In this episode, I am spilling the beans on what really happened after I sold my online business four years ago. You don't want to miss this one! Okay. Let's go. Hi, I'm Suzi Belmont, a multi seven figure entrepreneur with 15 years experience, as well as a psychology expert, qualified coach, and therapist. This podcast is your secret resource to help you grow from the inside out. It's like personal development for entrepreneurs and leaders, all wrapped up in fun, positivity, and motivation.
So, pull up your chair and get ready to change your life and your business from the inside out. This is the Inside Out Entrepreneur Podcast. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the first of many new episodes of the podcast. And I'm secretly smiling out loud today because this episode has been a long time coming. So if you are a long-time follower of mine and we have previously connected in some way, then hello. I want to take a moment to say thank you for reaching back out to connect this way with me.
And if you are a brand new listener, then hello and welcome to Suzi's world. This is a super relaxed space where everyone is welcome and where I hope you will benefit from me sharing stories from my entrepreneurial journey. From mentoring and coaching others. And from the huge amount of study I have done over the years as well. I also tend to talk about some more personal stuff from an angle of sharing things that helped me, because I hope that by sharing my stories, I can help you too.
And on that note, let's jump straight in because this episode is a big one. I want to share with you what really happened when I sold my business. The background to why I decided to sell it after 10 years of success and being a leader in my industry and how taking four years away from the public light after selling, it changed me entirely as well as changing the trajectory of my life and my future businesses.
One quick thing I should mention right at the get-go is that many of you listening may be wondering why I have a different surname. I used to be Suzi Witt and now I am Suzi Belmont, but there was no divorce, no witness protection scheme. No plan to run away to Brazil, nothing like that. There was a reason we changed our family name and it's probably not what you think. If you want to hear more about that head on over to the podcast page on my website at www.suzibelmont.com.
That's Suzi with an I. So S U Z I B E L M O N T.com because I briefly mentioned this in a secret episode that you can only download there. It's not the main point of that secret episode, but for you curious cats out there who just want to know this is where you will find the backstory. And obviously that also means I have changed all my social media handles to Suzi Belmont.
So if you want to make sure you are now following all of the correct pages, whether that's YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, or others, just head on over to the footer of my website at www.suzibelmont.com. And you can find the links to all of the correct pages that it's all in the black space at the bottom of my website, along with a place where you can sign up to my new mailing list there as well. if you want to make sure you're getting emails and updates about what is happening.
Okay. Back to today. And in order to explain what really happened after I sold my online business, I want to take you back to the beginning so that you can understand a little bit more about my life before I was an entrepreneur. You see, I have always been very open about my life as many of you know, from former episodes of my podcasts. But what I'm going to talk about today, I have never really spoken about publicly.
I am hoping that by telling you my story, you can take something from it that will help you on your own business journey. You will see why I knew I had to sell the business, what I realized only after I sold it and why there was no way I was going to build the next business in the same way. This episode is a really raw warts and all episode, but I know that you have come to expect that from me and my shows in the past. So nothing has changed there.
I am also super nervous to share all of this, but I'm doing so because I really believe it will help other female entrepreneurs and other female leaders. Perhaps something in my life will connect to something in your life. And as I always say, if I can do it, so can you. In saying that stick with this story, because although it starts off a little bit sad, I have achieved incredible success in my life, and I have always been one to pivot when things need changing.
So the backstory is not there for sympathy. I'm not interested in sympathy. It's so that you can see that anything is possible for you. And so you can understand some of the stuff I'm going to tell you about the future when I get closer to the end of this show. So winding the clock back to my childhood, I was one of three children and the oldest child in my family, my younger brothers were twins and 18 months younger than me.
And I say where, because one of my brothers died when he was 27 years old, but I'm sure that's something I will talk about more, another time. That's not for today. So in your mind, imagine a little girl who was about five years old. And as you imagine her, I want you to imagine that girl being somebody who spent a lot of time alone. I grew up in a family where I spent a lot of my time on my own, a huge amount, really.
And there was a lot of emotional neglect where I was left to figure out everything for myself. And at the get go, I want to be clear that I don't blame my parents for that. They just could not cope with their own personal issues, as well as raised three children who were all born very close together. There were also a lot of mental health issues in my family with depression, substance abuse, alcoholism, affairs, divorce. And as I mentioned already, emotional neglect.
And my family members were therefore quite isolated from each other as a result. There was no real sense of looking out for each other or supporting one another. And there were also very few boundaries and rules. We were just kind of left to set them ourselves really, which is really, really difficult when you are very young. And I think this came from my mother's side because her parents were very, very, very strict and she wanted to do things differently as most people do.
They want to do things differently to their own parents. But kids do need some rules, some guidelines. And I remember trying to work them all out for myself from a very young age. The biggest feeling I had though as a young child, was this sense that I just didn't belong in my family. My sense of belonging, just wasn't there. And one of my earliest memories and there aren't very many memories because I have quite a lot of developmental trauma.
But one of my earliest memories was looking for some kind of evidence that I had been adopted because I felt so out of place, I felt such a burden to everyone. And very different from everyone else in my family. I remember being left at home alone on my own quite often. And during those times, this is quite frequently. I used to pretend, I used to pretend that I was a ballerina and dance around the living room when no one was there and pretend I was just a famous dancer.
