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What happens when the business you've built looks successful from the outside... but feels completely wrong to live inside?
In this episode of The Reinvention Era, I'm joined by the fabulous Jodie Hayward for a conversation that sits right at the intersection of two things we so often treat as completely separate:
Who we are and how we operate.
Jodie works where identity meets operations, helping ambitious founders and business owners create both the structure to scale and the self-concept to match it.
And she knows what happens when those two things fall out of alignment.
After building a multi-six-figure business largely through referrals, Jodie realised she'd created what she describes as a “golden cage”. The business looked successful, but it couldn't operate without her, her life had to fit around it, and the freedom she'd originally gone into business to create had disappeared.
Eventually, she took the whole thing apart.
And what followed became the foundation of the work she now calls Radical Alignment.
We talk about what happens when your identity and your business are pulling in different directions, why better systems won't solve an identity problem, and why identity work without the operational structure to support it can simply create another route to burnout.
We also get into the ways your identity subtly shows up inside your business: delegation, people pleasing, overcomplication, procrastination, boundaries, visibility, the need for validation and that lovely little habit of convincing yourself you need another system, SOP or bit of preparation before you're finally allowed to bloody move!
Jodie talks brilliantly about the fear underneath so much of this, particularly the fear of being judged for succeeding differently, and shares one of my favourite lines from the whole conversation:
“Failure is foreplay for freedom.”
YES.
We also talk about why so many founders accidentally create a job rather than a business, why constant hustle can feel productive while getting us absolutely nowhere, and what freedom in business actually means when it's not simply about buggering off and doing whatever you want all day.
And, unsurprisingly, we end up somewhere I'm deeply passionate about too:
There comes a point where understanding why you are the way you are isn't enough.
At some point, you have to stop endlessly looking backwards, make a decision about who you're going to be and take the action that gives you evidence of that identity.
Which feels particularly appropriate because, as this episode lands, Jodie and I are together in London continuing this conversation live on stage at Be You Now.
In this episode, we talk about identity, operations, Radical Alignment, self-trust, fear of judgement, people pleasing, business structure, freedom, evidence, evolution and what it really takes to build a business that actually fits the person running it.
If you've ever looked at your business and thought, I've built this thing... but I'm not sure I actually want to live inside it, this conversation is for you.
Find Jodie
Jodie would genuinely love to hear from you, so please go and say hello on Instagram. As she says in the episode, she's a real human and she's the one who'll actually reply 😂
Instagram: https://instagram.com/the_jodiehayward/
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