Why Working Harder Won't Break Your Success Ceiling (and What To Do Instead)

Are you working harder than ever but still not seeing the results you desire? You're not alone. Many high-achieving women fall into what I call the "doing trap" - believing that if we just push harder, success will follow. But here's the truth: you can't outwork a subconscious block.

Today, I'm talking about why just following strategies isn't enough, why trying to force your way through resistance leads to burnout, and how your subconscious beliefs act as your own glass ceiling to your success.

I also share a client story that illustrates how deeply-held limiting beliefs can sabotage even the simplest strategies and actions. You'll learn why thinking positively isn't the answer and discover a more effective approach to rewiring your subconscious.

If you're tired of hitting invisible walls in your business and life, this episode is for you. It's time to upgrade your inner operating system and become the version of yourself capable of achieving those audacious dreams!

Want to learn more? Join me for my free training, "The Science Behind Success," on 4/17 & 4/18 by signing up at briseeley.com/science 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you have ever thought I'm doing everything right, so
why isn't it working? This episode's for you. You're showing up,
checking the boxes, following the strategies, taking the action, and
yet something still isn't clicking. You feel like you're working
harder than ever, yet the results are not matching your effort.

(00:23):
Does this sound familiar? This is what I call the
doing trap, and it is one that so many of
us high achieving women fall into again and again and
again because we've been taught that if we just work harder,
if we just push more, if we just hustle better,
successful follow But here's the truth that no one talks about.

(00:46):
You cannot outwork a subconscious block. You cannot force your
way to a goal that your subconscious doesn't believe you're
worthy or capable of. You can't outperform a belief system
that is quietly whispering you don't deserve this or this
isn't safe for you to have. So in today's episode,

(01:09):
I'm going to break down exactly why doing more doesn't
move the needle when your inner wiring isn't aligned, and
how you can use subconscious reprogramming as the most powerful
tool for unlunking your next level with more ease and
less resistant. So if you're tired of trying to force

(01:31):
your way through the gap between where you are and
where you want to be, buckle up. This episode is
your invitation to stop grinding and start aligning. You were
never meant for a small life. You have bold ideas,
audacious dreams, and visions that keep you up at night,
But the truth is, big goals don't come with step

(01:52):
by step instruction, and success doesn't come from doing more.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
It comes from becoming more.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
Welcome to Big Goal Energy a podcast for high achieving
women who are done shrinking, striving, and second guessing and
are ready to defy reality in pursuit of the life
they actually want. I'm your hostess, Free Sealy, go architect,
subconscious strategist, and your permission slip to want what you want.

(02:18):
Join me as we go beyond the service level success
to explore the mindset, identity, and inner work required to
bring your.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Biggest, most delulu goals to life.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
This is your space to be seen, to be expanded,
and to remember that you are not alone on this journey.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
Let's get into it.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
Hey, hey y'all. Bree Sealy here super excited for today's episode.
As you've probably noticed, I'm just a smidgeon obsessed with
the subconscious mind. I think it's walking fascinating. Today We're
going to dive even deeper into it, and I'm gonna
show you ideally how you working harder is actually not

(02:58):
going to do anything for you at the end of
the day. If you know me at all, you know
that I am a perpetual learner. I am on a
quest to perpetually be better, not only in my business,
but I want to be able to know more so
that I can help you more. So this weekend I
was in a business accelerator with a dear friend and

(03:19):
colleague of mine, Sally Arias you may have heard her
in one of the first four episodes I Think of
Big Goal Energy back in October of twenty twenty four.
Seally has this program, which unfortunately she's ending. However, she's
giving me permission to teach parts of it in my
women's business Mastermind, where we wet through a profitability calculator.

(03:44):
We wet through our break even point in our business
every month, we went through our money out and money in.
We went through our aligned marketing, our millionaire messaging are
like all these things. The very last part that she
talked about is mindset or is I like to talk
about it's brain science. And she brought up a really

(04:06):
brilliant example, and I want to lead with this so
that you can have something that you're probably already aware
of to kind of grasp onto and conceptualize this in
a really concrete way in your mind. So Sally talked
about how Will Smith taught her everything she needs to
know about mindset. So she started off by telling the

(04:28):
story that she had seen some interview with him somewhere
and he had talked about the secret to his success
was that he could outwork anyone, any day, any time.
He was so proud of how hard he worked. And
yet as I sit here recording this on Monday, April seventh,

(04:48):
twenty twenty five, his career is essentially over. So how
is it that someone could be the hardest working person
in showbiz and just two years later have a career.
He let his subconscious get in the way of his success.
Just like I already said, you cannot outwork a subconscious block.

