The Unspoken Truth About Entrepreneurship for Athletic Women in Midlife

Spoiler: Your business coach won’t teach you this, but your body’s been trying to tell it to you all along.

As a woman who identifies as an athlete – either now or in the past – you’re the type who has trained your whole life to perform — in sport, in school, in your job, in your business, as a parent, as a partner, and in service to others.

You’re the woman everyone calls “steady,” “inspiring,” “disciplined,” and a “leader.”

You can put your head down and get in the flow and churn out some amazing things.

But under the surface, your body’s whispering: this isn’t flow — it’s fatigue.

In order to care for yourself as you continue to raise the bar 1% by 1%, you’ve mastered every protocol — cycle tracking, productivity tools, putting your phone on do not disturb, professionals development, journaling, breathwork, balancing your hormones, taking continuing education, hiring business coaches…

And that has all worked well on paper. Yet, something keeps whispering “I don’t know how long I can keep this up” when you’re in “work” mode.

And that has you feeling a dissonance…a disconnection…a doubt. There’s a quiet questioning whispering from some place –  “Wait, is this really what I’m supposed to be doing?”

That deeper whisper shows up in the trigger points of your shoulders, in the tension in your pelvic floor, in the vigilance you have about your HRV and sleep scores every morning when you wake up. It shows up when you turn over two seemingly identical cartons of Greek Yogurt to see which one has just a little more protein in it. 

That voice says “This is so hard. I feel like I’m turning into a machine waiting for its next system upgrade or optimization, not a person who is truly experiencing and enjoying what I’m doing.”

And you look around and feel – dare you say it – shame. Because you are the one that built this business, this lifestyle, this family, this way of being in the world. But at the end of the day – You are the one that preaches to and giving to others to “optimize their health” and “build a balanced lifestyle.”

You are a literally walking talking picture of doing it all right – just as any athlete would be who truly cares about her performance. Your instagram makes it seem like it couldn’t be better … and you know damn well that’s on you for only sharing the highlight reel and the occasional snap of your messy kitchen to seem “relatable.”

And yet that whisper that won’t go away no matter how much you grit your teeth behind a smile when someone asks how everything is going  – has you feeling embarrassed. People look up to you. They say they want what you’ve built.

Yet you know you can’t sustain it.

And you don’t know what it will mean … or look like to everyone else … when …not if … you finally give in and say “No, this just isn’t it for me anymore.”

You find yourself fantasizing about what would happen if you just closed up shop, moved yourself and your family to Italy and read books and worked in a cheese shop.

You also wonder what would happen if you just burned it all down.

Aside from the obvious financial repercussions (which you aren’t quite ready to stomach or take on), you realize – it goes deeper than that.

This isn’t just about what you do in your work. Because your work itself has become a huge part of your identity. It’s your own version of “sport” – done through a “health and wellness service business” lens.

And it’s where most of your friends exist. The people you keep up with online and at those couple-times-a-year conferences or courses. It’s the people who send you Reels about the latest research or denouncing whatever some influencer or government official has said about women’s bodies this week. 

If you were to let go and shift into something else – would people think that suddenly you changing course in your work means you no longer support them? Who would stay and support you? Who would fall off? What would that mean?

And even deeper – you are … dare you say … kind of lonely here. You’re the one who holds it together, wishing someone would just celebrate you for doing even the littlest things. But of course they don’t – because you’re the one who is doing that for everyone else.

And that is exhausting. But what if…what if you really and truly made a shift? 

You shudder at the thought of how jarring that might feel to your system – to turn the tables .. Not just in your identity and work, but also in your relationships – overnight.

Yet, you also know – your body is saying – you can’t stay in this mode much longer. It’s time.

If this is you, I want you to know – I get it.

And before you burn down all that you’ve built and/or move across the world and become an olive farmer, I want you to know - perhaps there is another option that won’t feel so jarring to your system.

As an athlete, you’ve always been connected to your body. But as an entrepreneur, somehow you’ve become disconnected From Your Own Rhythm

As a lifelong female athlete (even if you’re not currently technically in a physical sport) – you learned to become attuned to your body’s rhythms a long time ago. This helped you thrive in sport – you learned when to push, when to back off, when to get back up after you fall down, and when to ask for help.

You participated in training cycles – of high intensity, recovery, strength work, endurance, even “fun” stuff.

You knew your mental game was just as important – if not more important – than your physical game.

You knew to stay in on a Friday night and rest up for a big event on Saturday. You know how to dial in your diet, your mobility regimen, and to keep things out of your life that might impair your performance.

But if you stop and think about it for a minute – this level of attunement is not only an athlete’s cyclical rhythm. It’s also quite feminine.

Cycles of rest, cycles of proliferation, cycles of peaking, cycles of slowing down, and cycles of letting go. 

So in theory – as a female athlete who now is an entrepreneur – this should set you up for incredible performance and sustainability when it’s translated to how you show up for and inside of your business.

Yet somehow when it comes to your business – this feminine and athletic mindset and attunement to your body, mind, and soul needs – has been…less sharp.

