After almost twenty years of running my own businesses, and now coaching women through theirs, I have come to believe that the women who actually break through are not usually the ones with the best tactics. They are not the ones with the biggest list, or the slickest funnel, or the prettiest brand. (I wish, honestly. That would be so much easier to teach.)
The women who break through are the ones who have, somewhere along the way, changed how they think about the work.
That is what this post is about. Ten mindset shifts that I have seen move the needle for women in my coaching practice over and over again. Some of these I learned the hard way in my own business. Some I learned by watching my clients learn them. None of them is going to surprise you intellectually. The work is in noticing which one you are not actually doing yet, and then doing it.
I would also gently suggest that you do not try to work on all ten at once. (We will come back to this. It is sort of related to the perfectionism one. You will see.)
What is a Mindset Shift?
A mindset shift is when you take the same situation, look at it through a different lens, and end up making a different decision. That is really it.
The most well-known version of this comes from Carol Dweck. She’s the Stanford psychologist who basically invented the language of growth mindset versus fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is when you believe your abilities are set, end of story. A growth mindset is when you believe they’re being built. The shift, in her framing, is moving from one to the other (and back again, because nobody lives in a growth mindset all the time, no matter what the wellness influencers tell you). I do recommend her book if you have not read it.
But honestly, in our actual lives as business owners, it does not show up that cleanly. It shows up in whether you send the cold pitch this week or just stare at the draft for another three days, telling yourself you’ll get to it. It shows up at pricing time, when you either raise your rate or apologize the second you say the new number out loud. (You know what I mean.) Sometimes it is just whether you close the laptop at 5:30 because dinner is dinner, or whether you open it again at 9pm because there is one client email you cannot stop thinking about.
Each one of those is a tiny mindset shift, made or not made.
1. Add the Word “Yet”
I used to say “I can’t do this” all the time. Networking. Hiring. Anything involving video. Then somebody (I genuinely do not remember who, which is annoying because I owe them a thank you) taught me to add “yet” to the end of the sentence. I am not good at video… yet.
I know that sounds like such a small thing. But the difference between “I am not good at video” and “I am not good at video yet” is the difference between a closed door and a project. One is a verdict. The other is a to-do list item.
Try it this week with whatever you have been telling yourself you cannot do. I am willing to bet your brain immediately starts looking for a next step, because that is just what brains do when you give them something to work with instead of a wall.
2. Loosen Up About the SMART Goals
I am going to get some pushback on this one and that is fine.
I came up loving SMART goals. If you have not run into the framework, SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Increase revenue by thirty percent by Q3. Get to ten thousand subscribers. Hit six figures by my 30th birthday. On paper, they look like exactly what an ambitious business owner should be doing, and for what it’s worth, they did work for me sometimes. They also taught me to feel like a failure any time the market did something I had not planned for, which, if I am being honest, was often.
So I think a little differently now, and I have started encouraging the women I coach to think a little differently, too. Instead of “grow revenue thirty percent this quarter,” what if it were “test three new offers this quarter and pay attention to which one lands”? Instead of “get to ten thousand email subscribers,” what about “send a weekly newsletter for six months and see what gets people to actually open them”?
Goals aren’t bad. I want to be clear about that. The problem is that a goal is essentially a wish about something happening in the future, and you only have so much control over the future. A process, on the other hand, is something you can sit down and do at 10am on a Tuesday, whether you feel like it or not. Most of us are way better at the second one, even if we have been trained to obsess about the first one. So when I work with women now, we spend more time on what they are going to do this week or this month than on what they’re hoping will happen by Q4.
3. Failure is Data. Mostly.
I want to be careful here because I think the whole “embrace failure” conversation has gotten kind of cheesy. So let me try to say what I actually mean.
When something flops, the question I want you to be asking is not “what does this say about me?” The question is “what does this tell me about what I just tried?” Those are completely different questions and they take you to completely different places.
