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There is no one right way to grow a business – and trying to copy someone else’s way will pull you out of alignment fast.

In this episode, I talk about the trap of comparison, the overwhelm that comes from consuming too much, and what it really means to stop forcing strategies that don’t feel aligned.

I also share a big realization I had after my event about capacity, and why you have to become the CEO who can hold your next level before it happens.

This is about scaling yourself and trusting your gut, so you can lead from alignment.

Key Takeaways

• Why the best CEOs ignore everyone
• How to unlock the next level for your business (it’s not what you think)
• The real way to scale in 2026

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

Is this right for me? Is this right for my business and its structure and what I know works? You are the magic of your business because you are the visionary. The moment that you feel like you’re forcing yourself to fit in a box, you have to pause because it doesn’t mean don’t do that offer. It doesn’t mean don’t be uncomfortable get.

Good at becoming aware of. When you have put yourself in this place of comparing what other people are doing, convincing yourself that you don’t know the answer, you have to become the CEO, who already has what you want. Your greatest strength is your greatest weakness. Embodied CEOs don’t chase trends.

They pave the way they lead from within. Move by purpose, unshaken by noise. When you are the source, you do not need permission. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having an amazing week. I’m feeling amazing because the first few weeks of the year, I had like vacation fun, snowboarding, and then full send into event, and just so much happening that now I’m like, okay, now I get to settle more into a routine.

Things are still, busy and life is full as usual. I have a very big CrossFit competition coming up this week. It’s my first, I’m super nervous, you guys. It’s my first it’s like a, it’s an individual competition. So usually I go to local gyms and you partner and you sign up for the competition.

Kinda like how you would a race, this would be equivalent to like the Boston Marathon where you have to get into it. So you had to submit qualifiers to get into the competition and then. Now you’re competing just yourself on the floor, but it’s like a stadium. So I’m very nervous if I’m excited, but I’m very nervous.

So I have that this weekend. It’s a three day competition. So there’s five total workouts in three days. And the thing is, I will be at the bottom of the group because I barely made it last year. I didn’t make it this year, I made it. So I’m just celebrating that I made it, but. I’m excited. I’m nervous.

It should be fun. Yeah, and I’m managing a lot in my training right now, so a couple of injuries and just figuring out how much volume my body can take, but I’m excited. Anyways, today’s episode is going to be a chat about a few things that I wanna talk about that are on my mind and conversations I’m having with friends, team members and in my own head.

So I think that you guys will get some value out of just like where my thoughts are on a couple of things. So one of them is, I think this reminder that we all need, and even myself at this level, like I find myself doing this, which is I will go compare a business that’s ahead of me, that’s where I wanna be.

That is like generating the revenue, the impact has the business that I would love to aspire in the near future. And I will start analyzing what they are doing from the offer that they have and the marketing strategy. And then I’ll catch myself doing that. And then I’ll maybe compare like somebody else.

And I always come to this realization of there is no one right way to grow a business, and it’s a very dangerous place to be when you abandon your own wisdom and what you know to be true, which we’re gonna talk about connecting back to that and how to apply that in business and marketing, but you abandon that because you’ve convinced yourself that’s.

Somebody else is doing it better than you. Now, yes, there are things I could learn from these people. There are things like, it’s why I put myself in a mastermind with business owners doing more revenue than me, more team, because I want my thinking to be challenged. But that doesn’t mean you go replicate exactly what they’re doing.

You have to run that through the filter of, is this right for me? Is this right for my business and its structure and what I know works and also my audience and the offer I sell and the way I sell it, and like the magic that is you. Every one of us as CEOs, as creators, like we are visionaries. We have a unique blueprint of skills and strengths and weaknesses and things that work and things that don’t.

And I tr I call it the magic, like when I host an event. I am constantly reinforcing that message to the attendees like you already know the answers. I am here to remind you, you are the magic of your business because you are the visionary and you have an impact and a problem you wanna solve, and a way to do it that is you unique to you, that I cannot replicate or tell you exactly what to do.

