In this five‑minute episode of Five Minutes of Momentum, Christine Corcoran coaches listeners—especially women entrepreneurs—on how to recognize and break the habit of "playing small" in their businesses. She explains that playing small often starts with setting goals that are safe, vague, or aligned with external expectations rather than personal growth. She guides listeners to create stretch goals that reflect the future version of themselves they aspire to become, and to regularly review and hold themselves accountable to those goals. Corcoran highlights that success can feel uncomfortable and unsafe because it is unfamiliar, and that the subconscious mind may protect us by encouraging self‑sabotage. She encourages listeners to reframe discomfort as a sign of growth, use visualization of their desired future self, and adopt consistent accountability practices to move beyond fear and expand their impact.
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Let's go. Welcome back to five Minutes of Momentum. Today I want to talk to you about breaking the cycle of playing small in business. This is one of the topics that I love talking about, but one of the things that I find is when women come to work with me, they're ready. They're ready to break that cycle of playing small. They've identified, they've been playing small in their business and deep down they know they're ready for more and they're ready to move through the fear to uncover their hidden patterns of where they're playing small. So I wanted to do an episode on this to help you start to identify where you could be playing small. First things first is your goals. Majority of the time you are playing small when you're setting your goals. We often set goals based on, like, the tasks or the things that we think we're going to do or things we're going to achieve anyway. That is not a goal, a goal. The whole intention of a goal is you stretching yourself, you creating expansive goals that help you step outside your comfort zone and go bigger. And this is not for the wrong reasons, Right? So I want you to identify, like, when was the last time you reflected on your goals? Are those goals something that are going to stretch you to become the person that you want to become? Right? So I'm not talking about setting goals that are other people's goals or what society deems to be important or what you, what you think success looks like, Right? So if it's like a million followers on Instagram or driving a Lamborghini, like, if that's not important to you, then that's irrelevant. This is about your goals and whether you're using them to stretch yourself or whether you're using them to stay safe. Okay? That's the differentiation because when you're thinking about your next level, so I always ask my clients, like, think about your next level and the person that you want to become in the process and how you envision yourself in the future, right? Having everything that you want to have, experiencing all the things you want to experience, achieving every all the things you want to achieve. Who is that person? And do you have Any goals on your goals list that help you become that person. That's how you identify whether you're playing small or not. A lot of the time people write down goals that are vague, that are boring, that are not actually going to stretch you at all, or things you're already going to do anyway. So I want you to start there. Are you playing small based on the goals that you've set? Secondly, are you keeping yourself accountable to those goals? Because a lot of the time we write goals down and we never look at them again. So how are you stretching yourself? How are you asking yourself to play at a bigger game? Because at the end of the day, success, it doesn't feel safe, right? If you don't have representation of success in your life, of at the next level, then it doesn't often feel safe if it's not familiar. If you don't have a representation of what that looks like, feels like, sounds like, then often your subconscious mind will protect you from it and will cause you to play small and cause you to self sabotage. Because that next level is the unknown. If it's something that you're stepping into that you've never done before, it's natural for you to fear it and to cause yourself to play small by just staying back in the comfort zone of where you currently are. So one of the things you need to do to shift this is to identify that success feels uncomfortable, success feels unsafe. It is what one of the things that actually Erica talked about at the Unstoppable Women event is that success feels really hard. And she was saying how like when.
People are saying to her, oh my.
Gosh, you're killing it, you're doing so amazing. She's like, yeah, I am, but I'm dying out here. And she was like tongue in cheek in a way. But what she was really saying was that yes, success may look good from the outside, but what's really happening on a day to day basis is that I feel like I'm sucking at this. I feel scared. I feel like I'm failing at everything. I feel like things aren't working out and I'm stuck in doubt and fear and scare and I'm scared all the bloody time. That's what success looks like. Because if you are not willing to get yourself out of your comfort zone and do things at a bigger level, you are never actually stretching yourself. Like me Running the Unstoppable Women event was scary. I had anxiety for weeks leading up to that event, right? I had moments where I was being stretched on every level from the investment, from reaching out to the speakers, from expecting what I wanted the standard of speaker to be, but also expecting that from myself. Right. It did not feel fun. It was not fun until it was the day of and then it was fun. But like, I think sometimes you've got to acknowledge that, yes, if we are playing small, it's because we're trying to stay safe. And if we are wanting to stretch to a next level and wanting to be expansive, then we're going to be okay. We have to get okay with being uncomfortable and to feel like it's anxiety ridden all the bloody time. And that's not for everyone. And I get it now, it's not always going to feel like that. But it's recognizing that for us to get out of the cycle of playing small in our business, we have to be willing to stretch bigger, to go bigger and to challenge ourselves to get uncomfortable. So the one question you need to keep asking yourself on a regular basis. Is there anything that I'm doing this week that is stretching me? Because if there's nothing on your to do list that is stretching you, you are going to continue to create the same results and you'll continue to play small in business. You have to believe that you're capable of doing hard things and you've got to do it uncomfortable. You've got to do it by recognizing that it's going to be scary and, and take the action anyway. Right. And I think I was saying this to a client the other day, like, it's okay that it feels like you want to vomit. It's okay that it feels like it's going to stretch you. It's okay that you are scared. It just means you have to keep going. Don't stop.
