In her first solo episode in nearly a year, Kristen Boss returns to the mic to share why she stepped away from her podcast, the healing journey that followed, and what led her to rebuild — not just a brand, but a new, more authentic way of showing up in business and life.
Kristen reflects on the hidden burnout that came not from overworking, but from being out of alignment with her message and identity. She vulnerably shares how scaling a personal brand accidentally led to commoditizing herself – and how that impacted her sense of self-worth, joy, and purpose.
“Entrepreneurship isn’t the problem. It’s who we are being in the process that matters most.” – Kristen Boss
This episode is raw, honest, and the beginning of a new chapter. Whether you’re in a winning season or a wilderness one, Kristen invites you to reflect, reset, and reconsider what success really means.
She covers:
- Why success without alignment leads to burnout
- The hidden cost of building a personal brand without boundaries
- What it means to pivot with integrity and without a plan
- Why healing must precede building
- Recovering from hustle… again
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Transcript for episode 229 “I’m Back”
(00:20):
You are listening to the Kristen Boss Podcast. I’m your host, Kristen Boss. As a bestselling author and performance coach, I’m on a mission to share about sustainable and purposeful approaches to both business and life. Each week I bring relevant topics that I believe are necessary to create a life of purpose, significance and meaning. Entrepreneurship is about so much more than growing your bottom line. It’s about who you are becoming in the process and building a life that is truly extraordinary. Entrepreneurship is really just the beginning. Hello and welcome back to the show. I’m not sure if I’m saying welcome back to my listener or welcome back to me. I feel like it’s a big day being back at the mic at my podcast. Back to the Chris and Boss podcast. This feels very well. Let’s just say I’m surprised by it. When I decided to take a break from my podcast, I think the last episode I was talking about a pivot.
(01:21):
I knew I was doing a pivot. I didn’t have a clear idea of what that was going to be yet, but I said, I’ll be back maybe in April, and I didn’t come back. And I think I had this story of like, okay, that’s it. Closing a chapter. The Kristen Boss podcast was a chapter that I’m closing and I went on, for lack of a better term, I went on a healing journey. And it has been not quite a year since I made that decision. I think it was last December when I published my last podcast. And I thought it was a good run. It was great. And I think at the time I thought, oh, there’s nothing left for me to say. And maybe that was true at the time, and I knew it was time for me to go and do my own work for a bit.
(02:12):
And so lemme just tell you a little bit about what that was like. I did so much paint by number. I should actually post on my social media how many paint by numbers I did, but I probably did probably, I don’t know, 15 paint by numbers. I even was like, maybe we’re going to buy property or land and I’m just going to raise chickens and do paint by number. And that was really what I thought was ahead of me. And it’s funny how we have our plans and then when we heal, we reflect and we sit down and we do the work. Sometimes our healing journey lands us in a place we didn’t expect. And for me, it was right back here. When I decided to step away, I really thought I was closing my brand, closing a bunch of things, closing a chapter, and it was a beautiful time for me to heal and get clear on some priorities.
(03:03):
But I found the itch to build and create, come upon me sooner than I anticipated. And also, you’re going to have to give me a little bit of grace here as this is my first time back at the mic by myself solo in more than nine months. So I feel a little out of practice. So if my A DHD takes us on a few rabbit trails together, thank you for coming on this journey with me. But here’s my goal of this episode is just to share with you a little bit about why I’m back, what you can expect, and what I’m going to be inviting you into. And so when I took a step away, mostly it was just to gain perspective, gain clarity. I’d been speaking about the same thing for a very long time, and I knew that I wasn’t done serving people.
(03:45):
I just didn’t know what capacity that looked like. I also knew I needed some perspective and some time away. And so again, I really thought, okay, maybe we’ll go do something else. I thought I was tired of the online space and in that I found the itch to want to build and create something. And I’m going to share with you a little bit about that journey. The new thing I’ve built, not to sell it to you, but to invite you into the story and the journey of what it’s like to build something again, when you maybe have the experience of building and you’re back in the build. And for me, it’s a startup. And the lessons that I have been learning have been, gosh, they say you learn from your winning season, but learning in a challenging season, you just rack up the lessons that much faster.
(04:34):
I’m going to tell you the story as it’s going to unfold over the next couple of episodes. This isn’t a story I can really tell in one because it has been kind of unfolding chapter by chapter. And so I knew I was going to build something and in my healing, the next build was inspired from my healing journey of like, okay, I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve served hundreds of thousands of people. What now? What am I called to do? What am I meant to do? Who am I meant to speak to? This is the lane I’ve been in for a really long time. And so I knew it was time to just step away and get some clarity. And I did. And in my own healing journey, I decided I’m going to create this thing. I may share with you a little bit about the journey of arriving to that thing.
