The Invisible Cage Keeping Women Founders Stuck
You don’t think of yourself as someone who’s playing small.
You’ve built something. You’re booked. Your clients love you. From the outside, you look like the kind of woman other women want to become.
And yet there’s a ceiling you can’t seem to break through. A hire you keep delaying. A piece of content you keep deleting before you post it. A version of your business that exists in your head and refuses to materialize in your calendar.In this week’s episode of FoundHer Rising, Natasha Golinsky shares the framework that explains why. She calls it the invisible cage.
What the Invisible Cage Actually Is
Natasha ran a web development agency for eleven years. She paid herself a six-figure income working between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. while her three kids were at school. By every metric, she was succeeding.
But for over four decades, she could not publish content. Not because she had nothing to say. Because every time she tried, she had panic attacks.
She finally hired a content coach who refunded her money mid-engagement. “She was like, you can’t do this,” Natasha recalls. “I’m not even going to take your money.”
This isn’t a content problem. This is what Natasha now calls root cause, the nervous-system patterns most founders never identify. We grow up learning rules for staying safe — don’t make anyone angry, don’t draw attention, don’t make mistakes — and then we wonder why we can’t scale.
The cage isn’t your strategy. The cage is the thing that won’t let you execute your strategy.
The Forcing Function Nobody Wants
In September 2024, Natasha was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer. Six weeks from a bilateral mastectomy. Three kids at home. One income. No partner. No number two in the business.
She hired a $60,000-a-year project manager she could not afford. She took out a bank loan to cover six months of payroll. She onboarded her new operations lead while drugged out on chemo or post-surgery medication.
When she came back to work in May 2025, her project manager looked at her and said: “Hey, I don’t need you. I got this.”
That moment is what most founders say they want. The team that runs without you. The exit you didn’t have to engineer. The freedom you’ve been promising yourself for years.
Natasha got there in eight months under conditions no one would choose. And here’s what matters about that fact:
She didn’t get there because she was finally ready. She got there because she ran out of the luxury of waiting.
Why Most Founders Won’t Hire
Natasha is blunt about why female founders stall at the hiring threshold:
“Building teams is a skill. People think there’s some sort of magic recipe. No. It’s a process. It’s a system. It’s a skill set. If you’re bad at it right now, or if you’re scared, it’s probably because you don’t know what to do, you don’t know how to do it, and you don’t know how to do it profitably.”
This reframes the entire conversation. The fear of hiring isn’t a character defect. It’s an information gap. You weren’t taught.
There are two viable paths in service businesses. You can build a quarter-million dollar solo practice and stay sovereign. Or you can build a team and create leverage. Neither is morally superior. But you have to pick.
The trap is wanting the second outcome while running the first model and then blaming yourself for being stuck.
The Three Lessons Worth Stealing
1. Symptom management is not the work
Most personal development sold to founders is symptom management. Breathing techniques. Supplements. Mindset journals. These help. But if you’ve spent six figures on courses and you still can’t show up the way you know you can, the issue is not your tactics.
The issue is what your nervous system learned when you were six years old.
2. The skill of hiring is learnable, and worth learning before you need it
Natasha hired one person under cancer-level duress and got an entire team that runs without her. Imagine what’s available when you’re not bleeding.
You don’t need a magic recipe. You need to treat team building the way you treated learning your craft. It’s a discipline. Study it.
3. Define success on a deathbed timescale, then reverse engineer
Natasha’s definition of success was a strong connection with her three kids. Everything she built was structured to make that outcome non-negotiable. Her 9-to-2 work window. Her remote contractor team. Her refusal to be the bottleneck.
Most founders have never written down what success actually means to them on a five-year, ten-year, end-of-life horizon. So they default to whoever’s yelling loudest on their feed.
What This Means For You
If you’re stuck on a hire, a price increase, a piece of content, or a pivot, run this diagnostic.
Ask yourself: have I tried to fix this for more than a year? Have I thrown money, time, and effort at it and watched it stay broken?
