What It Takes to Be a Resilient Entrepreneur Part 2: Who You Become When Things Burn Down

What if the hardest seasons of building your business aren’t happening to you — but for you?

What if every launch that flopped, every season where everything felt like it was burning down, every moment you had to pick yourself up and figure out how to keep going, was not a detour from the work, but the work itself?

And what if the resilience you’re searching for is not something you develop before you build but something that is being forged inside you right now, through the building itself?

About This Episode

This is Part Two of a series that goes where most business conversations don’t. In Part One, we got honest about what actually happens inside you when something doesn’t work: the shame, the wounds, the patterns you run under pressure. If you haven’t heard it, start there.

In Part Two, we go deeper. Because knowing your pattern is one thing. Building the identity that can hold under pressure is something else entirely.

And that’s the thread that runs through everything in this episode: your history holds more proof of your resilience than you have ever given yourself credit for. The evidence has been accumulating since long before you started your business. You just haven’t been counting it.

This episode is not about mindset. It is not about pushing through or thinking your way to the other side. It is about identity, the slow, lived, experience-built knowing that you are someone who finds the next step when things fall apart. Not because you are fearless. Not because you are certain. Because you have done it before. And your history knows it, even when your fear forgets.

The Real Conversation in This Episode

Most conversations about resilience will tell you to believe in yourself, to develop a growth mindset, to reframe failure as feedback. And while none of that is wrong, it misses the most important thing:

Resilience is not a belief you acquire. It is an identity you build — one experience at a time, one fall at a time, one moment of finding the next step at a time. And it cannot be shortcut, bypassed, or learned from the outside. It has to be lived.

