October 7, 2025
Do you ever feel like something’s wrong with you because running your business feels so stressful? Stress in business is normal. As Alex Hormozi puts it, “growth is stressful, stagnation is stressful, decline is stressful.” Business is stressful. As Judy adds, you’re human if you get to experience stress.
In this episode of Bringing Simplicity Unfiltered, Judy and Greta talk about why we automatically associate stress with failure, why your perception of stress matters more than the stress itself, and how to build a healthier relationship with it as you grow. They’ve built three seven-figure businesses in under a year, and they choose to go through the zero-to-seven-figures journey again and again with clients. Hormozi even called them masochists for pain.
When stress shows up, most entrepreneurs immediately assume they’re failing. But stress comes and goes. The problem is that we hold on to it, put it in our pocket, and carry it around. Whether you’re growing, staying the same, or declining, you’re going to have stress. So you might as well have it while you grow and scale.
Judy and Greta are very different people. They describe themselves as each other’s other half of the brain, and their personality assessments are completely different. They handle stress completely differently, and they’ve both been successful, together and on their own. There’s no single right way to deal with it.
Greta would argue it’s impossible to grow a business without stress. If you’re starting out and it feels stressful, “hold my beer.” When you start to scale, it gets more stressful. And when you hit $1 million or $2 million with a team counting on you, it’s still stressful.
She compares it to parenting. With a tiny baby, you think, “This is so hard.” Then they’re a toddler walking around and you can’t imagine how easy it was when you could lay them on a blanket and they stayed put. In the beginning of business, creating lead magnets and social posts feels overwhelming, but nobody has expectations of you yet. It keeps getting bigger, but you also learn to tolerate more.
We helped one client scale from a DIY course to one-on-one coaching. One of their biggest invoices at the time, $2K, got paid once and then the next payment was missed. They were freaking out, because that’s how they paid payroll. Totally understandable.
We had them anchor into perspective: this is one payment out of millions you’ll collect over the next 10 years. Do your best to recoup it, then move forward to the next person you can serve. Today that client collects $15K payments and barely notices the rare default. It’s a blip. You have to work through the discomfort in your body, acknowledge the stress, and keep moving.
Judy is go, go, go, much like Hormozi describes himself. Early in her career, she realized she was stressing everyone out by expecting everyone to be perfect and just like her. If no one wants to work with you, you won’t have a business. So surround yourself with people who balance you.
When something goes wrong, her first reaction is to laugh. She learned it from a mentor while growing a business from seven to eight figures, where the sales CRM could go down in the middle of six-figure days. It’s already happened, so she goes straight into solution mode: how do we prevent this right now?
Then she looks at the person or the process. Nobody wakes up thinking, “Today I’m going to mess up Greta’s day,” or “I want to lose a client with a $60,000 lifetime value.” So ask, “Help me understand why this happened. What process can we put in place? How can I support you?” Everything can be fixed. In her words, if a mistake didn’t happen during a launch or masterclass, we’re not running a business.
Five years ago, Greta’s default reaction to a client mistake was “I’m the worst, they should fire me, there’s no coming back from this.” Now she goes into root cause analysis: What happened? How can we fix it quickly? Is there a solution we can implement immediately?
She’s also learned to step away. After a recent stressful moment with a client, she took a quick walk around the block, did some deep breathing, and regulated her nervous system. She uses affirmations like “mistakes happen in all businesses.” Judy and Greta even screenshot mistakes from big-name companies, because they hold themselves to such a high standard.
Greta’s growth has come mostly in the last three years, through repeated exposure. She’s almost grateful for mistakes, because if she didn’t experience them, she wouldn’t get to practice regulating her nervous system.
Hormozi talks about building a stress tolerance. It goes up over time, and what used to feel huge gets smaller. Judy’s perspective: five years ago, she prayed for an amazing media buyer team. Now they’ve made a big mistake, and she reminds herself, “I prayed for this.” She prayed to be able to hand things off, and now she gets to live it.
Her take: if you can’t handle a $10,000 problem, you’re not ready for the $100,000 problem. The problems are the same, just with a different label. And the stress tolerance you see in your favorite mentors took years to build. For Judy and Greta, it took over a decade.
If you don’t have that tolerance yet, nothing is wrong with you. Get around people who can help. They didn’t wake up knowing how to laugh off a $10,000 mistake. They’ve done mentorship programs, keep doing them, and seek out experts in every area.
You’re the one labeling something as a problem. One of Greta’s favorite books is The Gap and The Gain, and this point comes straight from it. Stress often comes from focusing on the gap, the things that aren’t working. One of the fastest ways out is to focus on what’s working.
Entrepreneurs tend to be perfectionists. Nobody gets into entrepreneurship because they’re lazy. So we focus on the negative and forget to stop and say, “We did that.”
Greta points to a story Hormozi tells: he once thought no-shows at the gym meant the sky was falling. When he shifted his perspective, that problem shaped the program that became Gym Launch and helped other entrepreneurs solve the same issue. It wasn’t the end of the world. It fueled the next level of growth.
We watch masterclass show-up rates closely. If 30% of registrants show up, we could focus on the 70% who didn’t and feel like a failing business. Or we can focus on the 30% who came, many of whom book calls, find creative ways to bring in the people who missed it, and keep insane close rates. That’s a business on track to do more than $2 million in revenue this year.
When you treat stress as part of the game, you make decisions that keep you building.
Judy admits she doesn’t naturally stop and smell the roses. Greta does this well for the team and clients. When a strategy call starts with what didn’t happen, Greta asks, “What went well? What were the wins?” Start your day with gratitude. And if you never ground yourself in what’s working, you’ll never be able to 10X what’s working. You’ll just keep solving problems and doing more of what isn’t working.
Judy and Greta usually talk tactics and data, not theory. But this is where entrepreneurs either fizzle out or keep progressing. Judy works on her stress religiously, not when it’s convenient. Be as committed to getting your stress in check as you are to getting clients results, in every part of your business, and get people around you to help.
No. Growth, stagnation, and decline are all stressful. Stress is part of running a business at every stage, it just changes shape as you grow.
Differently. Judy laughs, moves into solution mode, and asks what process or support is needed. Greta does a root cause analysis, then steps away to breathe and regulate her nervous system.
Through repeated exposure, mentorship, and surrounding yourself with people who can help. Problems that feel huge early on get smaller as your tolerance grows.
Focus on what’s working instead of the gap. For example, focus on the people who showed up and converted, not only the ones who didn’t.
If you want help growing without carrying all the stress alone, learn more about Bringing Simplicity or reach out to us.
Want more? Watch every episode of Bringing Simplicity Unfiltered on our YouTube channel.
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