But then when everyone came back, I didn't do that. I never showed any of that side of me for fear of being ridiculed or mocked or called stupid. My one salvation from all of this was my Nana and I took every opportunity I could to go and stay with her. This included going to see her during family holidays when I would stay with her rather than go with my family on the family holiday. And so my parents just used to take my brothers. So as a young child, I was very, very lonely.
My answer to all of this was to turn to school. I didn't particularly like school, but I realized when I was around five, six years of age, that if I just did exactly what I was told and worked really hard and got good grades that people were really kind to me. And they gave me lots of attention. When I got good grades, people noticed me and they made me feel like I was good enough. They would say really nice things to me and make me feel like I had something that was good about me.
So from a very young age, I learned that hard work meant love and feeling enough. My inner world, my nervous system, my emotional world was wired, such that I believed that if I just worked and worked, then I would be good enough. And that's how my inner world got set up. I learnt to overachieve and to overwork, and I learnt to people please, in order to feel good enough from a really young age.
I learned that if I just said yes to everyone and I didn't make any fuss and then I worked really hard such that I was overachieving all the time, people liked me more. It was as simple as that. And honestly, I think it worked for quite a few years. School became my resource and I would put all of my negative feelings about myself, into my schoolwork.
Then when I got home from school because no one really wanted to talk to me and my family didn't really invest much time in me I would just watch cartoons and then work on my schoolwork a lot. And then inevitably, when I got the good grades that would follow, my family did show some interest in me. So this reinforced this cycle. Then as I got older going into my early teen years, drugs and alcoholism became part of my family environment. Not from me, but from those in my family.
My brothers were starting to take drugs and starting to take quite a lot of drugs and ultimately became heroin addicts as young teenagers. And my dad was drinking probably as a way to try and cope with his own issues. He had a lot of his own issues. My mom also had her own mental health battles so my mom and I didn't have any kind of close relationship. Of course at the time. I didn't know any of that.
This is me now reflecting and looking back on what the setup was with the knowledge that I have these days. At the time. What I experienced was that my home was just like a tornado. I had no control over anything. I didn't feel safe as my brothers were running up drug debts, and I was aware of what drug dealers might do to another family member if those debts were not paid, And that was quite frightening as an environment to live in. I was kind of in the middle of my teen years.
And as a teenager, I had to find something other than overworking or people pleasing to manage my inner world to manage this inner tornado and this sense of not feeling safe. So I try to manage my lack of control and my sense of safety by creating control. And I did this by controlling my food. By age 14 or so 14 and a half I was very seriously anorexic. My nervous system with a complete mess from very early on in my life.
And I had never really been shown how to self-regulate to co-regulate, to self-sooth and instead I had learnt that the way to feel better was by overworking and overachieving, by people pleasing, controlling, being a perfectionist. Thinking I had to work things out on my own. And so on. I had no sense whatsoever of self-compassion. So I drove myself very hard. The more, I felt rejected. The more I worked.
And I did things like people pleasing and controlling whatever I could in my world to try and make myself feel safe. All of these patterns and many more were my way of being and once they were set and I didn't know they were set because I was just a child, I ran my life from that place. And of course it then was inevitable that I was going to get straight A's in school.
I was going to go to Oxford university and get a first class honours degree, win all the prizes and the scholarships at school and at uni and achieve the highest grade in 31 years on my university program, which is something that I did. Because to me, achieving external qualifications was how I felt safe and good enough. It was my place of safety. I was wired that way from as far back as I could remember. The more I achieved, the more I felt good enough.
And I was congratulated on how well I was doing this all of the time by my teachers, by family, by friends, by anyone who came across me, they congratulated me on these high grades. Working hard was really praised as a good thing. And although I didn't want to be like that. And I wished I could just have more time to relax or make friends my system no longer really worked that way. I had absolutely no idea that this was actually quite unhealthy.
And I think if I could go back to that version of me now at that time, she probably wouldn't want to stop overachieving or overworking or people pleasing or any of the other things, because being honest, there was nothing else for her at that time. If that version of me had removed all of the achievements, she would have a gaping hole with no sense of feeling liked or perhaps even feeling loved. No sense of feeling good enough.
A family that was in chaos with drugs and alcoholism, divorce, and all sorts. So that version of me probably wouldn't have wanted to change anything because I would have felt even more unsafe. And the corporate world played into this. I became a lawyer, which is one of the most toxic professions for overworking. I remember being told in my twenties that the expectation was 3000 chargeable hours a year.
That means you have to do a lot more than 3000 hours because not all of your hours are chargeable. You didn't get paid for any overtime or for working late. And you were expected to do things like cancel your holidays if needed. And so I practically lived in my office. I mean, the office in the law firm where I worked had beds, because this was not uncommon. I definitely was not the only overachieving perfectionist out there in the world.
There was a very big community across the globe of people with patterns, just like mine. So I kind of felt that this is how it was supposed to be. Every other lawyer I knew was kind of the same as me. And this kind of working life was lauded as the way to success. It didn't feel great, but the conditioning was coming from multiple angles from school, from family, from society, from the workplace. So I just thought, well, this is how life is supposed to be.
I had no other model of a different way of doing it at that time. In addition at that time, no one mentioned things like burnout. No one spoke about the lawyers that collapsed in the office. No one spoke about the impact on your mental health. Everyone just put in more and more hours in the name of success. I can remember so clearly that the role model older lawyers were doing things like freezing their eggs, to delay childbirth until after they have made partnership.