Somehow – when we throw the label of “business” and “work” on the way we spend our time (and also wrap things like money, and income, and sales into the picture) – our very feminine and athlete natures can quickly exit the group chat.

Before you keep reading, take a breath. In through your nose. Drop in for a moment. Then exhale.

Notice what happens in your body as you land here. Check in with all of the parts of you.

Maybe there’s a part that’s curious about what I’m saying. There could certainly be a part that’s skeptical. And maybe there’s a part that is hyperfocused that already wants to take notes or fix something.

Maybe there are parts of you that have concerns about this topic. Maybe they are primed and ready to poke holes in whatever I might have to say.

Maybe your brain immediately wandered to the prescription you forgot to refill or the lunch you need to pack.

Here’s what I want you to know – All of that belongs.

Maybe you don’t necessarily notice parts that tell stories or have thoughts. Maybe you simply notice tension in your jaw. Maybe your toes are gripping in your shoes. Maybe your inner thighs are squeezing each other. (And I bet you just relaxed one or all of those body parts now that you’ve attuned in to them, right?)

But before you keep reading – instead of trying to do anything with your stories, thoughts, or random tapping toes, just notice what these parts of you need. Maybe they’re asking for 1% more safety, validation, coziness, warmth, or rest.

Maybe it’s an invitation to actually put your phone down and stop reading. Yes, as much as I’d love for you to stay with me and read, you also are perfectly allowed to walk away!=

What I want to offer right here in this pause – is to let this writing be less of a checklist, less of an essay for you to master (so you can regurgitate it later as an “expert” to your own clients or a way to “manage” yourself) and more of a simple listening practice and tune in for yourself.

Because this isn’t about doing or learning more. It’s about remembering what your body already knows.

And I’m gonna go out on a limb and say this is why you probably don’t need to burn everything down. You might just need to tune in a bit more here and there. 

My Own Reorientation

As I write this, I want to acknowledge that I’ve been on this journey for awhile too – tuning in and letting go of needing to master, do, fix, strive, optimize, or perform in the name of “business success.”

In fact, for most of this year, I’ve actually been coming out of a two-year retreat and integration period in my work and in my life.

You may (or may not) have noticed I’ve gone through a rebrand…and I’ve been slowly finding the words to wrap around it.

This isn’t just in my business. It has to do with a deeper awakening and uncovering of my own identity.

Determining what is true blue Julie, and what is not. Determining what I really want to be doing in my work, and what has run its course. Determining who is going to be on this next leg of the journey with me, and who has run their course.

But for the purpose of this article, I’ll be highlighting the unique crossroads where feminine rhythms, athlete design, and entrepreneur have met for me, and the unique way I see this showing up for my clients as well.

During my two+ year retreat and integration period, I did burn some things down. Believe me, they needed to be. So I’m also not saying that you won’t be taking a torch to various parts of your work and life. 

But for me, it wasn’t all a total slash-and-burn experience. For some things, I tore a lot of things down to the studs. For others, I kept it just as it was, but just put it in a vault to protect it while I did my inner and outer renovation.

It wasn’t just about what I wanted to build—but how I wanted to move and exist inside of it.

I was tired of following a business and growth model that worked well on paper, but simply didn’t work for my system. I wanted to sink into a more feminine and attuned playbook. And I still wanted to retain the athlete’s cyclical training design within it. Because that is an important part of my fabric.

So – after two years in to this reorientation and rebirthing – Instead of waiting until I had it perfectly figured out, I began to put it into messy, imperfect action. That brings us to this year of our Lord, 2025.

I’d dissected and broken down a million-dollar business. Now I’d evolved into something new and more integrated. There were elements of the old business, and emerging elements of new. It was kind of like if you were to mix salt and pepper in a jar together, it had its own flavor. And it would be damn near impossible to return to the separation of what once was. 

After a bit of a 2 year retreat (where, mind you – I was still working with clients, but in a quieter way) – I knew it was time to get out of “ideas in Google Docs and discussions with my own coaches and therapists” mode and truly emerge into this new salt-and-pepper era.

I knew I couldn’t wait for things to be “perfect.”

Like an athlete, I also knew I needed to just test the waters and see where I was after all that training.

So I started using jumbled and over-explainy words (as cringey and unsexy as it sounds) and let myself be seen before the website was done, before the offer was complete, or there was even something tangible to call myself or my work.

Enter...a science experiment, if you will.

(The mad scientist part of me loved this.)

I had conversations – online, in person, over coffee, on podcast interviews, and with friends old and new.

I posted online and got crap engagement.

I put words on my website that I knew weren’t the final product, but they were good enough to stand, for now. 

I riffed to a neighbor on a sweaty walk.

I tried things on with clients.

It wasn’t to prove anything, but to sense what actually landed — not with other people, but with myself.

I knew it had to feel like me to me — deep in my body. It had to feel feminine – gentle yet fierce.

I also wanted it to feel athletic. 

And what unfolded looked a lot like a female athlete’s training cycle.

Which makes sense, right? Because that’s a huge part of the fabric of who I am.

