Topics: Entrepreneur Mindset Blocks, Business Mindset Blocks, Fear of Failure, Female Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneur Mindset Blocks…it’s not what they say….
When growth feels tricky or you get stuck…
It’s not because you want to ‘play small’—it’s because your mind is protecting you.
In this episode, I explain why the coaching cliché of “playing small” is misleading (and damaging) what’s really happening when female entrepreneurs keep parts of themselves hidden or suppressed.
If you’ve been battling entrepreneur mindset blocks or business mindset blocks, it’s not laziness—it’s your nervous system trying to shield you from the fear of failure. I’ll show you how to see it, name it, and start dismantling it.
You’ll hear how I uncovered these patterns in my own work (and yes, cringed at past choices), plus what happens when you finally strip off the filter.
In this episode:
- Spot the Glimmer Effect: Identify where you’re showing just a glimpse of your real voice—and how to release more of it.
- Rethink Self-Doubt: Use it as a signal, not a stop sign, so you can move forward without second-guessing everything.
- Break the Future Backlash Loop: Stop rehearsing failure before it happens
If you’re ready to step fully into your message, and grow your business with less chasing, less hustle, this is a must-listen.
🎧 Listen now for mindset shifts that help female entrepreneurs like you move past fear and into action.
TIMESTAMPS
00:01 – The Truth About Entrepreneur Mindset Blocks
04:15 – How Female Entrepreneurs Hide Their Brilliance
09:48 – Business Mindset Blocks and Why You REALLY Hold back
15:32 – When Self-Doubt Feels Safer (Fear of Failure and Self-Doubt)
22:57 – Breaking Free from Entrepreneur Mindset Blocks
LISTEN TO NEXT: You’re Not Ready, But Do It Anyway
RESOURCES
Instagram:@chardetryel
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MORE ABOUT THIS ENTREPRENEUR MINDSET PODCAST EPISODE
“The difficulty with the entrepreneur mindset is it requires you to go against biology—opening yourself up to rejection, to someone saying no. It’s terrifying.” – Chardét Ryel, Visibility Mentor and Podcaster
- The Glimmer Effect and Business Mindset Blocks
- Self-Doubt as a Safety Mechanism
- The Future Backlash Loop
- The Cost of Filtering Your Brilliance
- Shifting From Fear to Full Expression
Have you ever been told you’re “playing small”?
Did it make you feel inspired—or did it make you bristle?
For many female entrepreneurs, that phrase has been repeated so often it’s lost any real meaning. It’s become a marketing cliché, thrown into sales pages and Instagram captions as if it’s the magic push we need to suddenly transform. But here’s the truth: you’re not deliberately choosing to shrink your vision or water down your voice. You’re doing something far more human.
What’s really at play are deeper entrepreneur mindset blocks—patterns of thought and behavior that develop from a mix of self-protection, conditioning, and lived experience. These aren’t just “bad habits” you can shake off in a day. They’re often linked to your nervous system’s desire to keep you safe from rejection, criticism, or uncertainty.
And that’s where this conversation shifts. Because once you understand the real forces behind your hesitation, you can start to work with them instead of feeling shamed by them.
The Glimmer Effect: When You’re Only Showing Part of Yourself
Think about the last time you shared something in your business. Did you post the unfiltered version of your opinion… or did you soften it a little first?
Most of us don’t realize just how much we edit ourselves before we hit publish. We show the world a glimmer of who we are—just enough to be seen, but not enough to feel fully exposed.
This is the Glimmer Effect. It’s one of the most common business mindset blocks because it feels safe. You share a slice of your personality, but you stop short of revealing the depth of your creativity, your ideas, or your real perspective.
It might look like:
- Choosing muted brand colors because they feel “more acceptable”
- Holding back a strong opinion that might polarize people
- Creating an offer that almost shows your genius—but keeps it small enough not to rock the boat
“You cannot attract the business, the clients you want, to that filtered version of you.” That line isn’t just about branding—it’s about trust. People connect to what feels real. And if you’ve been rationing yourself to protect from discomfort, you’ve also been limiting your ability to build something truly aligned.
