Entrepreneurship As A Trauma Survivor Pt 2 | Your Trauma Wise Career Guide Ep 27

Entrepreneurship As A Trauma Survivor Pt 2 | Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide Ep 27

What does it really take to build a business while healing from trauma? In this vulnerable follow-up episode, I'm getting real about the messy middle of trauma-informed entrepreneurship.

After our first attempt at recording this episode where a protective part showed up and wouldn't let me be vulnerable, I came back to try again - this time with full transparency about what it's actually like to run a trauma-informed business as a trauma survivor.

In this episode, you'll hear:

* The turning point that led me to create a trauma-informed career development company
* Why therapy alone wasn't enough - and what else I needed to succeed
* How attachment wounds made asking for help nearly impossible (and how I worked through it)
* The real talk about capacity, overwhelm, and moving at the speed of your nervous system
* Why traditional business advice doesn't work for trauma survivors - and what to do instead
* A powerful client success story that reminds me why this work matters
* The one piece of advice I wish I'd known before starting: go slow and trust your gut

Key Takeaways:
* You take your trauma with you into entrepreneurship, but it can become your superpower
* Working at the speed of your nervous system isn't a limitation - it's wisdom
* Community and support are non-negotiables, not nice-to-haves
* Small, bite-sized chunks of learning honor your capacity
* Trauma-informed business requires modifying traditional strategies through a trauma-informed lens

TIMELINE:
00:00 - Introduction: Coming back to be vulnerable
01:00 - The turning point: Why I created a trauma-informed company
03:00 - From trauma recovery coach to workplace specialist
05:00 - Showing up messy: Values and mission
07:00 - Non-negotiables: Therapy, community, and asking for help
09:00 - The difficulty with boundaries and capacity
11:00 - Working at the speed of your nervous system
12:00 - Honoring capacity and giving yourself grace
13:00 - Client success story: From 6 months to 3 years
16:00 - Advice to my former self: Go slow and trust your gut
17:00 - Trauma-informed vs. traditional business strategies
19:00 - Final thoughts: You can still be successful

When you're ready, here are 3 ways I can help you grow your career journey:

1. Free trauma-informed career development resources from my website! Visit https://www.cyndibennettconsulting.com for always up-to-date tips.
2. Ready to build a fulfilling career with trauma-informed support? Join The Resilient Career Academy Learning Community, where trauma survivors support each other, share resources, and develop career resilience in a safe, understanding environment
3. Ready for personalized trauma-informed career coaching? Explore my range of virtual coaching packages designed for different stages of your career journey. Visit my website to find the right support for where you are now. [Visit my website: https://www.cyndibennettconsulting.com/1-on-1-coaching]

DISCLOSURE: Some links I share might contain resources that you might find helpful. Whenever possible I use referral links, which means if you click any of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation at no cost to you.

Transcript

Entrepreneurship As A Trauma Survivor Pt 2 | Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide Ep 27

Cyndi: [00:00:00] Welcome back to your Trauma Wise Career Guide. This is Cyndi Bennett, your host, and I'm here again with Holly Dillon. And we are going to continue our conversation that we had in our last time that we recorded about entrepreneurship as a trauma survivor. And as a reminder, last time we recorded, the goal was for Holly to ask me some questions and for me to be very transparent and open about what it was like for me as a trauma survivor, being an entrepreneur. But as I mentioned before, I had a part that showed up that would not allow me to be vulnerable. And so the conversation went in a very different way than we had anticipated.

And so now we decided to come back and to revisit some of those same questions to see how would it be different if I was open and vulnerable. And yes, I, I did get buy-in from that little part that was in the way. [00:01:00] So so here we are, and Holly, we're going to turn it over to you to start asking the questions.

Holly: Okay. Sounds good. Cyndi. Thank you. Hello, everyone. All right. Most of the questions will be the same, but, expecting different responses, so same questions as last time. Okay. So Cyndi, what was the turning point for you that made you want to create this company that's a trauma-informed company working specifically with people in the, in the working area.

Cyndi: Yeah, thank you. That's a great question. When I had the zip file of repressed memories open up in the workplace, I felt very much alone. I didn't know anybody that had trauma. I didn't even know that I had trauma. And so when I was in the workplace and I didn't know how to react, I didn't know how to regulate myself. Nobody was talking about it. And I thought, isn't that interesting that we spend [00:02:00] 90,000 hours of our lifetime in the workplace, and nobody from a trauma informed perspective was even talking about how trauma shows up in the workplace. And that became my passion, because I know how I felt and I knew that I was looking for resources and I knew I wasn't the only one.

