What if you were already whole?

👋 Hi my name is Roslyn, I’m a 2x founder and executive coach. I help founders fall in love with building their companies again. Learn about working 1:1 here.

Hi there,

Hope you’re having a beautiful week. 

I’m working a short week to take some time to celebrate my sister’s bachelorette later this week. I used all of the tips I shared in my post “How to Gather With Intention” in planning and I can’t wait to bring it to life!

This week’s newsletter is my antidote to the achievement and self-improvement traps so many of us find ourselves in. As a society, so many of us carry a deep sense of deficiency—feeling inadequate, “not enough,” at our core.

So we hustle, we accomplish and achieve to prove we’re enough. 

Or we tell ourselves that if we read enough self-help books, heal hard enough, and do enough inner work, we’ll finally be healed… and then we’ll feel enough.

Both of these paths are, unfortunately, traps. No matter how much we do, we’re left wanting more. 

What if we flipped the script instead?

What if, at our core, we are already good? Already valuable? Inherently worthy, lovable, creative, resourceful and wise?

Easier said than done of course!

So today I’m going to share:

• An example of how I work with clients to help them access the infinite love, presence, wisdom, and creativity that live within them (and all of us)

• An alternative to living inside the achievement & self improvement paradigm

• Three shifts to move into a more unfolding-based approach

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And also if you’re in NYC, I’d love to see you at our next Within Walk!

I experienced such a moving moment yesterday with one of my longstanding clients.

The challenge she brought to our session, while not uncommon for fast-growing companies, was weighing on her. 

Last year, we’d worked on positioning her company for growth, building the foundation and team so she could extract herself from the weeds and focus on her highest-impact, most energizing work.

She’d entered the year with strong momentum and conviction to go after inspiring goals this year. 

But yesterday, she came into our session feeling frustrated that she was being pulled out of her zone of genius to fight fires and attend to (very normal!) operating growing pains.

She was understandably feeling a mix of emotions—frustration, guilt, fear—while managing an array of stakeholders: her team, her clients, and herself.

It was, quite frankly, a complex mess.

And complex messes are not uncommon for founders to bring into coaching. If it’s a problem with a straightforward solution, it usually gets resolved without a coach—or even without the founder.

The situations that get passed up to the founder, and then brought into coaching? Messes. Complex situations.

And as a coach, what made me SO happy to hear her say was: “I get that this isn’t about the problem itself, it’s how I relate to the problem”. 

Which was spot on. 

When we feel trapped by our situation, boxed in by competing stakeholders, and at the mercy of parts of us rooted in fear, guilt, or anger—parts that are trying to protect us—we feel very limited in the actions available to us.

We feel like there’s “no right solution,” like we’re stuck in a lose-lose.

But when we can step out of that narrow view, when we loosen black-and-white thinking, new possibilities begin to emerge.

When we can be with—and offer love and understanding to—the different parts of us that get triggered by old patterns and wounds, we begin to access the wisdom that already lives within us.

So my client and I did just that. We explored who this frustrated part was and who it was protecting. As she built a more loving relationship with these parts, they softened. Her body relaxed. She dropped into a deeper level of presence.

From this more resourced place, she was able to access new inner wisdom, new states she wanted to embody as a leader, and with that, a new path forward that hadn’t been available when she walked into our session.

As we came to the close, she said “It’s like your business name right? We have everything we need within. We just need to access it beneath all the parts.” 

We laughed together about how, a year in, she was really understanding my business name.

And deep down, I was quite touched. Because she was truly getting it: everything she needs—the answers to her questions, the leader she wants to be—is already available within herself.

She knows that in our coaching sessions, she’s not meant to come to me for direct answers. My role is simply to gently guide her back to the wisdom, love, leadership, compassion, power, vision, clarity, and creativity that are already within her. That are within all of us.

And that’s how I know she’ll be successful long-term, even after our coaching relationship comes to a close. Because she’ll deeply trust her own wisdom, her intuition, and her self-connection.

