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Foreign. Welcome to the Courage and Clarity podcast. I'm your host, Steph Crowder. I'm a former sales training director who's helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn a living doing something they love over the past 10 years. On your journey, you'll need the courage to be bold, to take risks, and to do what looks crazy on paper. You'll also need the clarity, the brass tacks, simple strategies that actually work. And on this podcast, we deliver both in equal measure. Oh, and by the way, we've got absolutely no time for bs, gross marketing tactics or get rich quick schemes. Just sustainable business strategies for good humans with big dreams. If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. Let's go. Hello. Hello, my friends. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome to 2026. My goodness, here we go. I am so excited to be here today. We are going to talk about, as the title of today's episode indicates, the sneakiest way that we avoid our own potential. And I think this is a really timely episode as we head into a new year. One of the intentions I have for this year that you're gonna hear me talking about a lot, and if this is something that you want, I'm gonna invite you to come along with me, because definitely going to be a theme that we will be exploring over the next several months, actually, is the idea of becoming more magnetic. Okay. So when you think about your business, and honestly, it goes beyond business, which we could talk about, too, but if we really think about business and the idea of doing less chasing and more attracting, I have a feeling that probably appeals to you, right? It certainly appeals to me. Not that I'm shying away from hard work and that I'm gonna just, like, sit back and hope everybody comes to me. I don't really think that's what we're talking about when we think about becoming more magnetic, but really it's about creating the energy that draws the right people in, that draws the people in that I dream of being able to help. And it's not about being louder. It's not about being busier. It's not even about being more visible, you know, And I know that visibility is something that we talk about as being really important and something that all of us or most of us want to do more of, but I'm not even sure if that's where we need to focus. I actually think that if we focus on becoming more magnetic, naturally, visibility kind of just takes care of itself. And one thing I know for sure when I notice every time, almost every single time, I sit down with my journal, which is something I've been doing a lot more of in recent weeks and months. Almost every single entry I ever make, themes of slowness and taking things at a different pace. Not I'm not even talking about doing less, but just not doing things frantically. And feeling so much wisdom in slowness keeps coming up for me again and again. And the more I sit with the word magnetic, like when I sit down and think, like, what would it take to become truly magnetic in my brain? But again, even it's fun to think of outside of business too. Like, what is it like to just be a magnetic person? You know, that person that you know who comes to mind when they enter a room, Everybody kind of looks their way. It's not even about being the subject of attention, but it's about being a light. You know, I have a friend that I'm thinking of who is just a light in the world. When this person enters the room and you start talking to this person, you just leave feeling better, touch changed, happier, right? And so the more I sit with the word magnet, magnetism, I the more I realize how much it's not about adding more for once, right? I think a lot of us are really good at adding more, doing the most. I would definitely put myself in that category. I'm like, okay, you want me to scale that mountain? Let's go. You want me to give more? Give the last 10%, let's do it, right? And maybe that's easier for a lot of us, for us high achieving types, it's like, let me just put my mind to it. Let me just find, come up with some more elbow grease to get the job done. But what if magnetism really has more to do, or at least as much to do with what we stop engaging with. Interesting, right? So today I want to talk about what I believe to be the sneakiest way that I see very capable people avoiding their own potential. And I think it's one of the biggest drains on magnetism because again, magnetism comes from what you don't engage with. This is my thesis, right? In a world that is just like, like so many things in this world are like a toddler pulling on your sweater, just like, pay attention to me, paying attention, attention to me. And it's like, what if to become magnetic in the way that we really want to in business, what if it's about having the constraint required to not give everything that pulls on our sweater our attention? So we'll break this down into a few parts. I want to Explore. I'm going to do a little bit of sharing, let you know how I got here, what I'm thinking about, and you can tell me what you think, and you can take from this what feels supportive. It's definitely been making me feel like. Like the mind blown emoji