Self-Doubt as a Safety Mechanism: Understanding the Entrepreneur Mindset
It’s easy to think self-doubt is a flaw to “fix.” But what if it’s not weakness at all?
Self-doubt often works like a built-in safety net. It’s your nervous system’s way of keeping you away from situations it perceives as risky—like launching a new offer, raising your rates, or taking a visible stand on something you believe in.
“Self-doubt isn’t always a weakness—it’s your nervous system trying to protect you from rejection, failure, and change.”
That protective instinct is deeply wired. For female entrepreneurs especially, there’s often an added layer of conditioning around being “likable” or “appropriate.” Over time, these patterns create entrepreneur mindset blocks that keep you in a loop of hesitation.
This is where the fear of failure becomes less about logic and more about biology. If you’ve ever second-guessed your pricing even when you know the value is there—or watered down your message so it wouldn’t spark criticism—you’ve felt this safety mechanism in action.
The Future Backlash Loop and the Fear of Failure
Here’s another sneaky block you might recognize: imagining criticism or failure before it even happens.
This is what I call the Future Backlash Loop. Psychologists call it defensive pessimism—a strategy where you lower expectations to manage uncertainty and anxiety. You might think, If I expect this launch to flop, I won’t be as disappointed if it does.
But there’s a problem. Creating from that place almost guarantees a weaker outcome. You’re less likely to give something your all if you’ve already decided it won’t work.
“The difficulty with the entrepreneur mindset is it requires you to go against biology—opening yourself up to rejection, to someone saying no. It’s terrifying.”
And yet, every breakthrough requires stepping into the unknown without rehearsing failure in advance.
The Cost of Filtering Your Brilliance
There’s a hidden cost to these business mindset blocks. When you operate from a filtered self—one that’s been edited for acceptability—you can build success that still feels strangely empty.
I’ve seen brilliant female entrepreneurs hide their edge, their voice, and their full ideas because they’re afraid of how it will be received. Sometimes it’s fear of failure. Sometimes it’s fear of criticism. Often, it’s both.
“So many female founders are brilliant, but they hide it back, doubting and watering themselves down.”
The result? You can hit goals, gain clients, and still feel disconnected from your own work. That disconnect breeds exhaustion because you’re always chasing—trying to figure out what people want—instead of leading with what feels most you.
From Filtered to Fully You, the POWERFUL entrepreneur
So what’s the alternative?
It’s not about “playing bigger” in the hustle-culture sense. It’s about showing more of your full self, unfiltered, in your work and your message.
“It’s not about playing small—it’s about no longer rationing your voice to the world.”
The shift starts small. You don’t have to bare everything or take reckless risks. Instead, find one place where you’ve been holding back and give yourself permission to drop the filter just a little.
Maybe it’s sharing a story you’ve never told your audience. Maybe it’s keeping the bold language in your post instead of toning it down. Maybe it’s pitching yourself to a podcast you’ve secretly wanted to be on for months.
Every time you choose to show more of your full self, you weaken the grip of those entrepreneur mindset blocks. You start to create momentum that feels exciting instead of exhausting.
Why This Matters Now – Understanding the role of Mindset Blocks
For female entrepreneurs especially, these shifts aren’t just about business growth—they’re about reclaiming your voice.
When you understand the patterns behind your hesitation, you can stop blaming yourself for “playing small” and start making choices that feel both bold and sustainable. You stop chasing the approval of the wrong audience. You stop editing yourself into a bland, forgettable version of your potential.
You start building in a way that feels like you.
If you’ve been feeling that pull between staying safe and going all-in, know this: you don’t have to dismantle every business mindset block overnight. You just have to start.
Because when you drop the filter—piece by piece—the fear of failure loses its power. And the right people, the right opportunities, and the right growth start finding you.
