→ Build your 2026 growth strategy with me in Austin. Embodied Marketing LIVE is coming up! Join me to build your Q3-Q4 growth strategy + embody the CEO who has it all. Early Bird Available: https://get.embodiedmarketing.com/live

There’s no shortage of opportunity in business. The hard part is deciding what’s worth your time, money, and attention.

In this episode, I’m walking you through the process I use to filter through opportunities, avoid reactive decisions, and choose the highest-leverage path.

I’m sharing what’s been happening behind the scenes as I’ve been sitting with some big decisions around scaling, marketing, AI, live events, and where I want to put my focus over the next 90 days.

If you’ve been feeling scattered in business lately, this episode is for you.

Key Takeaways

• Your business grows as a reflection of your “all-in” focus
• Saying no will double your business
• You don’t need more ideas; you need true priorities

 ____________________________________

More ways Embodied Marketing can support you:

Turn your expertise into consistent revenue. Funnels, strategy, launches—everything done for YOU. Apply here: https://get.embodiedmarketing.com/app

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW THE PODCAST!

Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of the Embodied Podcast! If this podcast has added value and helped you in your business journey, please head over to Apple Podcast, subscribe to the show, and leave us an honest review.

Your reviews and feedback will not only help us continue to deliver great, helpful content, but it will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs just like you.

♥ LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

There is such this balance as an entrepreneur of knowing when to pause and not take action and take action. There is genuinely a feeling in your body when you are aligned. And it is a feeling of ease and no resistance. So in those moments, if you are feeling force and resistance, that is the invitation to pause,

You could go any of those three directions with the next step and make it the right choice. But first the alignment has to happen because if you go from r- to relentless action from a reactive place, you’re fighting.

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 a great week. You can’t really see it in this camera, but I added a bookshelf in here. When we do guest interviews, and you’ll see both, you’ll probably see it.

The space is almost done. I’m super excited. I will put some pictures on Instagram soon.

It’s so good. It’s like I’m obsessed. I’m obsessed with being able to come downtown Austin and have this space. I can’t say enough good things. So I am officially putting it out there in a loose way to those of you on the podcast, if flying in or you live in Austin to do a VIP intensive with me where we spend a day, we deep-dive everything from your marketing, to your offers, to the offer positioning, to your business strategy, to your business plan, to auditing your website, looking at your content, hooks, angles, like everything.

If doing that is something you wanna chat about, I’m going to start opening a few spots. Maybe I’ll do one to two a month. So if that is of interest of you we can get so much done in the day. I’m, like, so pumped, especially in person. And also, we have our live event happening end of July, Embody Marketing Live.

So I don’t know if there’s gonna be an opportunity to somehow… Probably not, see the space. I’ll probably have some people on my podcast, but it’s gonna be super close. It’s– My space is right where we host the event in East Austin Downtown, all right. We’re gonna chat today. I have a few things I wanna talk about, just kinda some things that I think will be helpful for you to hear how I am approaching things in my own business right now, thoughts I’m having.

So first I wanna start with this. I wanna start with this thought I was having as I was driving here, which was there is such this balance as an entrepreneur of knowing when to pause and not take action and take action. And I think, as I’ve grown as an entrepreneur, I’ve learned better to know the signals for pausing, even if it’s half a day or a day and catching that, that those thoughts that end up convincing you that you need to scrap everything and do something crazy.

Or you’re bored, and let’s blow this thing up over here and let’s work on this or you just distract yourself. Or maybe something isn’t working and you’re like, “Okay, in order for me to fix it, it’s not gonna be just a few optimizations here.” It’s “It’s gotta be this big overhaul,” when it doesn’t necessarily need to.

And so anyways, I was reflecting on how I really do understand at this point the times where I need to just be in my own head and allow myself to like process and not take action, which usually is like half of a day or a day. I used to, because it’s a, it’s actually a strength of mine, go into action so fast and it is a strength and it does help a lot with growth, but it also can make it so you end up scattered.

