You’re not failing. You’re just building on the wrong foundation.
That’s the message at the heart of this episode and it’s one of the most honest, personal conversations Daniela has ever brought to the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast. If you’ve ever poured everything into your business, invested in coaching, implemented the strategies, and still found yourself hitting an invisible wall, this episode will give you a new way to look at exactly why that happens, and what to do about it first.
Daniela opens by sharing a season most people in her audience have never heard her talk about. While her husband was traveling for his military career, roughly 80% of the year, she was running a seven-figure business, leading a team of 15, raising two young children, and managing an entire household on her own. By every external measure, she had it together. Privately, she was in a spiral she couldn’t slow down.
The turning point wasn’t a better productivity system. It was a framework she credits to Tony Robbins: State, Story, Strategy — three words that completely reordered the way she approaches every challenge in business and in life.
State is where everything begins. It’s your physical and emotional condition — your sleep, your nutrition, your nervous system, the energy you bring to every decision you make. Daniela gets into the neuroscience here: when you’re depleted and running on stress hormones, your brain literally cannot access the prefrontal cortex — the region responsible for strategic thinking, creativity, and emotional regulation. You’re operating in survival mode. And from survival mode, every business challenge looks like a threat. This is why the smartest strategies can bounce right off you when your state is compromised.
Story is the layer most high-achievers never slow down long enough to examine. It’s the collection of beliefs you carry about yourself and what’s possible — beliefs so deeply embedded they feel like facts. “I’m not a numbers person.” “I should be able to figure this out alone.” “Paid ads don’t work for businesses like mine.” Daniela walks through how these stories quietly become self-fulfilling, and how the only real way to shift them isn’t to think differently, it’s to build evidence by doing the thing you don’t believe you’re capable of — repeatedly — until the old story simply can’t hold.
Strategy is where most spa owners start — and why so many get stuck. The strategies aren’t usually the problem. The foundation they’re sitting on is. When state is managed and story has begun to shift, the same strategies that bounced off you months ago suddenly land. The same course clicks. The same systems get implemented all the way through. Not because anything external changed, but because you did.
Daniela closes with a concrete three-step action plan: audit your state honestly, identify the specific limiting story underneath your biggest stuck point, and choose one area to build competence on purpose. Then — and only then — go deep on strategy.
This episode is personal, practical, and the kind of conversation that tends to stay with you. Press play, and then share it with the spa owner in your life who needed to hear it.
Resources Mentioned in Episode #474: The Real Reason Your Spa Strategy Isn’t Working (It’s Not What You Think)
- Tony Robbins’ State, Story, Strategy Framework: https://www.tonyrobbins.com
- I Am Not Your Guru (Netflix, 2016) — Tony Robbins documentary: https://www.netflix.com/title/80102204
- Read the Stress Signalling Pathways that Impair Prefrontal Cortex Structure and Function Study.
- Read the Stress Effects on the Body Study.
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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner
Daniela Woerner is the founder of Addo Aesthetics and creator of the Growth Factor® Framework, a proven system that’s helped hundreds of spa owners build profitable, systemized businesses. With nearly 20 years in the aesthetics industry, she transforms overworked aesthetic professionals into confident Spa CEOs through strategy, systems, and soul led support. Daniela is also the host of Spa Marketing Made Easy, a top ranked podcast with over 1 million downloads, where she shares real world strategies to help spa professionals grow with clarity and confidence.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, my dears, and welcome back to the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m your host, Daniela. And if this is your first time tuning in, I am so glad that you are here. This podcast is all about helping esthetic professionals build a systems based business, although today this is, this is quite the episode to pick for your first one, because we are going to get much more personal than we typically get. I’m actually going to be sharing about a really challenging time in my life, and I’m sharing because I have been through it, and I want to be able to share with you how I was able to get out of that really challenging, really dark time that I went through. And look, I am super comfortable talking about systems and strategies and numbers and all of that kind of fun stuff, but the personal stuff, it’s it’s much harder for me. So please have a little bit of grace with me as we go into this episode. Now, I wanted to do this because I hear from so many of you who are doing the work. You’re not sitting on the sidelines. You’ve got real businesses, a growing team, clients that Love You by every external measure, you are succeeding, and yet you feel stuck, not like stuck stuck, not like you’re not moving at all, but stuck in that frustrating kind of in between place where you know there’s a next level, and you can see it, but you just can’t seem to get there no matter how hard you try. You buy the course, you hire the coach, you implement the strategy, and it works for a while, and then it stalls, and you’re back to wondering what you’re missing.
So today, I want to share with you a framework that I believe will genuinely change the way that you approach every single business challenge that you face from this moment forward.
