The Emotional Skill That Determines Whether You Quit or Keep Going

I’m recording this episode from my parents’ guest bedroom in California - not because it was planned, but because life happened. A family health scare pulled me across the country, and in the middle of supporting my mom, solo parenting, and navigating heavy emotions, I still showed up for my business, my clients, and this podcast.

In this episode, we’re talking about emotional intelligence and resilience - the skills that actually determine whether you keep going when life gets hard. Because success isn’t about perfect conditions, motivation, or hustle. It’s about how well you can regulate your emotions, lead yourself through discomfort, and keep taking action when life throws curveballs.

This is a real, honest conversation for the woman building a business while life is still happening.

✨ In This Episode, We Talk About:

00:00 – Why I’m recording this episode from California

04:15 – Why success has less to do with intelligence and more to do with emotional regulation

08:30 – What emotional intelligence really means (and what it’s NOT)

14:10 – The duality of emotions as a mom and entrepreneur

19:45 – Why consistency breaks down when emotions run the show

24:30 – Emotional intelligence vs. resilience (and how they work together)

30:10 – Common ways entrepreneurs self-sabotage when emotions get heavy

36:40 – Why discomfort is a sign of growth, not failure

41:55 – How journaling builds emotional intelligence and resilience

47:20 – 5 powerful journal prompts to regulate emotions and keep going

55:30 – Final reminder: you don’t need perfect conditions to succeed

If this episode resonated with you, DM me on Instagram - I love having real conversations in the DMs. And if you’re feeling called to build your next chapter with support, I currently have limited one-on-one coaching spots for 2026 and my SheEO mastermind for early & aspiring coaches kicking off in March.

Journal Prompts:

