Why capable women stay stuck in business longer than they should (and what finally moves them).
There's a kind of stuck that doesn't look like stuck to anyone outside of you.
Women who feel stuck in their business despite doing everything right know this one intimately. It hits even though you're delivering good work. Even though your clients are happy. Even though the business is ticking over...
It starts as a low-level discontent you can't quite name. A kind of dawning realisation that the business you've built no longer fits who you're becoming, but it’s hard to name what you want instead.
I know this reality from the inside, not in any sort of theoretical sense.
In truth, I spent almost three years in this joy-sucking space, running a marketing agency I'd built from a desk and a laptop at my kitchen table. I was managing a small team, and we were delivering services and great results for clients I genuinely liked. I was regularly being asked to speak at events about business and marketing and the agency was growing.
But none of that mattered.
And so the story below is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of my book, Your Next Chapter; Ditch your doubt, own your worth, and build the business and life you really want - which I’ve just updated and released in a new edition.
I'm sharing it here for 2 reasons - firstly because I know this is a scenario that loads of women with their own solo and micro businesses experience (so many similar stories have been shared with me over the years since) but you might not yet be familiar with this phenomena, and I wish I’d had the insight back then, and secondly, so you can get a sense for Your Next Chapter, to see it feels like a book you’d like to read!
From Your Next Chapter, Chapter 1: Discontent
I had just arrived at the Sydney domestic airport to pick up my husband, who was returning after competing in the Sydney to Lord Howe Island Yacht Race.
Graham jumped into the car and tossed his sail bag onto the back seat. His eyes were shining, and he had a huge grin on his face. His excitement was palpable. 'It was incredible,' he said. 'Amazing! I was on evening watch one night, under a perfectly clear sky. The moon lit up the ocean around us, and the water was shimmering. It was so beautiful and calm … then the island came into sight on the horizon. It took my breath away.'
My husband was stepping into his own next chapter. A career in management consulting was giving way to the world of sailing, and he had recently bought a business in the industry.
As he shared the excitement of his first offshore race, I could feel my own tension increasing. My heart was hammering in my chest, my stomach was in knots, and I was finding it hard to breathe through the simmering resentment that was gripping me.
Finally, he turned to me and asked innocently, 'So, how was your week?'
I promptly burst into tears. Smacking my palms against the steering wheel in frustration, I cried, 'I just don't think I can do it anymore.'
What was going on?
I'd taken my marketing agency, Ideas into Action, from my dining-room table and built it into a thriving small business. I operated from an office on Sydney's North Shore, with a small team of full-time staff and fabulous suppliers. We were taking care of diverse clients across three states, enjoying increasing brand recognition in the market, and generating that magical multiple six-figure revenue per annum.
I had ticked so many success boxes, and I didn't understand why I felt so distressed, exhausted, and utterly, miserably discontented.
Perhaps I would have seen this outburst waiting to take centre stage if I'd looked a little closer at my life: my reliance on cigarettes and energy drinks; the crazy juggle of before-and-after-school care; the late nights and early mornings; the trying to be all things to all people, including best mother, wife, friend, employer and business owner. My life was so busy that there was no time left for me.
In another twist, I didn't realise at the time that what I thought were ambition and a strong work ethic were actually something else entirely. I was being run by what felt like an invisible motor — a restless internal hum that kept me pushing, producing, and performing. I now know this is another facet of ADHD in women: not obvious hyperactivity, but a deep, insistent sense of urgency that never quite lets up; a persistent sense of not-enoughness, and the subsequent drive to earn approval, to prove our worthiness by doing. Whilst this is not uncommon in any businesswoman operating in a fast-paced world that still tends to pedestal masculine-style achievement, it's almost epidemic in neurodivergent businesswomen who feel they've got more to prove right from the start.
Oblivious to this extra dimension of struggle, I'd been pushing down my discontent for so long, stuck in the narrative that the grind of hard work was the only path to success. So when Graham put his hand over mine and said quietly, 'Then don't,' I looked at him in disbelief.
