Hey friend, welcome back to Balancing Busy. I’m Leah Remillet and I am so glad that you are here today, because this episode is one that I have been wanting to record for a while.

There is something in your life right now that you want, but you don’t have it yet. Maybe it’s a business that finally is generating consistent income for you. Or maybe it’s a schedule that gives you breathing room instead of burning you out. Maybe it’s more clients or more freedom, or just ending your day feeling like you actually moved the needle. Maybe it’s a relationship that you desperately need to see improve.

You can see it. You want it. You’re working hard. Really hard. And yet it is not here yet.

Here’s what I want you to hear. There is a gap. And that gap isn’t because you’re not smart enough or disciplined enough or deserving enough. It’s not bad luck and it’s not impossible. It’s not even bad timing. Every single result in your life has a cause. Every single one. The results that you love and the results that you don’t.

Think back and consider something in your life that is making you really happy. You love this part of your life. It feels good. That is because of cause. And the moment that we truly understand this, everything changes. Because once we get this, we’re not just hoping that things get better. We’re working the mechanics that make them better.

By the end of this episode, you’re going to know exactly why some things in your life are working beautifully and why some things aren’t. You’re going to have a framework that you can actually apply to your business, your schedule, your income, your daily life, your marriage. And you’re going to walk away with one specific exercise that will show you clearly and immediately what to change.

Now here’s the part I love — and stick with me for a moment. I’m a little bit of a nerd about this stuff, but I think you are too. Because this principle is not new in any way. It’s not a trendy framework. Somebody did not invent this last year. It goes back about two thousand four hundred years to a philosopher named Aristotle.

What I love about this is that some things are true for so long, across so many cultures and so many centuries, that you just can’t argue with them anymore. And this is one of those. Which means this is a strategy that works. And you know how I feel — we need to have the right things in the right places at the right time, because we work like a mother. And that means we do not have time to be second-guessing or to have things not working the way we need them to work. So when we can pull a strategy that has a history of over two thousand years and it’s still going strong, we know we’ve got something good.

Aristotle studied under Plato, who studied under Socrates. The philosophers of philosophers. Aristotle’s foundational idea was this: if you want to understand any result in the world, in nature, in your life, you have to understand what caused it. He called this the principle of causality.

Centuries later, teachers like Brian Tracy picked it up and brought it into modern success thinking. And the translation is beautifully simple. Two words: cause and effect. One of the oldest, most proven principles on the planet — and yet one of the most underused. What I want to do today is help every single one of us use it.

I want to take you back to junior high with me to really bring this home. Seventh grade. First day of school. My first time ever having a locker. It’s one of those twist combination locks — you know the ones — three numbers, turn right, then left, then right again.

Sounds simple enough. Except I could not figure it out. You only have five minutes between classes and I’m trying to get into it so I can switch out books. But nothing was happening. Everyone around me — and I’m not kidding, every single one of them — seemed to know exactly how it worked. They’d walk up, spin spin spin, click, open, grab their stuff, switch it out like it was nothing.

Meanwhile I’m over there sweating through my first day of seventh grade because I can’t drop any books off. Math, science, history, English — all of it in my backpack all day long. I looked like I was preparing for a two-week wilderness expedition just to get through second period. My backpack was so heavy. My shoulders hurt. My back hurt. And I just accepted it as my reality.

But then I mentioned at home that I hadn’t been able to figure out my locker, and I was sent out to the shed that had one of those twist locks, and I couldn’t come inside until I figured it out. After way longer than I care to admit — trying and failing, feeling so frustrated, just crying — it finally clicked. Literally and mentally. I found the sequence. Forward. Back. Forward. Click. It opened.

The next day I went to school. Forward. Back. Forward. Click. Nothing about that school locker had changed. It was the same locker. The combination was the same. The only thing that changed was that I finally understood how it worked. My whole experience of school shifted, and all I did was learn how to put in the right combination.

Here’s what I want you to hear in this story. I wasn’t carrying all those textbooks because I was lazy or disorganized or not trying hard enough. I was working really hard. Every five-minute passing period I was there trying. I was doing what I thought I had to do. I just didn’t have the right mechanics yet.

And I wonder if that’s where some of you are right now. You are working hard. You show up. You try. You do the things. And yet it still feels really heavy. The business isn’t growing the way you want. The schedule never seems to settle. You keep ending your day feeling behind, even when you started it with the best intentions.

Can I tell you something? You might not be the problem. You might just be missing the right combination.

Aristotle’s big contribution was this: if you want to understand why something exists, why any result is showing up in your world, you have to understand what caused it. Nothing in our lives is random. The results you and I are seeing — the good ones and the not-so-good ones — all have causes behind them. And once we identify the cause, we have the power to change the effect.

Now Aristotle broke this down even further. He said there are four things that must come together to create any result. He called them the Four Causes. I’m going to give you his terms and then immediately translate them, because I need this to be useful to you, not academic.

Number one: what you have — your material, your tools, your resources. Aristotle called this the material cause. It’s the raw ingredients. Your time, your energy, your skills, your money, your knowledge.

Number two: the plan — your structure, your systems, your recipe. He called this the formal cause. It’s how things are arranged. The strategy, the framework, the order of operations.

