What You Tolerate Today Will Hold You Back Tomorrow

Most women don’t burn their businesses down.

They don’t make reckless decisions.
They don’t implode in public.
They don’t wake up one morning and think, “I’ve ruined everything.”

They leak.

Quietly. Incrementally. In ways that look responsible.

That’s the tolerance leak.

A tolerance leak starts the moment you notice something is slightly off… and decide it’s not worth addressing.

Not bad enough.
Not urgent enough.
Not serious enough to justify the discomfort of changing it.

So you adapt.

You work around it.
You smooth it over.
You tell yourself it’s fine.

Once? Harmless.

Repeated over months or years? Structural.

Women Are Very Good at Tolerating Friction

Especially capable women.

You get used to:

• The client who pushes boundaries “just a bit”

• The fee that’s slightly too low but easier not to revisit

• The admin system that almost works

• The offer you’ve outgrown but still sell

• The marketing you don’t fully believe in anymore

You tell yourself:

• “I don’t want to be difficult.”

• “It’s not that bad.”

• “I can handle it.”

• “I’ll deal with it later.”

And because you can handle it… you do. That’s the leak.

Why This Hits Women Harder

Many women were trained to be adaptable before they were trained to be decisive.

To keep the peace.
To make it work.
To not overreact.
To not ask for too much.
To not make a fuss.

So when something in your business feels inefficient, clunky, draining or misaligned, your default isn’t to remove it.

It’s to tolerate it better.

From the outside, everything looks fine.

From the inside, everything feels slightly harder than it should.

The Real Cost

Most fatigue in small businesses isn’t caused by workload.

It’s caused by friction you’ve normalised.

One awkward boundary? Manageable.
Five? Draining.
Twenty? Exhausting.

But because none of them are catastrophic, you never prioritise fixing them.

You just absorb the cost.

Energy.
Clarity.
Confidence.
Capacity.

All slowly leaking.

The Dangerous Part: It Feels Mature

Tolerance sounds sensible.

“I don’t want to over-optimise.”
“There are bigger things to focus on.”
“I’m being realistic.”

But sometimes “being reasonable” is just avoidance dressed up as wisdom.

Because fixing it would mean admitting:

• You’ve outgrown that offer.

• You underpriced yourself.

• You allowed something you shouldn’t have.

• You’re not as aligned as you pretend to be.

Tolerance delays the decision.

And delay has a cost.

How Businesses Get Harder Without Growing

Not from expansion.

From accumulated compromise.

A service you keep “just in case.”
A client dynamic you’ve quietly accepted.
A tech stack you half-use.
A boundary you enforce inconsistently.
A direction you no longer fully believe in.

None of these destroy a business.

They just make it harder to run.

Eventually you describe it as:

• Burnout

• Lack of motivation

• Imposter syndrome

• “Something feels off”

So you look for a big solution.

A rebrand.
A new niche.
A new qualification.
A fresh burst of motivation.

But the issue isn’t that you need something new.

You’ve just been leaking capacity for too long.

The Question That Changes Everything

If your business feels more difficult than you think it should, don’t ask:

“What’s wrong with me?”

Ask:

“What have I been tolerating that I shouldn’t have normalised?”

Not to overhaul everything overnight.

Just to notice.

Because once you see where you’re quietly losing energy, it becomes much harder to keep pretending the cost is negligible.

These aren’t personality flaws.

They’re confidence leaks.

And they’re fixable.

You don’t need more motivation.
You need fewer tolerance leaks.

That’s what I am unpacking further next week in the Confidence Connection emails.