Beate Chelette's Blog: The Women's Code

Money. That One Word.

Money. That one word changes everything. Especially when you don’t have it. I just had a conversation with my daughter. We have to talk money. I have to revisit every financial document because everything burned. I fired my broker over inconsistencies. I was tired of making him money and listening to him justify why he was making money when my portfolio wasn’t moving in the right direction. When he said to me, “You took too much money out,” I looked at the numbers. I mean I looked hard. This didn’t turn out for him the way he wanted. Did I mention he got fired?

Your money story determines everything. What your parents told you, how they lived, and the things they didn’t tell you that you absorbed anyway.

We Clipped Coupons

Back to the conversation with my daughter. It is hard for people to look at me and believe that I was pretty poor at some point. Gina, my daughter, says, “We clipped coupons.” We sure did. We had a coupon clipping book, too. I read the Los Angeles Times every week, and on Sunday I would go through all the coupons in the paper. Every dollar counted.

The Numbers Match or They Don’t

When I sold my company, the financial team that did the due diligence sat in my books for weeks and went through everything. I am a beast when it comes to operational excellence. The numbers match or they don’t. It either is or it isn’t. They said to me, “We have no idea what you lived off.” Fact is, I had no money. And then: “We do this all the time, for all kinds of people, and sometimes we see things. Sometimes we are not happy that this person is making so much money on the sale of their business. In your case, we can’t wish it on a better person. Congratulations.” I got the green light, the acquisition closed, and I became a multi-millionaire. It’s nice when the last barrier to financial freedom comes with champagne and well wishes.

Now, you would think that someone who has been through this is completely changed by the size of the outcome. Sorry to say, it isn’t so. I struggled; I tried to repeat my success. Looked for shortcuts. Nothing worked. I am finally at the point where I must look at this from a different angle. Finding someone to do things for me also doesn’t work. Because I can no longer say that someone has my best interest in mind because I pay them, or it’s their job. I believe them when they tell me they do, and I believe them when I find out it isn’t so.

The Child Imprint Is in Charge

Which brought me to the larger point about money. What exactly is my story? Is our money trauma embedded in our family history and genetically imprinted? The answer is yes. We are programmed to believe what we have seen and experienced. And where nobody explained what we saw, we filled in the blanks, often through the eyes of a child. And now this child imprint is in charge of your money story.

More, More, More

Fast forward to marketing. Would you like a nice house, a car, vacations? Convinced that this is all I want, because over here I am clipping coupons to save 75 cents on orange juice, I look at what these people do. They are slick. Their language is persuasive. They make it sound logical, and just like that we are pulled into the money story that makes this country, and every country, work. More, more, more. If you work more, you make more money. Then you can buy more and do better things. That all costs more, so now you have to make more money, because nobody ever wants to go backward. And now you don’t care so much where the money is coming from, or whether it is fully aligned. After all, you have to do what you have to do. You have to take care of your family. Right?

It all comes down to what you are willing to tolerate. If selling your soul and living like you are haunted works for you, and it works for many of us for a long time, then go for it. But inevitably there is a moment when you have doubts. Or a health scare. Or a come to Jesus moment.

This Time It’s Nery Gomez

That is where my podcast lives. The Business Growth Architect Show, Founders of the Future, talks relentlessly about the moment when someone has a massive personal transformation. This time it’s Nery Gomez, and it’s all about money. He walked away from a $3 billion table, in a Gucci suit no less, and then came up with the idea for a conscious investment equity fund. One that is not about flipping companies for profit, but about investing in communities, where each investment goes hand in hand with the next. I have never seen anything like it. Check out this week’s podcast on conscious investing and what is happening in that space.

The Seed That Needs the Fire

As for me, it is no coincidence that I am bringing in people who talk about money. It is a topic I have to come to terms with. After the endless lessons from the fire that took down everything, including my income streams, I am forced to evaluate what I want, where my passion is, what lights me up, and what I want to do. And just like that, I am seeing the first glimmers of hope, and transactions coming my way. Almost effortless. Sometimes it all has to burn for that special seed that needs the fire to germinate.

Who is in charge of your financial decisions? A toddler, a 7 year old, a teenager or an adult?

I’ll keep you posted.

I made my own cut of this conversation with Nery, the parts every Founder of the Future needs to know. We call it The Architect’s Cut: https://youtu.be/rX4EmH3fikg?si=tbGP0...

Let’s grow,

Beate

P.S. The Forge is where founders build the operations behind the money: YourBusinessMC.com

The post Your Money Trauma Is in Charge appeared first on The Women's Code.

Once Upon a Time

About a year ago, I had an idea. Now I have a lot of ideas, and that comes with the territory of being a creative and a serial entrepreneur. Hard to say sometimes if the lot of us is simply unemployable because we will not allow anyone to tell us what to do, or if we are a genius, or simply full of ourselves. But one thing is certain. Every invention started with an idea, so it is a good thing to have them.

It is one of those things I teach my granddaughter. We practice storytelling, and everything starts with opening the book and saying once upon a time. Then the next question is, who is in the story? XO, the stuffed animal, and Paw Patrol’s Liberty. What is going on? XO is hurt, and Liberty is going to save him. How is Liberty going to do that? With bandaids. Excellent. And how is the story going to end? XO is feeling good.

This is the same concept I take my clients through when we flesh out an idea. What are we doing? Who is doing it? What problem are we solving, and why are we solving it? Why are you the person to solve the problem? This simple concept, the storyline, teaches consequential thinking, logic, and understanding what we are doing and why we are doing it. Every idea needs to go through this cycle before it goes anywhere.

In The Growth Architect®, we promote podcast guesting as a simple and effective way to build your authority platform. Once you are clear on what problem you are solving and why you are the person to do it, you need to get your message out, and you need to get it to the right audience. Daniel Priestley said in his 2015 book Oversubscribed that there is a 7-11-4 rule: seven hours, eleven touches, four platforms. Dreamdata ran a benchmark in 2026 for B2B that puts the journey at 272 days, across 88 touchpoints, four channels, and ten stakeholders. That does not even include how Google’s search AI, Chat, or Claude are changing what a touchpoint even is. But one thing is clear. If you think you can run an email campaign and sign up ten thousand leads, it is not going to happen. The market has been destroyed by internet marketers, and it is heavily saturated. That means to stay competitive, you must adjust your strategy.

If It Was Mine to Keep, It Wouldn’t Have Burned to the Ground

At the risk of sounding repetitive, after the Palisades Fire, faced with a catastrophic loss, I had to rethink what I was rebuilding and how. My basic philosophy is that if it was mine to keep, it wouldn’t have burned to the ground. If it is gone, maybe there is a reason. The second question I ask myself is: what is it forcing me to do? And it is not high-ticket sales, as tempting as that sounds. It is starting from the ground up.