If yes, the problem isn’t the strategy. The strategy is fine. The strategy has always been fine.
The thing you haven’t looked at is the part of you that won’t let the strategy work.
That’s the cage. And the only way out is through.
Where To Start
You don’t have to hire a trauma coach tomorrow. You have to stop telling yourself that the next course, framework, or productivity hack will solve what isn’t a productivity problem.
At Hakkola Horizons, we work with women founders at exactly this threshold. Not the version of growth that looks like more output. The version that looks like more leadership, more leverage, and more of you actually showing up.
If this episode hit, pay attention to that. That’s data.
Full Transcript
Christine Hakkola: Welcome to FoundHer Rising, the podcast for women founders in wellness, coaching, and consulting who are ready to build businesses that create freedom, impact, and income. I’m your host, Christine Hakkola, business coach, former psychotherapist, and mentor to women scaling service-based businesses.
I’m joined by Natasha Golinsky, founder of Never Launch on a Friday. She helps female agency owners heal the trauma keeping them stuck and reach their goals, and is based in Vancouver, Canada. Natasha, welcome to the show.
Natasha Golinsky: Hey, thanks Christine. Super excited.
Christine Hakkola: I’m so stoked to have you. I’ll just say right off the bat, we actually met like a week or two ago to record this and you didn’t have any power. I’ve also been following you on LinkedIn for a little while before that, so I have a bit of context and history, and I’m really excited to record this episode with you. The very first thing I have to ask you is the name of your company. Never Launch on a Friday. Tell us all about it.
Natasha Golinsky: Oh my God. Well, I’ve run a web development agency for almost 11 years, and one of the things that I’ve learned in all that time is if you’re pushing a website live, never do it on a Friday because something’s always going to go wrong. There’s always going to be some sort of drama, and it means everybody works all weekend.
Christine Hakkola: Exactly. It’s just a disaster.
Natasha Golinsky: So originally the coaching business was working with women who worked in web, and it was about — like, we all know what that means, right? You never launch. And it was a coaching program for women in the web world like me. And then it just sort of evolved that the brand now became working with agency owners outside of web.
The idea of Never Launch on a Friday is, anyone who’s done it has serious PTSD. It’s just like — so the idea was trying to communicate, like, we all learn, we all make mistakes, we all fail, we all do things that are really not smart, but we learn, we move forward, we get better.
Whenever I tell people the name, people are like, oh my God, I know what you’re talking about. It just creates this sense of resonance of, oh, the painful things that we do, or that have happened to us. It didn’t really start out to be that deep originally, but now the feedback I get is, yeah, it’s about that idea of we learn, we move forward, we make better choices.
Christine Hakkola: It makes so much sense. From a branding perspective, I think it’s just such a fabulous name because it immediately caught my attention. It made me curious, which is exactly what you want your name to do. I love the more profound meaning behind it, and also just the permission. It’s so great.
You had mentioned earlier that you spent decades being very good at being small. What does that mean to you?
Natasha Golinsky: Yeah. I was raised by a bipolar parent. My dad had serious bipolar disorder. He didn’t ever get treatment. I was one of six kids. I was the oldest of six. My mom was very devout Catholic, very judgmental in a lot of different things. There were very strict ways she wanted me to live my life and very strong rules and very strong punishment.
I mean, I was never abused — to anybody listening, I never got abused by my parents physically or anything like that. But I grew up in an environment where I definitely had to toe the line. It was a very specific way I had to live to not provoke either of my parents.
Christine Hakkola: Well, and I just want to explicitly name the potential trauma of being raised in an environment like that. It’s not like better or worse than someone in a physically abusive environment. That takes a massive toll on anyone.
Natasha Golinsky: It definitely does. And I find when you’re in a very emotionally unstable situation where there’s a lot of consequence with either parent, there is no safe parent. You just grow up very dysregulated. You grow up very people pleasing, very perfectionist, because I didn’t want to trigger either parent. So you become this chameleon. And from the time you’re a little kid, you just know how to not make anybody mad.
