You're Not Inconsistent. You're Just Running on the Wrong Calendar.
- Kelsea Koenreich
- Jul 31
- 7 min read
Renee Fieck got dressed one morning and put on silver earrings with a gold necklace.
She caught herself thinking: those aren't supposed to go together. And then she paused and asked herself: who says?
Somebody, at some point, made a rule that silver and gold don't mix. Nobody knows who. It just became the rule, and most of us have been following it without ever deciding to. Same with brown and black. Same with a lot of things that feel like facts and are actually just inherited opinions.
Most of us are running our businesses by rules with the exact same pedigree.
Renee teaches women to use their menstrual cycle to build and run their businesses in a way that fits how they're actually built. She is a mom of three, an occupational therapist by training, and she ended up here after a year that included her husband's brain tumor diagnosis, a newborn, and three kids under six, when she finally hit the wall of "do more" coaching advice and started looking for a different answer.
I brought Renee onto the podcast because I've been paying attention to cycle syncing for a while and also because I have the kind of athlete brain that hears it and immediately starts listing reasons it won't work for me. I wanted to work through my own resistance out loud, and I think what came out of it is worth sharing.
The Problem With Running on a Man's Schedule
Men have testosterone operating on a twenty-four-hour rhythm. Every day they wake up with a fresh dose. It rises through the morning, dips in the afternoon, and resets overnight. Which means most of the productivity frameworks, the consistency habits, the "do this same thing every single day" advice, was built around a hormonal cycle that repeats daily.
Women's hormones don't work that way.
Estrogen and progesterone move through a monthly cycle and they do not behave the same way throughout it. Renee describes it like the difference between the sun and the moon. The sun shows up the same way every day. The moon has phases, and sometimes it's gone entirely. We have a different rhythm. The problem is that we have spent decades trying to run the sun's schedule on the moon's rhythm, and then wondering why we crash.
I read that and thought about every productivity book I have ever bought. Every morning routine I have tried to lock in for thirty days straight. Every time I told myself that the inconsistency was a discipline problem.
Most women Renee works with come to her saying the same thing: I have two good weeks where I go hard, get everything done, feel like myself. Then I crash for two weeks and can't produce anything and feel like something's wrong with me. What she shows them is that nothing is wrong. They're just not using the second half of their cycle. They're waiting for the crash to end so they can get back to performing, instead of understanding that the second half has a completely different kind of output available.
My Resistance, Named Out Loud
I want to be straight with you about where I started in this conversation: skeptical.
I am a former powerlifting athlete. My training brain says you show up every day and you do the work. The idea that there are weeks when I shouldn't push felt like an excuse I wasn't willing to make. I told Renee that on the podcast because I think a lot of the women listening would have the same reaction and I didn't want to pretend otherwise.
She said she's not asking you to reconstruct your entire business around your cycle. She is asking you to change ten percent. Even ten percent creates a noticeable difference. And that ten percent doesn't have to be in your business at all. It can be in your self-care, your exercise, how you eat, what you say yes to in your personal life. Just start applying the awareness somewhere and see what happens.
I thought about my client calls. I can't reschedule them based on where I am in my cycle. Neither can most of the women I work with. Renee acknowledged the same thing about her own schedule. The answer is not to eliminate everything that doesn't match the phase. The answer is to stop filling every remaining gap with more output, and to start making micro adjustments in the places where you do have flexibility.
Batch your social media during ovulation instead of creating it on the fly every day. Schedule your strategic planning sessions during menstruation instead of treating that week like a lost week. Write your most important copy in the luteal phase when you're closest to the emotional experience of your audience. And in the follicular phase, go as hard as you want, because that's when you have the capacity for it.
Nobody is asking you to build a different business. Just a different schedule inside the one you already have.
What Each Phase Is Actually Good For
There are four phases. Here is what Renee taught me about each one, and what I immediately started mapping back to my own month.
