What a Former Internet Marketer and an Ayahuasca Journey Taught Me About the Gap Between Strategy and Truth
I had already done it once.
Built a business from nothing. Scaled it. Sold it to Bill Gates. Proved it was possible.
So when I started over I thought I knew how it worked. I thought success left fingerprints. That I could follow my own trail back to the same result. That everything I touched from that point forward would carry the momentum of what I had already built.
What I did not understand was that I had changed. My priorities had changed. My desires had changed. The entire business landscape had changed. And none of the tactics that existed when I built the first business existed anymore.
So I went looking for new ones.
Courses. Masterminds. Funnels. Coaches. Over $150,000 spent chasing the system that would make it click again. Each one promises a shortcut. Each one delivers another tactic. And what I did not understand then was that I was not looking for a system.
I was looking for a shortcut past the inner work I had been avoiding.
The Lie I Was Living
There came a moment where I realized something that stopped me cold.
I was telling people to do something I was not doing myself. I was a liar.
I was teaching strategy while ignoring spirituality. I was coaching founders on alignment while living in a gap so wide I could no longer pretend it wasn’t there. The person I was presenting to the world and the person I actually was had drifted so far apart that the distance had become its own kind of exhaustion. I hammered down on strategy. Until that didn’t work because let’s face it, who wants just strategies for all kinds of things? Looking back now I see what I didn’t see back then. The lack of humanity and connection. The clients I attracted were not builders but last ditch efforts. Others like me, looking for one more strategy that would fix it all.
FAIL.
I went on my first Ayahuasca journey. I heard the call and didn’t think about it any further. It was time. What I got was a message I could not unhear.
Close the gap.
Between who you say you are and how you actually live. Between the spirituality you believe in and the strategy you build from. Between the impact you claim to want and the shortcuts you keep taking to get there.
That message changed everything. It brought me to my knees. I had to look at my trauma, my childhood. Remember, accept, forgive. I changed the podcast. I changed the business. I changed my life.
And then one year after the first journey, four days after the second, everything burned to the ground.
The Palisades Fire took our home and my office. I was forced to start over. Again. From nothing. Again.
And somehow — through all of that — I still managed to get myself hospitalized with acute pancreatitis on January 7th exactly one year later to the day of the fire
The universe, it seems, has very little patience for people who say they got the message and then keep going anyway. I seem to not be winning this one!
The Machine That Couldn’t Sleep
This is why I invited Charles Gaudet onto The Business Growth Architect Show — Founders of the Future.
Because Charles was inside the internet marketing machine I had been throwing money at for years. He built it. Ran it. Optimized it. Open rates. Click rates. Conversion hacks. The next funnel. The next trend. Always chasing the algorithm.
And he couldn’t sleep at night.
He takes you through how things got quite bad. Explains how it is possible to be successful and hate your life. Until one day he was driving alone and his pain got so heavy he found himself hoping someone would hit him head on. Just to end it.
He made it home. Sat in the silence. And heard himself saying thank you. Over and over. Without knowing why. Without him knowing he was using gratitude as a tool. He explains it in the show.
That thank you sent him on a search that led him to Dr. John Demartini, to Marshall Thurber, to an understanding of gratitude not as a morning practice but as a law of polarity. When everything falls apart the discipline is not to deny the pain. It is to ask — where is the opportunity I cannot see yet?
That question became his entire business model.
The Gap Between Tactics and Truth
What Charles found in that silence is what I found in the jungle.
The tactics were never the answer. They were a distraction. The thing we reach for when we do not want to look at what is actually driving our decisions — the fear, the need to prove something, the belief that we are only as valuable as our last result.
I spent $150,000 learning that lesson. Charles spent years building a machine he couldn’t sleep inside of. We arrived at the same place from different directions.
The gap between spirituality and strategy is not a philosophical problem. It is a practical one. When what you believe and how you build are not aligned, the business feels like resistance. Every step forward costs more than it should. Every result feels fragile. Every tactic works until it doesn’t and then you are back at the beginning looking for the next one.
Close the gap and everything changes. And listen to this episode.
Not because the tactics stop mattering. But because you finally know what you are building toward and why. And from that clarity the right strategy becomes obvious. The right clients find you. The right opportunities present themselves. Not because the universe is magical — though I believe it is — but because you are finally moving in one direction instead of fighting yourself at every turn.
The Work That Precedes the Strategy
You cannot scale past your own ceiling. And your ceiling is almost always a belief — about what you deserve, about what is possible, about what kind of person builds the kind of business you want to build.
The inner work is not the soft work. It is the most strategic work you will ever do.
I learned that the hard way. Through the jungle and the fire and the hospital room. Charles learned it on the floor of his own rock bottom.
You do not have to wait for any of those things.
But you do have to be willing to look.
A Closing Reflection
The shortcut you are looking for probably exists.
There is always another tactic. Another funnel. Another course. Another system that promises to make it easier, faster, cheaper and better.
And some of them will work. For a while.
But if there is a gap between who you say you are and how you actually build — between the values you teach and the ones you live — no tactic will close it. The results will come and go. The ceiling will keep appearing. The exhaustion will keep building.
I know because I lived it. I am still living it. Still catching myself reaching for the shortcut when the real work is sitting right there waiting. And as I sit here, my surgery scars give me daily reminders.
The gap does not close itself.
But every time you choose truth over tactic — even once, even in a small way — it gets a little narrower.
That is the practice. And it starts again tomorrow.
And if you want to go deeper on this, Episode 215 with Charles Gaudet is worth your time. He rebuilt from the inside out. And he will show you exactly how.
Let’s grow,
Beate