So life for everyone was just a hundred percent about working. And for me, well, I was loaded up with patterns of people pleasing so I never said no. I was happy to be overworking. Well, happy is probably the wrong word I was accepting of overworking. I mean, let's be honest. I was required to sign a contract that said I would not sue the law firm. If they made me work over the legal limit of reasonable working hours. And I like every other lawyer signed it.
I put in all of the hours for no extra pay. My inner perfectionist kept me working more and more. And I really felt that I could never disagree or show who I really was. In fact, there were times when the true me did seap out a little bit and do something entrepreneurial within that corporate law environment. And the times that I did do that, I was punished. I was punished for putting my head above the parapet and told in quotes to be less entrepreneurial.
In the legal world, there was also a total lack of collaboration. My female mentors operated in a way that once they had struggled their way up to the ladder, to the top of the ladder, they didn't reach down and help the juniors. Instead, they pulled up the ladder firmly behind them. So I continued to develop these core beliefs that I had, that I was not really able to trust other people. The people only like me for what I did, not who I was.
And this became the narrative for new people who came into my life in this period when I was a lawyer as well. And this went on for about 10 or 11 years. And then everything changed. Well, it didn't, but I did. I had my first child and he in many ways became my golden ticket out of the corporate world. At the time the law firm just wanted me to bounce back straight after giving birth.
And I remember my first week back and my boss telling me my female boss telling me I needed a day nanny, an evening nanny and an overnight nanny. Three nannies, Like her. Because then I would always be available for work. This was my immediate female role model in the workplace. I didn't have a role model in my mum because there wasn't that connection. So this was my immediate female role model. And whilst I nodded at her and said, okay, fine, that's what I'll do.
My inner world was screaming 'you are the last person I want to be like'. My intuition was starting to come more online and I was starting to realize that this wasn't right. Now at that time against all advice from my female mentors. I applied for flexible working and that was completely rejected by my female and my male mentors. Now I want to be really clear here. My application for flexible working was to work from 10:00 AM in the morning until 6:00 PM in the office. That's eight hours.
And then from 8:00 PM in the evening until midnight at home. And that was deemed not flexible enough. It was actually ludicrous. It was a terrible, horrible situation to be in. Now at the time, while one part of me was outraged by this rejection of flexible working. Another tiny little flame within me ignited and it was secretly pleased. Because of my strong people pleaser, it would have been really hard for me to just leave.
And this rejection, this being told no gave me a kind of kick up the bum. Something had changed in me. Realizing that it was not just me that would suffer if I was always in the office and always working and always overachieving and people pleasing. And never with my child meant that's something big clicked. Finally I had enough. I had enough courage to realize that I had to get out. And so I did. And I finally felt free. This was a big deal. No one really left voluntarily like this back then.
The internet was new. This was kind of 2009 time. The concept of building an online business didn't really exist like it does now. Or it was only really in its very infancy. So none of the really big names that we all know about were there at that time. I was literally leaving with zero plans. No idea what I was going to do. But this inner drive, this determination that I was going to find a way to make my life better than it had been was fierce. And it was determined.
It was like becoming a mother myself, came with this new level of bravery and courage to say, screw this. I actually do deserve more than this. My life is going to be more than this. And this is where entrepreneurship entered my life. Or rather, I should say re-entered because all of the signs were there from the get-go. I was the kid who used to sell ice creams to the neighbors and offer to wash cars for money.
I was the one doing a paper round, but actually paying all of the other kids, doing paper rounds to deliver my papers if I gave them half the money. And then I would go back and get more papers and do the same again meaning I usually got paid about four times what they all did for almost no work.
I was just handing papers to other people and not doing that really hard slog of carrying those really heavy papers around like the Sunday Times where you can only carry about four at once when you were a child so you can't deliver that many. I was also the kid who at 14, worked in a news agent shop to save up for a trumpet because I wanted to learn the trumpet. And I got my boss to agree that we could change the layout of the shop to increase sales and it worked.
And that boss, she was called Mary. She loved me forever after that. I was also the kid who set up a tuck shop in the sixth form at school that was so successful that the company running the school canteen complained that I was taking away their business and asked for the tuck shop to be shut down. I was the young woman who made a profit when I went to university by taking my student loan a seed money and investing it in something. So that I got more money than just what the loan was.
I was also the employee who was told over and over again, to be less entrepreneurial and stop coming up with ideas because I would make other people i.e. Either senior partners in my law firm look less good. So for me, starting my own business and working from home in 2010 was the best thing ever. It took me almost no time to realize that this work was work that I found really, really easy. I was happy to walk paths that no one else had walked. There were no rules in entrepreneurship.
And I was used to that because from the very start of my life, I had had to make all of my own rules anyway. Entrepreneurship felt completely normal to me because it was kind of how my system was set up. I was able to walk my own path and do things on my own and go left when everyone else went. Right. Because that's how my nervous system was set up. By 2011. I was building an online business with courses and memberships long before that industry fully existed.
When I started, there was no Kajabi. There was no Instagram, YouTube was in its infancy and there were not many people doing online courses who I could get help from. So I had to figure it all out and build everything from the ground up. I relied 100% on my intuition and my inner compass. I knew I could do it. I also at the same time started to find my people.
