Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share The Quiet Game
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
The Quiet Game
The Quiet Game episodes
- You Don't Have a Discipline Problem. You Have a Design Problem.
How many productivity systems have you tried? Time blocking, batching, inbox zero, the four-day week, the morning routine with the lemon water that someone very shiny on the internet promised would change your life. And how many of them stuck?
In this episode of The Quiet Game, Jo makes the case that the reason every system eventually fails has nothing to do with your discipline, your follow-through, or your personality. It has everything to do with the design of your business. There are two kinds of problems in any service business: behaviour problems and structure problems. They look identical from the outside. But they respond to completely different solutions. And if you've been bringing effort to a structure problem, you've been pushing water. You can push it for a while. But the moment you stop, everything slides right back.
This episode will change how you think about your own business, and more importantly, how you think about yourself.
Send us Fan Mail
20 min - The Sunday Feeling Has a Name. And It's Not Burnout.
Why does Sunday night feel so heavy, even after a weekend of rest?
In this episode of The Quiet Game, Jo explores why the dread many business owners feel before Monday isn't always burnout. Instead, it may be a sign that your business is structurally dependent on your constant presence.
Jo unpacks how an always-on business keeps your nervous system in a state of readiness, why staying busy often masks the real problem, and how to identify the hidden dependencies preventing you from truly switching off.
If you've ever come back from a vacation only to feel overwhelmed within days, this episode will help you understand why—and what needs to change.
A thoughtful conversation about sustainable business growth, nervous system health, and building a business that supports your life instead of running it.
Want to go deeper?
The Anti-Hustle MBA is a free 30-day email course for service business owners who are done running on empty. One email per day. One honest idea you can actually use. No hustle, no 6-figure promises.
Join free at https://www.jobeldade.com/theantihustlemba
Connect with Jo:
Instagram: @thequietgame
Website: www.jobeldade.com
Email: [email protected]Subscribe and leave a review:
If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a new episode. And if you have two minutes, leaving a review on Apple Podcasts helps more women find the show. It means more than you know.
Send us Fan Mail
14 min - The Clients Who Almost Made Me Quit
What happens when the work you love starts to break you? In this episode of The Quiet Game, Jo shares three real client stories that she has never spoken about publicly before. Stories that left her feeling disposable, guilty, and so drained that she almost walked away from her business entirely.
This is not a cautionary tale about difficult clients. It is an honest conversation about what it costs to care deeply about your work, where the line between professional and personal gets dangerously blurry, and what happens when you stay in working relationships long after you should have left. Jo shares the lessons she learned the hard way about boundaries, about testimonials, about ending client relationships with integrity, and about the most important thing she had to learn to protect: her own worth.
If you have ever felt disposable after giving everything you had to a client, or if you have ever stayed in a professional relationship too long because you genuinely cared this episode is for you.
Want to go deeper?
The Anti-Hustle MBA is a free 30-day email course for service business owners who are done running on empty. One email per day. One honest idea you can actually use. No hustle, no 6-figure promises.
Join free at https://www.jobeldade.com/theantihustlemba
Connect with Jo:
Instagram: @thequietgame
Website: www.jobeldade.com
Email: [email protected]Subscribe and leave a review:
If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a new episode. And if you have two minutes, leaving a review on Apple Podcasts helps more women find the show. It means more than you know.
Send us Fan Mail
21 min - Same Work. Four Times the Price.
What if you could earn four of five times more without working five times harder or even changing what you do? In this episode of The Quiet Game, Jo tells the story of a client who went from charging $60 per hour to $400 for the same work, simply by changing how she packaged and presented her offer. She didn't gain new qualifications. She didn't reinvent her services. She just stopped undervaluing what she was already delivering.
This episode goes deep on the real reasons why smart, talented, experienced women consistently undercharge for their work and it's not what most people think. Jo breaks down the psychology of pricing, the difference between charging for time versus charging for value, and why the client's mental maths changes completely when you reframe your offer. If you've ever suspected you're worth more than you're charging but don't know how to justify a price increase, this episode gives you the clarity and the confidence to start.
Honest, practical, and grounded in real client stories this is the pricing conversation you've been needing to have.
Want to go deeper?
The Anti-Hustle MBA is a free 30-day email course for service business owners who are done running on empty. One email per day. One honest idea you can actually use. No hustle, no 6-figure promises.
