A founder’s guide to ditching martyrdom and building with strategy instead.

There are people out there who can fold fitted sheets.

My sister-in-law is one of them (gag, Kimberly. I’m really just jealous though).

I, apparently, can run two businesses, raise teenagers, launch a strategy house—but ask me to return an Amazon package and I will disassociate immediately.

My husband is so perplexed by this behavior. He’ll watch me close 2 clients in a day or navigate a content strategy without breaking a sweat, but suggest I return something to a store and I leave my body.

Honestly, returning stuff curtails some of my spending because I know myself—I’d rather live with the wrong color lamp than deal with the return.

This got me thinking about the nature of hard things.

The big, obvious hard things—like moving your entire life abroad and uprooting your family.

I’ll never forget landing in Brussels and my oldest son waking me up in the middle of the night in tears, begging to go back to Texas. Saying goodbye to family and friends and everything we knew, without having a clear answer to the question running through my own head: Is this the right thing to do? No clue. Just a willingness to walk into the hard.

And then there’s the everyday hard things—the ones we unconsciously choose or even invent.

The high-achieving women I know?

They LOVE hard things.

They come in more than willing to do—to keep themselves busy, to take on more, to prove their strength.

But shifting their operating system around the belief that hard = legitimate?

That’s the real work.

Funny thing is they say they want more ease & income but the operating system is running a different program, an outdated one.

It’s not that we can’t do the simple things. It’s that somewhere along the way, high-achieving women decided that the hard path is the only legitimate path.

If it isn’t grueling, it doesn’t count.
If it isn’t “hard-earned,” we don’t trust it.

We don’t just take the uphill climb—we manufacture hills when the path is flat.
And it’s wearing us out. We confuse struggle with self-worth and end up anxious, resentful, and wondering why success feels like something that “isn’t worth it”

I realized I was making things harder than they needed to be—not because they were hard, but because I believed they were supposed to be.

That belief was an outdated identity trap I didn’t want to carry anymore and I don’t want you to carry it either because building a business is hard enough and we don’t need to be making it any harder.

The Belief Clash

I hear it constantly in the women I work with. We say we want to make more and rest more. But most of us don’t actually believe those two things can coexist.

If we’re honest, we secretly think:

• If it comes easy, it’s not real.
• If it’s not hard, it’s not valuable.
• Ease is for other people with fewer responsibilities, not us.

That’s the software running in the background of our businesses and you keep putting off the update!!!!

Striking the Balance

I hear it constantly in the women I work with. We say we want to make more and rest more. But most of us don’t actually believe those two things can coexist.

If we’re honest, we secretly think:

• If it comes easy, it’s not real.
• If it’s not hard, it’s not valuable.
• Ease is for other people with fewer responsibilities, not us.

That’s the software running in the background of our businesses and you keep putting off the update!!!!

Striking the Balance

Here’s the nuance: I’m not suggesting we avoid hard things.

Hard is often unavoidable in business and in life. But there’s a difference between facing the hard that grows you—and signing up for unnecessary suffering just to prove you’re strong.

Choosing the hard that matters, and releasing the hard that doesn’t.

Escaping the Cult: Awareness

Nothing shifts until we notice it first. And sometimes that means a brutally honest conversation with yourself:

• Am I doing this because it moves my business forward? Or because I need to prove I can handle it?
• What do I really believe about building a business and making money?
• Do I think struggle is the only legitimate way to succeed?

Awareness is everything. Because once you see it, you can question it.

Fleeing the Cult: Reprogramming your Mind

Here’s the practical move: flood your brain with examples of ease + income.

Follow women who lead with strategy and rest.
Notice founders who scale with simplicity instead of chaos.
Surround yourself with proof that it’s possible.

Your brain only believes what it sees on repeat.

If all you see is hustle = success, that’s what you’ll replicate.
But if you start normalizing ease and wealth in your line of sight? Your identity shifts. Your beliefs expand. You begin to rewrite what’s possible for you.

The Freedom

The flex is not: Look at me, I can carry it all.
The flex is: Look at me, I built a business that doesn’t require me to martyr myself every day.

Ease isn’t cheating. It’s strategy. It’s leverage. It’s empire-building energy.

And sometimes? Let’s be real…the reason you can’t step into ease is because you really do have too much on your plate.

And if that’s the case then I’m here for you.

I built She Posts First a boutique Social Media & Marketing Strategy House for brands and founders that are ready to lighten their social media & marketing load.

We don’t hand you another template or ask you to squeeze in “one more thing.” We take the marketing load off entirely. You stop posting just to “post” and start creating a brand that stands out. We see you and we help you build.

You finally get to test what ease feels like.

Hard used to be your brand. Now? Ease is your empire.