My job as a coach is not to solve problems for my clients or keep them dependent on me. It’s to prepare them for when they are no longer working with me—knowing they are whole, wise, resourceful, and creative, capable of relating to whatever complex situations they will inevitably face.

Because they will continue to face them. As companies grow, the messes get bigger. The pressure and responsibility rise. My work is to help clients expand into leaders who can meet that increased complexity.

The most important founder superpower isn’t charisma, pitching investors, relationship-building or even managing people. 

It’s the ability to do the inner work—to return to a present, resourced place in the face of growing messes, challenges, and responsibility.

What if you were already whole?

The belief system required to do this work as a founder is very different from the one that permeates our culture.

It’s the belief that you are already whole, and have everything you need within you. 

Our culture likes to tell us that we are deficient, that there is something missing. That we will only feel okay once we acquire that which is missing, and use that to achieve our goals. That only then will we be happy, fulfilled, and at peace. 

For example: we’re inherently lazy, so we must figure out how to discipline ourselves into working enough. Then we’ll be able to hit that revenue milestone, raise that round, get that Forbes article, exit our companies. AND THEN we’ll be enough. We’ll feel free. 

It doesn’t actually work that way. 

I interact with many successful founders—and post-exit founders—who still feel inadequate despite achieving their goals. I’ve heard more than a few say, “Well, I guess I just need to build a bigger company. Have a bigger exit.” I’m not kidding.

Heck, I myself have I hit milestones like funding from noteworthy brands, seven-figure audiences, multi seven-figure revenues, and recognition from publications like Forbes.

And the joy was fleeting. It lasted maybe a day or a few days at most. 

Then I was right back to feeling deficient again, with a healthy dose of imposter syndrome, chasing the next moving goalpost.

That view of myself was a large contributor to my ultimate founder burnout and having to move on from my company. 

So what’s the alternative?

Well, what if you were already whole?

What if there was nothing missing, nothing broken about you? What if you were already enough? 

The truth is that you are. 

The truth is that you are already perfect. You are inherently good, despite your very human flaws and mistakes.

Your DNA carries a unique blueprint for how you’re meant to live a fulfilling, joyful, and connected life—and, when you’re ready, to serve the world.

All you have to do is connect within. 

Listen to what energizes you. What lights you up. What you genuinely care about. To what feels like a yes or a no—not just in your mind, but in your body, your gut, and your heart. To who inspires you. To the places, people, and communities that feel like coming home.

“But what about my flaws? My hard emotions? My fear, jealousy, pride, envy, selfishness, obsession? What about the things I’m ashamed of? My trauma? My limiting beliefs?” you might wonder.

These are the things that make you human. They aren’t wrong.

And they are a beautiful starting place. They give us something to work with. Because wherever there is fear, there is also courage. Wherever there is selfishness, there is generosity. Where there is shame, there is also compassion.

If we’re brave enough to look at these things, to stay with the emotion, to feel where it shows up in our body, we give it the space to transform.

We go through so much of our lives suppressing our emotions, distracting ourselves from our shame and fear, not realizing that what we’re most afraid of isn’t so terrible after all. It’s just an emotion, a sensation in the body. And when we tune into the body, we can access the wisdom it holds. We can access our inner resources.

And often, the hardest things we’ve lived through contain clues about our path forward. The ways we’ve been hurt point us toward how we’re meant to serve.

Shifting our way of being in the world

So if you’re reading this and thinking, “Okay maybe… maybe I’m willing to buy in”, here are a few practical shifts to consider: 

Shift from outer accomplishment → inner awareness

Release the story that hitting external milestones will unlock the fulfillment, freedom, and ease you’re seeking.

Instead ask yourself how you can embody those qualities now. If you’ve been living in the paradigm of outer accomplishment, this will take a commitment to healing, expanding and embodying new ways of living and seeing things. 

