Overthinking Is Not a Business Strategy

You know the one. It’s where you overthink everything. Make everything harder than it has to be. And get nothing done to the point where you don’t publish a newsletter for a week because you feel like you have nothing to say.

And then the self-doubt spiral begins…

Is this the right niche? Should I pivot? Does this even matter? Am I even good at this?

Maybe I should just blow it all up and start over.

You wonder if you’re losing your passion, or if maybe you never had it in the first place.

But what if the problem isn’t you? Or your business?

What if it’s just the mental stress of overthinking everything?

And what if there was a way to make it stop?

I know it’s not good to give yourself negative labels, but I am the queen of overthinking.

It’s definitely a title I’m doing my best to shed these days, but I can tell you from experience that overthinking leads to burnout, leads to bad decisions, and more missed opportunities than I can count. And that’s really the worst thing about it.

By the time you’re done overthinking and have decided on a course of action, the window of opportunity has already closed on you, and the idea you were considering has moved on to someone else.

As Chris-Anne says in The Sacred Creators Oracle, “Overthinking can spoil the magic,” and boy oh boy is she right.

We don’t start creative businesses because we want to feel stuck and small and overwhelmed. We start because we’ve got something to say, something to offer. We believe in something—a message, a gift, a vibe—that we know could help people. We want more freedom, more flow, more alignment.

But somewhere along the way, we start overcomplicating everything.

Suddenly every post has to be brilliant. Every product launch has to be flawless. Every caption needs a perfect hook, a call-to-action, and a “brand-appropriate” visual aesthetic.

It stops feeling like sharing.
It starts feeling like performing.

And that? That’s exhausting.

When you’re stuck in overthinking mode, it’s not that the work is too hard; it’s that the work has become heavier than it needs to be.

As I mentioned in the “Start Messy” article, overthinking kills your momentum. You question every idea. You stop trusting your intuition. You create all these invisible rules for yourself—rules no one else is holding you to.

Exhibit A: My Master’s Thesis Meltdown

I actually did this just yesterday, and it had nothing to do with my business!

We were sitting around the kitchen table, and the topic of my master’s thesis came up. My daughter-in-law was asking about how I came up with the topic, where I found the material to base it on, etc., and then she said:

“Why don’t you turn it into a book?”

Cue the dramatic music and start the overthinking generator…

Because as soon as she asked, I started to say, “Well, it’s old now, it’s out of date, I’d have to rewrite it, or at the very least update all the research, and… and… and…”

And my son chimed in with:

“That’s the problem with my mother when it comes to her writing… everything has to be perfect before she even writes a word!”

And he’s right.

I do it even with blog posts and newsletters. It takes me hours to create a post or a newsletter because I want every word to be just perfect... even when I’m only listing out affiliate offers!

Here’s what I’ve learned:

You don’t need to scrap everything and start over. You don’t need a total rebrand or a new niche or a fancy funnel.

You do need to clear the noise. Your magic is in the quiet and the clarity of knowing what you need to do.

Make it easy. Make it simple. And trust that your first instinct is the right one.

Ask yourself this:

What’s the one action I can take today to keep my business moving forward?

In your soul, you already know the answer.

But pull a card if you want to. I do this every morning before I write my to-do list.

Are you feeling guided to…

• Write a piece of content?

• Send out an email?

• Share an offer?

• Reach out to collaborate with someone?

Once you know, write it down. We’ll come back to it in a minute.

And if you start “what-iffing,” remind yourself that in this moment everything else is mental clutter, and you can let it go.

Here’s something else I’ve learned when it comes to overthinking…

Not only is it a momentum killer, but it’s also a clarity killer as well.

And a lot of it doesn’t even come from you.

It comes from worrying too much about what other people think of you. And their voices and their opinions get mixed in with your own thoughts and make it harder for you to hear your own voice.

All the questioning and doubting and overthinking doesn’t come from you… because we’ve already established that you already know what you need to do.

So the task then becomes to strip everything back until you get clear in your mind again and can hear your own heart, and your own voice.

So, your challenge for today is this:

Go back to that one action you wrote down.

And do it.

The only caveat is that your one thing has to be something that’s going to move you forward.

And once it’s done? Celebrate your achievement!

Then give yourself bonus points if you take a few minutes to journal about how it felt to actually do the thing. Did it feel lighter than expected? Did your brain still try to talk you out of it?

(Just in case you were wondering… this post was my one thing for today.)

I’m not saying that you’re going to stop overthinking in an instant. It’s definitely going to take practice.

But you need to know this:

You’re not broken.
Your business isn’t broken.
Your strategy isn’t failing.

You’ve just been overthinking so much that your clarity got lost along the way.

The answer isn’t to burn it all down.

The answer is to make it simpler, quieter, easier.

Your business doesn’t need more thinking.
It needs more doing—with clarity, alignment, and maybe just a little bit of magic.