Ep. 87 The Real Reason You Can't Get Out of Your Own Way in Business w/ Jen Lemke
It can be so frustrating when you know you're doing all the right things. The strategy, the messaging, the offers, you name it, and you still feel stuck.
That is exactly why I wanted to sit down with my friend Jen Lemke for this one. Jen is a subconscious success coach trained in NLP, hypnotherapy, and EFT. She helps ambitious women break free from overthinking, procrastination, and other self-sabotaging behaviors by rewiring the identity level patterns that stall action and income. Her work blends neuroscience, subconscious reprogramming, and real world execution, and she delivers it with bold honesty and zero fluff.
We got into the difference between the conscious and subconscious mind, why most of our blocks are hidden so deep we don't even know they exist, and she shared three journal prompts to help you start uncovering what's actually holding you back. We also talked morning routines, investing in yourself versus your business, and why the inner work is always the work that moves the needle most.
If you have ever felt like you just cannot get out of your own way in your business, keep reading.
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From aesthetician to network marketing to subconscious coaching
Jen has been in the online space for about 15 years. She spent 13 of those years working as an aesthetician while holding down a full time job, single and living in the city. Then one day she found a fitness program she could do from home, and before she knew it she was in a network marketing company helping people get fit. She never intended to join network marketing at all. One thing just led to another, and three years later that side business, built on very part time hours, had outgrown her aesthetics income.
Then she woke up pregnant. She and her now husband looked at the math: commute an hour each way with a newborn, or finally do the thing she had been circling for years and build her business from home. She saw the whole picture in her head, the stages, the trips, the big team, and she decided she was going to be a work at home mom.
Within months, reality set in. She was 41, had never worked from home before, had zero experience with kids, and was trying to figure out the whole newborn thing while keeping her business afloat. The advice she got was simple: just work when the baby naps. It sounded beautiful in theory. In practice, her son slept in fifteen minute stretches on a good day. She worked mornings, nights, weekends, vacations, and wore the phrase "naptime hustle" like a badge of honor, often celebrating getting through the day with a glass of wine and a laptop on her lap at nine at night.
She did everything the gurus told her to do. Hired help. Got a babysitter. Got a VA. None of it fixed the real problem. By the time her son was three, her team was quitting, she felt like she couldn't coach her way out of a paper bag, and she was in a full downward spiral.
The shift started during a late night breastfeeding session, scrolling social media, when she stumbled across the phrase "subconscious mindset" and had no idea what it meant. She had prided herself on reading the most books and listening to the most podcasts, all while pushing a stroller, and yet her mindset, as she puts it, was a total dumpster fire underneath all that self improvement content.
She looked into subconscious work, got overwhelmed at the idea of adding one more thing to learn, and put it on the back burner. Eventually she hit a wall: either quit the business entirely or hire a coach. She hired the coach. Within two weeks, she says, it was like the clouds parted. Within about six weeks she shut down her network marketing business, studied everything she had purchased, got certified over 180 hours of training, and made her first thousand dollars with a brand new client within six weeks of starting that coaching relationship.
What strikes me most about that story is the line she used: I don't have enough time when I don't have enough time. The moment she got clear on what she actually wanted, instead of circling everything she didn't want and didn't yet have, time somehow appeared.
Network marketing as training wheels
I have talked to other guests on this podcast who also got their start in network marketing, and I know the industry does not have the best reputation these days. I would not go start one now. But I do think a lot of us got our first real taste of self employment and online business through exactly that kind of container, and there are skills you pick up there that are genuinely hard to learn any other way.
Jen agreed. She said she did not even realize at first that what she had joined was network marketing. She just wanted to help people in the fitness space, and by the time she figured out what she was actually part of, she was already in it, learning by osmosis from the leaders around her. She started sharing vulnerable stories on Instagram that she never would have shared otherwise, simply because that was the norm in the environment she was in.
Looking back, she calls it training wheels for the real thing. If she had started in business completely on her own, she does not think she would be nearly as far along as she is now.
