Ep. 17 | How I'm Harmonizing & Balancing Current Businesses, New Businesses, & ..

The speaker discusses the importance of vulnerability and openness in entrepreneurship and personal growth. They share their own experience of grief and how it has changed them. They emphasize the value of community and invite listeners to share their own experiences. The speaker also talks about their travel experiences and the challenges they faced as a woman in male-dominated industries. They discuss their desire to start a short-term rental business and the process of purchasing and renovating a home. They mention their husband's web development business and the need for personal growth and resilience in taking on new responsibilities. The speaker concludes by encouraging listeners to embrace enduring seasons and to seek support and guidance from their higher power. Hello. Welcome back to your Conversation Pitch. I'm Ash Henry. I'm going to have a vulnerability hangover after this episode for sure, but this is the good stuff and the stuff that we need more of in entrepreneurship, especially from business consultants and advisors, like not this – well, you've read the episode title. You clicked in. You already know we're getting personal, but I feel like there's a lot of scripted personality and a lot of scripted vulnerability, and no shame, no shame. Everyone has a certain amount of capacity for vulnerability. I feel like in the last year, if you've been listening to this podcast for the last couple of seasons and also have followed me on social media, you know that I've been in a grieving experience after losing my brother-in-law last May in 2023. We have just become different people, myself and my husband, after working through so much of the emotion that comes through after you experience a big grief, a big loss where you lose all stability every which way, even if you have a really stable life. We had a super stable life. This is just going to be so unscripted and very vulnerable, and I think we need it more than ever. My biggest desire for you as you leave this conversation, since it is one-sided, I'm speaking to you. Perhaps you're on a walk, you're driving, maybe you're in the shower. Who knows? I just want you to know that the other side is open, and if there's something you want to share that you've been walking through, just know I'm here to listen. That's my favorite part of running businesses and always has been. This is my third business, the Sheeta Company. My husband just started another business, and we've been prepping our short-term rental, which is going to be a business in and of itself. It's just been a reminder, especially in this season, that community is forever and always my favorite part of any business. Thus, here we are. I'm going to bear my soul to you and also ask that if I'm going to bear my soul to you, if there's something that you feel open to sharing with me, then you can do so below in the link that goes straight to our voicemail. I also think we have a text message type thing that you can do from somewhere. I'll have more details on that, but it might pop up on your current podcast catcher for you to send us a text if it has that update through the podcast catcher that you are listening through. Otherwise, find us on Instagram. We're on all social media platforms. We have an email. You can send us an email, hello, at thesheetacompany.com. Let's get into the nitty-gritty, but first and foremost, let's go positive. My positive focus today is that we've had the most fulfilling travel schedule this year. Also, the synonym of outrageous and sane, what did we do? We've been to Vegas. We've been to California. We've been to all parts of North Carolina, some of South Carolina. We've been to Florida a couple of times, everywhere. We've been everywhere. I've been thinking about how often I daydreamed in school about traveling and somehow working on creative things while doing so. I had a lot of different desires that I wanted to bring to fruition as my job, as my role. Being in school at the time, what I saw, and especially in a lot of media and overheard opportunities for other people, specifically boys and men, they could go travel and go on business trips and be in the arenas I wanted to work in, but I didn't see any prime examples of women traveling, being creative, having healthy and emotionally fulfilling lives, families, and work in my life. I wanted to go into journalism. I did a lot of journalistic work in high school and then in college. I wanted to go into marketing. That was very male-dominated, still is in a lot of ways, but we're rising as women in the space. However, that looks, I just love the evolution of it all, but in school, I saw men coming in to talk to us about careers, men getting opportunities. Of course, this is my perception. This is my space. This is where I was in Ocala, Florida, in the country school that I was in. I just didn't see happy women. I saw unhappy women. I saw women that lacked creativity. I saw women that were bitter about their lives. I saw women that were scared to take risks and looked over their shoulders for permission a lot, whether that be to a partner, parents that knew better than her, or even the ever-imposing whispers of those that weren't actually in the arena, as Theodore Roosevelt would say. Being from the American South, I saw opportunities that were available for others that weren't available for me. That is my own experience, but there were so many other experiences that I also saw and witnessed where it made me go, what's happening? Even at such a young age, why aren't women also put up there as people that can be happy and have creativity and be allowed and have permission, again, especially