And so anyways, I was reflecting, on some things that I was thinking about in the business and that’s where I’m gonna go with this. It’s what I’m deciding to focus on. And it can be really easy to bring yourself into a very scattered, you’ve lost focus, everything’s getting 70% of you place when you don’t have that little pause in between thought or idea or realization or addressing a gap or a struggle and action.

action is such a skill set. It is such a, it is such a superpower to be able to take action really fast. I think that some of the most successful people take action fast. And it’s while everybody else is still thinking about the ideas that they have and how they’re gonna do it, you’ve already done it, made a mistake, and done it again.

Don’t ever lose that. Also have that connection of when to pause. And so for me, I know that I need to pause. There’s like an energy to it. When I’m in a place of lacking clarity, but not clarity in I have the whole plan and I know exactly how this is gonna play out and I know what to do next and I know all these things, not clarity in that way, clarity in the alignment.

And this might… If you don’t, if you don’t get this, you won’t get this. But if you do get this, you will get this. There is genuinely a feeling in your body when you are aligned. And it is a feeling of ease and no resistance. It’s just ease. It’s just flow. It’s like even if it’s a hard thing that you have to go do next, even if it’s gonna take a lot of work, even if it’s gonna be uncomfortable, even if it’s a heavy lift, even if you gotta go, build something and do something that is gonna take a lot of energy or make you uncomfortable, there’s still that ease to it.

You’re like, “Yes.” That’s it’s aligned. And so I know the difference between operating from that place and operating from a place of force, and operating from a place of like tightly gripping, “I have to get something to work this way,” or, “I don’t have this yet,” or, “I want this yet,” or, “I wanna hit this goal,” or, “I wanna fix this problem.”

When I’m in that place, that’s the invitation to pause. I don’t know if that’s… That’s gonna only make sense for people who are ready to hear it. Because I’m pretty sure if you would’ve said that to me five years ago, I would’ve been like give me the checklist.” “Give me the checklist on how to do that.”

And the problem is you can’t… the somatic part of being in tune with your body and your intuition doesn’t come with a checklist because it’s based on a feeling, like an embodied feeling. So first thing that I wanna say is that in business, when you are hit with something that isn’t working how you wanted, you want to make a change, you’re feeling like this offer isn’t working anymore so you wanna do this, or this strategy, or you need to throw this out, or you wanna make this big pivot, or maybe you’re honestly deep down you’re just bored.

You’re like, “We’re doing the same thing, and I think if we did s- different things I’d get better results.” Maybe. When you have those moments where you’re contemplating and you’re thinking about taking a big action, or doing something different, or throwing something out, and trying something new, and, or making a pivot, or making a new iteration, which are all great things within business.

You do have to make pivots, and changes, and iterations, and be in between points of I was this identity in the business and this is what we did to this. And I think a lot of people are experiencing that right now because of AI, because of where we’re at, because of how much we have had to change how we serve people.

I think that people are experiencing this. So in those moments, if you are feeling force and resistance, that is the invitation to pause, take the step back, like tune into yourself. Do it literally through go for a walk, take breaths. Do something to get into your body so that you can come from that place of alignment because if you are in the energy of chaos, of fight or flight, of, control and trying to tightly grip a situation, it will never Work out how it could and it could be so much better.

So that’s the first thing is I have found myself in that place in the last week just thinking about “Okay, we launched these new offers. They’re doing really well. We have my weekly webinar. Do we scale that?” And I’ve played with a lot of different ideas. I’ve played with different ideas in terms of do we scale the webinar?

Do I do a, do I do a new launch? Do I do a new challenge? Do I do a paid challenge is something that I’ve considered. I’m giving you guys the full raw this is my internal thoughts. Do I launch a paid challenge instead of a free challenge? I don’t know the answer yet. Do I focus on doing some in-person intensives?