And so that had become very important to me, to show up and to speak up to let people know you're not alone, you know? And that's what I wanted. That's what I needed too.

Holly: Cyndi and I, most of you know, met during our training for trauma recovery coaching. Had you already decided, this is what I want to do, so now I'm going to go get trained in trauma recovery coaching, or did you go in to trauma recovery coaching, and then make the decision, this is going to be my focus.

Cyndi: Yeah, that's a great question. No, I actually went into trauma recovery coaching first. And, and then I [00:03:00] started working with folks and I was like, yeah, but this is not quite it. This is because that was on my heart from what I experienced. You know, I experienced that void in the workplace and we spend so much time in the workplace.

So after we went to training together and became a trauma recovery coach, I realized that there was this other place that was really on my heart in order to minister to people and to really help people in the workplace.

And, and it came a lot from my experiencing that in the workplace, of experiencing that void of resources and that void of support in the workplace.

Holly: Okay.

Cyndi: And so that's really what was driving it.

Holly: Just to clarify for people who maybe haven't heard us before, when we say, people in the workplace, it's not just people who have gone to work and been traumatized at work, it's people who have trauma and then are also trying to go and be [00:04:00] leaders and go to work. it's both,

Cyndi: Yeah.

Holly: really it

Cyndi: Yes. Both and

Holly: And you specifically focus on the employee, if you will, not the organization and what they can do, but what can the employee do to support themselves and ask for help, right?

Cyndi: Yeah. And it's both and, right? It's both -and. So as I go in, as an employee into my day job with someone who has trauma, I'm also trying to educate the employer on how can you make it better for people like me? What would be helpful for people like me? Managers, what would be helpful to know about, I don't know, having a performance review with someone who has trauma. Right. So it's both. And.

Holly: Yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic. All right. [00:05:00] So how did your own experience then in the workplace affect what your values and your mission statement was going to be for this particular company then.

Cyndi: You know, I really had a desire to show up as a real person. I didn't want to try to be somebody I wasn't, because then you're just trying to pretend that you're somebody and you had it all together. That was not me. I was going to show up and I was going to show up messy. And that was sort of important for me that vulnerability, that was my superpower. To show up vulnerable and messy, and to say, and to show it, and to be okay with it and to let other people know it's okay to be messy. It's okay to not have it all together. It's okay to not be okay. And lead by example in that way, because there are times, buddy when I show up and I am not [00:06:00] okay.

Holly: Yeah. Yeah. And it has to be that way because otherwise you wouldn't really be able to run a company. There's days when we're just not, and we still need to show up. so I think that's great. I like that. In the messy middle.

Cyndi: In the messy middle, a hundred percent.

Holly: Yeah. Okay. So what guiding principles or non-negotiables did you set up from the beginning in order to protect yourself? Because starting a company where we're going to support trauma survivors, we both have a company that does that. It's a big task and you have to take care of yourself as you're trying to take care of others, because that's what we do, that's why we set them up. So what were your non-negotiables, this is what I'm going to have to do to get support for myself or keep myself healthy through this.

Cyndi: Yeah. First of all, I could never be without therapy. [00:07:00] So like therapy was a really big important support, because in therapy is where I learned all the tools and all the skills and how to manage the overwhelm and how to manage all the emotions, right? But also, therapy wasn't enough. And I was going to therapy 90 minutes a week, sometimes twice. Right? And I, and I had a great therapist who taught me all those things and taught me how to work through, you know, all of the trauma symptoms that I was experiencing in the workplace. But also, you need more than that. You need community, you need people like yourself, like you have been a huge support for me, you and Alinda, and there's been a, a group of other coaches that have supported, have come alongside of, and I could call when I was dysregulated and say, Hey, do you have a minute? I'm working on such and such and I don't know what's coming up for me. Right? You have to have the support [00:08:00] because otherwise you can't do this on your, on your own no matter what those attachment wounds tell you, which I had really big attachment wounds that told me I could do it by myself. I don't need anybody else. That is not true. That is so not true, and now that I've healed some of that, I have the A capability now of being able to ask for help where I couldn't do that before. I couldn't ask for help and I couldn't receive help.