in the American South? I thought I was an Enneagram 2 for so long because of the way that I was brought up and where I was brought up. I'm an Enneagram 7. An Enneagram 2 is so focused on service and supporting everyone around them. I am too, but my ultimate mission in life is to have as much fun as possible and enthusiastically bring everyone else with me. In the American South, all I felt was I have to ask for permission. I need to serve everyone else before myself. If I serve myself first, I will be seen as selfish, overindulgent. Seeing the life that I've built one brick at a time alongside healthy risk-taking, risk management, emotional resilience, and fall-on-my-freaking-face experiences, it just feels so emotionally fulfilling in and of itself every single day, especially when it's an enduring season. That's what this whole episode is about, off the cup, unrehearsed, unscripted, and I would say unabridged, but I am a yapper by nature, so I'll always have more to say, but if you're in a season that's enduring, challenging, and asking you to expand into the very fibers of your being, hi, hello, me too, let's chat in the conversation pit, your conversation pit. I'm pulling most of these lessons straight from my pinned entries and my journals, from notes during client calls with some of the most influential female founders I have the honor of knowing and supporting, and from actual prayers, begging for support when my needs were already bruised from praying. I am telling you, I feel like I listened to a song the other day that was like, my God has a telephone, really great indie song, and I was like, I needed this a year ago, because this is just the truth, no matter what you believe, open to all things over here, but I was just like, I have a telephone straight to my higher power, because goodness gracious, I have been talking a lot and asking for support a ton, and so let's get into it. So we, starting a short-term rental in our 20s has always been a thing that Chris and I both wanted. Chris is my husband. We are celebrating a decade of being together in October of this year, 2024, and I think it's seven years married, eight years married, I want to say it's going to be seven years married, and I feel like we both had this desire. He wrote it down, I think, in late high school. I wrote it down more so of like, I want to run hotels, like I want to own hotels, run hotels, I ended up working in hospitality, he was working in hospitality, that's how we met, and we quickly shared, like, this is what I want, this is what he wanted, X, Y, and Z, and the first, like, beginning was to move away from Florida to the mountains. We've done that. We purchased our home with the, like, while we were searching, we already knew that whatever we purchase is going to be a short-term rental or a mid-term or a long-term, like, we're not going to live in the house that we're in forever, so I've been interior designing this house, I've been acting as a general contractor to coordinate every inch of the work completed for our soon-to-be vacation short-term rental. Chris did a lot at the beginning in terms of, like, getting us into this house and dealing with the pounds of paperwork that come with purchasing your own home. We didn't have a lot to go off of. My parents purchased a home, and they purchased a home in, like, 2007, 2008, like, near the crash, the millennial crash, God bless, I hope you're all doing okay, and it was drastically different than the experience that we had in 2021 when we purchased this home, and we just didn't have a lot of knowledge, and we had to figure a lot out by ourselves. We had to drop the ball, we had to risk manage, we had to be emotionally resilient. We both have experienced difficulties in just managing the amount of maintenance that comes with a home, maintenance that comes with, not even maintenance, but, like, active action that comes with getting a home to a state where we can then open it up to other people, and Chris started a business in web development and is creating a web app for someone, someone we love and know, and it's been such an interesting time of me having to take on the things that are not my strengths, and I actually asked for this. I think I've shared here before, and I've definitely shared with my inner circle that my prayer in 2022, 2023, was that my character be developed to hold the capacity of the responsibilities and commitments I was asking for, so I had huge dreams. I was really going for it. My brother passed away, and it was just like, okay, so we have to stop and grieve. Like, there's nothing else that we need to do right now. There's no goal to run after. There's no dream to fulfill. The action right now is heal, grieve, sustain, heal, grieve, sustain, and once I started getting my bearings, kind of towards the end of last year, after we held our retreat, after we off-boarded several clients, and I just went internal and said, like, okay, we're going to work on internal initiatives and projects, and we are going to get this house up and running. We needed to do a brand refresh on the Cheetah Company because it had gotten to a place where I loved it, but I also felt like our market was shifting and changing so quickly, and I just found the perfect, most ideal style of client that works best for me, and I work best for them, yada, yada, so all of this is happening, and then Chris starts the business, so all of his time, all of his energy goes there, plus his corporate job, and so I'm general contracting for our home, getting crews together to come in. I'm interior designing, which I love to do and have always designed my spaces. I didn't really put it in that category or box, but I lived in a home that was not