Podcast Episode 417: Toxic Grit: Why Doing It All Is Draining You (and How to Stop) Transcripts

Please note: Transcripts for the No Guilt Mom Podcast were created using AI. As a result, there may be some minor errors.

JoAnn Crohn (00:00)

Welcome to the No Guilt Mom podcast. I’m your host JoAnn Crohn joined here by the brilliant Brie Tucker.

Brie Tucker (00:06)

Why hello everybody, how are you?

JoAnn Crohn (00:09)

We’re talking today about something that I think affects both of us really, really hard. It’s this tendency to be hard on yourself and think you need to do all the things and be all the people and then you lose yourself in the process. It’s something that we talk about daily.

Brie Tucker (00:25)

Yeah. I think it’s something that a lot of people, especially in our generations wrestle with because I’m trying not to make it like so heavy, but it’s like that thought process that we were told growing up. Like pull yourself up by your bootstraps, keep going. If you’re not first or last to quote one of my favorite movies, Talladega Nights, it’s that process of like, you’ve got to be the best at everything. And if you’re not, then you should always be striving to be the best. And I feel like that’s just so much weight and so much pressure and most of it’s internal. That’s the thought process. So we’re putting it on.

JoAnn Crohn (01:03)

No one is forcing you it’s all internal. Helping us out with that is Amanda Goetz. She’s a two time founder, four time CMO and divorce mom of three. She inspires over 150,000 people every week through her social insights and weekly news on our life game. Her debut book toxic grit, how to have it all and actually love what you have comes out October 2025 and inspires people to create space for all the roles they play in their life.

JoAnn Crohn (01:31)

And with that, let’s get on with the show.

Welcome, Amanda, to the podcast. We are so happy to have you here.

Amanda Goetz (01:42)

I am so excited for this reunion. We met years ago, so it’s long overdue.

JoAnn Crohn (01:47)

Years ago, taught a killer exercise class when I saw you in person. Mountain climbers in particular are something that gets me every single time. And as soon as the mountain climbers hit, I was like, okay, I’ve worked out for today. This is good.

Amanda Goetz (02:03)

Yeah, I was not messing around with that workout. was like, we’re going to be staying all day. Let’s get something done.

Brie Tucker (02:09)

And where was Brie during that workout? She was sleeping peacefully in bed.

Amanda Goetz (02:12)

That’s okay, and there’s no guilt or shame in that as well.

JoAnn Crohn (02:16)

Thank you. Now, Amanda, you have really had so many roles in your life, just in your bio alone, your two-time founder, four-time CMO. You also used to be in the workout space as well, correct?

Amanda Goetz (02:31)

Correct. I was a certified trainer and group fitness instructor through college and a little bit after. And then I was also for a while a celebrity wedding planner and was on a reality TV show for planning weddings. So really.

Brie Tucker (02:46)

Dish on a few of your, just want to know some client. Can you share that client names that were on the show?

Amanda Goetz (02:52)

Well, the show was interesting. It’s called My Fair Wedding and they would give dream weddings to people who had like really compelling stories. So it was really beautiful. But on the show we did like Shannon Doherty’s wedding. I’ve planned many an NFL, NBA wedding. Yeah, we did one one 30th birthday party on Heyman Island in Australia. Like these are wild events. Yeah.

Brie Tucker (03:09)

I bet those are gorgeous.

JoAnn Crohn (03:20)

see like so many different areas of your life that you have also been really successful at. Like not everyone plans weddings and like then gets to be on a reality TV show. Not everyone like is a founder and is like speaking on the main stage. Like all of these areas I’ve noticed like you have really like I see it from an outside point of view. It looks like you have risen to a really high level in each one. And now you have this book Toxic Grit. So let’s dig a little bit into that, like how has your background shaped your understanding of toxic grit? And even before that, let’s define toxic grit. What do you define it as?