recently. Because, again, the word really is sneaky. It is so sneaky what our brains do as a way of protecting us. It's fascinating when you can see this in yourself. Okay, so I think the first thing maybe for us to dive into is the difference between felt effort versus meaningful effort. Okay, so what do I mean by that? What this basically translates to is why busy days do not create magnetic lives. Okay. And so in order to show that this is true, let's kind of define the difference. What is felt effort? What is meaningful effort? Well, felt effort is like when you feel like you've put in a lot of effort. It's what it sounds like, right? So it's like you've spent a lot of energy. You know those days that go by where you just feel like you're putting out fires all day, it just feels like everything's been urgent and you've just been, like, taking care of stuff. Taking care of stuff, taking care of stuff. And you even feel exhausted, but, like, it's like an earned exhaustion. I personally, this is gonna be for a very specific kind of person, and I am one of them. Where, like, I've been sharing this with some friends that my husband and I, John, we've been together for a long time now, and we have recently I turned to him and I was like, babe, we really thrive on chaos. And I don't know that that's always such a good thing. I mean, it's. It is good because here's the deal. Like, urgent things will happen in life. We know that, right? We all have made our peace with that. Like, there will be emergencies. There will be situations that need to be handled. There will be chaos, right? And those things are gonna come up for anybody, even the most calm level people. But at the same time, I think there's so many scenarios where you. Where it's very easy to almost become a addicted to that feeling. So for my husband and I, we have. We've overcome a lot of crisis together, right? We have been through a lot. We've been through family death. We've been through Covid and raising babies in Covid. We've been through multiple hospitalizations. We've been through medical diagnoses. Like, we've been through move after move after move. And I think at a certain point, like, if you. And if, you know. You know, if you've overcome a crisis with someone, you may even have experienced, like, the feeling of triumph at the end of the story, right? It's like you look back and you're like. I mean, it's like any hero movie. Like, look at any Marvel movie. It's like the heroes. It's like that scene at the end of the movie where the heroes are, like, standing on the scorched earth and, like, the. Everything's kind of burning in the background, and they're like, oh, my God, we saved the world. Like, you don't really think about this consciously, but I think there's something so satisfying about that. It's why we watch that movie over and over and over again. And when you have experienced that, like, I mean, I guess in a lot of ways this might be why. I mean, my husband is an iron man, right? Like, he's an athlete. Like, I'm an athlete in a lot of ways with my training. Like, that's a big reason that people run marathons, is to feel that struggle and to feel that, like, oh, my goodness, like, we overcame right now. I am not here to say that we can prevent. Like I said, life is going to happen, but part of what I want to do here today is examine, because this is where the line has really blurred for me, and this is what I'm seeing in myself now. And what I shared with John was like, hey, have we. Have we become a little bit obsessed with that feeling to the point where we may be inadvertently accidentally inventing chaos in our own lives in order to feel that feeling. And look, this doesn't mean that I have any regrets. So if you've been around here for a while, you might. You might know that we chose to move basically across the street to a different neighborhood. We didn't need to move. We basically just felt like it. There were reasons, okay? And I stand by the decision. I'm really glad that we moved, but I made that choice, and John and I together made that choice last year, and it created a lot of chaos in our lives. Right. Similarly, we had the opportunity to adopt a puppy, and we jumped pretty much right into it. And that was a very chaotic decision. Arguably more chaotic than either of us remembered from having our first dog together. And again, I stand by these decisions. I don't have regret about them, but I now kind of see it for what it was. Right. And those are just a couple of examples. Those are just some big Examples. But I can think of like a million little examples and things that pop up in your day. I am sure this is like the email that comes in the customer service fire that you put out, the drama with your mother in law, the, you know, you name it. When this like urgency comes up and you handle it and you spend all this energy and you're like so exhausted by it. Yeah, you're going to feel like you put in effort. But I think the question to ask is, was it meaningful effort? Right? Like, when you, when chaos like this comes up, it will change our direction. And I think part of the question is like, are we. Is that happening consciously? Like, for me, last, last year I had a stretch goal in terms of revenue, and I