Holly: I remember.

Cyndi: So that's a big deal.

Holly: I like to call that your board of directors. Right. That even no matter how small or large a company is, having a board of directors that, ' because different people will support you in different ways.

Cyndi: Yeah, a hundred percent.

Holly: you can go to for different things. So I think it doesn't have to be a huge board of directors, but definitely having that I agree with you, is key, and therapy. I love that you said that. Or a coach, or both.

Cyndi: Or both? Yes, for sure.

Holly: Okay. I was going to [00:09:00] ask what difficulties have you had keeping those boundaries, but actually you've talked about some of it, which was, I remember you going right in the middle, I think you woke up one morning and decided that you didn't need my help anymore. And you had to have a real conversation with yourself of where that was coming from. But you did, I think that's the important thing is you work through it with yourself and

Cyndi: yeah. I think though, some of the difficulties, for me, for sure as trauma survivors, we have very limited capacity to really work on new things and to learn new things. Right? And so for me, a lot of what I experience is overwhelm. Overwhelm is such a huge issue for me because in my mind, I can do anything, in my mind, right. But my nervous system is, says something different to me. It's like, oh no you can't. Like heck no. We don't have room for that. [00:10:00] Or that's way too much. And you know, I will take on so many different things because I think I can do it all. And how many times have you told me, Hey, hey, maybe you could just do one thing. You know, maybe you can just slow it down a little bit. Right? And an entrepreneur, you want to pick up momentum, you're trying to move as fast as you can. Just like when we go into therapy for the first time, we're trying to heal this sucker as fast as we can, because we don't want to be in pain. But as entrepreneurs, we want to stand this company up as fast as we can so that we could start making money. Right. That's important. Like when you have a company, it should make money, right? But you can't do that as a trauma survivor. You can't move that fast. You have to work at the speed of your nervous system. And that has been so frustrating for me at times because it's like, Hey, I've got a full-time job. Oh yeah, that's right. I do, I have a full-time job. [00:11:00] Oh yeah. And I'm trying to do three different things on my business. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And by the way, I just had a really intense therapy session that is taking up a lot of my capacity right now.

Holly: Yeah, no capacity is huge and you do tend to have a lot more than I've seen in the average person, actually. You are able to do a lot more things yeah, running out of capacity is key and honoring it.

Cyndi: Honoring it. Honoring it.

Holly: Because it's easy to ignore it or feel bad about it, actually, I remember, for myself, there were times when I went to some team members and I was like, we called our broken biscuits moment because it was a restaurant called Broken Biscuits. And I got there and started to cry, so literally my biscuits broke. I don't know how, but I just started to cry and it was like had to really pick me up at that moment, because I had just overused my capacity and I just was really hard on myself about it. [00:12:00] So I think that's the tip here is also, it's okay when you run out of capacity to honor it and give yourself a lot of grace.

Cyndi: Yeah, because we don't, right, we think, what's wrong with me? What is wrong with me? I should be able to handle it.

Holly: Yeah. Well because trauma survivors, as we know, are high functioning. Most are high functioning. Right. And so because we're high functioning, we're pretty hard on ourself. I spend a lot of time with my coachees in this area of self-compassion because we're so hard on ourself. Okay. Can you share a moment that really sits with you where, you know, starting this company has been the right thing. Maybe it's been impact on a client, on a team member, someone else you've been working with, but you've seen it work.

Cyndi: Yeah, I think I'm going to cry right now because. I have one member in my group and I have multiple members that [00:13:00] this is true of, but one member in in particular who was part of my founding members, I mean, she was with me at the beginning when I started coaching membership. And I tell her that whenever someone asks me a question about why do I do this, that her face comes to mind, and I've told her this multiple times. She was a person who has some deep trauma and also at the sign of any trouble, she would leave, she would leave her job. And so she didn't have job stability, and it impacted her financially as well. And so now to see her, and she's almost there for three years at her company, which is not a high functioning company, there's a lot of toxic people in that workplace. But she has learned through that how to take care of herself, how to practice the principles, [00:14:00] how to show up for herself, how to incorporate and infuse those principles into the workplace so that she gets that stability. And also she can choose how she wants her journey to go instead of letting trauma choose for her. And it just makes me cry. It makes me cry all the time. because she says, Cyndi, I couldn't have done that without this program, you know, and the support, because there's community in the program. And so it's not just me, it's everybody else in the program that she can get support from and to come to coaching calls and to get that support and, you know, and when you don't have support any other place to have a community and a coach that can help be your cheerleader and guide you and say, Hey, I'm really struggling with something, can we pull up for a minute and to be able [00:15:00] to ask for help. Like, that's why I am here. That's why I invest in. In my folks, I'm invested in their success.

