There's a difference between trying hard and training hard. One is an inevitable path to burn out while the other creates the capacity to sustain the life it feels like many people tell you to stop wanting. This week, it's just Thea on the other end of the line here to convince you that it's truly okay to want the high-effort life.

After speaking at the Boss Mares Lead the Herd Workshop in Fort Worth, Thea came home with a singular clarity about what rural women entrepreneurs actually need to hear: validation that wanting it all: the ranch, the business, the marriage, the community, the energy to show up fully in every role ... it isn't selfish. And the path to getting there isn't hustle culture power moves OR soft-girl simplification. It's a solid and strategic commitment to training for it.

This episode neutralizes the two narratives we've been sold as far as a solution to our overwhelm and exhaustion to either push harder or want less. Thea walks through her four-stage planning order of operations (Prime, Plan, Process, Preserve) and makes the case that planning itself is the training ground for the do-it-all life you're trying to create. You don't climb Everest on grit alone. You train for it. The same goes for juggling livestock, kids, a business, and your own sanity.

1. Why the "high-effort life" isn't a flaw to fix but an innate calling worth nurturing, and the permission you need to stop apologizing for wanting to do it all, and well.
2. The two false solutions keeping women burned out: hustle-harder masculinity or simplify-everything softness.
3. Planning as practice, not product: Why the process of planning itself, and not the perfect plan, is the strategic advantage that separates women who sustain momentum from those who white-knuckle it through every day.
4. The four-stage planning order of operations (Prime, Plan, Process, Preserve) designed specifically for women whose lives include weather, livestock, broken tractors, and kids who get sick on meeting days.
5. Why high achievers tend to skip the small steps and how that skipping catches up when you hit the end of your capacity (usually around motherhood, though it's not motherhood that breaks you).
6. A case for Thursday as your optimal planning day: How to use recency bias and week-ahead visibility to audit, adjust, and iterate without decision fatigue.
7. Muscle memory for decision-making: How consistent planning trains your brain to pivot quickly when plans inevitably go sideways (because they will).
8. The Mount Everest principle: You don't just show up and climb. You train. And if you want the high-effort life without burning out, the training is non-negotiable.
9. Why women under-resourced and exhausted can't solve the world's problems.
10. Boss Mares grant opportunity: Applications open now for 2026 business funding designed by Western women for Western women entrepreneurs.

1. 00:00 – The undervalued relief of "me too" and why conversation matters more than tactics.