This is the framework that really helped to pull myself out of one of the most challenging times in my life. So many of you know my husband was active duty for 21 years. I am so proud of him for serving our country, and I know that being a military spouse has taught me an incredible amount of resiliency. It’s taught me adaptability. I’ve met some incredible human beings. It’s a part of my life that I am very proud of and love, supporting the military in any way that I can. But a couple of years ago, my husband’s job required him to travel a lot, like 80% of the year, a lot, and I was running a seven figure business with a team of, I think we had 15 people at that time. I had two kids at home. They were four and seven, and I was managing, like our entire household. The weight of everything was on my shoulders or felt that way. Now I want to be clear, I have the most incredibly supportive husband, even from the road. Whenever he was able to or had access to his phone, he was there.
He was emotionally as present as he could possibly be. Sometimes from the other side of the world, he would leave video messages for the kids, and in this small amount of time that he was home, he was exhausted from the time change and getting ready to hop on a plane again, but he did his absolute best to ensure that he was making life at home as easy as possible for Me, so he was doing as much as he could to ease the stress of that year, but the reality of daily life when he was gone that fell on me, the kids activities, dinner, bedtime, all the business decisions, every team issue, all Me and I was struggling, and so were the kids. And I was just filled with guilt, because I thought there are so many military families out there that have a spouse that’s deployed. I knew so many of them, and they seemed to just have it together. They they had some level of order in their home that I did not and I kept thinking, we’re a military family. This is no big deal. We are strong, and we’re teaching the kids resiliency and doing so in a safe environment. But the kids and I did not have it together. Well, I should say that I did not have it together, which meant that the kids did not have it together.
I was not exercising. Dinner was whatever required the least amount of cleanup, and honestly, more times than I would like to admit, that meant Chick fil A was for dinner. I felt like I was just in this spiral that I couldn’t slow down. And then came even more.
Guilt, because I knew that there were single mothers out there doing this every single day as their permanent reality, not as a season. And somehow they found a rhythm, they found a flow. And I could not and listen. I have a massive amount of privilege. I have a incredible housekeeper. I have an au pair. I am financially stable, so the fact that I was spiraling without my husband was layering on guilt and making me question my identity, like, what did that say about me? And at the time, I believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I had always identified as this independent, hard worker, person that gets things done, but what I was feeling was just that I just wasn’t built for this, that other women could handle it, and I couldn’t, and I just had to figure out a way to live with it, and that was really hard for me. That was a deep look into who I was, a deep question into who I was as a person. But what I didn’t understand yet was that I was trying to solve the wrong problem. I kept looking for a better system, a smarter schedule, a more efficient way to delegate a better strategy. None of it was touching what was actually broken.
If you guys are like, type a lead with the masculine, you’re identifying with me there, right? Because when things go wrong, you’re like, what’s the system, what’s the schedule, what’s the WHO CAN I delegate to what’s the strategy, right? You go to those places. But what was broken wasn’t my business or the way that I was managing my household. It was my state. It was my energy. And around that time, I came across a framework from Tony Robbins. And look, I know not everyone is a Tony Robbins person, and that’s completely fine. He seems to be everywhere right now. I’ve heard him on like 10 million podcast. He had that Netflix special called not your guru. And I had watched that, and I had heard him on someone’s podcast, and he shared this framework that I’m going to share with you. This is his framework that he was teaching, and it resonated with me so incredibly deeply.
And I to this day, believe it’s one of the most important things that I’ve learned, because it has pulled me. I’m in such a different place than I was a year ago or year and a half ago, and it all started with this framework, three words, state, story, strategy. Now that’s the order, and most of us, again, especially the Type A’s, the high achievers in this industry, the ones who built these businesses, because we refused to quit, we skip directly to step three. We see a problem, and we go straight to strategy. It’s not a character flaw, it’s literally how problem solvers are wired, wired, but that can cost us. So let me break down what each of these steps actually means and why the order matters more than almost anything else. So state.
Think of state as your physical and emotional condition. I think of it kind of as my energy, like, how am I showing up? It’s the energy that you’re bringing to business every single day. Okay? So you can feel if someone is in a low energy or a high energy, and your state is affected by how you’re sleeping, how you’re exercising. Are you moving your body? Are you eating in a way that actually fuels you? Is your nervous system in a constant state of fight or flight, or do you actually have moments of genuine calm and clarity? And what I didn’t know at the time, and this is actually scientifically backed, is that when you are depleted, when you’re running on stress hormones and caffeine, with four hours of sleep, your brain literally cannot access the prefrontal prefrontal cortex, and that is the part that’s responsible for complex problem solving, strategic thinking, emotional regulation and creativity.
Guys, complex problem solving, strategic thinking, emotional regulation and creativity, if we don’t sleep and eat correctly, if we’re not moving our body, we cannot access that part of our brain.
Okay, we are operating literally from survival mode and from survival mode. Every business challenge looks like a threat, every decision feels impossible, every team issue feels.