Do I put energy and focus into getting a couple more VIP clients, which I would love to work with, and we have the capacity for that fractional CMO? Do I put energy into growing the podcast? Okay, we also have the live event. My head has been around, like, all these directions. I feel like I’m here, and there’s, like, all these roads and paths that I could take, and none of them are bad.

None of them are bad strategies or going to hurt anything if I go down them, but if I choose the highest leverage paths and I do less of walking down paths and I choose the highest leverage ones, I’m probably gonna get more out of it. And so instead of moving right into action and trying to do all those things, because all of them are things I wanna do, I paused, and it’s what?

Tuesday. This was Friday, Thursday, Friday last week that I was thinking about this, and I have not taken the action, and I’ve contemplated when I’m driving, when I’m working out, when I’m laying in bed at night what am I thinking about? I’m thinking about all the different ways, all the different places that we could put resources over the next 90 days ’cause I feel like we’re in this place where we launched our new offers.

We have a system that’s working. We have systems in delivery that are working. Obviously, you’re always improving, but kinda what’s next? Are we just gonna scale this? Are we gonna put here? I wanna fill the event. Anyways, so I’m in this space where I’m deciding, and I recognized that the energy behind it was lack of clarity and lack of alignment, and I didn’t wanna come from a place of “Oh, I gotta fill the event,” or, “I wanna, have…

I gotta have this, these clients so that we have, we’re at max capacity,” or whatever. You guys get it. And so I paused, and it’s been, whatever, four days, and I haven’t made a decision, and I feel almost clear. I feel pretty clear, actually. But I knew that I needed to pause because if I didn’t, I would start sending, team resources, company resources, my time, investment, and ad spend, whatever, into areas that maybe was more reactionary Instead of intentional.

That’s a big piece. That’s a good way to actually put it. When you are taking action in your business, are you reacting? Are you reacting to feedback, which is n- not a bad thing to take in feedback, but are you reacting in a reactive state where you haven’t processed the information to the point where you then can switch and be intentional?

There’s a big difference between being reactive versus intentional in a response to something, whether that response is to a problem, to accomplishing a goal, to launching something new. Are you being intentional or are you being reactive? And that’s, again it’s an energy. You can probably think of times in your business where you’ve been intentional and you’ve been reactive.

Reactive has the energy of chaos, of like it’s not grounded. It is… It’s chaos. And there’s force happening, and then that sometimes creates resistance, and then you’re not clear, and there’s just that misalignment. Intention is very grounded, very centered, very aligned. Okay? So the next piece I wanna talk about…

First, I wanna talk about that. I want to highlight for you learning, ’cause I think this is a very important skill for entrepreneurs, learning to differentiate the times where you should take action and the times where you should pause. And like I said earlier, the pause does not have to be like you pause for two weeks.

The pause can literally be, like, one hour, 30 minutes. It’s just that small moment where you’re like, “Hold up. I need a second. I need a second to digest this.” For me, it’s like I need a few days, mostly ’cause I had to work on other things, so I haven’t had time to mental capacity think. So knowing that is very important as an entrepreneur.

It’s a very important skill, and it really is one that only… the CEO has to lead that because the team’s gonna follow. The team’s gonna follow the leader, and if you say, “Hey, guys, this is the most important thing that we put our energy into right now,” team’s gonna follow. A good team is gonna follow that and is gonna go all in with that, which kind of brings me to my next point.

As I’ve been thinking about all this, as I have been thinking about… ’cause I feel like I’m in… just in a space in business where I’m like, “Okay, there’s a lot of things we could do next,” and some of them are around all the marketing things I listed, but others are, like, AI projects, agents we could build, resources I could put into specific roles and specific areas of the business to automate, and it’s like I can’t do all this at once.

I can’t. So what is gonna move the needle the most? And so that’s where as I’ve been thinking the last several days, what I have realized is The more you can go through the process of let me just put it all out on the table of what we could do, and this is an exercise I actually do. I get a blank piece of paper, and I just get it all out of here’s all the things that we could work on, that I could work on, that the team could work on, that we could put resources into to both grow the business and then improve the business.