(05:11):
What happens is that our experience of success will always
fall to what our subconscious beliefs as available to us.
I'm gonna say that again. Our experience of success will
always fall to what our subconscious believes as available to us.

(05:32):
It's like our subconscious is a glass ceiling inside of us,
and no matter how hard we try to break through it.
If you're a woman listening to this, you'll understand, glass
ceilings don't break. They don't break. So we can't surpass
our subconscious blocks. As a glass ceiling, even if our

(05:54):
vision of success is all the way up there, we
cannot get to it. So mindset and subconscious reprogramming is
not about thinking positively that shit doesn't work. You're still
always gonna hit up against your subconscious. This also is
not about pushing through it, because that shit also doesn't work.

(06:19):
What this is is it's about changing your identity. It's
about shifting your rule book and your operating manual. It's
about upgrading your iOS because, as Selly said this weekend,
your brain has absolutely zero fucking interest in you living
your wildest dreams. Our brain literally doesn't care, doesn't care

(06:41):
about our success. It doesn't care about our dreams. Our
brain's only job is to keep us safe and keep
us alive, so our brain is gonna do whatever it
needs to do to keep us safe and keep us alive.
And oftentimes, because we have such big goals, our brain
categorizes those things as unsafe and imminent death. So let's

(07:02):
get into why doing more every day is not going
to solve that invisible wall that you're bumping up again. Cool,
we all know this. We've all been taught that we
need to work hard, check all the boxes, and if
we just work hard enough the meridocracy that our success

(07:23):
will come. We all know that that's bullshit, right, I mean,
come on, look at the society, look at the world
we live in. It's all bullshit. Meridocracy doesn't actually exist.
Only really works mostly for one very small population of humans,
and even then I would say it's not working very

(07:44):
well for them either. So here we are taught and
conditioned to believe that we need to work hard, that
we need to check all the boxes, that we need
to be the perfect student and the perfect employee and
the perfect team player and the perfectness and the perfect that,
and will just achieve success. But what actually happens? Maybe

(08:06):
you have experience with this. I most certainly have experience
with this All of those things for me led to burnout.
All of those things also lead to diminishing returns. They
also lead to a loss of trust in self because
your inner self is in there being like, girl, you're
working too hard. You are working too hard. We're tired,

(08:27):
we're not taking care of ourselves. We don't have any energy.
When's the last time you meditated? How about that yoga
practice of yours? And you're basically taking that like inner
self and being like no, no, no, don't talk to me.
So you're suppressing yourself and as a result, you stop
trusting that part of you. I'm going to share an
example with you, and unfortunately, this is a not successful

(08:51):
example of a client anecdote. I had a woman that
I worked with about two years ago, and she was
so excited to grow her businessiness she was barely scraping by,
absolutely not profitable in her business, maybe breaking even, but
probably not even breaking even. She would come to me

(09:13):
each week and be like, I need to make more money,
and I'd say, great, here's a strategy. I gave her.
This strategy. I was like, go on Instagram stories every day.
Go on Instagram stories every day and do a featured
item of the day and sell that featured item of
the day on your Instagram stories five days a week.

(09:33):
I did the math and I was like, that would
literally increase your revenue twenty percent immediately. So we get
on the call next week. Well, she hadn't done it.
She wanted a different strategy. We get on a call
the week after. She hadn't done it. She wanted a
different strategy, And I started to ask, like, what is
stopping her from taking the action? Because she had a team.
She could have just said, this is a great strategy,

(09:56):
given it to her team, let her team put up
a featured product of the day and sold it and
increased her revenue by twenty percent. Right she to this day,
two years later, has never implemented this strategy. Now why
she very easily could have done it. Her team very

