Today we’re talking about lessons I learned about authenticity while growing a small business while at the same time, avoiding mom burnout.

I last year, especially last fall, trying in vain to figure out how to do all the things and, I failed miserably.

Here is the thing. I can’t do all the things. I know, I know. I tell you to stop asking yourself to do it all, like, all the time. I just don’t listen to myself all the time and that resulted in a very uncomfortable 2023 full of frustration and stuck moments.

Let me start at the beginning.

In 2018 I left a mental health group practice and struck out on my own. I have since built a thriving private practice alongside finishing a doctoral degree, volunteering for a few different organizations in not-small roles, raising three young adults and tending to a menagerie of pets etc. etc. You get the picture.

I got used to the frenzy of that lifestyle and weirdly didn’t feel like it was too much.

Until it was too much.

After I finished my degree I wanted to grow my business to be more than just individual/couples therapy. I threw a bunch of stuff at the wall like online courses, corporate speaking engagements, coaching groups and all the social media content you can stomach.

It was mostly fruitless and fully lead to burnout and a bit of an existential crisis. Here’s the funny thing; it turns out it wasn’t the stuff I was doing that was too much. It was all the stuff I thought I SHOULD be doing that finally burned me out.

I am so used to being a student that when I tried to grow beyond my therapy office, I adopted the stance of student around that as well. I thought I needed to learn everything about running a business from people who knew more than me. That wasn’t totally true.

Did I need to learn some things (hello, finance spreadsheets)? Of course. But somewhere along the way I started believing I needed someone else to tell me how to do everything I was doing since I clearly must be doing it all wrong.

That was not only a hit to my self-confidence but also a total gut punch to my creativity.

I spend all this time helping people tune in and trust their inner knowing and I completely abandoned my own.

Also, it turns out there is no magic formula that I needed to learn, I just needed to keep showing up as me.

Over the years, people have maybe come to my therapy practice because they think I’ll be good at what I do. Or perhaps it’s the letters after my name. Maybe people like that I incorporate more than just talk therapy into our sessions. Often, I bet they come because I was the only one to return their call.

People may initially come see me for a variety of reasons but they stay because we’re a good team. I show up as my authentic self in my office and the people who vibe with that girl stick around, and hopefully our work helps them feel better.

It’s the same reason people listen to my podcast or read my blog.  Something I said as I showed up as my warts-and-all human-self resonated and you wanted to hear more.

That’s all I want: to help people feel better.

That’s why I studied ALL the things. That’s why I do ALL the things to help people feel better.

Nothing lights me up more than serving you, the incredible women who clicked on this post. All I want is for women to feel better when they read or listen or show up on zoom or scroll on by the reels or youtube shorts or whatever other medium comes along.

That’s all I want for you. To know you’re not alone. To understand we’re all humans just doing the best we can and sometimes that’s messy and doesn’t feel particularly good, but it does get better and can be downright wonderful.

When I was on all these calls with “experts” in how to run a business, I could never come up with a cute, fancy-marketing-speak way of saying what I did in any area of my business.

I was told helping people feel better was too broad, not niche enough, not targeted enough, not clear enough, not enough for good SEO. You name it, I got it wrong. 😉

All that time I spent trying to do the things someone else told me were right, I missed doing all the other things like podcasting, writing, running a community, sending out newsletters every week.

I missed those things because they are authentic to me. They aren’t slick and probably not correctly marketed or using the correct terms for SEO, but they’re me and I’m not slick or correclty marketed. But, when I show up as myself and share what I know, people tend to feel better.

So, that’s what I’m doing.

I hope you’re still around to join me on this wild ride of humanness. It’s always better when we’re together.