Think about XO and Liberty. What is the real story here? The story is that I am an operations person. I do not mind sales or marketing, but at the end of the day I love tinkering and reverse engineering outcomes. Then I realized I get a lot of questions from podcast guests who ask me about my automation. How do you do it? Your reminders are spot on; your communication is consistent, clear, and excellent. What do you do? And finally, I realized that perhaps what I am being asked is to give what I built to other coaches, consultants, and service providers who need the workflows I have built. It is so easy for me that I often cannot understand why others are struggling with it. I mean, it is not hard. And then the self-check: we are talking about my super skill. This is what I am good at. Taking seemingly complicated things and putting them in order. So easy that I can teach a three-year-old these very concepts.

Do Not Lie to Your Audience

What I see working right now is the opposite of what AI makes possible. AI is telling us we can hyper-personalize by simply taking my thing and your thing and having AI make it work. Oh boy. Please refrain from jumping into that abyss. There is nothing AI does worse. It will find the most common, mediocre formula, Beate is a well-respected and highly sought-after podcast guest and host, and match it to the most mediocre description of where I am pitching to. And she is the perfect guest for your show on making business owners successful through specific strategies, like in your last podcast with XO, where Liberty healed him by simply applying a band-aid. You will not get booked.

I get hundreds of these. Josh Elledge gets hundreds of these. We all do, and one is worse than the other. I run a spiritual transformation show that showcases that every successful person has gone through a spiritual transformation that becomes the strategy. Please tell me you think AI can do that? It cannot. It is not possible. AI can outline the format, the structure of your pitch, but the key points, the match points- those you have to do yourself, personally and painstakingly. With AI, sure. But do not rely on a matchmaking AI podcast pitching service to do the thinking for you.

This is something I discussed with Josh Elledge on the last episode of The Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future. If you want to use authority platform building as a strategy, listen to this one. He has done 3,000 media appearances, recorded 2,500 podcasts, and launched 300. He can tell you what lands and what does not. Episode Link

Less Is More

In addition to getting your message out, there has to be a foundational aspect of how you do things. Is what you offer relevant now? Does it land? Who wants it? Do you need to start from scratch and ask, what does my audience want from me? And then lean into that.

If you read my newsletter updates, you have been on this journey with me. As I gain more ground under my feet, I am learning to drop more and more. I cannot be on X, formerly Twitter. The hostility of the message and the owner are not aligned with my belief system. Facebook. After they deleted my account with zero explanation, two weeks after the fire, when I was hacked, I never went back to rebuild it. I am not on it anymore, and I am certainly not clicking ads. So why try to keep it up? It has run its course. Google is gaining steam again, but what is up with YouTube? I like Substack, Threads, and LinkedIn. Less is more; targeted is better. And with that, I am focusing on one client at a time.

I am building out the backend, focusing more and more on my CRM, adding all of our workflows and materials to it, so you can use what I have built, and then use AI, and I will show you how, to take that and yours and start building your own follow-up. If you want to check out what I am building, or you need a CRM that is preloaded, check this out: Creator Forge.

Closing Reflection

But amongst all of it, what resonates now is what Josh Elledge said on the podcast: the lesson he learned from his mentor. Do not lie to your audience. So here is my honest question for you. If it burned down tomorrow, how would you rebuild it?

Let’s grow,

Beate

The post What Story Are You Telling appeared first on The Women's Code.

Don’t mix work with pleasure, people tell you. I am not the same person at home than I am at work, something I have never understood. How can someone be this horrible, mean person at the office and then suddenly at home be a lovely, committed partner who picks up a tiny pink telephone when their toddler calls them on the play phone? How can someone lie through their teeth, make up stuff, and then swear that they are an honest person? That one has nothing to do with the other, they say. Frankly, between you and me, I call BS.

That contradiction is the bridge between how you show up and who you are. And we see it everywhere right now, most loudly in politics. The old, outdated message of more, more, more is clashing against what most people believe in, and the ones proclaiming that message the loudest are usually the ones carrying the double bind themselves. Much of corporate is regressing straight back into that same behavior, because it is easier to treat people like numbers on a spreadsheet than as people.

They pay a lot and make it easy. Corporate gives us free treats, coffee, maybe even go-carts to make work fun. But at some point they turn on the screws, and we are caught in the golden cage. We can’t leave, we make too much money, the outside world is overrun with those of us who have exited, meaning how much opportunity is really left? And we designed a month-to-month lifestyle that doesn’t allow us to take time off, to take care of ourselves, because we become the victims of our own success. The more money we make, the more money we spend. We invest it into our children’s education, bigger cars, bigger homes, better vacations. We chase and chase and chase. Our identity becomes the job. The way they see us, whomever they may be, edified in our job title, our carefully crafted image.

And then it happens. Boom. A moment in time. A fire. A health scare. The death of someone. Or, like in Rachel Castro’s case from Know BS, a large commission check she got screwed out of.

I always say that change only happens when the pain of staying is greater than the fear of changing. And almost everyone I know thinks change is great, as long as everything stays the same!

 Change is hard. With the fire that took everything from us that we owned eighteen months ago, we didn’t have a choice. Many of these life-changing events don’t leave you a choice. If it’s not there, you have to rebuild it. If you rebuild it, what are you going to rebuild? And on and on the question goes, circling back to the beginning.

When you are in a disaster of any kind, you know who your friends are. You learn how long the empathy window is. You learn how to receive, how to allow people into your life. You learn that always being in control deprives others of the chance to step up. And often, you pray. You pray for a sign.

I prayed for a sign to tell me what in the world this all meant. At the same time, this week’s podcast guest, Rachel Castro, prayed for a sign on how to get out of corporate and do her own thing. That is how we met, two years ago, just a few months before my disaster. She had her wake-up call. And I had my fire. 

Today she is well on her way with her business. She leads a team of five, her branding is locked in, and she has done everything exactly right. Of course, there have been mistakes and setbacks, but she tells the story of how she escaped corporate and figured out how to make this life happen for herself. Today she makes decisions like a boss.

And what was it that she wanted, as a sign that she came out on the other side? To take her mother on a first-class trip to Europe. She’s there now, two years after first uttering the wish.

Every Person Matters

In my entire career I never looked at myself as up there, or above anyone. I learned this from my father who said that good company needs everyone including the janitor, and I better treat all of them with the same respect. And from Brian Tracy, the speaker and author of many books. I was his celebrity handler at an event, and people followed him all the way to the valet just to talk to him. I whispered in his ear that he only needed to say the word and I would free him from the trove of fans clinging onto him. He looked at me and said, “Every person matters.” And he meant it.

I never again looked at a person as a lead, a prospect, or a KPI. I realized he was right. Every person matters. When we engage in business from that perspective, we give to our clients, and we allow them to give to us.

Rachel is one of those people. She pushed me, more than once. And she’s been right, more than once. If we don’t allow the signs we pray for to be heard, we only continue down the same path. But if something stops us, if someone asks you a question like “can you teach me to be you,” perhaps in that one sentence was everything hidden that I am building now.

Seeking Connections, Not Transactions

It’s no longer about me. I don’t need to be on the stage anymore. I don’t have to fight my age and be upset if I don’t fit the mold of the cool 35-year-old. I don’t have to be the one with the microphone, the fancy suit, and the high heels. I can be the person in the background, applauding my client who just delivered the talk in their fancy suit. And I can say hell yes when they soar past me. Not to say that I’ll say no to an opportunity to share my message and microphones are most certainly welcome, but it doesn’t have the same pull. 

