3,144 Items Into Grief, and Still Focused on Building

A solo episode on loss, faith, and what it takes to keep going.

I'm 3,144 items into my insurance list. That's where this episode starts. What cracked me open while I was counting was a photo of the kids stacked in a tower on the living room floor, laughing, my husband Gary looking at them, thinking about adding himself to the pile. A house that doesn't exist anymore. And a question I couldn't shake, will we ever have a moment like that again?

This is a solo episode, and the honesty in it is a commitment I made to tell you the truth. I really, truly, deeply, 100% do not want to be here telling this story. I want to tell the comeback story, the glorious coming out on the other side. And that's just not true. So I can't tell that story. I have to honor the lesson I am in which is unbearable, long, drawn out, continuous grief.

Eighteen months ago, our home and my office both burned down, four days after I got married and four days after I received a spiritual calling to let go of everything I thought I knew. I declared the hard part of the grief over two months ago. I was wrong. The list keeps growing. Because life is, well... life.

One of my gifts is being able to see repeatable patterns and build frameworks around them. When I work with my consulting clients, I'm almost always watching the same transformation pattern play out, and it has three parts: the breakdown, the breakthrough, and the breakout. This year, I had to live inside that pattern instead of just naming it for someone else. Typical business challenges like cash flow, people leaving and arriving, a masterclass format still being tested, and a grief that doesn't move on the timeline anyone promised.

If you've gotten a calling that you can't explain and can't ignore, if everything that used to work has stopped working, this episode is for you. I'm not offering you a resolved story. I'm offering you the real one, still in progress, and an invitation to build alongside me while it's happening instead of waiting for the polished version.

Listen to the episode and find out why it always takes longer and goes in a different direction than we think. 