FULL TRANSCRIPT WITH CHARDÉT RYEL
Chardet Ryel (00:01)
If you go on Google or any of the search engines, one of the biggest terms that people are searching for that is plaguing them that they are really struggling with is entrepreneur mindset. And this idea of what does that even mean? Why am I getting stuck? How are all these struggles meant to be overcome? What does it really take to do it with courage, with calmness? I know that’s hard.
And ultimately, what is in my way? If you’ve been doing this journey for any amount of time in your business, then you know the one thing that really does block you is your mindset. It is the thing that is the hardest thing to overcome for us. It’s something that’s totally different from working a normal seven to nine or whatever your hours were.
It is every day all consuming. And so in this episode, the idea is to bring you a little closer to what it means to completely go into your deeper potential, to overcome some of the fears we have, and to do it from a place of understanding, not trying to bro market you into.
some sort of hypey mindset. It’s to really give you answers here. And so I’ve called this episode, Why I Hate Playing Small, because I think that term is so overused and very manipulative. And so I want to show you how can we think about this deeper. How can we think about opening up our potential, but not from this kind of skeezy way?
Because you’ve more than likely even on Instagram, TikTok, email newsletters, you have heard this expression playing small. And it is so often used for women. It’s always this idea of why are you playing small? Why are you playing small? Shouldn’t you come buy my 10K program? And it’s so overdone and it makes you think about, know, who would actually choose to play small?
No one is choosing to do that. No one wants that. And so what this is about is not about playing small, because that’s not what we’re doing. We’re doing something a lot more human. We are finding ways, defense mechanisms, to protect ourselves from the fear of failure, the fear of challenges to our identity, our self-worth.
maybe escaping the responsibilities we feel that will come with a lot of success. And none of that is playing small. It is all very human-based and we’ll go into it so you can understand a little bit more as well as maybe how to overcome it. First, let’s talk about the glimmer effect. So I don’t mean glimmer in terms of those happy moments that you have where life is great. I mean,
the sense of most of us, we only show a glimpse of our true voice, our creativity, our ambition, especially as women. We will take something that we feel and the first words we give it are the first watering down. You’ve probably felt this. I think about something that you feel so passionate about and how many times have you publicly said it in the exact words.
that you feel. Maybe sometimes, maybe never. Even the way we do our branding, we choose more muted colors, we choose expressions that we think are more appropriate. We kind of link in ourselves. And I do mean LinkedIn like LinkedIn. You know, we want to have this facade of acceptability.
And this is hugely tied into psychology. It’s hugely, it’s this idea of how we present ourselves. So we’re managing impressions that we give other people because our brains are wired to avoid social rejection. So if I see lots of likes on a certain trend, or if I see someone choosing certain brand colors again and again, I know that those are acceptable. And so I follow them.
What it looks like is this. And as I say these things, think about if any of these really relate back to you. It’s posting your safe opinions, but holding back the ones that feel a little risky.
It’s creating offers that may be almost, almost services, products that almost reflect your genius, possibly, but they’re small enough to not rock the boat. They’re small enough that you feel, I’m sure that I’ll be able to get one person in.
Have you done these things?
The difficulty with the entrepreneur mindset is it requires you to go against biology, which is opening yourself up to rejection, opening yourself up to someone not liking it, saying no. It’s terrifying. It’s so terrifying. And so we make ourselves so small.
And I have met so many entrepreneurs, especially female founders who are brilliant. I’m talking about you as well. You have a brilliance in you and you hide it back. You do not release it because you’re doubting, doubting, doubting, or you’re letting yourself water down. You cannot attract the business, the clients you want to that filtered version.
This is what happens when people build these big businesses and they realize they’re not fulfilled. And many times it’s because they are operating from an unfiltered or from a filtered self, right? They’re operating from someone who is acceptable. And so they never feel fully in what they’re creating. They never feel fully attached to it. They never feel like it really is them. And I have created
So many things like that. There are some things that I cringe because they were not me. They were so different from how I was. And just to give you a really tangible example of this, I remember back when I was teaching fitness classes in studios, I had a really distinct method. I had music from around the world. You’d have samba drums one moment and then French rap another. And I would mix ballet.
with martial arts stuff, it was just very different. Some people didn’t love it and they didn’t come back. And I remember I got in my head once because there was another woman teaching at one of the same studios and she was extremely popular. And I went to one of her classes and I saw how she did things. It was a lot more structured. She was doing more top hits in music. And I decided that for my next class, I was going to copy that.