Do I need a thousand clients, or can I work with a number that doesn’t make me lose myself again in the to-do lists, that gives what I have built and puts it into the hands of Founders of the Future, those who come after me? Can I find the same joy in watching someone dance with joy and be successful as I would if it happened to me?

The answer is yes. This is what is emerging nineteen months after the fire. I don’t seek transactions. I seek connections.

Closing Reflection

My hope is that if you have been watching my story, you recognize that change means changing something. That the thing you’re holding onto so tightly wasn’t yours to begin with. Nothing is. We take nothing with us. It’s all borrowed anyway.

This is a question I ponder again and again. If we let go of the construct of what we designed ourselves to look like, and fully surrender to this moment, the lack of clarity, the confusion, the deep desire with no fully formed plan, and trusted that what is ours is coming the same way we were forced to face the truth that what we had wasn’t working, would that not open the door you are waiting for?

Let’s grow, 

Beate

The post Can Clients Be Friends? appeared first on The Women's Code.

The Breakdown Isn’t the Problem

A few days ago I had a feeling that I needed to reach out to one of my clients. The work we had done together had cracked things wide open, and it was getting a little bit crazy. I was concerned. I ended the call by telling her she mattered, and that the work she is doing is intense enough that it does get crazy. Not entirely by coincidence, that is the subject of my current podcast episode too. Let me explain.

We constantly ask, pray, or beg for our lives to improve. That the love is reciprocated. That the promotion is granted. That the good stuff finally comes in. We do the work. The therapy. We work through the illness, the health scare, a death, a layoff. We ask ourselves what all of it means. We allow the breakdown, kicking and screaming sometimes, and it hurts. Then the breakdown is not even done, and the house burns to the ground. The office does too. So does the car. Then I get sick, away from home, five days in the hospital. Then my godmother dies. We find out there has been sexual abuse, beatings, and straight-up torture — the deepest, darkest family secrets finally surfacing. You ask yourself when this is going to end. Because even in a catastrophe, life still does what it does. People come and go. Things happen. It is not personal, but it certainly feels like it.

The pressure got so intense that I caught myself taking deep breaths between moments, mid-sentence, for no reason anyone watching could see. I am finishing an insurance inventory right now of everything we owned in the house that burned. Item by item. Retraumatizing myself over and over. Do not have this anymore. Do not have that anymore. Burned, burned, burned. I wrote recently about how exhausted I am from even saying all of this out loud, how ready I am to be done with it, how badly I want to write about it in the past tense. It is not happening anytime soon. I am deep in it, and it is, strangely, perfectly aligned with the energy in the world right now. The Ring of Fire keeps rattling and blowing off steam. I live in Los Angeles. I recently bought a lot of canned tuna. World politics feels genuinely unstable, and I do not care where you stand on any of it, but the pendulum swinging between two extremes is not a comfortable place for anyone to stand. It is crazy out there. The breakdown is not the problem. It never was. It is the part everyone tries to skip.

Crazy Good, Crazy Aware, Crazy Nevertheless

In my most recent episode, I sat down with Steve Barton, and we talked about crazy. Literally. What I love about that conversation is the idea that once you have had enough of the unhappiness, the uncertainty, the underlying dissatisfaction, and you finally allow the breakdown to start, it gets crazy. Crazy good. Crazy aware. Crazy nevertheless. That is the title of the episode for a reason.

When you allow that breakdown to happen and the energy starts flowing, it does not move in a straight line. It moves like a river of consciousness, but more like a wild toddler than a calm current. Uncoordinated. Screaming one minute, rolling on the floor laughing the next. Curious and uncontrollable, because the emotions underneath it are running that wild and that intense. You genuinely do not know what to do with it. Steve designed his coaching framework, the Game of Ten, to walk people through exactly this, all the way to full awareness. The conclusion at the end of it is almost embarrassingly simple: you are enough. That is it. All the years you spent wondering, the image you absorbed, the persona you built because it looked good from the outside, one day it just stops meaning anything. You feel like an imposter, because you have been imposing yourself onto an idea that was never actually yours to carry.

The First Wave Was Giving

I know a lot of my writing lately has been heavy and intense. It got intense again here, and I genuinely do not have the energy left to tone it down. I am exhausted and not exhausted at the same time. I feel one part of this ending, or at least rolling out, and the next part has not fully arrived yet. But I know in my heart that I have to learn to receive. Not just from you, though that is part of it too. The crazy, insane, wonderful people who carried me through the last eighteen months of this, and it has been dark, gave to me when I did not think I was worthy of it. I believed my role was to give, and that at some point enough giving would finally make me feel worthy. It did not. Not even a little. What actually happened was a full boomerang, with enough force behind it to say one thing clearly: sit down. And there it was. That was the first wave.

The Second Wave Is Receiving

The second wave is not material. It is not breakfasts, or lunches, or a bag someone hands you to make you feel better. It is the energy of love, success, money, and happiness that is already coming toward me, for me to receive. Not to fight for. Not to earn first. Just to let in. Maybe in a few weeks, maybe in a few months, I will tell you what Steve told me: that I am drunk and high on the sheer amount of energy screaming at me that I am enough. And you already know exactly what I will do when that happens. I will turn around and say it to you. Funny you should ask, this is what just happened.

Closing Reflection

So here is my question for you, founder to founder. What have you decided you have to earn before you are allowed to receive it? Where in your business, or your health, or your relationships, are you still fighting for something that has already been trying to reach you? I cannot tell you when your breakdown ends, mine has not. But I can tell you this with certainty. If this slightly crazy energy finds you while you are reading this, you are already enough.

Let’s grow,

Beate

The post It’s Supposed to Get Crazy appeared first on The Women's Code.

The list that will not stop growing

I am eleven months past the fire, and two months ago I declared the hardest part of the grief over. I was wrong. My insurance list sits at 3,144 items and it keeps growing because every week I find another thing that used to sit on a shelf or hang on a wall that is simply gone. I did not choose this pace. I do not get to choose this pace. And that is the actual subject of this newsletter: our need to rush things that cannot be rushed. The discomfort of being in a place we do not want to be in. The agony of having to admit you are still there. And the way our own judgment gets cloudy, because we want the pain to be over so badly that we will believe almost anything that promises it is.

What cracked me open

The moment that broke something loose was a photo from Christmas. The kids were piled on top of each other in the living room, laughing, and my husband Gary was standing there watching them, probably thinking about adding himself to the pile. A magical moment. So much laughter. Good food was involved. 

That house does not exist anymore. I found myself asking whether we would ever have a moment like that again.

We went to Big Bear for Gary’s birthday, with the same kids, though calling them kids is not quite accurate. They are all adults. And the goofiness came back. The silliness and familiarity were back. I realize we have not lost it. It was well preserved in all of us the entire time, just waiting for room to come back out.