Amanda Goetz (03:59)

Yeah. So I define it as hustle without intention. We live in a society that likes to inject guilt into every societal trend, right? Like right now, hustle culture is not on trend. So if you’re hustling, what do you feel? You feel guilt. And much of my life right now, especially with this book coming out and the book tour, looks like hustle because it is, but it’s with intention and alignment And so toxic grit is hustle without intention. And it usually also comes with without checkpoints that allow you to take inventory on, hey, I’ve been driving a little over the speed limit for X amount of time in this category of my life. Is it time to re-prioritize and bring, and I use the vehicle for which I use this throughout the whole book is called character theory. Is it time to bring a different character? into the movie, whether that be for an hour, a day, a month, or even a longer season. I think it’s important to also identify that toxic grit isn’t just about work. That is one version of yourself that can take over the whole plot line of your movie. But so can being a caregiver, a partner and supporting someone else.

So can the independent side. For a while after my divorce, my soloist character, the one that just wanted to crave independence, she kind of took over the plot line and I was kind of like, I don’t need anyone else type of mantra. And I had to get really intentional and create checkpoints to say, is now the time that I’m going to start inviting, being dependent on someone and allowing that companionship? Is now the time? Okay, not yet.

Like when is the next checkpoint that I’m gonna check in with myself? Creating these checkpoints alleviates the guilt that is just injected into every bifurcation or these binary societal constructs that we are inundated with constantly. It’s like, are you a girl boss or a trad wife? It’s like, I’m both. Like I truly am. There are days where I fucking love killing it at work and doing all the things that I’m doing. And there are days that I love just being home and doing all the things that would be quote unquote, trad wifey, right? Like supporting my partner and cooking all day and being with the kids and taking them to their activities. This book is really about allowing us to step into the director role of our lives, identifying these different characters and then placing them into the movie when we desire and when we see fit and when we realize that one or two characters are really needing to step into the spot.

JoAnn Crohn (06:55)

Yeah, let’s talk about those characters for a little bit because you divide it up into 10 characters. And something that I noticed too, that you just said is like a lot of misalignment comes when you lean too far into one of those characters, particularly all of you listening on the podcast. I know here in the no guilt mom community, no guilt moms really, really lean into the caregiver character and tend to have the martyr mentality and like feeling like they’re pouring from an empty cup and this lack of reciprocity from their partners and from their kids around them. And I thought that like, that really demonstrated exactly what our audience is doing. So can you give us a rundown of who are these characters that you’re talking about?

Amanda Goetz (07:39)

Yeah, so there’s 10. I’m probably going to have to see if I can remember all 10 of them.

JoAnn Crohn (07:43)

I have them in front of me so I can help you out.

Brie Tucker (07:46)

We can help jog that memory there.

Amanda Goetz (07:48)

That’s all good. It’s like a pop quiz of my own book. It’s so funny because you write these books so long ago and you’re like, okay, I can do this.

Brie Tucker (07:55)

Girl, you are not the first author to say that. And I think that we 100 % get it. Like even today, JoAnn was asking me or telling me about something that we said in a podcast episode a couple of weeks ago. And I’m like, wait, we did? I don’t remember that.

Amanda Goetz (08:07)

What did I have for breakfast? Okay. So the first are the big three. The big three take over most ambitious women’s plot lines. It’s the caregiver, like you said. It’s the CEO and not that you’re actually a CEO, but it’s the version of you that craves impact and an identity through that impact and what you’re doing in the world and the work that you’re putting out there. And then the third one is the partner character. I’m a divorced mom, but I’m now

Amanda Goetz (08:36)

with someone and it’s the partner character, which is I crave companionship, right? So those are the big three. Those are the ones that we have to right size because they can become the most quickly to take over the whole plot line, right? if we look at our human needs, we need connection. We crave significance. We crave levity and fun.

Amanda Goetz (09:05)

we crave exploration and novelty. Like if we start to break apart our human needs and we look at those three characters, sometimes they don’t meet all of our needs. Sometimes work actually starves me of creativity. Like if I’m in it and I am like in meetings all the time, I actually feel depleted in this creative outlet that I need as a human.

JoAnn Crohn (09:33)

Same, could totally tell you that. Meetings take my life force.

Amanda Goetz (09:37)

Right. And let’s look at significance. I don’t know about you guys, but when I’m in my mom character, my caregiver character, I don’t feel significant in a way that actually lights me up. I know I’m playing a significant role for them, but I am like their Uber driver, their chef. I am in a servant mindset. I don’t feel in a powerful, significant role in that life, in that character.

So when we start to break apart our human needs, we can then start to see why the other seven are so powerful and so important yet so easy to forget about. we have, let’s go into like the goddess character, the one that actually desires to feel pleasure and intimacy and craves to feel sexy.

