I Was Watching the Wrong Women

There is a specific spot at my kitchen counter where I have rebuilt my entire business at least twenty-five times.

It’s early. The house is still quiet in the way it only is before my son is awake. The coffee is too hot to drink, so I hold the cup with both hands and I start talking. Again. To the man who married me and then, somewhere along the way, became my confidant and my mentor and my coach all at once. Ya’ll have to know my husband is not a morning person as so it’s only love thats having him even engage in the conversation in the first place first thing in the morning.

I have a new idea. A new launch. A new thing that is finally, surely, going to get me over the wall I keep hitting.

Because there is a wall. My business has been good for years. Good enough that I should probably stop calling it a wall and start calling it success . But every time I opened my phone, the blue light told a different story. Somebody just did five million dollars in a single launch. Somebody grew by a hundred thousand followers in a couple of weeks. And there I was, having shown up faithfully for years and years, feeling like the number I knew was mine kept sliding just out of reach.

So I’d ask him. What should I build? How should I do this? And when I ran out of ways to ask him, I’d ask my mentor the same questions, in slightly different outfits, over and over and over. Shoutout to Kim ! She’s seen the many daily iteration of my overthinking brain .

Here is the part that still makes me wince. The answer was already in the room. It had been in the room the whole time. All I had to do was get quiet enough to look at it.

But my mind had other plans.

My mind kept me chasing, and I wanted the fast, loud, online kind of success for reasons that were real. For my family. For my son, who needs more from me than most children need, and for the person I wanted to be able to bring into our home to help care for him. I told myself that once I hit the million-dollar launch, I could finally afford the help. His disability has made life a bit more challenging and I couldn’t deny it I needed the nanny. The housekeeper. The breathing room. So the hustle was never vanity. It was love, pointed in the wrong direction.

And underneath the hustle was something quieter and more expensive. I could not see my own strengths plainly. So I kept building versions of a business that belonged to other people. A course. A new product. Another funnel. Another long, grinding launch that ended with me exhausted and quietly resenting the very thing I had just made.

The whole time, the data sat there like a note I kept forgetting to read.

Every single time I get near a woman, something happens. On a Zoom call, sure. But especially in a coffee shop. And most of all when it is a relationship we have let grow over weeks or months. I don’t pitch. I don’t push. I don’t perform. The conversion just arrives, like it was always going to. The numbers kept telling me this. They also kept telling me that Instagram was never my closer. It made a little noise, a little heat, a little attention. But I always had to carry that attention off the platform and sit with it, tend it, before it ever turned into anything real. At one point I looked up and nearly every client I had came from someone I already knew, or someone they loved enough to send my way.

By the end of 2025, I was tired.

So I sat down. I pulled all of it. Every number, every launch, every year, and I laid it out in front of me. And what startled me was not the data. It was that I had never once let myself fully look at it. I had been so busy building a business I wasn’t built for that I had walked right past the evidence of the one I was.

That was the morning I understood the real problem. I had been watching the wrong women.

There was one woman, near the end of that year, who cracked it open for me. Her name is Candice Marie. I couldn’t tell you the exact mechanics of what she does, only that every time I consumed her content, I felt better. She barely sold anything. A social media guide. A course, maybe. Everything else rested on the identity she had already built, quietly, as the expert. And the loudest voice in my head insisted I wasn’t allowed to make content like that yet. That I hadn’t earned the reputation to step back and simply trust that the right people would find me.

And still. I kept getting pulled toward her, and toward every woman like her. The one who markets slower. The one who builds a room instead of a following. The one who hosts. The one who lets you see her life but only the parts she decides. She loves art, she cares about the way things make you feel. The pull itself was the answer I kept refusing to see it. I didn’t want to be like these women. I was already them!

Here is what I finally admitted. I never actually wanted the volume. I had convinced myself I wanted three thousand people buying a three-hundred-dollar offer, when what I wanted was that same number reached through a small, close circle of women I could genuinely transform. Women of my own caliber. Women I could stand beside, not as some savior parachuting in, but as one small part of the beautiful thing they were already building. What I wanted was intimate. Curated. A little bit luxurious. I had let myself admire that in other women for years without ever giving myself permission to be her.

Until the top of 2026.

The Eden Eleven dinners were the first thing I have ever built that felt like the truth. New Orleans. Then Houston. I barely had time to promote them and they sold out anyway. And then I walked into rooms full of women from every industry you can imagine, opening up about the real parts of their journeys, and something in my chest went still. I could do this forever. Andre 3000 said he wanted little rooms instead of big rooms, and I finally understood him in my body. Not the giant conference where you pray to catch someone at the coffee station. The gathering where one conversation actually changes a person, and you both walk out with a friend for life.

So this year I started watching different women. Not the ones I want to be like. The ones who show me the woman I already am. And I started letting myself be her. Luxurious. Intimate. Selective.

I have built the rest of this year around all of it, and I am not being dramatic when I tell you it feels good in my soul. It feels good on my nervous system. It even feels good in my bank account, which is the part I didn’t see coming, that the aligned thing is so often the profitable thing too. I am taking the next couple of months to author something I am deeply proud of, and to build the next version of these gatherings for the end of the year and into 2027.

People keep asking if I’m excited. Excitement is in there somewhere. But the word I keep landing on is better than excitement. It feels aligned. It feels like a fit. It feels like the thing I should have known the whole time, the thing that stood directly in front of me, waving, while I looked straight past it because I was too busy chasing a model that was never mine and studying women I was never meant to become.

If you are tired at your own kitchen counter, rebuilding the same business for the twenty-fifth time, I want to give you the only thing that finally worked for me. Stop watching the women who make you feel like you’re behind. Go find the ones who make you feel more like yourself. Then get quiet, and go read your own data. It has been trying to tell you who you are this whole time.