well-designed, but my bedroom was because it was influenced by my grandmother's and how they would create their spaces and how it always felt just different than my home. It felt vibrant. It felt electric. It also felt cozy and homey and expressive, and so thus, designing this whole home to be for a buyer that is going to be searching on Airbnb or other spaces and deciding if we're the right fit to, or if this home, the House of Harmony, is the right fit to stay at while they're in the Asheville area of North Carolina, it just, it was so fun, but also really interesting because you buy your first home, and the expectation is that you're going to be living in that home, and we were living here, but we were preparing for other people to stay here, and I stood on our porch, one of our porches, and when we were originally going to put in a bid for this home, and I think we put in a bid for two other homes the same weekend, I just kept saying, like, whichever home is going to be the place where people can come and connect and have memories that they will always remember together, let that be the house that we receive, and that was this house. There were no other buyers in a crazy time, 2021 in America, we will always remember. Real estate agents, thank you, God bless you, you did well, that was a crazy time, and all of this to say, this was all happening, and then I asked for my character to be developed in 2022, the end of it, and God bless, I lost so much. I let go of friends that were not healthy for me, I let go of business partnerships that weren't healthy for me, I let go of relationships with family members that were really affecting me, even after communicating, hey, I want this to change, this has to be different, like, this is my boundary for me, I'm not going to be able to stay in this relationship if this is the continuation, you can continue, but this is, like, where I'm at, and that was true in all relationships, so business, family, and friend relationships, I looked around and was just like, what's the relationship with all of our team members, realized we needed to shift and change something there, brought someone else on that's been a day one, God bless Cara, Cara Harmon is the real deal, and she's with us, and has been with us, honestly, forever, she was our first hire at the Cheetah Company years and years and years ago at this point, but all of this to say, developing my character, I had to do things that were not in my strength, so doing something brand new, interior designing for a target market instead of my own emotionally fulfilling home, strange, a little bit risky, hoping that I'm doing it well enough, et cetera, et cetera, getting into a perfectionism trap, and then all of the back end that comes with preparing to run a short-term rental, having a house cleaning company, having landscapers, bringing in hardscapers to do the things that we need to do outside, calling all of these different folks to come and do things in our kitchen, and under our house, and completely redoing a master bathroom, all by my hand, either outsourcing or doing, but starting with the planning, designing from my brain, from my heart, and from the analysis of what's around us, that's the business. We've got the Cheetah Company, pulled back, let go of clients that weren't a good fit, realized who was our best fit, and recognized we've got to do a little zhooshing to our brand to be able to attract those folks easily, so boom, we've got all of these internal initiatives, you know what comes with a rebrand, not just logos, and fonts, and colors, and website, but offerings, retailering, messaging, making sure that the team knows what we're doing, updating our lead generation approach, updating the way that we speak to our ideal leads, making sure that we're on the same page with our offerings, and what's being offered, and what's no longer being offered, who we're talking with, like we do not connect with this style of client anymore because X, Y, and Z, and letting go of an offer, we let go of our biggest signature offer, like our longest standing, and it just was like so much all at once. Nevertheless, I had to do my own taxes for the first time in a long time. Doing our business taxes was a thing. That's not my highest strength, and it's not what I want to be in. It's Chris's strength, for sure, but instead, I was doing that, working through our finances, all of these things that I can do, but they're not my highest joy, and my creative self is over here, like, okay, I have creativity over here, but I don't have it over here, so where I've dropped the ball as an entrepreneur is I had to apologize so often about my reactions when my nervous system was not in a safe space, so doing all of this risk taking, doing all of this character development, letting go of all these folks, grieving the losses, even though they were right and they should have been there, also grieving the loss of my brother-in-law, and also his loss, his death, then sparking things inside of me that I didn't realize I needed to heal, so boom, we're back in therapy, all of these things happening at once. I had to reengage with my truth that I am starting a short-term rental with my husband in our 20s. We run a successful business at the Cheetah Company. He started his own business for web development, something he's wanted to do for a long time, develop an app. He's working in corporate. We still have a house to manage in terms of, like, the regular to-dos, and we also want to make sure we have space for traveling, which we've made space for, for our relationships. My best friend had a baby. We were straight to Florida. Our team member and close friend, Emma Favros, got married. Straight to California we