Surely it wasn't that simple.
While Graham was so joyfully embracing the next chapter of his career, I was wading through immense confusion and unhappiness in my own, even though outwardly it looked good by the typical measures of success. Following what the world says you should follow may look good on the outside, but it can be a complete mismatch with your needs or deep internal desire for purpose and meaning. Achievement doesn't guarantee happiness, contentment or fulfilment. My truth was that I'd built a business that utilised my skills, but no longer reflected my values, engaged my heart, leveraged my core strengths, or truly reflected the woman I had become.
(A topic I explore further here: how do you define success — without apology?)
I was beginning to understand that just because I could, it didn't mean I should; and that life was too short not to be doing the work in the world I was truly here for. I knew another change was coming.
With the help of some simple yet powerful tools and a healthy dose of courage, I finally made the choice to close the business, let go of my staff, and shift from business consulting to mentoring, inspiring and supporting other women.
That moment in the car became one of the clearest illustrations I know of what I now call the Deliberation Zone - and of how long capable women can stay in it, for reasons that have very little to do with lacking answers and everything to do with lacking permission.
If you recognised yourself in any part of that story from my book, the rest of this post is for you.
What keeps successful women stuck in business - and the real cost of this.
The Deliberation Zone is the space between knowing something needs to change and actually doing anything about it.
It isn't passive. You're working hard, but in two directions at once: doing the business in front of you while simultaneously having an ongoing internal argument about whether it's still the right business to be doing.
That takes an enormous amount of energy. Over time, it quietly erodes the enthusiasm that made you good at what you do in the first place.
You start showing up a little flatter. You find it harder to present your services with conviction, because the thing you're selling doesn't quite feel like you anymore. You say yes to things you really should decline, because you haven't yet given yourself permission to design something different. And the longer you stay, the harder it becomes to trust your own judgement, because that inner critic (Helga, in my world) taints every unresolved question with ever deepening doubt.
So , the real cost isn't so much the delay itself. It's everything that compounds while you wait.
The five stages that move you forward when your business no longer fits.
After making sense of my own journey and working alongside hundreds of women navigating similar crossroads, I mapped what I kept observing into something I call the Next Chapter Change Cycle. five stages that chart the shift from Discontent to Delivery.
Not a straight line. Not a tidy checklist. More like a map of the territory you're already in. And when you can name where you are, you can actually work with it and plot a new path forward.
Stage 1: Discontent.
The sense that something more is possible, or that something no longer fits. Most women dismiss this feeling at first, sometimes feeling guilty they have the audacity to want more, or to want to risk what they do have when things are going ok. Please don’t do that. Your feelings deserves attention and exploration, and I guarantee you, ignoring them rarely works out well!
Stage 2: Desire.
What do you actually want? This sounds simple and is surprisingly difficult. Women who've built their businesses by being competent at things they wouldn’t necessarily choose (so very common when you switch from corporate land to in business for yourself - we often just take our role skills and deliver them as consultants, overlooking the fact that we weren’t necessarily happy in those roles, and it wasn’t all to do with the office environment - yep, that was me). And depending on what stage of life you’re in, you may be genuinely out of practice at prioritising your desires, so knowing what to choose if the choice is fully yours is tricky. Desire takes self-knowledge and practice.
Stage 3: Decision.
The big pivot point between Deliberating and Doing. This is where most women stall the longest - not because they lack information, but because they're waiting for certainty wrapped up in a bow with a guarantee of success that can never arrive. Reality is your decision doesn't create clarity. It precedes it. It has to come first. You can then start to move and course correct as you go. One of my favourite observations is “you can’t steer a parked car”. Ever tried to? It’s literally impossible!
Stage 4: Design.
What does the next version of your business actually look like? What's the model, the offer, the positioning, the working rythym? This is where strategy needs to be informed by self-knowledge - your business needs to both reflect and leverage who you are now - your values, strengths, interests, skills and chapter of life. This is where so many plans totally miss the mark when they’re designed for who you were, not who you're becoming and/or for what “the market says works best”. That’s not always best for you.
