In this solo motivational monologue, Mary Schiller shares a recent episode of intense self‑doubt where she spent hours feeling like quitting her business. She recounts sending herself an email titled “I give up,” crying, and wrestling with the urge to abandon her shift from a coaching‑focused practice to a creator‑publisher model that includes YouTube videos, Insight Timer courses, and Amazon books. After a period of reflection, she decides not to quit, explaining that we often cannot see our exact position in a process and may be standing on the brink of breakthrough without realizing it. She uses a fitness analogy to illustrate how internal progress can be invisible while external results lag. Mary emphasizes that entrepreneurship requires a long‑game mindset, patience, and consistent forward steps even when tangible outcomes (money, clients) are absent. She frames life as a journey of activation and self‑discovery rather than mere achievement, urging listeners to persist through challenging periods, reject premature quitting, and continue expressing their unique voice.
Chapters
I spent about 2 hours yesterday feeling like I just wanted to give up, that I wanted to quit. That really what I'm trying to do with my business, going from primarily coaching people to becoming more of a creator/publisher, I should just quit and just not even bother trying. I was really, really upset. I was crying. I was feeling real anguish inside, and I even sent myself an email that said, I give up. The subject line. And I'm sure that you've had times in your life when you felt that way yourself, where you have wanted something, it hasn't seemed like it's coming to fruition, and so you just want to quit. You just want to throw in the towel, as they say, from the boxing days, I guess, and just, you know, walk away, just walk away. But then I kind of came to my senses and I realized that quitting is not something that I want to do because I really want to challenge myself to operate my business in a whole new way. Sorry, it's raining here in Oxford right now a little bit. I want to challenge myself to do business in a new way. I want to move forward with creating more and publishing more things like videos here on YouTube, courses on Insight Timer, more books on Amazon, and all these things. And I also realized something else, which I really want you to hear if you have felt this way yourself. Which is that we never really know where we are, right? We don't know where we are. I could be literally standing on the precipice of something great and not know where I am because that's not how we're designed. We're not designed to know where we are in the process when we are in the process. I was thinking about this, about fitness, for example, where you might have fitness goals or a fitness goal and you're working on it and it just doesn't seem like you're making any real progress. You're not seeing the outer evidence of it, but inside there could be really positive changes going on, but we can't see those. That's the same thing, it seems to me, with anything in life, is that it can take a long time, a quote-unquote long time, for us to see the outer evidence of what it is that we're working on or what we're aiming for. And we need to stay the course during those times. That's especially true in business. I've seen this in my business many, many times, which is why I didn't quit yesterday, because I know that many, many times I have not seen the evidence in terms of like money or clients or whatever, but I've kept going anyway because I knew that those things were only going to happen if I kept putting one foot in front of the other. If I just stopped, then nothing was probably going to occur. This is something that I see a lot of people do though in business, for when they're in business for themselves, is that they don't see the results like instantaneously, and then they just give up. They quit. They quit way, way, way too early. I don't want that for myself. I certainly don't want that for you. What kind of example would I be to you if I listened to that thought that said, just quit, Mary, it's not worth it? You don't know what you're doing anyway. Who would want to listen to you? I mean, any of those thoughts sound familiar to you? Because I think they're pretty universal. I don't think they're personal to me. I think that those kinds of ideas pop into our heads all the time, and we just need to listen past them to what it is that is really calling to us to do. Ultimately, for me anyway, This life that you and I are living is not about achievement. It's about activation. It's about self-discovery. It's about really seeing what is possible. What can we create? And, you know, for me too, it's also about coming through these periods where things have seemed challenging. I mean, to be really candid with you, the last 2-ish years of my business have been way more challenging than the first few years in terms of a lot of things, including, uh, not being at quite the same income level and being unsure of what I was putting out there and all kinds of things. But I haven't quit, and I'm not going to. I'm just not going to. I have too much to say. You have too much to say. We both have too much within us that is still dying to come out and be expressed and shared with people. So for me, in retooling this business and really starting from an entirely different place where I'm not even really picturing myself as a coach anymore, but as someone who creates and publishes and reaches people in these new ways, I'm realizing it's just going to take time. This is a long game. It doesn't matter how old you are, it's still the long game. It's still something that doesn't happen overnight. It never does for anyone. Don't listen to anyone who says it does because it's just not true. And we have to be willing to keep going even in those times when we really, really feel like giving up, like I did yesterday. And I'm not going to give up, I'm not going to quit, and I'm not going to let you give up or quit either.
