Mindset vs Strategy: What a Decade of Business Coaching Taught Me

What’s more important when starting, building and scaling a business? After a decade in Fortune 500 marketing and years coaching women out of corporate, my answer is: neither mindset nor strategy alone gets you out. Strategy without mindset stalls at the first glimmer of self-doubt. Mindset without strategy is expensive positive thinking. You need both…in the right order.

The corporate world already knows this.

When a Fortune 500 company wants to grow, they don’t pick one. They hire strategy consultants and executive coaches as separate line items in the same budget. The strategy team maps the plan. The leadership coaches make sure the people executing it have the inner game to actually carry it. They fund both because they’ve seen what happens when you skip one.

When high-achieving women leave corporate and intend to start their own business they are met with two different coaching options: business coaches who drill down on the strategy and tactics; or ‘life coaches’ who focus purely on mindset coaching. Very few combine both – or combine them well.

On one side: programs that are pure strategy. Frameworks, templates, marketing plans, launch checklists. These work beautifully right up until the moment the founder second-guesses her pricing, shrinks in a sales conversation, or quietly stops executing because something inside her doesn’t believe she’s the kind of person who gets to pull this off. This shows up in various ways, but most often shows up in ‘valid excuses’: busy with the kids, parents in town, vacation planned etc. Anything that will distract you from actually executing.

On the other side: programs that are pure mindset. Vision work, identity shifts, journaling frameworks, affirmations. These feel transformative right up until the client sits down to build a pipeline and has no idea where to start, because feeling ready isn’t the same as having a system.

I’ve seen both of these fail. And, unfortunately, I’ve experienced both of these failures at different times of my own leap and entrepreneurial journey. Which is why I have such an appreciation for both.

When I started coaching and consulting for female entrepreneurs in sales and marketing, I came in with a decade of Fortune 500 strategy. I knew how to build a brand, dial in the positioning and design their launch or growth plan. I built strategies for my clients that were genuinely excellent.

And then I watched them not execute on said plan.

Not because they didn’t want to. Not because the strategies weren’t right. They would get caught up on their pricing. They’d execute for a week, hit one rejection and then go quiet. They’d build the plan and then find a reason to wait a little longer before telling anyone about it. The strategies were sitting there, fully formed, but something was preventing them from being executed successfully.

It took me a while to figure out what I was seeing: mindset blocks. Not the soft, vague kind. Specific but unnamed limiting beliefs that were directly interfering with my clients taking action. “No one will pay that much for what I do.” “Who am I to charge that much?” “What if I put myself out there and it doesn’t work?”

These weren’t personality problems. They were mindset issues – fears, doubts and limiting beliefs – and no marketing strategy was going to fix them.

Realizing what the real issue was, I went and got my coaching certification (and then became a Master Coach) specifically so I could help women with both. That changed everything. I went from working with clients who were spinning their wheels to clients who were executing, week after week, building real pipelines and signing real clients. The strategy was the same. What changed was the person executing it.

Here’s what I’ve seen happen since then, across hundreds of women, and it is consistent enough that I no longer think of it as anecdotal:

The women who go from corporate income, six figures or multiple six figures, and match it or exceed it or double it in their first years of business… those are not always the women with the most polished strategy. They are consistently the women who have done the deepest mindset work.

Specifically: the ones who have done the work of owning their value and their worth, not just intellectually but in how they actually price, how they hold that price in a conversation, and how they feel about charging what they’re worth.

The ones who have done the work of shifting their identity from corporate executive to business owner, because it shapes how they make decisions differently. The corporate executive has plan B thru D ready in case plan A fails (after all, contingency plans are required when presenting to leadership teams). The business owner acts on plan A before it’s fully built, and adjusts accordingly as it unfolds, trusting herself to make the right adjustments if and when needed.

These women execute faster. They make decisions more confidently. They walk into a room and own it, where before they would have been grateful for a seat at it.

There’s also something specific about leaving corporate that adds a layer most entrepreneurship programs don’t account for.

If you’ve spent years climbing the corporate ladder, you’ve picked up habits that worked very well in that context and will work against you in this one. Head down, follow the hierarchy, wait to be recognized, defer to those above you, treat failure as a career risk. In corporate, those aren’t bugs. They’re features.

In business ownership, they’re the things that will inevitably stall you.

The abundance vs. scarcity mindset that shapes how you price. The relationship with failure and setbacks: in corporate, one bad quarter can follow you; in your own business, a failed launch is data and feedback and an invitation to pivot. How you manage your own decision-making without someone else (husband, mentor or best friend) to approve it. These aren’t character flaws. They’re programming that needs to be updated, consciously, before the strategy will ever be executed successfully.

Mindset isn’t the soft half of the work. It’s the vision and steering.

I want to say one more thing about sequence, because it matters.

The temptation is to build the strategy first, get the plan in place, and deal with the inner work later, once there’s “something to show.” I understand the logic. It feels more concrete, more actionable, more like moving.

Here’s what actually happens: you build an excellent strategy, take it into a client conversation, and the moment the prospect pauses, your inner voice fills the silence with every reason you’re not ready. The strategy didn’t fail. The person trying to execute it lost their footing.

We build the inner foundation alongside the strategy, because the strategy gets executed by a human being, and that human being has to be built to execute it. 

This is why the Fortune 500 runs both tracks simultaneously. They know the plan is only as strong as the people executing it.

The women who’ve doubled their corporate income doing this work didn’t find a better strategy. They became the version of themselves who could execute the strategy.

Sarah Janzen is the founder of Her Big Leap, a program that has helped hundreds of corporate women across North America and Europe build thriving businesses on their own terms. She does all of it while raising two boys, which is the best proof she knows that “waiting for the right time” was never the strategy.