That led me to my marriage. My ex-husband and I were together for 15 years, but in 15 years together, we never had a fight, because I knew how to play the role.
Christine Hakkola: You know what I mean? I knew the weight of that — how much emotional toll and energy it takes to play small all the time. Because you can’t step out.
Natasha Golinsky: Exactly. You are so afraid of making anybody angry. After years and years of therapy, anger equals danger to me. And there was a valid reason that I thought that, because it did equal danger. There were times that my dad would just be yelling at me and banging on my door, and there’d be times that my mom wouldn’t talk to me if she didn’t like one of my choices. So it really was real that anger equals danger.
I couldn’t grow my business because I could only take a certain number of clients that I could control it all. And for years I would never publish content because I was so afraid of what would somebody say.
Christine Hakkola: You couldn’t control the response.
Natasha Golinsky: I couldn’t control it. So I was always playing the cards to control the table. I put so much work into — and this is why I got into trauma work — because I couldn’t show up. I always felt so much bigger on the inside, but I couldn’t.
Years ago, I hired this woman to coach me in content creation. She was a pro. She had helped other people I knew who’d gotten great results. We were doing discovery, and I was just crying and crying in the session. It wasn’t even anything big. She was asking me to pick my content buckets or something. And just the idea of publishing content, I was having panic attacks. She finally gave me a refund. She was like, you can’t do this. I’m not even going to take your money.
I was like, oh my God. Because I’m the kind of person who has run a business my entire career. I’m not shy. But I was so stuck in this place. When I finally learned how to manage my fear of someone being mad at me or someone disapproving — oh gosh.
Christine Hakkola: I can imagine how huge that was for you.
Natasha Golinsky: Now I can publish content whenever I want. But it was 40-plus years. I’m 45 now. It was probably 43 years before I had — not even the courage, I always had the courage — but there was this invisible cage.
Christine Hakkola: The image I’m getting as you speak is this image of you being in a cage. And I’m so appreciative that you’re willing to share this story with our listeners, because I spend so much of my own time speaking with women service providers, not who have just experienced trauma — many of us have. Sometimes it’s what we call the small-T trauma of beliefs and ideologies that have been instilled into us from a young age that keep us caged.
What you’re talking about here is, of course, our childhood experiences for better or for worse shape who we become personally. And when we become business owners, we don’t separate from ourselves. We are still the same person doing that business. So sometimes when we get stuck in our business, when we feel overwhelmed, when we don’t know how to make a decision, when we feel stressed, sometimes it’s our personal stuff that’s getting in the way as a business owner.
For you, what were some of those turning points as a business owner that you had to untangle?
Natasha Golinsky: The biggest one probably was in September of 2024. I was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer. I had no genetic history. I had never smoked. I don’t drink. I was very athletic. It was one of these things that you think isn’t going to happen to you. I was scheduled for a bilateral mastectomy reconstruction six weeks out.
I was freaking out because I’m a one-income household. It’s just me. I have three teenage kids. I’d run my agency for about 10 years and it was just me running it. I had a team, but everything was on me. There was no number two.
This was my only income stream. I couldn’t just shut the business down. I don’t have a husband bringing in a paycheck. The kids need food on the table. I needed to keep it moving — a team who’s their payroll.
I knew this woman. She was a client of mine, a really good friend of mine. I knew she was an excellent project manager. She had no tech background, but I’m like, I need you in. When I hired her, I had no idea how I was going to pay her, because this was not a small hire. She was a $60,000 a year hire. It was not cheap.
I was like, okay, how am I going to pay myself, pay my bills, pay my team, not work, and pay her? My oncologist was telling me, you’re not going to be able to work. So I was thinking worst case scenario.
I went to the bank, I got a loan to cover at least six months of payroll. I had money saved, but I’m like, let me buy time to get them through treatment, then hopefully come back. I have no idea what’s going to happen.
Christine Hakkola: You’re preparing completely for the unknown.
Natasha Golinsky: She came in and we did the onboarding. It was so funny because we did the training with me always drugged out. I either was high on drugs or on my ass from chemo. I always admire her — the fact that you got through that, it’s a miracle. I don’t even remember what I told you most of the time.