Transcript

0:48

I wanna start off with something at the very beginning of this episode that is gonna reframe everything you have been through in your business, and I'm just talking about the hard stuff, the good stuff too, all of it. And here it is. Your business is not something you build after you've done the healing work. It's not waiting for you on the other side of enough therapy or enough inner work or getting my shit together or getting myself healthy enough sometimes. Because your business is, actually is, the healing path. It's actually what's going to help heal you. The building and the becoming are the same thing. They are happening simultaneously in the same moments through the same experiences. Whether you know it or not, So every activation your business triggers, every wound that surfaces when you try to charge more or show up bigger or be seen more fully, every single season where something falls apart and you have to figure out who you are on the other side of that, that's not a detour from your inner work. That is your inner work, okay? Your business is one of the most, seriously, the most precise, accelerated, and most honestly relentless paths of personal development available to you on this planet And once you understand, once you really understand that, not just intellectually, but, like, really in the way you relate to everything hard that comes, in the moment when really hard shit's happening, when you can relate to that and you can bring that up, it changes everything about how you show up in it. So if you have been waiting until you feel ready, until you feel healed enough, until you feel certain enough or worthy enough or unburdened enough to fully step into what you're building, I want you to hear this: The stepping in is what heals you. It's not the other way around. And I think that's the lens that I truly want you to hold for everything we cover today, and to truly keep that close, that, that actually moving forward in the business is many times what unlocks the answers that you're seeking. And so this part two of this two-part series on what it actually takes to be a resilient entrepreneur. And in part one, just to reframe, we went into the truth about what happens inside you when something doesn't work. The shame response, the two distinct wounds that get activated, and the patterns that most of us run into under pressure. And if you haven't heard it already, go back and listen to it. It will make everything in this episode land at a kind of different level because you've already been in the work there. But if you're starting here, you also can stay here, and it's fine to listen to them separately. We're gonna build something useful here together regardless. So here's where we're picking up. You know your pattern now 'cause we talked about that in our last episode. You know which ru- wound is running louder when something falls apart and what's getting triggered in you. That self-knowledge, that uncomfortable as it may have been to sit with for a minute, is not small. It's the beginning of everything we're about to do. So before we go any further, I wanna draw one distinction that I think matters enormously for how you approach everything ahead. There is a difference between recovering and rising. Recovery gets you back to where you were, and that's baseline, back on your feet. That is real, and that, that's great. That matters. I don't mean to minimize it because getting back on our feet, getting back to where we were is, um, many times a, a relief when we're going through something really hard. However, rising versus recovering means you come out of the hard season carrying something you didn't have going into it. It's like a new layer of self-knowledge, right? You just get this wisdom, or you get this, like, special gift of learning something, a capacity that only builds under that kind of pressure. You won't get it otherwise. It's an identity that is more solid than before, and rising doesn't just return you to baseline. It moves you somewhere where you couldn't have reached without the fall, and that is what we're building today. I wanna help you get to the rising part quicker, and I really believe that that is the key, and that is gonna be your best sign when you wanna ask yourself, "Am I get... Am I getting stronger? Am I getting more resilient?" Is how much more quickly you are not just recovering, but you're rising. And I think this kind of resilience we're talking about today, for many of us, s- could have started a long time ago. Even when you were a kid, I bet you can think back to a moment when you were faced with something, maybe some adversity that you moved through in such a way that it strengthened you. In fact, I was talking to somebody the other day about how fearless she was as a kid, and somewhere along the line, she had become really fearful and really trapped and feeling frozen in her fear and having a hard time moving forward in her business. And we got talking about, how things that happen when we're little can kinda really shape us, and she shared a story, and I also shared with her a crazy story of mine. I have a lot of crazy stories. I really do. Or I think they're crazy. So my story went back to when I was 12 years old. I was in eighth grade. I was a cheerleader, and I hear this girl wants to beat me up and that she is going to try to fight me at the football game. And I have all these friends around me that's saying, "I got your back, Michelle. I got your back. Don't you worry." And so instead of, telling an adult, right? I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna face this." And I had this moment of I can run and I can just not go to the game. Um, I can not show up for where I'm expected to be as a cheerleader, right? It was gonna happen after my- after the game. I could hide. I could run, right? There was all these things that were running through my little 12-year-old brain. And I said to myself, and I remember so clearly, I said, "I cannot run. I have to face this." I don't know what in me felt so strongly about that, but my friends said they had my back. I had never fought anybody in my entire life, okay? Just to be clear. And she was like, so I start to walk behind the bleachers where I know that they're all waiting for me. And I see a crowd of, of people, in a circle. One guy is holding chains, and he's clinking them together, and he's saying, "Fight, fight, fight." And this other guy that's like huge has this girl on her- his shoulders, and she's screaming and yelling, "Fight, fight, fight." And I just look around, and all these people are cheering for a fight. And I'm like, "Oh, my God, this is for me." And I'm just like, "What is happening in my world?" Right? So I look around And I turn around behind me to look at my friends to be like, "What should we do?" And guess