The Rule of Thirds: The Marketing Advice That Stops Every Room

There is a moment that happens in nearly every workshop I teach.

I'm standing in front of a room full of female founders — women who are brilliant, driven, and carrying more than most people can see. We're talking about marketing strategy, about all the things they want to build and create and put into the world. The lists are long. The ideas are electric. The ambition in the room is palpable.

And then I say it.

Take everything you want to do — and cut it by a third.

Every single time, the room shifts. There's a ripple of something between relief and recognition — a collective exhale, a few quiet laughs, some nodding that looks almost involuntary. Women turn to the person next to them. Someone says yesunder her breath. Someone else closes her eyes for just a second.

That reaction tells me everything.

Why We Overset the Bar

Female founders move fast. Extraordinarily fast. We are idea generators, systems thinkers, relationship builders, and execution engines — often all at once, often before 9am. We see what's possible with a clarity that is genuinely one of our greatest gifts.

But that same gift has a shadow side.

Because we can see so clearly what could be done, we have a tendency to plan for all of it. The full content calendar. The newsletter launch and the new offer and the event and the rebrand — all in the same quarter. We set the bar not at what's realistic but at what we can imagine, which is always, always more than any human being can sustainably execute.

And then the gap between what we planned and what we actually accomplish doesn't feel like a capacity issue. It feels like a personal failure.

It isn't. But it costs us anyway — in momentum, in confidence, and in the quiet, compounding weight of feeling perpetually behind on a race we set the rules for.

The Rule of Thirds

Here's what I want you to try.

The next time you sit down to map out your marketing — your content plan, your launch strategy, your quarterly goals, whatever it is — write out the full vision. Don't hold back. Put it all on the page.

Then cut it by a third.

What remains is your actual working plan: the two-thirds that is ambitious, meaningful, and — critically — achievable. This is the work you commit to. This is what goes on the calendar, gets resourced, gets done.

But here's what makes this different from simply scaling back: you don't throw away that other third.

The One Third List

The ideas you cut don't disappear. They go somewhere specific — what I call the One Third List.

This is a dedicated place to keep every idea, initiative, and marketing move that didn't make the active plan. Not a trash can. A holding space. Because those ideas are real and they matter, and you will get to them. Just not yet.

The One Third List does something important: it frees you from the fear that cutting something means losing it. It gives your brain permission to let go of what isn't on the current plan, because you know exactly where it lives and you can return to it when you're ready.

And when you do? When you work through your two-thirds and find yourself with margin, with momentum, with bandwidth you didn't have before? That's when you pull from the One Third List and bring something new into the work.

Not because you have to. Because you can.

What This Actually Changes

The Rule of Thirds isn't about doing less. It's about doing the right things fully — rather than doing everything halfway and burning out before any of it lands.

It protects your energy. It protects the quality of your work. And it protects something that is harder to recover than a missed deadline: your confidence in your own ability to follow through.

The female founders I work with are not behind. They are not failing. They are simply running a plan designed for an imaginary version of themselves who has no body, no family, no fatigue, and unlimited hours in the week.

The Rule of Thirds is how we build a plan for the real version — the one who is brilliant and capable and human, all at once.

Does this concept resonate with you? I'd love to hear what comes up when you try it.