I can give you advice, I can give you tips, I can give you perspective, I can ask you the right questions. Which is what a good mentor does, but not tell you what to do anyways, I found myself recently, as I’m looking at a big leap this year, I want to massively increase our monthly run rate by the end of the year.

And I found myself looking at companies doing bigger and like almost getting a little frustrated, going I don’t get it. What are they doing? Better than me and why are they there? And starting to almost confuse myself because obviously their business looks different, their ideal customer looks different, their offers look different, like their marketing structure looks different.

And so then I start to get overwhelmed and I realize oh my gosh, this is where a lot of people’s overwhelm comes from when it comes to marketing because. There are so many ways that you can do it. You can do, live launches. You can do a weekly live webinar of the same exact topic. You could do a challenge, you could do a paid challenge, you could do a challenge with a VIP upgrade.

You can do so many different things and there’s foundational components that everyone has, but how you get there is unique. And I think this is where our very linear black and white thinking as humans can get us in trouble. And I oftentimes. Fall into this because I like to, black and white thinking makes me feel very comfortable and in control.

It’s like it’s right or it’s wrong, but I continually have this lesson in life that like, we’re not linear beings. This is not a linear experience, and this comes up for me in business. It comes up for me in training. It comes up for me in, parenting in how I structure my life of there isn’t a right and a wrong.

There’s seasons and there is what’s right for me. And I find myself doing this with training. Like I’ll find I’ll meet an athlete who’s way ahead of me. And I’m like, okay, how many hours a week are you training? What exactly are you doing? So I can replicate that, but that doesn’t work because I have different weaknesses than them.

I have different needs in my training. I have a different body, I have different mechanics, and I have to tailor it to that same in business. If I go and replicate exactly what somebody else is doing, it is most likely. Not gonna work. And so I found myself in a moment of overwhelm because I had three or four different businesses I was looking at and going.

Okay, but they’re doing this and they’re doing basically the opposite. Which one should I do? And that’s when you gotta go. Okay, pause, take a step back. What do I know already? And what do I know when it comes to what my ideal customer is gonna connect with the most, what I am going to feel the most excited about, what I’m gonna feel the most connected to?

What is gonna have the most ease for me? Ease does not mean easy. I keep wanting to explain this in different ways to really get it to sink in, but I did talk about this at the event and I talked about like when you’re going to create content or create a funnel build a strategy, whatever for your business.

And if you have feelings of resistance, and I’m forcing this and I’m saying this, but I don’t really believe it, there was someone at the event that was like, yeah, every time I wrote this I just, I didn’t really like it. I like actually hated it when I wrote it, but I wrote it because it was like something she was calling a part of her offer.

She’s I wrote it because I thought that’s what people, wanted to hear. And I’m like, the moment that you feel that resistance. The moment that you feel like you’re forcing yourself to fit in a box, you have to pause because it doesn’t mean don’t do that offer. It doesn’t mean don’t be uncomfortable.

It does mean how do you find the ease and the buzzing and the excitement and the light energy. Even in the discomfort when you’re feeling the force, like if I were to look at one of these businesses and then go, okay I’ll give you an example. One of these businesses that I’m looking at she does $7 million a year.

She’s in the ads space and she does a paid challenge. And I don’t know the behind the scenes, but I’m like, I don’t understand. Like how is she getting that volume to a paid challenge and not doing something for free? And I’m like racking my brain for two days around this ’cause she’s doing these big numbers and I’m going like, I don’t, I don’t understand.

’cause consistently with clients and myself, like I don’t see that successful. And then I realized if I were to go, okay, I’m gonna just do a paid challenge now. It would not, it would feel like I’m forcing it, it would feel like I’m doing something that’s not in alignment with me. As a strategy that I looked at and was like, oh, that’s cool.

I could try it. However, if I did a challenge and I made a VIP upgrade, that would excite me. It’s like free challenge to VIP upgrade regardless. You have to pause when you have that feeling. So get good at becoming aware. Of when you have put yourself in this place of comparing what other people are doing, convincing yourself that you don’t know the answer, that you don’t know the best thing that somebody else.