Other entrepreneurial women who were coming to my classes and it wasn't long before I was then teaching business classes to other women too. And helping them set up their own profitable businesses. And I was really good at this. That first business became very successful making a million dollars in its first two years. And I will never be anything other than super proud of that, even though I do things very differently these days.
That business was a major part of my experiential learning journey. I learned things that you simply can't learn from books and studying. And I still talk about that because for me, for who I was back then, For where I had come from, or from where I had come from. That was an amazing achievement. . It always will be. And I will always be proud of that because for me it was proof that it didn't matter how crappy your start in life was. It didn't matter if your parents weren't interested.
It didn't matter if you only had a tiny bit of money to start something, you could still do it. That $1 million started with my my entire savings at the time of $600. Nothing else. But. And it is a big, but because at the time, I didn't know what I now know. I built that first big business on the exact same inner patterns that I had known for my entire life. In fact, I really clearly remember where I was standing.
When I told my husband I will be more successful than everyone else in this industry because I will work harder than anyone else. I really genuinely believe that the only way, the only way you could be successful was hustle hard work long hours, overachieving. And of course over time I learned that that's absolutely not true. That isn't the only way to be successful. It's more about working smarter than it is about working longer hours. But at the time, of course it worked for a while.
I mean, I'm not going to lie. This very masculine way of doing business by hustling, by working long hours, working, working, working does work to a degree. You do make money. If you do the right things and plug things into your systems and create processes, which I instinctively knew how to do. But what also comes with that way of building a business is a fast track to burnout. By the second or third year I was reaching burnout in my business. I had so many clients, literally in person.
I was teaching around 50 clients per week, 48 weeks of the year. I was saying yes to everything and implementing every single idea that I had. And at one point I had about 110 partnerships running at the same time. I had a lot of people working for me and I had to manage that side, the employee side as well. . And I was also now a mum of two. And I believe that I also had to work really hard to make that successful to. I didn't want to be like my own parents.
And so I wanted to ensure that I showed lots of interest in my children and insisted therefore, on working from home the entire time and my children, therefore being around. And I got this to work too. Anyone who came to my classes back then will remember my kids were very visible and often came in at the end of classes to meet people. So at this point in time, which is around about 2014, I had had a lot of external success.
I thought that I was successful because I was basing my definition of success on how much I achieved, how much money I made, how much I could control things, how many people I could make happy in one go, how much I could give to others. Whether my children, my husband, my business, my clients didn't matter. As long as I was giving to other people. And I remember at this time that literally everyone would call me superwoman or supermum.
Clients friends, the other mums at school, people in my town, the local newspapers, everyone. And I saw that as a total compliment at that time, like people would say things. I remember really good lawyer, friend of mine came to Bath and she's such a good friend of mine, but she said, I don't know how you do it, Suzi. You are just such a superwoman. I wish I was like, you.
Because everyone saw this external side and as a society, as a culture and a society, particularly in the west, we tend to equate success with money. And everyone could see, I was making loads of money. I remember my team frequently saying things like, oh, another 10,000 is just coming to PayPal. Shall I transfer that to the bank? And I'd be like, yeah. Okay. And I'd be thinking, this is more proof that this is all of the right way to do it. Because I was so connected to those financial results.
What I didn't realize in the middle of all of this material success was that my inner world was not healthy. And that was what was driving all of this. My drive to feel loved, to feel enough, to have attention and to feel safe. Was being answered by overworking and hustling and people pleasing just like it was earlier in my life. And my sense of exhaustion was rewarded by everyone telling me how amazing it all was. Now I don't in any way, blame myself for working this way.
I don't even regret it. Because at that time, that was my way out of corporate life. And I was so much happier working from home. Despite the overworking and the people pleasing my life was a immeasurably better than it had been at any point before. And I was fully in control, which kind of worked for me because I had this strong need to feel in control. So that fitted with exactly who I was back then.
The overworking lifestyle was and still is largely how a lot of entrepreneurial and corporate life is set up. But it is a really one-sided masculine way of doing business. I thought back then that this was the only way of doing business. I didn't know of anyone doing things differently.
And I still see posts today by male business leaders and influences lauding, how you have to work, work, work 18 hours a day, 12 days a week, work really hard from the age of 18 to 30 and sacrifice everything else to build your business, et cetera, et cetera. But here is where the true me. The real Suzi started to have an issue. You see, whilst I had all of this success on the outside, my inner world started to question whether this was really how it should be.
I was burning out and I was sabotaging parts of the business that my nervous system could not handle. For example, when my neighbors all got together to try and stop me running the business from home, which I should add was not illegal, but they just didn't want me to do it because literally no one did that back then back in sort of 2012, 13, 14, 15 time, no one really did that. So they thought I was somehow cheating the system of work, I felt really unsafe.
I didn't feel good enough, and I really wanted to be accepted by my neighbors. So all of the same wounds that I had as a child, when I felt rejected were triggered. And so I felt I had to hide my business from them or else they wouldn't like me, or they would hate me. They would gang up on me. Now I kept going through all of this time, but it was an emotional roller coaster.
Challenges became harder and harder for me to surmount because most of my decisions were being made from my inner emotional world. My subconscious and my inner energy was in charge. I had lots of strategies in business, which worked, but when push came to shove, my emotions always came first if they were in a battle with strategy. You can have all of the strategy, the external strategy in the world.