1. What am I feeling right now - and where do I feel it in my body?

2. What story am I telling myself about this feeling or situation?

3. Is my reaction coming from fear, protection, or leadership?

4. What would the most grounded version of me do next - even if it’s uncomfortable?

5. When have I felt something similar before - and kept going anyway?

Transcript

0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Building Her podcast. I'm your host, Kati Lillian. If you've been loving this podcast, go ahead and rate the podcast five stars and DM me on Instagram when you do that, because I want to personally thank you. If you are new here, hit that subscribe button. It really helps the podcast grow, and that way you'll never miss an episode. So let's dive in. Hey, my name is Kati Lillian, and I am obsessed with all things mindset, personal development, and helping you build the best version of yourself. I'm a women's life and mindset coach and an entrepreneur who started a fun hobby of posting hashtag sweaty selfies, grew a successful side hustle, and now I run a six figure coaching business. I teach you the secret of building a life that aligns with your deepest values and one that you wake up excited for. This podcast is designed to expand your mind and. Challenge the status quo. So get ready to uplevel your life and let's start building her. Hello everyone. I am coming at you from California. I am currently in my parents' guest bedroom and I am recording this because you girl threw her microphone in her suitcase and trow to California. To do this, and that's where I'm at. If you follow me on Instagram, you know why I am here in California. I actually wanna read my story to you all in case you missed it, so that you have context. And what inspired this episode today? So my first story, I say, I don't know who needs to hear this, but if your New Year's Eve didn't look like your feed fireworks, champagne, toast, and sequin dresses, it's okay. Mine didn't either. Mine looked a little different. Mine felt a little different. I booked a one way ticket to Cali on Monday. I left B to support my mom as she's going through scary health stuff and solo parenting. And guess what? Despite my personal circumstances, I still show up for my clients. I serve them, I support them. I pour into them. I push my shit to the side for one hour and show up on calls with a smile on my face. That is the definition. Of resilience. Stop waiting for the perfect conditions. Stop the victim mentality. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. No one cares. Sit with your emotions, move through them and then keep it moving. I say this lovingly, but just because it's. January 1st doesn't mean your business is going to be successful. Life will throw you a curve ball at some point this month, and you have to have emotional resilience to keep going. 90% of your success is based off of how well you handle your emotions and just keep going. And then the last slide I posted a a reel from. Why am I blanking on her name? Alexandra Cooper from Call Her Daddy. And she's talking about how emotional intelligence, which is also EQ, is so much more important than business and your business, um, IQ basically because you need to handle your emotions. So obviously my closer friends texted me, and I love you so much for doing that. You guys know who you are. But for everyone else some of you commented on the resilience piece or just like, you know, amen to what I was saying about just because it's one, one, you won't have a business that's successful. And so just going through everything that I'm going through in my personal life. I really wanna talk about these two topics of emotional intelligence and resilience. Now, I'm not gonna go too in depth about each one. Each one can have its own separate podcast episode, but I wanted to at least scratch the surface with you all, just so you understand how I built up and continue to build up my emotional intelligence. Now, please, I'm not perfect at all. I'm human. Still learning and growing over here, but I have learned a thing or two and it has absolutely been so instrumental in building my business. And then the resilience piece as well. So I wanna dive into it a little bit and give you my perspective, give you my experience, give you what I have learned. And I really, really hope someone out there needs to hear this today, especially if you're going through. Some personal life crisis right now. I think this can really, really help you because building a business with life still happening can definitely be hard and challenging, but not impossible. If you don't, if you don't get anything from this episode, but this next thing, then I've done my part. Your success isn't determined by how smart you are. It's determined by how well you handle your emotions. I'm gonna say that again. Your success isn't determined by how smart you are. It's determined by how well you handle your emotions. Everyone always talks about you need to be consistent. You need to be. Mm. You need to take action. You need to show up online, right? Like all that stuff is important, the action, the consistency. But I think a level deeper, which not a lot of people talk about, is like, well, how do you continue taking action? How do you continue being consistent when life happens? Right? Because regardless of who you are. Everyone has shit happen to them in their life, right? Like me. Currently, I am here supporting my mom who is going through a health scare right now. We don't have much information. They're doing lots of tests and all that stuff. We should know more next week. So it's a little premature, but regardless, it's scary enough. The, the fact that I basically stopped my life in Florida and jetted over here and. Like, it's serious, you know? So like I took action, but I also still have a business to run. And so the duality of emotions is so real. I talk about duality quite a bit actually in some of my mompreneur series. You can go, you can go check those out. But ever since becoming a mom, it's like every day there's a duality of emotion, right? The the duality of, oh my gosh. I have this daughter, she's so beautiful and healthy and amazing, and an angel and a miracle and wow. Right? I am so grateful and this is so cool and this is so fun. The other part of it though, is like this is happening way too fast. She's growing up way too quickly. I can't stop time. Oh no. We're all getting older. She's gonna be older. She's never gonna be this small anymore, and there's a lot of pain and sadness in that. And so for about a year now, right? It, it's dealing