And it was really embarrassing. I mean, the people who came regularly, you could tell they were just thinking, what happened? And for the people who didn’t, it just wasn’t as good as her.
You can never filter yourself to a enough powerful version of someone else. It just doesn’t work. It’s not possible. You don’t have all of their experiences, the way they operate. There’s no point in really trying it. But that’s what we do. These glimmers, small glimpses of what we really want to say, of who we really are. And I think a lot of you, myself included, have been in this position of
you don’t even realize how powerful you are. And so, if you’re playing small, it’s not because you’re choosing to. It’s because it is a way to operate in this world that feels a little less scary. And that’s where we go into self-doubt is extremely a safety mechanism. I don’t wanna…
make anyone feel bad or regretful that they have a lot of self doubt. Because it isn’t always a weakness. It is very much tied into your nervous system trying to protect you. Protect you from rejection. Protect you from failing. Protect you from change.
Because if you don’t believe you can, because if you don’t believe you can do something, then you never put your body, your mind, yourself in the situation that will challenge that.
This is where we come into a bit of the negativity bias where our brains will far outweigh potential threats. So a threat, for example, could be my business grows, I don’t know how to manage it. It could be I create something and no one buys it. Could be I put a post out there, no one likes it. Our brain will overweigh those threats and failures over opportunities. What if
the right person sees that post. What if I learn something from this failed offer that lets me create something much better?
Think about things you’ve done twice, three times or
Did you notice it was better than the first time you tried something where you had no idea what you were doing? Usually.
So see if any of this kind of sticks with you if you do any of this self-doubting. Second guessing your pricing, even though you know the value is there. The little hack here, remember, is if you don’t feel the value is there, find ways to increase it rather than to adjust the pricing.
You water down your messaging so it doesn’t trigger criticism. So no one can say anything.
Self-doubt is going to be there. There will always be moments, of course. But when you let it control what you release into the world and what you ultimately try to accomplish, living under it, that is the enemy. And so finding how can I go a little deeper than this?
When I hear people say playing small, it is this idea of going deeper, but I think that that expression really misses the mark. I feel that it shames you instead of empowering you. More like, can you see more of your brilliance here? And really, if you look deeply, what’s one part of yourself you’ve been editing out of your business or your content? Something that is just…
not there.
If you were truly sharing 100 % of yourself, you you are there, are unfiltered. What is the first thing you would share or you would create?
And last thing to ask you as you’re creating content is to think about, are you self-editing? Not editing for grammar or flow, but are you self-editing and can you stop yourself when the unedited version, the less filtered one would have said more what you want to say?
If you’re doing any of this, I know that it is second nature by now. I know that it is the de facto. And I also know that it’s hard to break. And so if you do want to share one way that you feel like you’re falling into this, that you cannot get out of creating in a way that is standard, or you can’t really find the you in it.
message me on Instagram, chardetryel. Okay, chardetryel, can see how to spell it in the show notes. And I wanna hear because I know that I’ve been through most of this. I know that it’s an ongoing thing. And I also know that it helps sometimes to just reach out. So I’m here if you wanna share it.
The you could rephrase this, I playing small? It could be, am I showing the full truth of me? Am I really accessing my deeper self? Am I accessing what I really wanna create?
As you’re going through unleashing the deeper you, the one that you’ve been hiding, the one that’s there, you might notice that this thing comes up. And I’m going to tell you now because I don’t want it to be the thing that stops you. You might experience a bit of a future backlash loop. This basically means that you imagine the future where you do something like this. You put the offer out there, you say what you want to say.
and it doesn’t work. You imagine the criticism, you imagine the failure, it’s your, told you so before it happens, and it causes you to wanna pull back.
