Six years ago, I could not walk to the post office on my own.
I had no self-trust, no agency, and a quiet life that looked like everything from the outside and felt like nothing from the inside. When the pandemic stopped the noise I had been using to drown out my own knowing, a steady voice underneath began to say this is not it. By 2021 I could no longer ignore it.
What followed was not a glow-up. It was a stripping. Years of loss, change, and inner work I would not have chosen if you had shown me the brochure. And in the middle of all of it, piece by piece, I built something I had never had before: a relationship with myself I could trust.
That relationship became the ground for everything that came next. The courage to speak to strangers. The decision to invest in a year-long coaching programme without knowing how it would change me. The first paying client. The first time I said a price out loud that felt big to me and held my own ground while I said it.
Today I run a small business and I coach the founders running theirs.
What follows is what the journey between those two versions of me has taught me, and why it shapes the way I work with the founders I support today. Five things. They might be useful to you if you are sitting somewhere along your own version of this path.
One. Decisions live in the body before they live in the spreadsheet
The first thing I learned, the moment I started making real decisions in my own business, is that knowing what to do and being able to do it are two different muscles.
I could analyse a pricing decision beautifully on paper. I could research a positioning question for weeks. I could understand intellectually that the next step was to raise my prices, to invest in something untested, or to say no to a piece of work that did not quite fit. The knowing was not the work. The doing was.
When I priced my first offer at a level that felt big to me, my body felt every pound of that number before my mouth said it. When I committed to a year-long investment in my own development without certain return, my body felt the leap. When I said yes to speaking on a stage long before I was sure I was ready, my body felt that yes for days afterwards.
Decisions live in the body before they live in the spreadsheet. The mind decides. The body has to hold. And if the body is not yet able to hold the choice the mind has made, the choice either does not get acted on, or it gets acted on with so much internal friction that the action loses its power.
This is the work I now do with the founders I coach. We grow the capacity to be in the decision, not only to think about it. Because the part of you that walks into Monday morning and executes is the part that needs the support, and that part is in the body.
Two. Presence is what helps the principles land
There are extraordinary books on leadership and entrepreneurship. There are brilliant frameworks, beautifully designed programmes, and teachers I have learned enormously from. I still buy the books. I still take the courses. I still sit with the ideas. The principles matter, and I have built much of my own foundation on them.
What I have learned in my own building is that principles alone are not the whole of the work.
There is something specific that happens when you have another human in the room with you, asking the question you have been avoiding, holding the silence after a hard truth, witnessing the decision while it is being made. That something is presence. It is not better than principles. It is the thing that helps the principles land in your actual life, on a Tuesday afternoon, when the conditions are real and the version of you who read the book is not quite available.
When I work with the founders I coach, I bring both. The frameworks. The body of work behind them. And the presence of someone walking the path alongside them in real time. The two together are what move the work from the page into the life.
Three. The bottleneck is almost always capacity, not clarity
One of the great patterns I see in the founders I work with is how often the answer is already known.
They rarely arrive confused about what to do. They arrive unable, yet, to do the thing they already know. The strategy is right. The hire makes sense. The pivot is the obvious next move. They have known for weeks. The knowing is not the issue.
What they are running into is a capacity issue. The version of them that needs to hold the next stage of the business has not finished arriving yet. The nervous system cannot yet hold the size of the decision. The inner architecture is one step behind the outer growth.
Once you see this, it changes the work entirely. You stop trying to give the founder a better answer, because she already has one. You start building the capacity in her to act on it. You regulate the nervous system. You strengthen self-trust. You expand the inner space the decision needs to land in.
This is the architecture I had to build in myself, slowly, across the last six years. It is the most useful thing I bring to my clients today, because I know what it took to build, and I know how much it changes when it is in place.
Four. The shift happens between the sessions, not only within them
I love workshops. I have been to many. I have run a few. There is a particular kind of magic in being in a room of focused people doing inner work together, and the insights that land in those rooms are real.
What I have learned is that the insight from a workshop is the beginning of the change, not the whole of it. The shift happens in the moments that come afterwards. The Tuesday at 5.55pm when the boundary you set in the workbook meets a client email asking for more. The conversation with your co-founder where the new clarity has to actually be spoken. The moment two weeks later when the old pattern wants to reassert itself and you choose, again, the new one.
This is why ongoing coaching exists alongside workshops, masterminds and programmes. They serve different jobs. The workshop opens a door. The ongoing work is the practice of walking through it, again and again, until the new way of being is genuinely yours.
When I work with my clients over months, what we are really doing together is supporting the integration that happens between the sessions. The session is the seed. The week between is the soil. Both are needed for the work to take root.
Five. There is an intimacy to holding the seat that is yours alone to grow into
Of the five lessons in this piece, this is the quietest, and possibly the most important.
When you hold the seat of a business, you carry decisions and weights that nobody else can carry for you. Not your team. Not your partner. Not your peer group. They can support you, witness you, love you through it, but the weight itself sits with you. The role is built that way.
This is not a problem to be solved. It is a feature of leadership. And there is a particular kind of intimacy with your own self that emerges when you stop trying to escape it.
There is a different relationship being built here, and we build it together: a kindness toward the part of you that holds the weight, a trust in her, a willingness to be in your own company in the seat without needing to be rescued from it.
This relationship with yourself is what makes the role sustainable. It is what holds when the team has gone home, the peer group is not on a call, the partner is asleep, and you are sitting with the next decision. It is the deepest layer of self-trust, and it is the work I am proudest to do with my clients.
What this means for you
If you have read this far, you might be somewhere along your own version of the journey I have described.
You might have built something real and be wondering why the inner experience of it does not match the outer success. You might be sensing that the next stage of your business is asking something of you that you cannot quite meet yet. You might be looking for the kind of support that meets you in the present, not on the page.
If any of that is true, . Twenty minutes. No pressure. A simple conversation about where you are and what you might need next.
Six years ago, I could not walk to the post office on my own. The version of me writing this knows that the journey from there to here was held by generous teachers, brilliant books, supportive communities, and the slow daily work of building self-trust one decision at a time.
I bring all of it to the founders I work with. The principles, the practice, the presence, and the lived experience of what it takes to become someone who can hold what you are building.
If you are ready to begin that work, I would love to be one of the people walking alongside you.