But if your emotional system is in chaos, it will rip through your external strategy, like a tornado and leave it in tatters. Another thing that I just knew didn't feel right at that time was this entire linear way of doing business where every week is supposed to be consistently the same as another week. Consistency doing the same thing every day or the same thing every week, week after week, this is like the most masculine thing ever. I'm female I'm cyclical.
I don't want every week to be the same as the one before. And let's be totally upfront here physically, there are some weeks where I'm super social and others where I'd rather not speak to anyone at all. Throw in periods and hormones, the perimenopause, or my God don't even get me started on that. And then try it and be totally linear. It doesn't work well. Throw in young children and just try and make them fall into line with a very linear business. Again, it doesn't work so well.
And just for the record here, whatever the hell mother nature was thinking when she scheduled the peri-menopause at the same time as most women having teenagers seriously, what the actual F was she thinking? Anyway, I digress. These ways of doing business that I was implementing then were coming from male leaders.
Or from my own inner compass at that time, that was very masculine in its way of thinking having spent 11 years in the corporate legal world, where I was often the only woman in the room. As time went on, I kept going because being frank, the money worked and back then the emotional side of business was not really spoken about anyway. , I also live in the UK, which is kind of, kind of makes us even harder because in the UK, we don't really speak so much about our emotions and our inner world.
And although that's starting to change, it's a very slow change. It was around this time when my third child was born, that things really changed again. Babies. Absolutely. 100% definitely bring abundance. That's been my case every single time, every single baby bought financial abundance, but emotionally. I was still really lost. I hadn't worked on any of this stuff that I'm telling you about. These inner wounds, these inner emotional survival patterns.
I loved my clients so much, and I felt so loyal to them. I'd taught thousands and thousands of people, and I had an almost a hundred percent positive feedback rate. And that side was amazing. But I wanted out because my emotional world was now starting to really catch up with me at every corner. And there were just these little flickers, these little indications that were telling me I needed to change things.
I was realizing like so many others that money alone is not ever going to be enough to feel successful. Hard work brings money. But money doesn't equate to a feeling, an inner feeling of success. And I didn't know, as I've mentioned several times, what I now know about my inner world. So it just felt overwhelming. I can remember telling my husband over and over often in tears. I don't even know why I have built this business. It's not even me. It's no longer me.
I can remember crying and saying to him, I don't know how to leave, because I don't want to let people down. And saying who in their right mind walks away from a multi seven figure business? Like who does that? . I thought I was going a bit crazy because I just couldn't reconcile my inner world, my energy, my energetics, with how I felt with my outer success. And many times, so many times I just debated, stopping or shutting it all. It got that overwhelming.
But I couldn't, because I felt such gratitude to my clients. So I didn't want to let them down. But I knew from around 2016 time, I had to get out. I had to change things and I had to start doing things differently in my life. I really had to unravel who I was at the core and build a business around that version of me. I knew that success was not meant to be built this way for me. I just didn't know what it was meant to look like. And I didn't know how I was going to leave.
And it was around this time, 2016, 17 time. That I really started to work on my personal development and I started to look more into the psychology of business and entrepreneurship. I started with behavioral economics and looking into that and then really went into psychology and mental health and energy. My discovery of business psychology and personal development and things were happening in the background. And they were giving me nudges and pointing me in the right direction.
As you all know, I did finally sell my business. It was so hard. It was so, so hard for me to do that. I remember that the discussions around the sale, the sale and purchase the acquisition by somebody else for the business went on for about six months. And throughout that time, I just kind of had to act normally. But my normal settings is those who know me know already are that I'm very open. I'm very honest. I'm very authentic. I say things as they are.
And I felt like I was keeping something from my clients because I was. So it was really, really hard. Really hard to maintain that, that status quo in that period. Many of my clients had also become really good friends and they were so, so loyal to me. 10 years is a long time and a huge number of my clients from the very first year in my, in my business was still very much in my world a decade later.
Loyalty is something that I really treasured in that business because it was not something I had ever experienced in my own family. So I didn't like having to keep everything secret because it felt disloyal. But I had to do it. And then I sold. And I remember we delayed for about five, four or five weeks before we announced it. The buyer and I worked on a joint statement to say that she was now the owner and oh my gosh, that was terrifying. Because I didn't know what was going to happen.
She didn't know what was going to happen when we went public with this. For once I had no control. It was no longer my business. And I had to hand over the ship to someone else because I knew I had a different calling and I knew I was no longer the right person to captain that ship. Now, thankfully, and I'm so thankful, and this should tell you everything about my former clients and the kind of people they are, the reception we got was incredible.
Women clients, peers, everyone, everyone, literally everyone, except one individual was so supportive. I was blown away. It was my first ever indication. That I could follow my path and people would not hate me for it. I will forever be grateful to everyone of the hundreds, literally hundreds of women and two men who sent me an email of support and encouragement after I sold my business. I will forever be grateful for that. That business taught me so so much. I mean, I learned on the ground.
And as I mentioned, I built it long before the online world had tutorials on how to do everything. I was a total pioneer in setting the standards for that industry. And yet, mentioned at the same time. I really didn't, even at that point, have any idea how much I was personally running it from a place of complete emotional rollercoastery. How I was using so many masculine strategies for doing business that came from my experiences in the corporate world.
