I almost let the business cost me my marriage

A note to the high-achieving woman who is still chasing something she may already have

I’m writing this from a plane. I’m on my way to the south of France to mastermind with my advisor and a few other founders.

The thing I love most about these rooms has nothing to do with strategy. It’s sitting across from another person who runs a business and being understood without a long explanation. I run a business that lives mostly online, and most days I love that. Some days it’s quiet in a way that gets to you. Face to face is the antidote.

I’m grateful that Duane steps in when I travel. He always does. Part of why I go at all is for Elise and Mia. I want them to watch their mother build something real and still be there for the moments that matter.

The night before I left, I had a call with one of my business besties that ended with me in tears.

I hadn’t called for that. I called to check my thinking on a change of direction for the business. She talked me through it. That part was fine. It was what came after that that undid me.

She told me I don’t need to do anything else. That I already do a ton. She knows me well enough to know what I do with a mastermind retreat like this. I leave activated. I come home with a list. I’m an implementer, so I get to work. She was telling me to stop before I’d even started.

Then she said the thing she had no way of knowing. She was tired of watching me work this hard and not get the results I keep chasing. That was the exact word I’d been carrying and hadn’t said out loud. Exhausted.

She asked me what I’m actually after.

I told her I wanted to contribute to my household. That I needed something of my own. And then I stopped, because I heard it. I do contribute. I’m raising two daughters I’m proud of. I am already the thing I was describing as missing.

She called me a hyper-achieving woman. I was offended. Then she kept going, and the offense turned into something harder to dismiss.

She said I don’t trust myself with myself. I hire people and don’t let go, because somewhere I don’t believe the work will be done right unless I touch it. So it comes back to me, which proves the story, which makes me hold tighter. I bring in coaches and switch strategies before the last one has had time to work. I make decisions I’m certain will move the business forward, and most of them just create more work. I have spent years in motion and called it progress.

Then she said the harder one. I don’t trust my husband to support me. Not in the small ways. In the real one. I have carried a belief since the day I married him that I need to produce more in order to provide more. No one has ever said that to me. Not Duane. Not once. I woke up with it one day and let it drive almost every decision I’ve made since.

I know where it comes from. I was raised by a single mother who worked several jobs to keep us. I watched provision look like exhaustion. I think I decided, when I was young, that this is what taking care of the people you love costs.

Here is what made it land. I have none of this hesitation with my clients. I trust myself completely to get them where they want to go. I have watched it play out across dozens of businesses, and I can usually see the path before they can. The doubt only shows up when the business is mine and the life is mine.

I have been in business for fifteen years. Married for ten. When I look at the people I started alongside, about half of them have lost something real. A marriage. Their health. The business itself.

I decided early that I would not be one of them. I was not going to put the business before my marriage. I held that line, mostly. I won’t pretend it was clean. There were nights I told myself a few more hours would fix it, and that everything would be fine.

What I see now is that the hours were never the real threat. Plenty of women work hard and stay married. The threat was the story underneath the hours. The quiet belief that I had to keep producing to earn my place in my own home. That belief doesn’t announce itself. It just keeps you at the desk and away from the table, chasing a finish line that moves every time you get close.

That is what I think ends things. Not the work. The reason for the work.

I have spent the past seven years making my life harder than it needed to be. I have been chasing an end result while standing in the middle of everything I left corporate to build. I live a life I could not have imagined in 2011, the year I walked away from my job with no proof this would work. My children are experiencing more at their age than I did at mine. By most measures, I was already there.

If you are a high-achieving woman, I’d ask you to do the thing I resisted. Take an honest inventory. Not of what’s left to build. Of what you already have and keep overlooking because you’re still pushing for more. Notice where you don’t trust yourself. Notice where you don’t trust the people who would carry it with you if you let them.

Sometimes the wall you keep hitting is one you built. And you can take it down the same way.