(05:16):
When I built it, I knew, okay, this is what I want for people. And one of the lessons I learned in my last business is, gosh, this is my first time sharing it in the mic. I’ve been writing this content, but I haven’t actually vocally shared any of these thoughts and feelings really at all. So it feels actually quite vulnerable. But one of the things I noticed and that I did with my last business is that I had inadvertently or unintentionally commoditized myself as a product. And you might be like, what do you mean by that? Well, if you’re an entrepreneur, oftentimes when you start out, unless you know from the very beginning that you want to build a company and that you want to go corporate, and then it’s something you want to, most people start by building a personal brand. They start by telling their story and inviting people into that story and being like, Hey, if you relate to my story, then I can help you.
(06:07):
And that is really how my business started. It was like, Hey, this is my story. This is how I can help you. Come on in. And then more and more people were like, yes, I would like your help. And then it started with me having a one-on-one coaching and consulting business, and then I had a six month wait list. And then I was like, well, I can’t help if it’s just me, I can only serve 20 people. But if I can take all of my knowledge and how I’m coaching just a small group of people, then maybe I can develop a program that can help thousands of people. And that is what I did. And that’s the concept of scaling. When you are looking at, okay, how can I fulfill or serve more people with less of me? But the thing was is I was scaling the wrong thing.
(06:52):
And it took me years to realize this. Actually, they say a lot is hindsight 20/20. And that was true for me. I had built a lot of brand, a lot of brand trust, and I’m very thankful. I was able to speak on a lot of stages and offer a lot of trainings, and I wouldn’t trade that for the world. But what I had unintentionally done was I had scaled my personality and essentially people wanting to work with me, not necessarily having access to a process or a system or knowledge. And I find this is true for a lot of solopreneurs and entrepreneurs when they’re starting out is like people do join you because they relate to your story. They like you, they trust you. You build a personality brand. And the majority of the market I served, that is how most people sell. It’s like, Hey, you got to, people resonate with you and then they buy from you.
(07:42):
And so I had done that. But here’s the thing is I had accidentally kind of put myself in a position where the thing that people wanted to buy was access or proximity to me. And that became less and less sustainable. Especially what was interesting is I was starting to evolve my philosophy and my thoughts were starting to evolve. And I was like, how my audience is still in this place, in this business? How do I serve them if I’m evolving, if I’m changing? And if your business is built on your personality and people who have bought into certain things about you, you feel like you’re not allowed to change. You feel like I can’t change because if I do change, then no one’s going to want this anymore. And so that was something I really had to work through. And I knew I was evolving.
(08:32):
I knew the things I wanted to speak to people on was starting to evolve. I knew the idea of coaching people on finding their target market and their niche and their marketing and selling and acquiring customers and what’s going on in the social media space and what does AI have to do with this? Yes, I could sit here and coach people on those business strategies, but it started to feel less and less and less fulfilling for me being like, well, what about the whole person? How are we serving? How are we serving that? And I also was just realizing I was feeling called to serve in a different way. And so all that to say is realizing when I scaled this business and I had accidentally commoditized myself, turned myself into the product, what I had inadvertently done was also dehumanized myself in the sense of I am the thing that people buy.
(09:26):
Therefore I have to make myself as palatable as possible so that people will continue to buy from me. And I didn’t even know I was telling myself that story, thinking that this was happening at a very subconscious level, and I started to feel less and less fulfilled in my work. I started to feel more exhausted, more drained, and I couldn’t put a finger on why. And here’s the thing is most people, when we think of burnout, we think of the number of hours worked. And so if you were to look at my calendar, even when I looked at my calendar, I looked at the number of days or hours worked. I was averaging maybe 15, 20 hours a week at most, unless we were in a launch. And then those times I might do 40 hours. But as far as my actual workload, it wasn’t that much.
(10:07):
I wasn’t working that much, but I was so exhausted and I didn’t understand it. I was like, how can I be burnt out? I’m not even working that much. Well, I think there’s different levels of burnout. And it took me a while to realize that my burnout was actually an alignment issue. I no longer felt aligned with essentially the box I had put myself in with the messaging. I wanted to convey who I wanted to serve. I started to feel like I was drowning. And it’s not because I didn’t care for my market anymore or didn’t care. I was coaching social sellers. And so it’s not like I suddenly was like, I don’t believe in this market, had actually nothing to do with that. It was just like, I don’t think this is the message that lights me up anymore. I don’t think this is what I’m meant to be doing or talking about.