And which aligned with the person I was then, but which no longer aligned with who I was then becoming. And before I talk about what happened next, hopefully you can now see why this backstory is so important to understand. The backstory underpins a huge transformation I have been through to be who I am today. And that transformation became the very core of what I now do and why I work with female entrepreneurs, high performers and leaders today. Let me explain a bit more.
It was only when I sold my business and actually had time to just be without all of the clutter that kept me so busy that I really started to become aware of my inner world, my patterns, my emotional world, my emotional intelligence. And I'm not going to lie. It was tough for the first six months. I was someone whose entire value system, my entire sense of being and wellbeing was based on overworking people, pleasing, controlling, over-giving comparing peacekeeping and so on.
Without a business to now hide behind without clients to now, please. I had just me for awhile and that was raw. I had to face some really tough inner growth. The universe had decided that I was ready for this level of growth. And I was. I was finally starting to piece together my journey and realize that the female entrepreneur journey, your journey as well as mine is so much more than just building a business with all of the strategy and funnels and money and mindset work.
Those things just skim the surface. Real success, true long lasting sustainable success. Starts with going to the very core of who you are. Slowly. I started to slow down. As I started to let go of all of these emotional survival patterns and lean into who I really was. I was learning how to heal. The more I learned and then put into practice. The more I slowly started to heal from the inside out. I knew then that I could never go back to the old way of doing business.
I knew that the next business would not rely on any of those masculine structures of doing overachieving and hustle. Now that doesn't mean I'm not going to work. I'm not going to tell you to just sit there and hope that your business works. You still have to do work. But I have a very different way of doing things now. And it was around late 2021 that I started to realize why all of this was happening for me.
Personal development and my breadth of learning around and into the inner world of females and humans combined with my own experiences as an entrepreneur and before was showing me so clearly that whatever I was going to do next, I was not going to do it the same way as anything I'd ever done before.
And being honest, warts and all, I very nearly went the wrong way around 2021 and nearly launched a business teaching how to build online courses and memberships with all of the strategy and the strategic side of doing things. But the universe had other ideas and put a lot of obstacles in my way. Now at that time, that was really frustrating. But I now see that that was almost like the universe saying, this is not for you. And you need to listen to what's happening here.
And I think at that point, had I not listened to my intuition and not pause things, which is what I did, there is a chance that the next chapter would have been anchored at least in part in hustle, overworking people pleasing and over-giving. So I actually took the time to really slow right down. I stopped hustling. I stopped comparing. I started receiving. And setting boundaries that worked for me and understanding more and more about my deep inner emotional patterns.
And then, people started to appear in my world, looking for mentoring or coaching as I started to share my work and my discoveries in a very small scale with people around me. And what I was working on myself, I started to work on with them and it also really worked for them. Their transformations were massive. And I realized that this was where it was all going to end up. It all made so much sense. I knew that I could help other women in a way that very few others could.
I had walked the walk of building a multi seven figure business. I had sold it. I had studied psychology, energy, mental health, therapy, coaching. And it was all coming together in the way I was helping my one-to-one clients. I had been financially privileged enough to take time out, to get some perspective. And yet, I also knew the other women running businesses may not be able to do that. It's not that many people that sell their business and get to take that time out.
And that started to really bug me. I had nowhere near enough tools and resources and mentors to help me with my inner journey during my own business journey. When I hadn't sold it when I was running it. So I wanted to ensure that what I had learned will be passed on to other women so that they didn't need to take time out to learn this stuff. I wanted to make it easier to learn during the journey. I wanted to help women with transformations that could happen alongside running your business.
I wanted as much of it as possible to be bite-size. And with the exception of this episode, which is extra long, this is what I intend to do with this podcast. This is why I have this new podcast show. Of course, I have courses and programs on my website www.suzibelmont.com, but I also wanted to help with week to week support in bite sized chunks via this podcast. Entrepreneurship has given me so much. And I want to give back to as many women as I can possibly help.
And this is one of the ways I will be doing this. I also wanted to ensure that I built something where female entrepreneurial wellbeing matters as much as money. Indeed the phrase where entrepreneurial wellbeing matters as much as money is so important to me that it's on the footer of every page of my website over at www.suzibelmont.com. I really strongly believe that we do not get entrepreneurs off to a good start in the school system. It isn't built for entrepreneurs.
For those who then do find their way into entrepreneurship often later in life for women, there is infrastructure that is still dominated by men or masculine systems that don't take into account the entire journey of the women in business. Which, as I said before is cyclical. It's multi-layered it's far from linear. We also have conditioning, social norms, educational norms, and much more to wade through.
All of it means so many women have a really tough time, a much tougher time than they need to when they're running their business or building their life around entrepreneurship. And this leads to my second focus. Not only do I want female entrepreneurs to feel good and understand who they really are and how they truly operate from the inside out. But I also want women to make a lot of money. Money mindset and making money will always be vital to me.
And I will support anyone helping women to do that. I think women are bloody amazing at business and leadership. And so I hope that this podcast will contribute to this conversation with the aim of helping any woman who is struggling with her journey to find a resource and support. Both in focusing on wellbeing and on wealth.
