long-term success that isn't all on your shoulders as the founder.
16:01 Uhm, so stay tuned for all the episodes. And speaking of, if you're looking for more support, I'm going to be picking off a beta cohort of my 14-week, seven-figure CEO interview.
16:16 Accelerator in June. So make sure you head over to TracyLynneMurray.com. That's www.TracyLynneMurray.com to sign up to the wait list.
16:28 Be the first to know when the doors are open, because I'm only taking a small, small step. Select a group of people for this beta cohort.
16:37 Other than that, I will see you in the next episode as we start to map your uncharted path to the business that feels like play instead of play.
16:48 Instead of like a prison. Thanks for joining.