Gary’s daughter walked in for the birthday dinner I had put together and stopped. This is just like it was in the Palisades, she said, looking at the table. I had brought over new wine glasses from Germany. My mother downsized and is living in an assisted facility now. She gave them to me. I set out new dishes, simpler than what we used to have, but arranged with the same care.

The story I wanted to tell you

I have to be honest about something. I really, truly, deeply, one hundred percent did not want to record this episode. I am so over this grief and the endless delays in waiting for this to move forward. I want to give you the comeback story, the one where I stand on the other side of the fire and tell you it made me stronger, that I see the gift in it now, that I would not trade the lesson for anything. That story is not true yet, and I am not willing to hand you a version of my life that is not true just because it would be easier to hear. And maybe it will resonate with someone who is going through a massive loss or prolonged period of grieving. It is what it is. It takes time and we are best served to not fight the time it takes. 

A memory that keeps coming back to me

I remember vividly the birth of my baby girl. I chose to have her naturally, in the bathtub. She is a water baby. That meant no drugs, no painkillers, just me and the midwife and pain I can only describe as excruciating. There is a moment forever burned into my memory. The midwife asked me if it hurt. Beneath two deep breaths and a muffled cry I told her I had no idea it would hurt this much, that it was the worst pain I had ever experienced; yes, it hurts. And she said, good. Work with it.

I have thought about that moment constantly this year. The process worked exactly as it was supposed to, with or without drugs. That baby was coming regardless of what I chose to feel. I just chose to feel every second of that journey instead of numbing my way through it. That is the instruction I have to hear again now. Work with it. Not around it. Not past it as fast as possible. With it. It is THROUGH the pain. Not around it that we come out on the other side.

Going through the list

At this stage, most weeks the work of rebuilding is just paperwork. I sit with every photo I scanned, or that someone else has and go through it with a magnifying glass, identifying what we lost. Family photo of the Turkey and the family and on the table the hand carved wooden bowl from Spain. The giraffes from Africa. The ceramic bowl from New Mexico. The blanket from Mexico. The necklace with the panther and the diamond that my father gave me thirty years ago. My communion cross from the Catholic Church, from when I was a child. Naming each object is its own small grief, and there is no way to speed through it. You either do the inventory or you do not, and the inventory does not care how tired you are of doing it. Every photo screaming at you, you don’t have that anymore; this is also gone. Remember this? Burned. 

Why we want to rush the pain and make it go away

You already know if what you are doing is working or not. You already got that call, or heard that voice, telling you whether you are on the right path. I am hearing that voice nonstop since the fire, in my dreams and in meditation, telling me I am being rewired, head to toe. I would like to rush through this. Can someone save me from this?

If our own stuff was so solid, it would not have fallen apart in the first place. The reason it fell apart is because it did not work. Something better is coming. But because the pain of not knowing what that something is happens to be unbearable, we get tempted to take shortcuts. We reach for the comeback story because the real story is too slow and too undignified to sit inside.

This shows up in business exactly the way it shows up in grief. If you want a different result in your business, you must undergo a real transition, and that transition follows a predictable pattern. The breakdown, where the old way falls apart and everything stops, whether you are ready or not. The breakthrough: the learning and letting go that happens once you finally stop defending what already failed. And the breakout, which is almost always the slowest part, the part where the new thing is born like my baby girl was and comes out into the world. So small and vulnerable at first. 

In my most personal episode yet, I talked about spending over $400,000 chasing funnels and lead pages that other people swore worked, because building my own systems from scratch felt too slow. It never worked, because I was still trying to skip the breakdown instead of letting it finish.

The most painful place is that these truths are in contradiction of my desire. I want to have already mastered it. I have spent years watching this exact pattern in my consulting work, and I have given people this advice with total confidence from the outside of it. Now I am the one inside it, and I must give myself the same advice I have handed out so easily to everyone else. Perhaps that is exactly why this was given to me to share with you, in all its painful, long, bone-crushing, snail-speed reality.

Closing Reflection

In my latest podcast episode, I talk about the difference between rushing pain and working with it. Where in your own business are you doing the first when the moment is actually asking for the second? What decision have you been forcing before it was ready, hoping speed could stand in for clarity?

Let’s grow,

Beate

The post Does It Hurt? Good. Work With It. appeared first on The Women's Code.

What Trauma Recovery Looks Like

When you hear the word recovery, you may think of addiction, drugs or alcohol, a specific and defined kind of return to health. That is not this newsletter. I am talking about recovery from trauma, and the unexpected turns any recovery takes when the thing you are recovering from does not come with a program or a chip you get to hold onto marking thirty days sober. We all experience it. A loss of a job, an illness, someone is dying, a massive life change or injury. Trauma comes in many shapes, and trauma recovery has no calendar. My work as The Growth Architect often brings me into these places with my clients, and the job is to help them understand what the spiritual meaning of their event is to them, and then to build a strategy to shape their future behind it. Every transformation moves through three stages: the Breakdown, the Breakthrough, and the Breakout. Two of those stages have real names, cumulative grief and liminal space. I did not coin them. It helped when I could map out my own experience by finding out about them later.

The Breakdown: When Everything Falls Apart

The Breakdown often has a lead-in. An unexpected unhappiness. An undefined restlessness. Things are tolerable, close enough to fine that you keep going, and still somehow not enough. You have a nagging suspicion that there is more to life, that this cannot be all there is for you. And then it happens. An illness, a catastrophic event, a scare, a layoff, something that forces the change you would not choose for yourself. That is the Breakdown in action. No matter what you want or desire, there is nothing you can do. You are along for the ride. You are in it, you feel it is out of control, and this part usually gets dicey enough that there is a point where you almost long for the pre-Breakdown misery and wonder if it was truly all that bad. It was. You just forget, because this part is so hard.

That is the Palisades Fire for me. There were many things I loved about my life before it. It is my husband’s house, but it had become our home. He built it. His kids grew up there. I moved in a few years back, and I loved the house, but truthfully it never felt like it was mine. It was his, and I lived there with him. The stories and the history of the house were not mine. But like with everything, you make it work. You create new memories. And then the fire came, and leveled three stories into three feet of ashes. My office burned before our home did, my peaceful getaway, next to the elementary school. That is another thing I miss, the kids running around below my office window during recess, the window I opened so I could hear them, or hear the coach giving them instructions during PE. All of it good. All of it tolerable. Some pieces wonderful, some merely okay, nothing fully aligned with me, and somehow it worked anyway. The fire took all of it. A full Breakdown overnight. Nothing to save. The way I lived, the way I worked, what I had and believed to be my life, gone.

A Breakdown Consists Out of Cumulative Grief

Here is the part that rarely gets mentioned before it happens: the Breakdown does not always arrive once and finish. Often there are things that happen on top of what already happened. My favorite aunt passed away. Old trauma resurfaced alongside it; childhood abuse I thought I had already made peace with. Now I was deeply grieving on top of the grief I was already in, and my work, the thing that has always steadied me, started to feel uncertain too. I could not rent another office. I did not know if I had all of this left in me.