I had the opposite path. I went to school for graphic design, took a corporate job, hated it, started freelancing, and suddenly had a business with no training wheels and no container. I was building the plane while flying it, trying to deliver client work while also figuring out what social media marketing even was. Having some kind of framework first, even an imperfect one, would have made that jump feel a lot less like free falling.
The identity shift nobody warns you about
One of the more interesting threads in our conversation was what it costs to go from promoting someone else's product to putting yourself out there as the product.
Jen described it as an identity shift. She had been known as the fit girl, the fitness mom, the one who always worked out. Stepping into subconscious coaching meant giving herself permission to stop working out five days a week, because she realized that level of activity was not actually relatable to most of the people she wanted to serve. She had to let go of habits that made sense for her old identity and build a new set of habits around who she was becoming.
In network marketing, even when you are being vulnerable and putting your own spin on things, you are still sharing someone else's products and someone else's script. When you go out on your own as a coach or a service provider, you are the product. That is a different kind of exposure entirely.
Jen said one of the biggest things she works through with clients is that they rarely come to her with a stack of testimonials to lean on. She tells them they have to become their own biggest cheerleader before anyone else is going to pat them on the back. That takes an enormous amount of trust and faith in your own ability to create something and to know whether it is working, without much external proof to point to yet.
She also said something that stuck with me: it is almost better that you do not know how hard the beginning is going to be, because not knowing lets you take more risk than you would if you understood what was coming.
The ego death of leaving your nine to five
I told Jen about the day I quit my nine to five. I am not generally an overly emotional person, but for three days straight I was a wreck, irritable and crying, genuinely asking my husband what was wrong with me. In hindsight, I think all the pressure of trying to do both a job and a business for so long had finally lifted, and I had space to actually feel things for the first time in a while. I was also completely unprepared for how overwhelming it felt to realize it was all on me now.
Jen asked if I would call that the death of an ego. She has been through something similar herself, and described it as an identity crisis where you are one thing and then suddenly you are another, and you have to let go of the old version of yourself before you even know what the new version looks like.
Because of that experience, when I coach clients who are about to leave their nine to five, I tell them to build in three or four days afterward with as few obligations as possible. Not because they will definitely fall apart, but because they might, and there is no shame in that. It says a lot about what is happening under the surface in our subconscious and our mindset, things we rarely think about until they smack us in the face.
Jen made a great point here too: when you finally have unstructured time, you tend to fill it with something. Allowing yourself to just not do anything is deeply uncomfortable, and that discomfort is usually exactly when the emotions and the insight show up. She takes phone free walks through a forest preserve for this reason. When you finally let yourself think without having to do, the answers that were stuck in your subconscious start to surface.
I have spent years untangling my own value from my own productivity. I built this business partly so I could have control over my time and enjoy my life, and then proceeded to fill every second with things I did not actually need to be doing. It took having kids for me to really learn that lying on the couch snuggling my baby is not unproductive. That counts. That is enough.
Conscious versus subconscious, explained simply
Here is the heart of what Jen teaches. Your brain takes in something like 17 million bits of information every single second through your five senses, far more than it could ever consciously process. So it filters, based on your belief system, your goals, and what you actually want.
Your conscious mind, the thinking, analyzing, figuring-things-out part of you, is only responsible for about 5 percent of your day. Your subconscious mind runs the other 95 percent. That is your habits, your automatic reactions, the foot you get out of bed with, the point in your routine where you brush your teeth. It is running constantly, 24 hours a day, recording everything, even while you sleep.
That is why Jen teaches her clients to set goals with the subconscious mind in mind, not just the conscious one. When you bring in what you would see, hear, feel, even taste around a goal, it stops being an abstract idea and becomes something your brain can actually hold onto. That activates something called the reticular activating system, and suddenly things that were always around you become obvious, because you are now primed to notice them.
She used the classic example of deciding to buy a red Jeep, then suddenly seeing red Jeeps everywhere on the drive home. They were always there. Your brain just was not flagging them as relevant until you gave it a reason to.
