.jpg)
Effortlessly Productive
Welcome to Effortlessly Productive with Annie Veblen McCarty, where we dive into the art and science of mastering your time and boosting your productivity without the burnout.
Join Annie as she explores practical tips, strategies, and mindset shifts to help you streamline your tasks, prioritize effectively, and get more done with less stress.
Whether you're juggling work, family time, or just trying to find more time for what matters most, our conversations will empower you to work smarter, not harder.
Tune in and discover how to make productivity not just a goal, but a way of life!
Effortlessly Productive
Why You Keep Stopping and Starting in Business - And How to Fix It
Tired of the frustrating cycle of building business momentum only to watch it fade away? This candid exploration reveals why entrepreneurs get caught in the start-stop pattern and offers practical solutions for creating sustainable growth.
The root causes might surprise you. Fear and self-doubt trigger our brain's protective mechanisms when we attempt something new or try to level up. Instead of pushing these emotions away with quick fixes, learn how to sit with discomfort, get curious about underlying beliefs, and address what's really holding you back.
Counterintuitively, success itself can derail your progress. When things are going well, complacency creeps in. You reach income goals and think "I'm good," then subtly pull back on the very activities that created your success. This dangerous phase allows for gradual decline that's often imperceptible until you're scrambling to regain lost ground.
Shiny object syndrome and burnout complete the perfect storm. Jumping to new strategies before stabilizing existing systems creates instability, while working in extreme bursts followed by crash-recovery periods prevents sustainable momentum.
The solution isn't working harder - it's creating systems that work for you even when you're offline. Automations, evergreen funnels, and structured workflows allow your business to function while you take necessary recovery time. Imagine creating content once, then having it serve clients for years without requiring your daily energy.
Ready to break free from this exhausting cycle? This episode provides the roadmap to transform your approach, protect your nervous system, and create a business that grows steadily while honoring your need for balance. Your future clients (and your wellbeing) will thank you for making this shift.
Coaches, healers, and creatives—how much money are you leaving on the table?
Coach OS is the world’s leading all-in-one software that automates your business, scales your income, and replaces all your other software for a fraction of the cost!
Grab your free trial now, at https://coachossoftware.com/
Hey, this is Annie Veblen-McCarty and I'm gonna teach you how to be effortlessly productive. I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and I got sick and tired of experts preaching what business and life should look like and what I should be doing as a leader and to turn a profit, only to find myself wasting time, burned out, feeling inauthentic and still not making any money. On this show, we are ditching the shoulds. I'm giving you permission to do business differently. As a certified master coach, I believe that everything you need to have success and build the life and business of your dreams is already living on the inside. I'm going to empower you to lean into what you do best, help you see your path forward clearly and give you the strategy and action steps along the way to become effortlessly productive. Let's dive in.
Speaker 2:Welcome to this episode of Effortlessly Productive. Today, we are going to be exploring why you keep stopping and starting in your business and how we can fix this. When I am coaching entrepreneurs, I often find that they come to me because their business had momentum and now they don't have momentum and they're trying to figure out what is going on there, or they are somebody who has just never built that momentum in the first place. So I do a lot of one-on-one audit calls with people where we dive deep into their business. This can either be on one specific thing that they know that they need help with, or we do a full audit of their business to figure out all the different leaks that they know that they need help with. Or we do a full audit of their business to figure out all the different leaks that they have and we come up with a strategy on how to fix it. In these audits, if you have experienced this, where you either found the momentum and lost it or just never have been able to build it in the first place, there is a good chance that you are doing something in your business that is related to stopping and starting and stopping and starting, and so let's talk about why this is because I've been on so many sessions with people and have been able to figure out a few of the reasons why this happens.
Speaker 2:One of the biggest reasons why this stop-start cycle happens is because of fear or doubt or that feeling of like I'm not good enough. These are all kind of related right. It's those like core limiting beliefs that we have about our self-worth. They're usually deep down in our subconscious. A lot of the time we're not even really aware that they are there, but they are having such a huge impact. We start to do something. Maybe it's new, maybe it's uncomfortable, maybe it's up leveling. We're going to a whole new level in our personal development or in our business, and our brain is literally designed to keep us safe. Right, it wants nothing more than to keep us safe and keep us alive, and so when we hit these points in our business and in our regular life, in anything we do, where there is some reason that our brain thinks that we are unsafe or that it's uncertain, we will start to experience these emotions of fear and doubt and not good enough and imposter syndrome, like. Whatever your flavor is, we usually each have our own special flavor of our story that our brain has figured out. When I tell her this, she's going to start to pull back, she's going to go back into that safety zone. That is one of the reasons I find that entrepreneurs do start and stop in. Their business is facing this uncertainty, this unknown growing to a whole other level, and maybe you have more clients coming in all of a sudden, and then you start to have that voice of doubt of like, oh my gosh, I don't even know how I'm going to handle all these clients. Or you launch something new and then all of a sudden, your brain is like are you even an expert at that? Right, that's more like that imposter syndrome. This is more our subconscious. So I'm going to give you a little tip.
