The Call Is Coming From Inside the House: The Beliefs Keeping Your Business Stuck
This is a little weird to admit, but sometimes a phrase gets stuck in my head and I can’t shake it for the whole week. I start wondering what it’s trying to tell me. Why this sentence? Why does it keep popping back up?
Last week, the phrase was “the call is coming from inside the house.” I’m pretty sure I picked it up from a novel I’m reading, and it just stuck. The idea behind it is that the thing you assume is coming from outside of you is often coming from your own beliefs, your own judgments, and the rules you’ve made for your life.
So I sat with it. Here’s what came up, and why I think it matters for anyone building a business on their own name.
When I burned out, I didn’t go looking for more strategy
Around April or May of this year, I was in a funk in my business. I didn’t know if I wanted to keep doing the same thing. It felt like it wasn’t meaningful or impactful enough. (That’s the season that led to my comeback episode about deciding Tiny Offers were, in fact, enough.)
When I first started my business, I consumed every strategy podcast and business book I could get my hands on. If you’ve ever seen me on video, those are the books lined up on the shelves behind me. And I’ve read every one of them. But I hit a point where I couldn’t read any more. It all felt like the same advice regurgitated in a different wrapper. Looking back, that exhaustion was a canary in the coal mine. I felt like I’d lost my mojo, and I was questioning my motivation, my excitement, and my purpose.
What pulled me through was a different kind of content. I started listening to podcasts about the nervous system, self-belief, confidence, and the underlying felt side of business. And I realized something: I’ve never been short on strategy. I’m a strategist. I teach it, coach it, and work directly with private clients on it. When I was stuck, I didn’t ask ChatGPT or Claude to map out a new plan for me, because I knew the problem was me.
When the pattern interrupt becomes the pattern
The same sameness I felt with business books is showing up on social media right now. Last week, I screenshotted every post I saw with the word “quietly” in it (as in, someone “quietly” used ChatGPT to do something). I ended up with about 15 screenshots just from casual scrolling.
One of the first marketing lessons I ever learned is that once the pattern interrupt becomes the pattern, people tune it out. When a lot of people are having AI create their carousels and their images, everyone starts to look the same.
That’s why finding your edge matters. What do you really care about? For me, the answer showed up in where I went for help when I was stuck. It also showed up in what my brain always wants to learn about. And it’s the underlying reason Tiny Offers have worked since I started teaching them in 2018.
The belief that what I do isn’t enough
Content note: this section mentions a death by suicide.
Some of our beliefs sit so far under the surface that we don’t even know we have them. One of my big ones is that what I do isn’t enough. It’s not deep enough, not big enough, not mass-market enough.
A year and a half ago, my cousin died by suicide. I used to babysit him, and his mom is my godmother. I was crushed. Sitting at his funeral, right in front of the lake with the waves splashing the whole service, I told my dad that this kind of thing really makes you think about your purpose. I wanted to lead a bigger life and do something that actually mattered.
My dad looked at me and said, “What do you mean, do something that matters? What you’re doing is massively impactful. You’re changing people’s lives. You’re showing them what’s possible.”
And the little girl in me tilted her head and said, “Really? You think my work matters?” I honestly thought he might see it as a waste of time. We’re all kind of little kids running around in adult bodies, and we still want our parents’ validation.
That moment showed me how many stories I carry about my work. The biggest one is that I sell things on the internet to other people selling things on the internet, so none of it is real. When I look for examples of online business, the blips that stand out to me are the bro marketers and the people who overpromise and underdeliver. Then I lump myself in with them. It’s hard to show up fully when part of you is equating your work with everything you dislike.
And, pausing business for a moment in honor of my beautiful cousin Ben, please, if you’re struggling, just stay another day. Get support. You can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US.
Why Tiny Offers work: you change while they’re working
I’ll happily talk about funnels, ads, and conversion events all day. But I have to admit that the strategy works when the other stuff is also working.
I’ve had so many coaching calls where someone gets their ads working for the first time and says, “I don’t know what to do with my time now. This feels so easy.” Sales start showing up like Monopoly money, and they’re shocked. Getting there takes a huge amount of self-belief.
This is the part people miss about Tiny Offers. They work because you’re changing as they work. The people who finish their offers, who test lots of different things without giving up, who run ads that flop the first two or three times and keep going — those are the people who change their lives with Tiny Offers. They’ve looked in the mirror and thought, “This isn’t working. I suck. It’s never going to work for me.” And then they kept showing up, and one day the ad worked. They made a sale to a stranger and thought, holy crap, my life is about to change.
That first sale is proof you can do it, and you only get that proof by taking the action.
What your judgments reveal about your rules
Here’s a useful exercise. What kind of content do you judge? What kind of entrepreneur makes you roll your eyes or cringe? Your answers can help you clarify your values. Keep an eye on where those judgments quietly turn into rules, though.
A few examples:
- You got burned by a high-ticket program. Maybe you spent a lot on a mastermind and the creator was nowhere to be found. Now your rule might be “high ticket rips people off” or “selling is obnoxious,” so you barely sell and never ask for the sale.
- You had a big team with a tiny profit margin. This one’s mine. My belief became “big team equals more revenue and more stress, and no more profit.” There are ways to run a high-revenue business with strong profit, and that’s what I’m working on now. But if I don’t watch that belief, it could keep me from hiring even when I’m drowning.
- You think personal brands are narcissistic. Then you’ll hide behind educational content and introduce yourself with a serious title so people take you seriously.
That last one is me, too. My siblings are both medical doctors, and I’m the weird artist marketer who was always smart but too rebellious to act like it. I have old stories about needing to prove I’m smart, or else I’m just selling snake oil. It has always felt more legit to tell the moms on the sidelines at sports games that I’m a marketing strategist than to say I help people through the fear, behavior, and avoidance psychology of running a business.
Strategy and the felt side of business go together
I don’t like fluffy advice, and I’ll never be the coach who says you don’t have a funnel problem, you just don’t believe enough. Sometimes it’s both. Sometimes you don’t believe in your offer, so you don’t talk about it. There’s real neuroscience behind that. And sometimes the copy is bad, the ad points to the wrong page, the checkout is broken, or the sales page is weak.
What I don’t want to do is answer every tactical problem with “rewrite your copy” or “spend more on ads,” because there’s so much more going on behind the scenes.
How to start hearing the calls coming from inside your house
Start listening to your own brain the way you’d listen to a curious kid. I’ve done this with my kids since they were toddlers. I ask a question, listen to how they’re thinking about it, and say, “Huh, isn’t that interesting?”
Try asking yourself:
- Where did this thought come from?
- Whose voice is actually saying it?
- What story is keeping it true for me?
- What evidence am I collecting to prove it?
A lot of the time, you already know what to do. The work is understanding why part of you keeps resisting doing it, and which stories are behind that. Some of them might go back to 8-year-old you, something from middle school, or something a parent or caregiver said. That resistance can’t always be explained by strategy.
So take one tiny step toward it. Talk about it, share about it, move through it, or hire a coach who can help you dig in.
Listen to the full episode
This is the call coming from inside my house. I want to talk more about the felt side of business alongside the strategy, because I believe you need both. These episodes are for you, but they’re probably more for me. So thanks for coming to my not-so-internal monologue.
Listen to the full episode above. Then send me a DM and tell me what you want to hear on the Start Tiny Show, what kind of coaching you need, and what would help you move to your next level.
This post is based on an episode of the Start Tiny Show. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, and if it resonated, send me a DM and tell me the one tiny step you’re taking this week.