Self-Care Might Be Saying No

I.

She got everything she set out to get, on schedule, and the getting is what caused the problem.

“So probably in my mid-thirties, I earned tenure, which was the goal that I’ve been working on all of my adult life.”

Read that sentence again with the arithmetic in it. All of her adult life. A PhD, then the job, then the years of proving, then the vote: one continuous project running from her twenties into her thirties with a single finish line.

And then it was over.

“I got the PhD, I got the dream job, I earned tenure,” she says, and then the turn. “I really all of a sudden looked up and I realized I don’t know that I wanted to do a lot of the things that I spent my time on.”

What followed was an inventory problem. She had the credential. She had the security most academics never get. What she lacked was a next thing, and the reason she lacked one is the part worth sitting with.

“I also had no idea what I wanted to do next because, both becoming a parent and just working that much, I sort of lost that connection.”

She had lost the connection to what she wanted. What was required, expected and achievable, she could see perfectly well. Wanting is a separate faculty, and it goes quiet while the achieving is going well.

II.

To understand why she ran the project that hard, go back further, to a judgment she made about herself as a young woman and then acted on for two decades.

“Growing up I was totally the weird kid,” she says. And then the operating instruction that followed from it:

“When I decided that I was gonna get a PhD, I had really told myself the only way that I’d be able to do it is if I worked twice as hard as all those smarty pants.”

That is a compensation strategy. A belief about her own insufficiency, converted into a work rate, then rewarded so consistently that nothing ever tested whether the belief was true.

She got the doctorate. The strategy worked. That is precisely the trouble with it.

III.

The business began as something she was doing for fun and could not stop doing.

For a couple of years she had been running goal-setting and planning workshops on the side. Her definition of planning has none of the productivity industry in it.

“The planning is a form of personal development. It’s a way to get data on yourself.”

Then the obvious landed. “I was just doing these workshops at some point and was like, you should, like, this should be a business.”

She formed the LLC in 2022 or 2023, and she is cheerfully imprecise about which. She is precise about what happened next.

“I started a podcast. Within like six months it grew to the top two percent.”

That podcast is Plan Goal Plan, and it now runs past three hundred episodes. Around it she has built the rest: one-on-one coaching, group coaching, speaking, an eight-week intensive called Simply Bold, quarterly retreats and a physical product, a spiral planner in checkerboard pink and teal called Sense the Possibilities.

“I have a paper planner, so I have like a physical product,” she says, with the faint disbelief of an academic who has ended up with inventory.

She has a title for the whole arrangement.

“Now I really do consider myself an entrepreneur scholar.”

IV.

For a long stretch she kept the two halves deliberately apart.

“When I started my business it really almost was, I needed that disconnect.”

Then the fear, stated plainly. “I was really worried that the university, or other people that I work with, if they knew that I had this other thing, that they’d assume that I wasn’t all in.”

And the specific thing she was bracing for: “If I drop the ball on anything, it would be blamed on me also having this business.”

That is the tax on the second thing. It becomes the standing explanation for every ordinary failure, in a way a colleague’s marathon training or an aging parent never does.

She kept two vocabularies, and that cost energy of its own.

“I feel like I’m code switching most days. A constant state of code switching.”

Her academic friends mostly don’t connect with the business, she says, so she had to learn a second language for it. “I had to do the translation work of how do I tell a story on LinkedIn that invites people in that aren’t just other academics.”

The irony arrived on schedule, and she tells it on herself. “The irony of this is at one point, when my business was doing pretty well, I was like, I need to take some things off my plate at the university.”

There is also a husband in this story who reads the calendar accurately. “He’s like, you need to quit having Saturday morning phone calls with clients.”

V.

The hardest part was charging for it.

“I definitely did notice trying to ask for money for my work was a challenge.”

The trap she describes is the one that catches people who like their work too much. “I have so much fun doing this. I didn’t feel like I could charge for it at first, and it was stuff that I was willing to do for free.”

Then the broader version: “Just asking people to compensate me for my skills, talent, time was a challenge.”

And the rule underneath it, the one nobody writes down.

“You sort of have to justify your desire to even make money, right? Like that’s somehow bad.”

She also met the objection every coach eventually meets, delivered by a friend. “I sort of had a friend that was like, well, why would I hire a coach? Like I just need a good girlfriend to go and walk with me.”

Her answer is one line, and it does not apologize.

“And I’m like, well, it’s a different skill.”

VI.

