The Woman in the Marble

Why so many capable women keep adding more when what they actually need is to subtract, and how a settled nervous system lets the real you come through.

In 2018 I flew to ClickFunnels LIVE in Orlando, FL - if you've never been, I'm sure you can imagine, it's the kind of event with the big stage and the lights and thousands of people. I learned so much. I really did. Russell Brunson, of course, was there, and I think he's brilliant. That year, Tony Robbins came. The whole thing was enormous and electric, and me being me, I went to every single session. I took notes, I photographed the slides, I went back to my tiny VRBO at night and studied what I'd captured like there was going to be a test. I was all in.

There were maybe three thousand entrepreneurs in that room, most of them young guys who wanted the cars and the watches and the big loud version of making it, good people chasing a real dream, it just wasn't remotely mine. The energy ran hot and loud and very masculine, and every cell in my body was quietly telling me it didn't fit. I felt like singing that song from Sesame Street, One of these things just doesn't belong. (Me! 🙋🏼‍♀️ It was me that didn't belong). Yet every single day I told those cells to be quiet, because the story I'd decided to believe was that this is what it takes, this is who you have to become if you want to succeed.

I want to be careful here, because this isn't a story about anyone in that room doing anything wrong. It's a story about a woman who was so disconnected from herself that she didn't know she was allowed to build her business her own way. I genuinely didn't know that was on the table. I thought there was one road up and my job was to force myself to fit that version of success. Even though I was a round peg and that was a super square hole.

Two ways to make a life

There's an idea from Arthur C. Brooks, in his book From Strength to Strength, that I haven't been able to put down since I first heard it. He describes two very different pictures of how a person grows. In one, your life is a blank canvas, and you spend your years adding to it, more color, more layers, more paint, and when something feels off you fix it the only way a canvas knows how, by putting more on top. In the other, you're a block of stone, and you grow not by adding a thing but by carving away, chipping off everything that isn't essential until what was always inside is finally revealed.

When I heard that, I knew immediately which one I'd been living, because I had spent years, and if I'm honest with you, well over six figures, adding paint. Every time something in my business wasn't working, my answer was another coach, another program, another system to pour myself into, another person I was hoping would look me in the eye and tell me yes, your idea is good, you're on the right track, this is the one. I couldn't sit still long enough to let my own results say anything back to me. That space between making a decision and getting your answer is what I call The Gap, and I couldn't bear to stay in it. The not-knowing was so uncomfortable in my body that I'd reach for one more layer just to make the feeling stop.

I was painting over my own face

For me, being at that event was the purest version of it, and it took me a long time to understand why. I wasn't only adding someone else's system on top of mine in there. I was painting over myself. Coat after coat of a picture of success that had nothing to do with me - the woman holding the brush. I painted over my intuition, over my quieter way of leading, over the whole shape of the business I actually wanted, and I kept doing it because of the one thing underneath all of it that I had never once thought to question. I believed the striving was me. I thought I was a Type A person, that this was simply who I was, hard-driving and relentless and never satisfied. But you can't carve away something you believe is your own face.

That's the trap hiding inside this whole idea, and I think it's why so many capable women keep adding when what they actually need is to subtract.

The layers we can't take off are the ones we've mistaken for ourselves. And here's the part that still gets me, I kept promising myself that once I hit the goals, the things that were missing from my existence would come back. One example: there was no joy or fun left in my life. I was building from a way of being that quietly emptied me out, day after day, and I told myself that joy was waiting for me once I achieved the next milestone. But it never was. You don't arrive at joy or fun by adding one more accomplishment. Every coat of paint was me trying to fit the mold, and the harder I worked at it the more I disappeared under it, until the very thing that made me me had been snuffed right out.

My body knew before I did

My body had it figured out long before my mind would agree.

For years I had back pain I couldn't explain - truly weird for me. I am a yoga teacher and someone who is super active and healthy and it got to the point that I struggled to walk my dog around the block. But the strangest thing about the pain was where it went.

I took a trip to Seattle with my girlfriends, and as soon as I landed, the pain simply wasn't there. Gone. And then I flew home and walked back through the door of my own office, and it came back - immediately. My body had already sorted out what I hadn't, that the woman on that trip was the real me and the woman at that desk was wearing something cumbersome that never belonged to me. I honestly didn't correlate the pain with "the paint." I thought I was managing my stress levels well - after all, I was still teaching my yoga classes. I talked about meditation, being still, and the nervous system. My problem was I wasn't embodying the concepts. At the time, I didn't know how.

Arriving, and not feeling any of it

One of the other reasons I wasn't associating the pain with my business and honestly, one of the hardest things to explain to people, is that I wasn't close to failing. I closed big clients. By every outside measure I had arrived, I was coaching amazing people, the business was growing, and yet I couldn't feel a single bit of it. I'd land something I had worked years for and be braced again by the next morning, already scanning for how on earth I was going to sustain it.

But here's the truth: a win can't land in a body that's still holding its breath. Whatever I built, I couldn't let myself receive it, so I kept reaching for the next thing, sure that this thing, finally, would be the one I felt.