When I looked back at my last business and all of the limbs of it, if I'm totally honest with you, I built a business based on programming that was at my core from childhood. And by the time I realized it, it was very hard to change things. Imagine what would happen if women like you listening had the tools like those I now have to be more emotionally healthy during your journey. To have more support with the emotional side of business too. To help develop your emotional intelligence.
This is my passion. This is my goal. And if this resonates with you, you are going to like, what's coming from me. Among other reasons. I also took four years out was because I didn't want to rely just on my story. I really wanted to compare and contrast to analyze and study other women too.
So I have worked with other clients during these last four years to test things out before returning and in the words of one of my clients who has been working with me over these past few years, she said, 'working with Suzi will make your life and business better in ways you could not even imagine. It is the best money I have ever spent, and I will continue to spend'. And in another testimonial. 'Oh, my God. Suzi has made my life better in ways I couldn't have even imagined.
The guidance and clarity on the next steps is one of the most extraordinary experiences I have ever had. I don't even know how to thank Suzi properly, but I am so, so grateful'. Now you can read, I'm not going to read them all out, but you can read testimonials from current and also from very important past clients who all played a significant role in me becoming who I am today over on my website at www.suzibelmont.com.
I hope that you can see a little bit more of why I took so much time, why I knew I could not build and grow the next business in the same way as the last ones. I'm simply not that person anymore. I knew that what I had tapped into was unique to me because so much of it came from the perfect alignment of everything that had happened to me in my own journey to gift me the skills I really needed to help and understand other female entrepreneurs. My driver is really strong.
I don't want other women in the entrepreneurial world or in positions of leadership to go through the mental, physical, and emotional roller coaster that I went through as I scaled to multi seven figures. I know that I am not the only woman who has had either a difficult start in life or who has challenges now in her personal life, which impact her business.
I know that I am not the only woman in business who has experienced sexism, narcissism, prejudice, discrimination, or other burdens as they try to grow. I know that I am not the only neurodivergent entrepreneur out there. So many entrepreneurs are, which also makes a lot of sense. I know that. women like you can succeed and up-level with ease if you work from the inside out.
I know too many women who have amazing businesses, but aren't fully happy in their inner worlds, in their relationships, their finances, or their emotional mastery. And I know how to help with that because this was the path that I walked. My ikigai completely changed during these past four years. I realized that my own journey put me in such a brilliant place to help you other women with your own journey, because you can only really teach something you have genuinely lived through.
You can only handle as much success as your own nervous system can handle. And I realized and observed so many women in the online space who seemed successful. But actually were showing signs of the kind of things that I was struggling with in my prior journey via their actions within their business or the way that they were showing up online. And I knew, I knew that I could start to add value to these women. And so this is what I now do. To be really honest.
I also want to bring together others like me. I thought about how during my own journey, there was nowhere where I could safely go to share my own fears, my inner world, my emotions, and how I sometimes struggled with those.
I wanted to ensure that in my world, there is this creation of a high energy space that allows that to happen safely, not a place where everyone is just being depressed and moaning and low energy, a place which is high energy that's allowing people to safely share and be picked up and supported by other women.
And so I knew that when I returned to the online world and to entrepreneurship, I will be building a place that would start to create this community where like-minded female entrepreneurs would help each other to rise together. I want you to ensure that in Suzi's world, you will find a place where you know it is safe to share how you are feeling on the inside.
And for sure that is what you will find in my world, a place where you will get support for your inside out journey, through entrepreneurship leadership and business. In fact, this is where the concept of inside out and the inside out entrepreneur, which is my trademark was born. During the past four years, my obsession with brains mindset, energy beliefs, psychology, the inner female world, the nervous system spirituality, and more just really, really grew.
I fully stepped into this new version of myself. And I could never have guessed how much this work would positively impact those around me whether my clients or my own family. I realized, and this is a really important point for any of you who are struggling right now. I realized that I had always been looking for something that I would never ever find. My whole life I had been looking for something that I was never going to find.
Because looking for what was broken to try and resolve my inner struggles. Because the masculine world, the patriarchy, the medical system, it looks to label and pathologize women who struggle with something. Whether we are called overly emotional, paranoid, hysterical, or something else our emotions, our inner worlds are seen as things to fix. But I don't agree. I don't think we need fixing. Emotions are energy. And they create feelings and these feelings aren't coming because you are broken.
They are feedback telling you what needs to be amended to fit with who you really are. You see, the most profound thing I realized about my entire journey was that there was never anything actually wrong with me. The Suzi who was born onto this planet was enough exactly as she was. And is. Just like you are enough exactly as you are right now. But years.
of conditioning, social conditioning, masculine structures, trauma schooling, parental inputs, the patriarchy, and more have trapped women like you and I behind a web of programming which means that when we think that when we struggle in business or in life, we must be somehow broken. That we have to fix something to be better or to be more successful. That there is this elusive thing that we are chasing to help fix us.
The medical system will diagnose you as having some kind of mental disorder instead of recognizing that it's not what is wrong with you that we need to ask. It is not what needs fixing. The question we need to ask is what happened to you? What made you act, how you act today? And what programming needs updating to match who you truly are on the inside. You already are are enough at your core, you were never, ever broken. You have nothing to fix.
But you can change the core programming that you might have been running for decades. Because this is affecting everything, your business, your life, your relationships, all of it. Your core programming. is not the same as you. You as a person don't need to change. You just need to update your programming if it is not working for you. And you will know that it is not working for you because you will feel that something is not right in how you are doing your business journey.