There is a name for this. It is called cumulative grief, or grief overload, and it describes exactly what happens when a new loss lands before the last one has had room to breathe. Grief does not get its normal integration time. It becomes a constant background weight instead of something that softens at the edges, and if you are in it right now, know that the disorientation you feel is simply what happens when your mind is asked to carry more loss than it was ever built to hold at once.

Why Breakthroughs Are So Difficult, Are You Stuck in a Liminal Space?

Someone once told me the in-between, the moment after the Breakdown and before anything resembling a Breakthrough, has a name too. Liminal space. The threshold between an old identity and a new one, the space with no roadmap. I did not make that word up, and neither did the discomfort inside it. Liminal space is uncomfortable precisely because it refuses to hand you a plan.

Recovery is not one massive change. It is a gradual transition, baby steps, one day at a time, excruciatingly slow until suddenly it is not. Transformation requires full surrender. You are not in charge here. The boats are burning behind you, and there is no way back. I spoke with a client this week who still has major things breaking down in her life, and it is exhausting for her. I talked with my nephew this same week, who is facing his own set of challenges, and I asked him the only two questions I know to ask in that space: what is this forcing you to do, and what is this forcing you to let go of?

And then, so subtly you almost miss it, the Breakthrough begins. A day that was not entirely dreadful. A few good moments inside it. You wake up, and for one instant before the weight returns you feel nearly all right, and then you remember, and the sadness comes back the way it always does. But that window, the one before you remember, gets a little longer each time. It does get better. It is barely noticeable at first, which is exactly why so many people give up right here, at the hardest part, mistaking the absence of dramatic progress for the absence of any progress at all.

Why Recovery Is Slow, Not Sudden (The Breakout)

That is the conversation I had on the podcast with Mike Weisman. He talks about the moment he found himself standing in the hall of fame of the marketing agency he had built and spent his life running, throwing every hard-earned trophy into the trash. And with it went the version of himself that needed that kind of validation to feel real. He had to figure out who he was without any of it. Neither Mike nor I have fully stepped into our own Breakout. We are both still working on our way there. We arrived at a similar understanding from very different roads: as long as you are holding onto the external version of yourself, the image, you cannot ever be truly happy, because happiness built for external validation can’t work because it’s not giving you the internal validation. You must do the inner work instead, the hard and heavy lifting of letting go of hustle culture and the constant demand for more, more, more, in order to become who you were meant to be.

That is the work. And it is exactly why so many people give up in those bone-breaking, back-crushing moments of not knowing, in the despair of realizing that what you held onto for so long was an illusion, without any clear sense of where you are going next. Because the pain of not knowing is so great, they abandon the transformation and try to fight their way back to the misery they were in before, because at least they know that part well, and as I said, it was tolerable. Compared to this massive uncertainty, it almost sounds desirable. With that begins a life of settling, and mediocrity. Nothing wrong with that if it is your choice. It is not for anyone I work with. That is why they come to me, because my cumulative experience of disaster after disaster has me well prepared to offer insight on some very tough journeys.

Marianne Williamson said something I think about often, and I am paraphrasing her here, that sometimes all you can do is stay on your knees and keep praying. It is a form of surrender to accept that our destiny unfolds over time and all we can do at times is trust that what we desire is within our reach.

Closing Reflection

I do not know where you are in your transformation, but I do know one thing. Greatness is not made from settling. If you have gotten the call, that phone keeps ringing until you pick up. That is your inner voice, reminding you gently at first and then with increasing insistence, one you can certainly ignore for a while until it blows up in your face, that you deal with what you came here to do. And if you are reading this, and are still reading this now, chances are you are in it. May some of this help you in understanding these journeys we go on that only make sense once we come out on the other side.

Let’s grow, Beate

P.S. If you want to connect or share your own piece of this, leave a comment or reach out to me directly. If you want help in your transformation, schedule time: https://UncoverySession.com

The post Cumulative Grief, Liminal Space, and the Slow Work of Recovery appeared first on The Women's Code.

I Sold My Company and Thought I Had It All Figured Out

After 13 years of brutal adversity, I sold my business to Bill Gates. I always said I was a spiritual warrior in a business suit. And I had this exit to prove that what I did worked. I did well. And this is the story I told for the next 20 years.

What I left out of that story is what came next. I thought selling the business meant I had conquered it, the visualization, the mindset work, the years of grinding through things that should have broken me. The proof was in the pudding. So from here on out, I assumed I would simply walk on water.

Truth is, I struggled. I had some success. I spoke on good-sized stages, had private engagements at Fortune 50 companies, was at the right conferences. But nothing compounded the way it should have. Not at the level I wanted to be at. With business changing at neck-breaking speed, I had, if I am honest, moderate success. I used my knowledge of how to make something look good. A skill I learned from my mother.

The problem with that skill is that it can put you in a double bind. You make it look as if things are working when in reality, they are not. They look good on the outside. On the inside, not so much. And so begins this odd, quiet war with yourself that most of us can’t even name.

Imposter Syndrome — Are You Getting It All Wrong?

Faking it till you make it is a strategy. I have said this often enough. There are two things happening at once. The first is the prerequisite to manifestation; it is the tool of visualization — seeing yourself having already achieved what you are working toward. In great detail, with colors and smells. That part is legitimate. The second is something else entirely: semi-convincing yourself, against your own perception of reality, that what you want is even possible. That second part puts you at war with yourself. This is when you say, but the reality is that I am broke, have no clients, miserable, stuck (your word goes here)

The second is where imposter syndrome comes from, in my opinion. You are trying to perform a version of yourself you do not yet believe in. You say it out loud as if you do. You act as if you do. But underneath, the two forces are pulling in opposite directions, and you feel every inch of that tension. I am certainly the mistress of this. I just did not know it at the time.

We talk about imposter syndrome as a confidence problem, a mindset problem, something to be fixed with better affirmations or a stronger morning routine. That is getting it wrong. Imposter syndrome is your signal. It is telling you that the gap between who you are performing and who you actually are has become too wide to sustain. You cannot affirm your way out of an unexamined wound.

When that truth comes to the surface through a forced-to-your-knees event, or a spiritual revelation, or simply a moment of exhausted honesty, it does not feel like relief but rather like exposure. You must look at yourself and ask who am I, what am I doing, and why. If you are lucky, you have people around you who help you see that you are not so bad after all. Perhaps you are wicked smart, and not a bad person to be around.

Phew. Good for you. We settled that.

Feeling Good Is an Inside Job

Now add to all of that the world we are operating in. AI hard at our heels. A pressure to optimize everything. Track your steps, your calories, your sleep, your breathing, your heart rate, your fat burn. I took my Apple Watch off. I know the hike I do regularly. What difference does it make if I am one minute faster? It is the same number of steps either way. What does it do for me to wake up and have an app confirm that I tossed and turned all night and should probably drink more water?

There is useful technology. But there is something happening with the overoptimization of every dimension of our lives that is worth naming. It is not making us better. For many of us it is making us more anxious, more surveilled, more disconnected from our own instincts.

The pendulum can only swing so far in one direction before it comes back. When the external has been tracked and measured and optimized to exhaustion, the only place left to go is inward. It is the logical next move.