Feels like a major crisis. No wonder the strategies aren’t working. You’re trying to run sophisticated plays with a system that’s just trying to get through the day. That was me, that was the whole problem, and I didn’t see it because I was so deep in my deep, dark spiral, and when I finally started addressing my state little by little, not perfectly, not all at once, just one teeny, tiny thing at a time, little by little, things began to shift. I committed to moving my body in the morning so not a full weight workout, not weights, all those things, I was literally starting with even 15 minutes on the treadmill. Okay?
I started prioritizing meal prepping so that we and I would do this on the weekend, so that we actually had food in the house. I started going to sleep on time instead of staying up and watching Netflix, because I needed something mindless, to just unwind. Okay, sleep is so important, and little by little, when I made those small choices, when I started creating those small habits, something changed, not my circumstances. My husband was still traveling, the business was still complex. The kids still needed me, but something changed in me. I had capacity again. I could think. I could respond instead of react, and that is when I could finally see my story.
So story is the collection of beliefs that you carry about yourself, your capabilities, what is possible for you. And here’s the thing about your story, it is so deeply embedded that it doesn’t even feel like a belief anymore. It just feels like a fact. It’s just the way that it is. And during that hard season, I was living inside of a story I didn’t even know I was in. I told myself that I wasn’t good enough. I told myself that I should be able to manage everything because other people did. I told myself that needing support meant that I was weak, that being overwhelmed was evidence that I was failing. None of those things are facts. Every single one was a story a belief that I had quietly assembled over the years trying to prove that I could do it all.
And here’s what makes stories so powerful and so dangerous at the same time, they become self fulfilling. If you believe that you have to do everything yourself, you’re not going to ask for help, which means that you stay overwhelmed, which reinforces your belief that you’re just not capable enough. The story creates the reality, and then the reality confirms the story. It is a loop.
Now I work with some incredible esthetic professionals who are building incredible businesses, million dollar businesses, big teams, and almost every single one of them is carrying some version of a limiting belief or a limiting story. They might believe that they’re not a numbers person, or that they’re terrible at leading a team, or paid ads don’t work for businesses like mine, or maybe it’s something that’s quieter than that, and maybe internally, you’re just saying I should be able to figure this out on my own. What’s yours? Think about that right now. Where in your business do you keep avoiding action, even when you know that that thing is important? Where do you spin instead of move forward? That is where your limiting story lives.
Now. This is the place where most personal development advice gives you bad direction. So people will say, just change your mindset. Choose a belief and choose something different. I understand that. I’ve done that, I have been through that, right? I’ve done the gratitude journals, I’ve said the affirmations, I’ve like all of the things I have been in that space, right? But you can’t just think your way into a new belief. You have to build evidence. And I saw this, you know, one of the things that I used to do.
I still do, actually, but I used to do it a lot more when I was really building this belief, I was worried about that one negative comment, or that one negative review, or whatever it is, and I’m sure that you’ve experienced that as well. And so I have a folder on my desktop, where I would screenshot hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of positive reviews and positive comments in ways that we’ve impacted people’s lives and ways that we’ve we have, we have clients who are now homeschooling their children, are able to have time to be present with their children or.
Present with their spouse and or care for parents, because we’ve taught them how to build a system to space business. And so there’s all this good in the world of you know, people that we’ve been able to help. And then there’s one negative comment that, you know, just sends you to your knees. You’re like, oh my gosh, I’m a horrible person.
I just shut down everything. And you feel that for like 30 seconds, or at least I would, and then I to get over that and to realize, like, Hey, I have one person that wasn’t happy, and I have 100 people that I changed their lives. And so it was going back every time we got that one comment, that one off comment, which wasn’t, you know, we’ve had a handful in the past 12 years, but they happen right? If you’re in business long enough you’re going to have that, and I would go back to that folder and I needed to have that evidence to show me that, you know, we are doing good, and that was the evidence that what we’re doing works. I needed that. I needed that evidence to help me make the shift in the belief I couldn’t just write out in my gratitude journal.
Okay, so what is it for you? What’s yours? I want you to think about that right now. Okay, think about that now. If your belief is your numbers. Maybe you need to run your numbers every single week and to until the fear dissolves and you realize, oh, this PNL actually makes sense, or if it’s for you, having a hard conversation with a team member and watching yourself navigate it with more skill than expected, or doing it calmly without getting super defensive, right, trying to listen to the feedback and trying to understand how you got into that place in the first place, learn from the situation, right? Or maybe you’re launching a marketing campaign and you’re discovering that you understand a heck of a lot more about your audience than you gave yourself credit for.