Menstrual phase. The week you're bleeding. Renee calls it the CEO phase, and when she said that I almost laughed, because that is the week most women write off entirely. Energy is lower, which is real, but she says this is also when women are at their most intuitive. The noise from everyone else's opinions gets quieter. Your own signal gets louder. Your biggest strategic pivots, the decisions about what to let go, the clearest read on where the business is actually going, those tend to surface here. Not because you forced them. Because you stopped moving long enough to hear them.
Follicular phase. Estrogen starts climbing after bleeding ends and you feel it within days. This is the phase for launching, tackling the projects that have been sitting on the list, clearing every administrative thing you've been avoiding. Renee describes it as the phase where your brain just wants to focus and check things off. The dog to the vet. The car appointment. The new offer you've been thinking about for six weeks. This is the window. Use it, because last week it felt impossible and next week it might again.
Ovulatory phase. Estrogen peaks around ovulation and Renee says this is when you are at your most magnetic, most confident, most physically present. Podcast recordings. Content batching. Hard conversations. Anything where you need to show up and be seen. Your body is doing something specific here and it is doing it in your favor. If you have been recording one video a week and feeling inconsistent about it, try recording all four in one session during this phase. The difference is noticeable.
Luteal phase. The two weeks before your period, progesterone takes over, and this is the phase most women call the bad weeks. The doubt surfaces. The frustration surfaces. The overwhelm surfaces. Renee reframed this for me in a way I have not stopped thinking about: this phase is a filter. Your brain is going through everything that isn't working, everything that needs to change, everything you've been tolerating. That is not dysfunction. That is useful information arriving on a schedule.
She also said this phase produces some of the most emotionally connected writing she has ever seen. The copy that lands, the content that makes people feel seen, often comes from writers in their luteal phase because they are closest to the emotional experience of their audience. Written content, yes. Video, probably not the week for it.
The Gold and Silver Rule, Applied to Everything
Renee put on silver earrings and a gold necklace that morning and caught herself thinking they weren't supposed to go together. Then she asked herself who made that rule. And then she kept pulling on the thread. Who said you can't run a multi-million dollar business from your couch? Who said you have to be put together and professional on camera every day? Who said the productive weeks are the ones where you're always moving, and the quiet weeks are the ones where something's wrong?
Somebody made all of those up. And most of us have been following them without ever deciding to.
The rules about how women are supposed to work were written for a different biology. The consistency frameworks, the hustle calendars, the "same thing every single day" approach to building a business, those were built around a hormonal rhythm that women don't have. Which means following them without question is not discipline. It is just compliance with a system that wasn't designed for you.
Renee asks her clients one question every day: what does my body need today? Not what do I have to do. Not what should I be doing. What do I actually need right now, and can I give myself that?
I'll be honest, I still fight that question. My default is straight to the list. But I've noticed that the weeks I treat my luteal phase as a lost week, I'm shorter with my team, I second-guess decisions I already made, and I spend the first two days of the following week recovering from the spiral instead of moving forward. Treating it as a different kind of productive doesn't make the phase feel easier. It does make it shorter.
The Mom Founders Table Is Where These Shifts Happen
This is the work inside The Mom Founders Table, and I mean the larger thing underneath cycle syncing specifically: questioning which rules were handed to you and which ones you want to keep. Redesigning your business and your schedule around the life you want instead of the model you inherited. Doing the identity work that turns intellectual awareness into something you can hold under pressure.
That is the room. Twelve months, thirty women, my accountability and a curated group of founders building at the same level. Your people, your pricing, your processes, redesigned so the business holds without requiring you to run against yourself every week.
Applications are open now for the September 1st cohort, with 30 seats. Full details on structure, calls, the retreat, and the guarantee are on the application page.
Apply for The Mom Founders Table or message me on Instagram if you want to talk through where you are first.
You can follow Renee Fieck on Instagram at @renaefieck and grab a free copy of her book at renaefieck.com/freebook, you just cover shipping. If this conversation opened something up for you, go find her. She knows this territory.