Two years ago, I began to understand that my childhood was a lot harder than I had admitted to myself. Society tells you to honor your parents regardless. They did their best. Acknowledging that something traumatic happened to you, especially at the hands of a parent, violates an unspoken rule, which is why so many of us carry it in silence for so long.

What I learned is that recognizing your own truth does not cancel out anyone else’s. You can say this happened without placing the entire weight of blame on the person who caused it. One truth does not invalidate another. I believe the greatest consequence is that the person who caused harm must live with the knowledge of what they did until the day they die. That is its own reckoning. Especially if they never asked for forgiveness and acknowledge their acts.

Happiness is an inside job. You have heard that. What it means is that no amount of external achievement, tracking, or validation will get you there. At some point, the inside work is not optional.

It is the work.

That Bone Tiring Place in the Middle (You Are Not Lost)

I recently learned there is a word for where I have been. It is called liminality. It is the stage when something has ended and is irrevocably gone, but what comes next has not yet arrived. You are in between. The old thing is over. The new thing is not here. And you are asked to keep functioning in the middle of that.

We lost our home in the fire. The office burned right along with it. In spiritual teachings, there is a belief that something of a lower nature must leave for something of a higher nature to come in. I would like to hold that truth cleanly. I am not there yet. I feel the grief. I feel the loss. Life does not pause while you process it. You carry it alongside everything else you are already doing.

If you are in this place, you are not lost. Lost and in between are not the same thing. Lost means no sense of direction. In between means something real has ended and something real has not yet arrived. The gap is uncomfortable. It is also not permanent. And the fact that you feel the weight of it means you took whatever ended seriously enough to grieve it. This is the bone tiring reality of genuine transition.

Most of what we read about transformation skips this part. It goes from the breaking point straight to the breakthrough, as if the middle is just a brief inconvenient corridor. It is not. For many of us we are talking months. For some of us it is years. The middle is where the real work happens, even when it does not feel like work. Even when it feels like nothing at all.

What Nobody Tells You About Transformation

This is why I was so moved in my last conversation with Maeve Ferguson. She is a funnel strategist working with the upper echelons of the thought leadership space — a fellow strategist, data-driven, results-oriented, and by her own description, a former non-believer. She came on the show and shared her journey to walking a genuine spiritual path. She has a spiritual coach. She is fully committed. And she was honest about what opened up when she began to take that seriously.

She is not the only one. I am seeing this across the founders I talk to and work with. The ones who have hit the wall of external optimization and found it empty. The ones who are in the in-between place and looking for a framework that goes deeper than a productivity system. There is a current running underneath the business conversation right now, and it is pulling people inward.

What nobody tells you about transformation is that it does not feel like becoming more. It feels like losing things. The identity you built. The story you told. The version of success you thought you had locked in. Transformation is a dismantling before it is a building. And the dismantling is where most people either do the work or find a way to avoid it.

There is real healing in acknowledging our hurt. But you must rip off the Band-Aid. You have to expose what is underneath and let it surface. And feel it. The feeling is the worst part. I say that from personal experience. It is also the only way through.

I do not know where you are in this. But I know this: we are in a major transformation, as people and as a world. Leadership is pushing narratives that cannot be believed. AI is not God. We are not replaceable. We are not machines. And no optimization system will tell you how to feel good or why you are here.

The spiritual undercurrent is not a trend. It is not new. It is ancient. What is new is that more people — founders, strategists, builders — are ready to stop treating it as peripheral. The inner work is not a detour from the business. For many of us, it has become the foundation of it.

Something has to burn before something better can come in. That is not a metaphor. Sit with what that means for you.

A Closing Reflection

Where in your life are you still performing as the persona you no longer are?

Let’s grow, Beate.

P.S.  If this is resonating and you are ready to do the real work — inner and outer alignment together — The Forge is where we start. It is free. No fluff. YourBusinessMC.com

The post Is There Really a Somewhat New Spiritual Movement? appeared first on The Women's Code.

Sometimes life is very messy. You just cannot give anything. You must preserve the little energy you have. I was there a while back. The last thing I wanted to do is to give back. And I was asked to mentor for the Entrepreneurs Organization where my husband Gary is on the board of Directors. He ran the mentoring program. And I really didn’t want to. To get out of it, I said there is really one person I would consider mentoring and that is Alice. You are in luck Gary said, she only wants to be mentored by you. Ok then…

Little did I know that she didn’t think she deserved a mentor like me. I mean we are talking about a woman who is a force. She raised millions, she keeps building climbing gyms like it’s nothing. Everyone loves her, she’s a mom of two, engaged in organizations and community driven. How can someone like that suffer from imposter syndrome?

Well, truth is, she’s been abandoned twice by her mother. The both of us got trauma with our moms. But what she does better than anyone, myself included, she knows her wound and she has learned to tell the story the way it no longer hinders her.

That is what I told another friend today over peppermint tea at the fancy hotel in Santa Monica. It is not that you do not have the wounds. It is that you have the wound and you do not let it write your narrative any longer. Easier said than done, so how do you do it?

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She Was Abandoned Twice and Still Built an Empire

Alice Kao was dropped off alone in America at fourteen. No parents. A little cash, an apartment near a school. The voice in her head has been running the same message since she was three years old standing in a doorway watching her mother walk away with two large suitcases without turning around. You are not good enough. You are not smart enough. They are going to find out. And then they will leave.

That voice did not stop her from building Sender One Climbing into six locations. It did not stop her from raising millions of dollars from over 100 community investors after countless no’s. It did not stop her from standing on stages in front of 900 people. And it is still there every single morning. The wound never healed. She just stopped letting it drive.

If you have listened to any of the podcasts on the Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future you will recognize a few recurring themes. Trauma, including the core wound, believing in hustle culture until it almost kills you, transformation themes when you realize that there must be something better out there for you than this, fear of the void or messy middle and the look backward in how you made it through the good, bad and the ugly.

We are very proud to announce that we are on the podcast service Goodpods now at number 12 in Business Growth and we just entered the top 100 in Spirituality. Who would have thought this is even possible with a show about business growth?

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The Race to Mediocrity Is Already Lost

Today during my peppermint teatime, I found myself explaining what I really believe is happening right now. Many of us who have received this call or calling to step it up are finishing this cycle, whatever number this cycle has for you. And you are sitting so uncomfortably in the in-between space. Disgusted really by what you see on the outside. The language in politics, the smears, the comments. AI generated rage and clickbait. The race to mediocrity. The illusion that a half-baked AI tool can replace people who are creative and can think or predict the future. That somehow you are now able to be more computer-like and function 24/7 over-optimized.

Seriously, what else are you going to optimize? I had this realization a while back on a hike. My inner voice said, it’s the same number of steps. The other voice said, geez you are getting slower. 

Next, I took the Apple Watch off. What difference does it make if it is my personal best? What does it do for me to know if my sleep was not ideal? Is it not enough if I feel good? Do I really need to feel guilty every time a fabulously rich piece of Swiss chocolate makes it into my mouth? Do I have to be the leanest, meanest, smartest, best, richest, and most optimized? Let’s not get started on a nice plate of pasta or eating a potato (gasp!!!) 

