If your business feels foggy, slow, or like nothing is clicking, you might be solving the wrong problem entirely.

In this episode of Heart-Led CEO, Anacani Walters breaks down the critical difference between a clarity problem and a strategy problem, and why confusing the two is one of the most expensive (and exhausting) mistakes women entrepreneurs make.

You'll learn:

→ The exact signs that tell you which one you actually have

→ Why "strategy applied to confusion just creates faster confusion"

→ The $99 investment that changed everything, and the personal story Anacani has never shared publicly before

→ A simple 2-sentence test to diagnose your business right now

This episode is for the woman who keeps buying courses, redesigning her offer, or overhauling her Instagram at 11pm on a Tuesday — and still feels stuck. Clarity isn't a personality trait. It's a practice. And today, we're going to show you exactly where to start.

Quick Win from this episode: Ask yourself: "Can I explain what I do, who I help, and what changes for them in two sentences or less?" If yes, strategy problem. If no (or you hesitated), clarity gap. That's your starting point.

Resources mentioned:

1. Free 12-Point Clarity Gap Checklist → Comment TWELVE (T-W-E-L-V-E) on any post @empowerherwave on Instagram
2. Clarity Catalyst Call (90-min 1:1 session) → empowerherwave.com/clarity (price increases in April)
3. Free Community → facebook.com/groups/empowerherbizcollective

Connect with Anacani: Instagram: @empowerherwave Website: empowerherwave.com

SEO Keywords: clarity vs strategy, business clarity for women, stuck in business, how to get unstuck, women wellness entrepreneur, heart-led business, clarity coaching, imposter syndrome entrepreneur, women entrepreneur podcast, burnout in business

Here's something that's going to save you months, maybe years of spinning your wheels.

Most women who are stuck in their business are not stuck because of a strategy problem.

Spoiler alert.

They're stuck because of a clarity problem.

And they keep buying strategy when they actually just need clarity first.

And today, I'm going to show you exactly how to tell the difference.

Because once you know, you cannot unknow and everything is going to change, my beautiful friend.

And so grab your cup of whatever's keeping you grounded and let's dive in.

Welcome to Heart Led CEO, the podcast for women wellness entrepreneurs who are ready to build, scale and automate their businesses without sacrificing their soul, sanity or authenticity.

I'm an economie Walters, a nurse turned entrepreneur, military spouse, first time mama in my 40s, and a recovering burnout survivor who's making it a mission to help Heart Led women just like you create thriving businesses that really feel good, do good, and give you the freedom that we all deserve.

Because here's the thing.

You don't have to hustle harder to succeed.

You don't have to drown in tech overwhelm or try to do everything alone.

And I'm here to give you the strategies, automation, tools and mindset shifts that will help you step fully into that leader, CEO and impact maker that you are meant to be.

If you're ready to grow your business in a way that aligns with your values and your life, you are in the right place.

Let's get into today's episode.

Hello.

Hello my beautiful friend.

Oh my gosh.

I am so happy to be here with you and I just want to take a real quick grounding breath because it's just been one of those mornings.

We're going to take a nice deep inhale into your beautiful belly.

Bring that breath into your chest and your ribs, shoulders up, back and down as you exhale through your nose.

One more time.

Inhale through your nose into the belly first, expanding to the ribs, chest, shoulders up, back and down as you exhale.

Beautiful.

I do want to start by asking you something, so that's why I want you to get comfortable and I want you to actually think about it.

Not like just nodding your head as you're folding your laundry.

If you're driving, keep driving.

Maybe pause and listen to this or come back to this when you get to your final destination.

And although if you're folding laundry.

Hi.

I see you.

Same, same.

I just folded my laundry yesterday.

I'm not gonna lie.

And I'm just gonna like Side note track right now, because I've been really taking to heart a lot of what I've been saying to you guys in the sense of how you do one thing is how you do everything.

And you guys are probably very much tired of hearing me say that.