go. We made space and time for all of these things, but I've dropped the ball and had to apologize because I wasn't managing my nervous system on days that I needed it the most. I quickly went back into old tactics of just push through, acting out of a wounded masculine, what I saw my fathers, my grandfathers, and yada, yada, continue to do, even when they're just dying and they're so burnt out and snappy and quick to frustration. That's where I went. I had to figure my ish out quick while building new ventures, acting as a general contractor and interior designer to coordinate every inch of the work completed for our soon-to-be vacation short-term rental this year. Chris has done a lot in the past. I didn't know a woman that was calm in enduring times, and I aimed to be her in this time, and I failed a lot, but I succeeded a lot more than I failed. I would also forget my commitments. I would overbook myself, especially as a projector in human design. I would overbook myself, having to remanage my time, having to say no, having to go dark completely with all notifications to be able to focus to the point that there were days that I was five days behind in my email, and that influenced me to say, okay, well, what's coming to me that doesn't need to come to me? What can I delegate out? What can I unsubscribe from? What can I roll out into a different filter that I check X amount of times instead of daily? I would regularly be behind with podcast recording. I would forget to review certain reports of the business. I was gung-ho to just move forward with our short-term rental, but totally forgot to figure out our occupancy rate and how much we need to charge. Literally wasn't even on my mind in comparison to the things that I loved doing, interior designing. So starting a short-term rental in our 20s didn't look like the dream that we sketched out on paper that we talked about over coffee when we first started dating almost 10 years ago, but it has looked like developing my character, making sure that I am being who I say that I want to be and that I'm ever becoming that woman and also allowing for a lot of space to reconnect with my nervous system, to re-manage my energy, and to not just shame myself as I'm learning new skills, putting skills that I usually love to just use for myself and our close friends and family in terms of hosting and hospitality and that southern drawl that I love so much of hosting and hospitality that I'm now doing this for buyers that are going to be coming into this household and choosing to stay in Asheville, North Carolina, one of my favorite places on earth, I had to give myself a lot of space to say, hey, you haven't done this before. Oopsie. Like, you dropped the ball. So what? Apologize. Move on. So moving on to the realities of being an entrepreneur, the perception versus reality, the reality of entrepreneurship and why I'm quick to share my mistakes, which really aren't mistakes. They're just lessons. I spoke about this before, but especially because clients have assumed I don't make any. Thus, I'm assuming you might get that thought too. And perhaps you think that about all business advisors and consultants. It's easy to put us on a pedestal or a business coach, if you use business coaches or any type of mentorship that you receive, just knock them right off the pedestal. Knock me right off the pedestal. This was a big theme of one of our annual reports, service summaries, I think it was in 2022, that I just saw so many people pedestalling people and then being upset when those folks didn't meet their expectations. And of course, unspoken expectations are immediate resentments. And I don't know that anyone resents me for them thinking I don't make mistakes, but I do know that I have a very enthusiastic and fun approach to life. I bring a lot of levity. I infuse a lot of joy into the rooms that I'm going into. And that is my personal mission. That's my biggest set of core values is to be enthusiastic about life. We get one of them. Even if you believe in other things like reincarnation or that we have been here before in other lifetimes of sorts, you still get this one specific life as you are right now. Even if you take that knowledge and that energy and your soul into other lives, whatever you believe, it still means we have this one life to live in this very specific way with this very specific mind, body, and spirit. And I'm not here to kind of Debbie Downer, but I am quick to go into the abyss of truth with you. If you want to just bring a healthy level of openness into life, I will be there with you. But I'm going to approach with enthusiasm and joy and probably more inner child energy than most people are used to in a business consultant. Perhaps I'm supposed to be more buttoned up. Perhaps I'm supposed to look just like our brand in every which way. But I would say that if anything, I'm the warm, fun academic, the professor that you love going to their class because you know you're going to learn and you're going to laugh. That's me. So sharing a few of my mistakes is super important because I never want you to think that I'm on this pedestal just because I approach and position myself in life and just naturally feel a heavy sense of joy that this life can be over so quickly and so thus enthusiasm and joy is just like my immediate call out. But sharing a few of my mistakes in this episode to unveil the inner workings and just really peer into kind of the engine room, I guess, of me as a person, as a founder, a CEO, and all of these ventures that we've got bubbling and starting and establishing and yada yada, all those good juicy words. I told you some. I was late on my emails. I was late on sending out podcast episodes. I