I recorded this episode from my car.

I was driving an hour and a half to Fort Collins, Colorado for a massage — a “free” massage, as I told my husband. He very quickly pointed out that it also included gas, a tip, a stop at Bindle Coffee, and obviously lunch because I’m a human who gets hungry. He called it “Ashley Math.” He’s not wrong. Girl math is real and I stand by it.

But somewhere on that drive, between Voxer calls with clients and the open road, I kept coming back to the same thing. The gap. The one I see in almost every high-achieving woman I work with.

The gap between what she shows the world and what she actually tells me. High-functioning entrepreneurs are some of the most capable people I know — and some of the loneliest when it comes to telling the truth about what it actually takes.

The Pretending Epidemic Nobody’s Talking About

I’ve been on a bit of a soapbox about this lately, and I’m not getting down.

I spent years doing it myself. Performing a version of my business that looked cleaner, easier, and more effortless than it was. I had my season of pretending it was all butterflies and giggles behind the scenes. I know what it costs.

And I see it constantly in the women who come to work with me as their business therapist. They show me their content, their podcasts, their stories — and it’s one picture. Then they get on a call with me and tell me the whole truth. And that truth is:

• 80-plus hour weeks
• A relationship that’s running on fumes
• Real guilt about motherhood that’s not showing up anywhere publicly
• A business model that depends on them doing everything, always

I’m not judging that. I understand exactly why it happens. When you’re selling something, you want to look credible. You want people to trust you. You think: if they knew how hard this actually is, they won’t hire me.

But here’s what that logic costs you.

What Hiding the Hard Parts Actually Does to You

Every time you perform a version of your life that isn’t true, you plant a seed of shame.

Not all at once. It’s slow. You post something that makes it look easier than it is. You leave out the 6am work session, the missed dinner, the Sunday you were on your laptop when you said you wouldn’t be. And none of those individual moments feel like a big deal.

But they compound. And over time, you end up living in this low-grade self-doubt that follows you into every offer you create, every piece of content you write, every client call you show up to.

Hiding doesn’t make it go away. It just makes it heavier.

There’s also the practical problem: when someone comes to work with you because your content made it look easy, and then they discover it’s not — you’ve created a trust problem. Not because you’re a bad mentor. Because the expectation you set didn’t match the reality they experienced.

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“If you’re hiding something you should be embracing, you’re missing the magical momentum that lives inside self-acceptance.”

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Why I’m Not Going to Tell You to Slow Down

I had a client recently who came to a call in full survival mode.

Seven-month-old baby. First child. Husband just started a new full-time job after being home — so now she’s essentially solo from 7am to 7pm. Living with her parents because they sold their house and are in the middle of buying a new one. And she runs a full agency with employees and clients and all of it.

A lot of coaches in the wellness or regulation space would say: what can we take off your plate?

I’m not going to say that. Not because it’s bad advice in general. Because I know her. And I know that if I said it, she would nod, we’d end the call, and she would take exactly nothing off her plate. Because there’s nothing to take off. She’s not being reckless. She’s in a season. A hard one. And the most useful thing I can do is meet her there.

So here’s what I told her instead.

Success Loops: The Small Shift That Changes Everything in a Hard Season

The worst thing you can do when you’re in survival mode is keep a 17-point to-do list.

Here’s what happens: you get through five of those things on a good day, and you end the day feeling like you failed. Like you didn’t do enough. And if you’re a high achiever — if you’re someone who has always measured your worth at least partially by what you accomplish — that feeling is not neutral. It erodes you.

The shift I suggested: shrink the list.

If you realistically have four hours today, build a to-do list of three or four things you know without a shadow of a doubt you can finish. Then have a separate “if there’s more time” list that you pull from as a bonus.

That’s it. That’s the whole move.

Because when you end the day having done everything on your list, your brain registers success. You get the loop. And that loop — that small, repeated experience of “I said I would do this and I did” — is what builds the momentum and the self-trust to keep going.

Especially in a season where everything feels hard, success loops are not optional. They’re oxygen.

What I Actually Love About the Version of Me Who Does This

I want to say something that I think doesn’t get said enough in spaces that talk about regulation and nervous system health and slowing down:

I love the version of me who records a podcast from her car.

I love that I figured out how to do Voxer on a walk, batch content on a drive, support clients in the margins of a day that was supposed to be personal time. Not because hustle is a virtue. But because this is genuinely who I am. It fills my cup. It doesn’t drain it.

There are plenty of voices out there that would call this a problem. They’d say I can’t separate business from personal life. They’d say I need to protect my downtime more rigidly.

As the entrepreneur’s therapist, I’d say: know thyself.

If the drive home from a massage is genuinely restful for you when it’s quiet and screen-free — protect that. If recording a podcast on the way there makes you feel alive and creative and like you’re doing exactly what you’re built for — that’s not a red flag. That’s data.

The goal isn’t to perform rest any more than it’s to perform ease. The goal is to know what actually works for you, and stop apologizing for it.

The Real Cost of Performing a Business You’re Not Actually Running

High-functioning entrepreneurs like you — the ones who identify as high-achievers, who have always moved fast and done more — there is a real possibility that you will always move at a faster pace than the world around you. That’s not a flaw. That’s part of what got you here.

But when you spend your time pretending that pace doesn’t exist — performing a calmer, more effortless version of yourself for an audience — you’re working against the very thing that makes you good at this.

The version of me who started this business? She was a badass. She didn’t take no for an answer. She followed through on everything she said she would do. She was scrappy and creative and relentless in the best possible way.

I’m not ashamed of her. I’m grateful for her.

And if there are parts of you that you’ve tucked under the couch cushions because they didn’t match the image you thought you were supposed to project — this is your invitation to pull them back out.

Hiding doesn’t make it go away. But owning it? That’s where the momentum lives.

🎧 This is Episode 188 of the Shamelessly Ambitious Podcast. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.ts.

xx, Ash

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