(10:55):
And I knew when I decided to step away, some people were going to have some very strong thoughts about that, and that was something I had to make peace with. But here’s the thing. I don’t want to learn from somebody who no longer is lit up by the thing they are teaching. I want to learn from somebody who is so passionate where they wake up every day and they’re like, this is what I want to learn. This is what lights me up. And when we’re serving from that place, it becomes aligned for both the people we serve and for ourselves. And so I realized, Ooh, I think I’m out of alignment. And someone had asked me the other day, they’re like, how was that pivot for you? And I was really ugly. There was nothing noble internally, nothing noble or beautiful about the pivot. It was like knock ’em out, drag ’em out, cry lots of therapy.
(11:44):
It had to be pride from my white knuckled grip. I was just so afraid to let go of this chapter that was a part of my life for so long, and I didn’t have a clear next. I just knew this no longer feels aligned, and for me to stay here would actually be a disservice to myself and those I’m serving. So yeah, that kind of sent me on this journey. And here’s the thing. A lot of times I find when we pivot, we look at our past experiences, specifically the pain of our past experiences, and we make quiet agreements with ourselves so that we never experience that pain again. I’ll give you an example. So for me, because I had inadvertently scaled a personality or commoditized myself as the product, I made this agreement with myself and I made this assumption that whatever I build next cannot have my face on it.
(12:43):
I can’t be a part of it. I’m going to build this faceless brand. I’m going to build this company. And it’s not, I became so anti personal brand guys. It took me what now six, nine months to come to this realization. I became so anti personal brand that I thought I’m going to have to build this faceless brand to go full corporate. And I didn’t realize I swung the pendulum so far the other direction because I was so afraid of repeating past pain that I had made this agreement. So there’s no personal brand, there’s nothing I even thought I can never be on a stage again. And we’re going to unpack that too, but I just thought, this is how it has to be now. And inadvertently, I had kind of chained myself or boxed myself into another painful reality where I had no other options.
(13:32):
And so here I was trying to build this new thing without my face, without my brand, without anything. And what was happening with the new thing is it lacked soul. It lacked the story. It lacked the “why.” And part of that is because I was holding my why close. And I’ll tell you, I’ve been holding my why close, and it was just last week I realized that I’ve been hiding, and it takes a lot for me to say that, but it’s true. I realized, I was like, oh, I’ve been hiding because I’m so afraid of repeating my past. I figured the best thing to do would be throw it all out, never have a personal brand again. And so I realized I kind of went into hiding. And in that I was holding my “why” close. And so over the next couple episodes, I’m going to be sharing with you the thing I’ve been keeping close to my chest for the last year.
(14:22):
I will tell you, it has been the hardest and best year of my life. It’s not best in a sexy way at all. It’s not “the best” in a, Hey, I left this thing and I went off to go make millions doing the other thing. It’s like, Hey, I left this thing and had to pull apart all these layers of myself to understand this next chapter of my life. And I’ve had to do the hard work of healing and all these painful lessons, but I can say, oh, but I really like who I’m becoming in the process of this chapter. And so maybe as you’re listening, maybe you’re in your own pivot, maybe you are in the in-between season and I am right now, I’m like, I’ve got nothing sexy to tell you. I’ve just got the good real life, real gritty stuff to tell you that maybe you’ll be able to relate with and be like, oh yeah, because maybe there was a time that in my, for lack of a better term, in my winning season, I became aspirational instead of relational and relatable, meaning like, wow, I want to get to where Kristen is, but no longer could somebody maybe resonate with me.
(15:32):
So over the next few episodes, you might actually be able to resonate with the things I’m going to be inviting you into. And so it’s this very careful dance I’m having to do right now. And one of the things I knew is with how hard this year has been, there was, I’m going to call it the Implosion the Event. And it happened over a year ago, and I knew one day when it was time I would tell the story, but one thing I wanted to be very careful of, intentional of is that I wanted to tell the story from the right place. And this is going to sound very crass, but I don’t know how else to convey this. But I didn’t want to prostitute my story. I didn’t want to take my story and dishonor it by thinking, cool, how can I monetize this or create a false sense of vulnerability?