So every marketing campaign idea… For me, it would be, like, the paid challenge, the live event, the podcast. Like VIP and elite clients have their own special strategy I want to implement, and it actually requires hiring a role for it if I go that route. Then, of course, there’s the weekly webinar. There’s the things that we’re doing.

And then on improving the business, it’s like the systems that we need to automate, the improvement in onboarding, the AI. I think about it so much. The agents. Which… what things are we gonna build that are gonna be still relevant in three or six months from now and not need a fresh, new thing?

Just dump it all on the paper. And so this is an invitation that you can do this. Dump it all on the paper, everything you could do, everything circling your mind, everything that’s “Oh, that’d be a good idea,” or you had the idea. You heard somebody else. You saw somebody else do it. You were inspired by something.

It triggered this idea. Get it all out on paper, and then ask yourself, ” If I only could do one, two, maybe three of these things,” which for me, I think that there’s three because I have a team. And so I can delegate, and I can lead and say, “This is the directions we’re going.” But for me, it’s probably two on the marketing side and one core on the delivery/operation side.

if you could only do one, two, three of them, what would make the biggest difference if it had all-in energy? Which is something that has been on my mind is all-in energy and asking myself, “What would that look like?” And this has come to me as I’ve… I don’t know. It’s just been something that I’ve been picking up on when I’ve done my webinars, when I’ve been coaching, when I’ve been even working with my team.

That’s the only energy I wanna have right now. And as a company, I think it’s it’s the… it is so necessary with how things are, with the saturation and how much we need to pivot and shift and stand out and be creative and innovative and create experiences both on the marketing and the delivery side and just really stand out as a company.

I think that having that all-in energy is what wins. And so if you can choose One, two, three areas or three projects or three things that you’re like, “If I go all in,” like it gets majority of my time, energy, and money. You’ve got the things that just keep the business running and are kinda status quo and need to still be done.

But go all in on taking this, it’s a seven right now and we take it to a 10 out of 10, blow it through the roof. What are those things that if we did that for three to six months, this is what I’m asking myself right now, it would pay off? It would also not be like I’m not looking for the overnight quick wins.

I’m looking for if we build this brick by brick and we put in that level of energy, and we are relentless with it, what’s gonna pay off the most? So for me, I think for me right now, those will end up being our live event, this podcast, and a specific kind of outreach strategy I have for me getting on podcasts and also our highest level clients.

I have a different strategy that I tell oth- we work with our clients on this too, but if you’re going after seven and eight figure businesses, that you follow to, to get them. And so for me, I think those will be the ones that I choose for the business growth side. And then on the operations side it’s probably gonna be, systems and agents to save time in day-to-day client management, tasking to different team members.

And so if I go all in on that for the next three to six months, and it might be a lift and it may not pay off for the even the next two months, but if I do that, I’ll have a different company in six months from now, in 12 months from now. So that’s what I’ve been sitting with. Like I’m at this place where there’s, I have so many ideas and so many things and so many things that like, again, none of the paths are wrong, and that’s where it gets hard.

I said this on the last podcast too. there’s not a shortage of opportunity. There’s never a shortage of ideas. There’s never a shortage of what you could do when you really sit down and think about it. It is choosing the things that are going to have the biggest impact, and I think the process to doing that is first pausing, and pausing just to hold yourself accountable for not reacting.

‘ Cause, another thing is that there’s a lot of people who have opinions, and a lot of people have opinions without context or enough context, right? And so if you were to go to let’s say, a coach or a friend and ask them, if I was to go to them and say “Hey, should I do this or should I do this?”

Without enough context, they could actually steer me in the wrong place You have the in-depth context of your business and what has worked and what you think is gonna move the needle the most, and it’s helpful to get other perspective for sure, but you have to be careful. So pausing enough to tune that noise out, to sit with, “Here’s the options.