(10:17):
easily could have done it. It wasn't the action that
was the problem. I found out through questioning, and unfortunately
found out through questioning, like two weeks before we were
done working together, that her mom had told her at
a very young age that success was selfish and that

(10:39):
her wanting to be successful was actually like verging on evil.
So every time she went to go take action in
her business and do more in her business. She stopped herself,
and again wasn't the action that was preventing her from

(10:59):
doing it. It was the subconscious belief that if she
was successful, that meant she was selfish and a bad person.
I even watched her win an award, I think it
was last year or eighteen months ago or something, and
she in her acceptance speech she would not take credit

(11:19):
for winning this award. She's doing amazing things in her community,
and she deflected taking ownership of her success. Not because
she wasn't successful, not because she hadn't done all the
things that they said she had done, but because she
has an invisible wall within her that believes that if

(11:41):
she claims her success, if she becomes a successful woman
in the world, her mom's going to disown her. Her
mom's going to think she's evil. Her mom's going to
label her as like a selfish, uncaring, terrible human. It's
really fascinating that it was the simplest strategy and yet

(12:01):
she couldn't do it. If you're listening to this and
thinking I wish I had more people in my life
who just get it, you're not alone.

Speaker 2 (12:11):
Big goal energy women are rare.

Speaker 1 (12:13):
We're the ones dreaming big, defying norms, and refusing to settle.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
And that is exactly why I created a Big Goal
Energy app. But it's more than just an app.

Speaker 1 (12:23):
It's a community, a safe, supportive space where ambitious women
like you and me can gather, grow, and go after
our biggest goals without judgment. Inside you'll find real time conversations,
powerful tools and resources, and exclusive content you won't get
anywhere else, and yes, direct access to me to support

(12:44):
you on your journey. Whether you're building, dreaming, shifting, or scaling,
you don't have to do it alone. Come join us
inside the Big Goal Energy App and surround yourself with
women who dream as.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
Delulu as you do.

Speaker 1 (12:59):
Download the app now or visit bra sealy dot com
slash community to learn more. So what actually is a
subconscious block? Subconscious programming is the automatic beliefs and patterns
that are stored below your conscious awareness. So your subconscious

(13:21):
automatic beliefs and patterns are generally put into your inner
operating system. You're subconscious before the age of eight. It
could have been an offhanded remark that someone said to
you once. It could have been something your parents believe.
It could have been a TV show you watched or

(13:41):
a book you read. Before the age of eight. We
are sponges. We are taking in so much information. And
the reason we do it is because if our brain
had to start from zero every day around doing things
like deciding what to eat or brushing our hair or
shout or brushing our teeth or any of these things,

(14:03):
the level of thought required to do that from a
base point zero every day would be way too much.
Our brains cannot handle that mut impetus for our actions
and the things that we're doing. So what happens. Five
percent of our brain remains conscious. Ninety five percent of

(14:24):
our brain are things that are kind of running in
the background. So if you think about your computer or
your phone, there are things running in the background to
make it work that you are not actually doing. That's
kind of how our subconscious works. So if you have something,
if you have the podcast stap Open or the YouTube
ab Open or whatever right now running on your computer

(14:46):
or your phone, that's not the only thing running. There's
a ton of shit going on behind the scenes. The
shit going on behind the scenes is you're subconscious. And
the reason it does that is so that shortcuts can
be made so that you're not overloading your system trying
to remember and do things that you don't need to
remember how to do every day. Now, yes, this happens

(15:09):
with habits and daily actions, but it also happens with
beliefs about ourselves or beliefs about other things. Right, Like,
being successful is bad because my mom's gonna disown me
because I'm going to be selfish. Money is hard to make.
I have to struggle to earn success. I'm not good
enough if you are fighting against your subconscious every single day.

(15:32):
It's like trying to drive a car with one foot
on the gas and the other foot on the break.
Have you ever seen anyone driving down the freeway and
they're like accelerating but their break lights are on. Like
the velocity at which they are going to ruin their
break pads is insane. You're trying to speed up, and
yet at the same time you're pulling yourself back. I

(15:55):
don't want this for you. Going back to will Smith,
he had his foot on the accelerator. He was working
his ass off, he was working harder than anyone in
the industry, and yet he clearly also had his foot
on the brake. Because all it took was one trigger
to ruin his entire career and his entire future forever.