(16:24):
And so I was going to hold the story until it felt like the right time to tell the story and a time to tell it when there was enough history behind me, enough healing behind me that my family and those that were a part of that story, they felt comfortable with me telling the story and me being strong enough to step into the story. And so I knew it was time to tell the story when it felt like a surrender instead of a desperate attempt to get people to relate or something like, Ooh, this will really bring some shock and awe. I knew it was time when it felt like a surrender of letting go of the thing that I was holding so close because I was afraid. And that is what I did. I even noticed I was getting more and more quiet on social media, and I realized it was because I wasn’t telling the whole story.
(17:17):
I wasn’t telling the whole truth, and maybe I wasn’t ready for it. And now it has just been the last couple of weeks. I sat down and met with some mentors and advisors and good friends of mine, and they were looking at this, our new build, and they’re like, Kristen, this is so great. It’s what the world needs, but what it’s lacking is, and these are people that know, that know about my, for lack of a better term, implosion. And they’re like, where’s your story? It’s not anywhere you’re leading with your success and your credibility, but that’s not what’s going to make people lean in, tell the real story. And they knew what they were saying was like, Kristen, invite them into the human moment. Invite them into not just the highest mountaintop of success, but you have to talk about rock bottom if you’re ready.
(18:10):
Because from rock bottom came, the new direction came, the message came the pivot. It sounds horribly cliche to say, from the mess comes your message, I will say there is an in-between part between the mess and the message. It’s like from the mess, you heal and you keep healing and you sit with it and you do your work around it. And then when the time is right, it does become your message. But only when the timing is right, when it is of service to others and not service to self. And so to be honest, I think I’ve just been having some questions of how do I do this? How do I do this? Well? And so what I’m going to be sharing with you over the next few episodes is I’m going to invite you into the story of the implosion that led to the pivot, some of my own downfalls that I was shocked to find myself in because one of the things I learned in the last year is you can never think you are above anything.
(19:12):
And there were certain things I thought “that will never happen to me.” I would never do that. I will have all these things in place—that happens to them, but never to me. We’ve watched people do things. We watch people fall apart, we watch their life blow up, and we’re like, we have, I am guilty of this. We make judgements on them, and we think, how could they? I never, until I found myself in the place where I said I never would be, and I’m not proud in any way saying that, but I’m like, you know what? If I have to tell the cautionary tale I will. If I’m going to tell the truth, I will. And I think I had to work through some of this. Hey, I wrote this book, pivot to Purpose, leaving the Toxic Hustles culture behind. And I had to make peace with and acknowledge, even though I wrote the book on anti hustles, I still broke from the hustle.
(20:09):
Again, it was just at a deeper level in a layer that I didn’t understand. When I wrote the book five years ago, I had that version of me, her current understanding of hustle. And then there is this version of me that has a completely different, much more layered, much richer, much more complex understanding of hustle and also realizing that I am always going to be, this is always going to be my work. Not running too hustle, not hiding in my work, not using my work to medicate. That’s going to be my work probably for the rest of my life. And so I’m not a poster child of the cure for hustle. And I think maybe, I don’t know, maybe I had positioned myself in that way, but it is not true. I’m like, if anything, maybe I’m the poster child for the constant work of returning to ourselves and recovering, what does it look like to be a recovering hustler?
(21:10):
What does that look like? Because the work is never done. I think I thought, “I’m not hustling. I figured this out,” and yet I still found myself there. And so I think there’s a little bit of how do I tell the story of how I wrote the book and still fell into the trap that I wrote a book about? And I think it was because it was sneaky, it was subtle, it was cunning. And I’m like, okay, I’m ready to talk about that. So here’s what I’m going to invite you into. I’m going to invite you into the story. It’s going to be a ride. I’m going to share a little bit about the different chapters of it and the lesson from each chapter in that kind of like what led up to it, all the warning signs that I ignored, the actual implosion, the healing, the pivot.
(22:02):
And now I’ll kind of be walking you through that. I would ask for your grace as you’re listening, because I’m not perfect. And sometimes we put people on pedestals thinking that they’re different from us, that they could never, would never. I am just as fallible as the next person. But the whole purpose of sharing the story is to invite people into the honest truth, the healing, the traps I fell into specifically around entrepreneurship, around identity, around business, around all of those things. And moving forward, if you’re like, well, what’s the podcast going to offer now? We’re still actually, sorry, you can’t take the girl out of entrepreneurship. We’re still going to talk about entrepreneurship. We’re still going to talk about how to lead well and how to serve, and the mindset behind those things, the things that you enjoyed maybe in our earlier episode, how to be efficient, how to protect your time.