I had a coaching client who launched her first online course to her email list of about two thousand people. She got five enrollments. Five. She called me kind of devastated, ready to scrap the whole offer, maybe scrap the whole online thing entirely. (I get it. I would have wanted to do the same thing.)
Instead of letting her, we sat down and asked her audience some questions. Not “would you buy this course,” because that is a useless question. We asked them what they were stuck on, what they had already tried, and what wording had made them not click on the original sales page. The answers were extremely specific. She rewrote the whole thing, repositioned it, relaunched it three months later, and brought in over a hundred people. Same content, basically. She just had information she did not have the first time.
Was the first launch a failure? Sort of, financially. But mostly it was just market research she had not run yet. That is the reframe I want you to try when something flops in your business.
4. Done is Better Than Perfect
This one I will keep short because perfectionists do not need a long lecture about perfectionism; they need to ship the thing.
The hidden cost of perfectionism is not the time it takes to perfect the one thing. It is all the other things you did not do because you were busy polishing the one thing. (I have a friend who has been “almost done with” her website for, no exaggeration, three years.)
Pick a finish time before you start. Two hours on this email and then off it goes. One weekend on this sales page, and then it’s going live. When the timer goes off, you ship. You can (usually) edit later. You almost certainly will. What you cannot do is improve something that is still living in your drafts folder.
5. Scarcity is Making You Smaller
Scarcity in business is sneaky because it doesn’t show up wearing a name tag. It’s more like a feeling. You catch yourself thinking “there’s not really room for both of us in this niche,” or you feel a tiny knot in your stomach when another woman in your space announces a big client win. (And listen, if you’re sitting there telling me you’ve never felt that, I love you, but I do not believe you.) That little flicker is scarcity talking.
Here’s the thing I want you to hear, though. That feeling isn’t a character flaw; it’s a learned thinking pattern, and like any pattern, you can change it once you notice it. The problem is what scarcity makes you do while you’re not noticing it. You stop sharing what’s working in your business because you’re worried someone will copy it. You hold your good contacts a little too close. You become someone who’s harder to collaborate with, which, ironically, is one of the fastest ways to make sure you actually do have less business than the women around you.
Abundance is the opposite. It says there is enough work, enough clients, enough good stuff to go around, and another woman’s win does not subtract from yours. (I wrote a whole separate post about this because the more I do this work, the more I think it might be one of the most important shifts a woman business owner can make.)
If you want a starting place, the next time you catch yourself thinking “she is getting all the clients,” pause and ask what you would say if you genuinely trusted there were more than enough clients in the world for both of you. The answer is almost always a more useful next move than what you were about to do.
6. Stop Measuring Yourself Against Her Highlight Reel
Social media has done a number on women business owners.
You’re scrolling on Instagram between meetings, you see another woman’s “I just hit six figures” announcement, and suddenly, your whole afternoon is shot. You can’t focus, because now you’re somehow behind in a race you didn’t even know you were running an hour ago.
Stop comparing yourself to other people’s highlight reels and start comparing yourself to where you were six months ago. That other woman didn’t post about her struggles, but I guarantee she had them. Worry about yourself. Are you working with better-fit clients? Have you dropped any of the patterns that were burning you out? If the answers point in a healthier direction, you’re growing, even if it doesn’t look like a six-figure announcement on Instagram.
I keep a running list on my phone of small wins that I might otherwise forget. It’s honestly kind of a silly list. (One of the entries from last month is just “did not say yes to the thing I should have said no to.”) But when the comparison spiral starts, I open it. And it works. (This post on the comparison trap goes deeper if this is the one that hit a nerve for you.)
7. Uncertainty is Not the Enemy
A lot of business advice treats uncertainty as something you should try to eliminate. Plan harder! I’m not anti-planning, but I have watched smart, capable women freeze for months because they were trying to map out every little thing before taking a single step. That’s not a strategy. That’s fear.