(16:19):
If your subconscious believes that you're not ready, that it's
not safe, that you're not deserving, it will always sabotage
your efforts. Which is why like, yeah, we can try
to hit the accelerator harder, but if we still have
that break engaged, we are never going to be able

(16:41):
to get to our big goals. So some ways that
this may show up for you undercharging or not asking
for a raise, even when you know your value, self
sabotaging right before something big, y'all, I'd almost didn't make
it to the tenex stage. I mentally got myself so

(17:01):
stressed I physically started shutting down. Fucked up, right. Maybe
you get stuck in perfectionism. Maybe you get stuck in procrastination.
Maybe you're researching all the time, maybe you're building a
lot in the back end, but you're never actually putting
anything out into the world. Your subconscious always wins unless

(17:26):
you change it, unless you rewire it. And remember this
is not about thinking positively. If you're thinking positively, you're
only in that five percent of your conscious brain. Thinking
positively does not access your subconscious, So how do we
rewire our subconscious? Hypnotherapy is an incredible tool that allows

(17:51):
you to bypass that five percent critical mind and works
directly with your subconscious. Now, I know a lot of
people are like, brain, are you gonna control my mind? No,
I'm not gonna control your mind. It's actually not much
different than meditation. We're just accessing a different part of
your brain. It is a relaxed and focused state where

(18:11):
your mind is actively open to suggestion. Now, I am
actually teaching a training about this called The Science Behind Success.
It's happening on April seventeenth and April eighteenth, and if
you're listening to this after that, I'm gonna put the
replay up online so you can still go to this
url and get access to it. We're gonna be going

(18:32):
over the three keys for finding success through your subconscious.
You can visit bree Sealy dot com slash science s
c I E n CE to sign up. It is
a free training and I am very very excited to
be coming out into the world more and more with

(18:53):
this because, as I've already stated, you cannot outwork your
subconscious and all of us, every single one of us,
even fucking Will Smith. Even Will Smith is fighting their
subconscious every single day. I'm personally working on a subconscious
for myself right now that I recorded for myself, and

(19:15):
I literally have the next two subconscious activations that I'm
gonna be doing for myself because I can very easily spot. Ah,
you're holding yourself back right there. You're stopping yourself from
taking action. Pushing through isn't gonna get you there. Working
harder isn't going to get you there. Thinking positively isn't
going to get you there. We need a hypnosis. So

(19:35):
I'm going to teach you about how to use hypnosis
to retrain your brain so that you can just put
your foot on the accelerator and take the other foot
off the brak. This is so much fun and it
is going to blow your mind pun intended. So make
sure that you come join me for The Science behind

(19:57):
Success April seventeenth, April eight teen. If you can't attend live,
you will get a replay. If you're listening to this later,
you can access the replay Brae Sealy dot com, slash science.
I want to share one more thing with you before
we wrap, and that is a mentor of mine. Navin Jane,
who wrote beforeward to my book Permission to Leap, said

(20:20):
this to me, and it's always resonated. I think about
this all the time. When your mind believes something to
be impossible, that thing instantly becomes impossible. But only for you,
not for me, not for everyone else listening to this
episode right now, only for you. So your belief isn't truth,

(20:42):
your belief isn't what you're capable of. Why not give
yourself permission to change your beliefs. You upgrade the operating
system on your phone every month, why not upgrade the
operating system to yourself. You deserve to have a subconscious
that is on board to help you create biggest goals,

(21:03):
the biggest visions that you have in your heart. Thank
you for joining me for this episode. As always, if
it resonated, please feel free to share it with someone.
I will see you next week. Thank you, thank you,
thank you. Don't forget come join me at the training.
If this episode lit something up and you share it,
text it to a friend, post it to your stories,

(21:25):
or leave a review. Because big goal energy is meant
to be felt far and wide, and if you're ready
to go deeper, explore the tools, hypnosis sessions and support.
Because your vision deserves more than hustle, join us on
the Big Goal Energy app by visiting your app store
and typing in Big Goal Energy. Your vision, your goals

(21:47):
deserve alignment, ease, and your fullest self behind them. Until
next time, trust yourself, dream bigger, and never forget you
are here for greatness