Beate Chelette's Blog: 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.

 

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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.

Why I Am Having This Conversation Now

Every so often a conversation sneaks up on you and reverberates when you are not looking. The temper tantrum of the toddler. You, yourself doing things behind your own back — ouch. And suddenly with that punch line smack to your face and the following nosebleed you look in the mirror and ask yourself: what am I doing this for?

 

The best part about my podcast is that I get to pick conversations with people I find interesting. Often they tell me what I need to hear and I get to share that with you. This episode was a ball-busting, gut-wrenching, nose-punching conversation. Immediately followed by my inner toddler throwing a temper tantrum. That poor unloved, mistreated little girl, who still reels from all this abuse. I may or may not have said in exasperation — why do I keep ending up here.

 

The Weight That Does Not Have a 90-Day Expiry

This may not make any sense without some context, so let me backtrack this past week. I am struggling. My husband is doing a talk about the fire and what it did to him. I took him through my system and structured the talk. While it is his talk, it is our story. We both realize in quite a few late-night tender moments that we have been hurting. A lot.

 

The fire was in January 2025. But it is not just our possessions. Who we were burned to the ground as well. Both of us immediately proceeded to try to get back to the way it was. But we are not those people anymore. It is too big. You cannot take something like this and, after the empathy window of 90 days expires, toughen up and move on. For those of you who know me — I most certainly do not need to be more resilient. I am pretty much a perfect ten on that scale. So if resilience is not the question, and overcoming and enduring is not the answer, then what is it.

 

When Everything Is Shifting at Once

I am facing what I fear is a massive betrayal from someone I trusted for twenty years. My own team is shifting. It has been a tough road to not go nuts with the political climate, all these fake bots designed for us to be at each other’s throats. The Edelman Trust Barometer confirms it — people do not trust anyone or anything. No wonder it leaves room for the crazy to do really crazy things.

 

I cite this not to be political but because I genuinely fear for our children and our grandchildren. If I said I would help you become a Founder of the Future, then I do need to stand up and speak my truth. Because I have certainly seen enough.

 

The Turning Point Nobody Talks About

We all get to turning points in our lives. Where we lose the feeling for it. Where it does not feel right anymore. Where you simply cannot do it any longer. Where you dread sitting at your desk, where you avoid the work, where the inner toddler wants ice cream and the playground and anything but what you are forcing yourself to do.

 

What is your this?

 

My husband is deeply involved with EO — the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. Many of our closest friends are in EO and so many have supported us through this time. I have been running an Accelerator Group for years. I love it. And then I said I am going to stop it. You should have seen my husband scratch his head. He broke it down for me: so what you are saying is that nothing lights you up more than watching the lights come on in someone — and you want to stop doing it. You really should have seen his face.

 

Then he said: why don’t you ask them. So I did. I asked: who am I to you.

 

Of course I cried.

 

What I Know I Can Do

I realize over and over again that my gift is to see you before you see yourself. That no matter how wild, unconventional, or unformed your idea is right now, I can get it shaped into something that is uniquely yours in no time. I calculated it. I spend one year with a monthly three-and-a-half hour session with them. That is it. They will never be the same. They come out fabulous, powerful, and capable beyond anything they thought possible. I love it. I love them. I am so proud, so humbled that I can do this.

 

And yet I do not have enough business. I cannot figure it out.

 

What Rachel Said That I Already Knew

So when I spoke to Rachel Allen this week, she only said what I have been feeling for a while. Something has got to change. We cannot keep ourselves so busy doing all of this for no reason other than someone said that is what you must do. Would you even notice if I did not write one week or one month? Is this the fear we try to push away — that if we do not keep up this relentless noise we will be forgotten?

 

Then I talked to my AI. And it asked: what would you do? And I said I would write. I love automatic writing, where I do not go back and clean or organize it, where you are listening to my stream of consciousness. The most feedback I ever get is when I talk the way I talk. And I like to go really deep.

 

Someone in the group said: I feel that you want me to make the money, but it is more than that. And I said — I want you to be happy. And I want the money to be the compensation for your happiness that you spread. And as I say it I have to ask myself the same question. Does this work for me? And the answer is: I need to change. And maybe if you are reading this, you need to change too.

 

A Closing Reflection

What is the one thing you are still doing because someone told you that is how it is done — not because it is yours? Sit with that for a moment. You do not have to burn it all down today. But you do have to be honest about what it is costing you to keep pretending it is fine.

 

The Forge Masterclass Series

I have been forged in fire. Literally. And so I am calling it The Forge.

 

I have created a free three-part Masterclass and I want you to have it. Here is what we cover.

 

In the first masterclass we figure out the stage of your business and what belongs in each stage — so you can finally shut down the noise, stop doing things that do not belong where you are, and get clear on what matters right now.

 

In the second masterclass I take you through the $40 Million Blueprint — the same diagnostic framework I built from my own experience scaling and selling a company. I show you how to analyze your business at each stage, identify what the real issues are, and how to solve them. Not the symptoms. The actual problems.

 

In the third masterclass we talk about how to take what you have already built and turn it into sales. Not more content. Not more noise. Revenue from what exists.