The movement against this learned narcissism is already in full flow. ‘Look at me’ is done. We know you bought the Instagram followers. We know you are using AI even though you say you do not. We know you outsourced your lead gen even though you insist I am talking to you. I call BS. You thought more is better because that’s what they told us. It turns out more is a disaster. 

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The Discrepancy That Kills Us

Moments like the one I described in a previous newsletter where you sit in a plane and recognize that you are no better than them, or your own mother who has put up this perfect version of oneself for the world to admire while it destroys you and everything that matters. This is what kills us. Metaphorically and literally. That is what keeps us up at night. The discrepancy between how we want to be seen and who we are. Because we cannot own this version of ourselves because we can’t measure up to our own image. 

The truth of our own imperfection hits us between the eyes and forces us to our knees. They will find out. I am too old, I most certainly have cellulitis by now and those extra Fire fifteen pounds are hanging very stubbornly around my midsection. No amount of Spanx or Botox or plastic surgery can hide the facts. I am a woman of a certain age. Why do we have such a hard time embracing that our lives go in stages? That we advance from one to the other. That it simply means we are moving ahead as planned.

Frankly, and forgive me here if I step on anyone’s toes, while I appreciate the effort, Madonna, Heidi Klum, Jennifer Lopez — many of those once celebrated sirens look awfully out of place competing with someone my daughter’s age. The story we tell ourselves is what? We must hold on to the original story and cannot rewrite a new one?

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The Old Stories Are Not Working for Anyone

Let me in on a secret here. The old stories are not working for anyone. I know this as a fact. I am The Growth Architect. The original one. It’s my registered trademark, glad to see it’s catching on. In my work I see hearts cracking open. Multi-millionaires begging for five hours of consecutive sleep after they optimized the optimization methodology. And I see things falling apart, followed by a whole lot of transformation. Because it is time for you to rewrite your story. And it starts with what you are telling yourself and then your willingness to do the inside work.

Alice did not wake up one morning healed. She woke up one morning and made a choice. The voice was still there. The wound was still there. But she decided that she was the one at the keyboard. Not the story. Not the three-year-old standing in the doorway. The abandoned teenager. The heartbroken adult. Her. Every single day she examines the stories her mind generates on waking, recognizes which ones belong to the original wound, and makes a deliberate choice about what she is going to build from what is there.

That is self-authorship. And it is the most underrated skill a founder can develop. Listen to her full interview on the podcast

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Transformation Is Always an Inside Job

Unless what you do is rooted in purpose and intention, how are you ever going to be believable? If it is not – you are chasing status. You are not growing into yourself. Then you feel like you live a lie and have to always worry about being found out. That is where imposter syndrome comes from. It is a misalignment.

The world is in the middle of a massive transformation. And you must — and this is not a suggestion — you must change before it does so that you can drive the change and not be caught in it. The founders who will shape this future are not the ones who optimized the hardest. They are the ones who did the inside work. Who stopped letting the wound be the narrator. Who learned, like Alice, to pick up the pen every single morning and decide what the story means today.

The wound does not have to heal before you build. It just cannot be the one driving.

—

A Closing Reflection

What story have you permitted to run as your source of truth? Is it true? Can you change the narrative and accept the wound but not what meaning it has? What would change?

Let’s grow, 

Beate.

P.S. Interested in more of my Founder of the Future concepts? Where we discuss the cycle change and share what you want to do to get ready for creating the future after the bullies are done breaking things? Join me in The Forge Masterclass at YourBusinessMC.com

The post You Will Always Carry the Wound. Stop Letting It Write the Narrative. appeared first on The Women's Code.

Life is messy. Transitions and transformations are great when you are done with them. When you go through them, not so much.

I tell my clients that there are three B’s. Breakdown. Breakthrough. Breakout. And I am in the breakdown version of this. Because of the fire, the letting go of the old version has been intense, hot like the fire that took everything. Not just the stuff I owned. The things that defined me. The image I portrayed. All of it in three feet of ashes.

“You will be more resilient,” they say.

Frankly, I didn’t need to be more resilient. Name the disaster, chances are I experienced it. Riots. Earthquake. The loss of a friend and collaborator in a Tsunami. Death. Divorce. Lawsuit. 9/11. And now the fire. Thank you very much, I have covered the topic of resilience. But this moment is not about resilience. This moment is about letting go and surrendering an old version of you that no longer serves you.

We believe that we must become something made from multiple parts. What our parents expected. What honors our ancestors. What lives up to our potential. Makes money. Creates value and makes meaningful contributions. Spends time with our kids and families. Lives balanced lives. Improves our spiritual connection. Dedicates ourselves to growth. And of course, eats and exercises the right way.

That is not balance. That is insanity.

The more I look at it, the more I realize that just creating that external version and feeding that, is both easy and difficult at the same time. That we craft this persona, call it your personal brand and then we defend it at all costs. When my godmother transitioned a few weeks ago, I see my mother and realize that this, her external version of herself is the thing that kept her together her entire life. Playing a part that she believes looks good on the outside. That she never examined who she is without this version of the woman with the hat that everyone is jealous of, admires and is deeply religious. All to avoid dealing with the realities of the stuff that is painful. Our imperfections, shortcomings, facing the mistakes we made, seeking amends for our trespasses and owning up to the choices we make. The willingness to let something that no longer serves you go and calling something new in. It’s too painful. It would be like admitting to having made a mistake. In Germany you just cannot do that. There’s punishment for that. Back when she grew up, people died for that. She took the route of asking God for forgiveness and in her life he did and therefore there is nothing else to do. It’s not happening in this lifetime. That is the decision she made. And she owns it. This decision I can live with. Because it is a somewhat conscious decision. She is 91.

The Breakdown

Watching that — what the deeper question around business success and the person that drives that success — really YOU becomes this: How are you doing?

How are you holding up in all of this? Are you buckling under the pressure? The making sure it looks good. Perhaps the monetary success is still the thing you are told that if you would only achieve it, somehow magically everything would fall into place?

Because being around a lot of high-net-worth people, I can tell you that the lifestyle just becomes more expensive. The expenses and expectations get higher. The goal posts move. The number moves. When you chase the external without the inner alignment, you are going on a bumpy ride. You may just become one of many, amongst an army of people who cannot sleep at night because the other part of them, the perfectionist cannot bridge the gap from you having done the growth work to letting your internal self catchup with becoming the person you did the work for in the first place!

It is admittedly a bit crazy making.

In my last podcast episode I speak with Tarkan, a fellow German who took his success to a whopping 50 million dollars, did business with the likes of H&M, and moved through the fashion industry at a high level. Until one day he was not sure what he was chasing. And he shut the entire thing down. Without a plan. Other than: not this.

Here is the episode. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2317415/episodes/19256413

The Breakthrough

The parallel I see — and why I did that interview — is that I want to show that there is a messy middle. The void, as Tarkan calls it. The piece where you are in the worst possible spot. Where the old is dismantled. Where you are grieving your old self while knowing you cannot continue. And where you have not yet stepped into the new version, because that vision has not shown up.

