Here’s the truth most of us don’t know—because once we see it, we cannot unsee it:
Most of us are trying to build a business from an identity that was never truly ours.
We were raised to believe that success lives somewhere “out there”—in the next milestone, the next breakthrough, the next strategy someone else swears by. We became fluent in hustle because the generation before us, yes, Boomers I am looking at you, insisted it was the only path to prosperity. Work harder. Earn your worth. Prove you deserve a seat at the table. It was a script we inherited long before we ever questioned whether it belonged to us.
So we chased. And for a long time, chasing felt normal. Expected. Even admirable. And I am sitting right there at the intersection of Boomer and X and don’t identify with either.
But somewhere along the way, the chasing starts feeling hollow. Especially for those of us who began realizing that the future we were running toward was undefined… and worse, misaligned. We kept pushing toward a horizon we didn’t choose, hoping we’d feel “ready” or “safe” or “successful” once we got there.
When we make the money.
When we buy the house.
When, when, when.
What we never stopped to ask was:
What happens to this version of me that’s doing all this chasing? And is she the one who’s supposed to lead my next chapter? Will she even be able to sustain it?
My own wake-up call didn’t come slowly or gently. It arrived through a series of what looked like disasters from the outside but were really clearing cycles in disguise. Facebook erased years of content overnight—an entire identity wiped with one corporate keystroke. That was two years ago.
Then this year I lost my home and my office in the Palisades Fire. Trust me, I tried to do the thing that I always do, brush it off, turn this into a lesson, and show other people I can overcome anything. But, instead my programs began to feel heavy. My team shifted. Parts of my business that once felt certain suddenly didn’t fit anymore. At the same time, family dynamics were cracking open, old emotional narratives resurfaced, and I found myself letting go of offerings, relationships, and roles I had once clung to for stability. This was too big. This was literally my identity burning to the ground.
It was as if life said, “Everything non-essential must go so you can hear yourself again.”
At first, I resisted the unraveling. I tried to rebuild the old way—more strategy, more effort, more intensity. The Hustle Era Beate reached for her familiar tools. But every time I tried to force clarity, something deeper pushed back, as if my intuition was saying, You can’t build the next version of you with the tools meant for the last one.
And that’s when I started noticing what so many entrepreneurs are experiencing right now: identity drift. Not because we lack capability, but because we’re building from outdated selves. Because we’re following blueprints we didn’t design. Because we’re trying to succeed as the person we were conditioned to become instead of the person we’re becoming.
For a while, it felt like I was living in a void—no longer who I used to be, not yet who I was meant to become. My old strategist voice was dissolving, and something deeper, wiser, more spiritually attuned was emerging. What I didn’t realize was that this wasn’t a pivot. It was a metamorphosis. A transition from expert to sage, from strategist to spiritual strategist, from force to alignment.
Is this a blank slate?
And if it is, is that a good thing?
The truth hurts sometimes
And beneath all of it, there was a personal story I hadn’t fully acknowledged—the one that shaped the way I’ve hustled, achieved, and protected myself for decades. The little girl who never felt fully safe. The daughter whose father tucking her in was the last moment of comfort before being left with someone unpredictable, my abuser. The woman who still sleeps with her left shoulder covered, not out of preference, but because the body remembers the one moment it felt protected. A mechanism still in place some 50 years later. The armor that kept me safe.
As I gain clarity in the unfolding my chasing pattern makes more sense.
And it is impossible to keep building the same way.
Here is where we go wrong
Because here’s what most entrepreneurs get wrong: they think they’re stuck because they need a better strategy. Just the other day someone said, how will this help me to 10x….
People don’t fail because they aren’t good enough. They fail because they never learned what they were actually good at. They don’t know what the aligned version of themselves is capable of. They fail because they undervalue themselves. They fail because they rely on tactics instead of identity. They fail because they hide their humanness behind the facade of exterior perfection, the can-do-it-all. They fail because they build for who they used to be, not who they are becoming.
And the moment you understand your true talent—your real voice, your innate power, your creative intelligence—your entire business reorganizes around that clarity. You stop chasing. You stop mimicking. You stop shrinking. You stop building from fear or pressure. You start designing from alignment.
This is what it means to be the architect of your own growth. Not hustling your way into a future version of yourself, but allowing your next identity to lead. Not forcing strategy, but letting strategy emerge from who you are. Not trying to be everything to everyone, but becoming unmistakably, unapologetically, fully yourself.
That’s why so much of my work now is to show you how an undercurrent of spirituality drives a strategy with more power and energy that any human effort can.
So I’ll ask you the same question I had to ask myself:
If you strip away the trends, the templates, the hustle, the generational expectations, the pressure to prove, and the identity you’ve outgrown…
Who are you really?
And what is the value you bring that no one else can?
Your success isn’t waiting at the end of more effort.
It’s waiting at the beginning of your alignment.
Success isn’t something you find through chasing.
It’s something you meet when you finally show up as yourself.
Your next level isn’t built on strategy.
It’s built on identity.
And the moment you choose to stop running and start revealing, everything accelerates—not because you’re doing more, but because you’re finally being you.
I know because I was brought to my knees and I haven’t gotten up yet. The old must break away for the new to emerge. The law of polarity says so. The opposite must exist.
Let’s grow!
Beate
