You're Not the Problem: Your Business Has a Design Problem
Someone names the chaos in your business, and before you can even think, a voice fires off: it's me. I'm the problem. I should be better at this. That reflex isn't humility. It's the thing keeping you stuck.
In this episode of QueenMode, Ana takes the whole problem out of your body and puts it back on the table where it belongs. She names the three disguises the self-blame reflex wears, explains why nobody ever designed the business you're currently running, and tells the chapter of her story she doesn't lead with — the year she nearly went bankrupt and decided it meant something about her character.
What You'll Learn
- Why "I should just be better about it" guarantees you'll fix the wrong thing — and hand yourself fresh evidence you can't fix it at all
- The three disguises: the self-blamer, the projector, and the "but I'm fine" — and what all three have in common
- Why your business is a magnificent accident: one yes at a time, under pressure, with no time to think
- The real price of crossing from business-by-accident to business-by-design (it isn't money and it isn't hours)
- The sentence to say instead of "that's a me thing"
Key Quote
"You cannot be ashamed of a floor plan. It's a floor plan. You can just… change it."
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Transcript
Here's something that happens to me almost every single time I describe this pain
Speaker:out loud. I'll be talking to a woman,
Speaker:smart, accomplished, running something real,
Speaker:and I'll start naming it. The fires,
Speaker:the 9 p.m. text, the team that can't move without her,
Speaker:the fact that she is the glue,
Speaker:the engine, and the customer service desk of her own company.
Speaker:And she'll go quiet, and she'll nod,
Speaker:and she'll get a little bit still,
Speaker:in the way people get still when you said the thing they thought only they knew.
Speaker:And then every time she says one of two things.
Speaker:Either, Yes, and I don't know why I'm like that.
Speaker:Or I know, I know, I just have to be better about it.
Speaker:She agrees with me and then she apologizes for herself.
Speaker:she takes something that is a design problem,
Speaker:a structural, fixable, entirely ordinary design problem,
Speaker:and she takes it inside her body and makes it a verdict on who she is as a person.
Speaker:And Queen, I want to talk about that today.
Speaker:Because that reflex, that little instinctive apology,
Speaker:is not humility. It's the thing keeping you stuck.
Speaker:What's up, Queen? I'm Dr. Anna Castilla,
Speaker:orthodontist, author, speaker,
Speaker:unapologetic dream chaser, and yes,
Speaker:I took my business from flatlining to an eight-figure exit in just eight years.
Speaker:But spoiler alert, I didn't get there by playing a safe.
Speaker:I broke rules, I made bold moves,
Speaker:and I became the woman my younger self was waiting for.
Speaker:Queen Mode is your weekly dose of fear strategy,
Speaker:unfiltered truth, and mindset shifts that will have you leading,
Speaker:growing, and living like the powerhouse you are without burning out or selling out.
Speaker:So if you're done playing small and ready to rise,
Speaker:welcome home.
Speaker:Let's start by looking at this head on because you've probably never watched
Speaker:yourself do it. Somebody names a problem in your business.
Speaker:Maybe it's me on this podcast in your car.
Speaker:Maybe it's your husband. Maybe it's a friend who says gently,
Speaker:you know you never actually stop,
Speaker:right?
Speaker:And what happens in your chest?
Speaker:You don't get curious. You don't think,
Speaker:huh, that's interesting. Let's look at the system that produced that.
Speaker:No, no. Something much faster than that thought happens and it goes,
Speaker:It's me. I'm the problem. I should be better at this.
Speaker:I should be more organized. I should be a better leader.
Speaker:I should have hired better. I should be able to handle this.
Speaker:Other people handle this. I should stop being so controlling.
Speaker:I should just let go. What is
Speaker:wrong with me? Should should should should should.
Speaker:It's like a should machine gun and every round is aimed at the same target.
Speaker:You. Here's why this looks like
Speaker:A virtue. It sounds like accountability.
Speaker:It sounds like radical responsibility.
Speaker:And you are a woman who takes responsibility.
Speaker:That's a huge part of why you succeeded.
Speaker:You don't blame the market. You don't blame your team.
Speaker:You don't blame the economy. You look in the mirror and you say,
Speaker:It's on me. And then you go work harder.
Speaker:And that reflex has genuinely built things.
Speaker:And it built my business too. I'm not gonna stand here and tell you it's worthless,
Speaker:but watch what it actually does.
Speaker:In practice in your real life,
Speaker:when you decide the problem is you,
Speaker:there's only one available solution.
Speaker:Be a better you. Try harder.
Speaker:Get up earlier. Be more patient with the team.
Speaker:Be more disciplined. Be less controlling.