But I kept staring at this very large and growing pile of clean laundry that was sitting on the laundry basket and it would migrate onto the bed and I would pull some out, get, you know, like if I was staging to actually fold it and then my 4 year old, he's about to be 4, would jump on the bed and like mess it up and then we would get sidetracked and then I literally would take this pile of, like pulled out, you know, arranged clothes and literally put it back into the laundry basket.

And I just couldn't anymore.

I took some time, I went upstairs and I just got it all done.

I folded his clothes, my clothes, and then put them away.

And I feel so much better, like to know that when I woke up, it was just this clean space.

I'm telling you guys, if it feels, like, heavy, if it feels weird, things that we are avoiding are the things that we tend to have to do.

So that's just like my little side note.

But as you know, you're folding your laundry, take a minute, sit down, do that deep breath, and then here it is.

When your business feels off, like if it feels slow or foggy, or you're working so hard and it feels like literally nothing is clicking, what do you tend to do first?

Like, that's the question.

Okay, now, if you're like most women that I talk to, the answer is some version of you go looking for a new strategy.

You start to Google it.

You watch a YouTube video, maybe you buy a course, maybe you start redesigning your offer, maybe you completely overhaul your entire Instagram grid at like 11pm because it's just sitting there picking at your brain on a Tuesday.

And then you wake up the next day wondering why you feel thousand percent exhausted.

Now, here's the thing.

I am not judging you at all because I have done it all.

I did all of that because it feels productive, right?

It feels like we're doing something.

And doing something tends to feel better than sitting in the discomfort of not knowing.

Take it from me, you guys know my story.

I am the queen of burnout.

So you know that I am a workaholic.

That is my coping mechanism when I get stressed, when things get uncomfortable, I tend to find things to do just to keep my mind from sitting in that space.

That I don't like because it doesn't feel good.

But here's what I've learned after years of doing this myself, suffering from two heart conditions and working with women inside of the community that I've been building.

Strategy applied to confusion, what does it create?

Faster confusion.

And that's plain and simple.

Like, that is the whole lesson.

Go ahead and write that down.

Strategy applied to confusion just creates faster confusion if the foundation isn't clear.

And we've talked about that, who you are, who you serve, what you're actually offering and why no strategy in the world is going to make it work.

Like it is like trying to GPS your way to a destination without entering the address.

You can drive really confidently in the completely wrong direction and be like, yep, I know where I'm going.

And be like deep inside crying and having massive anxiety because you're like, holy seaweeds.

I have no idea where I'm going, but I'm not going to let anybody know.

So how do you tell the difference?

And this is where I'm just going to get practical because that's what I like to do here on this podcast, I'm going to give you a few signs and I want you to notice which one lands in your body.

Because sometimes if you let your mind kind of decide, it's going to tell you there's nothing wrong and it's going to try to Jedi mind trick you.

So not just your brain, but your body maybe close your eyes if it's say to do so and listen and pay attention to how your body reacts to this.

Okay, so these are the signs that you have a clarity problem.

Okay?

You change your niche or offer every few months and every time it feels like a fresh start.

When you do it, it feels fantastic, but then it gets fuzzy again.

So you sit down and you create content and genuinely struggle because you don't know what to say.

You can't explain what you do in one clear sentence without adding like six qualifiers.

You feel like you're hiding, like you're posting, but you're not really showing up.

Like you feel like you're kind of ghosting everybody.

You have a lot of ideas, but no clear through line.

Like you just are are out there with beautiful, spontaneous things running around in your brain, but you don't really have this connection point to an end of what it's supposed to all lead to.

And maybe the biggest ones.

You feel like if you could just figure out what you're supposed to be doing, everything else would literally just fall into place.

That's a clarity problem, my beautiful friend.

Okay, now if none of that resonated, these are the signs that you have a strategy problem.

You know exactly who you help and what you offer, plain and simple.

You can say it clearly, you feel it confidently.

Your messaging is solid, okay?

But you don't have a system for getting it in front of the right people consistently.

You're not sure which platforms to really prioritize, and you don't have a clear funnel or a follow up process.