Speaker 2:So we need to sit in those emotions A lot of the time. I find that, especially people who have very strong mindful practices or spiritual practices and there is nothing wrong with making ourselves feel better. However, rather than sitting and processing and actually being in that emotion a lot of the time, we tend to just jump to like how can I make myself feel better? I'm going to go do a meditation, or I'm going to go do a workout, I'm going to take a walk outside. We have all these strategies and maybe you have your own special way of making yourself feel better, and that's great. We need these things to help regulate our nervous system back down.
Speaker 2:But unless we start to face where those beliefs are coming from and even what those beliefs are, sometimes we aren't even taking the step of figuring out what is that in my head. We just experience this emotion and immediately pull back and we're never getting curious and being like huh, I wonder where this fear is coming from. Today, fear, what do you have to tell me? Why are you popping up today? What's going on? What's coming up? And so when we can start to ask that emotion some questions of where it's coming from, then we can start to understand the underlying belief. That is one way, especially when we approach this particular flavor of that start-stop cycle. It's really important to sit in that, and sometimes that requires getting some help from somebody who is outside of our brain. It can be very hard for us to see all of our beliefs, to know all of our beliefs, to be able to ask the questions to ourselves, to pull out those beliefs. So definitely start there. However, you might want to seek out a coach, you might want to seek out somebody who can help you through that Even a therapist fantastic support, depending on what you're dealing with, especially if it's coming more from a place of trauma. Seek out a therapist or a counselor who is licensed to help people with trauma.
Speaker 2:That is one reason why we start and stop our business and just a little way of how to kind of break out of that loop of that start and stop. Another reason why people start and stop in their business is they hit this point where things are going really well and they're like I'm good, like things are so good and that's such an amazing place to be. I want to celebrate you for being in a place where things are good. But oftentimes what I find is we hit that place of being like I am good, the clients are flowing in, this income is great, I'm exactly where I've been working so hard to be and we pull back. We subconsciously start to pull back. Maybe we're not doing all the things that we were doing to get us there, maybe we're not doing the growth things. All of a sudden, right, we probably got to that new level and that place of being like I am good by growing and doing new things. And when we get to that place, rather than continuing to grow and continuing to do the new things or do the things that were working that got us there, we pull back and we're like, oh, I finally earned this. I'm going to take a little bit of a break, I'm going to take a rest, I'm going to coast on this, and I often find that for a couple of months we actually can coast on that momentum, depending on how big you built that momentum up. Sometimes it can be even longer than that, but eventually that momentum will start to dial back if we're not continuing that path of growth and not continuing the things that got us there in the first place. So the I am good can actually be.
Speaker 2:In my opinion, that's almost one of the most dangerous places to be, because we can lull ourselves into this, and this is where I often see entrepreneurs who have hit this I'm good place and that sometimes they're not even aware that this is where they've hit. But I will see somebody who achieves this level in their business. Let's say that they had a goal of earning $10,000 a month in their business and they finally hit it and they're so excited and maybe the next month they hit $10,000 again, but then all of a sudden their income falls off and they're back down to like 3,000 a month or 1,000 a month or 5,000 a month and we're trying to figure out what happened. They're like what is going on? I was so good and so then it's clawing back to that place. That's that start stop cycle, right? Another reason that this might happen is that we see a new way of doing things right, and I call this shiny object syndrome. So maybe we hear about this course and we jump into this course and we're so excited to implement this new strategy and we're like, so pumped and we're like I am going all in on this. This is going to be amazing, this is going to change my business.