I had quarters and months that felt like big training blocks — big creative work days and weeks.

I had mid-season “competitions” to test it out and see how things were going — podcast episodes, posts, emails, 1:1 conversations.

And then, there was the final “end of season” performance.

Each cycle came with embodied feedback — not just a smattering of KPIs or analytics, not “how it landed with someone else” — but real physiological data I could track: where I felt tension, where I felt aliveness and excitement, where I felt relief, where I felt resonance, where I felt dissonance, where I felt like I was doing it because I “should” versus doing it because it was really, truly, unapologetically me.

By the end of what turned out to be each roughly three-month cycle, I’d gained clarity and confidence.

It didn’t all come from my work. Life handed me plenty of lessons too (some pleasant, some painful).

Bonus points: I even received new clients along the way. People who were in a parallel – in their own messy, liminal, unfinished middle spaces. Who better to guide you than someone who is in it herself? 

To be clear, getting clients was the icing on the cake, but it wasn’t the original intent — each cycle was simply an experiment in showing up in this new way, however messy it looked and felt.

And it felt… not just messy. But effective, different, and gentle. Like play and joy, a science experiment.

It reminds me a lot of how Olympic hopefuls train in each quad. The “big goal” – getting an olympic gold medal – might be three or four years from now. Maybe even longer. Yet they don’t wait to show up until it’s time. They get started. They go to meets and competitions in the interim. They tweak. They rest. They get feedback.

I’d be lying if I told you that in this process, I didn’t find myself in days that felt like hustle, work, heaviness, or ignoring my body and pushing beyond my limits. There were absolutely (and still are absolutely) days I’d wrapped myself in a Shawl of Should – quite unable to tell which way felt like a “yes” in my system, only to come up for air at the end of the day and say “yep, that definitely was NOT it.”

Just like an athlete trying to master a new skill or a new training plan, you can’t completely unlearn an old way of operating in one day, one week, one month, one year … maybe not even in a decade or a lifetime.

But you can get back up and try again each day, recommitting to the new intention, while slowly shedding the old ways piece by piece.

And this has paid off. Not in huge income numbers. But in clarity, in confidence, and in continued certainty in my body – the most masterful part of me to guide me through the uncertain direction in which I was headed.

And each time, just as I peaked in my performance and had that “Ahh, I’ve arrived” feeling wash over me, I paused to rest, metabolize, and integrate.

Not because I was tired, burned out, or overextended.

In fact, I was working less than ever and was full of ideas and energy.

But something deep in me whispered: “Press pause here.”

So I did.

This wasn’t a rest like in other seasons I’d had in my ten years of business—those full of launches, sales campaigns, and group programs that left me needing weeks (if not months) to recover from what felt like all-out sprints, only to rinse and repeat and do it all over again.

This time, I stopped while I was ahead.

I didn’t wait for my body to scream “enough!”

I didn’t wait for exhaustion to hit.

I didn’t wait for the bank account to justify a break.

I didn’t wait for my business coach to give me a gold star for completing her launch formula.

I didn’t need a vacation or a reason.

My intuition and body simply said, "You’ve done a great job. Pause now. Assess the data."

That’s how athletes train and perform, isn’t it?

The best athletes with the most meaningful and sustainable careers don’t grind until collapse only to rinse and repeat all over again.

No, you train to peak, then stop, recover, and integrate so the body, mind, and soul can learn what worked, let go of what didn’t, then adapt and get stronger.

Business, I realized, is truly no different.

To be perfectly transparent, this wasn’t an easy and seamless thing to do.

Sometimes my brain — long-trained to equate “constant action” with “success” when it comes to business and marketing — took a more than a few days to finally let go and exhale.

But eventually, I got there.

Because, just like in my swimming and competitive athlete days…I function best in cycles.

And that’s when it really landed. My hypothesis was correct in this science experiment—this athlete and feminine playbook doesn’t just apply to sport or managing the day-to-day inside a woman’s body. It can apply to how you show up in business, too.

Four three-month(ish) training cycles.

Four seasons in a year.

Four phases of the moon.

Four phases of the menstrual cycle.

As women, we weren’t built to “succeed” by being “consistent” and “on” all the time.

Our most consistent trait is actually our quite inconsistent cyclicality.

These experimental nudges I took to pause weren’t for cutesy, Instagrammable “self-care” breaks. In fact, most of the time I didn’t make some grand announcement that I was taking a step back.

I just…did it.

(Gasp! And get this –The people of the internet didn’t throw stones at me because I stopped feeding them content! I know. Wild, right?)

And as I did this (and continue to do it) – I lived in a very liminal, ongoing reevaluation of how I was doing things, not just what I was doing — but how and most importantly why I was doing it.

Spoiler: it wasn’t to keep chasing income goals. Yes, income is kind of an important thing. Yes, that’s part of the formula here, sure. Let’s be perfectly clear that this isn’t an article inviting you to swear off the need or desire to make money and call it “feminine.”

But for me, there was a deep, cyclical death and rebirth of Self — in the way only a woman can experience – and an examination of how and why I was pursuing income in the first place. What energy I was bringing to the table (or not)? Who and what was it all for at the end of the day? Would my 90 year old self look back and be content, or would she wish I’d listened in sooner? 