 

This is free. It is waiting for you at YourBusinessMC.com. If this conversation landed for you today, that is your next step.

 

YourBusinessMC.com

 

Let’s grow, 

Beate

Beate Chelette is The Growth Architect & Founder of The Women’s Code, a training company specialized in providing companies an ROI on Balanced Leadership. She has been named one of 50 must-follow women entrepreneurs by the Huffington Post. A first-generation immigrant who found herself $135,000 in debt as a single parent, she bootstrapped her passion for photography into a highly-successful global business, and eventually sold it to Bill Gates in a multimillion-dollar deal.

Beate works with business leaders and supports organizations by developing and providing training the training, tools, and expertise to create and maintain a balanced, equal and inclusive work environment that fosters creativity, employee engagement and corporate growth.

Recent clients include Merck, Women’s Legislative Caucus of California, Cal State University Dominguez Hills, Small Business Development Centers (SBDC), NFTE, CreativeLive, the Association of Corporate Growth, and TracyLocke.

Beate is the author of the #1 International Amazon Bestseller “Happy Woman Happy World – How to Go From Overwhelmed to Awesome” a book that corporate trainer and best-selling author Brian Tracy calls “a handbook for every woman who wants health, success and a fulfilling career.

To book Beate to speak or train please connect here.

The post What Are You Doing This For appeared first on The Women's Code.

I Walked Into That Call Excited.

We finally had time to tackle something we had been planning. I had a list. I was prepared. I was looking forward to it.

Within minutes I realized I was in a completely different conversation than I thought I had scheduled.

Numbers being thrown at me that didn’t add up. A direction I hadn’t anticipated. Pressure dressed up as guidance. And me — sitting there — trying to find the thread back to what I thought this call was supposed to be.

I didn’t say much. I got quiet.

I got off the call and just sat there.

What the heck just happened.

I was confused,  disoriented, and slightly nauseous. The feeling of someone who has experienced something they cannot yet categorize. My alarm bells were going off — red hot — but I had no words for it yet. Just that uneasy feeling. That physical wrongness sitting in my chest that wouldn’t move.

And Then I Started Going Back Through The Data.

Because that is what I do when something doesn’t add up. I audit. Apply logic and strategy. 

And once you start looking — really looking — you start finding things. Small things and quite a few big things. Together forming a picture you didn’t realize you were looking at. A recommendation that in hindsight served a different interest than I had assumed. A pattern I had explained away because I trusted the person, so I trusted the explanation.

I went back further. Found more things that didn’t add up.

The logic I had built around this trusted advisor — the story I had told myself about who they were and what they were doing for me — just exploded. Because once your alarm bells go off, you start asking questions you hadn’t thought to ask before. You had no reason to. And then you do ask because you have many reasons to do so.

My husband asked me — do you think you just saw a version of this person today that you hadn’t seen before?

I don’t know. I don’t know if something changed or if I just saw something I hadn’t let myself see before. I don’t know if this was always there or if I am reading this wrong entirely. And that uncertainty — that not knowing — was almost harder than a clean answer would have been.

What I did know was this. Something had shifted. In me. Twenty years of trust — gone. 

I said to my husband: I feel like an idiot. I thought this person had my back. What I am starting to think is that I am just a number in a spreadsheet they are trying to secure.

My Body Knew Before My Brain Did.

The nausea. The alarm bells. The chest tightening before I had a single coherent thought about what was wrong. Aside from the financial implications this has, I had to acknowledge that my body seem to know something that I didn’t. Something was really wrong. 

Lucky me for being able to talk to the professionals about this. Meet Dr. Michelle and Dr. Dennis Reina — two PhDs who have spent 35 years studying trust in organizations and they have a name for this. They call it the somatic experience of trust disruption. Your nervous system registers that something is off before your conscious mind can process it. You feel the break before you understand it.

Which means my gut was telling me something real.

My brain just hadn’t caught up to it yet.

This Is Not Just My Story.

I am sharing this — deliberately vague, and because this is not about them — because I think most of you have had a version of this moment.

Maybe not with the same intensity. Maybe not after twenty years. But that feeling of getting off a call or walking out of a meeting and thinking — wait. Something just happened. That uneasy audit that follows. Going back through conversations. Finding of things that in hindsight look different than they did at the time.

That feeling is your trust radar working exactly as it should.

And right now, in 2026, that radar is being asked to work harder than ever before.

The Edelman Trust Barometer — the largest trust study in the world — just released its annual findings. Trust in institutions, in media, in government, in corporate leadership — at historic lows and still declining. AI deepfakes mean we cannot trust what we see with our own eyes. Social media is performance. Everything that was supposed to be a stable reference point has become something to question.70% of us don’t trust anything or anyone.

And now, we are all doing the feverish audit now. Constantly. On everything.

Which Brought Me To A Question I Couldn’t Shake.

If I — someone who thinks hard about trust, who interviews leaders for a living, who has built a career on reading people and situations — if I can miss something for twenty years with someone I spoke to regularly, what does that mean for every other area in our lives?

