It’s Not a Time Problem: Break the Cycle of Urgency, Perfectionism & Inconsistency

Ever feel like you know exactly what to do—but still can’t stay consistent with your workouts, nutrition, or self-care?

This episode is for the high-achieving woman who’s tired of thinking her problem is time management or motivation—when really, it’s deeper than that.

In this powerful solo episode, certified life coach and personal trainer Anne Jones shares the real reasons ambitious women struggle to stay consistent—and it’s not because they’re lazy or unmotivated. It’s because of perfectionism, nervous system urgency, and a deep-rooted fear of letting others down.

Drawing on a raw coaching conversation with one of her VIP clients, Anne breaks down:

• Why your “consistency” problem is actually a self-trust problem
• How urgency hijacks your nervous system and blocks follow-through
• What to do when overthinking and people-pleasing keep you stuck
• How to finally show up for yourself—without guilt or drama

If you’ve ever said “I just need more discipline,” but you’re doing all the things for everyone but you—this episode will shift everything.

👉 DM Anne on Instagram @annejonesfit and tell her what part hit home.

⏱️ Episode Breakdown

00:25 Understanding Inconsistency and Perfectionism

01:05 Client Stories: Overcoming Perceived Barriers

02:43 The Urgency Trap and Nervous System Patterns

06:03 Breaking Free from Perfectionism

11:36 Building Self-Trust and Letting Go of Worry

17:03 Final Thoughts and Takeaways

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• Instagram: [@annejonesfit]

• Website: [https://www.annejonescoaching.ca/]