This is also why hypnosis can be such an effective reprogramming tool, and why it is not nearly as woo as people assume. If you want to believe you are wealthy while staring at a bank account that says otherwise, your conscious mind will reject the affirmation outright. But early in the morning, before your conscious mind fully switches on, or late at night before sleep, that same suggestion can go straight to the subconscious without your inner skeptic standing guard. Jen compared the conscious mind to a bouncer checking IDs at a club door, blocking you from the fun stuff happening inside unless you time your entrance right.
Three questions to find your hidden blocks
I asked Jen how we are supposed to know when the subconscious is actually the problem, versus a strategy or messaging issue.
She told a story about journaling one day and writing, without expecting it, the sentence "more success equals more to lose." That belief explained a pattern she had lived out for years: two steps forward, three steps back. Somewhere in her past she had learned that success came with a cost, and that belief was quietly steering her decisions.
A lot of her clients show up wanting to fix their messaging. Messaging matters, of course, but you can have the most compelling messaging in the world and still stall out if you are carrying subconscious beliefs like "I'm not good enough" or "if I succeed, I lose time with my family." It is one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake at the same time.
Here are the three journal prompts Jen shared to help surface what is hidden:
If I fully succeed, I might lose what?
If I fully succeed, I might have less of what?
If I fully succeed, I'll never have what?
Sit with a pen and your journal and actually write out the answers. Jen said she was amazed by what came up for her when she did this, and it is exactly what helped her uncover her own blocks around success.
Why we resist doing “the work”
I asked Jen why she thinks people avoid this kind of work, even when they know it would help.
Her answer was simple: because it's hard. It is not easy to look back at your past and figure out what shaped you, and doing that kind of work means letting a lot of things go. Most people would rather listen to one more podcast or try one more meditation app and hope the answer shows up on its own. But when you actually start digging into what was programmed between birth and age seven, in the womb, even patterns handed down through generations, there is an enormous amount of opportunity waiting on the other side of that discomfort.
There is often shame tangled up in this too. Realizing you have deep seated beliefs about your self worth, your money, or how you look can feel like discovering it is somehow your fault, one more problem to fix. I prefer to flip that. If it is something you learned, it is something you have the power to change. That reframe alone can make the work feel a lot less heavy, even if it is still hard.
Jen shared her own version of this. One belief she had to unlearn was that the harder you work, the more successful you become, which is simply not true, and she had been deeply attached to achievement because of it. I could relate. I got a lot of praise as a kid for doing well in school, partly because neither of my grandparents finished high school and my parents barely did. School came easily to me, and every time I achieved something I got attention and approval for it. That pattern served me well for a long time, right up until I started running my own business, where nobody was handing out gold stars for effort. I have had to consciously shift from "work hard for the sake of working hard" to "doing the right work matters more than doing more work."
A different kind of morning routine
Before we started recording, Jen mentioned she has strong feelings about morning routines, and I wanted to hear them, because the internet is full of advice about elaborate 85 step routines involving warm lemon water, eye masks, and gratitude journals performed in a very specific order while somehow also looking peaceful and photogenic. Meanwhile some of us are just hoping to get a shower in before we have to wake the kids for school.
Jen has lived both versions. As a new mom she tried to run the full elaborate routine, hit every step, and technically "won" the morning, only to have everything fall apart by ten o'clock when real life inevitably showed up. She would find herself in reaction mode anyway, confused about why the routine had not made her feel as good as promised.
What she eventually realized is that the purpose of a morning routine is not to complete it. The purpose is to make you feel alive, and that can take three minutes just as easily as three hours. On mornings when she has almost no time, she sits for three minutes and visualizes what she wants her day to look like by the end of it, how many clients she connected with, what that felt like, what she saw and heard in that moment. She makes it emotional enough that it feels like it is already happening, right down to getting goosebumps.
The only real goal is to make yourself come alive. That is it. It does not need another step. If anything, most of us need fewer steps, not more. I have started asking myself what is the bare minimum I need to do for myself each morning before I start giving my time away to everyone else, and that question alone has made a real difference.