did not hit that. I basically repeated 2024 in terms of my revenue, and I worked my butt off to repeat my revenue. So that's part of how I arrived here is I was like, hold on a second. How did I just quote, unquote, just repeat my revenue? I mean, it still, like did really well, but it felt really hard. I was like, wait a second. I feel like I worked harder in 2025 to simply repeat what was done in 2024. Like, what is that about? And it really hit me like, well, hold on, Steph. Like, you had to keep overcoming like personal mountain after personal mountain in your, in your personal life and then wonder why you didn't have the energy that was maybe required. Or the. Maybe the better word is capacity. The capacity required to go to the next level. Like, I had defined how many clients I would need to work with, how many sales I would need to make across my two programs. And I basically, like abandoned working on those goals. I mean, I still did launches and stuff, but I did not make it the center of my attention at all. And that is okay. You're gonna have years like that. That is okay. But was it an intentional choice on my part? No, it was not an intentional choice. Like, it was kind of supposed to be this year that I hit this goal and I. To just make a long story short, I took my eye off the ball, right? And so one of the most disoriented places to be is to be completely exhausted without feeling meaningfully changed in terms of, you know, I experienced a lot of change personally, which again, is probably why I stand by my decision. But as far as my business, I think a lot of it was a bit of a. It was a bit of a stabilizing year for me in business. Right. And again, that is okay, but it wasn't really the goal. It wasn't really what I set out to do. And so I think a big part of this is coming to terms with the reality that our brain does reward the feeling of busyness. Right? And urgency also feels really productive. This is exactly why you can end a day feeling depleted, but not really feeling like you've moved the needle. I should have known. Like, the first kind of blaring siren for me was late last year and took me a while to figure out what was going on. I even said this to John. We were going to sleep one night and I was like, why do I feel like my life is Groundhog Day? I feel like every day is flying by and the days are like all running together. And it just kind of ended up feeling like a little bit of a treadmill. And I have really had to pause and look at. I mean, I haven't even shared some of the other things that I realized, which is like I'm giving so much of myself in the way that I coach cheerleading and I'm a room parent. And again, these are not bad things. I'm not saying we should say no to all these. Like, I mean, what am an amazing gift that I'm like involved in my children's lives. But I look at some of these decisions and they weren't actually decisions. A bunch of these things happened by default, right? Like, I love these roles that I play, but in those two examples in particular, I didn't really consciously choose those things. They kind of happened to me. Right. And you know, what I'm just realizing is that when energy is scattered across a hundred small things, nothing pulls towards you. Right? Back to magnetism. Magnetism requires concentration, right? Magnetism requires that essentialism, that idea of staying focused on the goal. And I think another interesting layer of this is busy can really be emotional protection. Okay. So what I mean by this is I, I really, I've been think now that I've had this realization about myself, I've been looking around and I'm just saying seeing it everywhere where busy, being busy, staying busy protects us from risk, right? It protects us from disappointment. It protects us from finding out what would happen if we really committed. Do you relate to this? Do you feel like. Well, yeah, I would like, like whatever your thing is that you're really scared of. Like for me it's, you know, I'm even scared to tell you on the microphone, I want to go for a million dollars in revenue this year in a 12 month period. Okay, there it is. South. There can't put it back. Okay. And if I'm too busy with, excuse my language, mundane bullshit to really be like, obstacles cleared. This is what we're doing. If I do that, I'm gonna find out if I'm gonna make it right. And this is just so sneaky. It's so incredibly self subconscious. So I encourage you to figure out for yourself, like, where could this be true for you? Because I had no idea I was doing this. I was just living my life. I was just trying to be a good mom. I was trying to be a good partner. I was trying to keep optimizing. That's the other thing is like the over optimization across all areas of my life. Like, I was trying to optimize my business last year and I was also optimizing our home life and optimizing my marriage and, oh, by the way, optimizing my fitness. I went to 200 boot camps last year. I participated in the athlete Games. Like every single area of my life was being optimized. And I'm not going to sit here and say, you can't do that. I don't really know. I just know it didn't really work out. It wasn't that last year was a failure by any means, but I do, I think that I was