Sustainable Success Nudge from Your Future Self:
💬 “Sometimes working harder is the loudest way we avoid listening.”

This week: Notice where effort has become your default response.
Where are you pushing when you could be pausing?
Because sometimes the next level of success isn’t in doing more—it’s in allowing more.

Hi Melinda,

When my mom was still alive she always said, “We are a can-do family.”

And she was right.

That phrase shaped generations of strength in my family—people who could handle anything. My grandparents mowed their own yard well into their late 80s. My mom took care of everyone around her. We didn’t wait for help; we were the help.

It’s a beautiful legacy—and for a long time, it served me well.
It helped me become independent, resourceful, and successful—as a woman and as a business owner.
But eventually, I realized that same mindset had a shadow side.

Because when “can-do” becomes “must-do,” it quietly turns into just work harder.
And that’s exactly where I found myself in 2018.

After more than a decade of building The Coaches Console, everything we’d done so successfully before suddenly stopped working. Our marketing. Our launches. The strategies that used to soar now flatlined.

So I did what I’d always been taught to do:
Work harder.
Try more things.
Hire more experts.
Push through.

And the harder I worked, the worse it got.
The more I pushed, the more disconnected I became—from my intuition, my creativity, and the joy that had built the business in the first place. I felt like I was banging my head against the wall.

Finally, I reached a breaking point.
I told my team, “Enough. I don’t know what the solution is—but I know it’s not this.”

That “enough is enough” had me take a radical step.
I stopped everything.
No launches. No live events. No marketing.
Instead, we returned our focus and energy to what was working: serving our clients deeply.

And that shift changed everything.
When I stopped forcing results and started aligning my energy, ideas began to flow again. My intuition came back online. Creative ideas from me and my team started coming. Opportunities appeared that had been invisible before.

Within a few months, that shift led to the acquisition of The Coaches Console—allowing me to partner with Mirasee, expand our reach, and serve more coaches than ever before.

All because I stopped believing the lie that “just work harder” was the answer.

You see, working harder is what happens when we’re operating solely from By Me consciousness with blinders on. It’s what we were all taught to do.

But thriving—the kind of success that sustains you—comes from Through Me.
It’s not about pushing more hours into the day. It’s about managing your energy instead of your effort.

⚡ This week, a quiet experiment:

Every time you feel the urge to push—pause.

Take one slow breath.

Ask: “What would happen if I didn’t force this?”

Then listen.
Maybe the answer is a radical step—like the moment I stopped all marketing in our business.
Or maybe it’s something small—stepping away from your desk, asking for help, moving a deadline, taking five minutes of stillness.

Whatever it is, let it be enough.
Because the shift doesn’t come from doing more.
It comes from daring to stop long enough to hear what’s next.

With grace (and permission to stop forcing),
Melinda