with that duality of emotions. Just like now, my current state, so I'm here, I'm in California for a pretty serious personal family matter, but I still have a business to run. I have clients to support, I have calls to take, I have voice notes to listen to. I have responses that I have to give. I have to record a podcast, and it is 8:04 PM. Which is pretty early. It's pretty nice, but I'm mom all day. Granted it was the first too, so holiday, but I have a podcast for tomorrow morning because I'm so religious about my podcast episodes releasing every Friday morning. Like I have not missed a beat since launching this thing. Right? So. I have to put on my coach hat, my business owner hat for 30 minutes an hour. You know, I usually don't work more than let's say, two to four hours a day, and that's not every day, which is so amazing. But the other part of my day is like handling my shit and handling my life stuff, and again, being a mom, being a daughter, all that stuff, but also. Right, stepping into the business owner identity, and so I have to handle my emotions appropriately and healthily so that I continue showing up so that I can continue taking action so that I can continue being consistent so that my emotions don't take over my life because then your girl doesn't have a business. Right, so emotional intelligence is key. If you're not aware or familiar with what emo emotional intelligence is, it's simply just being aware of your emotions, being able to regulate them. And then also being able to respond to them, make sense of them, understand them versus like being triggered and react and not really knowing why, right? It was just this feeling, this physical response. So it's really, really important to understand what is going on. What am I feeling now? I wanna be clear. It's not about being calm all the time. Like calm, cool, collected all the time. Right, and it's not about suppressing emotions and we're not talking toxic positivity. Please don't throw that at me. What it does mean is still feeling fear, doubt, worry, disappointment, sadness, right? Like we're all human, but those emotions don't run the show. I can't say, I can't tell you how many times I've used the analogy where I'm in the driver's seat, I'm driving the car, and fear, worry, doubt, whatever is in the passenger seat, right? They're the passenger princess, so they'll yap all day, every day and they'll, they'll say like, ah, I think you should go here. I think you should go left. I think you should stop. I think you should go right. I think you should go faster. I think you should slow it down. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, it's noise. Because again, I'm the driver. I say how fast we're going. I say How slow we're going. I say, when we go left, I say, when we go right. I say when we stop. So I'm the one who is still aware and can make decisions based off of like my grounded emotional state. That is what I'm talking about. Emotional intelligence is when you still fear all the human emotions, the emotional scale from joy, from gratitude, from happy, optimistic, all the way down to sadness and anger and frustration, right? We feel that whole array of emotions, but we do not let the emotions run the show. Now, that's true with both sides of the spectrum, by the way, so. Yeah, of course. We all wanna feel more joy and happiness and abundance and gratitude, and I can say that is my baseline, right? But even when I feel that, I know it's temporary, I know eventually there's gonna be a dip. Right. And so the trick is like even when you have the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, there is this medium. There is this baseline, this foundation of neutrality, the best word I can use to describe it. It's this neutrality of, yeah, when life is good, life is good, and we're gonna enjoy it and we're gonna be so happy and grateful for it. But we also know that's not gonna be all day every day. And so when also it dips, we also know okay, but that's also not gonna be all day. Every day there's, it's gonna bound to be go up. Can I speak? It's bound to go up again. So understanding emotions, not letting it run the show, making sense of them. Emotions are messengers. All of that play such a key role for all of my entrepreneurial girlies listening to this right now. Because when you are building a business. Right. Whether you're starting, you're aspiring and you're like, ah, I might dip my toe in this. I might start the Instagram account. I might post that reel today, right? We're starting, or if you're like me and you're hanging out in six figure land and you know you wanna take the next step, maybe you've mastered one-on-one, but you wanna do group. Or you wanna start a podcast or you want more passive income in your business, so you're entertaining another stream of income, like digital courses, like whatever it is, there's always going to be a different level and it's constantly going to require you to grow. And the way you grow is through pain, is through discomfort. There's no way around it. Right. So if we're talking about coaching, in my world, in my industry handling rejection, people won't reply. They'll leave you on scene. They'll no-show the calls. They ghost you, they tell you to fuck off. That's just true story that happened to me one time. How are we handling that? How are we showing up consistently, even when the motivation dips? Receiving feedback. Right. Constructive feedback without spiraling, without taking it personally. Navigating comparison on social media, regulating emotions around money, and asking and pricing, and being seen. Right visibility on social media, all of that will come up. And if it hasn't already, buckle up because it will. Now, none of this is to scare you, but it's the reality of this will happen. You will move through this. It is required. It is necessary for you to grow and build this business that is on your heart. Trusting you'll be stronger on the other side. Right? So those are examples here in coaching. But again, even in your personal life, shit will happen. Friendships will disappear. A best friend will send a text and say, I'm done. Right? Aging parents, health scares. Perhaps becoming a mom, perhaps having a second child, perhaps dealing with fertility issues. There are so many things that, and I want to look it up here right now because I don't have it. I wanna paraphrase it, but let's see if I can just find it. I'm doing this right now during my podcast. This is great. I don't think I'm gonna find it right now. I, I have a post from it like a long time ago. But basically she says, having a