Because if you are skeptical of everyone right now — and you have every reason to be — then someone is extending that exact same skepticism to you. To your brand. To your promises. To every piece of content you put out and every claim you make about who you are. This is coming from the highest level of world leaders all the way to your community. People are stuck in their belief systems and won’t allow anyone else or any other idea to infiltrate what they already believe. 

You are being audited. Every single day. By people who have been burned before and are not interested in being burned again. But, you lead people. You run a company. You are a community leader, you need to be trusted. 

So What Do You Do With That?

Become someone who doesn’t require an audit. Forget being perfect or even trying to have all the answers. But by being so consistently, transparently, uncomplicatedly yourself — in the small moments, the routine interactions, the follow-ups nobody is particularly watching — that there is no gap between who you perform and who you are.

Dr. Michelle and Dr. Dennis Reina call this the three dimensions of trust. Character — you do what you say, every time, without exception. Communication — you share what you know, admit what you don’t, and tell the truth especially when it is uncomfortable. Capability — you know what you are good at, you own what you are not, and you respect the people around you enough to use their strengths instead of pretending you don’t need them.

None of it is complicated. All of it requires a daily decision to show up the same way whether someone is watching or not.

What I know is that one call cracked the foundation. I will never feel the same way. I am exploring alternatives. This will not happen again.

A Closing Reflection.

Have you ever had a call, a meeting, a moment where your alarm bells went off and you spent days going back through everything trying to figure out what you missed?

What did you find? And what did it change about how you show up?

I’d love to hear where you are in this. Drop a comment or send me a message. This conversation matters.

 

Let’s grow, 

Beate

Beate Chelette is The Growth Architect & Founder of The Women’s Code, a training company specialized in providing companies an ROI on Balanced Leadership. She has been named one of 50 must-follow women entrepreneurs by the Huffington Post. A first-generation immigrant who found herself $135,000 in debt as a single parent, she bootstrapped her passion for photography into a highly-successful global business, and eventually sold it to Bill Gates in a multimillion-dollar deal.

Beate works with business leaders and supports organizations by developing and providing training the training, tools, and expertise to create and maintain a balanced, equal and inclusive work environment that fosters creativity, employee engagement and corporate growth.

Recent clients include Merck, Women’s Legislative Caucus of California, Cal State University Dominguez Hills, Small Business Development Centers (SBDC), NFTE, CreativeLive, the Association of Corporate Growth, and TracyLocke.

Beate is the author of the #1 International Amazon Bestseller “Happy Woman Happy World – How to Go From Overwhelmed to Awesome” a book that corporate trainer and best-selling author Brian Tracy calls “a handbook for every woman who wants health, success and a fulfilling career.

To book Beate to speak or train please connect here.

The post I Feel Like An Idiot. And That’s On Me. appeared first on The Women's Code.

I Had It All. And It Was Literally Crazy Making.

I was 23. Photo editor at Elle Magazine in Germany.

I had the job everyone wanted. The invites to every gallery opening, every glitzy event, every room worth being in. So much of all the desirable stuff. So much of everything that is supposed to mean you have made it.

And it was literally crazy making.

Because I just wasn’t feeling like I really belonged there.

I was playing a part. Performing a version of success that I had achieved — and that gave me nothing I thought it would.

It is a crushing reality check. You worked for this. You wanted this. And then you get there and see what is behind the curtain. Eating disorders. The cattiness. Meanness. The relentless pace. The fakeness dressed up as glamour. And you realize — this isn’t real. None of it is real. And the thing you chased so hard turns out to be a beautifully decorated empty room.

I kept waiting for the feeling to catch up to reality. It never did.

And then it dawned on me — they didn’t care what or who I was. They only cared about what I could do for them.

The job. The title. The function I served. I was useful. I was not seen.

And the moment I understood that I knew I had to leave. I did. Six weeks later I packed a suitcase. Got on a plane to the United States to go to Key West on a houseboat. No plan. Just a knowing so loud I couldn’t unhear it. I remember sitting on the plane next to a guy who had a rash all over his body and kept itching the entire flight — you must have gone nuts!

 She Felt It Too. Standing on a Tram in Berlin at 4pm.

This week on The Business Growth Architect Show — Founders of the Future podcast, I sat down with Wiebke Tasch — a fellow German, a publishing strategist, and the founder of Digital Authors LLC.

And within the first five minutes of our conversation, I knew exactly who she was.

Because she had stood in her own version of my Elle Magazine desk.

Hers was a tram. 4pm in Berlin. She had just come from an interview at one of the biggest publishing houses in Germany. She got the job. The dream job. The one everyone who wanted to go into publishing would have done anything for.

And something was knocking on her chest from the inside. Screaming. Get out. Get out now. If you stay, you will die. Not physically.

From the inside.

She describes it as her soul shrinking. I know exactly what that feels like.

She had done everything right. Two bachelor’s degrees. A master. Gap years in Argentina and Canada. The hustle. The city. And a career path laid out in front of her that looked, to everyone watching, like success.

She said no.

This Is What Germany Does.

If you are not from Germany or familiar with the history of the people and how they survived, let me explain something.