Start treating uncertainty as a field of options instead of a threat. When something unexpected happens (and it will, because that is what business is), the move is not to sit with it until you know what’s going to happen. The move is to list two or three different ways it could play out and what you would do in each case. You don’t have to know which one is coming. You just have to know you have a response ready for whichever one shows up.
That alone unsticks more women than I can count.
8. Stop Choosing Between Two Things You Can Have Both Of
Binary thinking is sneaky. Profit or purpose. Work or family. Ambition or peace. Confidence or kindness. Once you start noticing it you can’t un-notice it, and it’s everywhere, including in your own head.
Most of the meaningful tensions in our lives are not actually either/or. They are both/and. You can build a profitable business and a purposeful one. You can be ambitious and protect Sunday dinners. You can grow this year and take a real vacation. (Trust me on this. I have built my whole practice around it.)
Next time you catch yourself stuck between two options, try asking what it would take to get some of both options. The answer is not always available. But more often than not, you find the third path you had been missing.
9. Be As Kind to Yourself As You Would Be to a Friend
High-achieving women are, in my experience, brutal to themselves. We hold ourselves to standards we would never impose on a friend, an employee, or a coaching client. Then we wonder why we are exhausted.
I’m going to say something that might sound counterintuitive. Self-compassion is not soft. It is strategic. When you make a mistake, and your inner monologue immediately becomes “I am so stupid, I should have known better,” you spend the next two days trying to recover from your own self-talk before you can even start to fix the actual problem. Two days. Whereas when the same mistake happens, and your response is “okay, that didn’t work, let me figure out what to do next,” you’re back at your desk in maybe twenty minutes.
The next time you catch yourself spiraling, ask yourself, “what would I say to my best friend if she told me this story?” And then say that to yourself. Out loud, even, if you are alone. (I do this in my car. It is weird the first few times. It works anyway.)
10. You Are Not Your Résumé
I am putting this one last on purpose because I think it is the deepest of the ten.
Most of us walk around carrying a story about who we are, based on what we’ve done so far. I’m an introvert. I’m not technical. I’m not a public speaker. I’m not a salesperson. (Pick yours. We all have them.) Some of these stories are decades old. We’ve been telling them so long that we have stopped noticing they are stories.
Start treating yourself as someone who is still being written. The you who couldn’t do video three years ago is not the same you who could try it now. The you who failed at one thing is not predetermined to fail at the next. You are, like all of us, a fluid set of capabilities, and what you have decided about yourself in the past is honestly the most negotiable thing about you.
I regularly ask myself, “If I genuinely believed I could do anything I set my mind to, what would I try first?” And then I take a small step. Not a leap. Just a step. The willingness to keep stepping is, I think, what separates the women who plateau from the women who keep growing.
Frequently Asked Questions About Mindset Shifts
Your Mindset is the Asset
If you have made it this far, here is what I want you to walk away with. The women I see grow the most are not necessarily the ones with the best ideas, the biggest budgets, or the most followers. They are the ones who have learned to notice when a thought is keeping them stuck, and to choose a more useful one.
That is the whole game, basically. And it is available to you starting today, with whichever of these ten you decide to play with first.
You do not have to do this work alone. The Leading Ladies Facebook Group is a group of 7,000 women working through exactly these patterns together, and I would love for you to come hang out with us in there. If you want something more structured, The Hub has weekly coaching calls and a community of women who get it. And if you are wondering whether private coaching is the right next step for where you are, reach out and let’s talk it through.
You’ve got this!
Keep Exploring Mindset
- Growth Mindset vs. Fixed Mindset: Which One Is Holding You Back?
- Winning or Learning: Embracing a Growth Mindset for High-Achieving Women
- Embrace an Abundance Mindset to Fuel Your Business Growth
- Collaboration Over Competition: Building Supportive Networks
- Building Margins: The Key to Sustainable Productivity