I knew the answer.

Like most of my peers – other women entrepreneurs who were and are also wired as athletes  – I’d been operating under a far too masculine, far too “consistent” way of being in business that took me out of both my feminine and athlete rhythms.

And I noticed my own clients were doing the same.

So, what does it actually feel like when we forget our rhythm?

Quick note: You're going to be invited to drop into your body next. So make sure you're in a place where you can do that and/or it feels safe to do so!

Before you go scanning for what’s wrong and start coming up with ways to “fix” yourself, try staying in your body as you read.

See if you can sense what you feel without needing to label it as a pathology. 

In the past week, I’ve had sessions with astoundingly brilliant female entrepreneurial clients who come in and can tell me with textbook accuracy what their attachment trauma patterns are, why – according to IFS – their protectors are acting so ridiculously, why their HRV has dropped below 40, and why their left hip pain is simply a mechanical sign of aging. 

Yet, when asked how it feels in their bodies to actually be with all of those things – they blank. They want to tell me – nay – teach me – what’s wrong with them, clinging to the false promises of confidence and certainty that come with the idea that if you can just name it and label it then, well, you can master and control it. Gold star for you! 

So here’s my invitation to you. See if you can let this next part be data, not a diagnosis. Not a label. Not another way to classify yourself or optimize how you do things. Not another way of getting a gold star.

So many of my clients – women in healthcare just like me – have become star students at knowing endless facts and information about the body and how to fix it – but are C+ to F students when it comes to fully and truly being in the body without trying to fix it. 

And I say that with so much love and gentle knowing – because this is the journey I’ve been on, too. It’s not just about your physical health. It trickles in to every single part of your life. Because in order to live your life, parent your kids, work your job – you do it from inside your body. 

So, with that preface – 

If you feel sensations — a tug in your gut, tightness in your throat, a wave of relief — that’s your system speaking. It’s perfectly ok that it’s there. 

It’s nothing to fix. Nothing to burn down. Nothing to analyze. Just information. 

Kind of like in the science lab – you might collect data for sometimes weeks, months, or even years. You don’t sit and analyze and label every piece of data as it comes in and slap a label on it. That would be fruitless and exhausting. You’d never get to the actual synthesis part. 

The same goes for your body. Every sensation, thought, story, or experience is one piece of data, offering you an opening to tune in to the larger rhythms at play.

But here’s what I want you to know--

When you’re out of sync with your feminine rhythm, it doesn’t look reckless. 

It looks devoted.

It even looks like “wellness.”

It might even look a little obsessive…

But it’s still control — just wrapped in self-care and “health” language.

And here’s the thing: it’s not wrong that you’re doing all of this.

You were taught — like I was — that caring for yourself – and being in a job or business that allows you to care for others –  is the ultimate act of feminism.

You learned how to care about your body (and everyone else’s), but not how to care from within it.

You learned how to label sensations, measure them, manage them, quiet them, all in the name of progress, growth, and consistency.

And in many ways, it has worked.

You became the woman who does all the right things: the one who knows her macros, is clear on her attachment style, tracks her HRV, books the massage, can label her (and everyone else’s) trauma patterns, logs off to “rest” for no less than 8 hours a night, lest your Garmin chastise you for having poor recovery. 

It’s dutiful, devoted, and impressive.

But it’s still a pattern of moving through life and business that mimics a male rhythm — linear, output-oriented, full of boxes and labels, and unpausing. It honors someone else’s framework or diagnostic model instead of honoring your own.

You’ve been optimizing and looking the part of someone’s textbook definition of what it is to be feminine, not embodying what it is to you.

And just so you know — this isn’t a personal failure to find yourself here— it’s conditioning.

It’s also not an invitation to blame all men and chalk it up to your favorite “f*ck the patriarchy” meme and throw your hands up and say “well there’s nothing we can do about that” (although I will happily scream sing a certain line from a certain Taylor Swift song on that theme with you any time, anywhere)

All I want you to remember – is while your mind is already trying to make sense of what I’m saying—strategizing, analyzing, labeling, categorizing, pattern recognizing, maybe even preparing its rebuttal 😉—your body is having its own experience underneath all that intelligent, doctoral-level noise.

So these next few sections offer some glimpses on what it might feel like to be even a little out of sync with a more feminine (and athletic) rhythm – either because you’re hypervigilant or undervigilant. I invite you to let your mind do the reading but your body do the interpreting.

I also invite you to simply take note of how many of these glimpses feel like they land with you in some way – one? Two? All Five? None? 

Again – it’s just data. You’re not bad if you resonate with all 5. You’re also not somehow “doing it all right” if only one or none of them resonate. There is no scorekeeping here. 

Alright. Ready? Inhale…Exhale…let’s go!

Is this you?

Maybe you’re the Wellness Star Student

You wake and check your Garmin: You smile with satisfaction as you see that your HRV was 59 your sleep score is 98. 