positive mindset is not going to stop shit from happening in your life. Like shit happens to everyone in life, regardless of like how successful you are, right? It happens to everyone. But the key is having a more positive mindset will allow you to handle the ship better and recover faster when it happens.'cause it's bound to happen, it's inevitable, but you are able to handle it'cause you are emotionally equipped to handle it because you are working on yourself and you've got the personal development down and you've got the mindset down right. That is what we are talking about and that is resilience. So resilience is your ability to recover, your ability to keep going, and essentially self-lead through the discomfort. So I wanna be, again, clear resilience isn't about ever like having a breakdown, right? Dealing with harder emotions that are harder to move through because. Perhaps a friendship ending versus actually losing someone due to death. I would argue two very different things and one is heavier than the other, and so some emotions last longer. Some are harder to move through. Some are where you break down, but. Despite, again, any circumstance, it's just a matter of how quickly are we getting back up, right? When life knocks us down. Now, it could take a day, it could take a month. It could take a year. The point is you're just not quitting even when it feels justified. Right, and when I say justified, what I mean by that is like, no, this is actually a reason for me to stop because this is really hard and no one should have to go through this. Now I don't have an example. I've never felt that before, but there are absolutely. So many reasons, not excuses, reasons and excuses are very different, but there are absolutely reasons why people have 100% the justification to quit, to stop. But again, that's where people are separated from having the successful business that they dream of. And I wanna be clear, successful means on your terms, whatever that looks like. And that is built over time through the things and the shit that life throws at you. So I love, love, love how emotional intelligence and resilience work together because emotional intelligence, remember, it helps you understand what you're feeling. Emotions are messengers and resilience helps you move forward any way. Emotional intelligence helps you understand what you're feeling. It sorts through the emotions. We're journaling, we're meditating, we're doing all the things right so that we can get up and move forward anyway, and that is resilience. Okay. I think the biggest ways, mm, not, I think. A few of the common ways where I see other coaches, especially in CEO. It's my early and aspiring program. Sorry, it's my program for early and aspiring coaches. This is what I typically see. We avoid selling because it becomes uncomfortable, right? No one likes to get rejected. No one likes to show up to a call that they don't know. And now we have some script that we have to follow and we better not fuck up. And we hope they say yes at the end and we hope they don't have any objections. Like it's just a very uncomfortable experience initially, keyword initially.'cause the more you do it, the better you are, the more comfortable you are. So initially. You avoid selling because it's just uncomfortable. But you have to go through the discomfort. I digress. Another way. Making emotions means something about your worth, your purpose, your calling. Why you're coaching in the first place. Should I even coach? This is too fucking hard. Why do I keep getting rejected? We're making that emotion that we're feeling. The frustration, the anger, the comparison. The envy, the jealousy, whatever. We're making it mean something about the path that we're on. Or am I good enough? Why me? Why did I even choose this? Right? That's what I mean when I say you're worth, you're quitting too quickly after a setback, right? You have maybe five consultation calls and all five of them say no, so then you're like, ah, fuck it. This is, you know, too hard. I didn't sign up for this. I quit when the sixth one could have said yes. You take everything personally. So no one likes my content. Um, no one's responding to my messages. No one's watching my stories. They don't even care. Like you take it personally, right? And then you the biggest one, you wait, you wait to do anything. You wait to invest. You wait to feel confident. You wait to start the Instagram to. To post the photo, the real whatever it is, you're, you're in this waiting game because you don't take action. You don't step into courage before confidence and just take action. Remember, discomfort is not a sign of stop is not a sign that you're on the wrong path. It's a sign that you're growing. We don't know what that end result will become. But we know we're gonna get stronger. We know we're gonna learn a thing or two. So I would always argue, embrace discomfort no matter what's on the other side, because I know I'm only going to be stronger on the other side. I'm only going to learn something. So there's only upside from discomfort. There's only growth on the other side of discomfort. It's never something about wrong or bad, or not right. Because even if it's something that you didn't expect on the other side, now you have clarity. Now you know, now we can course correct. Now we can make another decision. There's only positive, there's only upside to discomfort. That was a little tangent for you. This podcast is not about discomfort, but that's what came for me, came up for me. So. One thing I wanna give you guys is how could you actually start to build emotional intelligence and resilience now again? Most of this is built through taking the action through, stepping in courage, and doing all those things I just said. Posting on Instagram, showing up online, inviting others to a call, having conversations, handling objections, asking for the sale, naming your price, right? Like all of that. Is going to build emotional intelligence and resilience. Now, what you can do in support of that, right? What you can do alongside that is journaling. Yes, there's breath work. Yes, there's all these nervous system regulation techniques. I do somatic breath work myself. There's so much you can do. Absolutely. My personal favorite, to reconnect with myself, to have awareness around my emotions and what I am feeling in that moment. I grab a journal. Journaling is my favorite way because it's pen to paper. So now I have two senses working. It's so much better than typing. Now I'm actually focusing, I do it to some music. I light a candle. I did it this morning actually