Could tell you better how to connect with your ideal customer, how to deliver your offer. Now again, I’m not saying that having mentors and having people who give you perspective and ask you different questions and give you feedback and help you collaborate. Is a bad thing at all. Of course, it’s a good thing.

You should be surrounding yourself with people who are higher than you wanna be in all areas. Like again, I surround myself in CrossFit with people who are way ahead of me. I surround myself in business with people making more money with bigger teams because I wanna hear how they think, but I don’t.

Abandon myself in that process, and that’s the difference. It is easy to look at somebody quote ahead of you and then abandon your own inner knowing, your own, I don’t even wanna say values, but like your own magic, your own essence. And abandon that because you convinced yourself that somebody else is doing it better than you.

They might be doing it better than you right now. You can learn from them, but you have to integrate it with you. And that’s the magic. And likely they’ve done the same thing. And that is why when you look at all these successful businesses and you were to compare them in your industry, you’re gonna see they’re all not doing the same thing.

If it was all the exact same thing, do you know how freaking easy business would be? Do you know how many people would have successful businesses if I was like, here’s a business in a box, do the exact same thing I did and you’ll be successful. It doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t work that way, and that’s why you never see that, right?

So learning how to catch yourself when you get into that place, but mostly learning how to catch yourself when you are putting yourself into a place of feeling resistance, feeling force. I’ll give you another example. I. I was doing a bonus coaching call and somebody on there who has, I’ve been in her world for a while, so I know her pretty well.

She was asking me a question and she was saying I had an epiphany, which is, I don’t like this whole way of. Getting my ideal customer result that I’ve been thinking that’s how you have to do it, because everybody teaches it that way. And I realized like that was actually holding me back personally from getting results.

And so I wanna teach it this way, but I’m scared of pissing people off, but I, because I wanna say this pretty bold statement around this is not how you get more clients and, I was like, do it. That’s amazing because people who resonate with that are going to love that. And also there is no one right way.

Both are right, like the way you’re saying to get clients is right and is a possibility. And the way that other people are saying to get clients in your industry is also right and is also a possibility. And the people for you who have the same resistance to that way. For the same reasons you do, they’re gonna be drawn to your method.

So again, back to that, we like to put things in a box and the linear, it’s right or it’s wrong, it’s black or it’s white. And it’s hard because that’s how our brain thinks and it makes it really easy, right? To be like, okay, if you just gimme the list of the right things then I’ll know. But it’s not the way it works.

So on this note, what I realized is, number one, i’ve even had different members of my mastermind, for example, where one grew her business through purely organic, like massive growth, creating content, no ads. The other who grew her business through all ads, no organic. Both have successful six, seven figure businesses.

Both did it completely different. There is no one right way. There are foundational principles. So what are those foundational principles? Number one, who are we serving, right? Like we all have to be serving somebody else, having a bigger purpose, having a bigger reason outside of money. Who are we serving and what is that powerful messaging behind that?

Those are foundational principles. Everybody needs to have that clarity. The last podcast I talked about with clarity, conviction, consistency, those are foundational principles that are true. The how you get there. Gets to be unique to you, and this is where being a visionary, being an entrepreneur is so cool because there are no rules.

Let’s not forget that there are no rules. So my, my invitation listening to this episode is like really reflecting on where in the last, six to 12 months have you. Maybe not even intentionally. Put yourself in a box where you are forcing yourself to either show up, structure your business, or offer something or whatever that you don’t feel in alignment with.

Now, let me be clear. If you go I don’t feel in alignment with live launching. I might say you have to have some sort of live experience to connect with your audience. The type of live experience the way you do it gets to be unique to you. If I was like, I wanna get healthy, and I was like I don’t wanna work out.

Okay. Too bad. Like the things that you have to do. We have to be consistent in growing our list. We have to be consistent in growing our audience. We have to create opportunities to bring people back to our offer. We have to engage, we have to garner attention, we have to have good messaging.

Those are all things that every business has to have. How you do it is unique to you. So look at like content creation. Your funnel strategy, your live launch strategy, your offer itself, the way you offer your offer, and look at, are there any places that I have put myself in a box because I saw somebody else do it.