You chat with your friends at book club and state  “my HRV has finally recovered after a long stretch of stress. This means I must be getting better.”

Yet, despite the numbers and textbook-ideal metrics, you still feel groggy. 

You still overstimulated way more than you normally are and just.cannot.have.one.more.sticky.and.sweaty.child.touch.you. 

You walk through the grocery store in a fog – trying desperately to remember the three things you tried to burn into your brain, cursing yourself for not just writing them down in your notes app before you left the house.

You stretch, meditate, journal, lift — and see instant results on your wearable the next day.

You’re tracking everything from macros to mood, cortisol to cycle phase.

You call it listening to your body. Your functional medicine provider praises you for how good your labs are, how aware you are of everything and how you can diagnose your latest hormone imbalance before even she can. 

But you’re managing yourself like a system and machine to optimize, not a sentient, messy, sensitive human.

It’s like you’re an athlete ignoring a recovery week because the numbers look good, because you’re operating at peak performance, because a competitor is doing an extra training session and you don’t want to fall behind … even though your body is sending you plenty of data that says “listen to what I’m really saying.” 

You’d call that overtraining as an athlete. 

But as an entrepreneur, you call it “optimizing my body so I can show up on top.”

💭 Before we go any further, Pause. How did this section land with you? Where or what do you feel in your body right now?

Did that resonate with you at all? Maybe it did. Maybe it didn’t. Either way, that’s information.

But I do have a question for you to chew on – how does your body show you when you’ve reached the point of “enough?” And I really mean “enough” – not “too much” and not “I’ve gone too far.”

Can you find that feeling or sensation in yourself? Maybe it shows up as thoughts or stories, or physical cues. Do you know when you’re there, or when you blow past it? 

What are the other ways your body gets your attention that your “stay consistent” mind often overrides?

Next question – what does it feel like when your wearables or trackers say you’re doing great but your body says “I disagree”?

No judgment — because we all do this – but just an invitation to allow curiosity about what “enough” and “too much” would feel like. Not in theory or based on a lab test or metric – but truly what and how it’s registering as from inside of you.

You’re the Good Leader who Sets an Empowered Example

When your team member misses a deadline or your partner brushes off your “woo,” you breathe, smile, and choose what you’ve been taught Grace should look and sound like.

You tell yourself you’re grounded, evolved, and “responsive and not reactive.” You’re setting an example for what “good energy” and “leadership” looks like. After all, you just read Brene’s new book. You can quote her mic drop one-liners with stunning accuracy. You don’t want to let down the imaginary Brene who sits on your shoulder. 

But hidden behind that smile, that gracious tone in your voice – your jaw locks. Your chest hums. You start to spin. 

A part of you catalogues it and wonders why on earth you feel unhinged.

And yet, you still show up with a smile. You want to be the bigger person – and model for others what it is to be a “good friend” or “role model” or  “team player.”

As an athlete – imagine that your coach or teammate asks you to do a training plan that ignores your needs, that disrespects your body, or goes against your values.

You know it’s all wrong for you.

You smile through gritted teeth and do it anyway because you don’t want to seem difficult, cause a scene, or let them down.

An athlete who never advocates for her body or needs gets injured or burned out.

In business – you call it “being easy to work with,” a “good leader,” or “someone who is energetically ‘evolved.’”

💭 Pause. Here’s your invitation to drop in for another moment.

Picture a time recently that you said yes when you really meant no, when you put up with someone else pushing or breaching your boundaries, when you cleaned up someone else’s mess for them without being thanked for it, or when you put up with inappropriate or disrespectful behavior.

Notice if your jaw, shoulders, or chest hold a story of irritation or frustration you’ve been breathing and regulating away in the name of being “nice.”

If you could listen and give voice to instead of soothe or quiet that tension, what would that part of you say?

You’re obsessed with 24/7 visibility

As a business owner who does much of her own marketing, you’ve been taught how important it is to walk the talk – and to show people you’re living by example.

You take pictures of your CEO time and post it to your IG stories #bossbabe

You show pictures of your journaling time with hashtag #selfcare 

You capture and share screenshots of client feedback and wins – showering you with praise.

Even your recovery walks with your dog have been shared #unwind

To be clear – none of these things is actually a bad thing. (Please don’t stop walking your dog)

But somewhere along the way – you learned that the only way to be relatable is to catalog and prove to the world just how relatable you are.

You learned to clock in every time you so much as relax for a moment.

There’s an urgency. A “what if?” A worry that you’ll become irrelevant even when your body says “Hey girl, take a beat. Leave your phone at home during that dog walk.”

You hear what the IG business coaches say – it’s like playing the slot machines. If you want to win the game, you can’t stop playing even for a day, and those who are “consistent” are the ones who ultimately win.

They frame this up with seductive, psychotherapy-sounding mantras that explain away why you should quiet those invitations from your body to stop feeding the machine  –

They tell you that your perfectionism or inner critic is telling you not to post, and you just need to let go of that “weak way of being” and keep posting. And as a recovering perfectionist, you don’t want to be caught dead falling victim to that voice of sabotage yet again, because it would mean you’ve gone backwards in all of the progress you’ve made in your mindset. So you show up and post even when your body says “no.”

