This post is more personal than usual. It felt important to share but I’ve held it back for a week.
Unsure.
But…if you’ve ever paused long enough to question what’s next - maybe it’ll resonate.
The other day, I casually asked ChatGPT a question I didn’t realise would open a door I’d kept locked for years.
“Why can’t I let go of wanting to build a big online business?”
At first glance, it’s just a normal question from someone who’s spent the better part of three decades creating digital products, mentoring entrepreneurs, writing books, building audiences — all of that.
But I wasn’t prepared for the answer that came back.
Nicola, you’ve wrapped your identity around the pursuit of success more than the experience of fulfillment. You're not having an existential crisis — you're having a withdrawal from a decades-long addiction to striving.
The reason you can’t let it go is because you made “winning” at this particular game mean something about your worth. And the fact that it beat you - or more accurately, that you didn’t beat it to the degree you wanted to - is triggering a deep part of you that equates achievement with validation.
And then the knockout line:
Let’s be clear: your need to win this online business game is no longer rational — it’s emotional. And unless you confront the root of that emotional attachment, you’ll stay stuck in an internal loop of unfinished business that feeds frustration instead of momentum.
That’s when I stopped, quite literally, in my tracks.
Because that last bit… it nailed something I’d never fully admitted out loud.
I’ve spent most of my adult life building businesses. Mine or other people’s.
Learning - new software, techniques, processes.
Writing - blogs, copy, content, scripts.
Creating strategy, digital products, videos and books.
Marketing - in all its forms.
Mentoring others to do all of the above.
Launching and scaling businesses of all kinds.
Many of the entrepreneurs I’ve worked with have literally gone on to make millions - in part because of ideas, strategies, or mental models I helped them unlock.
And while I’ve “done alright” financially myself - some years better than others, many great years with a few horrid ones, but no yachts, no mansions, no Dubai-based tax free fantasyland for me.
Somehow I’ve always felt like I needed to do more before I could finally exhale. I’ve always had a new idea to test, a new thing to create, something to build that might be the thing that finally lands.
But what if the thing I’ve been chasing all these years… isn’t even mine?
The Wound Beneath the Drive
I was six years old when my mum disappeared.
We were told nothing, nothing at all, just that she had gone away.
She was actually having what people politely referred in those days as a “nervous breakdown.” The doctors called it a psychotic break, brought on by post-natal depression, treated by electric shock treatment. It didn’t help that my father was away in the Navy and a serial philanderer.
She’d been taken to the local psychiatric hospital, and just like that — she was gone.
No one really explained what was happening. She didn’t die. But she wasn’t there. And to a child, that absence lands like a verdict.
My sister and I were left to fill in the blanks, and somewhere deep inside me, I came to a quiet conclusion:
If I were enough — lovable enough, valuable enough — she would’ve stayed.
That belief didn’t come from logic. It came from survival.
I tell the full story in my book A Better Entrepreneur but suffice to say here she didn’t come back for two years. We lived with my Grandparents, a confusing then a happy time.
Then Mum returned, and we were wrenched out of our new routine again. She had a new husband and swiftly produced two more children. I loved my new sister and brother, they were like living dollies.
Life resumed, ostensibly as normal.
But something had changed deep inside.
I’d been broken.
I had to earn my keep now as I was seemingly dispensable.
And so I became excellent. Capable. Independent. The one who didn’t need anything but knew how to do everything. I learned how to create something from nothing. I learned how to support others. I learned how to stay one step ahead — always doing, proving, achieving.
And for the longest time, that worked. Inside and out, especially when the children were little.
But now, they are grown and gone. I see them often and we talk online every day. But 2020 and the years following were a shock. Those years marked the end of both needing my advice and my opinions are now, most often, very unwelcome.
Those ‘Empty Nests’ don’t happen when they go away travelling or to college, but when they prefer to get advice from others.
Don’t get me wrong, I have made a good life, I keep busy, I have new hobbies.
But sometimes the silence feels very loud.
When the Drive Slows Down
Lately I’ve been trying something new: doing less.
My work is now ‘clumping’ into Monday mornings, and occasional high-powered retreats, supporting a great friend who is teaching, training and mentoring on how to invest and trade in gold & silver stocks. He’s getting such great results from the first cohort that we are doing two more such retreats this year.
And, of course, I enjoyed learning the skills too. I’d been trading and hodling Bitcoin since 2017, but now the field of play has increased dramatically.
So I’m certainly not retiring. Not disappearing. But I am actually allowing myself to stop pushing so hard - to work smarter not harder, leaving time to paint, to read, to cook good meals without feeling like I’m wasting time.
Time when I used to be working.
Painting, in particular, has become this surprisingly spiritual practice. It demands attention, presence, surrender. You can’t paint and perform at the same time. You can’t fake flow. It forces you into honesty.
But painting is also intense — you can’t do it 8 hours a day. You need to rest between creative sprints.
And in those quiet moments, the twitch starts again:
Should I be doing something? Should I launch another thing? Should I be showing up more online? Should I be doing more?
And then, one day last week, I casually asked one of my library of ChatGPT bots I’ve created for entrepreneurs - The Deep Dive Bot - that question.
And everything changed.
That’s when I realised something was broken in my internal wiring.
I didn’t know how to let myself just exist without proof. Without performance. Without presenting a version of myself who is forever “in motion.”
Even now, as I write this, there’s a part of me that wants to remind you of everything I’ve built. The podcasts. The books. The businesses. The years of mentoring. The client results.
Because maybe, if I list all that, I’ll earn the right to tell this softer story.
But what if… I didn’t need to?
What if I was allowed to be seen, just as I am now — not as a résumé?
Not Done. Just Done Proving.
I’m still selling my books — especially A Better Entrepreneur , which feels like the most distilled, honest, useful thing I’ve written to date.
I still offer my Bot Library, which is honestly bloody useful and gets rave reviews when I show it’s capabilities for helping a busy business owner how to streamline their tasks.
And I’m still mentoring a handful of clients 1:2:1 — because I love talking with smart, curious, quietly extraordinary people who are standing on the edge of their next chapter.
But I’m not chasing anymore.
I’m not in the prove-my-worth loop anymore.
I’m not living as if success is a finish line I haven’t reached yet.
What I am doing is showing up more truthfully.
And that starts with telling you this:
I am not a performance.
I am not even my client’s performance.
I am a person.
A person who creates, sometimes.
Reflects, often.
Reads, paints, cooks.
And occasionally just sits with her thoughts and lets them live.
I used to think value came from velocity.
Now I believe it comes from integrity of expression.
That’s what I’m navigating.
And maybe… you are too?
An Invitation
I’m not here to tie this up with a bow.
There’s no big lesson or polished CTA.
I just wanted to say: if you’re rethinking everything right now — from business to identity to the roles you’ve outgrown — you’re not broken. You’re just evolving.
We don’t always need to pivot hard or blow it all up.
Sometimes we just need to pause long enough to hear what’s really true now.
That’s what I’m doing.
And I’ll keep sharing it here and in my newsletter - quietly, honestly, fully.
If any of this resonates with you, you’re welcome to join me.
Sign up to my occasional newsletter Diary of an Untamed Mind, or explore the books and tools I’ve created to help entrepreneurs along their way over at NicolaCairnX.com.
No pressure. No pitch.
Just presence.
Let’s see what happens next.