would say that I was going to review reports, would totally forget and have to go back and apologize. We were late on our quarterly reviews, super late on our quarterly reviews. We haven't turned in our taxes. Crystal wants to review them. And so we had to ask, well, we didn't have to ask, God bless our accountant, Chad Brown, we love you. And a shout out to Melissa Pepin for introducing us. We had to just lovingly come to the call and be like, yeah, we're late. And he'd be like, yeah, we already filed an extension. It's totally fine. So all of these things are not done perfectly. I'm saying them all out loud so you can see, hey, we're about to run a short-term rental. Hey, we manage two businesses in this household plus the short-term rental. We're doing what we've always wanted to do with real estate. I love hospitality. That's how Chris and I met. I love to make sure that everyone in the room feels cozy and comfortable. And I think that's like so much of my astrological chart in and of itself, but just things that I inherently know deeply about myself that I want people to be in a room conversing, connecting, developing their characters to be all that they can be in this life. And in that, my mistakes, my lessons are kind of my favorite part. I love, I'm sure you've heard that trending song, audio, yeah, trending audio. I can't think of the gal's name right this moment. I meant to put it in my little notes, but the gal that's like, I like the way I make my mistakes. I like the way that I fail. I like the way that I live my life, yada, yada. I like the way that I make my lessons come to life. And I love in some ways when I'm falling behind because it gives me my cry. It gives me the ability to love on the little Ashley inside of me that did not feel comfortable or safe making mistakes in childhood. My parents didn't have regulated nervous systems. Many of our family members didn't either. And I was regularly told to, and this has all been discussed with my family members, God bless, but I was regularly reminded to be quiet, to not be so dramatic, not be so expressive, not take up the whole room with all of my emotions. And if I'm having big emotions, then go away, go deal with it. I love that when I make mistakes and I'm learning my lessons, I get to turn to myself and say, oopsie, it's totally okay. And you're totally safe to learn this lesson right now. And you'll carry it into your next season and you'll carry it into wherever you're going next. And I know that I personally and Chris and I as individuals and as partners and as business partners are on the precipice of so much because so much has been lost. There's so much space. There's so much openness. There's a void for things to come in. And with void times and spaces of loss, I don't really believe in the whole like you have to have a breakdown to have a breakthrough. I think that if you're, I think I've shared this plenty and enough, but I think if you're maintaining your emotional state and your resilience and you're really considering how you're feeling day to day, then you won't miss that you are on the way to a breakthrough and you won't have to have a breakdown. Because cars break down when you're not noticing the maintenance, when you're not giving a gas, when you're not taking it in for oil changes, when you're not listening to your usual maintenance for like the miles that you're hitting and how often you're using that car. Your body is a car in a lot of ways. It's a vessel that carries your mind, body, your mind, your soul, and your spirit in this body. And if you're listening, really listening, you'll be able to see that you're heading towards a breakthrough and it's just over the horizon and you don't have a breakdown, have to have a breakdown before you get there. Because you're pausing, you're oiling up, you're gassing up, you're gassing yourself up. If you like, I love that. I love that term and I use it way too often. But if you're gassing yourself up, if you are taking care, if you're going to regular car washes, then you'll still be looking good when you get to your breakthrough. You don't have to have the breakdown. But I've had a lot of mistakes in the last year. I've been curt with my language towards Chris and had to apologize. He has been too. We've had to reevaluate the way that we communicate with each other. He's very logical. I'm very emotional. We have to meet in the middle. We have had to communicate about things that are incredibly difficult in relation to familial relationships and friendships. Just so much has been different in our lives. And honestly, Chris felt it before I did that big changes were coming and we both were experiencing anxiety. I went through depression last year after losing my brother-in-law alongside all the death really opens up in life. So we'll go towards that in just a second. So the illusion versus the reality of entrepreneurship is owning those lessons and recognizing that they're not mistakes. They're just decisions. And you made those decisions and they led you to a scenic route that takes you longer to get to the goal that you were trying to achieve or the person that you're trying to become. Or it was a shortcut and you made a really great decision and you got there quicker. Neither is good or bad. They're just neutral. If you want to see the scenic route, you'll have more lessons. If you want to take a shortcut, you might miss some of those micro skills that you would have achieved on the way. Very similar to children crawling before walking or running. We need all of those micro skills to be able to say, okay, he or she has great posture. She's really holding herself up whenever she gets up to start walking. That's just everything you're