(22:56):
But the thing I care most about is how do we protect our peace while pursuing our purpose, while going after our big dreams and our big goals? Because going after the big dream and the big goal wasn’t the problem. It was in some ways it was some of the lies I bought in my journey there. And I kind of liken my story to I feel like parts of Wizard of Oz where I felt like entrepreneurship was the Emerald City. I’m going to get there. I’m going to arrive, and everything’s going to be perfect. It’s going to solve all of my problems. I think when I first set off on the yellow brick road of entrepreneurship, I saw at the Emerald City, if you were to put a price tag on the Emerald City, I would’ve said making a million dollars. Once I make a million, all of my problems are going to go away.
(23:44):
And interesting is that was not the case. And I just had a different set of problems with different layers of complexity. And I was surprised. I was surprised that things were still hard. I was surprised that I still felt a lot of pressure. I thought pressure only happened at certain income levels, and it’s just a different kind of pressure. And so there was some things where I finally got to quote the Emerald City, the thing that people are like financial freedom, time freedom, if you could look it up in the book, I had all of those things, time freedom, financial freedom, I had options. I had choices. I had scaled the business I had, I had all the things I feel like they put on a billboard for this is why you should be an entrepreneur. And I had reached the “destination,” and there I am in, the Emerald City, and I meet the wizard, the one who promised me all these things. And I finally, and I look behind the curtain to see, wow, this is nothing of what it promised me.
(24:45):
Now are all those things still great? Yes, but it’s incomplete. And I thought it would be a complete picture. And so I got lost in believing and thinking, okay, maybe it’s just making another million and maybe another million. Okay, maybe it needs to be this or this and this. And it just turns out there is nothing in our external world, a paycheck, your house, whatever. Nothing that we can do externally can solve an internal problem. And that was when I think it was that realization that came hindsight. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about that. And do I still think entrepreneurship is an amazing and worthy and awesome journey and worth it? Yes. 1000000%. Are you like, if someone was to ask me, would you do it over, would you still choose to be an entrepreneur? Yeah. In fact, yes, I did.
(25:42):
I saw all the things that were hard, and instead of going off and buying land and living off of that for however long or completely we had choices, we could have done whatever we wanted. And yet, I was still called back to entrepreneurship. It’s just about doing it differently. And so I’m like, entrepreneurship isn’t the problem. It’s who we are being. It’s who we are in the process. It’s who we are becoming. It’s how we are handling adversity. It’s how we’re handling pressure and difficulty and market volatility and changes, rapid changes that happen in how many micro pivots we have to make in a given moment in order to actually achieve our goals. So all that to say is I’m inviting you into the story, and I hope you’ll be along for the ride, and I hope it serves you in a different way, because if you’ve been listening since episode one, my goodness, I think if I was to go back and listen to episode one, I don’t think I’d recognize that person.
(26:37):
But you get to be invited into this next chapter, this messy, gritty, raw chapter where it’s not, I’m not going to sit here and wave a flag and be like, Hey, it’s a winning season. No, it’s a learning season and it is gritty. It is hard. I’ve been crying a lot, which I think is good. Even my therapist is like, you’re feeling, I’m like, how do I unsubscribe from this part? This is not fun. But I can say, I like who I am in the process. I like this version that I’m getting to meet and get to know in this learning phase. So maybe you’re there, or maybe you’re in a winning season, and if I could give you the markers or the warning signs that I ran by at a million miles an hour when I was in my winning season, friends, there were several warning signs I ignored that I marked as normal.
(27:28):
This is just what comes with entrepreneurship. This is just part of the success tax that everybody has to pay. I didn’t realize it wasn’t normal. And so maybe if you’re in the winning season, maybe I’m going to give you the warning signs so that you don’t experience what I did, the hard, hard lessons I had. I still feel very thankful that my life is still beautiful and my family and I, we are good. And I feel like that’s God’s grace if I’m going to be really honest. But if I could save you the pain I’m going to. So whatever season you’re in, you’re invited into this. You’re invited into this new season, and my goal is every week you have something to take away from it to apply either into your everyday life or into the season of entrepreneurship or business that you find yourself in. So stay tuned. I’ll be telling you the story, and we’ll see you next week. That’s a wrap for today’s episode. Listen, if you love what you heard here today, I would love for you to leave a real quick rating and a review. This helps the show get discovered by new people. Be sure to take a screenshot of today’s episode and shout us out on Instagram. We’ll shout you right back out. If you’d like to find additional resources or discover how to work with me, head to www.kristenboss.com.
