There’s a version of my story that looks great on paper. I built a company over 14 years, reached tens of millions of people, published and sold nearly half a million books, led a team, and eventually sold the business. That version is true—but it’s not the part that explains why I do the work I do now. Rebuilding after losing everything is something I didn’t talk about while I was in it.
What that dressed-up version leaves out is what happened after the sale.
The people I sold my company to were, at best, drinking their own kool-aid or at worst, hiding information and misrepresenting the transaction. Regardless, the truth of what I’d gotten into didn’t fully reveal itself until it was too late. What followed wasn’t a clean exit or a celebratory transition. It was years of legal work, significant financial loss, and the unraveling of something I had spent over a decade building. I lost my team, my income, and a version of my identity that had been deeply tied to the business itself. I ultimately enforced the contract, but it took years—and by then, the emotional and financial damage was done.
That experience was the first time I truly understood trauma, and not in the way I had previously defined it. I didn’t have language for how it could show up in business, or how it could quietly shape decisions long before anything collapsed. But what I experienced wasn’t just stress or burnout. It was a full-body response that I couldn’t ‘mindset’ my way out of. Everything that had once felt intuitive suddenly was inaccessible, my system went into pure survival mode, and no amount of strategy, fixing or “positive thinking” could override it.
The hindsight of understanding trauma for the first time suddenly explained every business problem I’d ever had: the overworking, the people-pleasing, the hesitation, the moments of pushing through things that didn’t feel right or freezing when something did. At the time, I would have called it ambition, responsibility or sometimes self-sabotage. It wasn’t until everything fell apart that I had to understand it differently.
There’s a lot of coaching conversations now about mindset, limiting beliefs, the amygdala hijack, and nervous system regulation. Those things matter. But there is a level of lived experience that doesn’t translate through theory alone. When you’ve gone through a true collapse, there’s a very real gap between understanding something intellectually and being able to act on it in your own life. And until you’ve had to go from literally being curled up in the fetal position crying your eyes out to rebuilding, finding silver linings, and coming back out on top, it can be really fucking hard to be able to actually know what the hell it takes.
That gap is where most people get stuck.
It took me about a year and a half to find my footing again—not just in business, but in my ability to trust myself, make decisions, and move forward without that underlying sense of threat driving everything. That process fundamentally changed how I approach business. And it drove me to find a way to bring that work to the world.
I work with coaches, practitioners, and deeply self-aware entrepreneurs who already know a lot, but find themselves stuck when it comes to building their own business. Not because they’re incapable, but because something in them is protecting them. Through my Intrinsic CEO workshop, I help them close the gap between what they know and what they can actually apply—so they can build sustainable, values-aligned businesses that support both their livelihood and their capacity.
What once took me over a year to move through, I can now help people navigate in weeks or a few months. Not because the work is simple, but because I know where the real friction lives, and I understand exactly how the brain works through it – both intellectually and from lived experience.
I’ve built and sold a business. I’ve also rebuilt from the ground up. Both matter—but it’s the second one that defines how I lead now.
