Honestly? This is How I'm Doing

I just hit CTRL + ALT + DELETE on a 850+ word newsletter I wrote for you yesterday.

I sat in my favorite coffee shop sipping on my 2% iced cappuccino with lots of cinnamon and wrote what I thought would be most helpful to you: tips on how to get back into the swing of things this month.

But that's not what I really wanted to write to you.

I texted my mindset coach, Jennifer Diaz, and told her how I'd just written something I knew would do fine, but that felt totally boring to me.

What I really wanted to write about was how I took most of this summer off, but my business did better than ever. I wanted to write about how I thought I'd feel fresh as a daisy having taken so much downtime... but really I feel a bit of a sense of dread coming "back to work" today.

"So then why not write about that?" she asked me.

Because it's unrelatable. It's not helpful to them. It's sticky and messy and feels like I don't have a lesson to teach anyone about it yet.

"For you to be fully you, you cannot hold everyone else," Jen replied. She pointed out one of the things I'm working on the most:

Letting go of controlling how I'm perceived and how everyone else feels about everything.

I wrote about this in my book, but I wasn't seen, heard, or paid any attention to growing up. Quite the opposite.

I had to be invisible, without needs, and perfect to survive.

I was so attuned to my mom's status that I could tell by the click of her tongue how many pills she'd taken that day... down to the brand.

It's no surprise that 30-something years later, I write emails focused on making you happy, but that hurt my soul a little bit.

Even now, as I have experienced so much business success for so long, I consider staying with my discontent so as to not make other people unhappy or disappointed in me.

In the past, I've chosen everyone else's feelings over my own, in little ways like email topics to big ways like real estate decisions.

"Write what you're excited about, what you're inspired by. Write what you're experiencing," Jen told me wisely.

So Reader, this is what I'm experiencing right now.

I feel a little sad that I'm coming back to my successful business that seems to excite other people more than it does me these days. I'm a little bored from doing the same thing for 10+ years. I feel ungrateful and like there's something wrong with me for just not being able to appreciate it.

I'm beyond grateful for this business, my customers, and, most of all, my mighty little team of 3 behind the scenes, every day. 🙏

But know this: if you think building a successful business online will be the end all be all -- or that you'll never have any ambition to do anything else or different once you do -- think again.

Building a successful business wasn't the end of my story. I sort of feel like I'm just getting started.

Nothing's changing with my business. It sort of feels like more of a job these days, which, I wrote in my book, I don't think is a bad thing. I don't take things as personally and I also don't entangle its success or failures with my intrinsic worth. I'm doing fewer but more impactful tasks in the biz these days... yet my sales are wayyyy up over last year.

Anywho! That's my honest catch-up. That's how I'm feeling this first day of September.

Normally I'd end this email with a "let me know if this was helpful!" but respectfully, the most important thing is that it was helpful for me to write.

Thanks for listening 🫶

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🔗 Links You'll Love

📮 My favorite email list software team ft. my story! How Sam Vander Wielen built a multi-seven-figure business on two products and an email list Read it here →​

🎤 I chatted with my friend and the Founder of Kit, Nathan Barry, about how to ACTUALLY sell online courses in 2026→ Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube​

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