experiencing in life, too. So moving on to the intimacy of entrepreneurship starts with interpersonal skills. The interpersonal relationship hills that I've had to climb and the ones that really influenced me to go back to therapy alongside my husband and business partner. We have been navigating life and business as wife and husband, business partners for years. He has seen me and supported me in two other businesses before the Cheetah Company. Him starting his own venture and us starting our short-term rental business, we have communication differences. Since we got together, we met in work, we do navigate work pretty well. We work very well together, but if our nervous systems are not managed, if we're not leaning into emotional resilience, then we will quickly go into old habits that we learned growing up, honestly, and that I learned in past relationships. We went to therapy as a couple in order to walk through the grief of losing my brother-in-law and all of the emotions that came with that, all of the pain that came after the fact of a death really influencing life. Like I was saying, two look different, losing family relationships, losing deep trust with family members, really just going into a lifetime story, to be quite frank. I very much see Chris and I's love story as a hallmark story, but our life has felt like a lifetime movie special for the last year and a half, two years. What's so interesting is it's not because of us. It's things that are outside of us and around us that we are then having to navigate through. Going to therapy to walk through all of the grief and the loss was beautiful. Of course, it's personal. It's more personal than I want to go into, but our communication has never been better, and it's always been pretty good. Even in our deepest, darkest moments where we've argued a ton or had constant discussions or have allowed for smaller things to be the things that we fight about, even though there's some bigger root that we're not looking at or we hadn't stumbled over yet, we were still way better at communication than a lot of relationships that we both saw growing up. Have experienced in terms of watching and witnessing others in adulthood that are either the same age as us or above. We've been constantly reminded that we're good at navigating communication, and yet and still, I will advocate for therapy and mentorship and mental health support always. Thus, we went straight back to therapy, and we concluded therapy together, so exciting, in January of this year, and it was so good. We successfully achieved our objective, and we have really taken those lessons and those experiences and those conversations into the rest of our conversations. Losing my brother-in-law, what we both recognized immediately after and even to this day is that we're so much more graceful with each other than ever and patient to understand each other's differences and where we're maybe missing the mark in understanding each other, and that's been a wildly beautiful gift from such a painful experience. My brother-in-law was 25, and we just recognized we've only had almost a decade together, and we want 60 more years, 80 more years together in hopes that we live forever, and so thus being really cautious and careful with each other and also very clear and direct and kind when we're asking for something different or something more. Moving on to the myth and lie, that's what I wanted to say, the myth and lie of work-life balance versus holistic harmony in life and business. If you've been around, you already know we developed the method of holistic harmony in life and business to regularly come back to and center and harmonize and have a reckoning with ourselves that's very clear when we've leaned too far into trying to fit ourselves into what the world believes is balance instead of just the pursuit of our own individual view on harmony. When I say that, balance is easy to look at and say, okay, my life is a 100% percentage, and I need to get 10% here, 10% here, 50% here, and try to add it up to 100% so that you're constantly juggling and feeling like, okay, I'm not doing anything right because my energy is going in every which way and direction. As an agency owner, before we retired the agency, I was like, oh, I have to turn off my notifications. I have to communicate with friends that I'm going to be dark for a while. I'm going to have to say yes and no to things very clearly. I'm going to have to say yes and no to things in business very clearly if we're not available for this PR opportunity or, yes, we're available for this. It also influenced me to say I have to recognize what my personal goals are, what my business goals are, what my relationship goals are, my spiritual goals, all of these things that add up to being the pie of life. I have a tendency to lean too far into perfectionism if I am not really owning my creativity and my expression. Often, it's less about comparisonitis and more about just my own version of perfectionism. I can get into comparison more so of am I growing in the direction that I think that I should be growing? Am I growing at the rate that I think I should be growing towards the things that I think I should be growing into as quickly as I can instead of as harmoniously as I can? Perfectionism is the enemy of entrepreneurship, and success is really determined by your own value system, your own optimism, and the way that you expect to grow, the way that you want to grow. Enthusiasm, optimism, resilience, and personal reckonings to continue to take risks while managing my nervous system have been the things that have kept me afloat. There are many times in the last year that I've questioned what the hell am I doing and why, as my