Speaker 2:I am not saying do not lean into that, lean all the way into that. However, a lot of the time, we forget to keep doing the things that got us to where we are. So my rule of thumb in business is we want to keep doing the things that have been working for us until that new thing has completely supplemented our income or our number of clients or whatever it is that we are looking for in our business. Whatever our metrics are. We want to make sure that whatever that new way of doing things is is bringing in our clients and our income and all of that to the same level of our old way of doing things. Before we start to dial back the old way of doing things and in fact I would encourage you rather than just cutting off the old way of doing things that was bringing in some income, we can keep doing that, and we can often keep doing that by automating or by outsourcing, like finding somebody else that we can teach. Hey, this is what I was doing and it's working really well. I'm gonna show you exactly what I do so that I can lean into this new way of learning and doing things.
Speaker 2:Obviously, if the old way was not bringing in very much, that's your call, it's your business, you're the CEO and you get to make the decision when it's time to let go of that. However, if you do find yourself in a start-stop where you're like, oh, things were so good, I had so much momentum, and then they fell off a cliff and all of a sudden, clients stopped coming in, my income stopped and I don't know what happened. Often it's that we have gotten distracted with doing things a new way, or maybe you're not putting as much time into your business because you're learning this new thing, so keep doing those old things that have been working for you until you make the very conscious decision that it is time to scale that back and scale up the new way of doing things when that starts working really well. So the last little bit I want to talk about here on this episode it feeds into that start-stop cycle that you may have found yourself in is your time and energy. So I often find that entrepreneurs go really hard. We get so excited right, especially like.
Speaker 2:Think about when you very first started your business, how excited you were because you were doing something brand new. You are a soul-led entrepreneur, so I'm sure it was like such a strong internal calling that you had where you were like, oh my gosh, I want to share this with the entire world. Literally everybody needs this and I'm going out and I'm going to make the hugest impact in the world, and that excitement that fed into your momentum. However, I often find we get into this and we're like I am going all in, I'm going to be working a million extra hours and I'm going to put so much energy into this and then we hit that point of burnout, right.
Speaker 2:We end up with a nervous system that is completely out of whack. We end up either constantly stuck in fight or flight and it's not to say like fight or flight mode in our nervous system. It's not necessarily a bad thing as long as we're not there all the time, right, because that can be that excitement, right. That can be that state of just being like a little bit elevated and like I'm really excited. But if we're at that point of like, oh my God, I am fighting every single day, or when we get true burnout, then we are kind of stuck in that nervous system place of freeze where we have literally been in that fight or flight for so long that we just literally start to shut down. And so if you find yourself stuck in fight or flight or in freeze mode, there's a good chance that you have worked to the point of burnout, and so we need to start to heal that right. But rather than reaching that point, let's talk about how to not go there.
Speaker 2:A lot of the time, again, I find that people put in so much time and energy and then they're exhausted and then they take a break to recover and there's nothing wrong with recovery. I am 100% all here for recovery. However, we need to have that built in. So rather than like having a huge peak and then this huge valley where it takes weeks or months to recover and then we peak again into the stratosphere and we are launching a million things and then all of a sudden we're exhausted and we crash back down, let's see if we can smooth those peaks and valleys out a little bit right. We don't want to get rid of the peaks and valleys that's a natural part of life and business but rather than having it be this huge, tallest mountain in the world down to, like the depths of the ocean, the deepest point in the ocean, let's have it be a little bit more leveled out, right. So rather than going 1 million percent in on your time and energy and then having to crash and recover for weeks or months, let's see if we can find a more even place where our time and energy is going in but it's a sustainable amount and we can take a recovery day. Please be taking recovery days at least once a week, if not more than that. Have that time to recover. But we want it to be a more steady flow. I hope that makes sense.
Speaker 2:This cycle of start and stop, and whatever reason it is that you are starting and stopping I am sure that is not an exhaustive list of the reasons. Those are just the biggest ones that I see when I am working with clients, especially in these audit sessions in their business this cycle of start and stop, what this is ending up doing, it is actually keeping you from your big vision. It's keeping you from making that impact that you want to make, because we get going, we build up and then we crash back down. And we get going and we build it back up again and we crash down. Rather than having that slow build that then eventually, as we know, I am a total math nerd. I love advanced math stuff. So you think about the parabola, right? Usually you start out a little slower and then you start to take off. Right, that's the growth pattern we want to see.
Speaker 2:But if we're like constantly up and down, and up and down, and up and down, we're never going to reach that place where we take off and we can build our business with ease, make it feel effortless and clients are flowing in. We never hit that point of having that big vision and making that huge impact and changing lives literally across the world, because we are so stuck in this on and off again cycle. So the secret to momentum is not working harder. As you could see in every single one of those examples, the hard work is not going to get you there. Yes, we need to work hard, but if you are already, like I am working at a top level, sustainable pace, just saying work harder than you are working right now, that is not the answer. That is actually going to feed into this start-stop cycle, for probably all of these reasons I just talked about, we don't want to just work harder.