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Transcript

0:01

Welcome to the Muscles and Mindset Revolution Podcast, for ambitious women who want to build strength, feel confident, af, and lose fat for good, without counting calories or bs. Quick fix. Jones, certified life coach, personal trainer, and mindset expert. After 15 plus years in the fitness industry, I know the real key to lasting change isn't just what you do, it's how you think. If you've ever said, I just need to be more consistent, but you're already doing everything, this one's for you. Here's what I want you to hear upfront. Your inconsistency is not a character flaw or a moral one. It is often a nervous system pattern. It is perfectionism and no, you don't have to think that you're perfect or be perfect to be a perfectionist because nobody ever achieves perfection. It is survival conditioning showing up as urgency, and we can change that, but not with another cute planner. If you're ready to shift your mindset, build a lifestyle you love and feel confident af, you're in the right place. Let's dive in. Hey friends. Welcome back to the show. Today I want to talk about something I see, and honestly, it's something that I am still working on in my own life, too. This episode is inspired by an incredible conversation that I had recently with one of my one-on-one VIP clients. I knew right away that these themes were too important not to share with you. So if you are a woman in your thirties or forties who's ambitious, successful in so many areas of life, and you know all the things, right? You have all the information. You've probably tracked macros before. You know how to train, you know some stuff about exercise and fitness. You've got self-care tools coming outta your ears, but you're still struggling to stay consistent, this episode is for you. Because here is the deal. It is most likely not a time management problem. my client came to me convinced that her biggest problem was... well first I think she was convinced that time management was her biggest problem and then later, she came to me convinced that it's consistency. I just, it's consistency is my problem. Now, she's a total high achiever as many of my clients are. Mom of two, brilliant career, highly successful and decorated, and she knows pretty much everything there is to know about nutrition, exercise... now mindset work, nervous system regulation. We've worked together on those things for a year and a half. She's even gone to therapy and learned how to connect with her inner child journals like a pro. And she's not alone. I see this with my clients who are teachers, business owners, lawyers, nurses, moms, creatives, women who are doing it all and still feel like they're dropping the ball. And often it's not because they don't know what to do. It is because the moment they wake up, they're flooded with urgency. Logically, she now has all the information. She knows that she needs to make time for herself, particularly where it comes to movement. She knows movement is good for her body and her brain. She wants to do it, but here's what happens. She wakes up, her brain turns on and immediately there's urgency. Urgency about work, urgency about her kids feeding people, driving people places, answering emails, getting ahead on tasks. And even though she's gotten so much better at delegating her own needs still land dead last. She knows she wants to work out. She knows how to work out. And she tells herself, you know, it doesn't happen in the morning. I'll do it later tonight, but by the time, she's cooked dinner, she's exhausted and it doesn't happen. And I know so many of you listening are nodding your heads right now because you have been there, too. Here's the thing that I have come to with this client after many, many months of working together, and I had this feeling like when I, when I coach a new client, I can hear what their perceived barrier is, and I can usually tell if it is a true barrier or a perceived barrier. And almost all, almost a hundred percent of the time with clients', time is a perceived barrier. It's not real, but we think and we've decided that we don't have enough time, or that our time management is poor. So with this particular client, after some coaching, we both agreed it is not that she doesn't have time. She's very busy. Yes, that is real. But it's not that she doesn't have time. It's not that she doesn't have motivation. That's another thing like not so much my clients, but brand new people coming into my audience think that they don't have motivation, they have a motivation problem. It's that her nervous system shifts into urgency mode. And I can relate to this. And when that happens, it actually feels so unsafe to rest or not even rest, just slow down or focus on one thing at a time. Unsafe to do something purely for her. This is Nervous System and stuff. This is our schemas, our old conditioning, old schemas, deeply ingrained beliefs about what makes us safe, worthy, and loved. And this is so common for high achieving women. We think if I'm not doing something useful, I'm not doing anything. I'm failing. If I put myself first. People will be disappointed. People will be disappointed in me. There will be a fallout. This is what I have clients say to me, right? People will be disappointed. There will be a fallout, or people will be angry. If I pause, everything will fall apart. Who's gonna do it? If I don't do it, nobody else will. And sometimes we're afraid to face what might come up if we actually slow down, right? So we can put off dealing with everything I just talked about. Delegating our interpersonal relationships, we can. It's just easier. That's what my clients say, right? Sometimes it's just easier than to deal with the fallout. I get it. I totally get it. And the drama, I always say drama is temporary, right? So we disappoint someone, they get mad at us. We allow them to fail forward by not doing it for them. That's temporary and it's actually honouring the other party's boundary, but that's not what we're talking about today. Another huge piece of this, and this came up with my call with this particular client recently as well, is perfectionism. This client is a mom, as most of my clients