what? They were gone. They ditched me. And I look and I see the girl who said she wanted to fight me, and she was standing in the center of the circle, and she had this other little girl. She was really tall, and she had this other girl that was really short next to her. And I was like, "You know what? The only way through this is truly through." I really felt like if I run, then I'm gonna be dealing with this for the next months, right? Uh, they're gonna harass me. I have to face the music no matter what happens. And I walked in to that circle. And when I got there, she looked at me I think she was surprised that I showed up, and there I was, and I looked at her and she said to me, and I remember this so clearly, like it was almost like the cheering and the chains that were clinking and everything else going around just kind of like died away. And I remember looking at her and she said to me, "I heard you wanted to fight me." And my little empathic self right then and there saw the, the ginormous door open up that this girl doesn't wanna fight me. She just turned the power over to me. She said, "I heard you wanna fight me." And I was like, "Oh my God, it's gonna be okay." And there I was in that moment. I said, "I don't wanna fight you. And hey, by the way, let's have a deep conversation about what is happening here and who you are." And next thing I know is we're being friends, and I walked away, and there was a very disappointed crowd of people, but that moment, me walking into that fight, being this little girl like, that never done anything like that before, was really a moment that I taught myself something ginormous. And that's that I can face something so scary. I mean, I was shaking, right? I could face something so scary, and I could know on the other side of it, I'll f- I will work it. I will fix it. I will, I will use my intuition. I will use my gifts to figure out what is needed of me and take that next step, and that's exactly what I did, and I can continue to do my whole life. And I bet you that you yourself could find a situation that you faced that was really scary, and you did it anyway so now I have a question to ask you. What do you believe? Do you believe that you're resilient? Most of you will probably say yes. I, I think many of you will say yes, and I, I actually believe you because you have evidence. You have survived things. You have rebuilt things. You have kept going when keeping going costs you something, and I think the belief is there. But here's where the real question lands, right? When something in your business... I mean, this is-- All my podcast episodes can be translated into life because how we do one thing is how we do everything, you hear me say all the time. So sticking with business, when something in your business falls apart, when the launch fails or, the client that you've been working so hard to build a relationship with just says no or, or, you feel rejected in some way. When the thing you put yourself behind publicly just, falls apart, whatever that is, can you still find that belief that you're resilient? Not just when, you're coasting. Can you find it in the moment? Can you find it in the storm? Can you find it in the moment when things are on fire? And can you reach for that knowing that you're gonna be okay? Can you find that? And that's hard. And for most of us, honestly, for most of us, I really think the answer is, "I can find it, but it's not reliable. I can't always find it." I think when the shit happens and goes down, the knowing of that is typically later when things settle. And in the moment, we are panicking, and we're struggling, and our nervous system is activated. And a lot of times we have to act anyway, because, or we don't, and then later when we've come through it, the belief comes back. But sometimes I do think that that belief about yourself is definitely stronger and is more battle-worn when it returns. When you get back to that belief, it gets, solidified. But here's what I want you to understand about that gap, and that gap is the space between the belief you hold when things are calm, right? When I ask you that question and you say yes because things are good and you can reflect upon it, and the belief you can reach when things are in the middle of falling apart. That gap, That is evidence that your resilience is still being built. I think your resilience has, um, more rings in the ladder, as they say, right? There's more for you to learn. There's more for you to grow if you can see that in the moment you don't always have it to grasp You're just still being tested And the way that gap closes, the only way it actually closes, is through the accumulation of lived proof. I think affirmations are so helpful. I do. I believe affirmations are powerful mindset shifts, and mindset work is so powerful. But when it comes to activating our nervous system, truly, we also need evidence of our history. I think The evidence of your own history keeps building every time something falls apart and you find the next step anyways. So I wanna give you something right now. I wanna give you your own evidence. So let's take a moment, and I want you to name to yourself a time when something fell apart in your business, potentially just in your life. You know, a moment where the thing you were counting on just fell through, where the ground shifted. Like, whatever happened, you didn't know yet how it was gonna turn out. And I just want you to go to the moment itself when it was falling apart, and you didn't know yet that you'd rise out of that And then after you name that, I want you to also find the moment. Can you remember When you got back on your feet or you rose to another level, okay? So when was it? Was it an hour later? Was it a day later? Was it weeks, months, years? Was it just today in this moment and I'm think- saying this to you? Not because, the fear was gone. I'm not saying you have to look back on it and say, "Okay, I, this is when I stopped having fear." I'm talking about having fear and moving, and believing you're gonna be okay anyways, and moving forward anyways through the fear. Just like I showed up at that crazy-ass fight with people s- you know, taunting and, and cheering for a fight, and I walked into the fire anyways. Might have been dumb, I realize but, but in that moment, right, that was me looking back and saying, "I stepped through it anyways." And I want you to think about when you did that. Um, even small, even imperfect, you moved, and that right there is your resilience. It's not about the outcome. It's the moment of movement before certainty, through the fear, in the middle of not knowing. This is what you're made of, and it didn't happen just once. Your history is so full of those moments. You just don't always count them as evidence because you were too busy surviving