But the truth is – you can’t not post – even about the latte you just made – because disappearing feels dangerous.

It’s like an athlete who is glued to her Strava or Garmin Connect, but now it’s in your business — clocking and screaming into the abyss that you’re consistent, visible, valuable, relatable – anything to prove that you should be the one to have the next big breakthrough.

In sport – it would be like an athlete who is obsessively keeping one eye on the clock every step of the way, monitoring the leaderboard instead of her breath. It would be an athlete who asks her coach how she’s doing in every practice, but has no awareness herself. The athlete who measures performance by how many people showed up in the bleachers. 

There, it’s obvious. We’d call it distraction or unhealthy obsession. 

But in business – the inability to actually fully step away, the inability to actually go “invisible” for 24 hours without fearing what that means to your audience? We’ve all learned to call it marketing.

💭 Pause. Here’s an invitation to drop in yet again.

Inhale and feel the air through your nostrils. Hold it for a moment at the top. Now let it out with one big “aaaaaah.”

Notice – How does the idea of invisibility, being unrelatable, or being irrelevant feel in your body?

Exciting? Terrifying? Dreadful? Something else?

See if there’s a place or part of you that longs to be seen without having to constantly perform, keep your eye on metrics, tell everyone what you’re doing every minute of the day, or hit a daily goal.

You’re the Manifesting Maven

You’ve learned that as a woman in business who respects both the seen and unseen, you can’t ignore the “woo.”

You visualize, journal, and affirm until you can taste the renovated kitchen and the dream 3 week vacation to Iceland. Hot springs, here you come.

You have an altar, an oracle deck, and several rituals you can’t live without to help you drop in to visualize the next 10 years.

You’re fluent in the language and act of manifesting abundance, but rarely pause to ask: How do I actually feel in all this wanting? Is this thing I say I want something I’ve been led to believe is the definition of “success?” Or do I actually want it? 

It’s like an athlete who rehearses seeing herself on top of the Olympic gold medal podium because in her sport, that’s the ultimate definition of success to most people.

But she never stops to ask herself “Is that really what this is all for? Or am I doing all of this simply because I’m good at it and people encouraged me to keep going, but I don’t necessarily want all of those rewards and prizes?”

Gentle reminder: just because you’re incredibly good at something doesn’t mean it’s your calling. Or maybe it was once your calling, but it no longer feels like it. You’re allowed to change your mind, change course, back off, or set different goals for success that don’t always look like the picture perfect “top of the podium” version that everyone encourages you to manifest.

💭Pause for another moment. 

Drop your attention to follow the gentle ebb and flow of breath into your pelvis and lower belly and just notice – how does it feel to notice your breath there? 

Is it free and easy to breathe? Without making it happen or forcing it to happen – does it feel like your breath goes all the way into your pelvic bowl? Or does it feel like there is any tension held somewhere between your ribcage and your pelvis? 

As you notice this area, gently ask –

What desire – if any – is actually alive right now inside of you — not the goal, but the felt sense of wanting? Do you need to get up and wiggle? Do you need to pee? Do you need to drink something? Do you need some chocolate?

I’m not talking about those BIG big desires that show up on your vision board. I’m talking about the micro desires we often don’t romanticize. Because it’s in those doorways that we often find the truer, deeper pathways to our deeper and more romantic big picture desires. 

If you want to take this a step further and make this about your work or business – just answer this one question. How would you like your work to FEEL? 

You’re caught in a Masculine Business Hustle (Dressed in Pink)

While we’re on the topic of “woo” and “manifestation” – you’ve also received a lot of advice and mentoring from female business mentors who have likely taught you all kinds of business frameworks designed for “flow.”

But underneath the pink and gold branding and feminine words they use to describe their copywriting and launch formulas, the structure still rewards output: more posts, more launches, more visibility, more dollars, more showing up day in and day out.

They throw in spiritual practices and energy cleansing to make it seem more feminine, but underneath all of it is still a patriarchal, masculinized system that pulls you out of the very feminine they purport to be helping you stay rooted in.

It’s the business version of cycle-syncing your workouts as an athlete – a very popular approach where someone else has told you exactly how to train and exactly what workouts to do at various stages of your menstrual cycle based on faulty-at-best research – instead of trusting you to listen to your body and show up in ways that feel good to you.

In your business, when exhaustion whispers or your very cyclical nature shows its face, you’ve been taught patch it up — caffeine, adaptogens, even a hormone patch to offset fatigue instead of listening to it.

In sport, that’s called doping and performance enhancement.

In entrepreneurship, it’s called “feminine optimization so you can be a boss babe.”

But the truth is – you’re not optimizing your feminine rhythms, you’re quieting them in order to maintain momentum.

💭Pause for a final moment.

Check in with the part of you who is afraid if she doesn’t follow her mentor’s framework, she will fail.

Ask it what it’s protecting you from if you actually paused when your body asked you to instead of swallowing nootropics for better focus or doing an extra breathwork session before a sales conversation just so you can make the sale.