personality who wants to have fun and wants to enthusiastically go and do whatever whenever, why am I starting so many business ventures? Is there anything that's tying me down? Am I ready to leave this home that we've created, not just in the physical house, but in Asheville, North Carolina? Am I ready to not be able to call my girlfriends and go get wine or go to a spa night or go to an event in Asheville? Am I ready to go and travel across America and be living out of Airbnbs and have to be super routined in order to have the most fun? So making sure I'm still sleeping, that I'm moving my body, that I'm having enough freaking fiber. I have everything else down, but fiber is the thing that I'm like, I need, I think, two to three times more to make sure that I'm just regular in every which way. Am I going to remember to take my supplements on the road? Am I going to remember to double up on my minerals when I'm feeling really exhausted? Can I handle the jet lag and all of the things that are going to come with moving time zones regularly with a Zoom-based business? Am I going to be able to handle all of the things that I'm asking for? And leveraging holistic harmony in life and business to regulate my nervous system as a female founder and CEO is the only way that we're able to start these new ventures and pursue all of our goals, even though my real truth is losing my brother completely tore the rug of safety out from under me and out from under our family. Isaiah was a pillar of our life and recognizing that we have to rebuild and move forward without him physically here while still keeping his memory and then evaluating our lives like, are we having enough fun? Are we, and this is coming from an Enneagram 7 and a Libra. Chris is a Libra and he is leisurely. He does things efficiently so he can have the most time to rest and experience and be in the world. So we fit really well together as Leo and Libra, but it made us look around and say, like, do we love the life that we're building? And I'm happy to say that after a year of tussling with that question, the answer is hell, yeah. But a lot had to go in order to get to this revelation, I guess you could say. And a lot had to be reckoned with and we had to expose our inner workings of what no longer belonged and what we had to let go of in service of our future selves and in service to live a life after Isaiah and losing him the way that we did. Ultimately, if I didn't have holistic harmony in life and business, I think the last year would have been me trying to still balance as though something didn't blow up our lives. I think I would have still tried to keep up with what I thought I needed to keep up with. And in the past, I didn't stop to grieve major traumas in my life and they caught up with me. And now I feel more than ever that I'm here to help female founders have great businesses, profitable businesses, productive businesses, but more so peaceful businesses. And emotionally fulfilling lives where they can look around and say, I built this and I love it. And that is that alarm. I don't just like shout out to the podcast team. Don't remove that, please. That alarm felt like a confirmation. So here I am, unscripted, totally bare in my own personal experience for the last year, year and a half and some. There's so much more that I've shared little bits of on this podcast and I'm excited to do more of it. I feel like this year has been a reminder that we all just need self-expression and creativity. And that leads us to the avenues that we're meant to be on, whether that be the shortcut route or the scenic route. Our character will always be developed. And that was my prayer in 2022, shared it with so many people that were in my inner circle to honestly keep me accountable and to say it with my whole chest that I was ready to be developed for the responsibilities, commitments, desires, goals, and dreams that I had for my life, that I had for Chris and I's relationship in our lives. Especially in relation to family and starting a family with children and traveling and all of the things that we're doing and so much more to come that we've been dreaming up for so long that we finally get to do because we went for it. So we're going to end here, but your conversation topic of the week is to ask your inner circle of entrepreneurs how they're actually doing beyond the surface, straight into the abyss of truth. I hope that it inspires more conversations like this. And again, as always, you can reach us in the links below if you want to share your story, if you want to share some things that you're experiencing and walking through. Always a moment for connection. I am always here for a moment of connection. And your conversation pit is not just a catchy title of a podcast or some positioning piece so you know that we're here in the circle with you. It is the bread and butter of me as a person and it's the fiber of my being that I want to yap with you and I want to chat with you and I want to connect and I want you to walk away and me to walk away better for the conversation that we had. So as usual, thank you for tuning in and listening. Share with a friend if you feel called to. Leave us a review. That would be such a great energetic shift in agreement. Between us. Since we are serving you here on this podcast. And if you need and desire or want support from a business advisor and consultant. That will tell you about her mistakes and that will help you take the shortcuts or be next to you during the scenic route. I'm here. We are currently booking for one on one clients. Our sales course is always available. And if you'd like a little discount, send us a message on Instagram and I'll send you a discount your way. XOXO.