I was talking with a woman recently whose business is honestly doing really well. Nothing is broken and nothing is on fire, and things are steadily moving along. When I asked her what would stop her from getting support, she went quiet for a second and then told me she just felt capped out. If you’re an overwhelmed business owner, you probably recognize what she said next: her energy was split between her little one and her business, she was trying to regulate the other humans in her life and regulate herself at the same time, and the idea of adding heavy brain work on top of all of it felt like far too much.
I felt that in my bones, because we are living in an era where the mental load is absolutely enormous. What I heard underneath her words, though, was an assumption that coaching means more: more homework, more worksheets, and more hours of digging. She also told me that her brain didn’t believe she could expand her capacity, as if capacity were a fixed set point. That’s the part I want to talk about here, because I don’t believe capacity is what we think it is.
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Why “I Don’t Have the Capacity” Keeps Women From Getting Support
The number one reason women tell me they aren’t ready to get support is that they simply don’t have the capacity right now. I truly understand that, and I also believe we have the whole thing backwards. My hot take is this: if working with a coach feels like one more thing on your plate, you’re working with the wrong coach.
So much of what’s out there has taught us that support means mindset work, and mindset work means hours spent journalling every day, meditating, and unpacking your childhood until it feels like a second job layered on top of every other job you already hold. That kind of work has its place, but it isn’t what I do, and it’s easy to assume that it is.
What Does Capacity Actually Mean for an Overwhelmed Business Owner?
Capacity is the mental and emotional bandwidth you have available to think, decide, and act, and it’s separate from the hours in your calendar. When you say you don’t have the time, you’re talking about your schedule, but when you say you don’t have the capacity, you’re talking about your brain and your energy. An overwhelmed business owner usually isn’t short on hours so much as she’s carrying far too much in her head at once.
Your Brain Can Only Hold About Four Things
When I did my NLP training years ago, I learned about working memory, which is the part of your brain that holds whatever you’re actively thinking about. Research suggests it can only hold about four things at once, so you might have your little one, supper, and the task in front of you, and everything else has to drop.
Most of the women I work with, myself included, have been trying to hold forty: the launch, the client who needs something, the renovation, the school permission form, the email you forgot to send, and the plant you meant to water before it quietly died.
The Invisible Work of Cognitive Labour
There’s research on this too, and it’s called cognitive labour, which describes the invisible thinking work of running a life. It includes anticipating what’s needed, weighing the options, deciding, and keeping track of whether things actually happened, and studies have found that women carry more of it, especially the anticipating and the tracking.
This is why I want to reflect something back to you: you’re not tired because you’re working too many hours, you’re tired because you’re carrying everything in your head. No extra afternoon or patch of white space in your calendar will fix that, because you’ll simply fill it.
Does Getting Support Have to Mean More Heavy Brain Work?
It doesn’t, and this is where my approach as a business coach for female entrepreneurs looks different from what many women expect. Instead of adding more work, I look for the root cause of what’s keeping my client stuck. I call it the red thread, which is the one thing we can pull to unravel everything else, because I believe each of us has one main pattern we fall back on whenever life presents a challenge.
Why Tiny Micro Tools Create the Real Change
Once we find that red thread, we solve for it with small, actionable tools that my clients can use in their real lives, between client calls and school pickup and everything else going on. My goal is to make solving that root cause the easiest thing they’ve ever done, because women tell me they want tangible steps rather than another pep talk, and honestly, so do I. Research suggests it takes about 66 days on average for a new habit to become automatic, and the part I love most is that it happens through repeating something small in the same situation, and missing a day here and there doesn’t wreck your progress.
When women join The Evolving Entrepreneur, for example, I give them a tool called the envisioned success statement. It’s about five minutes long, and all I ask is that they listen to it every other day, perhaps on the drive home from school drop-off or while brushing their teeth. I think of it like the stock market: you don’t build the portfolio you want to retire on by dumping it all in at once, you build it one small, consistent deposit at a time.
