🎙️ EPISODE 042: Build the Business, But Don’t Abandon the Soul
How Ambition Turns Into Disconnection
You came into business with fire in your bloodstream: clarity, hunger, conviction. You moved with a kind of certainty most people never taste. You made decisions fast, trusted your instincts, followed the pull of something bigger than logic. That fire carried you through seasons where most people would have collapsed.
But somewhere between the milestones and the metrics…something got lost. Not your ambition. Not your intelligence. Not your strategic mind.
What slipped was your center. It was the part of you that used to be deeply connected to your own truth. The part of you that didn’t second-guess herself. The part that didn’t negotiate her intuition to keep the peace or maintain momentum.
You built the business - but the woman building it? She became a shadow version of herself, performing competency instead of embodying her truth. She learned how to appear strong while feeling hollow. She learned how to deliver under pressure while starving emotionally. She learned how to execute flawlessly without ever asking, “Do I even want this anymore?”
Because here’s the truth high performers hate admitting, even to themselves: ambition mutates when it’s fueled by fear instead of desire.
At first, your ambition was clean, right?. It came from vision. It came from curiosity. It came from a knowing inside your bones that you were built for more.
But somewhere along the way, desire got replaced with fear.
Fear of falling behind. Fear of losing momentum. Fear of disappointing people who only love you for your output. Fear of slowing down long enough to feel what isn’t working. Fear of being honest about what success actually costs you.
And that’s where disconnection begins. It’s not in the workload, but in the why behind it.
You don’t burn out from doing too much. You burn out from doing what no longer aligns. You burn out from performing a version of yourself that your soul never consented to.
Because when your ambition starts running on fear, you stop expanding, and you start escaping. Escaping the discomfort of your own truth. Escaping the realization that you’ve outgrown the identity you built your success on. Escaping the feeling that something is missing, even when everything looks perfect on paper.
And the cost? Your inner world starts starving while your outer world keeps applauding.
People praise your resilience while you’re collapsing internally. They praise your consistency while you feel emotionally numb. They praise your results while you feel like a stranger inside your own life.
This is the fracture so many high-performing women carry in silence: the life that looks aligned on the outside doesn’t feel aligned on the inside.
And the more you achieve, the harder it becomes to admit that something is off…because everyone around you is benefiting from your disconnection.
This is how ambition, once your rocket fuel, becomes your cage.
So if you feel that pull in your chest as you're listening…that’s not weakness. That’s not overwhelm. That’s not “burnout.”That’s your soul trying to get your attention. And this is where the real recalibration begins.
Signs Your Soul Has Left the Business
Let’s rip the veil off the signs she tries to negotiate with. The ones she rationalizes, minimizes, or explains away because admitting the truth would require her to confront herself.
You hit a goal and feel…nothing. The dopamine is gone. The celebration feels forced. And somehow the achievement that once lit you up now lands like a flat line. You don’t feel proud - you feel empty. And you tell yourself you’re just tired…but the exhaustion isn’t physical. It’s existential.
You wake up to a calendar you built and resent every single piece of it. Every meeting, every deliverable, every task feels like a contract you signed under duress. You created this structure, but somewhere along the way, it became a prison. A self-constructed trap disguised as “commitment.”
Your nervous system feels wired, but your purpose feels numb. Your body is busy, but your soul is bored. You’re constantly in motion but rarely in meaning. You mistake the adrenaline of productivity for passion…but they’re not the same. One fuels you. The other depletes you.
You’re producing, performing, pushing…but you’re not in it. You show up. You deliver. You impress. But your presence is hollow. It’s the performance of a woman who knows exactly what to do - and has forgotten why she’s doing it.
You know how to execute. You’ve forgotten how to feel. Execution became your identity. Feeling became an inconvenience. And somewhere in that trade-off, you stopped being a human leading a business…and became a machine maintaining one.
This is the quiet fracture successful women don’t talk about. Not because they’re hiding, but because they don’t have language for what this feels like. The world celebrates their output, but has no idea their inner world is starving.