She came through it. When I came back to work full time in May, I’d already finished all my chemo. She was like, hey, I don’t need you. I got this. All of a sudden I was out of the agency, which allowed me to hang up my shingle for something I’ve been doing for a long time behind the scenes — the trauma root-cause work with other founders like me.
Christine Hakkola: How did that feel? That moment when she said, I’ve got it, I don’t need you to come back. Were you mad? Were you scared? Were you relieved?
Natasha Golinsky: It’s an interesting question. People ask me that all the time. On one hand, I felt relief, freedom, excitement, possibilities. What can I do now? I’ve been doing the same thing for like 10 years. Oh my God.
But on the other hand, I felt really sad and really lonely, because this was my team. I’d worked with more or less the same team for a decade. These were brilliant people that I loved. And now they were her team.
Christine Hakkola: You arguably it was still your business. You could have said, no, you’re out, I’m coming back. What made you lean into this and go with it rather than taking the reins back?
Natasha Golinsky: I just knew I didn’t want to do it anymore. I knew I didn’t want to be the project manager ops person anymore. And she did a way better job than me. She’s such a better project manager than me. She came in and cleaned it up, worked on processes, cleaned up the contracts. She did all the stuff that as the founder where you’re in biz dev and project management and running a household and have kids — I could never dig into all the details the way she could, because she was just running ops.
For me to come back in, it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense to mix it all up again.
But I felt a humongous sense of abandonment. I felt like they don’t need me anymore. I felt a lot of grief, if I’m honest about it. I felt lonely. Who do I talk to now? Before it was always my team. Now I’ve got nobody. They’re not talking to me anymore, they’re talking to her. On one hand it was a huge victory. I had technically exited. I hadn’t sold, but it didn’t need me to run anymore. On the other hand, it was grief.
Christine Hakkola: Before we keep going, I want to say something. If you’re listening to this and thinking, oh, I’m in that season right now, I’d love to talk to you. FoundHer Rising isn’t about polished success stories. It’s about real growth — the hiring decisions, the revenue plateaus, the identity shifts that happen when your business starts stretching you. If you’re building something meaningful in wellness, coaching, or consulting, and you’re willing to have an honest conversation about what scaling actually looks like, apply to be a guest. The link’s in the show notes. I’d love to meet you. Okay, back to the episode.
You’ve experienced a journey that I don’t imagine anyone willingly steps into. I can only imagine how overwhelming and horrendous that was. What I hear you talking about is all of the benefits that came from the other side, in large part because of the decisions you made about how you were going to move through that journey.
What I want to hold up is this: what resulted and what you’re experiencing now is something that almost every female founder I speak to wants. We start our own business scrappy, being the only service provider, and a lot of women I speak with have aspirations of one day hiring, having a team, having systems, not having to wear all the hats. And the choices you made under pressure — you made the best under the circumstances — sounds like you expedited that whole process.
What strikes me is that sometimes female founders tell themselves this story of one day. When I check all these boxes, when the business looks like this, when, when, when. And you never get there. Yet you did something under pressure way before you were ready, and probably under less than ideal circumstances.
Natasha Golinsky: It definitely turned out incredibly.
Christine Hakkola: What that does for me is it’s mindset shattering, belief shattering. Maybe I’m the one making up all these stories about what it takes to get there. I’m curious, what did you learn through that, specifically with respect to hiring and building a business you can step back from? What advice do you want to pass along to other female founders who are kicking the can down the road of hiring and outsourcing?
Natasha Golinsky: In a past life, I was a recruiter in a previous business. It’s funny because in my agency life, I run a web development agency but I’ve never built a website. I’m not a programmer. I was a management consultant and I had a client who wanted help with the website. I got a guy from Upwork, some random freelancer. I had no idea what was going on. Hired him, he did the project. We ended up doing another project and then another project. Next thing you know, I have a web designer, a web developer, and I’m running this team, and I’d never —
Christine Hakkola: You were never responsible for the service delivery.