with my mom, with a cup of coffee. Like it's a thing, it's a vibe so that I can feel and tap into those emotions. I'm not gonna multitask. I'm not gonna do it with the TV in the background. Like I'm sitting there with my journal. With some song on a candle and some kind of beverage. Okay. And then when I journal, I'm asking myself questions. Can I use chat GPT? Absolutely. Maybe I just do stream of consciousness writing where I journal. But the awareness has got to go up so that again, I understand what I'm feeling, why I am feeling perhaps possible, triggers that I'm feeling. What is the unhealed wound behind that trigger, right? Like all of the journaling brings all, all it does is brings up awareness. Then I get a lesson from that. I get some clarity from that. I actually just feel better from that because it's a release outta my head onto paper, right? And then because I feel better, right? I'm back at that neutral baseline. I get to now move forward. I get to go and show up back on Instagram. Right. I, I had, I didn't post for like over a week, I think. And then today I decided to post, but that's because I've moved through my emotions. That's because I've been journaling every single day. That's because I've been having long conversations with my mom. That's, you know, like I've been doing the work here behind the scenes so that I felt like, okay, I can show up again here online. Right. So. I'm gonna leave these questions in the show notes below, so if you just wanna scroll down you can take a screenshot or just look at. Your, this description, the show notes below, while you journal as well, come back to this podcast, you can do that if you are moving through anything and you want some help. Um, but I'll just say it here for the sake of the podcast, especially if you're just listening in. And then yeah, I'll, I'll leave you guys to it. I, I'll. Let you journal and see what comes up for you. And then, um, maybe I'll do a part two and part three, diving more into emotional intelligence and then more into resilience. Okay. Journal prompt number one, what am I feeling right now and where do I feel it in my body? Now, part of this is also. Naming the emotion. So when you detect what you're feeling and where you feel it, you can also name it. So like is this fear? Is this frustration? Is this disappointment? Or flip side is this excitement? Right? So awareness is power. That's what we wanna do as a step one, step two, what story am I telling myself about this feeling or situation, right? So this means I'm behind. This means I'm not cut out for this. This means I should stop. This means I should quit. C, life always happens to me. Whatever it is. What? What is the story that you're telling yourself, right? Number three is my reaction. And the way I'm processing this and the way I am handling this, is it coming from fear? Is it coming from protection? Is it coming from leadership? Is it coming from grounded emotional state? Right? You, you wanna detect basically from this question, are you in fight or flight mode or are you in a grounded, neutral state? Right. And from that type of state we know, okay, this is emotional regulation, this is emotional intelligence, this is emotional awareness. I can move forward. Question number four, what would the most grounded version of me do next? Even if it's uncomfortable. Right. We can, we can feel that it's still a scary choice. It's still a scary decision, but deep down we know it's right. That is the best way I can filter through my emotions when I'm making decisions, because if it's right, that's my intuition, right? That's my heart. That's my soul talking. But scary is my head. That's my logical side of the brain. So yeah. Okay. It feels scary. Head's in the way. Mind chatter is there. Got it. Monkey mind is a thing, but deep down. Right noise to the side, it actually still feels right, like, I need to do this. I need to say this thing. I need to reach out to this person. I need to fly out to Cali. I need, you know what I mean? Like we still need to do something about it. And then the last question, when have I felt something similar before? And kept going anyway. Now this is really huge, especially to leave this, um, and let you guys go because we wanna stack proof and evidence for our brain. So if you remember other difficult situations that you've been through, other challenges that you have met head on. It actually empowers you to be stronger in the current moment and in the current emotions that you're experiencing because you're like, okay, I've gone through some shit before and I came out on the other side alive. I'm okay. Might even be stronger. And so I can get through this as well. So that reinforces resilience, that reinforces this idea of keep going, keep moving forward because you've survived and you've done hard things before. So that's really important to do as your last prompt, because that's where you leave this journal session, right? So it's really, really powerful. So I also just wanna be clear with journaling,'cause I think a lot of people overlook it or they don't think it's as powerful as whatever else technique is out there. There's so many and so I just wanna be clear, like journaling doesn't remove the emotion completely. It's not a fix it, it's not a bandaid, you know? But what it does do is it teaches you how to lead yourself through. The thing you're going through. Right. That's why I even created my own journal. Called pen drop. I think it was two, three years ago now, like journaling is my thing. I journal right, and again, for the good and the bad and everything in between. So it doesn't fix everything. It doesn't solve everything, but it absolutely helps. It teaches you how to lead yourself through, again, building up the awareness, the emotional intelligence, and then moving forward anyway through resilience. I hope you all loved this episode, and I really, really do hope you gained so much out of it. I really hope you have a notebook full of notes if that's your thing. So I'm gonna leave you with that. If anything about this episode resonated with you, please do me a favor and send me a DM on Instagram. You guys know I. Love, love, love my conversations and dms, and if there's any part of you that is interested in working with me this year in 2026 and just what that looks like, what do I even have available for you as a one-on-one, as a group? Is it none of that? Because it doesn't fit, it doesn't align. That's what I'm here for. That is what a conversation is for. I'm never going to pressure you into anything. It's not good for me and it's not good for you.