Connect with Beate Chelete

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Everything I owned, but not quite everything, most of it. And I don't remember in the last year and a half that I've ever seen him laugh like that again. And I wonder, will we ever have a moment like this again? When we have such a silliness and normalcy in our lives. The breakdown's brutal. You have to let things go. What you see is a breakdown. I have no idea what it is, how big it is, but I'm being asked to believe. Can you lean in to believing that what will emerge is better? I'm 3,144 items into my insurance list. And the photo that cracked it and that made me have a complete breakdown was a photo of our adult children building a human stack tower in the living room, you know, like when they lay on top of each other and they're all cracking up. And I see my husband, and my husband stands there, and he is just laughing. And I don't remember in the last year and a half that I've ever seen him laugh like that again. And I wonder, will we ever have a moment like this again? When we have such a silliness and normalcy in our lives. Welcome to a solo episode for the Business Growth Architecture of Founders of the Future. My name is Beat Schlett. I am your host. I'm the growth architect. I'm a fire survivor. And I am going to share with this honest episode with you sort of what it takes to recover from grief, to manage a catastrophic loss, not lose yourself in the process, and lean into your calling. I know many of you are in a similar situation. Your fire might not be a little fire, but it might be a fire for you. It might be that you have lost your job. It might be that you're thinking about going out in the world, setting up your own business. You may have major changes. You may be longing for something that is not yet yours. And you are looking at the external circumstances, which in everybody's book are pretty freaking dire right now. And figure out where are you in all of this? How are you building something? How are you building a future? And what's your part and your calling in all of this? So the numbers I've looked at, it's like one in three adults are planning to start a business this year, which is which is much, much higher than we've seen it before. So the call to set up your own business to get going is very strong. I have been wrestling with this for years, in where exactly should I put myself in service? So the story goes like this. I have built and sold a business to Bill Gates. That was many years ago. That's a story I've told. I've told that story many times. I went to a spiritual journey. On this spiritual journey, I got a clear calling. And it was that I had to change the way I did things that I needed to let go of everything, my story, how I tell my story, what I do, how I do it. And naively, I thought, you know, it's just one of those things. And then four days later, after I got married, on my honeymoon, four days after this message, everything I own burns to the ground. Not quite everything, but most of it. When you are forced on to your knees by these kinds of circumstances, and you know, I had an office, I had a podcast studio, I loved going to my office. I loved having people at my office, I loved seeing clients at my office. And that burned separately from my home. So literally everything that I was told I needed to let go, I had to let go. A series of events that happens when something so catastrophic happens, or any type of grief really, and you can grieve for whatever you are grieving for in your life. For me, this is this particular grief of being in this catastrophic loss, the loss of my life, the way I lived it, you know, not my life as, you know, I'm obviously alive, but my life, how I used to live it with my husband and the family. And for 18 months, I was dealing with the grief, trying to keep myself above water, moving forward. If you were to ask me what I did the first six months, I can't even tell you. I don't know who I talked to, I don't even know how we put out podcasts or what we did. But somehow my amazing team helped me through all of this. And then when the grief, when you see that the grief starts to not be so intense anymore, that you have lighter moments in between and you've found yourself laughing at something silly in between, you're realizing you're starting to come back. With my husband, I see it that he's taking care of the plants. With myself, I see it that I'm, you know, really diligent about my spiritual connection and taking care of myself better, setting boundaries, because on the anniversary, the one year anniversary of the fire, I ended up in the hospital with emergency surgery, was going septic, um, and had pancreatitis. And that was a pretty close call for me to recognize that I cannot just always take care of other people, that I also have to take care of myself. We declared in about two months ago that this hard part of the grief was over and that we are now committing ourselves to building. Now, what is so difficult about building is that many of you, and I've spoken to many of the people that are listening through the show at some point or another. I know many of you have gotten a very clear call. You know why you're here. You know that God, spurred universe, whatever you want to call it, has given you a very clear directive of this is where you're supposed to be. The problem is, in order for this to happen, everything that you once were has to break down. That's the concept that I always talk about is the breakdown, the breakthrough, and the breakout. It always happens in these three, it doesn't go any different. The breakdown is brutal. You have to let things go. You cannot do things the way you did them before. It is a challenging path in life to recognize that everything you've done up until now is worthless, useless, no longer relevant. And with a realization you have much deeper questions, who am I? Why am I here? Is this even worth it? Would anybody would anybody worry or would anybody care if I would have said I am gonna close this thing down? And that's it. It just wasn't meant to be. But the thing when you get the call, or you have that strong calling, where are you gonna go? Like, where are you gonna go? There's nowhere for you to go because all it does, it creates more friction, it makes you more upset because you're still in this call, you just don't know what the heck to do with it. All you see is a breakdown. So, what really breaks