Germany is a country that was rebuilt after two world wars on the foundation of precision, order, and the elimination of mistakes. You do not veer off the path. You do not trust feelings over logic. You follow the sequence — study, work, marry, house, car, retire — and you do it correctly so that no one can criticize you. Perfection is the name of that game. There is a lot of guilt and shame we carry for obvious reasons.

The cultural weight of that is immense. Especially when you are the daughter of a mayor, as Wiebke was. Everyone knows you. Everyone has already decided who you are supposed to become. Funny enough, my uncle was the mayor of Munich. There are definitely expectations.

And your inner voice — the one that says this is not your life — does not get a seat at the table.

Feelings, as Wiebke said, are completely verboten.

What Wiebke and I both had to do was not just make a career decision. We had to break out of a generational mold. We had to choose ourselves over the plan that had been made for us before we were old enough to have an opinion about it.

That is not a small thing. That is everything. And perhaps you can relate.

She Asked for a Sign. The Universe Answered.

After Wiebke said no to the Berlin job, she went home and asked the universe for a sign.

The next day, an email arrived. An invitation to a women’s empowerment workshop in Morocco.

She went.

It was February 2020. Ten days with a group of women — visualization, hypnosis, past life regression, and something far more important than any of that: women in their forties and fifties who had followed the calling and lived to tell the story.

They all said the same thing. When you put your energy into something that is truly yours, it works out. Not in a straight line. Not from A to B. But it works out.

Then COVID hit.

Wiebke stayed in Morocco until June. And while the rest of the world panicked, she built. Website. Offers. Pricing. Her first clients were the women she had met at the workshop — coaches and therapists who needed help turning their expertise into books.

Digital Authors LLC was born in a lockdown in Morocco, from a 10-day empowerment workshop, from a sign she asked for because she had run out of logic.

That is not a business origin story. That is a soul story and one that is still evolving. This is the follow-your-dream path.

What Is Your Equivalent of This Awakening?

I want to stop here and ask you.

Have you had a moment like this?

Are you experiencing it right now?

Maybe it is not a tram in Berlin or a desk at a fashion magazine. Maybe it is a boardroom you have worked for twenty years to sit in. A business you built that no longer feels like yours. A role that looks extraordinary on your LinkedIn profile and exhausting in your actual life. You may have fulfilled your parents’ dream, become someone they can be proud of. Or like @Nick Jain realize that your Harvard MBA is useless.

Maybe you are not at the breaking point yet. Maybe it is just a quiet hum underneath everything. A feeling you keep pushing down because the logic says stay. The mortgage and the lifestyle created the golden prison and your logical voice says you have to stay.

But the inner voice is pesky. And it just keeps getting louder.

And you know this is happening, but you are not ready to listen. You can’t. Obligations, expectations and demands.

But there is a price. Your happiness.

I want to ask you — what does that voice say to you? Not the voice of reason. Not the voice of obligation. The other one. The one that shows up at 3am, or in the middle of a meeting, or on a Sunday night when the week is about to start again.

What does it say?

Because here is what I have learned from twenty years of building businesses, interviewing hundreds of founders, and having my own version of every breakdown and breakthrough on this show:

That voice is not a problem to be managed.

It is information. It’s your own wisdom, your connection to your higher, more evolved self that is calling you.

It is the most honest thing about you.

Wiebke heard it on a tram. I heard it at a desk surrounded by everything I was supposed to want. And we both did the same thing — we stopped arguing with it and started listening.

What comes after the listening is the whole story. And it is different for everyone. But it always starts with the same moment.

The moment you stop performing in your life and start becoming the Founder of your future.

A Closing Reflection

How do you reconcile what your inner voice is saying with the obligations of your outer world?

I think we all back up against this. More than once. More than we want to admit because it hurts.

But here is the question I keep coming back to — what makes you think you are going to be more successful doing something you are no longer passionate about versus following the path to your own fulfillment?

Wouldn’t you expect — shouldn’t you expect — that on that new path, your true unfolding happens? That wealth, happiness, the sense of finally being in the right place — wouldn’t that be waiting for you there?

The obligations are real. The fear is real. But so is the cost of staying somewhere your soul has already left.

I’d love to hear where you are in this. Drop a comment or send me a message. This conversation matters.

 

Let’s grow, 

Beate

Beate Chelette is The Growth Architect & Founder of The Women’s Code, a training company specialized in providing companies an ROI on Balanced Leadership. She has been named one of 50 must-follow women entrepreneurs by the Huffington Post. A first-generation immigrant who found herself $135,000 in debt as a single parent, she bootstrapped her passion for photography into a highly-successful global business, and eventually sold it to Bill Gates in a multimillion-dollar deal.

Beate works with business leaders and supports organizations by developing and providing training the training, tools, and expertise to create and maintain a balanced, equal and inclusive work environment that fosters creativity, employee engagement and corporate growth.

Recent clients include Merck, Women’s Legislative Caucus of California, Cal State University Dominguez Hills, Small Business Development Centers (SBDC), NFTE, CreativeLive, the Association of Corporate Growth, and TracyLocke.

