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So, you know, I don't think anyone ever becomes a therapist because they had a well adjusted childhood. Of course, I haven't met anyone yet. So, you know, the why really is that I grew up in a very volatile household and, you know, struggled with a lot of, um, challenges myself, either, like I mentioned, having a learning disability, uh, growing up no one expected me to graduate high school, much less get a master's degree. So, um, and the problem was I saw myself as the problem as opposed to the system.
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Welcome to Shout Your Cause, everybody. Today I've got a really special guest named Nicole Lewis-Keeber. It is not Keebler. Do you get that from people
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? Oh my God, all the time.
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. It's not Keebler, it's Keeber. K E E B E R. But anyway, welcome Nicole.
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Thank you for having me. I always tell people there are no elves here. We don't bake cookies, , so it's Keeber. So thank you for getting it right and thanks for having me.
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Well, maybe you're, you're baking business cookies, I guess
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, maybe
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Cook cookies to heal our inner child trauma
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, I guess. Oh my God.
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Speaking of inner child and trauma, why did that come up in the description when we just talked a few minutes ago? What, where does that come from?
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Well, you know, I was a therapist for 18 years. I'm, I have a licensed in social work and was a therapist and worked in all kind of mental health and clinical settings and before I left the field. And so, uh, yeah, trauma's pretty much a part of all that. Um, and when I transitioned from doing therapy to working with small business owners and leaders and entrepreneurs, that, um, idea of trauma's impact on our life and our decisions and how we see ourselves, it did not end in the therapy room. It came with me into learning about people's businesses and what works for them and what's not working for them. And so, yeah, with, that's why I always, you know, say, Hey, this is the first thing that I always wanna talk about is what is trauma? What isn't it because of my background and how it merged into what I do today. There's not a lot of people who talk about trauma and entrepreneurship, but it is something I've been doing research on and I'm really passionate about.
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Well, it makes a lot of sense though, because entrepreneurs really push, we push ourselves really hard. We have this deep belief and passion for what we're doing, and we think that everybody needs to have that same passion. And then we get out into the world and we find out that not everybody's on our same bubble. Not everybody is on our timeline. And a lot of the things that we carry in our lives during maybe stressful times Yeah. Or during conflict tends to come up. And we can probably trace that back to something, right?
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Yeah, it's, it's, I have a masterclass called the Trauma Entrepreneurship Connection. And there really is a connection because what I've seen over in my research over the years is that there's usually some experience that we had in our formative years where we're developing our sense of self, um, or what is possible for us where we had a moment whether either we felt unseen, unheard, unsafe, misunderstood, you know, or had resources removed from us in some reason, in some way. And there's a moment of, you know, first our nervous system activates and like, I don't feel safe here in this moment, or something needs to change. But we may kind of an unconscious vow to ourselves in that moment of, I'm not gonna be like you or I'll preview wrong, or I never want to feel this way again. I always want to be the one who's in control.
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And so I haven't found a person yet who can't track back some entrepreneur, some germ of that entrepreneurial journey that came from a moment like that in their childhood or maybe teenage years. And, and the thing about people who've had, you know, challenges in their childhood or, you know, even those formative teenage years, is that we develop a high tolerance for discomfort, right? So that's a skillset kind of that you need for an entrepreneurial journey. And also the desire to be the one who's in control and having a high tolerance for the buck kind of stopping with you and really leaning on your own self, right? To be the one who's always in control. And those, those are all amazing skillsets for an entrepreneurial journey or a small business ownership or leadership. But they hit a wall pretty quickly at some point. And that's when people come to me because they're realizing like, oh gosh, you know, I, I can't get to where I want to go because now I can't bank on myself solely.
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I have to allow other people into my journey. I have to, you know, trust them to do their job. I have to rely on them to take something off of my plate. And that's when it could get really hard if you've had wounding around your trust. So, you know, the entrepreneurial and that trauma, childhood trauma and entrepreneurial connection is really deeply connected. Um, and our businesses become a way in which we work out that experience. And if we're not aware of that, it can derail your process. So it's really fascinating to me, and I've never understood why people, you know, particularly in the, in the business world or our career, say drop, you know, work stuff is work stuff home stuff is home stuff. We don't drop our baggage at the door and we've started something new, we bring it in with us. Maybe we're better at masking it in one area than another, but it's never made any sense to me that we should have compartment lives in, like our lives are siloed like that. It's not how our nervous system works. It doesn't work that way.