when we're in moments like this? And I want to be very clear about this, and this is sort of the part where I have to be more honest, and I choose to be more honest because it's not that it's about faking things, but it is about a pretense sometimes where we get attached to the image that we want to portray because we feel that the external circumstances, the hustle culture, the status symbols, the all the things that you have, that they represent who you are. You need them sometimes as crutches. The title, the job, the house, the necklace, the watch. This is something you worked for. This is something you built for yourself to prove that you have a right to be that person. You you're working toward that. But here's the thing: I think there's two pieces we have to understand. One is the double binding message of pretending to be somebody we really don't feel like we are, and the other one is the active person with a vision that we're working toward to. One works, the other one does not. That probably for me was the hardest realization, or is the hardest realization in it. I am still in it. I wished I could give you this conversation from this heighty mighty place of saying, I got it all figured out, just follow these five steps in my signature way. I've built a nice little process around it, and boom, there you go, and you follow that, and all we do is sail in the sunset. But that's not what I'm seeing right now, and that's not what's happening here. What I see in what's happening is that the external pressure right now on our system structures and processes and procedures and how this entire country, how the world really operates, is under really severe scrutiny. I've talked about this excessively and intensely. The structures are breaking, you are here to watch it, and your job is not to do anything other than create. Create the future, create a future you want to live in, create what comes after this. That's your job. So, how do you do that when everything is breaking down? You feel like shit because you go, oh, what do I do now? And then you have to somehow find your way through this place of stillness where you're supposedly having a breakdown, you think you're having a breakthrough, where you're supposed to have a breakthrough. You don't know it's a breakthrough because it doesn't feel like a breakthrough. It feels like complete utter failure because everything's just suddenly come to an absolute standstill. You are now in this point, in this place, in this moment where you have to be completely still. So, what's this really look like? In my case, it is, I said, that I want to bring spirituality and strategy together, because I do believe these two need to need each other. That if you come from this perspective, that your inner alignment with your purpose and your passion and what you're here to do is fully aligned. The universe, spirit, God, energy has no choice but to bring that to you because you envision it, you live it, you believe it, you are it. But you're not it, and you sort of believe it, and you want to be it, but you haven't done it yet. That's the double binding message. That's the message that gets us to our niece. So it's gonna break down regardless, because it has to, it's not yours. And so now you get to this moment where you want to pull out your hair one by one, and you say, What do I really believe in? That's what forces you to really truly believe or not. And you have to account for that belief system to nobody other than yourself. No church, no religion, no prayer or meditation. That's a belief system. That's your North Star, your compass, that's what you truly believe in. And if you don't, and if that is uncertain, then nothing really can happen, then you're gonna just keep staying there. So, how do you get out of this? Welcome to my world. The following the breadcrumbs is really the methodology on how to get out of this place of not knowing, out of this place of what is happening for me, what's coming to me? What do I see that's happening that makes sense? I have uh a woman by the name of Rachel Castro, who called me out of the absolute blue, and she said, I want to learn how to be you. And at first I was offended. And I said, If you think that I'm giving you all my hard-earned IP away, you are sadly mistaken. And yet here I am, what is it, a year and three months after that call? And I have done exactly that. Where my call, my calling, was very clear that I am to give my IP away and all my knowledge that nobody really cares about my ideas, but people that care about how I operate, how I do processes and procedures. So as I do my podcast, I'm realizing that people that have been on my podcast, people that I meet, realize on how connected I am to the operational piece and how much I actually love it. Then I get more and more answers and questions and requests on partnering people with people or doing that. Now, I cannot build everybody's business on the operational side and partner with everybody. That's not the business model that I'm going for. But what I am going for is the business model that helps operate that. So if people come to me after all the pretends, the office, the nice house, after all of this is gone, and they ask me for what? They ask me for how do I create processes, procedures, how do I get people to follow these? How do I use these pieces to grow? Then maybe that's where I need to follow. And that's my message. He's like, that's what's in the still moment of the break through, is that you're required to listen and to ask questions and to stay in this moment of stillness, of saying, like, well, if that's what I asked for, the clarity, and I asked for if it's not mine to break away, please by all means take it all, take it fast. And then I asked for something new to come in, but I don't know what it is. Because if I knew it, I would have done it already. You, as you're sitting in this uncomfortable place, are now supposed to do what? Listen. You're supposed to listen. You're supposed to watch what comes to you. So I tell you what's happening for me. So, number one, I get these calls where people say, Hey, can you can you do this operational piece for me? I'm the fractional COO for my husband's company. And I'm realizing to get a people, to get a business up for acquisition or to get a business ready for, you know, really a scaling process, that in order, you know, when you come in, there's no processes and systems, that you really need to put in