Speaker:Be more of a leader. Whatever that means.
Speaker:Nobody's ever explained it, but be more of it.
Speaker:So you go do that. You white-knuckle it,
Speaker:and for about 11 days, it works.
Speaker:works. You are patient, you are calm,
Speaker:you are delegating, you are a vision.
Speaker:And then week three, something breaks and you're right back
Speaker:in the machine doing everything at 10 p.m.
Speaker:furious with yourself.
Speaker:And now this is the part that guts me.
Speaker:Now you have two problems. You have the original problem and you have
Speaker:the evidence you just handed yourself that you're the kind of woman
Speaker:who can't fix it.
Speaker:That's a spiral, and I have watched brilliant women live inside that spiral
Speaker:for years, getting more competent and more exhausted at the same time,
Speaker:achieving more and enjoying it less.
Speaker:I'm gonna say that again. Achieving more and enjoying it less.
Speaker:Building an empire and quietly,
Speaker:privately, believing they're failing at it.
Speaker:So let's get out right now, today,
Speaker:because I'm about to take this whole thing away from you.
Speaker:Now, before we
Speaker:go further, I want to show you something because I've come to believe this reflex
Speaker:is nearly universal among high-achieving women,
Speaker:and it wears three different costumes.
Speaker:And you will recognize yourself in one of them.
Speaker:I promise you, and it will be uncomfortable,
Speaker:and I want you to stay in the room anyway.
Speaker:This guy's number one, the self-blamer.
Speaker:This is the woman we just talked about.
Speaker:You name the pain and she says,
Speaker:I know that's a me thing. She catches the whole problem in her own
Speaker:two hands and swallows it. She's not arguing with you.
Speaker:She agrees with you immediately and then punishes herself with the agreement.
Speaker:She's the easiest to spot and the hardest to help because she
Speaker:has already decided the verdict.
Speaker:She doesn't need convincing that there's a problem.
Speaker:She needs someone to take the problem out.
Speaker:out of her body and put it back on the table where it belongs,
Speaker:where it can actually be looked at.
Speaker:Disguise number two, the projector.
Speaker:This one's more armored, and if you're a little further along,
Speaker:this one might be yours. She will not admit the pain in herself.
Speaker:Not for a second. Bring it up as she gets polished.
Speaker:Everything is fine. Everything is handled.
Speaker:She's very structured. She's got systems.
Speaker:and then in the very next breath,
Speaker:she'll describe the exact same pain with total fluency in
Speaker:somebody else. my clients do that.
Speaker:My friend's business is such a mess.
Speaker:She does everything herself she can let go.
Speaker:It's the need for control. She can diagnose it perfectly.
Speaker:She can diagnose it in a stranger from across the room in about nine seconds.
Speaker:She just cannot turn the lens around.
Speaker:And I'm not mocking her. I love her.
Speaker:And honestly, she's kind of magnificent,
Speaker:but I want to point out what's actually going on.
Speaker:Admitting the pain for a woman who has built her entire identity on being
Speaker:the one who has it together doesn't feel like an observation.
Speaker:It feels like a confession. It feels like standing up in a room
Speaker:and announcing you're a fraud.
Speaker:So she won't do it. She'll hand it to somebody else and keep talking.
Speaker:Disguise number three, the but I'm fine.
Speaker:And this is the one that gets me.
Speaker:This is the one I find genuinely moving
Speaker:Because she's the most honest of the three and she still can't stay in it.
Speaker:She'll tell you the truth, all of it.
Speaker:She's exhausted. Her team can't seem to follow instructions.
Speaker:She's doing way too much. She knows she is.
Speaker:She'll say it right out loud without any prompting at all.
Speaker:And then in the same breath, before the sentence is even cold,
Speaker:she closes the wound. But I'm fine.
Speaker:We're almost there. We really are.
Speaker:I feel like we just need a little bit more time.
Speaker:she names it and she immediately heals over it like a reflex like pulling your hand
Speaker:back from a stove
Speaker:And here's what I understand about her that took me a long time to see.
Speaker:That reflex is why she survived.
Speaker:That's not denial, that's self-rescue.
Speaker:She is very likely a woman who grew her struggling business by refusing
Speaker:to sit down and cry about it. She got up,
Speaker:she kept moving, she fixed it,
Speaker:and that muscle worked. It's the reason she's still standing,
Speaker:the reason there's a business at all.
Speaker:I know because that was me. So when I ask her to sit inside
Speaker:a problem and actually look at it,
Speaker:I'm asking her to do the one thing she trained herself never to do.
Speaker:Of course she flinches. Sitting in a problem is in her nervous system
Speaker:the thing that gets you killed.