You don’t have to change anything — just let that part know you’re listening and you appreciate all its hard work.

Did any of those land with you?

Before we go any further– pause to take a moment and look at the data you felt and gathered. 

Even if you don’t feel ready to say it out loud or even do anything about it – Your body knows the truth of what’s right for your own rhythm and how you perform best in your business before your mind, the latest wellness biohacking protocol, your Oura Ring, or your business coach admits it.

As an athlete, you would listen in, tweak, and shift based on the ongoing data you receive from you body.

In business, you’ve been taught to “regulate” the signs and signals your body sends. 

But it’s not regulation. It’s suppression. It’s ignoring. It’s overriding.

This is where the female athlete/entrepreneur parallel becomes undeniable:

As an athlete, you’d never train through injury and call it discipline.

So why – in business – would you work through depletion and call it devotion?

And before you move any further – let’s acknowledge that there may be a part of you who LOVES to take feedback and use it to “self improve.”

If she is speaking up, sitting on the edge of her seat – ready to take notes and wondering “Ok, what do I DO about this?”

I get it. I have a similar ambitious part. And I want to invite you to give her what it is she needs right now – without necessarily overhauling your routines, throwing out everything, or abandoning your ambition.

Just see if you can move 1% closer to what your body is asking for right this moment.

Sometimes listening — not leaping — is the bravest next move.

Notice what shifted as you read through this last section—maybe nothing, maybe everything.

How This Played Out In My Life (The Rebuild)

For me – in my 2+ years of breaking down and reconstruction in not only the what of my business but the how – dropping into my body time and time again revealed behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes that didn’t necessarily need to be regulated. They needed to be tended to, listened to, and allowed to speak up for what they were really asking for.

I had grown a million-dollar business each year from 2020–2023.

I had done everything right.

So much of what I did and created was rooted in truly authentic “me.” It wasn’t all wrong. I didn’t totally ignore my body.

So it wasn’t about burning it all down and starting over.

It wasn’t about healing or fixing every part of me.

It wasn’t about going all feminine and abandoning the masculine.

It was about looking at where I strayed from my body’s intelligence and wisdom in service to following someone else’s design, framework, or definition of success.

And here’s the kicker — you’d think I was following business advice from men.

But I wasn’t.

For years, I’d followed advice from women mentors: a launch-and-scale approach that looked soulful, but was still a patriarchal system dressed in pink sparkles and labeled “feminine.”

In truth, it was a Conformity Corset that leveraged the very feminine need of co-regulatory relationships and mentorships to create power dynamics of “should” and “have to” and “performance.”

This looked like calling it a “collaborative, supportive, and connected group program” when really – underneath – was competition, passive aggressiveness, and pressure to gain favor and approval from the leader of the group – the coach in charge.

Parts of it were working.

But it was all in service of keeping the engines running at full throttle.

I wasn’t sick. I wasn’t suffering.

But I felt the dissonance every time my body whispered “No, stop, pause, do less” while my calendar (or coach) screamed “Yasssss Queen, keep going!”

So I stepped back to recalibrate, reorient, and release what no longer fit.

It wasn’t a sexy, quick, or painless process.

It was an identity shift. A soul inventory. A redefinition of purpose, pace, and people.

And paradoxically, many women around me questioned it—because they, too, had internalized the cultural norm of go-launch-scale-rinse-repeat, and do it all while wrapping yourself in a cloak of regulation, self care, optimization, wellness, tracking, metrics, meditation, manifestation.

That part was hard.

But I chose to listen to my body over the noise or the pressure to just keep going.

Because I am a cyclical being.

I thrive when I honor that.

And the women who get it will clap when I do. 👋

What I found was that our world’s definition of “consistency” isn’t holy, it’s internalized capitalism

I stopped conforming my energy and rhythms to fit a never-ending target of “happiness” defined by revenue, metrics, performative balance, what the multi-billion dollar wellness industry calls “healthy,” or what former mentors called “successful.”

I redefined success altogether.

Being attuned. Rest. Happiness. Play. Joy. Levity. Deep contemplative and creative moments.

Those became the new gold medals.

And then—I rebuilt a business from there.

There’s so much noise about “consistency” in female entrepreneurship.

It often comes from a good place—especially if you struggle to follow through.

But for women like me—the overfunctioners, the high performers—

“Consistency” just rewards constant output and “sameness" while overriding your own rhythms.

A sameness modeled on a more masculine rhythm, one that is also built on year-over-year growth.

It flattens our natural waves of intuition, creativity, integration, metabolizing, and rest.

And then, with the best of intentions, we’re told to “schedule self-care” into that masculine structure—like another to-do list.

We use, operate, optimize, train, biohack, self-help our bodies as vehicles for success, but we’re not embodied in those bodies as feminine beings.

Like an athlete – it’s like using your body to fuel someone else’s dream at the expense of your own. In professional sports, that’s exploitation. In business, we call it “grit” and “determination.”

Zooming Out: The Cultural Context

And here’s where this might get uncomfortable—because our conditioning runs deeper than our business decisions.