In the interview, Tarkan shares what he did to get comfortable being so uncomfortable. The 5 am Club that cracked him open in Bali. The Sufism framework that helped him understand why everything was being taken away and how to see it not as punishment, but as preparation. The 12,000 hours of self-development that have compounded into something he is still learning how to bring into the world.

And as I did this interview, I had to admit something to myself. I am there too.

It burned. God, I am so over saying that. Half the questions I am asked, I must answer with don’t have that anymore, it burned. That burned. It is exhausting.

And the internal part is not much easier. Now add the somatic piece of grief and let go of it. Headache. Stiff neck. Name the virus of the week, and it will find me. I just want to sleep.

Why can’t I focus?

That is in direct competition with the old version of me that says, you can design a process around it. Will take you less than an hour. My superskill, easy! Isn’t action always the answer.

And the answer is no. Not this time.

The Breakout

The answer is: can you just be, for once, and let this do what it does?

Can you sit with this in full surrender and allow it to be what it needs to be? The grief and the sadness that come with letting something go. Being just in that without the need to call in something new. Because this is about being not doing.

I hate this part.

Because the new thing is probably already in formation. It is already here.

I just cannot see it yet.

That is the breakthrough before the breakout. That is where Tarkan is. That is where I am. And if you are reading this and nodding — that is where you are too.

The breakthrough is not the end of the story. It is already the first chapter of the next one. The prelude. The breakthrough does not announce itself. And the breakout? It does not send a calendar invite. It arrives in the quiet after your full surrender. This is the moment you step into the new version of yourself because you were willing to stay in the fire long enough to allow the Phoenix to rise. The Phoenix rises from the ashes, after the fire has full consumed everything.

That’s why I say I have been forged in fire. Literally. And it is why I am calling where I am going — The Forge.

The messy middle is not a detour. It is the work. And you are not behind. You are exactly where you need to be. As I tell you that, my friends are telling me. 

We are in this together.

A Closing Reflection

What if the thing you are waiting to arrive is already forming — and the only thing standing between you and seeing it is your willingness to stop filling the silence? To fully surrender. To be and not do.

Let’s grow, Beate.

P.S. If you are in the void right now and you want a framework for what comes next, The Forge starts here: YourBusinessMC.com  

The post When You Know You’re Done With One Thing but the Next Thing Hasn’t Arrived appeared first on The Women's Code.

When you are so deep in the grief of your own life, sometimes you forget that others — roughly 40,000 others — are going through the same thing. With over 14,000 structures burned in Los Angeles, there are many of us in different stages of grief and recovery. One year ago, I heard the clear message of letting go. And what I got was a complete serving of letting go of my life as I knew it. My home, office, podcast studio, belief system, what I wore, how I showed up, my accessories, my closet staples, the shoes, my favorite leather jacket. The list is endless. Our story is difficult because we had just gotten married and were on our honeymoon. We did not save anything. Not even our art, a piece of jewelry, or the cash.

And then sometimes you hear the other stories. The couple in their eighties, he is on dialysis, and they are rebuilding. The underinsured. The family with teenagers fresh out of Covid. The ones with a nine-month pregnant wife. We all have our story. There is a part about a disaster you are overcoming, where your friends and the world have compassion for you. It did not happen because you did something. It is outside of your control.

Now, let us go to the other side of things.

What if things are going exactly as you thought they should? You hit the jackpot. You found the thing.

The thing became successful. You hustle, you put the hours in, you are going somewhere. I cannot begin to tell you how many people I know who are successful who do not sleep through a single night. Whose relationships are volatile or sexless. Who has children who despise them? And that is what we are taught — you are either rich and unhappy and mean, or you are poor and happy.

MEET THE WOMAN WHO LOOKED LIKE SHE HAD IT ALL FIGURED OUT

She lost her home in the Palisades Fire, too. She is everything you want to be. Beautiful inside and out, successful at just about everything she touches, and she looks immaculate from afar. Tracy built Hatch Beauty into a $100 million empire in five and a half years. Self-funded. Three kids under five. EY Entrepreneur of the Year. Every metric of success you could point to and say, she made it.

And then she could not keep up with her own success.

One morning at 7:15, after another three-hour sleep night, with exactly 14 minutes and 30 seconds calculated to get coffee, use the bathroom, and make her next appointment, she pulled over on Pico Boulevard and thought three steps into a truck doing 50 miles an hour was the only way out.

What I learned from Tracy is that once again, what we see on the outside — the carefully crafted image— is often not what lives on the inside. That no matter the level of success, we all have a story on the inside that does not match.

HOLDING ON TO THE IMAGE CAN COST YOU EVERYTHING

The biggest theme I keep coming back to is this. When all of our effort goes into keeping up outside appearances, we destroy ourselves on the inside.

This past week, I flew to Germany to hopefully catch my favorite aunt and godmother in time before she took flight. I made it just in time. She departed two days later. Then I went to see my mother, and I did something I have never done. I confronted her about what she did when I was a child. Asked her if she was even willing to admit it. And I realized she had completely erased twelve years from her memory.

It does not fit the image of who she has decided she is today. That is why she cannot ask me any questions. She does not know who I am, what my life is like, because she cannot bridge fourteen years.

We cannot have those remember when you were little conversations. The teenage years. None of it.

As I sat there, I was thankful. Thankful that I have done the work. That I can say it without anger.

That I am not even mad at her anymore, just sad at how much she missed. Because she was — and remains — obsessed with what other people think. She gave up the entire richness of connection and intimacy with the people who mattered most, so she could hold on to that image of herself.

TAKING A HARD LOOK AT YOURSELF — TIME TO LOSE THE PRETENSE

As a fire survivor, survivor of childhood abuse, raised by World War II parents who were raised by World War III parents, I have myself relentlessly pursued the upkeep of the image that worked for social media, that fit the brand, that matched what I was offering. And while we watch the great dismantling of our cultures, systems, and structures, I predict that what will rise is those of us who are done walking in the shoes of others. Done parading on the runway of life in borrowed clothes, we present as if they are ours.

This is a time of loss. The loss of the pretense and the pretending.

Because if I learned one thing in the fire, and while dealing with my own trauma, it is this. I am enough. I have friends. I am loved. I am everything that little girl was told she was not. And for every one of us who stands up and drops the act, we step into a new flow of living. Really living.

Enjoying and collecting moments of true connection where the dinner with friends supersedes in importance any deadline for a social media post.

Tracy’s story cracked that open for me all over again. The secret keeping. The toxic silence of maintaining a perfect outside image while quietly falling apart inside. The identity built around being the one who has it together, who never breaks, who figures it out. And how that identity becomes its own kind of prison.

She also shares what came after the turning point. The daily practices that recalibrated her thinking. How she rebuilt a $27 million business in 24 months. And the question that changed everything — not how do I keep up, but how good could it get.

A CLOSING REFLECTION

Where in your life have you been postponing yourself — your happiness, your relationships, your actual self — until after the next milestone? And what would happen if you stopped waiting?

The post Keeping Up Appearances Until It Almost Kills You appeared first on The Women's Code.