How I’m Holding a Full Plate Right Now
I want to be real with you, because I’m not writing this from a magically calm season of my life. Mark and I are in the middle of a full home renovation that we’re living through, and I chose to take most of July off to manage it with him. The Evolving Entrepreneur early bird ran in September, The F-YES Mastermind early bird is open now, and I launched my podcast on October 6th, with all of the emails, Instagram content, connection, and discovery calls that follow each of those things. The day I recorded this episode, I was racing the clock because the window crew was coming to remove seven massive windows from our house.
The reason I can hold all of this isn’t that I have more hours than you. It’s that I’m very clear on what matters right now, my work time and personal time are both scheduled, and there is a firm beginning and ending to each.
How the Domino Method Gives an Overwhelmed Business Owner Her Capacity Back
When I coach, my goal isn’t to give you one more thing to do; instead, I want you to bring every single thing on your plate, both personal and business, so that I can help you see what actually matters right now. From there, I teach my clients something I call the Domino Method, which is all about knowing which domino needs to fall first so everything else can start moving.
Your 90-Day Goal Comes First
We begin by getting clear on the one thing you’re moving toward in your business over the next 90 days, along with why it matters to you. For me this season, that domino was the podcast, even though I also wanted to do a podcast tour, run ads, and finish my lead magnet.
Every Task Gets Filtered and Scheduled
Every task then gets filtered through that goal and given a documented time in your calendar, rather than living on a random to-do list you stare at all day. If a task doesn’t help that first domino fall, it waits. My honest opinion is that most of us aren’t facing a capacity problem at all; we’re facing a focus problem, because we have ten dominoes wobbling at once and none of them are falling. Psychologists have found that unfinished goals keep popping into our heads, yet making a specific plan quiets them, which is exactly why choosing your first domino frees up so much mental space.
How to Find Your First Domino Today
- Grab a piece of paper or open the notes app on your phone, and write down absolutely everything on your plate, from the launch to the laundry to the conversation you’ve been avoiding.
- Notice that once it’s all on the page, your brain no longer has to hold it, which is the first bit of capacity you’ll get back.
- Look at your business and ask yourself which single goal you want to move toward over the next 90 days, then circle it.
- Ask yourself which item, if it happened, would make a bunch of the other things easier or even unnecessary, because that is your first domino.
- Give everything else permission to wait while you schedule time in your calendar for the tasks that move that domino forward.
What Support Looks Like When It Doesn’t Add to Your Plate
This is exactly why The F-YES Mastermind is designed the way it is. It takes three hours a month, not a week, and everything else happens inside the business you’re already running. On your kickoff call, we build your pyramid of potential, which maps out all of your dominoes step by step so you never have to re-decide your priorities. You can also voice note me on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so a decision you’ve been spinning on can take minutes instead of weeks, and you’ll be in a room of women who have full lives and full seasons and are growing anyway. If you’d prefer something more personal, 1:1 coaching gives you that same clarity with my undivided attention.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do I feel so overwhelmed when my business is doing well?
Overwhelm often has less to do with how your business is performing and more to do with how much you’re mentally holding at once. Your working memory can only hold about four things, so carrying every task, worry, and to-do in your head will leave you drained even in a successful season.
What’s the difference between time and capacity?
Time refers to the hours available on your calendar, while capacity refers to your mental and emotional bandwidth. You can have plenty of open space in your schedule and still feel like you have nothing left to give, which is why adding white space rarely solves overwhelm on its own.
Does business coaching require a lot of extra time?
It depends on the coach, but it doesn’t have to. My approach focuses on finding the root cause of what’s keeping you stuck and solving it with tiny, repeatable tools you can use in your everyday life, rather than hours of homework or worksheets.
How do I decide what to focus on first in my business?
Start by writing down everything on your plate, then choose the one goal you want to move toward over the next 90 days. Look for the task that would make many others easier or unnecessary, and let everything else wait until that first domino falls.
You Don’t Need a Bigger Plate
What I know to be true is that capacity isn’t something you wait around to have more of. It comes back when you stop trying to push every domino at once and when you stop carrying everything alone. You don’t need a bigger plate; you simply need someone to help you see what’s already on it.
If you’d like a taste of how I do this, send me a message on Instagram @tracey.jazmin and tell me everything that’s on your plate along with the domino you think you want to knock down first. I’ll share what I see, with no strings attached, because I genuinely love doing this.
