Welcome back to She Wears the Pants — the place where high-growth women come to build companies that match their calling.
I’m your host, Ashley Deland.
Today’s conversation is a little different than the ones we normally have here.
Most of the time when we sit down together on this podcast we talk about leadership, strategy, scaling businesses, and building companies that support the life you want to live. But there is another side of entrepreneurship that every founder eventually walks through, whether we talk about it openly or not.
It’s the season where everything begins to shake. The moment where the vision you built your life around starts to crack open and the chapter where the path you believed was certain suddenly becomes very unclear.
And what I want to talk about today is what leadership actually looks like inside those seasons.
Because over the past year I walked through one of the hardest seasons of my career. And the lesson that continues to echo through that experience is this…
The shaking is actually the shifting.
Sometimes the very things that feel like they are tearing your world apart are quietly repositioning you for the next chapter.
But when you’re inside the storm, it absolutely does not feel that way.
A few years ago I built a business that I genuinely believed was destined for extraordinary success. I invested over six figures into it. I poured my heart, my time, my vision, and my future into creating it.
From the outside it looked like one of those bold ventures that had the potential to become something very big. We had the capital, the potential woman power, the network…
But from the very beginning every single thing felt overly difficult - and not the same kind of expected challenges that comes with building a new venture.
There were constant pivots, challenges that seemed to appear at every turn, moments where things didn’t flow the way I expected them to. We ran into multiple legal challenges, then before I knew it, true colours from partners were starting to show.
At the time I told myself that was a good sign. You hear so often that resistance means you’re onto something important. That adversity shows you’re building something meaningful.
So instead of listening to the quiet signals in my intuition, I pushed forward and I silenced the small voice inside of me that was asking harder questions.
And eventually that decision cost me.
It cost me six figures. It cost me months of legal battles and the emotional weight that comes with them. It cost me partnerships, friendships, and a community I genuinely believed would be part of my future. And in many ways it cost me a piece of my confidence for a while.
Because for the first time in my career I found myself looking at something I had built and realizing it wasn’t going to become what I believed and knew it could be.
Everything I had poured into it began to collapse. And that was the shaking.
There were nights where the house was quiet, my daughter and husband were asleep, and I was sitting there after another long day of legal calls, another round of emails, another difficult conversation, asking myself questions I never imagined I would be asking.
How did something I believed in so deeply turn against me?
How did this God-sized download go so wrong?
And one of the hardest questions of all… how is there no justice in the world?
That season shook my confidence. It shook my sense of identity. It shook the way I saw my leadership.
And yet, even inside that storm, life didn’t pause.
I still had all my clients depending on me. I still had responsibilities as the owner of 3 businesses, leading teams while being a mother and wife. I still had to show up.
And there were days where the only way I could show up was through preparation. If you go back and look at my content from that time, you’ll notice that much of it was pre-recorded. Not because I was trying to create distance, but because emotionally I didn’t always have the capacity to show up in real time while everything was unfolding and crumbling behind the scenes.
My natural instinct was to go quiet, to step away from the public eye for a while, to question whether I was even meant for entrepreneurship anymore.
And in those moments the work wasn’t business strategy.
The work was emotional mastery.
It was allowing myself to grieve what had been lost. The partnership. The friendships. The expectations I had built around that business.
It was sitting in the darkness long enough to actually understand what it was trying to teach me.
Because eventually you reach a moment in seasons like that where something becomes very clear.
And that is - No one is coming to save you.
No one is going to rebuild your confidence for you. No one is going to restore your identity for you. And I remember the moment I realized that if I was going to move forward, the decision had to come from me.
I had to go into the depth of what honestly felt like an empty soul at the time and decide once and for all if I was going to allow that experience to break me.
And when a deep, undeniable “fuck no” fired through my body, I knew the next step.
It was time to move forward.
Not by pretending the pain wasn’t real, but by mastering the emotions enough to put the past where it belonged and start deciding who I was going to be after this experience.
And listen…
There were mornings where the only thing holding me steady was quite literally my faith and the belief that God had not brought me this far to abandon the story now. That everything unfolding was somehow happening for me and not to me. And that He had never failed me before, and He wasn’t going to start now.
My husband carried me through many of those difficult days. My daughter reminded me every single day what joy looked like. My closest friend stood beside me while I slowly began putting the pieces back together.
And over time something unexpected began to emerge.
Gratitude.
Not gratitude for the betrayal or the legal battles or the financial loss, but gratitude for what the experience revealed.
Because that season had such a deep purpose.
And here’s five things I can share:
Even in seasons that feel empty or uncertain, God is still working in your life.
What feels like difficulty right now is often preparing you for something greater.
Sometimes He allows these seasons to happen so that we remember where our strength truly comes from.
He shapes our faith, strengthens our spirit, and prepares us for the blessings that are coming next.
God never promised that weapons wouldn’t be formed, but he does promise that they would not prosper.
And when I look back now, I can see clearly how much that season changed me.
My discernment in partnerships is sharper than it has ever been. My intuition has strengthened. My boundaries are clearer and more grounded. My leadership has deepened. And my trust in God now rests on a foundation far stronger than it ever was before.
And slowly I started to see something that I couldn’t see while I was in the middle of the storm.
The shaking wasn’t destroying me.
It was shifting me.
Because the bigger you grow, the more complex the journey becomes. Bigger opportunities bring bigger responsibility, and sometimes they also bring pressure, painful pivots, and lessons that stretch you in ways you never expected.
No one building something meaningful is exempt from that part of the journey.
The only way to avoid those experiences entirely is to stay small, stay safe, and stay hidden.
And that was never the path I chose.
So I made a decision.
I refused to let that season define me. I refused to let a failed business define my leadership. I refused to let financial loss define my future.
Instead I allowed it to refine me.
Because every valley season invites a founder into a deeper version of herself. A version with stronger discernment, stronger faith, stronger leadership, and a much clearer understanding of who belongs in the next chapter of the journey.
If you’re listening to this right now and you’re walking through your own valley season, maybe a partnership has collapsed, maybe a business has failed, maybe you’re questioning whether you still have the strength to keep building, I want you to hear this clearly.
The valley is not the end of your story.
It is part of the transformation that prepares you for the next level of leadership, success and self.
The shaking is a divine shifting. A redirection you couldn’t see while you were standing inside the storm.
And when you walk through it with faith, resilience, and the courage to stand back up again, you often discover a version of yourself that is stronger, wiser, and more aligned than the one who began the journey.
I’m cheering you on my friend, Trust that God is still writing the story.
Until next time, keep rising into the woman your calling requires.