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Tell me a little bit more about your book. What's the name of it again?
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It's called How to Love Your Business. And it has a long subtitle that I can't even remember myself. , it's over there. I don't wanna reach for it. .
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So what is that book about?
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So the book is about, um, first of all, it shares my journey of how I kind of came into this awareness of trauma and, and entrepreneurship or, or, or trauma in business. And it, so it tells a story about how, um, about two years into my own business, cuz you know, we have, we teach what we have to learn ourselves. I recognize that I was feeling really burnt out in my business too early out. Um, I was feeling like a failure. And all of the evidence did not suggest that that was true. There was no data to support the fact that I felt like I was a failure. Um, my clients were doing fine, it was contributing to my family financially, no big deal. But I was feeling it. And so I had, I came to an awareness one morning, I just kind of had to get over myself and recognize why am I feeling this way?
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I'm a business of one. Like, there's no one else here. Why do I feel like I'm failing? Like I'm a loser. Like I'm scared of my business at this point. Like I was really dreading Mondays and I didn't leave my job to dread Mondays, right? That was part of starting my own businesses though. I didn't have to feel that dread anymore. And what I recognized through using some of my own coaching skills on myself and my therapeutic skills was I recognized that I was feeling like this about my business. It, it felt like it was um, kind of of an abusive dynamic. I was kind of fearful of it. I didn't feel supported by it. And so after some deduction I realized like my business has taken the place of a parent figure that I had growing up that was very demanding and demeaning and not supportive.
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And so I started to do some research on how we can recreate unintentionally the power dynamics and the relationship roles that we have in our lives, in our business. Because I believe that when you start a business, you enter into a relationship with it. You are not your business that is something outside of you that you were relating to. And so we can recreate that dynamic and we can, that may I be so bold as to say we can actually abuse ourselves with our businesses by recreating those power, uh, those power patterns within it. So the whole book is about how I came to terms with it, how I worked with my clients or stories about clients in there and how we go from having kind of this mean boss where we're like, you know, being mean to ourselves and our businesses, to developing a relationship that's supporting and loving. And there's exercises in every chapter to help you do that.
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Well, I used to beat myself up a lot and I wanna give you a specific example cuz it makes total sense. Mm-hmm. , I was an actuary for 25 years and so I worked in statistics and data analysis and really deep complex stuff for a long time. And so what I did was I tried to bring that into what I was doing with Facebook advertising because you can really get analytical with this stuff. But I found out that I was just recreating the thing that I didn't want anymore and I needed to stop doing that. And it wasn't until I realized, gosh, yes, maybe I do know these things and I really have a deep, vast knowledge of all of this, but that's not where my heart lies. My heart lies in creating content and helping people be inspired by, uh, sounds and colors and everything to, to create their content and giving them a pathway to be able to do that. That's very easy to follow, like follow the yellow brick road type of concept. And it, the storytelling and bringing that into my work, that was what really fueled me. And I'm like, why am I trying to make this so difficult and complex just like I used to do at work? Like cuz I had to, I don't have to do that anymore. I have the power and the business to be able to love my business. So how to love your business that I think that that fits perfectly.
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Yeah, I'm glad that you went on that journey. And usually if you pull back G layers, there's usually a younger, I call 'em your inner kiddo. It's like a younger version of us that's like mm-hmm , but this is how it's supposed to be or this is what's expected of me or, you know, and we kind of have to give them a little love and let them off the hook and say no, you know, we don't have to do it that way. Like, with my business, no one else is here. I get to do what I wanna do. Finally. Like, let, let's do this. Let's have fun.
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Exactly. Love it.
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Would you rather work or would you rather play? If we're going to go through all of this business building stuff, it better be for something that we love doing, right? Take a moment to do this quick life purpose challenge to discover what makes you truly happy. It's free visit sallyhendrick.com/lifepurpose. You know, I wonder if there is like some sort of formula to this. Can you sort of pinpoint that if somebody's having a problem in this area in their business that maybe that you might find this in their past?