Speaker 2:We need to start to create systems in our business that actually work for you. They work for you even when you're offline. They work for you when you are taking your recovery days. That's part of why I'm like please go take your recovery days. And when you have these systems in place whether it is automations in your business, whether it is just more organization and structure, whether it is that when you sit down to work, you know what you are doing each and every day and you have the back-end systems that are doing the heavy lifting for you, so that you can put your time and energy into what you do best and what you love doing. When we have this stuff automated when we check out, when we go on vacation, when we take our recovery days, when we go do things with our kids, our business is still growing and building and sustaining in the background, and that means that we don't have to be switched on all the time.
Speaker 2:Being switched on all the time is not the goal. Yes, work hard when you are sitting down to work. I want you focused and giving so much energy, and it's also just as important to be able to check out and recover like the boss, like the six or seven figure CEO that you are in your heart. They take days off, they recover, they make sure that their nervous system is being able to come back to a place of regulation. Again, we want that flexible nervous system so we can be excited and we can come back down and be in that place of just being good, being social, being loving, chilling out.
Speaker 2:If you can't get yourself into that place of chilling out, that's usually a pretty good sign that your system is completely hijacked, and so we need to start to be able to work on that and, at the same time, we don't want to let our business go right. We don't want to stop that momentum. So that's why it's so important to have these systems in place to support you in your recovery and in your energy. Right? If you're like, okay, that's great. Like you keep saying business systems and automations, and I don't really know what that means. I don't know where to start. I don't know how to do this.
Speaker 2:So an example of a business system that might be supportive to you in your business is something called an evergreen funnel. So think about it. We have people coming into our business, new people that have never met us and never heard of us are coming into our business on autopilot because we have the system set up to bring our ideal client in. Once they come in, they get some emails, they get some messages, whatever this looks like in this system that we set up, in this funnel that tells them about a course or about an offer or a membership that they can join, and we have a whole funnel system in place so they are able to actually sign up and join whatever it is that you have for them. If it is an evergreen course or training, they can go watch. That training is actually delivered to them. They don't need you sending them emails, sending them their login, sending them the videos, sending them the playlist on YouTube. No, it is all delivered to them, where they can go, log in and they can take this training and they can get your magic without you needing to give your energy at this moment.
Speaker 2:The energy part came in when you created all of this, and now that energy gets to get shared out and compounded over and over and over again. And so when we say evergreen, that's where you do a training or a course or a program one time and I highly recommend doing it live that one time. So do it in front of people and then take what you taught and turn it into something where people can go buy this for years and years and years to come, and you get to serve people for years and years and years to come with that energy that you put in that one time. How does that sound? To me, that sounds way better than constantly, constantly pushing right. We are growing in the background. We are continuing to grow without having to expend our energy on that one thing over and over and over again. We get to now take our energy and go create more magical things.
Speaker 2:So that is what true growth is where we get to put our energy in one time. We get to continue to serve people with that energy forevermore, as long as it lives out there, and then we get to take our energy and put it into growing new things and creating new things right New containers, helping new people, finding new people, serving our clients who love us so much, doing the things that are our magic. That is true continual growth and a way of growing that is not going to completely exhaust you and completely hijack your nervous system. So I hope that this help today just shed a little bit of light on why you might be stuck in the start and stop cycle, some strategies and some ways to break out of that and how to set your business up so that you continue to grow and you continue to build and serve more people and make that huge impact that you want to make without you totally burning out and just shutting down and being gone. Think about the impact that we get to make when we set our business up this way. Not only is it better for us and our well-being, it also is better serving for our clients and the people who need our light and need our help.
Speaker 2:So I cannot wait to hear what little bits and pieces you took from this episode. Maybe there's a big shift that you are wanting to make in your business. Please share that in the comments. I would love, love, love to hear or reach out to me on social media and, if you are interested in an audit, if you're like, yep, that's me, I need to figure out what is happening here and how to seal up some of these leaks. I would love to help support you with that. So definitely find me on social media, reach out to me and we will go from there. So have a beautiful rest of your day. I cannot wait to see what you create and I cannot wait to see all the people that you help and serve and that huge impact that you get to make with your business. I will see you on the next episode of Effortlessly Productive.
