Lessons - She Built the Agency Everyone Wanted Then Learned What Scaling Actually Costs | Jessica Zweig - SimplyBe Founder & Author of Be

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In this lessons episode, discover why scaling a successful business can come with hidden personal costs.

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Understand how relentless growth can blur the line between ambition and self-worth.

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Explore why building a personal brand requires serving others rather than chasing validation.

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And uncover how burnout and difficult seasons can reveal a more meaningful path forward.

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So the problem that Simply V was solving was personal brand.

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Yes.

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And then why, back to that thought, why does no one care what your personal brand is when all you were doing was building personal ads for people?

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Yeah, it was a pretty provocative thing I put on Twitter.

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And I wrote about that in my first book, B.

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So I built a personal branding agency rooted on the premise of authenticity.

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That to build a brand from ego is...

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Doing it wrong is what a lot of people do, which is why the idea of personal brand is sort of gross to people.

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People think that they never want to do it.

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What do you mean from ego?

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When you're simply self-promoting, when it's all about you, when you're the star of your own platform, you're not, your community is the star.

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They're the main character.

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That you're showing up to be seen without any purpose or service towards your community.

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The biggest secret about building a personal brand, this is what I said on my Twitter account.

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is that no one cares about you.

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No one cares about your brand.

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What do people care about?

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Themselves.

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Yeah.

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And so everything that you create has to come from a place of service.

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If you want to resonate online and create loyalty, create trust, create a compound effect of growth to create clients, you know,

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It has to really come from your heart.

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You have to be of service knowing that you're just the vessel.

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You're just the channel.

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Your gifts are needed.

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You were put here for a reason.

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You are special, but so are the people that you serve.

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And if you architect content every time you go post, whether it's a YouTube channel, a tweet, a blog, a talk, a book, and you put your audience first in every single thing you say and do,

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You're going to resonate.

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You're going to find your people because they feel like you care about them.

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And so it's great.

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You should you should care about your personal brand.

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You should care immensely about it, but don't care about that more than you care about the people that you serve, because I think that's really what we're here to do.

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I think that's when we're in our highest vibration, when we're helping other people.

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You know what's interesting though?

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So the issue, not the issue, difficulty people have is we just spoke about how entrepreneurship is a shit show.

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Yes.

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And everybody feels like an imposter.

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Yeah.

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Everybody's trying to build shit and nobody wants to open up as to what's really going on in their life or their business.

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Because if you actually spoke about what's going on in your business, arguable that it would have even, like it would even be received well because it's such a mess.

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It's so chaotic, right?

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100%.

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Yeah.

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So if I'm trying to inspire and I'm trying to teach, how am I going to tell them that, you know, my video editing team for my podcast didn't follow the SOPs for like the 10th time in a row?

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Because that's what's going on.

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Yeah.

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But that's not helping or teaching or inspiring anybody.

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Yeah.

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So then I feel...

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that there is this disconnect between what I'm experiencing as a business leader and then what I'm putting out into the world as a personal brand.

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So maybe I could try and teach and inspire, but it's not really what's going on every single day.

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So even from a personal example, what I've tried to do is turn my content into a lesson that I should have learned already.

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Beautiful.

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That I'm actually just telling myself.

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Yes.

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Yes.

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And that's worked out well so far.

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But I think a lot of people have a hard time being that vulnerable.

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I think it's difficult.

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I think it's a couple thoughts there.

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I think it's important to take your audience on a journey with you.

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I think it's important to be the student out loud to some degree as much as you are a teacher.

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I think people resonate with them.

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truth in a way that they don't resonate with perfection and it's it's a fine line I'm I'm with you too I just started my whole new business and it is somewhat clunky and chaotic and I'm figuring it out as I go and I haven't wanted to share it's not from it's not necessarily for my audience to know yet because here's what I say I have so many thoughts on this I'll take you back to when I was um

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First on Facebook back in like 2010, I was going through the most horrific breakup with this guy that I was with for five years.

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I loved him so much.

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We had this horrible breakup.

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It was so, so painful.

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And I was new to social media and I didn't really, you know, understand what it was going to be.

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And I was getting on Facebook at the time.

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Instagram wasn't even out yet.

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And like being really cathartic and talking about my breakup and my posts.

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And my friend of mine who was a little older than me, she pulled me aside.

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She was like, Jessica, the internet is not a place for you to process.

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You have your therapist for that.

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The internet is a place for you to share wisdom once you've learned your lessons.

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So break up, go through the breakup, feel all the feelings, talk to your mom, talk to your therapist, heal from this.

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And then come back online in six, seven, eight, nine months when you've grieved it and have gotten over it.

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And you have new lessons to share about love to your audience of women.

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And relationships.

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And I'll never forget that.

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And I think that principle has always rung as true for me as possible, because I'd like to share what I'm going through.

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But certain things, whether it's personal or professional, simply aren't for the public.

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And it's...

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Your audience probably doesn't need to know that your YouTube guy didn't follow the SOPs, you know, but you can talk about it once you've figured out and come back and share that.

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And that would be so relevant of what you learned so that they can learn it too.

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And that's, and the second thing I was going to say is it's so important to find community of other like-minded entrepreneurs and talk about these things in private spaces.

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That's why masterminds exist.

