Do You Trust Yourself Enough to Figure It Out? How to Trust Yourself to Make Big Decisions In Business
- Kelsea Koenreich
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
In This Post
→ Why your brain will always build you a logical, responsible-sounding case for waiting → The question that finally broke two years of spinning open for me → Why the decision is a trust move, not a logistics move → How to install accountability without adding more meetings to your week → What actually happens to your capacity once you make the call
I'm sitting at my kitchen table in my workout clothes, no makeup, writing this, because this one felt too important to wait until I looked the part.
Two years ago, my husband Eric and I were in a pool at a resort in Mexico, kids at home, actually able to finish a sentence, and I told him something I had never said out loud to anyone. I felt guilty dropping our kids at school every morning. Not because anything was wrong with their school or their teachers, and I want to be really clear about that, because teachers are some of the most incredible humans on the planet and I have nothing but respect for what they do. This was about me, and about a vision I'd been carrying for our family that I kept shoving back down every time it surfaced.
I should say, this was also one of the last times Eric and I had a drink. We chose to stop a while back, for no more complicated reason than we wanted to feel good and alcohol is poison, and looking back, that decision followed the same pattern as every other one we've made together: we knew for a while before we did anything about it, and when we finally decided, we figured out the rest from there.
The homeschool conversation was the same.
I knew we wanted to homeschool. I knew I wanted our kids learning about entrepreneurship and money and creative thinking, getting more than fifteen minutes of recess, getting to actually be outside and explore the world. I knew it. I had known it for a long time. And for two years, I did absolutely nothing about it.
Last month, we took our kids to school for the last time.
The Real Reason We Don't Make the Decision
The story I told myself for two years was that I didn't know the how. I didn't know how homeschooling would fit around my clients. I didn't know how I'd carve out time for myself, and I need that time. I get up before my kids every morning, I work out, I protect space away from my children daily because that's how I stay centered and functional as a human outside of all the roles I wear. I follow a woman on Instagram who calls herself a selfish mom and I related to every word. I need my time.
So the story was: I don't know how it all fits. And that story felt true and logical and responsible.
But here's what I know now that I didn't let myself know then: the how was never the problem. The problem was that I didn't trust myself enough to figure it out.
That is the thing under the thing, every single time.
When you say you want to earn the same revenue and work fewer hours but you don't know how, that's not a strategy problem. When you say you want to step back from the day-to-day but you don't know what would break, that's not an operations problem. When you say you want to bring on a team member or raise your prices or redesign how your business runs but you just need to figure out the right way to do it first, none of those are research problems.
They are all the same problem: you do not yet trust yourself enough to take one step without having every other step mapped out in front of you.
And the brain will give you a very convincing reason to wait. Every time.
Why We Choose the Uncomfortable Known Over the Unknown
Our brains are wired for certainty. Not for happiness, not for growth, not for the life we say we want, for certainty. The known thing, even when it's uncomfortable, even when it doesn't feel right, even when it is actively costing you something, feels safer than the unknown thing, because at least you know what it looks like.
This is why we stay in businesses that are running us instead of the other way around. This is why we accept dynamics on our teams we've known for months aren't working. This is why we keep dropping our kids at school when everything in us is saying this isn't right. We know what the current thing looks like, and knowing is comfortable, and comfortable keeps us exactly where we are.
I knew for two years. Two years is a long time to know something and do nothing about it, and I say that with no judgment toward myself and no judgment toward you, because I understand exactly how it happens. The uncertainty of the new thing feels so much bigger than the discomfort of the current thing. So we spin. We make lists of all the reasons we can't yet. We spiral into every possible obstacle. And then we land on "never mind, I'll just keep doing what I already know" and call it being practical.
It isn't practical. It's fear dressed up as logic.
The Question That Actually Breaks It
The shift for me wasn't a plan. It wasn't a spreadsheet of how homeschooling would work around my schedule, or a framework for how to structure the kids' days, or a conversation with someone who had done it before. It was one question I finally let myself sit with.
Do you trust yourself enough to figure it out?
That's it. That's the question that broke two years of spinning open.
Because when I got honest with myself, the answer wasn't "I don't know the how." The answer was: I wasn't sure I trusted myself to handle whatever came from making the decision. And underneath that was something I think most of us carry and almost nobody says out loud, which is that we're afraid of what life looks like if we actually have the thing we want. We're afraid of looking dumb if it doesn't work. We're afraid of what people will think if it does. We're afraid of not knowing everything before we start, as if the people who built things worth building knew everything before they started.
They didn't. None of us do.
But here's what I know about every single woman reading this: you have never come up against something you didn't find your way through. Every problem your business has thrown at you, you have figured out. Every hard decision, every impossible season, every time something broke at the worst possible moment, you handled it. That is not luck. That is evidence. And it's the only evidence that actually matters when you're standing at the edge of a decision that scares you.
You are so resourceful. You always have been. The question is whether you'll let yourself count that as proof.
What Making the Decision Actually Does
The night after we finally made the decision to homeschool, I sat down and started working through the logistics. What it would look like, how the days would flow, how to balance my client work with actually being present for my kids' learning. I didn't have it figured out. I still don't, fully. We don't even have a house in Texas yet. We know the area, but the address doesn't exist yet.
And I was okay.
Not because everything was mapped out. Because I had made the decision. And making the decision meant I was signaling to myself, maybe for the first time in two years, that I believed I could figure it out. That is what deciding actually does. It's not a logistics move. It's a trust move. You are telling yourself, with your actions, that you are someone who follows through, and every time you do that, you give your brain new data. You start to become the person who handles the hard things, not the person who waits until the hard things are no longer hard.
That's the only way the relationship with yourself gets built.
We love to say we'll believe in ourselves once we have more evidence. But the evidence only comes from making the decision first.
What This Has to Do With Your Business
I'm not talking about homeschooling. I'm talking about the decision you've been sitting on, the one where you already know what you want and you've been making it about the how for longer than you'd like to admit.
You want to step back from working every weekend. You want a business that doesn't fall apart when you take a week off. You want to stop being the one who gets called about everything, who makes every decision, who the whole thing routes through. You want to earn more and work less, or earn the same and feel like a person again.
You know what you want. You've known for a while.
The question isn't how. The question is whether you trust yourself enough to take one step in the direction of it without having all the other steps visible yet.
I also want to say this directly, because I see it in the women who inquire about working with me and then don't make the decision: the reason is almost never the investment. The reason is that they don't yet trust themselves to follow through on their own end. And I understand that. I was that person for two years with a choice that cost nothing but time.
What I want you to know is that if you come into a room like The Mom Founders Table, I'm going to give you the tools, the resources, the structure, and the accountability. What I cannot give you is the follow-through. That part is yours. And the willingness to show up for yourself completely, to actually implement, to carry it all the way through, that is the whole thing. Everything else is just the container.
You can figure it out. You always have.
The Mom Founders Table Is the Container for the Work
Everything I just walked you through is what the women inside The Mom Founders Table are doing.
They came in knowing what they wanted and not knowing exactly how to get there. They made the decision to be in the room anyway. And now they're building the infrastructure that makes the business actually run without them, the people, the pricing, the processes, all of it redesigned so they can take their foot off the gas without the revenue disappearing.
You get my accountability, a curated room of women building at your level, and twelve months of work that builds the thing instead of just talking about it.
Applications are open now for the September 1st cohort, with 30 seats. The full details are on the application page.
If you've been sitting on this decision, I want to hear where you are. Apply for The Mom Founders Table or message me on Instagram if you want to talk it through first. Either way, you know where to find me.