Natasha Golinsky: I’ve never done deliverables ever. Which is hilarious to so many people. I have no idea what any one of my team does, but I know my part. I know my lane. I’ve always run a team because as a single parent, my window to work was between 9 and 2 while my kids were at school. I did not have the luxury of working all the time. My goal was to pay myself a six-figure income working 9 to 2. And I did that year over year over year. The only way I can do that is because I have other people working.
I got really good at team building. I had really good retention. I had nobody leave the team for a decade. I fired a lot of people, but I never had anybody quit. I know how to build good teams — virtual contractor teams, 100% remote.
I tell people, obviously I can’t build a website to save myself, but you have to have the right people on the bus.
Christine Hakkola: What do you say to the woman founder listening who wants exactly this — not the cancer, the successful business part. The ability to pay yourself a six-figure income, work Monday to Friday nine to two, to the extent that your kids are like, do you even work? What do you do?
It sounds amazing. And what I’m hearing from you is the key was hiring — hiring the right people, probably hiring before you were ready. What do you say to the female founder who wants the thing, and here’s the key, says, but I can’t, or I’m scared. I don’t have the money. I don’t know how I’m going to afford that hire. I don’t know who I can trust. What if I hire somebody and they mess up my company? What do you say to that founder?
Natasha Golinsky: Building teams is a skill. I have a cohort running right now and it’s a skill. People think there’s some sort of magic recipe. No. It’s a process. It’s a system. It’s a skill set. If you’re bad at it right now or if you’re scared, it’s probably because you don’t know what to do, you don’t know how to do it, and you don’t know how to do it profitably.
It’s not some magic elusive thing. It’s a skill set. Don’t just go hire anyone. There’s a way to do it.
I look at it like — there are two schools of thought when it comes to building a service business. One is do it yourself. Don’t worry about your team. You can build a quarter-million dollar business doing it just with you. To me, that’s cool. There’s a lot of thought leaders who go down that road.
To me, that is so unappealing. I don’t want my business dependent on me. It’s one way to do it. It’s not right or wrong, but a lot of women don’t want that. For me, if I had followed that school of thought and gotten cancer, I’d be dead. Not literally dead, but my business would be dead.
I have always looked at it — and this is just me — I was always thinking about my deathbed. My definition of success is a strong connection with my kids. I have three kids, they’re teenagers now, my oldest is 19. And I have a really strong connection to my kids. The way I grew up, I was not willing to jeopardize that connection. My whole entire life is set up for that outcome.
The team building, the freedom, the leverage of knowing how to do that — was always my play. As a service provider, as a coach, both ways are totally viable. But which one do you want? I wanted the freedom that if I had to drive to a field trip, I could. If my son had a volleyball game, I could not be on my phone.
Yesterday I went to a female founder event all day. I told my ops manager, hey, I’m out, call me if you need me. I didn’t check my messages.
Christine Hakkola: I love that perspective. You don’t have to hire, but if you don’t want your business to depend on you, then it’s a skill set you can learn.
Natasha Golinsky: Exactly. There’s no — someone who builds teams and someone who doesn’t. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just something you don’t know how to do yet. If you’re an interior designer, you learned how to do that. Okay, you did that. Now let’s just learn how to build a team. It’s a different skill.
That’s something I do a lot of teaching on and coaching on, because that’s the freedom. If I didn’t have a team, going through a divorce, going through cancer, going through — I have a special needs daughter who needed a lot of time at the hospital — I couldn’t have done any of that without stressing about my clients, without somebody else running it.
Christine Hakkola: It depends on the lifestyle you have.
Natasha Golinsky: Exactly. Both ways work.
Christine Hakkola: I come back to that time and time again. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s about what do you want? Every choice we make will lead somewhere, and we’re the only one who has to live with the consequences. We all want something different. So I’m a lot more interested in understanding what people want to build and what are the required steps to get there.