Speaker:If that's you, I want to say something to you directly,
Speaker:and then I want you to keep listening.
Speaker:I'm not asking you to sit in it.
Speaker:I'm not asking you to wallow or grieve or make it a thing.
Speaker:I know.
Speaker:You're not going to fall apart.
Speaker:You've proven that a hundred times and you don't owe anybody another demonstration.
Speaker:I'm asking you to look once clearly with your eyes
Speaker:open. And then get up, like you always do,
Speaker:and go fix the right thing this time.
Speaker:Because here's what all three disguises have in common,
Speaker:and this is the whole reason I'm walking you through them.
Speaker:Every single one of them keeps you from looking at the structure.
Speaker:The self-blamer looks at her character.
Speaker:The projector looks at someone else's business.
Speaker:The but I'm fine looks forward at the horizon at the getting there.
Speaker:Nobody is looking at the machine,
Speaker:and the machine is the only thing that was ever going to change.
Speaker:want you to think about how your business actually came to be.
Speaker:Not the story you tell on your website,
Speaker:the real one, the messy one.
Speaker:Did you sit down at any point with a blank sheet of paper and design this company?
Speaker:Did you architect the roles? Did you map out who would own what?
Speaker:Did you decide deliberately on purpose with a clear head that you would
Speaker:be the person handling the vendor problem and the front desk emergency
Speaker:and the payroll question and the client who's upset and the thing that broke
Speaker:on Saturday? No, obviously not.
Speaker:Nobody does that. I certainly didn't.
Speaker:Here's how it actually happened.
Speaker:Something needed doing and there was nobody to do it.
Speaker:So you did it. That's it. That's the origin of every single task
Speaker:on your plate. The phone rang and there was nobody to answer it,
Speaker:so you answered it.
Speaker:Somebody had to figure out the software,
Speaker:so you figured out the software.
Speaker:A client was upset, and you were the only one she trusted,
Speaker:so you took the call.
Speaker:You needed help and you were desperate,
Speaker:so you hired the first warm body that could start Monday.
Speaker:And now you have a person in a role that person cannot do and you fill
Speaker:the gap yourself every day, quietly,
Speaker:forever. One yes at a time,
Speaker:under pressure, in the middle of a busy life,
Speaker:with no time to think, because you were building the thing.
Speaker:That's not a business plan. That's an accident.
Speaker:And I don't mean it as an insult.
Speaker:I mean it structurally, almost lovingly.
Speaker:Your business is a magnificent accident.
Speaker:It's a house where somebody kept adding rooms without ever consulting the blueprint.
Speaker:A hallway that goes nowhere. A staircase in a strange place.
Speaker:A bathroom you can only reach through a closet.
Speaker:And it works.
Speaker:That's the incredible part. It works,
Speaker:it makes money, it employs people,
Speaker:it serves clients who love it.
Speaker:It just requires you to personally know where every weird little passage
Speaker:is because you built them in the dark while carrying a baby and a phone
Speaker:and someone else's emergency. So when you sit there at 10 p.m.
Speaker:and ask, what is wrong with me?
Speaker:Queen, nothing is wrong with you.
Speaker:Nobody ever designed this. Not one person.
Speaker:Not one.
Speaker:Ever sat down and designed the thing you're currently running.
Speaker:You're not failing at your business.
Speaker:You're running an undesigned business at full speed on personal willpower,
Speaker:which by the way is the single most impressive thing about you,
Speaker:and also exactly why you're so tired.
Speaker:You cannot fix a design problem with a character adjustment.
Speaker:You can be the most disciplined woman on this earth,
Speaker:and you will still be exhausted because the building.
Speaker:is the problem. Discipline does not move a wall.
Speaker:Now
Speaker:I want to be careful here because I do not want you to hear this as your business
Speaker:is a mess and you build it badly.
Speaker:That's not what I said. And if that's what you heard,
Speaker:I need you to rewind. The accident wasn't a mistake.
Speaker:The accident was the price of building something real,
Speaker:fast with no map. Think about who you had to be to do this.
Speaker:You had to be the woman who says yes when she has no idea how.
Speaker:The woman who figures it out at two AM,
Speaker:the woman who covers the gap herself rather than let a client down.
Speaker:The woman with standards so high that she would rather do it herself than watch
Speaker:it be done badly. Those are not flaws.
Speaker:Those are superpowers. Those are the exact traits that separate the women
Speaker:who build something from the women who talk about building something.
Speaker:You have them. That's why you're here,
Speaker:and most people aren't.
Speaker:And here's the thing that took me years to understand.