are. And this client, like many of my clients, wants to give her daughters a very different experience than what she had growing up. So for example, she wants to be the mom who makes dinner every single night because she never had that. Totally makes sense. Right? I can appreciate that. And when you hold yourself to that level of perfection for, you know, their whole life, 20 years, there's. Zero room for your own needs. Not zero room, but almost zero room. So my client, again, like many of my clients, tells herself, it's just easier. It's just easier, you know, and now they're used to it, right? It's just easier to make dinner for everybody forever then to deal with the fallout of not doing it, even though you know they're old enough to do it now. As teenagers and going to, or, and or her partner, her adult partner. Right. It's easier to do it than to deal with the disappointment or the fallout of not doing it and going to work out, or she gets stuck in overthinking. Okay, so she, because again, she's done a lot of this mindset work. She's done a lot of this nervous system work, so she can see this thought, right? She knows she's going into her people pleasing mode and she gets stuck in overthinking. Which part of me is resisting this? Is this my inner child talking? Did I eat enough to work out? Do I have time? Is this the right time of day? I've totally done. I've done all of these things. You guys, I'm the first one to say there's so much value in self-inquiry and inner work and listening to your body, but sometimes it keeps us stuck in analysis instead of getting into action. So what I told my client and what I wanna tell you is this. Particularly when it comes to movement. Sometimes the solution is just go work out. Just go do it. Step out of thinking. In fact, it's really good for your brain because your brain can't not do something. You can't tell your brain to stop thinking. All it's gonna do then is think. You tell your brain not to think of a pink elephant. What are you thinking about right now? Pink elephant. Don't think about a pink elephant. There's research behind this. Actually, the study was with a polar bear, but I say pink elephant. Your brain can only do something, can only take action. So when you get stuck in that overthinking, I'm not motivated, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Literally the solution is just to do it. Stop thinking about the eating.'cause it doesn't matter if it's perfect cause you're not doing it anyway. Even if it's messy, even if it's not perfectly planned or perfectly timed, just go do it because your brain is not gonna magically stop thinking the impulses that you're having to care take. Won't disappear overnight, but you can choose a different action in the moment. And over time, this will not only build consistency for you, which builds confidence, it starts to train those around you as to who you are and what you're doing.'cause this is an identity thing, right? You become a person who consistently does the things that you do. So if you want to feel different, you wanna be different. You have to start to embody the woman who does the things differently in the way that you desire. So here's a question I posed to my client and I want you to ask yourself as well, if you feel like perhaps this is you, you're getting caught in a little bit of perfectionism. Can both things be true? Like, can we make it not black or white? Can you be the mom who makes dinner three or four nights a week and the woman who goes to the gym three nights a week? I love, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. I listened to her podcast and, and for the most part I love her, but I really love her talks on parenting because she is a professional. She's a busy woman. She's a busy woman. She's a doctor. She's highly educated. I believe in a lot of the same parenting values as her. And her, or at least when I listened to her podcast, her two little kids were still little and she was talking, I think with her sister about like prioritizing fitness and all of this. And she said that she had to face like her kids. She was not going to be there three days a week when her kids got up or when they had breakfast or, I can't remember what it was. And as a parent who desperately, wants to do a good job. As I know many parents do, many moms do. I work my whole schedule, my whole life around my daughter. Right? And that was very important to me, was to be present when she wakes up. now she's older, but even since she's a toddler, she's known she can't come outta her room until 7:00 AM So I never wanted to be working or working out or not here. When she came out at 7:00 AM I wanted to be like, come to me. You know? And so for me to hear that, I was like, okay, maybe I can be that mom four days a week, but three days a week, you know, she can play for 15 or 30 minutes while I'm finishing work or finishing my workout and then I can be fully attentive to her. It almost like gave me permission to hear that from someone else. So I really like that example because I know it's like we want to be this type of person. Can you be that type of person? And can you be a person who is not only present for their child when they wake up, but also. Works out three mornings a week, can you show up for your family and show up for yourself? And this does not mean doing more. This does not mean doing it all. It means stepping out of that perfectionism that you need to be giving a hundred percent in all areas of life. When there's only 100% of you to go around, can you hold your standards high without expecting yourself to be perfect? This is how we break free from the all or nothing trap, which bleeds into so many areas of life. The last piece I wanna speak about, which I've been thinking about a lot lately and really coached this client around a lot, is self-trust. So my client is not alone here. For years, I didn't trust myself either. And not only that, I didn't know that I didn't trust myself. I didn't know what self-trust meant and many of my clients start out the same way, and that is one of the reasons that we're often seeking external validation, external support. There must be a diet. There must be a trick. There must be a motivation