In psychology, we call this defensive pessimism. It’s the strategy where you will lower your expectations to manage uncertainty and anxiety. Because if I feel like no one is gonna buy, and I go ahead and I create the thing anyway and they don’t buy, I didn’t have this expectation of, ⁓ so many people will.
But the problem you’ll see with this, and I really encourage you to focus on it because it is hard, but it is so helpful, is to think about if it did succeed, how would you act? Because the problem is when you come from defensive pessimism, you are actually going to create in a way that doesn’t result in a great outcome. Whether that be you’re not realizing certain insights that would help you.
You’re not taking your time. You’re not revising where you need to. You’re holding back something. You will do something without realizing. So you always want to come from a position of, me just pretend in the beginning that I fully feel what I could create, that I fully see who I could be and see what happens from that.
avoiding letting this backlash stop you.
And so we finish with these questions for you.
to ask yourself. And I’ll give you a moment between each one. You can always replay this episode and journal them properly if you want, or leave little voice notes to yourself can also be helpful. Verbalizing this stuff rather than just listening is the best action step you can take. So first, where am I only giving people a glimmer instead of the full glow?
where in my online presence, my offers, my support.
In what ways does self-doubt try to protect me?
What are the ways that you are using self-doubt without realizing it to be protected?
What future backlash situation failing am I rehearsing in my head right
Again, I invite you to share these with me. Let me know if you have any of these specifically, because sometimes it helps to just say them and to share them.
Your big action for this week, obviously we’ve already done a lot of actions just by you answering these questions, is to choose one of these things that you see is holding you back and committing to disrupting the pattern. So examples, we talked about the glimmer effect where you’re not fully sharing. So share something raw that you’ve been holding back. Doesn’t need to be a deeply personal.
moment or insight, can just be your voice a little deeper.
This is where I love podcasting because I feel like it’s almost voice therapy. Next one, self doubt safety mechanism. Where are you using self doubt? So create the thing at the price you first wanted. Even if you don’t get people buying and yes, it’s possible, but why think about that scenario now?
Think about if it worked, what would you do? Would you take more time? Would you go a little bit deeper? Would you add certain things? Or lastly, the future backlash loop one. Pitch yourself to something you’ve been avoiding, be it a conference, a speaking gig, a podcast, whatever you’ve been doing, the thing that’s been avoiding, because you’re afraid of what the future failure.
or ghosting or whatever it is will look like. You do it anyway.
It’s not about you playing small. It’s not about you having to play bigger. I don’t like that bro marketing term play bigger. It’s about you no longer dripping yourself to the world, know, rationing a little piece here or there. Because when you stop drip feeding your voice and you really start giving the full dose or at least a little closer to the full dose, the right people come, the right opportunities open and
you stop feeling like you’re always chasing.
Okay.
And you stop feeling like you’re always chasing because the exhaustion you feel is one, from the energy of always filtering and two, trying to always figure out what people want and chasing them down to notice you when it could be so much easier on both ends if you just drop the filter a little and let the right people see.
I recognize this is challenging. I know that it’s hard to figure out what is my real voice. How do I show up? If you’ve been doing it so long, not showing up.
And if this is where you are getting stuck, you know that you have that free resource that I have mentioned on so many episodes because I know that it can help you. And that is the secrets to standing out. And to be honest, they’re not even secrets. They’re the deeper things that we need to hear to really let ourselves shine fully. The full you, not the watered down you. That’s a secret podcast. It’s 10 episodes.
you can get Optin very easily.
Was it?
You can get access to that private secret podcast now if you go to the Her First Three Years website, also in the show notes there, and it will help you. There’s lots of questions like this that have you reflect. Every episode’s 10 minutes, so you could be driving, having your coffee, your tea, your juice, and start to really figure out how can I be more me?
So I don’t feel like I’m always overwhelmed, exhausted, and not being the true person that I feel in my business and with what I create.
Please share this episode with someone else who you know is brilliant. You want them to see it too. And I will see you in the next one.