Your offer is so good, but your delivery or your visibility structure is pretty inconsistent.

That's a strategy problem.

Okay?

And strategy actually works once that Clarity foundation is there.

So what's the best way to look at this?

So the key difference here, clarity is internal and strategy is external.

Now, you cannot outsource clarity, but you can outsource strategy like all day long.

You can hire someone, you can buy a course, you can follow a framework, but clarity, that has to come from inside you, from like, your values, your actual vision, from really understanding who you're meant to serve and why.

And sometimes, honestly, it can be.

Most times you need someone outside of you to help you find it.

Like, it's not something that you can just intuitively soul search for yourself.

And this is where I'm going to get a little bit personal with you.

So just bear with me for a minute.

Because I used to be the girl who thought investing in coaching was literally a waste of time and money.

I'm not going to lie.

I'm going to be real with you that I really believe that.

I was like, I'm not paying some stranger to tell me what to do.

I.

The one pet peeve is that I hate, if you know me, I hate people who tell me what to do.

I do not like being told what to do at all.

Ask my husband.

I'm.

I would just like, tell myself, I can YouTube this.

I'll figure it out.

I'm super smart.

I went to nursing school.

I can read, I can learn.

I don't need to pay someone to tell me how to do things that I could literally find for free.

And I held on to that belief for a long time.

Like crazy too long.

I dug my heels in.

I'm super stubborn.

That is not something that I'm necessarily proud about in this moment.

But I watched myself suffer and spin for years.

I watched myself burn out almost in my first entrepreneurial, like, journey.

And I got into this place where I was genuinely ready to give up.

Like, not dramatically ready to give up.

Just, I was like, this is not for me.

I burnt down in nursing.

I'm not about to do it again just because I decided that I thought I had some big dream of changing people's lives.

This is for the birds.

This is not for me.

And in that moment, literally at the end of my rope, I decided, like, I was at my wits.

I was ready, really ready.

I was crying to my husband telling me that this wasn't for me.

I was going to give it.

It was too hard.

I invested $99 into a coaching program.

$99.

It might not sound like a lot to you, but for somebody who wasn't making any money, it was.

And what I really want you to know is that I don't think I've ever said this publicly.

So lean in because I'm probably only going to tell this story once.

I had to ask my husband for that money.

And if you know me, you know that I do not like asking my husband for money.

Like, that is genuinely one of my least favorite things to do in this world is ask for money.

Like, my independence is everything to me and it's attached to something that I went through when I was younger.

But.

But I was that stuck, okay?

And I was that desperate for someone to just look at my business from the outside and tell me what they saw or give me some guidance.

So that $99 call and courage that it took to ask my husband changed everything.

And not because the coach that I invested in gave me some magical pill to swallow and then, boop, everything was okay, or some magical strategy, but because she helped me see what I couldn't see from the inside of the bottle.

It's like, literally, if you are trying to do it by yourself, it is like trying to read the label of the bottle from the inside.

She held up this mirror and said, here's what's actually going on.

And that clarity is.

It was like one conversation unlock something in me that months of Googling or course buying, because I was addicted to course buying and late night Instagram and YouTube, binge watching, trying to overhaul everything, had never come close to the clarity that I got from that one investment.

Now, since then, I've invested over $10,000 in coaching since that day.

And I will never stop.

Like, I now have a set percentage of my income that I make in my business that I put aside to reinvest into myself for coaching because I understand now what investment and clarity actually does.

It literally collapses time.

It stops this spin that we put ourselves in and it tends to give you back energy that you didn't even know you were, like, leaking.

What I say out loud now is what I hear my clients say.

I wish I would have did this sooner.

Now, what I want you to take away from today, before you go buy another course, like, before you go hire somebody to maybe run your ads, or before you start to redesign your website or brand your entire whole thing, whatever it is that you're doing, ask yourself honestly, do I actually have a strategy problem or do I have a clarity problem?

Because, again, if it's clarity, and for most of us, especially when we're stuck, it is.

