“I think I miss who I was last year.”
That hit me really hard.
I had a call with a client recently. By all means, she was doing great in her business.
… but it wasn’t tracking the same numbers as it used to be.
Notice how she did not say “I miss the numbers,” but she missed who she was.
Because at some point, without deciding to, she had quietly made those two things the same thing.
Her worth = how much she was making.
The numbers became her proof that she was good at what she did.
And when the proof stopped arriving, she didn’t just experience it as a dip in revenue.
She experienced a loss of evidence.
If you’ve been in this industry more than a couple of years, you’ve definitely felt it.
The thing that used to work… doesn’t anymore.
Perhaps it was the launch that used to fill…
Or the offer that used to sell itself…
Or maybe even a specific instagram post that used to fill your calendars is not performing how it used to.
And most people respond to that in one of two ways.
- They decide the industry is dying.
- Or they decide they’ve lost it.
I’ve watched a lot of good coaches quit somewhere in between those two stories.
But I don’t think either of them is what’s actually going on…
Perhaps there was a version of your business that has come to the end.
And you’re grieving it without knowing that’s what you’re doing.
Now, nobody calls it grief. That’s the problem.
We don’t have permission to grieve a business the way we’d grieve anything else, so it comes out sideways.
Here’s what it looks like in the wild:
- A completely different offer or rebranding (the website, new colors, new niche… you know, the bells and whistles)
Perhaps you dove into the busy work because it allows you to avoid sitting with the loss of the thing that used to work.
It looks like hustling harder.
Doing more of the old thing, louder, as if the problem is volume.
Bargaining with yourself “If I work harder, and try new things, something will eventually pay off”
2. Blaming the market, algorithm, economy, state of industry or whatever!
Just like grief stages, comes denial and anger.
It feels productive for about a week. And you stay in denial by comparing every current month to a version of yourself from way before.
Years ago now, I hit my first $30k month.
If you’ve had one of those, you know it isn’t really about the number.
(It’s that something you’d been reaching for finally landed, and for a few weeks you walk around feeling like you’ve cracked it.)
I was on top of the world, and thought I had business all figured out.
And then the month right after that, a completely different story.
Every enrolment call I got on, I got a “No.”
Not a “let me think about it” or a “maybe…”
A solid. Flat. No.
17 times.
And here’s where my head went:
First: it was a fluke. The $30k wasn’t real.
I got lucky and now everyone’s about to find out.
And then, I started telling myself:
“I’ve lost it. Whatever I had, it’s gone.”
That second story is the one that nearly took me out.
Because underneath it was grief, and I had no language for it at the time.
So I just felt like a failure instead.
Here’s the thing about a season that goes really well.
You don’t just get attached to what you were doing.
You get attached to who you got to be while you were doing it.
Certain. In flow.
Not overthinking the price.
Not rehearsing the call in the shower beforehand.
That’s what you’re actually grieving more than just the offer or the strategy.
Her.
The version of you who found it easy.
And that’s why it feels like failure instead of change.
Because when something external stops working, you can fix it.
But when the version of you that made it work has expired, it doesn’t feel like a business problem at all.
It feels like a verdict.
So what do you actually do?
You let the version completely expire.
That sounds dramatic, but I mean it practically.
Most people don’t.
They keep the corpse propped up in the corner and keep talking to it.
You cannot build the next version while you’re still negotiating with the last one.
You get to decide the evidence doesn’t mean anything about you.
Those 17 no’s were data.
But data can’t be read accurately by someone drowning in shame (you’ll likely interpret every single number as a verdict.)
Only from there could I get curious.
And then you go and find out what the new version needs.
For me, that meant going back to the offer honestly… was it still built for who my people actually were now?
… and then doing the thing I really didn’t want to do.
I reached out to all seventeen.
Not to re-pitch, but to ask them “why not?”
And the answers I got were GOLD.
It wasn’t about me, it was more about how my offer didn’t meet their needs at the time.
So I got more intentional about making the fit explicit… for that person, in their words.
And on the next call, I was a completely different Christina.
Not just more confident, but more specific.
I played more. I sat in genuine curiosity, rather than sweating behind the camera about not fumbling my words.
But I want to be honest about the timeline, because this is the bit people skip.
The reaching out, the offer work, the new version of me on that call… none of that happened until I’d stopped mourning.
The grief came first. It had to.
I’ve been through this cycle several times since. Different seasons, bigger numbers, different offers.
It doesn’t stop happening.
What changes is how quickly you recognise it.
So here’s what I want you to take from this:
Every version of your business has an expiry date.
Every single one.
That’s not a punishment for doing something wrong, that’s what happens when you grow, your market moves, and your people change.
You’re allowed to be sad about it.
That version meant something.
It paid for things. It made you feel capable.
But grief and failure are not the same thing, and treating one as the other will keep you frozen for months.
The industry isn’t dying.
And you haven’t lost it.
Something you built has simply reached the end of what it was for.
Let it be over.
Then go find out who you’re becoming next.