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Yeah, so in some of the research that I did, I had, I started just having conversations with entrepreneurs as small business owners. Cause it was like, okay, so, you know, no one's looking for trauma in their business and we really haven't even defined how that could look. So let me just start talking to people and finding out what are some of the most common patterns or places that this shows up in business. And, um, what kind of came to the surface where several different categories. And one of them was about, um, well, money's always there. You know, like money's always the, one of the categories. It's like, you know how, um, they're trusting themselves with, you know, how you price your stuff or how you trust yourself to manage your money. So I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on money cause I feel like everybody talks about that one.
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But one of the, one of the categories that came up was, um, was trust. And it looked a little bit, looked a little bit different for, um, people, but it kind of came down to two ways. It's either a lack of trust in themselves because they had experiences where people, you know, uh, didn't help them build self-trust or made them feel very doubtful. Like they had an overly critical parent or someone who made them doubt themselves. So it was either the fact that they weren't trusting themselves enough and they were giving power away in their business, letting other people make decisions for them, um, or not managing their team or not being as, as firm of a leader as they could be, or that they didn't trust other people at all. Meaning that, um, fi you know, probably some business coach hared them into getting employees or, you know, hiring contractors to do the things they really shouldn't be doing anymore.
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But they were, um, paying the, you know, paying these contractors or these employees and still not getting out of the way of them to do their job. Because relying on someone is the behavior of trust. And if they had challenges around trust, they were not allowing their employees to do something, they would never quite let go of something. Either they're micromanaging or stepping back in, so they weren't getting the relief that they needed because they wouldn't let go. Um, so that piece was really big because if you want to grow your business outside of just you, you have got to trust other people to do their job. If you want to be the c e o of your business, you have got to trust yourself to be the captain of that ship, to recognize where you wanna go and how you need to lead the people, um, in order to get you there.
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So I think, you know, trust is one of the biggest ones I think that I work on with people. And it usually has been where they have had some wounding around their trust, whether that they can't trust others because they were abandoned or, you know, abused or, you know, something happened or I can't trust myself because I have been criticized, I've been told that I'm wrong. Or even like me, I grew up with a learning disability and so I always felt like I couldn't trust myself because I didn't know what was going on most of the time and I was being told that I was lazy or that I wasn't trying hard enough. So my trust in myself was really damaged. So that's one of the areas that I see it come up a lot that can really impact the business.
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That makes a lot of sense. And I feel like I've been through that as well and I don't have it as much anymore. I now have let go of several things in my business and it's nice to be able to just have to supervise it mm-hmm. or just check it off the list and make sure it's been done and, you know, uh, any type of super supervising task that go along with that. That's, that makes a lot of sense. So money, trust, any others that you would list out?
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Yeah, boundaries.
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Boundaries.
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Um, boundaries is another big one. It is, um, if you, again, have had people or even systems around you that don't respect your boundaries or don't allow you to have them, um, depending on how you grew up, you know your needs, your wants, your, your opinions, you know, any of those, if they were, uh, not valued and and nurtured in any kind of way, um, boundaries can be really difficult to set in place. So again, we see this kind of flip of the coin. It's either really poor and flimsy boundaries with your clients. Maybe they're, you don't set limits with them and say you're constantly doing work or maybe you're not setting boundaries with your time, and so you're working 24 7 even though that's not what you really signed up for. Um, so they could either be really poor boundaries or they could be so rigid that it doesn't allow for growth, flexibility or support because you have set your boundaries to be so tightly and so close that it's just like, you know, the brick walls around you that, um, you're kind of, you boxed yourself in. Um, so boundaries is one of them. Um,
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And visibility is another one. I bet you see this a lot in the work that you do in helping people, um, really kind of step into whatever creative pursuits they want to do or to sell more things. That that fear of visibility isn't just the cliche that you hear in a lot of coaching circles. There's something very, very real about that in that if you were someone who grew up in a household that was very chaotic or very, uh, volatile, being seen was dangerous. And so your nervous system had that experience over and over during these very important years of your life. And so it's, you know, your nervous system doesn't give a shit about how, how old you are that this is just running a Facebook ad or whatever. It doesn't care. Um, it's, um, if if being visible, being seen and being acknowledged was a danger to you or could it get you in trouble or, you know, if you just learned how to fly under the radar, stepping out to be more visible to sell what you need to sell in your business or, you know, be a more of a leader.