Number three: the action. This is the actual doing. He called it the efficient cause. The work itself — someone actually executing something.

Number four: the purpose — the why. He called this the final cause. This is what we’re actually trying to create. And the deeper we are in that why, where we can feel all of our senses come alive — that has so much power to keep us anchored into getting the results that we want.

Let me show you why this matters with three real-life examples.

Every single woman listening to this podcast understands this deeply relatable truth: dinner does not make itself.

To get dinner on the table every night, you need all four causes working together. You need what you have — food in the house, a working stove, twenty minutes that aren’t already claimed by homework and practices and the seventeen other things happening at five p.m. You need a plan — maybe that’s a weekly meal plan, maybe it’s a rotation of five dinners your family will actually eat without complaint, maybe it’s just the plan that tonight is takeout. You need action — someone has to actually cook, or at minimum, call for pickup. And you need a purpose — which for me is less about nourishing my family and more about being able to sit together and reconnect.

When dinner falls apart — and we all have those nights — it’s almost always because one of those causes is missing. No groceries, or you forgot to pull the meat out of the freezer. No plan — you come out of your office at two in the afternoon, brain fried, and you haven’t thought through dinner. Or you have a plan, but nobody executed it. None of those things means you’re a bad mom. You were just missing a cause.

Example number two: consistent content. I hear this so often — I just can’t stay consistent with content. And I want to gently push back on that. I don’t think consistency is actually the problem. I think a missing cause is the problem.

Here’s what you have: your expertise, your perspective, your phone, your voice. You have everything you need to create content. The next step is the plan. Do you have one? A real one? Not I should post more — but an actual content system with a specific rhythm that you’ve decided on and can repeat. The action: are you actually creating and publishing, or does content live forever in draft folders? And the purpose: are you super clear on who you’re trying to reach and the problem you solve?

Nine times out of ten, when someone tells me they can’t stay consistent, the missing cause is the plan. They’re trying to figure out what to say from scratch every single time, and that is exhausting. The solution isn’t more discipline — it’s a better system.

If you’re resonating with this and thinking, yes, this is my problem, I need a plan — I want to mention the GPT Business Brain File. In ninety minutes or less, it will give you twenty-four content ideas, nail down your niche and messaging, and sharpen your offers with an AI coach trained on my systems. Right now it’s just seventeen dollars. I’ll have the link in the show notes.

Example number three: getting more clients. You’ve wanted more clients for a while now. You’re working hard, you’re showing up, and yet the clients aren’t flowing in the way you need them to.

What you have: an incredible service, real results, a heart for your people, credentials, testimonials. You have the goods. The plan: what is your actual client-getting strategy? Not I post on Instagram — but a real, repeatable system for getting visible, building trust, and making offers. If that answer isn’t clear, we just found the missing cause. The action: are you consistently having conversations, making offers, and following up? That is the trifecta. And the purpose: be honest about exactly how many clients you want and what specific income you’re working toward. Vague purposes produce vague results.

In all three of those examples — dinner, content, clients — you can see how this works. When a result isn’t showing up the way you want, something in the chain is broken. And the fix isn’t to work harder across the board. It’s to find the missing piece.

To bring this all together, I want to give you something to actually do with this. Grab a piece of paper or open a note on your phone and draw a line down the middle. On the left side write: Results I Love. On the right side write: Results I Don’t Love. And just start listing. Be honest. No one is grading this.

On the left side — the things that are going well — start asking: what actions are consistently producing these results? What systems do I have in place? What habits are running quietly in the background? Give yourself credit. You built something that’s working, and it’s worth knowing what it is so you can protect it and replicate it.

Now the right side — the results you don’t love. Approach it with curiosity instead of criticism. Not what is wrong with me but what is causing this? Look at it like data. What actions, or missing actions, are producing these results? Is there no plan? Is the plan there but not being executed? Is there a missing resource? Is the purpose fuzzy? The moment you can name the cause, you have the power. You are no longer at the mercy of those results. You know exactly what to change.

That is a completely different feeling than just trying harder and hoping something shifts.

You know what I think about when I remember junior high Leah hauling that overstuffed backpack through the hallways? She was trying so hard. She showed up every single day. She wasn’t lazy. She wasn’t incapable — even though she felt like she was. She was doing everything she could with the information she had. She just didn’t have the sequence yet.

I think that’s where a lot of us are. We’re showing up. We’re working hard. We’re carrying more than we should have to, because we haven’t figured out the right sequence yet.

You are not locked out from those dreams and those goals that you have. The key exists. And now you have a framework for finding it. Look at your results. Trace them back to their causes. Find what’s missing. Change the cause — and the effect will follow.

Because success is not magic. It’s mechanics. And you are more than capable of learning the mechanics.

Alright friend, before I let you go — if this episode resonated with you, will you do me a favor and share it with someone who needs it? A friend, a fellow mom entrepreneur, someone in your life who’s working hard and carrying too much, and you just want her to know that you see how incredible she is. Send her this episode.

And if you’re ready to go deeper, the GPT Business Brain File is only seventeen dollars. I’ll have the link in the show notes. You are not going to believe what you walk away with. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being brave enough to build something. And I’ll talk to you next week.

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