This is bigger than your personal habits. It’s cultural, generational, and systemic.

The reason we override our rhythms isn’t because we’re weak—it’s because we were trained to.

And look – I love that as women we even get to be entrepreneurs.

Fifty years ago, women couldn’t even have their own bank accounts. In some countries, they still can’t.

That’s a miracle of feminism.

But here’s the nuance–The intent of feminism was equality—i.e. Equal opportunity.

But the actual outcome of that has often resulted in an imitation of a male operating system.

We’re optimizing and regulating so we can operate like men to keep that equal opportunity.

And why wouldn’t you? If you want to prove you can do it just like men, then you might literally mimic exactly what, how, and why they do it. Where else have you seen it modeled any other way?

But what if the way we’ve been taught to operate actually works against our deepest rhythms as women?

What if you could reach the same (or better) outcomes, with a completely different, embodied feminine playbook – one that also mirrors how you’d operate as an athlete?

In the fight for equality, we also inherited pressure to be steady, reliable, unshakeable, unbothered—to prove our worth by performing sameness, coolness, consistency, and constant unstopping growth.

The entrepreneurial world calls that holy. But it’s really just internalized capitalism.

This world still doesn’t make much room for the unavoidable on-again/off-again cycles of womanhood—pregnancy, child care, perimenopause, caregiving, and much much more.

Add the extra barriers of race, disability, income, and access—and it’s no wonder many of us can’t metabolize this message easily. No wonder we’ve internalized capitalism and patriarchal standards of success.

This is where you – as an entrepreneur – someone who literally makes the rules – can come in and change how you do things. 

And to be clear – I’m not saying this is just something you can click your heels and do. It’s not always easy, it hurts a lot, there’s a lot of grieving and letting go – and it’s not an overnight thing. 

This is why I don’t recommend burning it all down. Because it’s a slow, titrated process. Some things you might want to hang on to – because they’re working for you. It’s not an all-or-none. 

But what I’m saying is – it’s possible to start shifting, even bit by bit. 

You Don’t Need a Framework — You Need a Better Relationship with Your Body

If reading that just landed in your body as truth—or if it stirred resistance or rage or something else you can’t quite name— I invite you again to pause.

All of this is information for you.

This isn’t about closing up shop and kissing your entrepreneurial dreams goodbye. 

I’m not telling you to stand in your kitchen and clean all day with a baby on your hip while your husband goes off to the workplace to provide for the family (though…no shade if this is your vision, dream, or current reality).

It’s not “do it a hustly/masculine way and pinkwash it with sparkles and self care” or “do nothing.”

It’s certainly not about following some 5-step framework that I’m going to give you.

So if you’re waiting for the part where I give you a checklist on how to succeed in your business, this isn’t the place for that.

I’m not your business coach. From here, the work isn’t in doing. It’s in listening and attuning.

It’s about coming home to and designing your own rhythm within your entrepreneurial dreams.

It’s about pausing to breathe – not to regulate yourself, but to drop in and listen to how you want to do it.

It’s about knocking on the door and letting your body, heart, soul, and mind respond.

Because the coolest thing about entrepreneurship? You’re literally the boss of your career. 

You get to design – from top to bottom – how you operate. You make the rules. It’s nobody else’s body of work but your own.

So what if the new playbook for women entrepreneurs who also identify as athletes —the one where you thrive in business and life—isn’t about doing less or more?

It’s about listening, fine tuning, and tweaking to a rhythm that honors your cyclical nature?

What if it’s about the very athletic model of periodization – a strategic, yet gentle design of your business energy and vision into specific phases and cycles with distinct goals, volumes, and intensities to still allow performance, but prevent overtraining, burnout, and overriding your own fluidity?

It’s about knowing when to go full throttle, and when to disappear into the woods to integrate, digest, and recalibrate.

Because your body – not the business coach who guarantees you 6 figures in 6 months – is the most advanced business mentor you’ll ever have.

And when you honor its rhythm—you don’t fall behind.

You fall into alignment.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re with me on this—reimagining what it means to succeed like a woman athlete in business—save this post.

Come back to it when the hustle stops feeling holy.

Circle back when you forget that you can swim hard and sink soft and not lose touch on what’s most important to you.

Use any of the embedded somatic “drop in” moments as a resource to check back in with yourself. Maybe some of them didn’t land today, but they may land another day.

Use it as a reminder when you’re tempted to burn it all down and move across the globe.

You don’t need to leap into a new life. Just lean 1% closer to what your body is whispering.

Your body already knows the truth.

And as an athlete, you’re excellent at listening to and training your body to do amazing things.

But as a business owner, you’ve just been trained to forget it.

And whenever you’re ready, you can always tune back in and let it know you’re listening.

If any of this landed or resonated with you – I’d love to hear from you! My DMs and email are always open!

And if something stirred in you and you’re curious about what it could look like to be guided and held as you shift bit by bit into a more intuitive, body-led rhythm in your business and life – reach out. 

From someone who’s been there, done that (still doing it) and loves guiding others just like you – I’d be honored to be in your corner.

Cheers to you!

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