Hey Reader,

Welcome back to Little Leadership Lessons, my (now) Monday newsletter sharing quick, powerful insights from coaching seven-figure creators. These lessons help you grow as a leader so you can grow your business—with more clarity, alignment, and peace of mind.

I had a coaching session with a founder who came in carrying more than any one person should be asked to carry.

She has built a multi-million dollar business from nothing. But she also has a team that has almost entirely turned over in the last 45 days and razor thin profit margins.

With two kids at home and a husband whose own business has taken off in ways hers hasn't yet she was sitting with a question she had been afraid to ask out loud:

Am I the person who can actually lead this thing where it needs to go?

What we landed on in the hour we had together is something I see in almost every founder I work with. So I want to share it with you this week.

Let's get to it.

A Beautiful Photo to Quiet Your Body and Mind

The Situation

We started with the usual context that's necessary, but rarely the most important part of any coaching discussion:

• Revenue and profit
• Product portfolio
• Team structure
• Hypotheses about the employee turnover

Then, a few minutes in, she said something that pinged my internal coach sensors.

"I know the things that need to happen in theory. But I subconsciously battle against actually doing them."

This was almost a verbatim recitation of a thing I say in almost every workshop I give when speaking at conferences: most entrepreneurs know what they should do, but they struggle with the emotional cost of doing it.

So I asked her to pause. "Where does that battle live in your body?"

"Right here. It's a pit. It's always there," she said as she put her hand on her stomach.

These kinds of somatic sensations are almost always a source of untapped wisdom. I asked what was inside the pit; what it might say if it had a voice.

She told me about the hard conversations she had avoided for too long. A team member she should have let go a year before she did. The way her laptop would magically find its way into her lap at her daughter's softball practices. The walks she did not take and workouts she didn't prioritize. The mornings she didn't reclaim for her own peace and priorities.

It was a long and growing list of the accumulated cost of a business that had become both her source of meaning and the thing keeping her from the people she most wanted to be with.

She was describing, in her own way, a deep inner conflict that was showing up as 14 different small things that added up to a feeling of insufficiency as an entrepreneur and leader.

The Emotional Blocker

Once we slowed down enough to listen to what the sensation in her stomach was trying to communicate, four different voices showed up inside her. [For my other coaching nerds, we used some of the tools from the IFS framework to reveal these,]

The first voice felt the weight of responsibility of her role as CEO: The team's livelihoods. The brand. Her family finances. Every decision, every miss, and every win all sat on her shoulders.

The second voice was the pit in her stomach. This was the avoidant one that said "don't have that conversation, you'll hurt them" and "Don't set that limit, they'll think you're a jerk."

The third voice lived in her chest. It was a quieter voice that wanted health, family time, a walk on a Tuesday morning, joy. This voice wanted time and energy for what matters most to her... An unironic glimpse into the desires of the heart.

And then there was a fourth voice. One she hadn't named until we were deep into the exercise. When it finally spoke, it said this:

"What you've done so far isn't worthy of joy or peace. You haven't earned it yet. You better keep going if you're ever going to be enough."

Ah. I know the sound of that voice. It's familiar to my inner world and it's one that show up often in coaching: the shame monster.

This is the voice almost nobody talks about at fancy entrepreneurial dinner parties. It's the engine and the fuel that too many high-performing founders won't admit to running on. It's also what burns them out.

The trap is in what we do with it. Most of us either try to silence it, which makes us distant from ourselves. It numbs the experience of our entire life.

Or we obey it, which makes us tired. It runs us into the ground.

Almost nobody does the third thing, which is actually listen to what it is trying to say. That's where the breakthrough usually happens.

The Breakthrough

I asked her a question I've asked a lot of clients over the years.

"If shame gave up the job of attacking you from the inside out, what other job might it take? Perhaps something more useful and vulnerable."

She sat with it for a long beat.

"Maybe it could be a signal," she said. "When I'm doing something that isn't actually moving me toward what I say I want."

Yes. A signal.

Most of us treat our hardest emotions like noise. In fact, they are a form of intelligence. Our emotions represent precise, embodied data about the gap between how we are living and what we actually care about.

The pit in your stomach when you're about to send an email you don't believe in. The shame that creeps in when you pick up your laptop at your kid's practice. The weight on your shoulders when you take on a problem you were counting on a teammate to solve.

Hard emotions don't have to be your enemy. You can think of them like indicator lights on the dashboard of a car.

Your check engine light isn't trying to ruin your day. It's trying to keep you from breaking down on the highway. Your job isn't to disable the light so you don't have to stare it at anymore; it's to learn what the light means and then repair the underlying issue.

I left my client with two small experiments after we saw the opportunity for a new relationship to the underlying emotions.

The first was to keep a pocket journal. For one month, every time one of those indicator lights came on, she would log it. What was happening just before? How did she respond? But there's no analysis and no fixing allowed. Just noticing for now. After a few weeks of data, the patterns will speak for themselves.

The second experiment was harder: Pick a small, honest number of commitments each week that are about your family, your body, or the relationships that matter most to you. The goal was to create a finite, doable list of priorities she will protect for the people she loves most. And then protect them.

Because here is what I told her at the end, and what I want to leave you with too:

Coaching Questions to Apply This to Your Business

• What inner voice has been driving you the hardest, and what is it trying to tell you?
• If you treated that voice as an indicator light instead of a verdict on your character, what would it be pointing you toward?
• When in your week do you keep violating what you value without meaning to? What one small, finite protection could you put in place this week?
• What has it cost you to keep ignoring these signals for as long as you have? And what might it free up if you stopped?

You don't have to silence what is hard inside you. Instead you can listen to it long enough that it doesn't need to shout.

Thanks for reading as always. I'm grateful you give my work space in your inbox.

Much love and respect,

PS: I have coaching sessions like this 8-10x per week with high level entrepreneurs like you. In the process, my clients experience transformations that lead to alignment between their inner and outer worlds. And in the process they experience more peace, more well-being, and often more revenue. Apply to work together here.