I Sold My Company and Thought I Had It All Figured Out
After 13 years of brutal adversity, I sold my business to Bill Gates. I always said I was a spiritual warrior in a business suit. And I had this exit to prove that what I did worked. I did well. And this is the story I told for the next 20 years.
What I left out of that story is what came next. I thought selling the business meant I had conquered it, the visualization, the mindset work, the years of grinding through things that should have broken me. The proof was in the pudding. So from here on out, I assumed I would simply walk on water.
Truth is, I struggled. I had some success. I spoke on good-sized stages, had private engagements at Fortune 50 companies, was at the right conferences. But nothing compounded the way it should have. Not at the level I wanted to be at. With business changing at neck-breaking speed, I had, if I am honest, moderate success. I used my knowledge of how to make something look good. A skill I learned from my mother.
The problem with that skill is that it can put you in a double bind. You make it look as if things are working when in reality, they are not. They look good on the outside. On the inside, not so much. And so begins this odd, quiet war with yourself that most of us can’t even name.
Imposter Syndrome — Are You Getting It All Wrong?
Faking it till you make it is a strategy. I have said this often enough. There are two things happening at once. The first is the prerequisite to manifestation; it is the tool of visualization — seeing yourself having already achieved what you are working toward. In great detail, with colors and smells. That part is legitimate. The second is something else entirely: semi-convincing yourself, against your own perception of reality, that what you want is even possible. That second part puts you at war with yourself. This is when you say, but the reality is that I am broke, have no clients, miserable, stuck (your word goes here)
The second is where imposter syndrome comes from, in my opinion. You are trying to perform a version of yourself you do not yet believe in. You say it out loud as if you do. You act as if you do. But underneath, the two forces are pulling in opposite directions, and you feel every inch of that tension. I am certainly the mistress of this. I just did not know it at the time.
We talk about imposter syndrome as a confidence problem, a mindset problem, something to be fixed with better affirmations or a stronger morning routine. That is getting it wrong. Imposter syndrome is your signal. It is telling you that the gap between who you are performing and who you actually are has become too wide to sustain. You cannot affirm your way out of an unexamined wound.
When that truth comes to the surface through a forced-to-your-knees event, or a spiritual revelation, or simply a moment of exhausted honesty, it does not feel like relief but rather like exposure. You must look at yourself and ask who am I, what am I doing, and why. If you are lucky, you have people around you who help you see that you are not so bad after all. Perhaps you are wicked smart, and not a bad person to be around.
Phew. Good for you. We settled that.
Feeling Good Is an Inside Job
Now add to all of that the world we are operating in. AI hard at our heels. A pressure to optimize everything. Track your steps, your calories, your sleep, your breathing, your heart rate, your fat burn. I took my Apple Watch off. I know the hike I do regularly. What difference does it make if I am one minute faster? It is the same number of steps either way. What does it do for me to wake up and have an app confirm that I tossed and turned all night and should probably drink more water?
There is useful technology. But there is something happening with the overoptimization of every dimension of our lives that is worth naming. It is not making us better. For many of us it is making us more anxious, more surveilled, more disconnected from our own instincts.
The pendulum can only swing so far in one direction before it comes back. When the external has been tracked and measured and optimized to exhaustion, the only place left to go is inward. It is the logical next move.
Two years ago, I began to understand that my childhood was a lot harder than I had admitted to myself. Society tells you to honor your parents regardless. They did their best. Acknowledging that something traumatic happened to you, especially at the hands of a parent, violates an unspoken rule, which is why so many of us carry it in silence for so long.
What I learned is that recognizing your own truth does not cancel out anyone else’s. You can say this happened without placing the entire weight of blame on the person who caused it. One truth does not invalidate another. I believe the greatest consequence is that the person who caused harm must live with the knowledge of what they did until the day they die. That is its own reckoning. Especially if they never asked for forgiveness and acknowledge their acts.
Happiness is an inside job. You have heard that. What it means is that no amount of external achievement, tracking, or validation will get you there. At some point, the inside work is not optional.
It is the work.
That Bone Tiring Place in the Middle (You Are Not Lost)
I recently learned there is a word for where I have been. It is called liminality. It is the stage when something has ended and is irrevocably gone, but what comes next has not yet arrived. You are in between. The old thing is over. The new thing is not here. And you are asked to keep functioning in the middle of that.
We lost our home in the fire. The office burned right along with it. In spiritual teachings, there is a belief that something of a lower nature must leave for something of a higher nature to come in. I would like to hold that truth cleanly. I am not there yet. I feel the grief. I feel the loss. Life does not pause while you process it. You carry it alongside everything else you are already doing.
If you are in this place, you are not lost. Lost and in between are not the same thing. Lost means no sense of direction. In between means something real has ended and something real has not yet arrived. The gap is uncomfortable. It is also not permanent. And the fact that you feel the weight of it means you took whatever ended seriously enough to grieve it. This is the bone tiring reality of genuine transition.
Most of what we read about transformation skips this part. It goes from the breaking point straight to the breakthrough, as if the middle is just a brief inconvenient corridor. It is not. For many of us we are talking months. For some of us it is years. The middle is where the real work happens, even when it does not feel like work. Even when it feels like nothing at all.
What Nobody Tells You About Transformation
This is why I was so moved in my last conversation with Maeve Ferguson. She is a funnel strategist working with the upper echelons of the thought leadership space — a fellow strategist, data-driven, results-oriented, and by her own description, a former non-believer. She came on the show and shared her journey to walking a genuine spiritual path. She has a spiritual coach. She is fully committed. And she was honest about what opened up when she began to take that seriously.
She is not the only one. I am seeing this across the founders I talk to and work with. The ones who have hit the wall of external optimization and found it empty. The ones who are in the in-between place and looking for a framework that goes deeper than a productivity system. There is a current running underneath the business conversation right now, and it is pulling people inward.
What nobody tells you about transformation is that it does not feel like becoming more. It feels like losing things. The identity you built. The story you told. The version of success you thought you had locked in. Transformation is a dismantling before it is a building. And the dismantling is where most people either do the work or find a way to avoid it.
There is real healing in acknowledging our hurt. But you must rip off the Band-Aid. You have to expose what is underneath and let it surface. And feel it. The feeling is the worst part. I say that from personal experience. It is also the only way through.
I do not know where you are in this. But I know this: we are in a major transformation, as people and as a world. Leadership is pushing narratives that cannot be believed. AI is not God. We are not replaceable. We are not machines. And no optimization system will tell you how to feel good or why you are here.
The spiritual undercurrent is not a trend. It is not new. It is ancient. What is new is that more people — founders, strategists, builders — are ready to stop treating it as peripheral. The inner work is not a detour from the business. For many of us, it has become the foundation of it.
Something has to burn before something better can come in. That is not a metaphor. Sit with what that means for you.
A Closing Reflection
Where in your life are you still performing as the persona you no longer are?
Let’s grow, Beate.
P.S. If this is resonating and you are ready to do the real work — inner and outer alignment together — The Forge is where we start. It is free. No fluff. YourBusinessMC.com