Okay, I did it.

I leaned back from my computer after hitting send on the email. The one I wish I was organized enough to have written last week, then scheduled so I wouldn’t even remember when it was sending, and I’d be surprised and delighted when the Stripe notifications started rolling in.

But I didn’t write the email last week, so here I am, sitting in front of my laptop, deeply aware that I just sent an email that is supposed to drive sales.

I pick up my phone. No notifications. Hmm… well sure, yeah, it’s only been a few minutes. Nothing to worry about.

Phone in hand, I open up Instagram, then my LinkTree, just checking to see if I’ve got new likes, followers, DMs, clicks. Hmm… nothing new since I checked 30 minutes ago. That’s fine though. Nothing to worry about.

Maybe I should check my waitlist. Back to the laptop, looking at my email. Still no clicks, hmm… but let’s see if anyone else is new on the waitlist. Nope… but that’s fine, right? Probably nothing to worry about…

What about a new sales call? Check the calendar… blank.

Fuck. What if this isn’t working? Look back at the email I just sent. I’ve got clicks now, but they’re unsubscribes.

The panic is seeping into my chest, snaking up my throat with little whispers of it’s not working. This launch is failing. You’re not doing it right.

That, my friend, is basically the rundown of what I spent the first 3-4 years of my business doing every single day.

Whether I was selling on evergreen or launching or not selling anything at all, I was obsessed with my metrics. And not in a healthy, smart or strategic way. In a dear god I need proof that this is working or I feel like I may die.

So I’d rewrite the sales page. Throw up another post. Add in a new bonus or inventive. Convince myself the price was wrong. Change the subject line for tomorrow’s email… or, I’m ashamed to admit, add a ps claiming I only had 2 spots left for clients, when the truth was that I would’ve taken as many clients as I could. Anything to feel like I had control over whether it was all working.

That’s why years ago, I came up with the concept of digging up seeds.

Journey with me, if you will, to the land of gardening.

So when you plant seeds, you have to leave them be to do their thing, right?

You water them. You make sure they have light. But you don’t dig them up every few hours to check if they’re sprouting yet. Because if you did? You’d kill them.

Business works the same way.

You send the email. You post the content. You open cart. Then you have to let it work.

But most of us can’t handle that. We need to know if it’s working right now. So we check the metrics. We refresh the dashboard. We look at opens and clicks and unsubscribes and try to find meaning in numbers that are too small to mean anything yet.

And when we don’t see immediate proof that it’s working, we panic. We assume something’s broken. So we change it.

We convince ourselves that this one thing we’re focused on is the problem, and if we just fix it, everything will start working.

But you know what happens when you keep digging up your seeds to check if they’re growing?

They die.

In business, that looks like checking your email open rates two hours after you hit send. It doesn’t help you makes sales, and just makes you obsess over tiny amounts of data and try to make meaning out of numbers that can’t tell you anything useful yet.

Or changing your pricing four days into a launch, which doesn’t help you convert more people. It just means you’ll never know if the original price would’ve worked, and you’ve messed with the perceived-value of everyone who was considering buying at the old price.

Or rewriting your sales page copy mid-launch because you’re convinced that’s why people aren’t buying… which doesn’t help you sell more. It just means you’re making panicked decisions instead of strategic ones, and you’re robbing yourself of clean insight into what actually works.

The metaphor isn’t perfect because checking your metrics doesn’t literally kill your campaign. But it does often kill your motivation, confidence, creativity, and trust in yourself.

And worse? It costs you the ability to ever actually know what works.

Unfortunately, our brains have a hard time with the lag time between taking a marketing action and seeing a sales result.

We’re wired for immediate feedback. Do thing, get result. But in business, there’s a gap.

You send an email on Tuesday. Someone reads it on Wednesday. They think about it Thursday. They talk to their partner Friday. They come back to your website Saturday and buy Sunday.

But your brain doesn’t want to wait until Sunday. Your brain wants to know right now if Tuesday’s email worked.

So you check the metrics. And when they don’t immediately show you what you want to see, your nervous system interprets that as a threat. Something must be wrong. You need to fix it.

And launching, selling, putting your work out there and asking people to pay you for it feels vulnerable as hell. So checking the metrics feels like control. It feels like you’re doing something. Like you’re being responsible and strategic and on top of things.

Except you’re not. You’re just reacting from a dysregulated nervous system, making yourself nuts and sabotaging your success.

When you’re stuck in this cycle, it looks like…

• The Story You Tell Yourself → It’s not working. I need to change something. Maybe the price is wrong. Maybe the offer is wrong. If I just tweak this one thing, people will start buying. I need to do something right now or this whole launch is going to fail.
• Which Leads to The Action You Take → Checking metrics obsessively. Rewriting copy mid-launch. Changing prices or adding bonuses out of panic. Sending increasingly desperate emails. Second-guessing your entire strategy. Making changes before you have enough data to know what’s actually working.
• And Causes The Ripple Effect → You never get clean data on what works because you changed too many variables. You train yourself not to trust your own strategy or decisions. Your audience gets confused by constant changes and mixed messages. You burn out from the anxiety cycle. You can’t build on past launches because you have no idea what actually moved the needle.

So what actually works?

Well, part one is increasing your capacity to feel the uncertainty in the between without panicking or making it mean something.

You’ll get some tools for that in Friday’s podcast episode.

Then part two is about building a sales ecosystem you can trust, so you’re not constantly wondering if it’s working.

That means three things:

1. Get clear on your sales rhythm and the marketing channels you actually need. Not every post needs to be a sales post. Not every email needs a CTA. When you know what your sales rhythm is (what you’re selling, when, where, and how often) you can build a marketing plan that supports that rhythm without requiring you to be in constant sales mode. This is where most people get stuck. They flip between either always selling (exhausting) or never really selling (confusing). A clear sales rhythm means you know what you're doing and what each phase requires from you. No more last-minute launches or panic posting.
2. Build your always-on assets. These are the things working for you even when you’re not actively launching. Long-form content with SEO staying power. A podcast that brings in new leads every week. A private podcast that moves people closer to buying without you having to manually do it every time. When you have assets working in the background, you’re not entirely dependent on this one launch, this one email, this one post. The pressure comes off. You can let things breathe.
3. Know what data actually matters, and when to look at it. Open rates two hours after you hit send? Not useful data. Conversion rates after a full sales cycle? Very useful data. When you know what metrics matter and when to evaluate them, you stop digging up your seeds. You give your campaigns time to work. You make changes based on real insight, not panic.

Inside my 1:1 retainer, The Empathy Edge, we build all three of these together. A sales rhythm that works for your business and nervous system. Always-on assets that keep leads coming in. And a way to evaluate what’s working that doesn’t require you to check your dashboard every 20 minutes.

Because you didn’t start your business to spend your days refreshing analytics and spiraling over unsubscribes.

You started it to do work that matters, serve people well, and build something sustainable.

And that requires letting your seeds grow.

I’m taking on 3-4 more clients before the end of the year. If you want to head into 2026 with a sales system you actually trust, let’s talk.

Talk soon,

CQ

ps Friday’s podcast is walking through how to build your own sales rhythm and know when you’re nurturing vs selling. Make sure you’re following The Resonance Effect wherever you listen.

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