I heard this is the way to do it. I told myself the story that this is the only way or the best way to do it, and it doesn’t feel in alignment. It has that feeling, that feeling in your body where it’s I’m forcing this. I am forcing myself to do this. I’m not excited about it. I’m not aligned.

It. It’s an actual energy, and then there’s the things that you’ve done that you feel excited and electric, and it’s I could do this all day. Even if it was hard, I could do it all day. You have to find that. If I go back to the analogy of working out, if someone comes and says, I wanna get in good shape, I’m not like, the only way to do that is CrossFit.

No, you could run, you could do Pilates, you could do kettlebell training, you could do CrossFit, you could do all sorts of different things. But you have to do something. What you do, you gotta figure out what you like the most. You gotta figure out what feels the most exciting, the most aligned for you.

Same thing in business. You’ve gotta have the consistency. You’ve gotta have live launches. You’ve gotta post and create content. You’ve gotta show up. How you do it is up to you. So pull best practices and different things that you see, and then run it through the filter of what do I feel, what do I think?

And give yourself just a little bit more creative expression and a little bit more freedom in how you execute it. So that’s the first thing I’ve been thinking about. And I get in this trap too, and I realized as I was doing it, ’cause I was creating overwhelming, like even frustration for me as I was becoming, not even comparing, but I was like, okay, I got overwhelmed at what about all this?

And what should I do? And it’s almost I think there’s a power in just tuning out noise sometimes. I think we. We consume and we consume ideas and podcasts and social content and digital products and all these things, and we, it’s very much can be masked as productive. It’s I’m learning, it’s productive, I’m learning, it’s gonna get me results.

But I think it, a lot of times it does more damage than it does good. And having a season where you tune everything out and you tune in and you like, you tune into you, but you also tune into your audience. And you tune into who you’re serving and what you’re building and the impact you’re here to have and how you’re gonna have it.

And like you tune everything else external out for a while and then you can go through a season, you can be more discern, have more discernment with what you consume. I think that’s really powerful and that’s where I got is there was this girl. And I actually texted my friend and I was like, this is all a me problem, but I think I have to actually unfollow this person because I’m not feeling inspired.

I’m noti noticing myself getting into this place of comparing and she’s better than me and like I guess a little bit of jealousy. And I’m like, that’s not the energy. And it’s not even her. She’s awesome, right? Like it’s not her at all. It’s me. And that’s not healthy consumption for me. And that was a realization I had.

The second one I wanted to talk about that. I had a big realization after my event that I think you guys will relate to is, I’ve always said this and it came up again for me, but I believe that our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness. And I think it comes up again, like we’re not linear, right?

There’s this dance between it all the time. And if you can get good at recognizing it and being aware of it, then you can leverage it better. So one of my strengths is that, number one, I believe I can have it all and I create the life where I can have it all. Number two, I. Am ruthless with my time and energy, and so I only focus on what is right in front of me right now and what has to get done.

That sometimes results in me doing things more last minute than I should because it’s like I don’t have to do it today. There’s actually more important things I have to do today, so I could just push that off and then my. Strength in believing that I can have it all. And pursuing that sometimes pushes me over an edge where I’m doing too much.

And then my body gets sick or gets injured. So anyways, after the live event, we’ve had three in body marketing lives now, and they’ve all been amazing and we keep selling the same amount of tickets. And not only that, but like we’ll sell more tickets, but the same amount of people show up. Isn’t that weird?

Like we’ll sell, like we sold the most tickets this time, but then there was like a few extra people who couldn’t come for whatever reason, a sick family thing. And so the same amount of people end up in the room all three times the exact same. And I was like, I said this to my team member. I’m like that is not an accident.

That is a very clear signal. And I realized on day three I was like, oh, I am showing up as an event facilitator and a leader who can handle the capacity of that number of people. And that’s why we keep getting handed that number of people, because I can crush it for that number of people. I might think I can crush it for a little bit more, but if I said I wanted to double it.