able to optimize that. Like it needed to be or I wanted it to be a really big optimization year for the business. And it still was a strong year, I want to be really clear. It was a really strong year. I'm very, very proud of what I created, especially with some obstacles that came up that were operational and team related. And there's a lot of big changes, a lot of big changes for me last year. So I'm grateful and I think things did turn out really, really well. But if you're telling me that I'm going to have to do the impossible this year, which feels impossible to me, right? Which is like, you know, essentially a little bit like triple doubling, tripling my revenue that we're talking about here. Okay. Like, I'm not going to be able to be optimizing every single area of my life. And, you know, if you're busy, you always have a reason. And if you always have a reason, you never have to fully show up. Like, it's kind of like a very, very sneaky, hidden excuse. I've shared this story on the podcast before, but it really reminds me of years ago. A coach and friend of mine helped me uncover. I kept having the same fight with my husband over and over again about the dishes in the sink. It's become like this allegory that I've used. Like, I always come back to this idea of the dishes in the sink. And I just kept flipping out and I kept going on the same monologue where I'd be like, I, well, you know, my business would be more successful if I didn't have to do all these dishes. And it felt so real and it felt so true in the moment. But the truth was, I was really hanging onto the dishes because I was able to say, well, yeah, I would be achieving all of my dreams, if only. But like, I can't do that because I'm always doing dishes, right? And now in this season of my life, it's like, well, you know, I gotta do this. Like, scary. And frankly, we're gonna talk about boring. Frankly, like a lot of the work to scale A is boring, guys. It's boring. And as somebody who loves excitement and loves when things are new and loves jumping around that, like, staring at that work and being like, this is gonna be boring. This is gonna be monotonous, this is gonna be tedious, and this is gonna be hard. You bet your butt. I went ahead and found where I could make life more interesting, right? And so I think there's like, again, now I see it all over the place. I see it when I hear gossiping, right? Like when my kids are involved in sports and some of the parents there make their whole lives about. I mean, the way they talk about the team, you would think it's like a fantasy football league. It's like we know the stats on each kid. These kids are nine years old, right? And I think listening to it, thinking to myself, like, where else could all. Where could that brain power be going? Like, what else could these moms be doing with the massive amount computing power that we are spending on back handsprings and who can tumble and who's back spot and et cetera, right? So it's like we. But we don't think of it at the time. We're like, we're just being involved in our kids lives. But where is it buffering? Where is it actually? Like, I had the thought, you know what? Amazing. You know, I'm always thinking about entrepreneurship and I'm thinking about these over obsessions that all of us get into. That was just one example. Sometimes I'll be like, what could that, what kind of business could that person have if they freed up some brain space, right? Like, what are they avoiding? It's not a judgment, it's just an observation, right? So gossip. Scrolling over planning. Again, like the. And with the scrolling, I think we all know, like, scrolling is not what we're supposed to do, but when you're on, you know what I'm talking about, the kind of scrolling where you tell yourself you're like, I'm on social media for work, right? I do that. Like, oh, I. I can't. I can't possibly take Instagram off my phone because I need it for work. And it's like, girl, come on. Like. And then I haven't made a piece of content, and I'm just looking at stuff right over planning, you know? So it's like the concept of you just planned out your next three months of content, but did you make a single post? I'm not trying to, you know, call you out here, but I'm just wanting to bring this to the. You could spend an entire day. And I have my friends. I have spent an entire day planning a content calendar for a year and feeling like, whew, we really did something today and didn't make a single piece of content that ever saw the light of day. My brain is tired. My brain has done its thing where it's like this little hamster in a wheel and it's like, yay, we used up our energy, right? But did making that content calendar, if I don't actually take action on it, is that moving me anywhere in the direction of where I'm trying to go? Okay. Other examples are just micro problems. Like, we all. And maybe you've been this person, I've been this person. We've all met people like this who, like, every minor inconvenience in life is just like a spiral for the rest of the day. It's like, we spend time complaining about it. We spend time telling our friends about it. We go on Voxer and talk about it. I've done that many, many times. Instead of just, like, handling