I’m not a Fraud. I’m a Lifelong Learner.

35 minutes ago

6 min read

Not long after my first book came out, a reader told me she carried it with her everywhere she went.

It was the book she'd needed, she said. Not because it told her what to do, but because it helped her figure out what kind of entrepreneur she wanted to be.

I was so grateful.

And I was quietly coming apart.

When Things Stopped Making Sense

By 2017, things I'd been good at for years started to feel impossible. Networking drained me for days. Sales calls filled me with dread. Every proposal felt like proof I was doing something wrong.

My inner critic, the one I'd written a whole book about learning to discern, had never been louder.

On the outside, my business looked successful. On the inside, I felt like a foreigner in my own body.

I didn't know what was happening. I just knew I'd lost control of something I used to trust. And that confusion didn't last a season. It lasted years.

What I didn't understand then was that I was changing at a core level. I was no longer willing to make sacrifices I'd made my whole life in order to belong. On the outside, it didn't look like much. On the inside, a very young part of me felt like her world was ending.

Writing that book had been the first time I truly claimed my voice. I didn't realize that's what I was doing. And I didn't anticipate what it would cost.

Sometimes we only recognize courage in retrospect, because the costs arrive after the act.

What the Book Really Was

Rereading it now, I can see I was speaking from a place of knowing when there was so much I was still learning.

In the book, I explained the four stages of learning: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence and unconscious competence. To illustrate, I told the story of riding a bike with handlebar brakes for the first time, pedaling backward out of habit and slamming into a parked van.

I thought I was in conscious competence with so much of what I wrote about. I understood it. I could teach it. When it came to applying the practices while struggling with complex PTSD, I was in unconscious incompetence. I didn't know what I didn't know.

That's where the fraud feeling came from. Not from pretending. From the crash triggered by trauma.

I wrote, "Not taking things personally helps you detach your self-worth from both the disses and affirmations of others."

I believed it. I wasn't living it. Not even close.

Here's the irony. A core premise of the book was that the human side of business is what wears people down. I wrote that so many people had confided in me about "how surprised and burnt out they were by the emotional rollercoaster of being an entrepreneur" that I decided it was time to lift the veil.

Then I got tested on exactly that.

It wasn't the client work. Once I'm with a client, I'm in the zone. They chose me, and I trust what I bring. It was everything around it: the marketing, the networking, the selling. My identity was so tied up in my business that each of those acts felt like asking for acceptance. When I didn't get it, I was devastated.

My business was demanding far more of me than I was getting back. And I was exhausted.

The book wasn't just a record of who I was. It was the vision of who I was striving to become. That gap wasn't fraud. It was learning in action.

Learning What Home Feels Like

Coming home to myself didn't happen in one place or through one practice. It took therapy, breathwork, somatic coaching, journaling and a lot of support. Two things mattered most.

The first was finding spaces where I could say what was really going on inside me.

In 2017 I joined a year-long contemplative program. I deeply believe every person is inherently worthy of dignity and belonging. In that circle, for the first time, I said out loud that I didn't believe it about myself.

Everyone else, yes. Me, no.

I'd kept that hidden for so long, I'd hidden it from myself too. Revealing my pain in the safety of that group cracked my heart open.

The second was learning to listen to and trust my body.

I'd lived a very intellectual life, detached from my body. Fear ran the show, and my thinking brain tried to keep everything under control.

In 2019, I started using a HeartMath biofeedback trainer. I'd sit down, feel good and assume I was in high coherence. Then I'd look at the screen. I wasn't.

And when I actually was in high coherence, I didn't recognize it. What felt familiar was anxiety. Being on alert. Scanning for what might go wrong.

Peace and calm not only felt foreign, they scared me.

That's when I realized I'd been living with a baseline of anxiety I didn't even know was there.

Coming home wasn't a return to somewhere I'd been. I had to learn what safety felt like in my body. I had to train myself to find comfort in calm moments without the alarm bells ringing to create familiarity.

Two Voices of the Critic

Looking back at those years, I notice two ways my inner critic likes to tell the story.

One is to cringe. How could I write a book about discernment and then lose access to it? Why didn't I see what was happening?

The other is nostalgia. In 2016, I was the mother of a toddler. I was running my business, completing a demanding Conversational Intelligence certification, volunteering in the community, working out regularly, serving on multiple boards and writing a book. Part of me is in awe of her. Part of me wishes I could still do all that.

They sound like opposites. I've come to think they're the same voice.

In my work as a coach, I have found our inner critics have two ways of talking about our past: "How embarrassing" and "You used to be capable of so much more." Both measure one version of us against another and find someone lacking.

Neither tells the whole story.

The whole story is that 2016-me accomplished remarkable things. She was also pushing past every signal her body sent her, and that contributed to health challenges I live with today. She was brave, and she didn't know what her courage would cost.

She did the best she could with what she had.

I can hold all of that with care.

Maybe that's what wisdom is: being present to the shock of a reality that looks so different from the vision that propelled us forward, without being defined by it.

What's Different Now

I know these are scars now, not wounds, because of how I move through hard moments.

I can hear difficult feedback without feeling sucker-punched.

I can take a risk and put myself out there without questioning my worth.

I can experience rejection without spiraling into shame.

Most days, I feel at peace in my body instead of anxious, on edge and waiting for what's next.

That doesn't make those years easy to look back on. It means I can look back without letting one interpretation become the whole story.

Do You Accept the Challenge?

Here's a confession: until this anniversary, I hadn't reread my book in years. Preparing for this celebration is what finally sent me back.

I haven't gotten far. But I've been writing in the margins.

Some of it cracks me up. In the introduction, I wrote, "I want to encourage you to follow your curiosity and develop your skills without getting overwhelmed or feeling utterly lost." I want that too!

Some of it makes me cringe a little. I wrote with so much confidence, and I know now how much I still had to learn the hard way.

And some of it moves me. 2016-me was so bold and determined. She'd grown so much in her first five years of business. She just didn't know how much more growing she had to do.

What's changed is that I can notice the cringe without believing it. I can be curious about what she knew and tender toward what she didn't.

So I'm going to finish it.

I invite you to do the same with something from your own past. It doesn't have to be a book. It could be an old journal, photos, a business plan, a calendar from a year that changed you, or a memory that pops up on social media.

As you look, notice which voice shows up first. The one that cringes? The one that misses who you used to be? Neither is the whole story.

Notice where you feel it in your body. Meet it with curiosity instead of judgment.

Then see if you can soften toward yourself, even a little.

From that softer place, things that felt impossible often become manageable. Not because they've changed, but because you're no longer stuck in a threat reaction, fixated on what you're afraid of. You have the capacity to see the bigger picture: what's in your control, what isn't, and perspectives you couldn't see before.

What might you notice if you looked back at your past self with care? How might that change how you show up today?