Stage 5: Deliver.
Delivery can’t just be about getting your ducks in an efficient row - it has to be sustainable delivery. This stage is where your inner critic resurfaces with a new lease on life, tipping you into the Comparison Trap, because you’re past the planning and designing stages (whihc are quite safe) and are now going to put your new self “out there”. This is when your self-leadership work can pay off, but it’s a stage that’s almost always underestimated in terms of its ability to derail you..
A particular note for sparky-brained women
If you've always moved fast, generated ideas faster than you can execute them, swung between incredible focus and total disconnection, struggled to find systems that work and wondered privately why the approaches that seem fine for everyone else just... don't, this next piece is especially for you.
That invisible motor I described in the excerpt, the restlessness and search for enoughness that kept me pushing way past the point of what made sense, is something I now understand is a big part of my ADHD wiring. And it wasn't until my daughter Charlotte was diagnosed, and I began to genuinely understand what ADHD looks like in women, that I started to see my own history through a new lens.
The loop of Perpetual Potential, knowing you're capable, receiving great feedback, working genuinely hard, and still not quite getting the traction you know you should have, is exhausting for anyone. But for sparky-brained or ADHD women, there's often an extra layer of friction: we’re trying to work with strategies that were designed for different wiring, and that means we’re often berating ourselves big time for not measuring up. No wonder our sense of self-worth erodes, self-doubt ramps up and we stay where we don’t truly belong, where we could never truly thrive waaaaay longer than is healthy.
You, like me, don't need to try harder or accept a situation that every part of you is rallying against. You need a different map.
The revised and updated edition of Your Next Chapter weaves a dedicated thread through every stage of the cycle for my sparky-brained readers, and those who may have a formal ADHD diagnosis or who are on the journey of exploring that possibility.
There was so much I understood about my business trials, tribulations, and ceative triumphs once I had this new lens.
But sparkies and ADHDers aside…
What actually moves capable women forward in business?
In my experience, what shifts things isn't more information. Most of us stuck in the Deliberation Zone already know, intellectually, a great deal about what to do. What's missing from the equation is something quite different.
Permission To want what you want, to leave what doesn't fit, to toss away the should’s and must’s and recalibrate your business so it serves you as much as it serves your clients.
Language to describe the discontent accurately so you can accept it and work through it rather than pushing it down.
A freedom framework that’s not a version of someone else's blueprint, but an original map of the territory you now want to navigate.
And often, recognition and connection when someone else says, I know exactly what you mean, here’s how it looks and feels for me
That's why I originally wrote Your Next Chapter. And it's why, when I finally understood my own wiring and habits more clearly, I knew I had to update it.
The revised edition includes a new Preface (Through a New Lens), updated business and content development models, and a sparky-brained thread is woven in a kind of “ah, so that’s why….” way. Insightful and helpful but not overpowering the whole book.
I am rather delighted though, that Neurodiversity advocate, OAM, and fellow ADHer, Patricia Falcetta has written the Afterword, sharing the impact what I’ve written and shared had on her. I’ll be honest, when I first read it in an email she sent, I cried. Like you, I’m sure, I want my work to be meaningful, to be helpful, to add value to the world. Patricia helped me to appreciate I have because, like you I’m sure, I can still sometimes default to thinking what I’ve created is not quite good enough. This personal growth stuff is never ending isn’t it!?
Whether you read this edition cover to cover or dip into the pages that fit the stage of change and business you're currently in, I hope it gives you the map, the language, a deep exhale and a path forward into unlocking your fabulous next chapter.
You can order a copy of Your Next Chapter here
And if you'd prefer to talk through where you are right now, you're always welcome to book a Connection Call with me.
Warmly,
Angela
P.S: When your copy arrives, you'll find a password inside that unlocks two complete companion toolkits - a Strategy Toolkit with five practical business tools, and a Self-Leadership Toolkit with five practices to build the inner foundation that makes everything else sustainable. Good things await!