JoAnn Crohn (10:31)

gosh, Amanda, I feel like that is something that is lost amongst so many moms. Like that’s like one of the big things to go I see loss of the goddess a lot more.

Amanda Goetz (10:39)

But as someone who got divorced, who was like, that character’s not in my movie anymore. ⁓ she was. She definitely was. Like after my divorce, I rediscovered my sexuality and I was like, this character is still very much cast in my movie. I just one didn’t have the tools to create space for her And two, let other characters just completely write her off the script and just move her out of the scenes. And so we talk about the art of transition and how to allow yourself, because when you start to look at these characters, and we’ll go into the other ones in a second, but I think the goddess one is a really good one to dive into here. When we look at these different characters in a vacuum and how we show up fully in that character, you can start to see…

how it makes sense, how hard it is to transition from one to the other. Yes. When I’m in work mode, I am on and assertive and aggressive, and I am just like out to like win and play the game. Mom version of me is so silly. I want to be silly with my kids. I love to make them laugh and to dance and to make the fart jokes and whatever. Like I am just hungry for like the silliness. Those two characters don’t play well together.

JoAnn Crohn (12:09)

No, they’re diametrically opposed.

Amanda Goetz (12:12)

Literally. Now, goddess character, I cannot go from work mode into goddess, and I definitely cannot go in from mom mode into goddess. So now when we start to separate these characters, we’re like, well, no shit, we need a transition. We need to give ourselves the opportunity to go from one character to the other. And what does that look like for everyone? It may be different. For me, It usually involves either a bath or separation or some kind of intentional spacing between these characters.

JoAnn Crohn (12:51)

That’s interesting. like, it doesn’t just happen in a second. It has to be some kind of physical transition. I’m interested in that and then looking forward to hearing with the rest of the characters right after this break. Right before the break, Amanda, you were talking about how we need some kind of physical transition to go from one character to another. I’m curious on then the rest of the characters and how they fit into our life.

Amanda Goetz (13:19)

Yeah, so we have other characters like the inner caregiver, the one that cares about you and that is like looking out, it’s called your inner doctor. The one that’s like, hey, did you drink water today? I really want to work out. I want to meditate. I should do a red light therapy mask. Like all the things that we want to do for ourselves. There’s that one. There is the explorer, the one that craves serendipity and novelty and newness in our life.

Think about in our 20s, why our 20s felt so different. it’s because the world was so new. And now, like, I’m heading into my 40s. I have to go seek out novelty. I need to go find experiences that feel new so that life feels rich in that way. We have the creative, the character that really wants to create something. That may be, sometimes again, work can fuel that and the CEO and the creative work really well together. Sometimes they don’t. Depends on what you’re working on, but you may find that your CEO character is actually starving your creative and you need to create space for that. And I know somebody listening to this is going to be like, there is no way I can fit in 10 characters every single day, right?

JoAnn Crohn (14:38)

It’s a hard thing. Right.

Amanda Goetz (14:40)

So it’s about the intentionality and the intentional imbalance. There will be seasons of life where your creative may get 30 minutes every few weeks to work on a project. But you may start to feel like, I am so starved for creativity and I need to write them in in a bigger way. So you can start to see how you can rewrite the plot of your movie and build in some more intentional rhythm.

JoAnn Crohn (15:13)

It’s kind of like similar to values. Like if you know your values and what you hold really dear, need to make space for them to make sure that you honor them.

Amanda Goetz (15:23)

Yeah. And one of the exercises I take people through is what I call the minimally viable day. So we are all, especially like ambitious moms, we are all gold star seekers. We’re like, yeah.

JoAnn Crohn (15:38)

Give me all the stickers, I want them.

Amanda Goetz (15:39)

I’m going to give 110 % in whatever I do. Like if I’m gonna do this thing, I’m in it, right? Gold star. What I want to implore people is to seek enoughness. What does enough actually look like? And I say in the book, if you only have 30 % to give and you give 30%, then you gave 100%. And if we start to look at the ideal day, like what does your ideal day look like right now based on these characters that you’re trying to write in? Well, an ideal day for me, maybe I need to move my body. I want intentional time with my children. I want intentional time with my partner and I want intentional time with myself. OK. If those are the different characters that we’re going to write into the script right now, what is the ideal state look like?