Join free at https://www.jobeldade.com/theantihustlemba
Connect with Jo:
Instagram: @thequietgame
Website: www.jobeldade.com
Email: [email protected]Subscribe and leave a review:
If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a new episode. And if you have two minutes, leaving a review on Apple Podcasts helps more women find the show. It means more than you know.
Send us Fan Mail
17 min - You built a job, not a business.
If you're a service-based entrepreneur who is fully booked, exhausted, and wondering why your income has stopped growing no matter how hard you work, this episode is for you.
In this episode of The Quiet Game, host Jo breaks down the difference between a business and a very demanding job you created for yourself. Most online service providers, coaches, therapists, consultants, and freelancers fall into the same trap: they build a business model that depends entirely on their presence. And when that happens, growth becomes impossible without working more hours.
Jo shares her own experience of working constantly while talking about freedom, and what she learned about building a business model that actually delivers the life you set out to create. This episode covers the emotional reality of entrepreneurship including the loneliness of building something no one around you fully understands and offers a clear, practical first step for service providers who are ready to stop being the bottleneck in their own business.
If you've ever had a quiet moment where you missed the predictability of a nine-to-five job, this episode will make you feel seen. And it might just change how you think about your business model entirely.
Want to go deeper?
The Anti-Hustle MBA is a free 30-day email course for service business owners who are done running on empty. One email per day. One honest idea you can actually use. No hustle, no 6-figure promises.
Join free at https://www.jobeldade.com/theantihustlemba
Connect with Jo:
Instagram: @thequietgame
Website: www.jobeldade.com
Email: [email protected]Subscribe and leave a review:
If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a new episode. And if you have two minutes, leaving a review on Apple Podcasts helps more women find the show. It means more than you know.
Send us Fan Mail
13 min - I Disappeared. Here's What I Learned.
For almost two years, I was invisible online. No content, no launches, no presence. Just gone.
It wasn't burnout. It wasn't a strategy. It was life arriving all at once and refusing to wait.
In this first episode of The Quiet Game, I share what those two years cost me, what they taught me, and why I came back building differently. If you have ever felt like your business was held together entirely by your own constant presence, this one is for you.
The Quiet Game is a weekly podcast for established service business owners who are tired of performing success. New episodes every Thursday.
Want to go deeper?
The Anti-Hustle MBA is a free 30-day email course for service business owners who are done running on empty. One email per day. One honest idea you can actually use. No hustle, no 6-figure promises.
Join free at https://www.jobeldade.com/theantihustlemba
Connect with Jo:
Instagram: @thequietgame
Website: www.jobeldade.com
Email: [email protected]Subscribe and leave a review:
If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a new episode. And if you have two minutes, leaving a review on Apple Podcasts helps more women find the show. It means more than you know.
Send us Fan Mail
17 min
About The Quiet Game
From the publisher's feed
If you've ever felt like the online business world was built for someone else, you're in the right place.
The Quiet Game is a podcast for established women entrepreneurs who are done with the…
noise. Done with the highlight reels, the hustle narratives, and the advice that sounds good at 9am and useless by noon. Done pretending everything is fine when it isn't.
Every week, your host Joana Beldade sits down for one honest conversation about what it actually takes to build a business that works for your life. Not someone else's life. Yours.
Jo studies what keeps people well in the most extreme environments on Earth, research that started with a master's thesis on isolation and confinement, and applies it to something nobody else in this space is talking about: the isolation of building a business alone. She calls it your business habitat, the space, the person, and the model, working together or quietly working against each other. She's also a business strategist with 8 years of experience across Portugal and North America, a certified yoga teacher, a former Air Force officer, currently completing a Psychology degree, and a single mum to a five-year-old boy. She launched a programme from a hospital bed at 29 weeks pregnant, hit rock bottom with thirteen euros in her bank account, and rebuilt. Slowly. Without anyone watching.
That's what this podcast is about. Building a business without the performance. Without the promise that it'll be easy or fast or linear. With the honest acknowledgment that life happens, that hard seasons are real, and that isolation has a real, researched cost on how you think, decide, and price your work.
No advice that ignores the human being behind the business. No six-figure promises. Just real talk about solo entrepreneurship, business isolation, and what it actually takes to build something sustainable, from someone who studies this for a living and has lived it herself.
New episode every week. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.