Speaking of building, I want to talk about your pivot. You had this moment where your life shifted course, many moments where your life shifted course, but the one I want to talk about is when your project manager said, we’re good, we don’t need you to come back. You’re still on the business but you stepped away from it, and now you’ve built something new. Tell us what you’ve built.
Natasha Golinsky: Growing up how I grew up, I have spent a crazy amount of money on therapy, courses, energy healers, somatic experiencing — yoga teacher certification. I probably read my first self-help book when I was 15. It’s been like a 30-year journey of healing and unlearning, just so I could function in my life.
Growing up how I grew up, it does a lot of damage to your psyche. And it is very, like you said, little T, big T. Maybe I wasn’t physically abused or raped or anything, but it’s a big-T trauma. It took me a long time to admit it was traumatic. It was definitely traumatic.
I always thought type-A alpha females were like, nothing can hurt me, I’m invincible. We have this idea where we negate what happened because we feel like we’re bigger than that. So it took me a long time to admit, no, this is not okay.
I started working on looking at my own blocks and looking at my own places where I was stuck. In the example of the content, I could not for the life of me create content. And I’m the kind of person who always has something to say. I knew I would be one of those people who could create really great content. I just couldn’t do it.
As I learned how to heal those wounds inside of me that allowed me to say something and show up bigger and stop worrying about making somebody mad — people from my peer group, all my colleagues, friends, they started asking me, whoa, you’re so badass, you’re so bold, boundaries with my clients. I started being able to really push back with my clients. People would reach out to me, like, how did you do that? They’d call me crying and I’d talk them off the ledge. Hey, let’s do some breathing, things that I learned for me.
Once I was out of agency life, my day to day — not having to do 2FA code validations and changing the contacts —
Christine Hakkola: We all messed up our life, right? I’m like, how much of our day is actually spent doing 2FA validation?
Natasha Golinsky: Half a day, you’re just like, please be online to validate my login. This is the nightmare for all agency owners. So then I’m like, wait a second. I couldn’t do it before because I didn’t have the time. I had a career, kids, and cancer. There was no margin to add something else.
I knew, you know what, I’m going to finally hang up a shingle for this. My philosophy as a founder — I’ve been an entrepreneur my entire life. I’ve never had a job. I’ve always run my own business since I was a kid.
None of us really know that it’s there, but we all live in this invisible cage of things that were probably our nervous systems, our beliefs, our trauma that we learned when we were little. It’s not something we consciously chose. I never thought, oh, I don’t create content because I’m afraid of my dad getting mad at me. It took me 40 years to make that connection.
I really started studying root cause. Why? Even this morning, in one of my communities with other agency owners, there was a woman who published, do you guys ever experience panic attacks as a founder? You start freaking out and emotionally you’re on this roller coaster. A lot of the people in the group were like, hey, I take this supplement. Hey, I do this. I’ll go for a walk. All these symptom management strategies.
But my question is, where is the panic coming from? Why? Maybe when you were a kid, if you made a mistake, someone hit you. I don’t know the story. But where is this panic attack coming from? As opposed to publishing content. Whether it’s hiring — not to say we all have trauma just because we have a growing edge in our business. But sometimes that can be the case, and sometimes it’s really worth exploring if that thing is causing significant turmoil inside, or persists to be a problem longer than you might expect.
Why the panic attack? What about this? I know for me, I used to have a lot of panic attacks too, because if I made a mistake there was going to be serious consequences. I was terrified of making mistakes. Maybe she does too. That was something I learned as a kid.
I’m obsessed with root cause, because female founders, we are badass, we are brilliant, we are shiny and bright. So many of us — I know for me and a lot of my colleagues — I’ve spent six figures or more on personal development. So much. But I have not even, in so many ways, come close to achieving my goals. I know that’s the same for so many founders.
There are things we don’t know. We’re trying to fix all the stuff we’re conscious of, but what about what we’re not conscious of? It can be business skills — we just don’t know how to grow a business, and we can learn that. Yet in the process of that, many times we bump up against our own internal stuff, whether it’s big-T or little-T trauma.