Speaker:The trap didn't catch you despite those traits.
Speaker:The trap caught you because of them.
Speaker:You are stuck in operator mode precisely because you're capable.
Speaker:If you were mediocre, you'd have been forced to build a real team years ago.
Speaker:You'd have had to. You couldn't have carried it.
Speaker:But you could carry it. You could carry an absurd,
Speaker:superhuman, frankly ridiculous amount.
Speaker:So you did, and the business being an obedient little organism simply grew
Speaker:to the exact size and shape of what you could personally carry.
Speaker:And then it stopped growing because you hit the edge of you.
Speaker:That's not a character flaw queen.
Speaker:That's physics. That's a bucket filling up.
Speaker:So can we please, please stop with the what's wrong with me?
Speaker:Nothing is wrong with you. Something is wrong with the design,
Speaker:and you did not design it.
Speaker:You survived it. There's a difference,
Speaker:and the difference is your whole self-respect.
Speaker:Here's the reframe I want tattooed on the inside of your eyelids.
Speaker:The enemy is not you. The enemy is the accident.
Speaker:You and I are on the same side.
Speaker:We're both looking at the strange,
Speaker:beautiful, accidental house you built,
Speaker:and we are not there to judge the woman who built it in the dark.
Speaker:We're here to turn the lights on and draw a real blueprint.
Speaker:Now I'm going to tell you something I don't say often because the version
Speaker:of my story people like to repeat is the eight-figure exit.
Speaker:And honestly, that part's boring.
Speaker:That part is the last five minutes of the movie.
Speaker:I almost went bankrupt. Not I had a hard quarter,
Speaker:not cash was tight. I mean I very nearly lost the entire thing early on.
Speaker:And there was a period where I did not know if I could make it work.
Speaker:numbers were simply not there and I was doing everything and it
Speaker:was still not enough. and do you know what I did with that?
Speaker:I made it mean something about me.
Speaker:I was sure, dead sure, that it was because I was bad at business.
Speaker:I was a doctor who had gone in over her head.
Speaker:I couldn't sell. That's the truth.
Speaker:I was terrible at sales. Terrible.
Speaker:I was uncomfortable talking about money.
Speaker:I hated feeling like I was pushing anybody,
Speaker:and so I just didn't.
Speaker:And I told myself a story about how that was a character defect,
Speaker:some kind of moral failure. Anna can't sell.
Speaker:Anna's not a real businesswoman.
Speaker:Anna's a fraud in a white coat.
Speaker:I carried that around for a long time.
Speaker:That specific, private shame. And I want to tell you what was actually true.
Speaker:Because it took me years to see it.
Speaker:And I'd like to save you the years.
Speaker:I wasn't broken. I had never been taught that.
Speaker:That's it. That's the entire thing.
Speaker:Nobody teaches a doctor to sell.
Speaker:Nobody teaches an expert to position herself,
Speaker:to price herself, to speak about her own value without wanting to leave her body.
Speaker:I was expected to walk out of a decade of clinical training and simply know
Speaker:how to run a company. And when I didn't,
Speaker:I concluded there was something wrong with my soul.
Speaker:That's insane. Say it out loud and it's obviously insane,
Speaker:but we all do it.
Speaker:and here's the part I have come to be almost grateful for,
Speaker:in a strange way.
Speaker:It happened when the business was still small.
Speaker:That was a blessing in disguise.
Speaker:Because a business by accident that's small is a business you can still redesign.
Speaker:The walls are still light. You can still move them.
Speaker:If that same accident had scaled,
Speaker:if I'd taken that structure to 10 times the size before it broke,
Speaker:it wouldn't have been a hard year.
Speaker:It would have been a catastrophe.
Speaker:So when I tell you your business is an accident,
Speaker:I'm not
Speaker:Standing above you. I'm telling you what I saw when I finally turned
Speaker:the lights on in mine. And I'm telling you that the redesign is what took
Speaker:it from flatlining to an exit,
Speaker:not a personality transplant. I didn't become a different woman.
Speaker:I was the same woman. I just stopped trying to out hustle a structure
Speaker:and started building a better one.
Speaker:So let's talk about what it actually takes to cross the line.
Speaker:Business by accident on one side,
Speaker:business by design on the other.
Speaker:And I want to tell you what it costs because I hate it when people sell
Speaker:you a transformation and hide the invoice.
Speaker:It does not cost money. That's not the real cost.
Speaker:You've probably already spent money on this.
Speaker:Courses, consultants systems, and you're still here.
Speaker:So we both know money isn't the lever.
Speaker:It does not cost more hours. You don't have more hours.