Holly: That's a great story. yes, three years is really good. Do you know how long, prior to the three years was her longest tenure at a company?

Cyndi: Six months maybe?

Holly: Oh my, yes. Fantastic. That's lovely. Good for her. So this is the last question. If you could whisper one piece of advice to yourself prior to starting the company, what would that advice be?

Cyndi: Easy, go slow and trust your gut. I had to learn how to trust myself. I had to learn how to trust my nervous system to lead me and to guide me in places that I had never experienced before. Because I've been through a lot of training. I've been through membership training, I've been through [00:16:00] course creation training, i've been through launch training and that's great, but also they're not trauma informed. And so those things are good tools to use, but you have to figure out how to use them in a trauma-informed way because I can't do all the things. I have to move at the speed of my nervous system, and I have to trust that and to go slower and to only bite off a little bit at a time as opposed to big chunks. And so you have to figure out how do you modify what you're being taught? This is how you're being taught to be successful as an entrepreneur, but it doesn't work for you because trauma has informed your nervous system.

Holly: Well, also your nervous system, but also you, everything you do is trauma-informed and those programs aren't built with that, so you have to overlay, how do I [00:17:00] implement it for a trauma-informed audience.

Cyndi: A hundred percent

Holly: Yeah.

Cyndi: So how do I do things differently? Like, how do I launch my business without sending out 20,000 emails that could really trigger people in my audience, right? That will get them clicking unsubscribe in a minute. But I'm not trying to do that to them, i'm trying to provide them content that's going to help them in their journey. But when you do it this way, it's not going to work for them. So you have to like figure out, you have to take what they're trying to teach you and you have to see it through trauma informed glasses, right? To be able to say, okay, I can't do that, but I could potentially do this. Or for learning. You know, we only have the capacity a little bit. I always tell people, I said, have a little bit of capacity to learn [00:18:00] because we have so many other things. We've got therapy and we've got family, and we've got our jobs and whatever, all the things that are in our, in our bucket, right? And so we have this little capacity to learn. So what are those bite-sized chunks of learning, and how can you package 'em so that they can actually consume them and not be overwhelmed? Because I know my system gets overwhelmed, and I'm sure that other people's system gets overwhelmed too. So how do you handle that with the learning that you're, you're trying to provide for them? Right? And it's really small, very small chunks.

Holly: Yeah. good. Well, is there anything you wished we would've talked about and I did not ask, or that you want to say?

Cyndi: I think for those who go into entrepreneurship that think it would be better because then they don't have to deal with the politics or [00:19:00] whatever in the workplace. It's really important to know that you take that trauma with you, it lives in your body, but also, you can still be successful. Like it doesn't have to hold you back. It can actually be your superpower. But one of the biggest things, and one of the first things that is so helpful is just to notice. It's really just to notice. Notice what's coming up in your nervous system when you're doing certain things and just be curious about it. Oh, isn't that interesting, i'm feeling like really overwhelmed, or I'm feeling really like I can't breathe or have a lot of pressure, or whatever it is that you're feeling in your body, to just notice it with curiosity and compassion and to go slow. That's it. Just go slow. You can figure it out. [00:20:00] And to reach out to those of us who are doing the thing, that are in entrepreneurship. Get yourself a community. You know, have people that are in your corner that can help support you.

Holly: Very good. Well thank you for being brave. because it is brave to come back on and say, I didn't do that how I wanted to and let's do it again in my authentic self. thanks for

Cyndi: We're here in the messy middle, right? We're just going to keep it real and, and we continue to move on. We're going to share, we're not going to pretend that we've got it all together, because I certainly don't, I don't know anybody else who does. So we're going to continue to move forward in the messy and just keep moving. So thank you for doing that.

Holly: Absolutely. Take care everyone.

Cyndi: Bye now.