EP 161: The 40K Collapse That Changed Everything, And What It taught me about sustainable success)

This isn’t a highlight reel.

It’s the story behind the moment I sat on the lounge room floor—heart racing, bank account in the red, realising the business I’d built from the outside in had just cost me everything I thought I was working for.

In this episode, I’m sharing the full story: From my $40K collapse… To the chronic stress, disconnection, and panic disorder that followed… To the exact moment I decided to rebuild—on new terms.

Not with more strategy. Not with another certification. But with a new identity. A nervous system that could hold success. And the creation of what would become the Energies of Success framework.

Inside, we explore:

• The invisible beliefs and patterns that sabotage success—even when you’re doing “everything right”
• Why your business won’t outgrow the version of you still operating from survival
• The exact shift that led to my first $50K launch and how I built a sustainable, soul-aligned business model from the ground up

This episode is an invitation to stop proving and start receiving. To stop running from old stories, and finally decide to become the woman who can hold what she’s building.

Reflection prompts:

• Where am I still leading from urgency, fear, or past failure?
• What story about success am I ready to rewrite?
• What would it look like to become the woman who trusts her business will hold?

If you’ve been doing the work…
But still feel like something is blocking you—this is where we begin again.

Listen now, and come back to the truth of who you are.

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to Resource with Jessica Reed. This is the podcast for visionary entrepreneurs who are here to build a thriving business and luminous life, fully resourced from the inside out. Here we unlock the magic of inner alignment, emotional mastery, and energetic strategies, so you can lead with clarity, confidence, and ease. This is your space to shed what no longer serves you, embody your highest potential, and expand into the next evolution of your business and soul's work. You are meant for more, and it all starts here.