So many of our thoughts, views and behavior are a product of our upbringing, culture and unfortunately, of the ways in which we were hurt (big and small) throughout our lives. A willingness to lovingly examine and heal these wounds—and shift the behaviors that grew from them—is a lifelong journey. And it’s so worth it.

What I’ve personally experienced, and seen in others, is that as we heal, expand and cultivate our inner worlds, changes start to show up in our outer world—our relationships, our businesses and our broader lives. The shifts can be subtle at first, but over time they are powerful. They change lives and they change the world.

As we start to value and trust ourselves, the needs for accomplishment and material things start to soften a little. And a desire to serve the world starts to emerge. Our outer focus starts to shift from “What can I achieve to I get what I want” into “How can I be of service”?

Not necessarily in a sweeping way. It can unfold slowly. But it feels good to live this way.

Shift from self-improvement → self-unfoldment 

Inner work can’t come from a place of self-deficiency. Self-improvement, like endless achievement, can become a trap—a never-ending treadmill. I’ve been there: “One more modality, one more healer, one more course, and then I’ll be healed.”

It doesn’t work like this. 

For me, the end of my own self-improvement trap came when I was introduced to Aletheia coaching, which is based on the idea that we are already whole. 

Instead of asking “What’s missing?”, it asks “What if nothing is missing? What if I’m already a whole human being?”

Instead of “what’s my goal”, it asks “what’s unfolding right now?”.

It works with the assumption that we are already whole, and that through the inner work, we unfold into more whole versions of ourselves. 

We access qualities and states that already exist in all human beings. These inner resources are what allow us to navigate the complexities of being human in the world.

Instead of focusing on the future, what’s missing from the present, and what we need to control to bridge the gap, we start to focus on what’s here now. When we more fully sense, feel and understand where we are now, new possibilities emerge for how to more skillfully navigate the present.

As we focus on the present, we unfold the future, often in ways that we couldn’t have imagined.

See entrepreneurship as a spiritual path. 

Entrepreneurship is a way to deeply know yourself. If you have money issues, they’ll surface. If you struggle with self-worth, boundaries, focus, or conflict—you’ll feel it.

Where you’re stuck in your business mirrors where you’re stuck in your life. 

Your business shows you the places where there is opportunity to heal, expand, and unfold. 

If you want to grow your business, you need to grow yourself. The bottleneck often isn’t strategic or tactical. It’s you. 

AND when you commit to self-develpment, you become a more conscious, self-aware, emotionally intelligent leader. 

Your capacity to consistently tap into your inner wisdom, creativity, and resourcefulness in the face of complexity grows. 

Your capacity for impact grows. 

This path isn’t for everyone. But if you’re still here with me, it could be for you. It will ask a lot of you, but nothing you are not equipped to handle.

Because you are infinitely capable of learning, growing, and unfolding your purpose. Of contributing to the world you actually want to live in. Of facing what you don’t want to look at.

And if you’d like some support on this journey from someone who:

• Sees and believes in your inherent worthiness, goodness and capability as a leader, even when you can’t

• Lovingly challenges you and holds you to what is actually aligned to who you want to be and how you want to live

• Can hold a loving container for you to engage with the parts of you that were hurt, and may be holding you back in your current life

• Can guide you to build a stronger relationship to your self, your intuition, wisdom and inner capacities

…then, let’s have a conversation. You can find time with me here.

Within Walks

Join us for our next Within Walk for female founders next Friday, February 20th at 8am.

If it’s quite cold, we’ll stay inside the cafe and I’ll lead a discussion around our theme instead of walking outside, like we did this past week.

RSVP here.

• 1:1 Coaching: If you’re curious about how coaching can support you on the spiritual path that is entrepreneurship, you can book a free coaching consultation.

• Walk with us: Join for our next Within Walk.

• Let’s be friends: on LinkedIn and Instagram. I share more startup content and what’s going on behind the scenes there.

• Finally, tell me how you liked this newsletter. I read every piece of feedback.

Thanks for being here. I’m so grateful.

With love,
Roslyn 💚