Beate is the author of the #1 International Amazon Bestseller “Happy Woman Happy World – How to Go From Overwhelmed to Awesome” a book that corporate trainer and best-selling author Brian Tracy calls “a handbook for every woman who wants health, success and a fulfilling career.

To book Beate to speak or train please connect here.

The post You Are Doing Everything Right But Why Doesn’t It Feel Right? appeared first on The Women's Code.

Chapter 1: The Year Nobody Prepares You For

We came back to nothing.

I do not mean that as a metaphor. I mean we landed from our spiritual journey, four days after getting married, and we had nothing. No home. No clothes. No toothpaste. No phone charger. No Mother’s Day cards. No grandmother’s pearls. No letters from my father who has been gone for twenty years. Nothing that was meaningful, sentimental, irreplaceable. Gone. Burned at two thousand degrees. Not damaged. Not salvageable. Vaporized.

The first days were a blur of logistics. Where do we sleep? What do we wear? Where do we get the basics? And underneath all of that was something we did not have language for yet. A grief so heavy and so disorienting that we genuinely did not know which way was up.

People were extraordinarily kind. The outpouring of support from people we knew and people we had never met was something my husband and I still cannot talk about without getting emotional. And yet even in the middle of all of that generosity, there was this strange feeling of not being anchored to anything. Of reaching for something familiar and finding only air.

We had lost the physical containers of our life. And without those containers, we were not quite sure who we were anymore.

Nobody prepares you for that part. The self-help books do not cover the weeks where you cannot focus. Where a simple decision feels impossible. When you don’t care how you look. No makeup, I didn’t use a blow dryer for months.

Where you find yourself standing in the bathroom staring at the sink not remembering if the hot water is to the right or left. Grief does not follow a schedule or respond to productivity hacks. And nobody tells you that sometimes the most honest thing you can say is — I took my eyes off the ball. And I do not know yet when I will get them back.

Chapter 2: The Pressure To Be Further Along

Somewhere around the six month mark, a different kind of weight started to settle in.

We should be further along by now.

I heard it in my own head. I heard it in the way well-meaning people asked how things were going, their voices carrying just a hint of expectation that the answer should be better by now. I felt it in the gap between where I thought we would be at this point and where we actually were.

The phoenix rises from the ashes. That is what they say. Strength is forged in fire. What does not kill you makes you stronger. Out of the darkest moments come the greatest breakthroughs. We have all heard these things so many times they have become wallpaper. We say them to people who are suffering because we do not know what else to say. Because the alternative — sitting with someone in the reality that some things just take a very long time and there is no shortcut — is uncomfortable for everyone.

I want to tell you something honest. A year out, we are not the phoenix yet. We are not standing on the mountain looking back at the fire with hard-won wisdom and a clear vision of what it all meant. We are still in the valley. Still rebuilding. Still some days not entirely sure what rebuilding even looks like. We have yet to break ground.

And I have had to make peace with that  because pretending to be further along than you are is its own kind of loss. It is the loss of the truth. And after losing everything else, I am not willing to lose that too.

So here is where we are. A year in. Still in it. Still moving. Not yet on the other side.

Chapter 3: Then The Health Wake Up

And then, as if the year needed one more thing, my body sent the bill.

On the one-year anniversary of the fires, I was hospitalized for five days. Emergency surgery. Serious enough that my husband flew to get me. Serious enough that the recovery took months. Serious enough that I spent the better part of this year not just rebuilding from the fire but rebuilding my physical self at the same time. And an almost weird relief that while I was in the hospital nobody expected anything from me. I was being cared for because I could not care for myself.

There is only so much you can absorb before the question becomes less philosophical and more visceral. How much more do I need to handle? When does it get to be enough? 

The health wake up did something to my sense of timeline that I am still processing. When your body stops you, when it physically removes you from the equation for weeks and months at a time, the gap between where you are and where you thought you would be gets wider. And the pressure — internal, mostly, but relentless — does not pause while you recover.

Shouldn’t we be further along?

I keep coming back to that question. And I keep arriving at the same uncomfortable answer. We are not further along. We are here. Exactly here. Still in the process. Still in the middle of something that does not yet have an ending I can show you. Still searching for the gift that everyone keeps promising is in here somewhere.

I will let you know when I find it. But I am not going to manufacture a resolution I do not yet have. I am not performing anymore. And frankly, you deserve better than that from me.

Chapter 4: Personal Reflection — The Message I Did Not Ask For

Here is what I expected.

I expected that at some point in this process — in the meditation, in the grief work, in the quiet moments of rebuilding — I would receive some kind of clear directive. A blueprint. A download. The thing that would make sense of all of it and point me toward the next chapter with clarity and purpose and maybe even a little relief.

What I got instead was this.

Give it all away!

I want you to understand what that means in context. I am a strategist. I have spent decades developing frameworks, systems, methodologies, trademarks, and business models that I have fiercely protected as intellectual property. It is how I built my career. It is how I created value. It is the foundation of everything I built professionally. You have to protect your intellectual property, Your IP.

And in the middle of the worst year of my life, the message was not — here is how you rebuild. The message was — stop protecting what you know and give it to Founders of the Future. 