Her clients are radiologists, lawyers and doctors, people whose competence has never been in question, and they arrive convinced they are falling short.

Her diagnosis for the whole category is an inversion.

“They think they aren’t doing enough, and actually they’re doing too much.”

The reason they cannot simply stop has nothing to do with time management.

“They’ve been taught that their value is being available to people all of the time. So boundaries seem like actually a threat to their value.”

Read that as an equation and the behavior makes sense. If availability is what you are worth, then declining a request is a withdrawal from the account.

Which brings her to the sentence people write down.

“They’ve been taught that self-care is just like bubble baths and pedicures.”

“Self-care might be saying no.”

And then the part that makes her a coach. She does not think the answer is to make everything gentler.

“You don’t start to learn by making things easier. But when you’re in a period of hard, adding hard seems really dumb.” And: “They try to make everything easier, but then they feel empty.”

VII.

Her own day is built around a fact about herself she has stopped arguing with.

“I wake up pretty early, like five. Locked in until like probably seven. And then I get my kids ready, I take them to school. Around nine-fifteen I start working again.”

And the constraint that shapes everything after: “I can’t do high-level work in the afternoon.”

Can’t. The thinking happens in those two early hours, and the rest of the day is arranged to protect them.

The speaking work taught her something similar and less convenient. “The more that I do speaking, the more that I realize crowds are really hard for me. I need a full day beforehand to really be locked in, and then I will crash after the event.”

A woman who is very good on a stage, telling you the stage costs her two days. She schedules for the truth, which is the only version that lasts.

All of which produces a standing irritation with how work gets counted.

“I get very frustrated any time that we structure work based off of hours put in instead of impact. This idea that only if you see me work, it counts as work, even though everybody’s talking to me in the hallway and I’m not doing work.”

VIII.

Asked what she would go back and tell herself, she names a belief.

“Trust myself. I kept looking outside of myself and relying on those things because I didn’t believe that I already had the skills.”

The form the doubt took will be familiar to a lot of accomplished women, and it is almost funny given the credentials. “I felt like, but I don’t know anything about business, I don’t have a business degree.”

A woman with a doctorate, tenure, a top-two-percent podcast and a product line, holding herself back over a missing business degree.

So she went looking for what she thought she lacked. “I also kept looking for strategy, when what I probably needed to do is a lot of my own personal work.”

Somewhere in the middle of buying all that strategy, she noticed who she had been buying it from.

“Even myself, I found at one point I was like, oh my gosh, I’ve only hired men coaches. What’s going on there?”

She made it a rule. “I just made a commitment that if I was gonna hire anyone, I was gonna hire a woman. Okay, Danielle, you’re gonna start strategically hiring women.”

The transition carried a cost that shows up on no balance sheet. “The connections that I’ve been developing the last twenty years weren’t necessarily the sort of connection I needed. I had to kind of start from scratch.”

She now makes a point of meeting one new person a week.

IX.

She did not quit the university. She is still a tenured professor, still directing a theatre, still doing the work she spent her twenties earning. The business restored the part of that life that had gone quiet: the part that gets to want things.

That is why the title she chose is a compound. Entrepreneur scholar. Both, on purpose, at some cost in code switching and in Saturday mornings she has since taken back.

It also explains what she sells. She already ran the do-more experiment on herself for twenty years, and she knows exactly what it yields: the credential, the security and no idea what you want. What she teaches is the thing she had to learn afterward, from scratch, after being rewarded the whole time for not knowing it.

The planner is a way of asking yourself a question you were never raised to ask.

Her clients arrive certain they are falling short. They are radiologists. They are doing fine. What they are is available, to everyone, always, in the belief that this is what makes them worth something. She is the one who tells them the sentence nobody at work will.

Saying no is the whole of self-care.

Sources: Barzilay & Ben-David, “Platform Inequality: Gender in the Gig-Economy,” Seton Hall Law Review 47, 2017 · Theeboom, Beersma & van Vianen, “Does coaching work?” Journal of Positive Psychology 9(1), 2014 · Jones, Woods & Guillaume, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 89(2), 2016 · de Haan & Nilsson, Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2023 · Barber & Santuzzi, “Please Respond ASAP: Workplace Telepressure and Employee Recovery,” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 2015 · Barber, Santuzzi & Hu, Group & Organization Management 51(1), 2026 · Pencavel, “The Productivity of Working Hours,” The Economic Journal 125(589), 2015.