What’s Shame Got To Do With It?

I recently did an interview with Tarzan Kay for The Girlboss Apology Tour. We had a pre-interview chat to explore the territory. I’d told her about what I felt I needed to apologize to myself for, so I knew she was going to ask about it.

And still, when she did, I could feel myself talking around it. The shame was right there, prickling up my neck, flushing my chest, doing that thing where my skin goes red, which makes me feel like I’m naked in my shame soup for everyone to see.

And then, because the universe enjoys a bit, I felt shame about feeling shame. Which is shame’s whole move, really. It festers in the dark, and then when you finally catch a glimpse of it, it whispers oh, so you’re the kind of person who has this? interesting. Love that for me.

If you want to know what I’d been “shoulding on myself” about, you’ll have to watch the interview. But what’s more interesting to me than the content is what was moving beneath it, an arrogance I’m also embarrassed about (take that, triple shame!), because I was pretty sure I was above it.

Gather round. The elder internet coach has thoughts.

I came up in the online coaching space in the early 2010s, before that even, when personal brands were just becoming a thing, when blogs ruled the internet, when you could share a link on The Facebook and actually (genuinely, wildly!) all your “friends” would see it. Most would share it. And if you were good at your work and bold enough to ask a client, “If you know someone who’d benefit from this, would you tell them about me?” — you could end up industry famous.

It was the golden age of online business.

Every client who came to me found me in one of two ways: a direct referral, or they’d read something I’d written. When Danielle LaPorte, an early client (now dear friend), mentioned me in a newsletter, I was booked out for a year. An article I wrote got shared six thousand times overnight — viral, for those days — and led to a firestorm of activity, opportunity and clients.

It was easy. Until it wasn’t.

Twitter exploded. Instagram arrived. People started jumping ship from Mailchimp to Infusionsoft and Ontraport because “oh my god, you don’t have a funnel yet?!” Affiliate marketing became a surge and a spectacle, a referral circle jerk where people earned social clout by landing on top of the B-School leaderboard.

Things haven’t moved like that in a very long time. A single drip would create a massive ripple. Now you can have a whole ass body of work, be creating in your genius zone, dance on TikTok, be splattered across publications, take a stand on social media about every horror in the news cycle, be a magician at your craft, have an army of affiliates, and still feel like you’re crying into the void.

The first business book I ever read was The E-Myth, back in the nineties. Michael Gerber’s whole premise is that most businesses fail because a technician (someone good at the actual thing) has an “entrepreneurial seizure” and decides to start a business, not realizing that doing the thing and building a business around the thing are entirely different skill sets.

That problem isn’t new. But the internet turned it into a hall of mirrors.

Suddenly, the technicians were drowning, not because the premise had changed, but because the sheer volume of people selling how to sell, building businesses to build businesses to build businesses, coaches coaching coaches coaching coaches coaching coaches. All dressed up in cute filters and enviable lifestyles, what Kelly Diels (also on the Girl Boss Apology Tour) coined as the Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand.

Welcome to the Girl Boss and Business Bro era! Often (not always), people with zero training in the actual thing (the technical, the craft, the practitioner promises being peddled) make bold transformational claims. Those of us who were established had roots to rely on. Some newcomers couldn’t make a go of it in the speed and volume, while others made bank fast, capitalizing on having a strategic edge, sometimes ethically, often exploitatively.

And the age-old challenge, people who just wanted to do their work and share their gifts without having to build the infrastructure and marketing engine around it, were not only more disoriented than ever, they had a deluge of psychological selling slurping up that confusion with shame and blame tactics. It’s your mindset! It’s your fear of success! Have a money breakthrough, put my course on your credit card!

I’ve had conversations with a lot of people who came up in those early days, and the grief we’ve felt in all of what flooded in, the ways we felt we didn’t keep up, the things we tried in earnest not to get sucked into, how many things that started as places of genuine opportunities for connection and growth (early social media), have turned into harrowing horrors.

The sheer noise and volume of tactics and strategies could make you feel like you’d miss the gold rush if you didn’t have a lead magnet with a nurture sequence to your $47 micro-offer funnel to the $497 course that fed the $2,997 group program that you’d A/B test to split your audience into a $27/mo membership or $27k VIP mastermind (or for the lightworking witches, those numbers would all end in 11, 22, 44, or 88 because magic over bro math stats amiright?)

And yet, I mostly felt outside of the circus.

In part, because I have a pretty strong inner directionality, but it’d be arrogant to hang it all on that.

Some of it was just technological ineptitude, an unwillingness to race or compete or just your run-of-the-mill freeze and avoidance. I’ve always said I’m an eighty-five-year-old when it comes to tech, so I’m never going to jump on a trend, whether that’s the first on a new platform or an evergreen funnel.

I never got on the psychological triggers sales train, which was rooted in moral superiority for sure! Countdown timers on digital products that could technically be purchased at any time? How are you not embarrassed? I didn’t chase followers. I didn’t chase top-line revenue as a brag. I stayed in my lane, did the work, wrote the things, got the referrals.

And I told myself I didn’t care.

Which was mostly true. But not entirely.

Because what came up in that interview with Tarzan, what had me prickling red in my chair, is that even while I was feeling quietly above or simply not aligned with a lot of it, it was still being internalized. Where I should be by now. What I should have done or built. Comparison I wasn’t tracking. Ways I’d felt I’d failed by metrics I wasn’t even trying to play.

Turns out I’m a little vain about not being vain. Certainly, in the territory of what I’d have called vanity metrics. My version of unconscious superiority was feeling above the tactics, and actively telling myself I didn’t care about certain things. And I didn’t. Not really. But I also, quietly, had. Just enough to carry shame about it while not going after things that maybe I wanted but felt like I shouldn’t.

The design of the thing I told myself I wasn’t subject to had gotten me anyway.

I’ve been in a multi-year metamorphosis. I’ve put down the coach identity as my primary vocational self. Not because I don’t love coaching, I do. And I still use those skills every day. But because the identity took up so much room inside me, I needed to kill it off to make space for what’s coming through me next.

Whenever I move into something new, I like to anchor into what I’m bringing with me from my past self. What hit a nerve in this interview is that just as important as what we carry forward and what we leave behind, is what needs to be integrated, healed, translated or grieved, so we can actually feel free and alive going forth.

That’s what The Girlboss Apology Tour is for.

It’s not about tactics. It’s not a “how to make money online now” summit. Tarzan has put together something far more generative. It’s a chance to see the water you’ve been swimming in, to orient in a disorienting landscape, to grieve a little if you need to, and to be in honest, open conversations with people who are more interested in courageous and connected relating than posturing as experts.

Fifteen years ago, everyone was aspiring to be a brand. Now I think a lot of us are craving the opposite — intimacy, trust, connection, things we can just feel and know are true, being real and messy enough that we won’t be mistaken for AI. Experts selling to experts selling to experts. Who cares. Boring. Sad. I still want to know your expertise, sure. I definitely want to experience your gifts and champion your genius — but I’m far more interested in who we are when we stop being impressive. To me, that’s where trust, intimacy, and actual connection live.

The Tour is free, it starts tomorrow, April 13. In addition to interviews, there are opportunities for live connection and collaboration, and if you want to know what I’m embarrassed to be embarrassed about, my interview is in there.

Come hang out. Bring a friend. Let’s all make art, love and a living in a way we can actually live with.

Love,

Chela