them to recognize that you were building, that it was building you. So much of your identity is built from what we believe about ourselves, and one of the most important beliefs you can carry into this work is, "I am somebody who finds the next step." Let me repeat that to you, and I want you to say this to yourself. I am somebody who just finds the next step. Even when everything's on fire, even when I can't see the whole staircase, right, as they say, even when the outcome is not guaranteed, I find the next step and I take it. That identity, the person who moves through the fall, you know, through falling down rather than waiting for it to be over, is not something you either have or you don't have. It is something you have been building every single time something didn't work and you kept going. The question is whether, are you willing to claim it? Can you believe that about yourself? Will you allow it to let the evidence you already have eventually land as proof of who you freaking are? Because here is what I've seen over 20 years of work. The people who build something that endures, the people that are successful, the people, whatever that even... however you define that. But they are the ones who have developed an identity that can stand up to pressure. Not an identity that never gets shaken, an identity that gets shaken and holds anyway, that knows even in the shaking that this is not the end of the story. And it doesn't have to be that you're perfect at that right now, because that's what we're building, right? This is your business. Every hard season of it is like a training ground, literally. I mean, are you even an entrepreneur if you haven't failed multiple times and gotten back up? I mean, seriously. It's training ground.. And I wanna talk to you about what I'm calling the activators. We touched upon this, I think, last week. But these are the specific pressures of building something in public that will surface unhealed identity material, right? And I don't mean just might, honestly. Like, will for all of us. This will happen. At every level, there is no version of this path where the activators stop coming. What changes is your capacity to move through them, but they keep coming So a couple to mention here while we're in this conversation is visibility. Every time you step more fully into being seen, you got a new audience or you're building it, you're-- got a bigger platform, your more vulnerable piece of content goes out, right? Your nervous system reads it ex- as exposure, and exposure activates every unhealed wound around worthiness and whether you are someone who deserves to take up that much space. This is why deeply qualified entrepreneurs shrink at the very moment that they're about to expand. It's par for the course. but it is a visibility wound asking you to be healed through the act of being visible anyway. Just do it. I know you're hearing me right now, and you're like, "Oh, yeah." Like, you know that I'm speaking to you. You know that there's something you've been holding back on, something that maybe you have been trying to avoid or hide or just really not address. You're like, "It's summer. I'm gonna be more laid back," right? Whatever. I want you to hear that. The visibility wound is asking you to be healed through the act of being visible anyway, okay? And even with money, money's another activator. Charging what you're worth, raising your rates, selling at all, especially if you're an empath, if you're a sensitive seeker, and you're a sensitive healer type, like, you feel like you are supposed to make everybody feel better. And so it doesn't feel right to even sell because, could you be potentially being gross in it? Could you potentially, doing something with money that doesn't feel good? You shouldn't be making out on other people, right? Money and business is never purely transactional. It is a mirror of what you believe about your own value, and most money blocks in a business are worthiness wounds wearing a financial mask, and then authority is another one of those activators the moment that you step fully into leadership, when you look around and everybody's looking at you, into being the person with the answers, the teacher, the guide. The fear of being exposed as unqualified tends to arrive with it, especially for empathic entrepreneurs, but especially for those women whose early experiences taught them that being too certain, too much, too visible just wasn't safe, stepping into authority activates all of that every time until the healing catches up to the expansion, right? But being witnessed in imperfection, this is hard. This catches people who've done a lot of inner work and think they're past it, and then all of a sudden, they make a very public mistake. And, you can be deeply self-aware, genuinely healed in many areas, and still find that being publicly imperfect, making a mistake, a stumble, it, it hits harder than you expected. Because every single human being is imperfect, my friend. Every single human being is struggling. They are suffering inside in some way because that is what it is to be human. But because this one combines the visibility wound with the internal competence kind of wound, right, right, around all of it, it's at the same time, it's really hard. I mean, this was huge for me in this podcast, and I'm still making so many mistakes, I'm still a one-woman show. But I'm at that point where, you know, I am, I'm doing a lot of different things, and so I am editing my podcast, and I make mistakes. I think just a few podcasts ago, I was-- I, I do keep an outline, and I do have some stuff scripted because I wanna stay on track. And literally a couple weeks ago, I have an episode that went out and, like Hundreds of people saw it, like it was a couple hundred people saw it. And I literally in the middle of it just... And if you heard this, like just have compassion for me. I literally like stopped and said, "No, no, that's not what I need to do." And then I went back and reread it a couple times. That would have literally pummeled me a couple years ago. Like, that would've made me cry. I would've felt like, oh my God, I look like such a crazy imposter. I look like so ridiculously stupid. I would've felt so awful. And now I just go, "Shit. Oh, man." And then I was like, you know what I say to follow that up? Just I can share this, is my mantra was like, well, they'll have more opportunities to like me. They'll have more opportunities to see that I'm legit. They'll have more opportunities to see my wisdom. They'll have more opportunities to see my greatness, my genius zone, all the good stuff I have to offer. But it always comes with a shadow, right? There's always an imperfection for every individual on the human planet, right? So here we are. Now getting back my squirrel brain to what I wanted to