You’re building the evidence. When you build the evidence that story changes, not in a flash, it’s gradual, but little by little, that changes your story, and when you get to that point, that is when strategy becomes exponentially more powerful. Now here’s what is important to understand the strategies that you’ve been trying many of them are probably good strategies, okay? And the strategies are most likely not the problem. The problem the problem is the foundation that they were sitting on, strategy without state and story is like building on sand. It’s not going to hold no matter how good the blueprint is. But when your state is managed, when you’ve got some capacity, some groundedness, some actual rest in your body, and when your story has started to shift, when you’ve accumulated enough evidence that you’re capable of more than you thought, the strategy works.
That same advice that bounced off you six months ago suddenly lands. The same course you started but never finished, suddenly clicks. The same systems you implemented halfway suddenly get implemented all the way, not because anything externally changed, but because you did.
After I had done the state work and I started to shift my stories, I was finally ready to think strategically about what I actually needed, both in home and at business, I restructured my schedule. I had an honest conversation about my husband, about what needed to change when he was home, what needed to change in his next job. I adjusted my business operations to reflect my real capacity. I made a lot of changes in my business, and I was just really honest with myself about what I could handle during that time.
All of those were strategy moves, and they worked not because they were genius strategies, they they were not genius strategies, but it was because I was bringing a completely different version of myself to them. Your business cannot grow beyond your personal development. I know that’s hard to understand, but when we’re saying you’ve got to show up as the best version of yourself, it’s so vitally important the ceiling on your business is the ceiling on you.
Ooh, which sounds limiting, until you realize that it means the single most leverage investment that you can make in your growth is the investment in yourself. State, first story, second strategy, third in that order, every single time, and we got to give a shout out to Tony Robbins for simplifying that in a way, creating that framework in a way that we can really understand.
Okay, so I never want to leave you with just ideas. I want you to walk away with something that you can actually do. So here’s where to start. First, audit your state. Take an honest look at the last two weeks. How’s your sleep, how’s your nutrition, how’s your movement, what are you consuming mentally, right? What is the information that’s coming at you? Is it building you up or is it tearing you down?
This is a really important piece of social media. I have not been on social media for years because it affected me mentally. When I go on to Instagram, I am at my profile or in my messages, I am not scrolling, and that is really an important thing for me to manage my state. Okay, you need to be brutally honest with yourself, this assessment is for you, not anybody else.
Okay, then, once you identify, you need to pick one thing. It might be your sleep, it might be your nutrition, it might be movement, it might be kind of what you’re consuming. Pick one thing, not five, not a whole, wellness overhaul, one state habit that if you committed to for the next 30 days would make a big difference in how you show up. It might be protecting eight hours of sleep. Maybe it’s 20 minutes of movement before the day pulls you in. Maybe it’s getting off your phone an hour before bed. It doesn’t matter, whatever it is, choose it, protect it, and treat it like a business critical decision. Now second, I want you to identify your limiting story. You might not even know what this is, but just try, right, if you were like me, that was so deep in the story that you couldn’t even see it, maybe go and grab the big leap by Gay Hendricks, it’s a wonderful book about, you know, limiting beliefs.
But if you can see a story that you have, think about the area in your business where you feel consistently stuck, where you keep knowing that you need to do something, but you don’t write down the belief underneath that I’m not the type of person who, or I’ve never been good at, get it out of your head and onto paper, then ask yourself one question, Is this actually a fact, or is this a story that I’ve been telling myself for so long that it started to feel like one and third I want you to choose an area where you’re going to build competence. On purpose. You don’t have to become an expert. That’s not the goal. We just want a CEO level of understanding enough to have an informed conversation, make a real decision, provide strategic direction. All right, start small, take one step, and let that step become evidence that your old story is wrong.
Okay, then and only then go deep on strategy, because from that foundation, everything changes.
Now. I want to close by saying this the season that I shared with you today was genuinely one of the hardest of my life. And looking back, I can see that it was such a great gift.
It made me stronger. It gave me this framework which permeates through so many different parts of my business and the way that I show up. Okay? So if you are in a season that feels impossible right now, if you’ve got all the strategy in the world, but something just still isn’t clicking. I want you to start here, not with a new tactic, not with a new tool. Start with your state and then your story, and let the strategy come after you’ve built something real. You are capable of so much more than the stories you are currently living in, and I believe that with every bit of my heart and soul. So if today’s episode hit home for you, I would be so grateful if you took 30 Seconds to leave us a review on Apple podcast. Reviews are genuinely the lifeblood of this show. It is how other esthetic professionals find us, and they made the world to me, personally, and if you’ve been meaning to do it and just haven’t got around to it, today’s the day I read every single one, and I just told you I screenshot them and save them in.
My Folder, so I so deeply would appreciate it. And if you know another spa professional, another esthetic professional who needs to hear this conversation today, just forward this episode to them. Share it in a group chat or in your team slack or your Instagram Stories.
Let’s get this in the hands of people who need it. Thank you so much for being here, and I will see you in the next episode.