Speaker:That's the whole problem. If the fix required more hours,
Speaker:you'd be disqualified. And so would every woman I've ever worked with.
Speaker:Here's what it costs: it costs you the willingness to look.
Speaker:That's the price. That's the whole price.
Speaker:You have to be willing to sit down and look with your eyes open and your excuses
Speaker:off at the thing you built and see it clearly.
Speaker:What's actually happening?
Speaker:Here, what's actually on my plate and why?
Speaker:Which of these things are here by design and which are here by history?
Speaker:Where am I the bottleneck? Where have I been quietly doing a
Speaker:job for free for three years that should belong to someone else?
Speaker:And that is terrifying.
Speaker:Not because it's hard work, because you're afraid of what you'll find.
Speaker:There's a fear underneath this.
Speaker:I want to name it because it lives in almost every woman I talk to,
Speaker:and almost nobody says it out loud.
Speaker:The fear is: what if I look and it turns
Speaker:out it really was me?
Speaker:What if I'm the reason? What if I'm not actually good at this
Speaker:and everyone's about to find out?
Speaker:So you don't look, you work instead.
Speaker:Because working feels productive and looking feels dangerous.
Speaker:You'd rather run the machine at full speed for another year than
Speaker:open the hood and find out what's in there.
Speaker:I know I did it too.
Speaker:So let me tell you what you will actually find when you look.
Speaker:Because I've now seen it enough times to promise you you will find
Speaker:a structure that was never designed.
Speaker:You will find roles that don't exist.
Speaker:You will find decisions that got made in a panic in 2019 and never got revisited.
Speaker:You will find over and over that the thing you've been calling
Speaker:a personal failing has a name and a cause,
Speaker:and this is the
Speaker:Good part, a fix. you will not find a bad woman.
Speaker:You'll find a good woman running a badly designed machine at
Speaker:a hundred miles an hour, wondering why she's tired.
Speaker:And when you see that, when you actually see it,
Speaker:the shame drops off like a coat you didn't realize you were wearing.
Speaker:Because you cannot be ashamed of a floor plan.
Speaker:It's a floor plan. You can just change it.
Speaker:That's the whole shift, Queen.
Speaker:Not from bad to good, from accidental to intentional.
Speaker:So here's what I want you to walk away with.
Speaker:The next time somebody names the pain,
Speaker:the next time you hear yourself described a little too accurately,
Speaker:and you feel that hot flush of recognition,
Speaker:and your mouth starts forming the words,
Speaker:I know that's a me thing. Stop.
Speaker:Do not say it. Try this instead.
Speaker:That's a design thing, and I designed it by accident,
Speaker:so I can redesign it on purpose.
Speaker:Feel the difference in your body when you say that.
Speaker:One of those sentences makes you smaller.
Speaker:The other one hands you a pen.
Speaker:Because you were never the flaw in this business.
Speaker:You were the force. You are the reason it exists at all.
Speaker:Every wall in that strange, beautiful house is standing because you held
Speaker:it up with your own two hands while you were busy building something out of nothing.
Speaker:And I will not stand here and let you apologize for that.
Speaker:Honor it, the doing built this,
Speaker:it really did.
Speaker:and now the doing is the ceiling,
Speaker:and there's only one woman on this earth who can lift it.
Speaker:She's not going to lift it by being better.
Speaker:She's not going to lift it by being more patient,
Speaker:more disciplined, more organized,
Speaker:or less controlling. She's not going to lift it by getting up at 5 a.m.
Speaker:and hating herself with more structure.
Speaker:She's going to lift it by looking,
Speaker:honestly, without flinching, at what she actually built
Speaker:And deciding on purpose what it's going to be from here on.
Speaker:You are not a mess queen, you are an accident waiting to be a masterpiece.
Speaker:So stop apologizing and start deciding.
Speaker:Thanks for tuning in, Queen.
Speaker:I hope today's episode gave you the clarity,
Speaker:courage, or conviction you needed to stop building your business
Speaker:by accident and start leading it by design.
Speaker:If this episode spoke to you, subscribe to Queen Mode so you never miss what's
Speaker:coming next. And if this made you think,
Speaker:pause, or quietly say, Okay, that was for me,
Speaker:share it with another powerhouse woman who needs the reminder.
Speaker:Your reviews, shares, and messages help more women find the show
Speaker:and more queens rise. And when you're ready for the next step,
Speaker:head to dranacastilla.com. That's where you'll find my latest resources,
Speaker:ways to work with me.
Speaker:And information on coaching, courses,
Speaker:and speaking. Until next time,
Speaker:keep showing up, keep leading boldly,
Speaker:and remember, you were born to reign.