say. So the reframe, I want to share with you, is that these activators, they're not the problem The activator is the curriculum. Every time one of these surfaces, it is pointing directly at what is needing to be healed and integrated. So it's not the obstacle, it's actually the freaking path. And remember, your business is the freaking path, right? Is the path to healing. So every time you're, like, freaking out and you're spinning and you don't put out the thing, or you make a massive mistake in front of everybody, or you do whatever, I want you to remember this is the curriculum. This is what I signed up for. This is the class, and this is what I have to learn, and this is what I have to heal. And not everything that feels like it's falling apart is actually breaking down. Some of what feels like collapse is actually the shedding of an identity structure that can no longer hold the person you're becoming. It needs to fall apart. This happens in relationships. You've done this your whole life. You have had relationships. Think of friends that you were so close with at one point, but somehow either there was a breakdown, there was a fight, there was something, maybe there was conflict, or perhaps it was just, you know, space and time. Things change. They're always changing, Because sometimes things just need to die, right? Dying can look like, you know, the version of you that built the thing that no longer fits has to change. Maybe there's some type of thing that you've been working at in your business at a previous level but feels increasingly hollow now, like a way you were going about it, a way you were going about any part of your business can change and shift. But how you manage people, how big you get, how much you put yourself out there, what you're willing to do to extend past your comfort zone many times looks like and feels like imperfection. When you think about what feels like it is ending right now, like think of something right now that feels like it might be on the edge of coming to an end. Does it feel like loss or does it feel like release? I think that's an important distinction. Maybe there's change happening for you, and I just want you to ask, does it feel like loss or does it feel like release? Both can carry grief, okay? Both can be painful, but they point in different directions, and your body usually knows which one it is before your mind does. So sit with that and just ask your body to answer it. You know, does this feel like release or does this feel, right, like loss? One of the hardest discernments in this work, I mean genuinely hard, and I have navigated this myself and sat with hundreds of people navigating this, is when something isn't working and you have the urge to pivot, right? And that pivot, that urge arrives. Is that pivot being called by fear or is it like a soul calling, like intuition? Because from the inside, in the middle of it, they can feel identical, right? They both arrive quickly. They both can feel like the right move. And if you act from the wrong one, if you pivot from fear when the soul was asking you to stay and do the work, or if you stay out of fear and the soul was asking you to move, you'll feel it, and usually expensively, right? There's a cost a lot of the time. And a fear-driven pivot comes from that urgency and contraction. It wants to move away from pain, away from visibility, away from the activation, right? It really feels like escape. And sometimes we address that escape as strategy. Like, "Oh, this is the really smart thing to do here," and why. And it often abandons something before the lesson inside it has been learned, which means the lesson arrives again in the next thing, wearing a different face, right? But a soul-directed pivot, it comes from a quieter place. It comes from a sense of incongruence. The thing no longer fits who you're becoming, rather than just not working the way you hoped, it tends to arrive after the emotional charge has settled. It feels less like running from something and more like being called towards something, right? Direction rather than flight. That's how we can kinda know the difference. One feels like I have direction, the other one feels like I'm fleeing, and if you're in a moment of wondering whether to pivot right now, just give it a moment and let the acute activation settle, and then ask your body, not your brain, just what, what does it know? So I wanna bring you back to where we started, because I'm wrapping us up, and I think it lands differently now than we did maybe when we first started talking. And your business is not separate from your healing. Every activation that you've felt in this work, the shame, the, the contractions, like your whole system feeling like it's under stress, the visibility wounds, the imposter spiraling, the season where everything fell apart, that was not interference. That was actually the work asking you to go deeper, asking you to become someone who can hold more, someone whose identity doesn't collapse under pressure, but even expands through it. Resilience is a relationship you develop with yourself, and it's deep. It's earned, right? It's that body-level knowing. When things fall apart, you will find that next step and the next one after that. Not because you're fearless, 'cause I'm not fearless. I just do shit anyway sometimes and I'm freaking afraid, right? You're gonna have bad things happen, and you're gonna keep taking steps forward. And I'm building something right now that I think is gonna actually make a lot of what we covered in this series even more precise and personal for you. I'm building an assessment, and it's gonna be almost, like, oracle-like in terms of what it delivers, we're gonna get into your specific patterns and wounds with real clarity. So I'll let you know when it's coming. I'm really excited about it. And if this series moved something in you, send me a DM because I love hearing from you guys. And I... You know what? I'm actually gonna start doing shout-outs because I haven't done that at all enough. I just heard from a woman, Elizabeth, who is making a big pivot in her life. She's gotten through... Like, talk about... This episode, Elizabeth, if you're listening, this episode is speaking to you. You've gone through so much. You got yourself out of a nasty relationship because of who you are and who you're becoming as that strong woman really working on herself and showing up for your wounds and showing up for yourself. And she reached out, and. it meant the world to me and just to hear that she's trying to build this business that's off the path a bit, and I'm just... It thrills me to hear, Elizabeth, and I want you to keep working and keep being strong. And so I just wanted to say thank you again. Thank you for being in this work with me. I'll see you in the next episode. Bye for now.