And then what is the minimally viable version of this? And now we’re giving ourselves this spectrum of enoughness. If I can’t get in a full one hour workout plus sauna session plus, you know, swim, whatever is my ideal day of moving my body, what’s the minimally viable version? It may be a 10 minute walk. And that’s when I say to myself, Okay, I only had 10 % to give and I gave 10%. That was enough today. But it’s allowing ourselves to say, I see the compounding interest of showing up in each of these characters. Because what can happen for so many women is that the CEO and caregiver characters take over the whole plot line. yeah. We end the day, and we literally collapse onto the couch. And we say, and that I’m just gonna scroll, watch TV until it’s bedtime. Right? That’s so real. It’s so real.

JoAnn Crohn (17:41)

It’s happening every day, like the members in our balance community, talk about this all the time and saying how guilty they feel when they collapse on the couch and then scroll and it’s then becomes a cycle.

Amanda Goetz (17:52)

Yep. So we have two characters that we haven’t talked about, the lazy girl and the soloist. Now they’re different, but they seem very similar. The lazy girl doesn’t have any goals. She just wants to decompress on the couch. when we say, okay, I do one Sunday a month, that’s called my binge Sunday. And my lazy girl gets to take over and my kids, I throw granola bars at them. They get to do whatever they want that Sunday. And I don’t move from the bed or the couch. And I just binge all day. My lazy girl gets to take over that day. The soloist is the one that craves personal growth. That’s the one that’s like, I want to do a class. I want to grow. I want to start Duolingo or whatever. It’s like the personal growth, right? What I see so many times is you are saying you’re being lazy, but if you actually are embodying the lazy girl, she is in full decompression mode. There’s no guilt. There’s no shame. She’s intentionally allowing herself to decompress. But let’s talk about rest. If rest is really what you’re seeking, we have to acknowledge that there’s physical rest, there’s emotional rest, there’s sensorial rest, there’s cognitive rest, not thinking about things. So if you said that the lazy girl, you’re going onto the couch and having lazy girl time, great, then say that. And you’re allowing yourself to have these different kinds of rests. are you actually? Because scrolling isn’t emotional rest. You’re seeing horrible things put in front of you

JoAnn Crohn (19:38)

And comparisons to everybody else doing so much more when you’re sitting on the couch. I mean that gets me.

Amanda Goetz (19:44)

Your emotions are not resting at that time. You’re cognitively not resting because you’re thinking about these things. You sitting on the couch having decompression time while still ordering groceries and thinking about ⁓ Halloween isn’t cognitive rest.

Brie Tucker (20:02)

It’s the joy of where is that off button?

JoAnn Crohn (20:04)

It’s true. just had someone on body doubling today in our balance community who was doing a puzzle, but she was also managing the Instacart order and like answering back the shopper with all the replacements and stuff. But it often feels like as moms, like we have no other choice than to do those things else they won’t get done. So let’s talk about that right after this.

So coming back, Amanda, like as moms, the biggest thing I hear and I experienced this as well is that a lot of times we feel like we have no choice but to do all the things all the time. Like never turn off that caregiver mode, never turn off the CEO mode. Like what kind of advice do you have for that kind of mentality?

Amanda Goetz (20:47)

So we have to start small, right? We have to allow ourselves to really start to embody this agency, this ability to bring back some of these other characters. So what I would say is, you’re going to plan out a few, let’s take three characters that maybe haven’t been in the spotlight for very long, and you’re gonna try writing them back into your movie this week. And you’re going to create the ABCs of the multiverse, which is you’re going to bring awareness to the fact that you’re going to transition into that character. You’re going to create boundaries so that you can stay in that character. And then you’re communicating that you’re going to be in that character to yourself, to everyone around. And then when you’re going to transition back into your character of remote again.

Brie Tucker (21:35)

Okay, I have to just say, think that communication part is a missing, that was a mic drop for me right there. Cause I’m like, I do these. But then I’m like, wait, but then I never tell anybody else I’m doing it. And I get so angry. I do jump to anger when I’m trying to do it and people come in and interrupt it. And yeah.