Let that sink in for a moment. Give it away.

Not just what you do. How you do it. The entire system. The business model mechanics. The diagnostic frameworks. The alignment tools. Everything. To the founders who are building what comes next. Because this moment — the breaking of the old systems, the collapse of the structures that were never going to hold anyway — this is the moment that needs builders. And builders need tools. That’s my job. That’s what the voice said.

 

But this one thing — this inconvenient, expensive, completely counterintuitive directive — I am listening to. For the first time ever I am opening the LAB. Because the message was clear and I have learned, at significant cost, what happens when you do not listen.

If you are a Founder of the Future — and if you are reading this, you are — then what I have spent decades protecting is now yours. The episode is out. The masterclass series is coming. And everything I know about how business actually works, what stage you are in, what is misaligned, and how to go out and make sales in this market right now — all of it — is yours.

I will let you know when I find the phoenix. Until then, I am in the ashes with you. And apparently I am handing out blueprints to anyone who wants to know how to build a business.

Here is the episode and here’s the Masterclass. It’s live.

🔗 yourbusinessmc.com

 

Let’s grow, 

Beate

Beate Chelette is The Growth Architect & Founder of The Women’s Code, a training company specialized in providing companies an ROI on Balanced Leadership. She has been named one of 50 must-follow women entrepreneurs by the Huffington Post. A first-generation immigrant who found herself $135,000 in debt as a single parent, she bootstrapped her passion for photography into a highly-successful global business, and eventually sold it to Bill Gates in a multimillion-dollar deal.

Beate works with business leaders and supports organizations by developing and providing training the training, tools, and expertise to create and maintain a balanced, equal and inclusive work environment that fosters creativity, employee engagement and corporate growth.

Recent clients include Merck, Women’s Legislative Caucus of California, Cal State University Dominguez Hills, Small Business Development Centers (SBDC), NFTE, CreativeLive, the Association of Corporate Growth, and TracyLocke.

Beate is the author of the #1 International Amazon Bestseller “Happy Woman Happy World – How to Go From Overwhelmed to Awesome” a book that corporate trainer and best-selling author Brian Tracy calls “a handbook for every woman who wants health, success and a fulfilling career.

To book Beate to speak or train please connect here.

The post We Are Still In It. And That Is The Truth Nobody Tells You About Rock Bottom. appeared first on The Women's Code.

What a Harvard MBA and Former McKinsey Consultant Told Me That I Did Not Want To Hear — And Why I Invited Him On Anyway

I have learned something after years of doing this work. And I see it every single day.

We come to believe firmly what we believe in. That sounds like a mouthful but stay with me. Because the danger is not in having strong beliefs. The danger is when you only allow confirmation of those beliefs to come in. When every book you read, every person you follow, every conversation you have simply reflects back what you already think is true.

When that happens you have stopped growing. You have built a fortress around your own thinking. And you are slowly becoming a prisoner inside it.

How do I know if what I am thinking is actually true?

As a podcast host I have a tool most people do not. I can bring in people who agree with me. And people who do not. People who see the world completely differently. And then I have to sit across from them and stay open. Not just listen politely while waiting to make my point. Actually staying open.

Nick Jain is one of those people. Harvard MBA. McKinsey. The kind of career that gets you into every room you want to be in. And he sat across from me and said that everything he worked for over the last thirty years does not matter anymore. For one reason only. The world changed.

I invited him on because I needed to hear that. Even though part of me did not want to.

The Fortress We Build Around Our Own Thinking

I have spent the better part of two decades building a philosophy. The inner work comes first. Strategy without foundation is just noise. You have to know your why before the how means anything. I believe this. I have lived it. I have watched it work for thousands of people I have coached and trained.

And because it has worked I have also — if I am honest — possibly stopped questioning it as much as I should.

That is how confirmation bias works. It does not announce itself. It does not feel like closed mindedness. It feels like wisdom. It feels like discernment. It feels like you have simply learned what works and stopped wasting time on what does not. Think about a wise guy sharing their knowledge. That’s so Beate… I love seeing myself that way. Hello ego!

Until someone sits across from you and says something that does not quite fit or it threatens that previous belief. And you feel that pull to find the flaw in THEIR argument. To protect what you have built. 

I felt that pull with Nick.

He said in business you have to let the spirituality go to the side and focus on what you can measure. What you can prove. What the data is telling you.

My first instinct was to push back. And then I stopped. Because I thought about Sharona.

The Woman Who Refused To Leave My Office

The single most important hire I ever made in my business was a controller. She was more expensive than anyone I had ever paid. Her name was Sharona.

I will never forget the day she walked into my office in her high heels, perfectly put together, she does wear the best clothes. She closed the door behind her, threw a folder on my desk and refused to leave until I looked at those numbers. She had that look on her face. Crossed arms, too.

It was not comfortable. I did not want to look. I had been running my business on instinct and vision and sheer will for years. I knew we were doing well. I did not particularly want to know the details.

Sharona did not care what I wanted.

And she wasn’t leaving. And when I finally looked — really looked — it was the first time I truly understood where I was making my money. Not where I thought I was making it. Not where it felt like I was making it. Where I actually was.