my life right, and then just the constant reacting to things, just being in reaction mode instead of taking a step back and being like, does this really need my attention right now? Right? When you engage with everything, it's like, there's no center, right? And people are not drawn to people that are not centered. That's part of what I think we're talking about here. Okay, let's talk about boring. So you may have seen, I posted this reel on Instagram that I almost didn't post, and then people really loved it. So that was pretty cool about why and how I think that I'm going to make a million dollars in 12 months by making my life more boring. It's not the most inspiring thing, but it resonated with a lot of people. And what I've been thinking about is that boring seasons can create magnetism, right? What I've noticed is that people who become magnetic, their lives kind of seem to get quieter first, right? And we could say magnetic, we could say legendary. We could say whatever word we want there. But just think of examples, right? Like, think about the training season in a sport versus the performance season, okay? The training is probably boring in comparison to being on the stage, right? All we see is Simone Biles at the Olympics versus the years and years and years and hours and hours and hours and hours of just being in the gym. Boring, right? That's kind of boring. We think about repetition versus novelty. This is something that I'm thinking about more is like, my brain just loves novelty. My brain loves new and different and exciting. And I'm asking myself the question, okay? I'm actually feeding myself a statement which is like, I know you love novelty brain. Guess what? Now you love repetition. Repetition's your new best friend, right? And, like, really allowing repetition, allowing myself to find safety in repetition, right? Not seeing repetition as the enemy. Repetition and stagnation are not the same thing. Over winter break, I started practicing this instead of having my family being go, go, go, go, go, go, go all winter break, we didn. My daughter wore the same, like, Snuggie wearable blanket every single day. You know, we still made. Of course, we made family memories and spent quality time together. But it was like, just kind of let it be, like, still and let it be, like, a, like, low. Low dopamine, right? Part of this is, like, resetting how we get our dopamine. Resetting how we get our stimulation. Speaking of stimulation, something else I'm thinking of is consistency. Focusing on consistency versus constant stimulation, right? When we think about stimulating ourselves, like, stimulating our brain, like, moving is stimulating. Getting a puppy is stimulating. Going to a new place on vacation is is stimulating. Switching things up all the time is stimulating versus how can we activate the same pleasure center in the brain? By being consistent and watching consistency pay off. That's what I've been thinking about, is, like, I've been getting my dopamine from, like, new and different. And it's like, I would like to start switching to getting my dopamine from project completion, which is something I really struggle with, is completing tasks, especially boring ones. And so I think it's important to consider that boring seasons aren't empty and they're not worthless and they're not wasting your life. They're concentrated, right? They're focused, they're. They have a purpose. And when your energy stops leaking, leaking into the drama, leaking into the urgency, leaking into the noise, you can actually start using that energy to pull people in and realizing just that, you know, magnetism, when I think about magnetism, it's not loud, it's stable, it's predictable, and it's grounded. Okay. And you know, another thing for us, like, as I kind of start to wind this down that I want to think about is I'm really wanting to connect this idea of magnetism and why it matters beyond just the vibes, beyond just like, you know, oh, this is like a cool idea. But how does this tie into wealth? How does this tie into leadership? What about long term vision? I want to apply these ideas of purposely being more boring to connect it to CEO energy. Right. If you desire wealth, that will require sustained energy. Right. If you want to be a stronger leader, that will require your selective attention. And this is something I need, really need to work on. As I've shared. It's like being so much more selective with my attention. Right. Just because my kid's classroom needs a room parent. Oh, they're not gonna have any parties if somebody doesn't step up. Well, like, then I guess they're not gonna have a party, you know, like, to me, that was so unacceptable. And again, no regrets. No regrets. I'm really happy I've been able to participate in the way that I have. But, like, it's time. It's time for me. And this is something that I believe too is like, everything can be a season. I don't really think this level of constraint is necessarily going to be my reality for forever. But for right now, trying to enter, like rapid growth mode, this is what's required. Scale requires fewer decisions, not more. Literally. Guys, I'm thinking of the nitty gritty here. I am thinking about my family eating the same foods