I don’t think I’m showing up as the person who can facilitate that. I’m doing things to last minute I, and not to where anyone in the room could feel that, but I felt it, right? So like my energetic capacity. Leading up to the event because I waited too long for things, becomes more stressed. And so that is just a signal of I’m putting out this energy of I can only handle this much.

And even if I go back to the first event, my very first event, like I don’t think I was ready to facilitate for a room bigger than that. This was the first time that my facilitation was like I wouldn’t. I’ll always get better and grow, but it was like it just dialed in and it just clicked in a different way.

And I don’t know if the attendees noticed or not, but I noticed, and then also our execution of the event and like how we did things, how we structured it, like the behind the scenes stuff. So anyways, I realized on the last day I said, oh, I have not been the leader who can handle, let’s say a 50 person event.

So before we can sell 50 tickets, I’ve gotta become the leader who operates that way. Starting with, what I did is I said this week we’re booking the venue that holds 50 people. Because what I would do in the past, and I’m being like fully honest with you guys, is I would wait, I’d wait a few months.

Like it’s six months, right of runway. I’d wait until four-ish months, sometimes even three months, see where the ticket sales are, and then book the event. And I’m like, Emily, you know this shit. What do you think that’s putting out there as a message? You’re waiting. You’re going, I don’t know if I’m gonna sell the ticket, so I’m gonna wait and I’m gonna wait to book the event.

No, you book the event. Right now you book the venue this week for 50 people and you make it a non-negotiable to fill it, and you put the message out there that I’m ready to host an event with 50 people. So it made me realize two things in this. Number one, our greatest strengths are our greatest weakness.

My strength at being able to do things, quote last minute it is a gift of mine. And also sometimes I create my best stuff that way. But can I be the CEO of an eight figure company with 50 plus people at a live event operating that way? No, I have to change it a little. I have to get the support, I have to get the infrastructure.

I have to shift the way that I’m operating or I’m gonna be stopping myself from growing. The second thing is, my core constant reminder is you have to become the CEO who already has what you want. And I wasn’t doing that and I didn’t even see it. And then I’m like the same number of people all three times, even no matter what the ticket sales, like the same number of people in the room.

It’s fricking weird. Why? Oh, because that’s your capacity. That’s your capacity because you try to do too much around the event and then just show up and teach the event. That’s the energy that I have And it’s amazing, but it’s if that was double the people, let’s just say if it was double the people in the room, could I do that?

No. So there’s my answer. Your greatest strength is your greatest weakness. Look at where is that potentially. Getting in the way. And then if there’s something you want this year in your business, a number of sales a revenue number, filling an event, filling a mastermind, whatever, have you become the CEO.

Who can carry that? And it’s not just a matter of making the decisions, it’s literally the capacity. It’s the capacity of can you hold that many clients? Can you hold that big of a team? Can you hold that big of an impact? And if you are maxed out every single day, how are you going to hold more? How are you going to create that capacity?

You gotta get more help. You gotta put more structure in place for yourself. You have to get back the capacity. So for me, it was a big epiphany and I have zero doubt that we will fill 50 tickets at the next event because I’m already starting now to operate that way. Instead of going, oh, six months is so much time.

I do a lot of things last minute and I do a lot of things very well last minute, and I’m really fricking good at it. But it is also stopping me from getting to the next level and I am fully confident in that. And so we will be changing that. Alright, everybody, last thing I wanna say before I wrap up the episode is we did just open the doors to the embodied CEO Mastermind, so we, the next round is now open.

This is a container where seven women. Can work with me one-on-one. You basically get me one-on-one for six months. We do weekly calls where you get one-on-one hot seat in the calls, we have a telegram chat. You get two one-on-one calls with me. It is the highest level of getting me basically as like a consultant in your business for six full months.

And we go deep on everything from your offers, your business structure, your marketing, you name it. I have gotten amazing results for the women in the groups the last several rounds. And we just opened the next round, so we kick off the next round in February. If you go to embodied marketing.com/ceo, you can fill out an application.

I personally review every single application because I’m working one-on-one with you, so we open the next round. We only open it every six months. And if that calls to you, I would love to have you in there. All right everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in. I’ll talk to you next time.