The move is not more information.

And I just saw this this week.

The move is a real conversation with someone who can see you clearly, ask you the right questions, and help you find what's already inside you waiting to come out.

Because I saw this in real time of watching somebody who had no clarity.

The first thing that they gravitated to was more education, more like another course.

And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

That's not what we need right here.

You.

You need to sit down and go through your stuff and, like, do the hard stuff that you're avoiding that.

I can see it right now.

That's what actual clarity is.

It's not like a lightning bolt that just hits you one day, some epiphany that just happens.

It's what happens when you finally stop trying to think your way through it alone.

I hope this landed, you know, I hope you got something out of it.

And just to kind of like recap.

Okay, Just a few things to just put it all on there so you can take your notes if you need to right now.

One, if your business feels stuck or foggy, you're probably solving the wrong problem.

Check first whether it's a clarity issue or a strategy issue, because the fix for each one is completely different.

Okay, number two, strategy applied to confusion just creates bastard confusion.

Clarity has to come first, like always, and I am very guilty of that.

I wasted a lot of years of just being in denial about that.

Okay, number three, you cannot find clarity alone.

Like, it's.

It is not a weakness thing.

This is just how humans work.

We need mirrors, we need conversations.

We need someone outside the bottle to read the actual label.

Now, your one quick win that I want you to have for today, grab a piece of paper or your notes app, whatever it is that you typically write your, you know, your journaling on.

I'm old fashioned, so I like writing things down on a piece of paper.

And I want you to write down this question or voice memo it.

I don't care.

Can I explain what I do, who I help and what changes for them in two sentences or less?

If yes, then you might just have a strategy problem if you're still struggling in your business.

If no or you hesitated.

So be honest with yourself.

You've got a Clarity gap and that's your starting point, my beautiful friend.

Remember I always say this awareness is power.

Don't beat yourself out about it.

This is our starting point.

And hey, if you want to go deeper on Clarity Gap specifically, you can go to my Instagram at Empower her wave and comment 12tw v e on any post and I will send you the full 12 point clarity gap checklist straight to your DMs.

Like there's no opt in.

It's not like a thing.

It goes straight into your dms like nice and beautiful.

Also, I'm just mentioning this because I just want you to know if you actually know, you need a real conversation.

Like you need that mirror.

You need those dedicated 90 minutes with someone else to help you untangle your stuff.

I do offer that and it's called the Clarity Catalyst Call and the link is in the show notes.

Now, I will tell you that it's been $297 for a while now, but just because I've been getting bus with clients and I have a lot of other things going on in my life, supply and demand is fluctuating and so it is going to be going up in April and I just want you to know that one, I offered and two that it's going to be going up.

So it's a great time if you want to get in this last week before April starts.

Now, as always, my beautiful friend, I want to thank you for just spending this time with me.

I hope I gave you something to think about.

I hope you take it with heart.

Know that I say everything with love and most of the things I tell you are things that I've already been through.

So do not reinvent the wheel.

Learn from my mistakes, don't make them yourself.

And as always, continue to be you.

Continue to be beautiful and continue leading from your heart.

I will catch you in the next episode.

All right, beautiful.

That's a wrap on today's episode.

But before you go, let's talk about something really important.

You are not just another entrepreneur trying to figure things out alone.

You are a Wave leader.

Someone whose work is meant to create real impact, touch the lives of others and make this world better.

And I want you to know you don't have to do it alone.

If today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love to keep this energy going inside of my free Facebook community.

Empower Her Biz Collective.

It's where we take these conversations deeper with live trainings, tech walkthroughs, and real heart centered support from other women wellness entrepreneurs who really get it.

So if you're ready for community, clarity and support as you build your own business with heart and ease, I'd invite you to come and join us.

You'll find Find the link in the show notes.

And hey, if you love today's episode, make sure to subscribe, leave a review if you feel inclined, and share this with a fellow heart led women entrepreneur so that we can build this movement together.

Until next time, keep leading with heart.