Once I saw it I could not unsee it. I knew exactly what I needed to do more of. I knew what to stop doing. I knew what the path to an acquisition looked like in actual numbers on an actual page.

We did the work. And we sold. For a few million dollars.

Sharona was not my spiritual advisor. She was not my mindset coach. She did not ask me about my why. She threw a folder on my desk and made me look at reality. She was my numbers girl. She crunched them all day long.

And it changed everything.

What I Had To Admit To Myself

Here is what Nick made me reckon with.

I teach strategy. I teach systems. I teach the five steps and the frameworks and the operating models. And I also teach that none of it works without the inner foundation. Both things are true and I stand behind both of them completely.

But somewhere along the way I started to weigh the inner work so heavily that I was in danger of using it as a reason not to look at the numbers. If the inner works the outer will follow. 

The world does not wait for your spiritual development to catch up. And neither do your numbers.

Nick said that the entire economic model of the last two thousand years was built on intelligence being expensive. The expert. The consultant. The credentialed professional. The person who knew something you did not and charged you accordingly for it. And that model is collapsing right now in real time. The intelligence that used to cost half a million dollars a year is available for a few dollars a month. That changes everything for every business owner reading this newsletter.

Including me. Including you.

Two Things That Seem Contradictory Can Both Be True

Nick is a deeply spiritual person. He told me that directly. His values — passed down from his grandparents who came from colonial India, earned through an immigrant household with every disadvantage you can imagine — are the foundation of how he runs his internal world.

He just does not let that be an excuse to avoid the numbers.

And that is the thing I keep coming back to.

His grandmother’s survival was pragmatic. You make do with the world you have. You do not mourn what is gone. You find the opportunity in what is arriving. That is faith. And it shows up differently for different people.

We prove something on this show every week. Two seemingly contradictory viewpoints can exist at the same time. The inner work matters. And the outer strategy matters. Your vision is everything. And the world is moving whether you are ready or not.

Both are true. At the same time.

Pay attention to both.

A Closing Reflection

I am still thinking about the confirmation bias question.

How do I know if what I am thinking is true? How do any of us know? We have built our beliefs from experience and evidence and the stories we tell ourselves about what happened and why. And then we go looking for more of the same. More confirmation. More validation. More proof that we were right all along.

The practice — the real practice — is to keep inviting the Nicks and the Sharonas in. The people who will throw a folder on your desk and refuse to leave until you look. The people who will sit across from you and say something that does not fit your framework and mean it.

To test what you believe. To sharpen it. To make sure it is actually yours and not just a fortress you built so long ago you forgot you were living inside it.

Nick did not change what I believe. But he sharpened it. And I am grateful for that.

The world has changed. Faster than most of us have noticed.

What are you still holding onto that used to work — and might be costing you everything?

That is the question worth sitting with this week.

Episode 217 with Nick Jain is worth your time. He will make you think differently about what is coming whether you want to or not.

 

Let’s grow, 

Beate

Beate Chelette is The Growth Architect & Founder of The Women’s Code, a training company specialized in providing companies an ROI on Balanced Leadership. She has been named one of 50 must-follow women entrepreneurs by the Huffington Post. A first-generation immigrant who found herself $135,000 in debt as a single parent, she bootstrapped her passion for photography into a highly-successful global business, and eventually sold it to Bill Gates in a multimillion-dollar deal.

Beate works with business leaders and supports organizations by developing and providing training the training, tools, and expertise to create and maintain a balanced, equal and inclusive work environment that fosters creativity, employee engagement and corporate growth.

Recent clients include Merck, Women’s Legislative Caucus of California, Cal State University Dominguez Hills, Small Business Development Centers (SBDC), NFTE, CreativeLive, the Association of Corporate Growth, and TracyLocke.

Beate is the author of the #1 International Amazon Bestseller “Happy Woman Happy World – How to Go From Overwhelmed to Awesome” a book that corporate trainer and best-selling author Brian Tracy calls “a handbook for every woman who wants health, success and a fulfilling career.

To book Beate to speak or train please connect here.

The post The Most Dangerous Thing You Believe Is The Thing You Never Question appeared first on The Women's Code.

Why Every High Earner Is Driven By the Same Thing — And It Has Nothing To Do With Money

For the longest time I believed that if I was just successful enough, I would get everything I wanted.

My mother’s love. Her appreciation. Her admiration. Her acknowledgement.

I have not told this part of my story before. It has been a shameful part of my past. One I spent years denying and forgetting. And finally two years ago I allowed myself to unpack what really happened.

My mother told me I was too stupid to amount to anything. That nobody would ever love me. That I would end up on the street eating dog shit.

I am sharing this with you. Not for pity. But because I know that you too have a painful story like that somewhere. A teacher. A lover. A breakup. A firing. Something someone said that sits like a thorn in the middle of your heart.

And in today’s newsletter I want to share how you can remove that thorn. Because that event — whatever it was — may be driving you toward success right now. But if you achieve it and you don’t understand what comes next, you may be in trouble.