They keep scaling the strategy while abandoning the self. They keep building the empire while shrinking internally. They keep growing their business while decaying emotionally.
But here’s the truth you can’t sidestep: you can’t expect your business to feel alive if the woman running it feels dead on the inside.
When you disconnect from your own soul, everything you build becomes mechanical. The creativity dries up. The intuition goes quiet. The momentum feels manufactured instead of magnetic. And nothing - not money, not success, not recognition - can compensate for that loss.
This is where misalignment becomes identity erosion. Where you slowly become a stranger inside your own life. Where you start questioning whether you even like the woman the world thinks you are.
This is where soul exits the building. Not with a dramatic collapse…but with a quiet withdrawal - a slow fading of truth, joy, purpose, and authenticity.
And the most dangerous part? You can run a wildly successful business long after your soul has left the room.
But not without consequence.
This is the point where the whisper in your chest becomes impossible to ignore. Where the version of you who’s been silent starts breaking through. Where the truth demands a seat at the table again.
And this - this moment - is exactly where the recalibration begins.
Integrating Power, Pleasure, and Purpose
This isn’t about “balance.” High-performing women don’t need balance - they need integration.
Power without pleasure becomes pressure. Pleasure without power becomes avoidance. Purpose without either becomes martyrdom.
Integration is where you begin leading from:
- your body
- your intuition
- your inner truth
- your future identity
…instead of from strategy, fear, and survival.
This is where scaling starts to feel like creation instead of extraction.
This is where the soul comes back online.
And when she does? Your business stops being something you maintain…and becomes something that magnetizes.
Building Systems That Feel Like Alignment
Most women build systems that match their survival identity - not their future self.
They build for who they were…not for who they are becoming.
Aligned systems feel like:
- clarity instead of chaos
- efficiency instead of exhaustion
- simplicity instead of performance
- support instead of strain
- permission instead of pressure
An aligned system doesn’t just optimize performance - it protects your identity.
It ensures you never accidentally become the woman you worked so hard to outgrow.
This is where structure stops suffocating and starts liberating.
Staying Tethered to Soul While Scaling
Here’s the part you might not want to admit: scaling isn’t the threat. But losing yourself in the process is.
And you know it. I know you know it. You feel it in those moments when you’re moving fast but not consciously…when you’re taking action out of habit instead of truth…when you’re saying yes because it’s easier than confronting your own misalignment.
The woman you’re becoming - the one who commands wealth, impact, and clarity with presence - she’s not born from grind. You can’t chase your way into her. You can’t perform your way into her. You can’t outwork your identity.
She’s accessed through stillness. Through emotional command. Through inner authority. Through the vision that lives in your body, not your task list.
Staying tethered to your soul while you scale means you stop outsourcing truth. You stop asking for permission to follow what you already know. You stop shrinking your intuition to fit other people’s expectations. You stop bending your alignment just to keep the peace.
It means you stop negotiating with the voice inside you that has never once misled you. It means you stop trading your integrity for approval. It means you stop chasing validation and start leading from identity - not strategy, not fear, not performance.
Because this - this - is where scaling becomes sacred. Where execution stops coming from pressure and starts coming from presence. Where the business you’re building finally moves in the same frequency as the woman leading it.
Here’s your micro-shift for today: ask yourself: where am I building from obligation, and where does my soul actually want me to go?
And then - make one decision from truth instead of fear. One pivot. One boundary. One realignment.
That’s how you collapse timelines. That’s how you stop abandoning yourself. That’s how you scale with your soul intact.
If you want the full breakdown, all the takeaways, and the prompts from today’s episode, grab the show notes at:
https://rewiredtorisepodcast.com/episodes.
Thanks again for spending time with me today - it is always an honour to spend time with you. You’re listening to the Rewired to Rise Podcast and I’m your host, Tanya-Marie Dubé. We’ll see you on the next episode.