hack. It's just'cause we don't trust ourselves to figure it out. We tell ourselves we need more structure, more discipline, tighter plan, perhaps a spreadsheet. But the truth is most high achievers actually don't need more rules. They need practice living in the gray areas. They need to prove to themselves that even if things go sideways, they'll figure it out. This is what I have been working on in the past years, and this is what I told my client is, this is actually one of the biggest reasons I love traveling alone, by the way. It forces me to figure things out without a. I mean, or maybe there is a plan, but if you are a partnered person who travels with your partner, especially a bit of a, you know, somebody who does like to have a plan, particularly around travel like my husband does, or you know, when your partner's, the one who's always driving your partner's, the one who only looks at the money, like, why would you trust yourself to be able to figure that out when you are never doing those things? So I love traveling alone because I want to learn. I want to trust myself. No matter what happens, the flight gets canceled. I miss the thing I, there's no food where I am. I want to be able to trust myself to figure it out. This has quelled my anxiety so much is practicing the thought,"I trust myself. I'll figure it out." Worry comes from believing something bad's gonna happen, something bad is gonna happen. It is not that nothing bad is never gonna happen again. That's not how we eliminate our worry. We trust ourselves to deal with it if and when it comes. If you follow me on social media, I shared this on my stories on the weekend: one of my superpowers is not taking many things personally. I care deeply. I just don't spend time on what's not mine. I stay in my story and resist making up stories about what someone else is doing or thinking. Most of the time it's not about me, and even if it is, I trust that I can handle it." That has been huge for me. Most of the time it's not about me, and even if it is, I trust that I can handle it. It's the same with fitness. It's the same with nutrition. It's the same with life. Yes, we need tools and structure, but at some point you have to practice self-trust. You have to practice believing you'll handle whatever comes up even without a spreadsheet or a perfectly scheduled workout calendar. I shared this with my clients recently that I also used to be a worrier. I used to be a highly anxious person, like I didn't sleep at night for several years if my husband was working, which he is 60% of the time, working or away. I didn't sleep at night until a year and a half, two years ago, and one of the things that allowed me to start sleeping at night and letting go of worry was. Practicing figuring it out. So for example, they were interviewing a therapist about worry, and she said what she coaches her clients to do is trust themselves. So for example, and I use this example, there's eight external doors in this house. Eight doors, numerous windows. Okay? So in those early years when I was highly anxious, sleeping alone, I would constantly be like, oh, did I close that door? Did I check all the doors? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what I learned, this tip that I began practicing was trusting myself that I had done it. So like I always lock the doors. When I come inside, like it's just a habit. I lived in the city. It's just a habit. I'll always lock the door. If I walk by the door and I see it's unlocked, I'll lock it and I'll do a little walk around, at least upstairs before I go to bed, making sure everything's closed and locked. And so what I practiced doing when I would have that thought,'did I lock it?' Is just trusting myself that I had done it. And you know what? Now I don't even have that thought anymore. Because I started trusting that I had done it. And yes, there will be the one off occasion that you hadn't, but it's worth the lack of stress and worry. I taught this, I coached this with my team a couple years ago, and one of my team members. Came back and said, she was like, I tried it, I did it. I, I left and I thought about driving home'cause I thought I left my curling iron on and I didn't, I just trusted that I had done it. And then she's like, but I had left my curling iron on and I was like, and you survived. The house didn't burn down. It's okay. And you're not gonna forget next time. So I know that seems like a fail, but it's actually a win because like shit will happen and you will figure it out. So here's what I want you to hear loud and clear. If you keep getting stuck in urgency, perfectionism or overthinking, it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. These patterns are old and they take time and practice to unlearn, and every time you level up in life, there's gonna be something else. Those patterns might resurface when your stress bucket fills. Those symptoms will come up. I don't see them as faults anymore. I just see them as symptoms. When I get a little bit like checky with my phone with a sense of urgency, I'm like, oh, this is a symptom of my anxiety. What's going on? It doesn't mean you failed, it just means you're human. So keep practicing. Keep choosing yourself even in small moments because you are worth that. I need you to believe that, too. And this work, nervous system work, self-trust work, it is worth it. All right my friends. That is what I have for you today. If this resonated, share this episode please with another high achieving woman who needs to hear that her problem isn't a lack of time. It's that her nervous system is screaming urgency when she tries to rest. Or a friend who you know who worries and remember, you don't need more discipline. You need more self-trust. Thank you so much for listening to the Muscles and Mindset Revolution Podcast. If you love this episode, please hit the subscribe button and leave me a review. It helps more women find this show, and if you want more support, come hang out with me on Instagram at@annejonesfit. That's where I share daily tips and behind the scenes of how I'm navigating my own muscles and mindset, revolution, fitness and mindset wise. I appreciate you so much, and I will see you in the next episode.