That is exactly what Eric Mitchell helped me see in Episode 216 of The Business Growth Architect Show — Founders of the Future.

The Question That Started Everything

Eric Mitchell leads over 200 people and has interviewed thousands of self-made millionaires. His criteria was simple — you had to be self-made and earning more than a million dollars a year. And he asked every single one of them the same question.

Why do you want the money?

Not one of them said because it is money.

His journey to that question started in 2004 when his mentor looked at him across a dinner table — after a successful site visit, more money than he had ever made in his life — and asked him the same question.

Why do you want all this money?

Eric could not answer it. He did not even understand the question. And the look of disappointment on his mentor’s face cracked something open that sent him on a decade long search.

What he discovered after thousands of interviews is that every answer falls into one of five buckets. Five reasons. That is it. Every high earner on the planet is driven by one of them.

None of them are money.

I will let Eric walk you through all five in the episode. But I will tell you mine.

My Two Drivers

For most of my career I was driven by the need to prove something.

Not to myself. To my mother. The woman who told me I would eat dog shit. I was going to show her exactly who I was and what I was capable of.

In 2004 I sold my company to Bill Gates for millions of dollars.

She never needed to know.

And I thought naively that I had figured it out. That one massive success like that meant I had cracked the formula. That everything I touched from that point forward would work the same way. I was going to repeat this. Over and over. Easy.

What I did not understand was that I was still chasing the same thing. Still trying to prove something. Still running on the same driver without ever examining it.

I see this all the time. Many of my high net worth friends — people with more money than they will ever need — are still consumed by the fear of not having enough. Still grinding. Still anxious. Still chasing. Not because they are greedy or broken. But because the driver has never been examined or adjusted. They achieved the thing and kept running as if they hadn’t.

Eric calls this the collapse. The moment you achieve what you have been driving toward your whole life the driver disappears. And if you do not replace it you keep running on empty wondering why nothing feels like enough.

Two years ago I had a massive awakening. I realized I was still trying to prove something. And it simply was not working anymore. The inner work I had been avoiding could not be avoided any longer.

That is when everything began to shift. Slowly. Uncomfortably. And then something quieter and more powerful emerged.

I wanted to inspire.

Not because of what I had survived. But because of what was possible on the other side of it. Every founder I work with, every person who listens to this show, every woman who is told she is not enough — I want them to see what becomes possible when you stop listening to the wrong voice and start building from your own.

That shift — from proof to inspiration — changed everything about how I work, how I lead and how I measure success.

Eric has a name for both of those drivers. He has a framework for understanding exactly where you are in your journey and what comes next. And he shares it all in the episode.

The Thorn That Drives You

Here is what I know after this conversation.

The thorn does not get removed by pretending it was never there. It gets removed by letting it drive you somewhere worth going — and then consciously choosing what drives you next.

That is the work. And it is available to every single one of us regardless of what the thorn was or who put it there.

Eric also shared something in this episode that stopped me cold. A story about a Marine, his wife, and a room full of smokers that will change how you think about motivation, emotion and what actually drives human behavior. I am not going to tell you how it ends. You need to hear it for yourself.

A Closing Reflection

My mother was wrong about most things.

But the hunger she created in me was real. It drove me further than I might have gone otherwise. It made me prove something to myself that needed proving.

And then one day I realized I was no longer proving her wrong.

I was proving myself right.

That is the shift Eric is talking about. From wound to wisdom. From proving something to someone who may never acknowledge it — to building something that matters long after the moment has passed.

You do not have to know your why perfectly. You just have to start asking the question.

Why do I want the money?

Sit with it. Be honest. Let the real answer surface even if it surprises you.

Because when you find it — really find it — everything changes. Including what you are willing to do to get there. And what you do with it when you arrive.

That is the practice. And it starts again tomorrow.

Episode 216 with Eric Mitchell is worth your time. He has asked this question to thousands of people. And he will help you find your answer.

 

Let’s grow, 

Beate

Beate Chelette is The Growth Architect & Founder of The Women’s Code, a training company specialized in providing companies an ROI on Balanced Leadership. She has been named one of 50 must-follow women entrepreneurs by the Huffington Post. A first-generation immigrant who found herself $135,000 in debt as a single parent, she bootstrapped her passion for photography into a highly-successful global business, and eventually sold it to Bill Gates in a multimillion-dollar deal.

Beate works with business leaders and supports organizations by developing and providing training the training, tools, and expertise to create and maintain a balanced, equal and inclusive work environment that fosters creativity, employee engagement and corporate growth.

Recent clients include Merck, Women’s Legislative Caucus of California, Cal State University Dominguez Hills, Small Business Development Centers (SBDC), NFTE, CreativeLive, the Association of Corporate Growth, and TracyLocke.

Beate is the author of the #1 International Amazon Bestseller “Happy Woman Happy World – How to Go From Overwhelmed to Awesome” a book that corporate trainer and best-selling author Brian Tracy calls “a handbook for every woman who wants health, success and a fulfilling career.

To book Beate to speak or train please connect here.

The post The Question Nobody Asked Me Until It Was Too Late appeared first on The Women's Code.