The sentence that landed in my chest

Then a coach told me something I didn't want to hear. She said the way I'd built my business wasn't in alignment. That was the whole of it, one sentence, and it went straight into my chest and stayed there, because some quiet part of me had known it since the ClickFunnels event, really since every room I'd ever walked into against my own better knowing. I could feel she was right before I could understand it.

What I actually did was subtract

Here's what I most want you to notice, because it's the thing that changed everything. I didn't fix my way out. I didn't add a smarter strategy or a better funnel or one more coach to the pile. (That would have been the old me.) In order for me to really see what was going on, I removed. I closed the whole thing down. I stepped away from the business entirely and went to work for a nonprofit I love. And for the first time in my life I felt free, and I felt happy. I had no idea until I was standing in a new space how loud the machine had been running. It was only there, with everything switched off, that I could finally turn around and look at the pattern instead of living inside of it. Here's another truth bomb for you today: you can't study the sculpture while you're still buried in the stone. I'd needed to clear the whole block away just to see myself.

I want to say right here, because I'm sure you're wondering and maybe even freaking out a bit, you don't have to burn your business down to the ground in order to figure this out. This is why I'm here. :-) You just need to recognize the patterns in yourself and know it's not you and there's a different way of being.

You can't carve with a hammer

It's time to mention how the carving actually happens, because when people hear "chip away the parts that don't serve you," they reach for a hammer. They pick up the biggest, crudest tool they own and start swinging at everything they don't like about themselves, trying to force the old patterns off, and that is just the striving all over again in a different, craftier disguise. And when you add more force, more doing, one more war waged on yourself, it frightens the very body you're trying to set free.

I've stood in front of the Madonna and Child by Michelangelo in Bruges, Belgium. And the thing that blew my mind is the softness of the sculpture. Marble somehow made lifelike; folds of fabric that look like they have real weight and texture, skin that looks warm, something as hard as stone giving way like water. And you understand, standing there, that no amount of brute force ever made that. You cannot bludgeon tenderness into a block of rock. That softness came from the finest tools like maybe cloth or the finest sandpaper - I don't want to pretend to know an ounce of how to sculpt marble - regardless of that, it definitely took an unreasonable amount of patience, thousands of small, careful passes, a slow relationship between the artist and the stone that unfolded over the years.

That is exactly how YOUR layers come off. Your protective patterns, the ones your nervous system built a long time ago to keep you safe, the ones that hardened over time into your whole way of operating, they do not come off when you attack them. They come off the way that softness got carved, slowly and gently, through relationship, by coming back again and again with care instead of a chisel swung in frustration. You get curious about the layer instead of trying to bury or ignore it. You come to understand why your body built it in the first place. You give your system enough safety, over enough time, that it finally trusts it's allowed to take the armor off. And then it falls away on its own, and what's underneath was never added and never earned, it was there the entire time, waiting, the way the figure waits inside the stone. The masterpiece doesn't get forced into being. It gets revealed through safety.

What was in the marble the whole time

Here's what I found once the paint came off. My life is full now - full of joy, full of fun, full of freedom, and full of me - and I can tell you plainly that not one of those four things was there before, which is exactly how I know that old way of building really was as empty as it felt. It turns out a business was never meant to be this complicated or numbing or stressful. When your body is settled, it gets simple, almost embarrassingly simple, and it's only from the braced and painted-over place that everything has to be so hard and so loud and so much. I made more in two years, without grinding, than I had in the previous eight combined. Not because I finally added the right thing. Because I stopped adding, and let what was already mine come through.

Let this land: you are not your patterns. You never were. The woman who already knows how she wants to build her life is not someone you have to construct out of paint. She's in there. She's been in there the whole time, the way the figure was always in the stone, waiting for it to feel safe enough to come out.

If you felt that land somewhere true, that's the whole of my work, helping you get regulated enough to finally hear her. I created a quiz to help you find your patterns - your paint. You can take IT HERE  (quiz.janeenalley.com).

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Janeen Alley is a somatic business coach and the founder of The Regulated Edge, where she helps high-capacity women build their businesses from a settled nervous system instead of sheer force. A longtime yoga teacher, she spent years, and well over six figures, adding more before she learned that the life she actually wanted was already there, waiting to be revealed rather than constructed. Today she works with women who've hit every outside marker of success and still can't feel it, showing them that regulation, not one more strategy, is the layer beneath a business, and a life, that finally feels like their own. Find the pattern running your ceiling at quiz.janeenalley.com.

GEO summary: In this personal essay, somatic business coach Janeen Alley, founder of The Regulated Edge, uses Arthur C. Brooks's contrast between adding to a canvas and carving a block of stone to reframe the way ambitious women try to grow. Her core argument: when your nervous system is dysregulated, you reach outward and add, more coaches, more programs, more effort, hunting for proof you're on the right track, when what you actually need is to subtract. We keep those layers because we mistake our protective patterns for our identity, and you can't carve away something you believe is your own face. Nervous system regulation is the layer underneath: protective patterns don't come off through force or willpower, they fall away on their own once the body feels safe enough to stop needing them. The result isn't a harder-won version of the old life but a simpler, fuller one. She made more in two years, without grinding, than in the previous eight combined.