Or you will be struggling, frustrated or not making the money you desire. Because is actually fairly simple. But as I said at the beginning of this episode, so many women struggle because they focus all of their effort and attention on the external factors of business. And not enough time, effort and attention on the inner internal factors. But it is the inner work that actually creates the transformations that lead to the external success and results. And so this is what I now do.
I help women, female entrepreneurs, leaders, and high performers smash through your invisible glass ceilings, the inner glass ceilings so that you can not only make more money, but also find unshakeable emotional stability in your life and in your business. I help you to revolutionize your relationship with yourself so you really truly understand who you are and how you operate. When you run a business from that place, everything changes. Everything becomes easier.
I guess I embody the concept of my trademark, which is the inside out entrepreneur. So as I come to the end of this week's episode and the first one back, I hope that I have given you a bit more of an insight into the past four years for me. And so this brings me to what I will be doing, going forward. I have been really intentional about how I have designed this new business. I have really deeply looked into what drives success from the inside out.
I have really embraced fact that every single woman is completely unique. And so there is no cookie cutter method. They only ever work short term anyway. My methods are tailored to how you choose to make them fit for you. I don't want you and I to all be a bunch of identical women leaders. I want to empower you to create your own picture and then to jump into that picture. And tell your own story in your own unique journey.
I will be vocal about rules and culture and society and business methods that just don't work for women in my opinion. I am board a F of the bro marketing methods of doing business that just don't work around family and kids and tie you to a life of hustle. Often something you don't realize until you're in it, and then you get trapped. I want to be consistent, but not a slave to social media.
And I will talk separately about what I learned from years of just leaving social media as there was some huge business lessons I got from being in that very unique position of not having to post. Just choosing not to post on social media, but that's for another show. I want to work with women who want to play a part in a global longterm change in entrepreneurship and business. Women who want and feel passionately about business working for you.
Financially, emotionally, personally, and environmentally. I want understand how you work from the inside out. 'cause my whole is about empowering you in life and business. I want to always show up as the real me, which is why I have been so raw and so honest in this podcast about how the real me has changed. The old me wasn't the true Suzy. It was a version of Suzi who was hidden by layers of conditioning from society, family, school, culture. and how my inner world hadadapted to that.
True. Suzi is more free. . I want to show you that it is possible to run a business and take care of yourself and your nervous system. It is possible to make money without neglecting yourself. It is possible to run a business without masses of self-sabotage when you really understand what is going on, you get to catch it before it happens. I want to help you to feel good about business and measure success based on feeling, not just based solely on the dollar or the pound.
I know that women can have it all. But I don't want to try and have it all. I want to have the option to have it all, but choose what I will do and what I will be. I can be a woman who can have it all, but I can choose not to do it all. Women running businesses like men doesn't really work for me. Women make decisions differently. You and I have different rhythms and different cycles.
We like some parts of our lives to be quite masculine and have doing energy, but some parts to be more about receiving energy and more feminine and in flow. It's about balance feeling like you fit in that you have your place, that you are enough is not about fixing you to fit within the system that let's face it was created largely by a patriarchal society. It is about fitting within your own system on the inside and understanding what that system is.
And so I hope you will join me on this future podcast journey where I will share everything I have learned my experiences, things from psychology, from mental health studies, from my masters and anything that really fits within the definition of the inside out journey of a female leader, high-performer and entrepreneur. And that brings me to the end of this first episode of the show, which is crazy long compared to how the future episodes are going to be.
They're going to be much shorter than this. So what can you expect from what is coming. Well, I'm going to be releasing an episode once a week from now on. And as I said, they won't all be this long. Most episodes will be easy to digest. And under 30 minutes, my ADHD brain does not like the long drawn out things. It likes things that are quick, easy to digest and make a difference.
And sometimes I will also release secret episodes like the one that you can find on my website podcast page right now. So make sure you subscribe to the podcast on your app, on your device, whether it's iTunes, Spotify, wherever you're listening. And also sign up to secret episodes via the link on my website. over at www.suzibelmont.com. Just go to the podcast page when you're at the website and you'll see the link right at the top of the page. And finally, I wanted to say thank you.
It is so, so good to be back. I feel quite emotional recording this today and being honest, there were moments where I had to stop because it was sometimes really difficult for me to tell this story. But I really hope that you enjoyed learning a little bit about what really happened whilst I was away on this very long, personal sabbatical. That chapter of my life has now ended, and I am here for the next chapter and so excited for you and for me about what is to come.
I hope you will join me in this new season of my life and my business. And of course it goes without saying that as this is the first episode back, I would love it. If you could give me some early day support and encouragement. It's kind of daunting wearing your heart on your sleeve and coming back after such a long break.
So if you are happy to please do leave me a five star review and perhaps a little written testimonial or a welcome back over on iTunes if you enjoyed the show or you can also email me any feedback at [email protected] too. And remember, I am Suzi with an I, so SUZI BELMONT.com. And don't forget, you can find all of my social media pages in the black footer of my website at www.suzibelmont.com.
Come and say hi, and if you knew me before, reach out and send me a message I'd love to reconnect with as many of you as possible and hear about what you are doing right now. I will see you all next week and thank you for making it to the end. You absolutely rock. Bye.