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That's why group coaching programs exist.

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That's just why a network is so powerful.

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I was mentioning all those women I'm seeing tomorrow and having dinner with here in Miami.

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Those are all women that are playing this game too.

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And those are some of my favorite spaces because we all get to just be so honest and private.

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And it's healing.

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Yeah.

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When you look back at sort of the journey you went on with Simply Beat,

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Like I would say, I would ask the question, like, are you happy you went through all those experiences?

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Do you wish anything could have been done differently?

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Because an agency is a very difficult business.

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Dude.

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An agency like, like, okay, so I want to talk after this because when you build a personal brand and you build a large podcast, then you, your friends start asking like, can you do this for me?

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Yep.

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And I think that's how an agency starts to form.

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And I'm like very...

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I'm very careful not to, not to, cause I don't know if it's scalable.

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I I've worked with tons of agencies.

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Um, I mean, the margins seem like they're patient thin, like absolute shit.

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I see the people that work for them don't even like working for them because they're like all overworked and underpaid.

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So is this a business that you were happy building in retrospect?

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You just described my life for seven years.

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Although I did pay my people really well.

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I was above market for sure.

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Good.

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It's exactly what happened.

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I wanted to build my own personal brand.

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I had run a business before Simply Be.

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I ran a magazine.

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People knew me as this girl that could do marketing and branding really well.

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I started getting clients right away to pay the bills in consulting mode.

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And all I really ever wanted to do was build my own brand, but I was really good at building brand.

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And so clients just kept coming and I kept saying yes.

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And the truth is I loved my clients.

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I wouldn't work with anybody unless I loved them.

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I believed in them.

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I wanted them to be amplified in the world.

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I loved that I could be the person to help them do that.

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But it is a beast of a business model because the more clients you get, the more people you have to hire.

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And you're selling time.

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You're selling ideas.

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You're selling strategy.

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And we were brilliant at it.

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That's why I continued to grow.

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We were really great and our clients were happy.

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But there's a lot of attrition in the agency space.

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It attracts typically a very emo, creative type, which I'm here for.

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But I had a lot of Gen Z, millennial people who were just...

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putting it on their resume, you know, and I was building my dream.

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I was building my soul's vision and I wanted a family.

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And, you know, you're always on.

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It's a services-based businesses, regardless of what it is, are brutal.

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But to answer your question, Scott, I wouldn't take any of it back.

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It was a total accident that I created an agency and

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I became one of the top agencies in the country.

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I really grew my chops as a leader.

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I've created and trademarked a methodology that I put in my book that now almost 100,000 people have read.

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I feel like it was all divine.

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I'm, you know, pretty spiritual, as you know.

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And I am so grateful that it...

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It led me here because I learned some of the deepest, darkest lessons.

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This is where I found my light.

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And that's kind of what my new message is all for.

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And yeah, I don't regret it.

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When you speak about your new message and light, and this is like you're writing another book about this now.

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I don't really know much about what this book is actually about.

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So what prompted the thesis of light and the concept of light?

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And then it's really called light work.

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Yeah, the light work.

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So what does that mean?

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So it's a big question.

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Because I know you're spiritual, but I'm sure there's a very tangible entrepreneur component to it as well.

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There is.

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So what does this mean?

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So...

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I started writing this book when I was coming out of the depths of my burnout.

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So simply be, yeah, oh yeah.

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After we spoke about our podcast.

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That was like October of 22.

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I know the date.

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This was October of 22.

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A couple weeks after I met you, I went to Egypt on a spiritual pilgrimage.

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That was completely predestined.

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I could not have planned that trip more effectively or perfectly.

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And I had a full-on...

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death in Egypt.

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Like I had a total ego death in that country.

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I had a massive experience in one of the temples.

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I write about all of this in my book.

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And my system activated.

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And I was really able to understand the truth of my human experience.

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especially in those last few years, building a business as a high-performing female entrepreneur that was highly addicted to success, that was very much measuring her value based on how much money she was making, how much accolade she was receiving.

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The world was reflecting back to me that I was winning, but I was miserable inside.

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Toward the end of 2022, I wanted to burn it all down.

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Speaking of your question of what was running the agency like, it was the hardest thing.

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And so I've always been spiritual.

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I've always really felt more like a spiritual being, having a human experience, more so than even an entrepreneur.

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It's sort of been...

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I've been pretty open online about my spiritual practice, but it hasn't really been out loud.

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This is really me coming out of the closet in the spiritual world, in the community, saying, I'm a teacher of this.

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To be a lightworker today, which is what my book stands for, it's called The Lightwork, Reclaim Your Feminine Power.

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It's a book for women, but men can get a lot out of it too.

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Live your cosmic truth, not your truth, but your cosmic truth.

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And when you do those two things, you can't but help illuminate the world.

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And that's the illuminate the world is the end of the subject line.

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And I think that we're really in a very dark and heavy time on our planet.

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Just turn on the news.

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And it is so important for us to show up in our full life.

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our magnificence, our full power, our full confidence, our full sovereignty, our full conviction in who we are.

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And how we find that light is through the dark.

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And to accept these dark challenges, whether they're personal or professional, we as women and people have them all, is where we find our brightest light.

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Thanks for tuning in.

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If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

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And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode.

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See you in the next one.