for dinner. Okay? I'm like making a new menu every week. And my menu at John is different than the kids menu. Oh, but he'll eat that and she won't eat that. Do you even understand how much brain power is going into that? Right. Thinking about spring break, I like to take a trip with my family for spring break. We're gonna go to the same hotel that we've been to before at the same beach instead of finding a new place to go to. That would require research and making a plan and figuring out what we'd be doing. No, we're gonna repeat a trip. It was a great trip. And guess what? My kids are delighted to do it again. Instead of judging myself and being like, everything has to be different. Like, you gotta see the whole world as fast as possible. It's like, there can be, like, let's just let that be great, right? It reminds me of the whole Steve Jobs wearing the same black mock turtleneck every single day. And you don't necessarily need to make to take it to that extreme, but, like, yeah, maybe you just have a few outfits that you repeat instead of constantly rearranging your closet or shopping over and over again or feeling like you need a whole new wardrobe. Every season, I'm trying to have the same routine every morning. I'm trying to go to the same workout class at the same time again. This doesn't mean that I'm not gonna have any fun this year. This doesn't mean that I'm going to, like, again, live that. That Groundhog Day life. But I really wanna see what happens if I stop filling all of the space and stop filling. Filling it the second that it gets quiet. Because here's the other thing. Some of you are. This is specific. Some of you are gonna relate to this. For me, my children have entered a new era, right? My youngest went to kindergarten this year. And if you have had a kid like my youngest child, y' all keeping that child alive through the preschool years. He is a daredevil. He is a troublemaker. I mean, he's got a heart of gold. Love him to death. But, like, it was hyper vigilance there for a while. It was, like, a lot of supervision, and we didn't always have the most childcare, right? And now he's in, like, a full school day and he's learning to read and he's doing great, right? And he's, like, coming into his own. And I have a little bit more bandwidth, like, for the past five or six years that, like, survival mode. If you are somebody who's been in survival mode out of necessity, that was a necessity for me. But I don't need to be in survival mode anymore. Anymore. Like, the danger has passed, right? Like. Like, it. Like, it's a little bit of, like, oh, okay, we've got a little bit more space. And what I'm realizing I inadvertently did in 2025 is I just filled it right back up. That space felt uncomfortable to me. That space. I didn't know what to do with it. I've never had it. I haven't had it in years and years. Probably like a decade, right? Cause I had a baby before that. And so I want to invite you to also consider. Where have you filled up? If you're somebody who's maybe had a little bit of white space open recently, like me, you may have inadvertently just, like, created more drama again. Some of it's great, like good stuff. It's not just bad stuff because you were afraid to sit with the quiet, afraid of what would happen if you stopped running. And so that's a big part of what I'm exploring as well. So if becoming magnetic is something that you want this year, I want to encourage you to pay less attention to what you're adding. We always think about what we're adding. Should I try Facebook ads? Should I try Instagram? Should I try this strategy? Try that strategy. Add this offer. Add that offer. What if you pay less attention to what you're adding and more attention to what you're no longer available for? I think that could be a really powerful exercise for us all. Because once again, magnetism does not necessarily come from effort. At least it doesn't come from effort alone. I think it comes every bit as much from restraint. Friends, I feel like this was a very honest episode, so I hope that you liked it. I don't know. It's a bit of an experiment. Maybe I'll come back and be like, that was ridiculous and didn't work out. I don't know. But I think I'm onto something here and I'd love to know if you have thoughts you can always share with me. You can reply to any of my emails if you're on my email list. By the way, I'm trying to send I. Let me amend that statement. I am sending more like thoughtful, personal emails. So you want to be on my email list for sure. If you go to stephcrowder.com plan, you can get my 15 minute planner method and get yourself onto my email list. I already sent. I'm recording this episode. I've already sent an email with some thoughts earlier today. So if you're on the list you saw and you can always reply to any of my emails, tell me what you think. It comes right to me. I want to hear your just your reflections. And if you're going for something totally different than me this year, I'd love to hear that as well. You can also always send me a DM on Instagram. I'm at hey, Steph Crowder. All right, my friends, I cannot wait to see you in my next podcast episode. And until then, I'm wishing you the courage and the clarity to go after what you love.