You don’t find yourself. You stop hiding.
We talk about “finding yourself” like it’s a treasure hunt — like the real you is buried somewhere, and if you just do enough inner work or take enough courses, you’ll finally dig her up.
I don’t think that’s how it works. I didn’t exactly set out to prove that this season, but looking back on Season 4, there it was, hiding in plain sight. Pretty much every single episode this season circled the same theme: It’s time to give yourself permission to stop hiding the real you.
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First you have to know who she is
You can’t stop hiding someone you haven’t met yet, which is why so much of the season started underneath the business, in the deeper work of actually knowing yourself.
When I brought my husband Tzvi on to talk about building a values-driven life and business, the whole conversation kept landing on the unglamorous part nobody sells you: you have to get painfully clear (yes, sometimes this process is painful!) on what you stand for before you can build anything honest on top of it. There’s no shortcut around that foundation. Everything you put on top of a self you haven’t examined is just a nicer-looking performance.
This is also the least comfortable part, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. When Dr. Megan Daley came on to talk about nervous system regulation, she named something I feel in my own body: this work of getting to know yourself and facing what you actually value is really damn hard on your system. It’s a lot to sit with. Part of why I do this alongside my clients is so nobody’s doing it alone, but you also need real tools for staying with the discomfort when things surface that you don’t love. Knowing yourself isn’t easy, but it’s the price of admission to everything after it.
Then you have to stop apologizing for her
Deep down, most of us have some idea of who we are — maybe even a pretty good idea of that. But somewhere along the way, we learned to tuck her away.
I told the story this season of the lunchtime shows I put on in middle school, where I was fully, gloriously the weird kid, until I learned the lesson we all get taught: that I was supposed to tone her down. Years later, when my business was sputtering along and dying a slow death, what turned things around was going back and getting that weird kid out of the corner I’d put her in, because she’s the thing that makes me me, and she’s exactly what draws the right people to me.
Liza Vou Goje came at the same idea from the outside in, through clothes and image and how we physically show up in a room. I work on this from the brand and content and website side; she works on it through what you wear and how you carry yourself. The reason that conversation became one of my favorites of the season is we were so obviously describing the same woman — the one waiting for an occasion, someday, to finally let herself be seen. Whether it’s your outfit or your homepage, shrinking yourself is never the path to success.
The thing you keep hiding from is usually your own patterns
Sometimes the hiding is subtler than tucking away a personality. Sometimes it’s refusing to look at how you actually operate. When Monika Kunz came on the podcast, we got into the patterns we drag with us — out of old jobs, and much further back, out of childhood — straight into the businesses we build. The way through these patterns is to name them honestly, so you can build in a way that’s actually aligned with who you are, instead of performing for someone else’s approval. You can’t stop hiding from a pattern you won’t admit is there.
Even the episode that looks least like an identity episode turned out to be one.
Last week I talked about pricing with my business coach, Peter Giordano III, which sounds purely tactical until you notice that so much of what you’re willing to charge comes straight from how you see yourself and whether you’re willing to step fully into who you are. I wanted to close the season on something concrete you could use immediately, and even the most concrete topic I could find — literally, what number goes on the invoice — ran right back to the same place. Your pricing is a confession of how visible you’re willing to be.ween “I worked so hard” and “it didn’t land.”
If you’re anything like me, you hate paying through the nose for the tools you need to run your business. That’s why I switched to NeetoCal. It’s a super affordable meeting scheduling tool, with all the bells and whistles of their big competitor (you know, the one that rhymes with “balendly”). Do yourself a favor and switch to NeetoCal!
Why being seen feels dangerous in the first place
A thread ran under a few of the travel stories this season too, the ones where, apparently, my husband and I cannot stop doing slightly dangerous things on vacation.
Underneath the adventures, they were all about the same idea: knowing when to say no, knowing when something doesn’t sit right with your values, knowing how to find your actual voice in the moment and use it. Every one of those is the same choice between the nice, expected version of how to handle a situation, or the real version that’s actually you (but maybe less “popular”).
I think that’s why hiding feels so much safer, and why permission is the thing we’re actually missing rather than information.
Being unmistakably yourself means some people won’t like it, won’t get it, will drift away. Staying blurry feels like it keeps everyone comfortable. But blurry attracts exactly no one. If there’s one thing that came up again and again this season, it’s that the visibility that scares you is the exact thing that lets the right people find you.
The one thing to carry out of Season 4
So if you take a single thing from this whole season, let it be this: you have full permission to be your true self. She was never missing, so there’s nothing to go find. There’s only the daily practice of letting her be seen.
Closing that gap between who you think you’re supposed to be and who you actually are is the most useful thing I know how to help a woman do, and I promise it changes everything downstream of it — your business, and pretty much every other part of your life too.
A little rest before Season 5
This was such a great season! We’re going to be taking a month or so off of the pod, so my team and I can catch our breath and come back with everything we’ve got planned for Season 5, which I already think is going to outdo this one.
Think of it the way I talked about my plants earlier this season: sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is let something breathe for a stretch so it comes back with new growth. Plus, the break is a good chance to catch up on any Season 4 episodes you missed!
Thank you for being here for all of it. This show is for you, and every time one of you tells me which episode landed, it helps shape where this goes. I’ll see you next season.
LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED
- NeetoCal — The calendar booking tool I use to keep my business running smoothly
- Get the Season 5 launch dates and everything else first — join my email list. It takes about two seconds.
- Catch up on the podcast before Season 5 kicks off
- Find your Content Marketing Power Type and build a content strategy around how you actually work.
- Need help getting crystal clear on who you are and what you offer? Let’s meet for a free 15-minute vibe check – this is exactly what I help my clients with.