I want to talk about something that I spent years doing without realising it was the thing holding me back more than anything else. Not a mindset block, not imposter syndrome, not fear of being seen. Those are real things, but this is more practical than that and honestly more embarrassing to admit.
I was busy all the time. Genuinely busy. There was always something to do, always something I was in the middle of. And I genuinely believed I was working hard on my business. Because I was working hard. I just wasn’t working hard on the right things.
What I was doing had a name, though I didn’t have the name for it at the time. I was taking passive action. And passive action is one of the most convincing traps in online business because it feels exactly like progress. It has the texture of work. It takes effort. It fills your day. But it does not move the needle.
So in this post I want to break down what passive action actually looks like, why it is so easy to fall into especially as a yoga teacher building an online business, what the real action actually is, and how I learned to organise my week around the things that matter. I’ll also share a story from one of the teachers I’ve worked with, because I want you to see that this is not about discipline or motivation — it is about clarity.
When I started building my online business, I had come from a background in advertizing. Marketing, project management, big brands. I knew how to work. I was not someone who sat around waiting for inspiration. But when I went out on my own, something shifted. Without a boss and without a structure that had been handed to me, I had to create everything myself. And what I created, without fully realising it, was a lot of activity that did not add up to much.
I would spend hours on my website — because this is what I love doing, I know this is not true for everybody. Tweaking fonts, moving sections around, watching tutorials on how to write better copy. I would consume content about online courses for a year before launching mine. I would research tools and compare platforms before I had any clarity on my offer, on what I wanted to create.
And don’t get me started on my Instagram bio. I would obsess about it — and I know I’m not the only one.
I convinced myself all of this was necessary groundwork. And none of it was useless exactly. But none of it was the work either. The work was creating an offer and selling it. That was the work. Everything else was preparing to be prepared.
I was unconsciously choosing these tasks because they were safe. Nobody rejects your font choice. Nobody says no to your Canva graphic. The risk of failure is zero when you are perfecting things nobody has seen yet. Real action — like sending an email, making an offer or having a sales conversation — that has risk attached to it. And my nervous system was very cleverly steering me away from that risk by keeping me busy with things that felt important but were not.
What passive action actually looks like
So let me define this properly, because I think it is easy to nod along and then immediately go back to doing the same thing.
Passive action is anything that feels productive but does not directly generate income or move a potential client closer to a decision. It includes watching trainings you have already bought but not implemented. It includes spending four hours on one graphic for Instagram. It includes optimising your Instagram highlights when you have not sent a pitch email in three weeks. It includes listening to podcasts about business strategy while you have an offer sitting in a draft folder that you have not launched yet.
I want to be careful here, because none of these things are bad. Learning matters. Design matters. Your podcast intake can give you real ideas. But there is a version of all of these things that is genuinely useful, and there is a version that is displacement. The question is not what you are doing. The question is what you are not doing instead.
There is a pattern I see consistently with many of the yoga teachers I work with. They will describe their week to me and it is full. They are not lazy people. They are working. But when I ask them — how many people did you invite into your offer this week? How many sales emails went out? Did you actually pitch anything? — the answer is often none. The whole week went by and not a single direct move was made toward generating income.
That is passive action at scale.
What real action actually is
Real action is anything that directly moves someone closer to buying from you, or that builds the infrastructure that makes selling easier and more consistent. It is a much shorter list than most people expect.
Creating your signature offer is real action. Writing a sales page is real action. Sending an email to your list with a genuine invitation to work with you is real action. Having a discovery call is real action. Showing up on a podcast as a guest to reach a new audience is real action. Building out a simple funnel so that people who find you can find their way to your offer without you having to be present every time — that is real action.
Notice that most of these things involve some degree of risk. You are putting something out into the world and people will either respond or they won’t. That is uncomfortable. It is also the only way business actually works.
This is why I believe offer creation should come before almost everything else. Before you worry about your content strategy, before you spend months growing your Instagram, before you invest in a beautiful website — you need to know what you are selling and you need to know how to sell it. Because without that, everything else is just set dressing for a shop that has nothing in the window.
How I organise my week around the things that matter
When I finally got serious about the gap between how hard I was working and what was actually happening in my business, I had to make a structural change. It was not enough to feel differently about it. I had to build a system that would force me to prioritise the real action first.
The most useful thing I introduced was a simple filter for every task I was considering. The question was: does this move someone closer to buying, or not? If the answer was no, I would either drop it or put it at the bottom of the list after the things that mattered.
I also started doing something that felt almost too simple when I first heard about it, which is identifying my three most important tasks for the week. Not the three things I needed to get done — the three things that, if I got them done and nothing else, the week would still count as a success for my business. And crucially, those three things were always income-generating or offer-building tasks. Sending my launch sequence. Finalising the sales page. Reaching out to a potential podcast guest to grow my audience. Things with a direct line to revenue.
Everything else — the social media scheduling, the admin, the small stuff — that happened around those three things. Not instead of them.
It sounds straightforward, and it is. But most people are doing it backwards. They clear the small tasks first because small tasks feel satisfying to tick off, and then they run out of time and energy for the things that actually grow the business.
What happens when you finally stop waiting
I want to share a story that reflects what I see again and again with yoga teachers I work with. I am keeping this anonymous, but the shape of it is very real.
I worked with a yoga teacher who had been building her online presence for almost two years. She had a good following by most yoga teacher standards — over a thousand people on Instagram, people who genuinely loved her content. She was posting consistently, she was showing up, she was doing the things people told her to do. But she was making almost nothing from it.
And when we looked at why, it was not because her audience was wrong or her content was bad. It was because she had never built a signature offer and she had no sales system. She was creating all this content and sending all this traffic to essentially nowhere. There was no door for people to walk through.
She had spent two years preparing to be ready to sell rather than actually selling. She had been telling herself she needed a bigger audience first, she needed better branding first, she needed to feel more confident first. And because she was genuinely working hard the whole time, it had not occurred to her that the direction of the work was the problem, not the amount of it.
We spent the first part of our work together getting her offer clear and her sales process mapped out. Not perfect. Clear. And then she actually launched it. And within six weeks she had made more from her online business than she had in the previous eighteen months combined.
The audience had been there the whole time. The missing piece was the offer and the invitation.
Where to start
So if you are reading this and recognising yourself in any part of it — the busy weeks, the endless preparation, the sense that you are working hard but not seeing results — here is where I would start.
First, audit your last week. Look at what you actually spent your time on and ask honestly: how much of that was real action? How much moved someone closer to buying? If the answer is very little, that is useful information. You are not failing. You are just working on the wrong things.
Second, look at what you are offering. If you do not have a signature offer that is transformative and specific and priced properly, that is your number one job. Before content strategy, before growing your audience, before anything else. Get the offer right.
Third, build a sales system around that offer. That does not need to be complicated. It can be as simple as an email sequence that introduces people to what you do and invites them to take a step. But it needs to exist. Your audience cannot buy something you have not made available to them in a clear way.
And fourth, protect time for real action in your week. Put it in your calendar. Treat it as non-negotiable. Because if you leave it to what’s left over after all the small tasks, it will never happen.
Ready to do this work?
If this is exactly the work you know you need to do but have been putting off, then come and join me at the Profitable Yoga Business Intensive. It is a three-day live event starting March 23rd, and this is precisely what we work on together: your offer, your sales process, and how to put it all in motion.
Spots are capped at 100 so I can give everyone proper attention and feedback, and we are already at 70. You can find the registration link at the top of susannerieker.com, or in the show notes if you came here from the podcast.
