The Ascent

part two in a three part series

Start with Part 1 if you missed it.

Something showed up for me in that warehouse release that a previous version of myself could not have believed was possible.

The decision was clean and effortless. When I knew, I knew, and it stayed.

The move itself was almost effortless. There was a rhythm that took over, like a river finding its own current. I did have to let someone go and that was probobly the hardest part. I hated loosing a great team member, and I'm forever grateful that she stayed with us until the end.

My brick and mortar team never had to step foot in the warehouse. Neither did my mom/partner. They were able to stay focused on the final month of the Year and holiday season in the retail space, while I work with my dad and warehouse team member to transition out. Because I focused so intently on developing airtight operating systems for managin our inventory and transfers from the warehouse to the shop, the move out flowed seamlessly and (almost) effortlessly.

Over that whole transition time, I often check in with my failure programming, and each time I did I was felt completely fulfilled with this ending. I was proud and grateful that I had scaled to something like that for us. A true test of capacity, and the only reason we weren't meant to hold it was because the cycle ending was calling for something new to be born.

With that space in my mind and body freed up, I was ready for my second iteration of Intentional Retail... Or so I thought.

Enter the March 2025 eclipse and Mercury retrograde window. I was planning, preparing, and even launched Intentional Retail 2.0. Then I shut it down almost as soon as it went up. You can read about that here.

One of the pillars of that course is core values.

My number one value is integrity.

And I could feel I wasn't operating from that place.

The gripping and control patterns from my perfectionist arc came in hot. I was anxious, overcommitted. The course had grown from six weeks to ten, with deliverables and bells and whistles I couldn't hold without performance anxiety bleeding through everything. Somewhere in the contraction, I had begun to declare that I wanted more flow and freedom. And the course I built still had frictions and triggers I was ready to be rid of.

And the noise on social media breaking me at that point.

Just after I called off the launch, I went off social media for six weeks. To get quiet. Still enough to connect to what this work was actually going to look like.

What I didn't share then was a really big root living underneath.

It wasn't failure. But there was an imposter feeling I couldn't shake. How could I show up and offer this method if I couldn't hold the scale myself?

Six weeks off social media. Two weeks in Europe with my family, and a really quiet, soft, and intentional summer brought me closer to feeling ready to breathe life back into the mentoring projects I could feel wanted to come through.

Even though things felt evened more out, a quiet discomfort kept surfacing.

It would come out in small bursts to my mother. "I don't know if I want to do this anymore." We'd talk it through and I'd land back on how much I love the shop, and what we've built together. We were doing it differently. Less team, less inventory, less weight. But something was still unresolved.

Then in the final week of October, one of my team members quit with one week's notice.

I think my body felt it in the field before my mind received it. The morning she delivered the news, I had another moment on the phone with my mom. I even came into work with residual tears and when she told me she'd be leaving, I received it in vomplete calm. No panic. The understanding landed instantaneously. I knew it was part of the bigger plan.

It was going to take some grit to get through the season without her but We just accepted it and rode the wave. I even worked sick through all of Black Friday weekend, knowing it was just a season and clarity was coming. There was a threshold in the discomfort.

As things quieted in mid-December, I sat with my mother and said what had been forming for months.

"When I say I don't know if I want to do this anymore, what I'm really saying is I don't want to do it like this anymore."

"I won't be building or scaling this in a way that costs me myself. I have something else I want to build. This is your baby and I am so grateful I got to grow it with you. I will continue to nurture it with you until your retirement, as long as it never feels like this again."

She understood. She told me in that moment that she knows and has always known that there is something else I am meant to create and offer. She felt it's through writing and speaking and those moments she finds herself in awe of my wisdom.

It's still landing for her. But we both know that if that team member hadn't quit, we wouldn't have reached that conversation. Because the comfort of the support would have allowed us to bypass and continue our journey without the friction to change. Without knowing what our true nature wanted for both of us.

A lighter schedule. Two weeks off after the holiday to just rest. We now have a 4 day open schedule and I am commited to only two of them. As we head into the summer months we are embracing a 3 day schedule. This was what we all needed.

I told this story recently in a Buds and Business chat. A participant said she'd been feeling like she had to scale and grow, but after hearing my stoey she wasn't sure anymore.

I offered her two questions.

Why do you feel you have to? Is it coming from external expectation, or do you feel the expansion within you?

and

What makes you want to pull it back?

She wasn't sure on the first. We left it open. On the second, she said she loves the flexibility she cultivated after taking Intentional Retail. That was her answer, even if she hadn't named it yet.

My response to her was the same thing I'd finally said to myself.

No regrets. A completed cycle. Proof of capacity. I had it in me to scale, I showed up, my systems held through every season, and in the end my priorities shifted. Maybe she's feeling the call to stretch her edges and it's coming through scaling her business. Just because I am moving in a different direction does not mean that was the path for her.

The whole point of what I teach is trusting your own calls. Your own compass.

The deepest revelation burned right through the imposter syndrome and showed me that my methods align with whatever season I was moving through. I had to prove the concept one more time before the rebirth.

Not failure. A completion.

Read Part 3: The Rebirth

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