When the gap starts to show
How’s the year going?
And I mean really – not the version you’d say out loud to someone who asked at a networking event, but the honest one you sit with on a Tuesday morning when the diary is quieter than you’d like and the pipeline isn’t quite where you thought it would be by now.
Because we’re at that point in the year where the gap between where you are and where you thought you’d be starts to show up. It’s there when you look at your numbers, your inbox, the proposals that went out and haven’t come back yet. And underneath, there’s a low hum of pressure that’s hard to name but impossible to ignore.
The external world isn’t helping. Budgets are stretched. L&D teams are being cut while the need for the work quietly grows. Organisations are applying sticking plasters where they need proper support, and you can see it. You know you could help, and yet getting in front of the right person feels harder than it needs to be. Proposals disappear into silence for months. The open to work banners are appearing in your feed from people you respect. The roles being advertised are good ones, and you notice yourself noticing them.
How the noise takes over
So you do what capable, resourceful women do. You look for answers. You reach for quick wins. You try the strategy someone swears by. You tweak the offer, rewrite the bio, show up more consistently, show up differently, show up less. You consume more content about visibility and pipelines and positioning than you can actually do anything with.
It all just adds to the noise.
Worst bit is that somewhere in all of that, your own voice gets very, very quiet.
Here’s how the pattern tends to play out. The noise gets so loud that even the things you know – the things you’d say to a client without hesitation – stop feeling true for yourself.
The logical part of your brain knows this is a cycle. Knows you’ve been here before and come through it. Knows the work is good and the business is real. And yet none of that stops the spiral.
The moment your knowing breaks through
And then it really hits you. A moment where you catch yourself thinking about a different version of your life; safer, simpler, someone else’s problem to worry about. Maybe applying for a ‘proper’ job would be the best thing?
And then you realise how you feel about that thought… and about even having that thought in the first place. Not because that other life would be wrong. But because this – what you’ve built, what you’re building – it matters.
That very moment, when that sickness in the pit of your stomach hits, it’s your own knowing breaking through. It’s your compass, still working, telling you that you already have your answer. You just can’t hear yourself think clearly enough to trust it.
And that’s not a pipeline problem. That’s not a visibility problem. It’s what happens when you’ve been looking outward for so long that you’ve lost the thread back to your own thinking.
The advice out there isn’t wrong exactly. It’s just not yours. And you can’t sustain something that runs on someone else’s fuel.
Making space to hear yourself think again
What helps isn’t more input. It’s space. Space to stop taking things in long enough to hear what you actually think. To look honestly at what you’ve built, where your energy is really going, what isn’t moving and why, and what you actually want from this business – not the polished version, the real one.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I’ve built something to help. Two things, actually, because I know that some of you need a starting point and some of you are ready to go further.
The Wing Woman Five Day Challenge runs in May – five mornings, one task each day, a chance to cut through the noise and hear yourself think again. It’s free, it’s focused, and by Friday you’ll have a clearer picture of what your business actually needs right now.
And for those of you who finish the week knowing you want to take what you’ve surfaced somewhere, the Wing Woman Strategy Day is waiting. A full day, just the two of us, built entirely around you and what matters most. The space to get everything out of your head, make the decisions you’ve been deferring, and leave knowing exactly what you’re doing and why.
Both start with the same thing. You, deciding it’s time to hear yourself think again.
The challenge sign up is here.
And if the strategy day is already calling you, you know where I am.