squadcaster-9d00_1_04-09-2025_102603: 0:47

Sitting on my lounge room floor late November, 2014, I remember my whole body feeling hot. My feet were aching, my arms were heavy, my head was just tired. I was completely drained, but in the best way, I had just wrapped up four straight days of running Canberra's only health and fitness exhibition that I had built. From scratch. We were in our second year. I'd had over 2000 people come through the gates. I had over a hundred exhibitors. The energy was huge. The event looked like such a success. We had a fitness influencer there. It was before influencers were actually a thing. And for a moment, just for a moment, I felt proud of myself. I felt like maybe I had finally made it, like maybe I had finally found the thing. That I was going to be known for, that I was going to be good at, that I was going to make enough money to be able to have a baby. I was 26 years old, but as I sat there on that floor counting the cash takings from the day, the cash that was supposed to be my profit prophet, my stomach dropped. I remember the sound of my family fading away from me. I realized that not only had I not broken even, but I hadn't covered my expenses. This event that I had worked all year for the one that was supposed to fund my next 12 months of business and life didn't even cover my costs, and as I was choking back the tears. Plastering a fake smile on my face trying to pretend like nothing was wrong. All that pride drained my from my body, absolutely gone. And as I was digesting this, I've gone really quiet. My phone went ping, and when I opened in those emails in that moment and changed absolutely everything for me. Welcome to Resource with Jessica Read. In this episode, I am sharing the real story behind my first$50,000 launch, but not the strategy, not the highlight reel, the identity shift that had to happen before anything was ever going to work for me. Because your business doesn't start working when you try harder. It starts working when you decide that it's going to. So this episode is about energetic leadership, emotional safety, about financial loss. It's about becoming the woman who can hold what she is building. So let's begin where we just left off. I opened my email and saw$40,000 supplier invoice that I just did not see coming. I felt the blood rush to my neck, my face, it was hot. I thought I was gonna throw up. I felt like I had been completely exposed. Shame was exactly what I knew this feeling to be. It was shame. All I wanted. Was to be successful, I just wanted to have a successful business so I could start a family. I wanted to make the millions of dollars that I had always dreamed of, that at some part of me believed that I could, but most of all, I wanted to be the woman that people believed that I was. The people, the woman that people continually told me that I was confident, inspiring, capable. But right there on that floor, I felt like the fraud that I deep down actually believed that I was. So in this moment, I did exactly what any woman who overspends does, you'll know what I mean here. I hit it. I didn't tell anyone. I didn't tell my partner. I didn't tell my family until I had to. Months later, I shut the whole business down. Didn't matter that I knew how to recoup my costs for the next year didn't matter that I'd found a new venue, different suppliers. It didn't matter that I had what I had learned. I couldn't see that in that moment. All I could feel was the shame. The perceived judgment from the people who financially bailed me out. I shut the business down. I ran from it, and I ran straight back to a traditional job suppressing the natural bond entrepreneur within me. Yet again, it wasn't the first time I'd run from that. So then I quickly elevated into this senior leadership role. I had a team of 48 support staff. I was working long hours. I was rewarded for continually taking on more. How many of you can relate to that? I had my first child when I returned back to work, she ended up in 11 hours a day of daycare. As I was running from my feelings, I was running also on the fumes of chronic stress. Until eventually my body screamed loud enough for me to, listen. So June, 2017, it was one of those stunning, if you've ever been to Canberra, you'll know what I'm talking about. One of those like stunning winter days. It's this crystal clear blue sky. The sun is sharp, it's beautiful, but there's also this kind of crisp air coming off the mountains. And it's all happening all at once and it's beautiful. And my daughter and I, she was around 18 months at the time. We had the most perfect day. We had been out shopping, we'd been to the mall, we'd gotten a new outfit. We had then done our groceries, and then we were just starting to get ready for the week ahead. And I had no idea just how much everything was about to completely crumble around me. As I was putting the washing away, as she was playing in the room next to me, I turned around from the washing and my knee dislocated. As I fell, I slipped my head open, and as I sat frozen in shock, I will never forget the look on my daughter's face. These beautiful blue eyes coming in as she came in running mom, because I was screaming, she stared at the blood that was on my brand new white knit top that we had just bought. And there was just something about this moment that I knew that, I was never gonna be the same. Not because this was my big breakthrough, but this was actually the beginning to my unraveling. So what followed this then was a blood clot pulmonary embolism, eight months of a nearly full leg brace, a walking stick. Unable to bear the weight of carrying my daughter. Say goodbye to the second pregnancy that I wanted at that time. My ideal two year age gap while I was on warfarin, none of that was ever gonna happen. Multiple ambulance trips, multiple hospital trips, chronic migraines, gut issues, emergency visits eventually a diagnosis for SVT and then a panic disorder that took me down like a ton of bricks My body was breaking down, but a part of me told myself that this was normal because this is what working hard looks like, right? And this is what women do. We get knocked down and we get up and we keep going. We get knocked down, we get up and we keep going. We don't deal with it. We don't pause, we don't stop. We don't slow down. There was no time for that in my job. There was no time for that being a mom. So I normalized it. This became my life. I masked my pain. I drove to work with my heart rate at 180, running my team meetings completely dissociated, depersonalizing as I was having conversations with people walking down hallways with the carpet patterns, making me feel like I wanted to fall over. Literally living this life where it was like looking through this glass window and I didn't feel real, but I kept going. And then I had my second daughter and there came a point through that pregnancy, and then after she was born where I was at the absolute height of my panic disorder, that I knew that I couldn't keep living like this. There was this little voice inside of me that says, this can't be it. I'd started to step out of, this is just my normal into this can't be it. Surely you can feel normal again. Surely you can leave the house without feeling like you are going to have a panic attack or faint, or have another medical episode. So this is when I actually stumbled across EFT Tapping and I began to regulate my nervous system. I thought, what a great tool to take back to my team while I was on maternity leave. But learning EFT was just the beginning. It cracked something so deep open for me that I actually felt safe to start to bring out that entrepreneur within me again, that entrepreneur that first came out when she was 12 years old. So I started a business again. I didn't return back to my job. By the way. Spoiler alert, that's another story. I started a business again, and this time I had tools. I had a different perspective on working and living to actually support your nervous system to support your emotional wellbeing. I had all of this subconscious work. I had a diploma in clinical hypnotherapy. I had all of these other qualifications. I had a nervous system that I could actually regulate. I had strategy, experience, I thought I was good. I thought this is it. Now, this time I am going to reach my desires. This time I am going to be successful, but guess what? All of those patterns that I took into my last business. The overgiving, the money beliefs, the urgency, the addiction to stress, the shame that I was still carrying from that. It took me eight years before I could even talk about that business. I brought that with me. That didn't magically disappear just because I had a break. So I was launching to my list of 47 people convincing myself that no one wanted to buy my things, when really I didn't actually feel safe to be seen. I would hop on sales calls carrying this energy of fear and desperation and lack negotiating down my$50 an hour fee, actually$50 a session, and my sessions were never capped to an hour because I had to first of all, prove my worth. I had to earn enough money to not go back to my regular job. All of these stories and narratives and pressure, so much scarcity, so much desperation, so much fear. And then every time something didn't work, every failed launch, I ghosted the offer just like the last business. I was so sure that everybody watching me was judging me and that shame that lived in my body from that$40,000 loss that came straight back. So I'd spiral and I would ask myself every time, how can I be that woman that they say that I am when I am still so clearly a fraud and I am not where I wanna be. So let's fast forward 18 months into my business and no, two years into my business actually, we're a bit more than two. No, probably two and a half years. We're about two and a half years in actually by this point. And there was this one day in August and there was literally nothing special about this day. Absolutely nothing. I just woke up. Something inside me had snapped. This was 2023. I woke up. Something inside me had just changed, and I can't describe this any other way than this deep knowing that things were going to work. Now in this time, I had been in a high level mastermind for 18 months. I had been diving into those money stories. I had done somatic work around the shame that I was carrying and where those money stories actually came from to begin with, right? From my early programming, I had been diving into my visibility fears. I had been doing hard internal work behind the scenes, and literally one day I woke up and I decided. I decided it was this full body, deep inner knowing that I was going to make money. And the difference from that, the difference from that was me putting out my office with this narrative and this fear. This, oh, no one's probably gonna buy anyway. Oh, I'll only probably get one or two people. Oh, this kind of this, disbelief in myself. To me, literally being like, this business is working because I've decided it's going to work, and I was done pretending that I was busy, I was ready to make money, I was ready to make impact, done, trying to keep my stress, addiction happy. Done, building from the same patterns, the same beliefs. That had praised me in traditional employment, yet left me abandoning my kids, done believing that hard work equaled success, and that burnout and stress were as natural collateral of that. And in this moment in August, it hit me. It's not that my business wasn't working, it's not that I was flaky and couldn't finish something or couldn't commit to it. It's that my identity. Had not actually caught up with what I was building. I realized over those years just how much of that$40,000 shame I was still carrying, how I was still trying to prove my worth through output. Still launching from urgency and fear, and I was now done with that. So at this point in my business, I did not need more strategy. I needed to become and own and fully embody the woman who could hold the success that I said that I wanted to have. And this is where my energies of success framework was born because it became really, clear to me, and this has been proven over and over again, and you'll see this with any successful entrepreneur. Who has built a sustainable business with a healthy body, mind, nervous system, emotional state, scaling your business is not just about learning more, doing more, going as hard as you possibly can. And yes, there are seasons where we do go hard, but as I've recorded in the past, hustle to the health of your nervous system. But this is about unlearning, unbecoming, the over-functioning, the overgiving, the shame driven patterns that are keeping you stuck at your current level. It is about healing the emotional capacity that you need to receive more, clients, more income, more opportunities without collapsing under the pressure. It's about having the courage to do things differently and build a business that actually holds you a business that feels like home, a business that loves you back because you have stepped out of the normal way of doing things. It is about your identity because your business we'll never outgrow the version of you that is still running it from survival. And do you know what? You know what happened after this decision? This deep inner knowing that things were changing and that I was going to do things differently. Two months later, I launched my mastermind. I had my first$50,000 launch. I then three months later filled my private practice, completely booked solid to the capacity of my choosing, and I think that's important to throw in here. Completely working with Dream Clients, launching other lower ticket group offers with minimum 10 K launches. What a difference that is. From launching my$47 offer and having$300 launches, I began aligning my business with my unique energetic blueprint, really operating from who I am. In my human design, in my astrology, I created a business model that meets my nervous system and that holds me when human things happen.'cause you know what, and I've recorded about this before too. I have the channel of struggle and the channel of crisis in my human design chart. I'm probably not done in terms of chaos, right from this. From all of this alignment, the Energies of Success framework were created, and I will tell you not only from my journey, but from the hundreds of women that I have worked with since mastering the Energies of success is the only way to grow successful, scalable, and sustainable business coaching practice, healing practice, any business. With energy that is clean capacity, that is strong. A business that holds you, feels like home and loves you back, and a nervous system that is finally on board with your growth. So you are no longer self-sabotaging every time you get to that next level. And if you are here, you are listening. If you are building and it still feels heavy. If you are hitting glass ceilings, swinging between visibility and then hiding and then charging, but resenting, if you are done with the strategies that sound good but don't land, then if the first 10 strategies didn't work for you eleven's not gonna work either because this is your identity that needs to shift and I wanna tell you that it is okay. That you have been operating from your old stories. It is okay if your nervous system has been running the show up until now. It is okay if shame, scarcity, urgency have been in that driver's seat, but now you know this. Now you have this awareness. Because I'm so sure that even if you have not had all of the sequences of events that I have experienced in this to come to this lesson, you would've had your own moments of shame, your own moments of hiding, your own moments, of launching and believing at some part, some level of your being that actually this isn't gonna work. You would've had your own doubt, your own fear, but I'm willing to bet that you are done living in that loop because we, you and I, we are embodied entrepreneurs. We don't just build businesses. We build the bodies and the beliefs that can hold them. We turn our struggles into strengths. We turn doubt into self-trust. And if that is you too. Then I actually want you, I don't care where you are right now, where you're listening. I want you to say out loud, speak out loud. I am ready to master the energies of success. I am the woman who holds her vision. I don't chase timelines. I expand into my next level. I am. The Embodied Entrepreneur Speak that claim it. Let that land in your body, if this story resonated with you, then let's have a conversation about how you can expand into your next level through containers like the Transcendence, mastermind or private mentoring, where I will mentor every bit of your expansion through the lens of the energies of success. This is your invitation. To stop hiding, to claim what is rightfully yours, to heal and to grow and to expand. So I would love to hear from you in my dms. Come over to Instagram and tell me, did you have a moment? In your life, in your business where everything just changed a moment where you realized you were done with something and things are going to be different. Come and tell me about that moment. I can't wait to hear and I'll see you on next week's episode.

23:42

Thank you for tuning into resource with Jessica Reed. If today's episode spoke to you, I'd love for you to share it with another soul led entrepreneur who is also ready to rise. Make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and stay connected because when you are deeply resourced, you become unstoppable. Until next time, my friend, stay resourced. Stay radiant and trust in the magic that is you.