Here’s the problems I’m reacting to. Here’s the gaps that I have. Here is the opportunities. Here’s the goals. Here’s where we’re falling short.” To sit with all that, which is literally the job of a CEO, and then pause, even if it’s for a day, and say, “If I were to go all in…” And you know what I’m talking about, that all-in energy of ” I’m relentless.

This will be the best thing that I’ve ever done for the company. This will be successful. There is no other option but that.” If you were to go all in that way, what would make your business unrecognizable in six months from now if you chose those options? And there’s something about that all-in energy that is, coming up for me a lot in coaching and answering people’s questions is it’s not enough to be operating from a place of “Oh, I need to do this.

I should do this. I saw somebody do this.” It’s just different energy versus where you’re like, “I’m freaking so clear. I am crystal clear on this path. I am intentional with this path, and now we move.” And that’s where then the speed of action comes. It’s like you took that moment to get clear.

You took that moment to get aligned, and now we move like never before. We take the action. We get the help. We execute. We implement. We make the mistakes. We learn from the mistakes. We move forward. We take the action, and we are in motion, but we’re doing so from a place of intention and from a place of not resisting, and not resistance, and not friction, and not force, and not control, but ease.

Although it’s probably not easy. To me, ease is like flow. Ease is flow. There’s not the resistance, but it’s not easy. It’s not effortless. You’re still making an effort. So that’s been my brain for the last four days, and I don’t know if it’s helpful for you guys to hear that because I think no matter what level you’re at, you’re faced with this.

We think it’s, “I need to know the strategy. I need to know the next thing that I should do in my business,” but the strategy and what to execute is rarely ever the problem. And I re- I actually remind myself of this all the time is like there’s not a one right way. I think I just said that to myself the other day because I was try- I was like getting caught up on which direction to go, whatever.

And I was like, you could go any of those three directions with the next step and make it the right choice. You make it the right choice when you come from that place of alignment and relentless action. But first the alignment has to happen because if you go from r- to relentless action from a reactive place, you’re fighting.

And you are forcing and you are pushing and that is so much harder. It’s not that you can’t even create success from that place, it’s just so much energy expenditure when you could be putting that energy into other, into a better way. And so I said that to myself the other day of there isn’t a right way and people, our brains love it and that’s why we are drawn to this, is like we want a coach or we want someone to tell us like, “This is the right way.

This is the strategy. This is what works. This is the only way.” And the reality is that’s not true. And there are times where, a client will come to me and I’ll be on a client meeting and they’re like, “Should we do this or should we do this? Should we change our offer this way or should we change it this way?

Should we set it up in this model?” Whatever. “This strategy,” da. And a lot of times I find myself saying “We can go either way, and either way could work. Here’s the pros and cons.” That’s where you sit and you weigh, “Okay, here’s the pros and cons of this. Here’s what we have to look at. Now let’s tune inward and let’s figure out what feels like the best action, what feels like the best next step, what feels the most aligned, what feels the most in flow,” and we go that way and then we become relentless.

Because we’re coming from a place of intention, it won’t come from a place of force. All right. Hopefully that made sense. It makes complete sense to me. So my invitation to you is to think about, maybe do that exercise. Get everything out on a piece of paper, all the things you’re thinking about. I just, I think we do this way too much as entrepreneurs is we have our hands in way too many places at one time.

And that’s what keeps coming up for me as a message of what if you took all of that where you’re trying to put all your energy and you’re trying to put all your effort and you just focused. And you put that same amount of energy but into less places, but from an extremely intentional place that you’re choosing right now, and then you go all in.

So that’s what I have for you today, guys. All right. I hope you found this helpful. Back to what I said at the beginning, if you are interested in a VIP day out here in Austin, just send me a message on Instagram. And let’s chat about it, chat about what that would look like when we could book it, and process, flow, set up for that.

Otherwise, I will talk to you guys next week.