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It's your, your nervous system is gonna have that trigger. So visibility is also another one. So, um,
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That makes a lot of sense. That's really, I I actually kind of felt some of that fear when you talked about that, about, you know, what, where does that come from? Did something ever happen? So if scooting past all of the specifics of what you do and how you help people, why, why do you do this? Yeah.
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Yeah. So, you know, I don't think anyone ever becomes a therapist because they had a well adjusted childhood. Of course, I haven't met anyone yet. So, you know, the why really is that I grew up in a very volatile household and, you know, struggled with a lot of, um, challenges myself, either, like I mentioned, having a learning disability, uh, growing up no one expected me to graduate high school much. Let's get a master's degree. So, um, and the problem was I saw myself as the problem as opposed to the system around me that first of all didn't acknowledge my struggle, personalized it, inflamed them on me. And, and other than that didn't know how to teach me, right? It was their job to learn how to teach me mm-hmm . Um, so it was a challenge, right? It became a trauma for me to go to school every day like that.
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But it also became a skillset, which is what you'll see a lot when it comes to trauma and entrepreneurship, is that we have the challenge that creates a, a skill, uh, that we can harness if we're aware of it. Um, and so for me, I just didn't want other people to feel like that. And so I had a really strong desire to help other people. Um, and so I wanted to, you know, when I finally got into college and I was trying to figure out what I was gonna do, I wanted to be a therapist, I wanted to help other people. And so a social work degree made sense and that's how I kind of started things. Um, but as far as my why now, it is that I, I just have, I feel very strongly about the fact that having your own business can provide you with financial freedom.
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It can help you be a disruptor. It can help you be, um, it can help you heal. Like I see people heal through their businesses every day. It is possible. And so I believe, and particularly people who are in more marginalized communities like women and, you know, people of color and people with different orientation, that small, you know, owning your own business or being, or being a defined leader or being entrepreneurial is your way through. And you may have a bad business idea. You may, your product may need some ing there, there may be other reasons why your business doesn't thrive and succeed, but it will not be because you don't recognize that childhood trauma or any kind of trauma that you've had has set up shop in your business and is keeping it from thriving. Not on my watch, not ever. It may be for another reason, but it will not be for that if I can help it.
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So, um, that is my why, that that is the reason why I do this. That is the reason why I have my own business as opposed to, you know, getting the 401k and, and just getting my paycheck and shutting up and going, sitting on the beach on the weekend . Um, it is because we need to understand that first of all, many of us have childhood trauma that don't recognize or realize it is trauma because we were told to shut up, no big deal, walk it off. And that your nervous system doesn't care what you call it. You're still reacting to it and it's still part of who you are. So first of all, it's education and then support and disrupting this idea that mental health doesn't matter when it comes to your business. That, um, you can have the resilience from the challenges to help your entrepreneurial journey. Um, and that if you don't, are not recognizing and aware of it and getting support from it, it can be the deterrent from you continuing it on your journey as well. So that's kind of why I'm here and what I do.
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I love it. Thank you so much. Now can you tell us where we can find you online?
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Yeah, so if you are a TikTok fan, I'm on TikTok, um, at the business therapist. Um, I know that Sally and I both like TikTok ,
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I like TikTok.
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I do too. It's changed my whole life. Um, my website's, nicole dot lewis keber.com, that's where you can find that, um, free masterclass I mentioned the Trauma and Entrepreneurship connection. You can also find my book there, how to Love Your Business. Cool. Um, yeah. And so yeah, those are the best places to find me.
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Excellent. And I, I'll link everything in the show notes as well. Well, thank you so much. This has been wonderful. I've loved getting to know what you do in your business, but also why you do it, which makes a whole lot of sense. I love that you've shared, you know, some of your own personal struggles here today. So thank you. Thank you so much.
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Well, thank you for having me.
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Thank you for listening today. My name is Sally Hendrick. Be sure to visit our website for show notes and more information on how you can inspire others. If you would like to contribute content to our magazine, please apply on our website at shoutyourcause.com.