That’s where Never Launch on a Friday came out. I’m like, no, I’m hanging up a shingle to be able to help. It’s kind of a taboo subject, talking about trauma. I read this book and it was all about as a founder, managing stress. It was all about symptom management. To me, I always see it further. I always see it deeper, because I’ve done so many decades with myself. Six figures managing symptoms. Never once have I taken a course that’s like, okay, creating content, module one — hey, where are your fears around creating content?
Christine Hakkola: Symptom management can help, but for some of us there’s this desire to heal it at the root cause and go deeper so we don’t have to keep managing the symptoms.
Natasha Golinsky: Exactly. That’s where I sort of have found myself coming in — where somebody’s trying to achieve a goal and they’re trying, and then year after year, they’re putting money into it, they’re trying, and it’s not getting them anywhere. Okay, that’s when you know there’s something else.
Christine Hakkola: Would you say that’s your vision for the future? Helping female founders who want to be helped recognize their own internal blocks, big-T or little-T trauma, so they can be more successful?
Natasha Golinsky: 100%. Cancer makes you think. You start thinking more about legacy. The type of cancer I have, there’s a high chance of recurrence. I can live as healthy as I want, but you never know. None of us know what we have.
I thought about it a lot. What do I want to leave behind? Leaving behind a world of more brilliant, shiny female founders. I really do believe women running businesses changes things. Families, communities. I know I’m totally biased, but I really do believe women killing it — everybody wins.
If there are women who are really going after it, like your clients, people who hire you, who are like, yes, I’m ready to go to the next level — you have a background in mental health as well. That fly hitting the window, bam, bam, bam, bam. You hit that, you kind of bottom out and you’re like, I don’t know what else to do. I’ve tried everything, nothing’s working. Okay, now that’s the time to look a little deeper.
I know myself, I’ve gone to so many Tony Robbins events, taken courses, hired — I was paying a coach $2,000 a month to work with me. It was always working on the external stuff. Let’s fix your pricing, let’s look at this. What really moved the needle was when I actually looked at myself. Where’s my trauma around money and earning and showing up and saying? Once I started healing on the inside the stories I was telling myself without even knowing it — that’s when I felt the freedom to show up very differently. Maybe very woo-woo, I don’t know.
Christine Hakkola: I personally don’t think so. I feel like we need three more episodes just to unpack everything I want to talk about. I personally find this subject so exciting and so important.
Although our focus as professionals and service providers is a little bit different, one of the things that has always been and will continue to be very important to me is creating a space where founders can learn to build businesses and also feel safe to name those things and bring awareness to those things as they come up. So certainly have that in common.
I can imagine there are listeners who, like I get excited talking about this topic because to me it holds the potential for freedom — freedom from those cages that kept us. I’m imagining some folks listening having a similar experience, going along with us. They’ve been there and they get it and can resonate. I’m also imagining listeners who are maybe feeling scared or overwhelmed, thinking, oh my gosh, is this me? This could be their first time hearing something like this.
I want to name firstly that whatever your reaction is hearing this conversation is normal, and give yourself grace. For folks listening who want to learn more, who are maybe at that stage or will be at that stage in a few months or a year or two of, I’m ready to take a look at this — Natasha’s your girl. Where can people find you and learn more about your story and how you work?
Natasha Golinsky: That’s a great question. I would just say head over to LinkedIn. That’s my home base. Come find me on LinkedIn. It’ll be in the show notes. I post content seven days a week. I wish I could post 20 times a week.
Christine Hakkola: So much to say.
Natasha Golinsky: Yeah. Send me connection requests. Tell me that you saw me on the FoundHer Rising podcast. I would love to meet you.
Christine Hakkola: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Natasha. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you.
Thank you, listener, for tuning in to FoundHer Rising. If today’s episode resonated with you, follow the show, share it with another founder, and leave a quick review. It helps more women find these conversations.
You can connect with me on LinkedIn or learn more at HakkolaHorizons.com. Until next time, keep rising and keep building the business that gives you freedom to live, lead, and create on your terms.