Amanda Goetz (21:56)

Yeah. And so when we communicate, well, in the absence of information, people make up their own information. Right. Right. So if I’m looking at my phone, planning out my content for the week or whatever, because I’m in CEO mode and I’m planning out my content, but my kids just see me on the phone, the story they’re telling themselves is that I’m distracted and I’m not. But if I communicate and I say, hey, for the next hour, mommy’s going to crank out these couple of things. You’re going to watch TV for an hour. I’m going to set the Amazon Alexa and in one hour we’re going to go do a puzzle together. I have to honor two things. One that I will transition out of that and go back into my mode so that they can start to respect that boundary. And two, I have to honor that for that one hour I’ve placed that character as the priority. So many times we think that we can prioritize two characters at once when in fact we would be so much more benefited, both us and the people around us, by allowing us to create hierarchy. It’s okay to say, I’m gonna be really good for one hour at work, and then I’m gonna be really good for one hour as a mom, than trying to be shitty at both for two hours.

JoAnn Crohn (23:15)

See, it’s so interesting with that because I hear you say that commit to being good at one hour at work. And then for some reason I get into moods where I can’t commit. Maybe I don’t want to commit. And then that’s when the task really stretches out longer and longer and longer. And also what you said about honoring that transition. I don’t honor that transition. And I think that’s something that I could do much, much better at stopping when I say I’m going to stop. I’m so

Brie Tucker (23:40)

I’m guilty of that. And I’m going to throw this out there. Like I think that in my life, the less that the mom role has been needed on a consistent basis. So as my kids have gotten older, I have one in college and I have one a senior in high school. I do not honor that mom role very often. I like being in it. But if I tell my kids like I’ll be done at five, 90 % of the time I’m done at six. So and then you feel guilty, or at least I do feel guilty that I didn’t honor it and I make up what stories my family is telling themselves because mom doesn’t honor what she says she’s going to do. Yeah, that’s a lot to think about.

JoAnn Crohn (24:19)

Here’s the other thing. Then I get mad at my husband because I don’t feel like he has all these roles that he’s constantly trying to juggle between. I mean, what have you seen in this, Amanda? Like, do you see like your partner juggling between these roles or do you see men in general having to intentionally juggle between these roles?

Amanda Goetz (24:38)

I don’t think the cognitive load is as much. mean, look, there are tons of stats like Eve Brodsky literally writes books upon books and articles about this and has an entire Institute talking about fair play and that it’s not fair. Look, getting married a second time, I’m doing things very differently. I am allowing and trusting.

Amanda Goetz (25:04)

It may not be done exactly how I want to do it, but I’m creating space for someone else to rise to the occasion and truly create an equitable domestic situation here. But I want to talk about two traps that women fall into over and over again, the significance trap and the urgency trap. When everything is important, nothing is. Everything is urgent, nothing is. So let’s talk about maybe the person in the community who is doing the puzzle and doing the Instacart order, okay? In that moment, depending on whether she was like placing the Instacart order or monitoring it, right? Like if she was placing the order, my question to her was, was that as urgent? If you sat down to do a puzzle, because you really needed cognitive rest, sensory rest, time off of your phone to just sit, have your hands be busy because you said, I need some solo time. I need to like just be. Let’s say you set a timer for 30 minutes and you’re like, for 30 minutes, I’m just gonna do this puzzle. Now you’re saying, okay, awareness that I need to be in this soloist character, because I could really use some cognitive rest.

I am setting a boundary that I’m going to do this puzzle for 30 minutes and I’m communicating to everyone, myself included, that for 30 minutes I’m going to do this puzzle. What actually happened was it popped into her head. She didn’t want the cognitive load of remembering that she needed to order groceries. And so she just started it. Now we didn’t have cognitive rest. So I call these mosquito tasks in the book, like, they buzz into your head and then we just jump to it because we’re like, this is so annoying. I need to kill it. Yeah. Okay. I’m sorry.

Brie Tucker (27:05)

I thought you were gonna say cuz they suck the ever-living love out of everything

Amanda Goetz (27:10)

They are sucking all of the intentionality that you have just set forth. So we have to get the mosquitoes away from us. We have to just have a place to dump them. Okay. I have a note in my notes app called mosquitoes. If something buzzes in, I get it out of my head so I don’t have to keep letting it buzz around. And then I go back to the thing that I said was important. And why do we fall into these two traps, right?