This connects to something I changed in my own business a couple of years ago. I moved my CEO days, the days I block off to only do work I actually want to do in my business, from Thursdays to Mondays. I used to start the week with a client call at eight in the morning. Now I ease into the week instead. It has changed the entire tone of my week, because I am not starting Monday already behind or already prioritizing everyone but myself.
Investing in yourself versus investing in your business
Here is something I talk about with business friends constantly. We will drop a thousand dollars on a business expense without blinking, because it takes money to make money and we have all heard that a hundred times. But ask that same person to spend eighty five dollars on a pedicure and suddenly it feels indulgent and hard to justify. I would bet the same resistance shows up around therapy, mindset work, and gym memberships.
I asked Jen how she talks to business owners who want to work with her but feel apprehensive about the cost.
She starts by asking about their goals and their values. If your values are not aligned with your goals, you will feel constant inner conflict, and that conflict often shows up as reluctance to spend money on the thing that would actually help. She likes to ask directly: what is your one year goal, and how do you plan to get there with a coach versus without one? Once you can see the value of getting there faster next to the cost of staying exactly where you are, the decision tends to get much simpler.
She also pointed out that the fear is not always about the money itself. Sometimes it is a fear that you will not do the work, or that the coach will not be able to get you the results they claim to. Those are legitimate fears in a coaching industry that does not always deliver on its promises. But she does not think of coaching as an expense. She thinks of it as an investment in your own future, and she asks, if you are not investing in your own growth, what exactly are you investing in instead.
There is also a difference in the shape of the return. Hire a social media manager or a copywriter for a launch, and you will likely see a fairly direct return, but it is often tied to that specific project or timeframe. Do the work on your mindset and your subconscious, and the return tends to ripple outward indefinitely, into your business and into the rest of your life.
Jen described her own experience hiring her first coach. It was not a cheap investment, but she had full body belief in herself and trust in the person she hired, and she asked herself what the consequence of not doing it would be. What she learned in that relationship, how to notice her own language, how to question the meaning she was assigning to things, she still uses today. The business growth is the goal, but the mindset work is the precursor to that growth. She has had clients spend thousands of dollars on strategists and done for you services with nothing to show for it, only to start doing less once they worked on their mindset and get better results anyway.
Working with Jen
If you find yourself spinning at two in the afternoon with 85 browser tabs open and nothing actually accomplished in the last 45 minutes, Jen created a free mindset activation audio for exactly that moment, something you can pop into your ears when you feel like you are giving your power away to everything external. It is called Activate. She has also published a planner on Amazon called Becoming Her, is currently building out a community, and offers both one off sessions and a larger one on one coaching package.
For anyone who does not want to commit to months of deep inner work but just wants help getting unstuck from one specific thing, she also has a $77 offer where you answer a set of pointed questions and she sends back a personalized video walking through what your answers reveal about the blocks holding you back. It is a fast way to see what has been hidden so you can actually do something about it.
It All Begins With Knowing What You Want
If you are ready to start doing this work yourself, Jen says it all begins with knowing what you want, why you want it, and what having it will actually do for you. So many people default to a number, like five or ten thousand dollar months, without ever asking what that number is really in service of. Once you know the deeper reason behind the goal, that becomes your real motivation. From there, get clear on your values, align your goals with them, and expect blocks to surface as you start doing the work. Those pauses where you cannot figure out why you are not just doing the obvious next step are usually a sign that something hidden is in the way.
If you have been feeling stuck despite doing everything right, I hope this gave you a new place to look. Sometimes the missing piece is not another strategy. It is the belief running quietly underneath all of them.
🔗 Links & Resources Mentioned In The Episode:
➡️ Visit Jen's Website
➡️ Get Jen's Free Activation
➡️ Follow Jen on IG
➡️ Follow Morgan on IG and Threads
➡️ Book Your Stand Out Brand Strategy Session (use code SFBPOD for $100 off)
➡️ Book A Brand Chat
🎧 Listen to episode 86 of The Six Figure Brand Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube
