EP 209 - Why Growing Your Business Can Feel Like Grief: Identity Shifts No One Talks About

Something happens when you know the next move is right. You've mapped it out. You've probably paid someone to help you map it out. And right as you go to move toward it, there's this weight. Not fear exactly. Something heavier. Something that feels almost like sadness.

You push it down, tell yourself you're being stupid, call it resistance, and try to strategy your way through it.

It's not resistance. It's grief. And in this episode, we're finally giving it that name.

Drawing on Resource Therapy and the concept of Survival States, this episode explains why the heaviness that shows up at your biggest growth edges isn't a sign something is wrong. It's a sign something is changing. And a part of you is mourning what's being left behind.

We cover the exact moments this grief tends to show up, what's actually happening underneath the stalling and resistance, and the reframe that changes everything: the woman on the other side of this grief is not a stranger. She is more fully you than you've been able to be in a very long time.

In this episode:

• Why the weight you feel right before a big business move is grief, not resistance or self-sabotage
• The specific growth moments this shows up: moving from 1:1 to group, building a team, hitting a goal and feeling flat
• Survival States explained via Resource Therapy: the part of you who built your business and why she grips when you try to scale
• Why grief is not the opposite of growth. It is the doorway.
• The reframe: growth asks you to become more of who you've always been, not someone you won't recognise

Links:
Empire Edge Diagnostic (free, under 5 minutes)

Brain, body and business experience for female founders ready for their income to finally match their expertise.

May 25 cohort is enrolling now.

VISIT THE WEBSITE HERE

Ready to go deeper?

→ The Scaling Ceiling Diagnostic (Free)

Find out exactly what's bottlenecking your next big aligned move in just 5 minutes.

→ Access the Vault here

 My complete business rebirth vault - 10 programs, frameworks, and backend tools for rebuilding your business from identity to income. 

→ Explore working together

Connect with me on Instagram

@jessica.read.co

Transcript

1:53

Welcome to the Fck Yes Frequency, the podcast where strategy meets energetics and your business gets to feel like a full body yes. I'm Jessica Read, frequency-first business mentor for the woman building a sustainable, scalable, and sexy business grounded in her unapologetic self-expression, authority, and embodied leadership. Let's drop into the episode. Something happens when you are about to make a move in your business that you know is actually right. You know it strategically, you've mapped it out, maybe you've even paid someone to help you plan out your next steps. It makes sense. But right as you go to move towards it, there's this, this weight, and it's not exactly fear. It's something heavier. It's something that almost feels like sadness. Now, when you think about it, you don't actually know what you're sad about because things are good. The business is growing. You're taking the next big, scary, exciting steps, right? Things are working. So you push it down, tell yourself you're being stupid, you should just go and be more grateful, call it resistance, and then try to strategy your way through it. Now, today, I want to actually give you language for this, because this is more common than what you think, and I'm not hearing it get enough airtime. Now, when you start to feel sad as the next good things are happening in your business, there is a name for this. I'm going to explain why today, and that name is actually grief. Now, my name is Jessica. Welcome back to the Fck Yes Business Frequency. Need you to stay with me on this one. Let's get really specific because the grief isn't random. It is going to show up at very particular moments, and I wanna really name them. Because when you hear yourself in these situations, you go, "Oh, yes, this is what I am going through. This is why this makes sense, why I'm not just gonna brush it away, tell myself I'm being stupid". Because here in my world, we are here to have emotional experiences as we run our business because we're human, and trying to pretend like this doesn't happen, trying to pretend like we don't have very real feelings as we move from leading from one identity to another, trying to pretend that that doesn't happen is not gonna help anybody. You are here to have the full extent of a human emotional experience. So let's understand what the f*ck is actually going on. Now, let's first of all focus on the expansion points where this might come up. We've talked a lot about identity shifting lately. We have talked a lot about being the woman who holds your next level. So if you are moving, let's say, from a one-on-one business model to something a little bit more leveraged, a group program, a membership, but every time you go to build it, you're feeling this sadness. So you're like, "Oh, maybe it's the, not the right time. Maybe I just need more clarity on the container. Haven't figured out my messaging. No one's gonna buy. The market isn't ready". Like you know the stories that you're telling yourself. But underneath that, it actually feels like betrayal. Maybe you feel like you're actually abandoning the intimacy that made your work feel like yours, and that comes with this natural fear. Are people going to get the same results if I am not giving to them in the same way, if I'm not as available to them? But I want you to hear the identity that is coming forward and saying that. The part leading you in that moment is a part of you that has been leading for a very long time, a part that has gotten very used to being needed the way that she is needed, very safe in getting the results in the way that she has been getting results, and now we are asking you to let her go. We are asking you to lead with a different part that holds different beliefs, that holds a different capacity in her nervous system, that doesn't lead from the same survival-based beliefs around proving worth, around being needed, around needing to do certain amounts of work to actually get paid. We're asking you to shift into this whole different identity. Why have we not acknowledged that shifting identity actually means grieving the part that we're leaving behind sometimes? So that's one example. Another example of when we can start to feel this grief, and can I just say two things can be true. We can hold the excitement for what is coming. We can feel the stretchiness. We can take the action, and we can hold space for the sadness and recognize that, that that's there. We're letting go of something that has been very familiar to us. So think about maybe if you're at a stage of more delegation, bringing on more team, expanding your team from a VA to an actual team. We are told it should feel like relief, but sometimes it feels like loss. Like something is actually being taken from the work rather than being added to it. And again, thinking about the parts that are leaving you. We are having to say goodbye to a part of us that has likely been leading for a very long time. Maybe you are about to hit a goal, and you've been chasing this goal for years and years, and then suddenly feel flat or sad. That makes no logical sense. But it also makes complete sense when you think about it from this identity shifting lens that I'm talking about. Maybe it's the moment that your business stops being something that you built with your hands and starts becoming something that you are leading. That transition, the distance between you and the work that used to feel like the whole point, there is this grief that comes with scaling. And also thinking about that then visibility expansion, being known at a bigger scale. And something in you keeps pulling back to that version of where it was smaller or closer or safer. All of these are really good examples of transitions that happen in business when we are growing, when we are expanding, when we are moving forward, that we've got this hint of heaviness or sadness at the same time. None of these, none of them are strategic failures. None of them are signs that you are not cut out for the next level. I can guarantee that most of them are not going to need to be therapied their way through. So don't make that mistake of feeling like just because something feels off inside means that we have to go and necessarily do all of this inner work all over again. That's something that we're becoming very, very discerning around in frequency-first business. These ladies are doing these identity-shifting, massive internal transitions, and then it gets to a point where the story comes forward and I ask them, "Does this actually need to be worked through? Is this something that feels like it actually holds a whole heap of emotional weight still? Or is this just a well-worn pathway and we're gonna lovingly hold your nervous system through this while you take action?" So I really encourage you to start to learn that discernment in your own body. Not everything needs a therapy session, but you'll know when it actually does. This is your system responding to what it perceives to be a very real threat at first. And to understand what that threat is, I wanna bring in a framework. We're gonna talk about it in the context of parts. I use this a lot with my clients. So when we think about parts, when you actually understand this, the grief will stop feeling like dysfunction and start feeling like what it actually is. When we are moving through the very first phase of frequency-first business, the very first thing that we work with is the survival parts that are leading, and then bring in what we call a more resourced part. Because the thing is, the woman who actually built your business to where it is right now, she wasn't meant to run it forever. So we work with multiple parts of the personality, not metaphorically, literally. Distinct states that develop at different points in your life in response to what you needed to actually survive, to be loved, to be enough. Some of those are resource states. So the parts that are grounded and present and creative and genuinely you. And some of these are survival states, and those survival states are a part that developed as a protective strategy. And I'm gonna say 'she' to you rather than saying 'you', because when we are made up of these multiple parts, the way that we are feeling or the way that we are thinking, the way that we are being, the part of us that is leading, that is not our whole self. So she, that part, is not broken. That is not a problem to be fixed. That part is actually brilliant. She built a response to her environment with exactly what she had available. She's amazing. But the specific survival state that runs the most high-achieving women's businesses, she comes forward as the indispensable one, the one who learned that her worth lived in being needed, in being the one in every single room across every single client relationship, the constant one who holds it all, and that has served her up until now. But the reality is, Is that that is not emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually sustainable. It's not sustainable. If your goal is growth, it's not sustainable. So this part leading may have very well actually learned a long, long time before the business actually existed. Learned that being capable was how she received love maybe. You're gonna have your own version of this. This is the first things that we uncover in Frequency First Business. Learn that being the one maybe who held it all together was how she stayed safe. She's carried that strategy, that protection strategy, all the way into her work, and it worked remarkably well. She helped you build the reputation. She created the results with your clients. She is the reason that clients trust you and stay with you and prefer you. She has given you her everything. But now growth is asking her to take a step back so that she doesn't burn out, so she doesn't fall apart. Because what she knows and believes has a ceiling. So growth is asking her to delegate all of a sudden, to build a model that doesn't require her to be in every single room, to hold hands with every single client through every booking process, through every onboarding, through every little piece. And so she is coming forward with this huge red, like flashing alarm light going, "No, no, no, this is a threat to my whole entire survival strategy." Not a business pivot, not an exciting growth strategy like another part of you is telling you, but a threat to her actual existence. So she is gonna grip, she's gonna grip hard. She's gonna create the resistance, the stalling, the weight that shows up every time you go to make that move. She's not intentional. Well, I guess she is intentionally sabotaging you, but she's doing exactly what she was built to do, which is protecting you. But once you can see this, once you understand this, once you are able to actually bring safety to those survival parts, just like we do in phase one of Frequency First Business, once you are able to do that, you see this completely differently, and you can ask questions like, " Is this now something that I actually have to emotionally deal with, or is this just a well-worn pathway?" And once you have actually done that work, it becomes just a well-worn pathway. And so we have these processes where it's like, "Okay, thank you. I see you, I recognize you, but I now know how to anchor into a more resource part that is going to come forward and lead the business." Now, that part, let's think about what's actually happening underneath this resistance. So underneath the stalling, underneath that flatness because sometimes when we are bringing forward different parts to lead, particularly if they're not parts that have been in the driver's seat for a long period of time, they're unfamiliar. It's unknown territory, and we can start actually feeling sad. Sad for a part that stayed with us for so long. It's almost like saying goodbye to an old friend, even if that relationship was toxic. So what do we do with this? If we're not fixing it, we're not clearing it, we're not pushing through it. I feel like what we need to do is something that the business world actually never gives you permission to do, and that's actually to feel the grief. Let's imagine for a moment that this is an old friend. She built your business. She deserves more than a mindset hack. We need to feel the grief. Naming it as grief, if that's what you are experiencing, actually matters. Don't just call it resistance. Don't just call it self-sabotage. Don't just say it's a block that you need to clear. Feel it. Feel it. Call it grief, if that's what you're feeling. If you are grieving an old friend or a very familiar part that was leading your business and now you are asking it to stop leading your business, to take a back seat, to go off and die, feel the grief. She is a part of you. A part of you who has been working flat out, possibly likely for decades, to keep you safe. A part of you who loved you in the only way that she knew how. She gave you everything that she had. She earned the right to be felt as she leaves. She earned the right to a proper goodbye. So what that actually looks like, this doesn't have to be a big ceremony or a journaling exercise if that's not your thing. It just looks like the permission to feel the loss without making it mean that something has gone wrong. The permission to say,"This part of me was real. She mattered, and I am allowed to mourn her. I can feel this heaviness and still move forward. I can acknowledge this sadness, I can feel it in my body, and I can still press forward with the things that I am excited to do in my business." Grief is not the opposite of growth. Grief is the doorway, and you will notice it. You will actually notice all of the stages of grief do come through in identity shifting. You will start to notice those patterns within yourself, and then it's one less thing that you tell yourself is wrong as you are growing. Grief is this, it's a doorway. It really is. You don't bypass it and then arrive somewhere better. You move through it to arrive somewhere not better, truer. What you don't do is spiritually skip it, reframe it too fast. I'm not saying that it has to take over your whole day and grieve in the same way that you would in very big, significant losses. But you do allow yourself to feel it. Feel it and keep moving. You don't turn it into a lesson before you've let it be a feeling. The bypass is what actually will keep you cycling through the same ceiling, the same resistance, the same stall, wondering why the strategy isn't working. You need to feel it. Now, here is what I really, really want you to hold alongside everything that I've just said in this concept. The woman on the other side of this grief is the one your business is growing toward. She is not who you're afraid she is, and feeling this grief isn't as scary or as business demolishing as you probably believe that it is. Now, growth is not asking you to become someone you won't recognize. It's asking you to become someone that you've actually always been. The fear underneath all of this, that scaling means losing the version of yourself that made the work feel meaningful, the fear that you'll build to a 500K business and feel nothing or not recognize yourself in that, that you'll become the kind of leader that you used to judge, that the intimacy or the soul or the thing that made this business yours will be gone. That fear is actually just another survival story. Because if you are actually allowing yourself to grow and evolve, you are moving closer towards the real you, the most unfiltered version of you. The survival state was never showing you who you actually were. The survival state was showing you who you needed to be to stay safe. The doing, the holding, the indispensability, that was the survival strategy, not your true self. Underneath the survival state is a resource state, the actual you. The one who existed before the strategy was necessary. The most pure version of you. We are always working towards this. We are not dismantling the protective part, but we're actually getting underneath of what she was protecting. Bringing that part forward. So what this would then look like is creating from genuine desire, from emotional richness, not fear of what happens if you stop. Leading from presence, not pretending that you have to be someone else. Holding a team, holding visibility, holding a bigger container and still feeling like yourself. In fact, more like yourself than you have in years. That's what this work does. The specific things that don't disappear on the other side of this grief. The intimacy, it doesn't dissolve, just lives in a different place in your business. The soul of the work, that expands. It doesn't leave. The connection with your clients becomes something that you can actually choose rather than something that you need. There's a whole different energy behind how you're running your business. The growth. The growth is integration. You are not leaving the woman who built this. You are bringing her with you, but without the survival armor that she needed for as long as she can remember. And that is actually not loss. It is the most fully yourself that you've probably ever been. So then this is where the excitement lives, not despite the grief, but through it, on the other side of actually naming this, of feeling it, of letting this part finally rest. There is a version of your business that feels like freedom, that feels like home. It doesn't mean it's gonna be easy, but there are more resource parts to lead it within you. So now I just wanna leave this with you. Is this something that you have been experiencing? Does this maybe give you some language to what you have been going through in your business? If you have been pivoting, if you have been rebirthing, if you have been at an integration edge and you are trying to step over into something new, I want you to remember, take away with you that that integration is the strategy. The grief isn't the obstacle, it is the doorway to the other side. Now, if you know that you have a block, I actually have a free resource for you. You're gonna love it, particularly if you are not sure exactly what that block that is keeping you from stepping over that edge, taking more aligned steps towards your empire, and it is called the Empire Edge Diagnostic. It is completely free, and in less than five minutes, you are going to have a clear picture of what is going on across your business, your identity, and your nervous system with the exact next lever to pull for you to actually be able to break through this. So that is your next step. There is a link down in the show notes. It is jessicaread.com/diagnostic. It is completely free. That is your next step, so go and do that. And of course, my DMs are always open for you if this episode has really brought something alive in you. Come and tell me about it. If this episode awoken something in you, good. You are ready to lead from your f*ck yes frequency, and you'll find ways to go deeper in the show notes. And before you go, I would be so grateful if you could leave a review and share this episode with someone who you know that is done leading their business from survival and ready to create and live in overflow. See you on the next one.