Well, it comes back to like a lot of our programming. If we don’t do something immediately, what does that say about us? What will somebody else think? If our friend texts us and we don’t text back immediately, what will they think? Will I lose their love? Will I lose their friendship? We have these kind of deeper roots that actually are causing us to behave from a place that is really subconscious.

but your conscious logical self knows that friend will still be there in 10 minutes, 10 hours, 10 days. So we have to sort of right size these two traps and say, is this actually as urgent as my nervous system is telling me it is? Chances are no. Now your kid is sick at school and the school calls, yeah. that is significant, urgent, you must address it in this moment. But I would challenge everybody to start to bring awareness to the mosquitoes and say, okay, for the next hour, I’m on a date with my partner. And my goddess character is kind of wanting some time. So I need to have some separation from these other characters. Anytime in that date that you start to talk about kids work.

All of these other things, those are mosquitoes in that moment.

JoAnn Crohn (29:11)

That’s interesting that you label them as mosquitoes because we had a situation with a girls night where all of sudden like we started talking about like the kids rather than started talking about our own lives. And I think those little mosquitoes like pop up in everybody’s unintentionally. It’s so interesting this whole conversation around it because as soon as you bring it to the surface, you’re like, ⁓ this is a thing that’s affecting my entire life and I could really do something about it.

Amanda Goetz (29:28)

Yeah, and in those girls nights, my best friend and I were going through divorces at the same time. And I remember when you think about when you’re not playing all these other roles, what would you be doing in girls night? You’d be like laughing and telling stories and dreaming of things or planning a big fun thing or whatever, right? Yeah.

JoAnn Crohn (30:01)

The planning of fun. Yes!

Amanda Goetz (30:04)

or just getting ready together or like doing things together where it’s just you’re just in it and you’re just doing it to just be together. When these mosquitoes happen, you have to either set a boundary and say, okay, look, we know kids are a huge part of our life. Or for us, it was like, we’re both going through some shit right now, but we also want to have fun. Our socialite character, the character that craves levity and connection needs space and time.

And if we aren’t allowing that character to fully embody what they’re meant to bring to our life, because we spend the whole time venting and that we’re not having emotional rest, we’re thinking about the really tough things of life. So we would set a timer. We would literally be like, OK, 10 minutes, you go, I go. And then we’re not talking about our exes, our divorces. We’re going to have levity because that’s what this character needs. I need that levity.

I need this outlet. You make me laugh like nobody else. Let’s allow that to that character to fully come into the movie.

Brie Tucker (31:13)

Love that. 

JoAnn Crohn (31:14)

I love it. Amanda, what is something right now that you are excited about that you’re looking forward to?

Amanda Goetz (31:23)

Goodness,  Well, we’re like in the book tour right now. So that has just, I’m allowing my CEO character to be in the spotlight. I’m allowing that to happen. And I have a big spin cycle coming up. A spin cycle is a whole chapter in the book about that intentional time where you alleviate the intensity of a character that built up. Just like in a washing cycle, right? It’s that last cycle that allows the heaviness to come out And for the month of December, I’m allowing my explorer, my partner, and my caregiver characters were going on vacation and then I’m getting married.

So going on, but it’s to a very beautiful season of letting those other characters really be in the spotlight for a while. And then we’ll bring the CEO back after that.

JoAnn Crohn (32:18)

That’s amazing. Amanda, this has been such a great conversation. And for all of you out there, keep an eye out for those characters popping up into your life. And we want to hear too, which characters do you feel like you need to bring back? Come and let us know. We’re hanging out on Instagram at no guilt mom. And Amanda, thank you again and go get Amanda’s book toxic grit, how to have it all and actually love what you have it is out now and she has so many more suggestions and tips on how to look at your whole self and really bring those characters back into your life instead of going forward and going into martyrdom and doing everything for your kids. with that, thank you, Amanda, so much for joining us today. And remember, the best mom is a happy mom. We’ll talk to you soon.

Brie Tucker (33:09)

Thanks for stopping by.

JoAnn Crohn (33:12)

If you’d like to support the show further, you could share episodes with your loved ones, leave a positive review or follow us on social media at No Guilt Mom. You could also show your love by visiting our amazing podcast sponsors. We have a link in the show notes.