about 18 months. That's what it takes to get a business ready for a real scaling operation because you have to design everything, uh, which is a great exercise for me to know how to do that. Because as I, as you can imagine, you know, I love processes and systems. So as I'm doing this, I'm creating processes and systems for processes and systems. This is how obsessed I am with this. And then you sit in this and you um realize that now you come to an even more impossible choice. Because what you want to do is you want to now take these like five, three things, four things, six things, ten things that are coming to you, and you want to go right back to where you were, built the funnel, the lead pages, the this, the that, the that, and do exactly what you did before that didn't work, and that broke down. So you have to restrain yourself. You you cannot do that because you're gonna, if you keep doing that or you go back to that, you're gonna have the exact same result. So you have to shut up. You just have to shut up and sit down and say, okay, I'm gonna be a big girl now. I'm gonna just wait to see what's coming to me. And I get a call from a company that is putting people on a board of directors. And I'm I'm on the board of directors for women in technology Hollywood uh with I'm on the advisory board for two other companies. That's really a place I want to be in a founder space where, you know, where I'm uh on the board of directors. So if you're listening to this and you want, you have a board position, by all means reach out. It's definitely something that I'm interested in doing and I'm I'm already doing and want to do more of. And then that's coming to me. I did nothing for that. But I had envisioned that for years and talked about it for years, and now it is coming to me. I did nothing for it. I had become subscribed as an agency for a CRM called high level. And what that means is that you can build it out in, you know, the way you want it, and then become a reseller, so to speak, for high level. So anybody who who uses the CRM through our forge, which is what we call it, has access to high level and I can set my own prices. Now you can always go to these things directly, or you can get it from me. And what we realized is that over the last couple of years, increasingly so, that people have asked us, how do you do it? How do you do it? How do you do it? Like, what do you exactly do? And then I looked at how much we've created the workflows, the landing pages, the websites. And believe me, I've spent over $400,000 on education on trying to figure all of this out. And most of it's bullshit. Like most of the stuff out there that they teach you how to do, and the, you know, the internet marketing space, it has its place, and and you may need a few things here and there, but that's not a business. You know, none of the stuff that they're selling you, they've never done it. They've hacked an internet marketing scarcity system, took content from other people, and then as they learned how to do it, that became their operational system. None of them, really, none of them, has had success before they became an internet marketer. But now they are successful. And now they can talk about what they've done. But that's not your business. Your business expertise does not come from learning how to be an internet marketer because the success rate is what 0.1% in internet marketing of people that actually make any kind of decent money because it's mostly not aligned with anybody. And you, the amount of the quantity then you need to push through it is very rarely true for most people. How many clients do you need? If you had five clients that paid you $100,000, if you have 10 clients that paid you $100,000, you'd probably be pretty happy. And uh, if you can scale that up, and then you have 20 clients, 30 clients that pay you $100,000, and you have a couple employees, believe me, that'll be a pretty, pretty darn good life. So it's always also the question, what it is that you want. And that's, I think, this breakthrough moment is for you to get a little bit more real about what's really true about what's being said out there and what is not true for you. What is true for me is that it is uncomfortable. I can freaking stand it. And I wished I was out on the other side. I wished I could tell you all the great things that come out of it. But I am 3,144 items into a list where I had to look at every photo that I ever taken and every photo that was ever taken in our home. And I had to look through it with a magnifying glass and go, oh, that's the bull from Spain. Those are the giraffes from Africa, that's the bull from Mexico, that's the blanket from Mexico, that is the necklace with a panther and the diamond in it that my father gave me. That's my communion cross from when I, you know, received communion in the Catholic Church when I was a child. And you realize that all of the stuff is gone. Let me just tell you that's pretty sobering. Talk about, you know, acknowledging your loss and talk about acknowledging all of this. I was actually wondering the other day, as I'm sitting there, you know, and you have to imagine, like you're you're looking at me, you know, if you're watching this on video, you're seeing me, and then literally in front of me, there is a pile of coins and and burnt stuff because I'm going through everything right now and uh capturing it for the insurance because we need to now bring our insurance list in so we can get the estimate for the house. I mean, how much money we have and what we what we actually can build and what we cannot build. So it's uh it's a process, it's a hard, hard process. So, but I know this because it designed the system, the breakdown, the breakthrough, the breakout. So I know the breakout is coming next. So, what is this conversation today about? This conversation is about these are the times we are in. You are not alone. I am sharing this uh so honestly with you because uh I cannot uh uh uh pretend it is anything different, it is too big. Do not pretend if it's happening, it's happening. It's happening for a reason. And instead of looking at it and being upset, see if you can look. Look at it as the transformation with curiosity. What is coming to you? What do you feel resonating with you? Where is this leading you? What are you going to lead in? Follow the breadcrumbs. This stage of receiving versus pushing. You know, I said we are no longer in the persuasion business. We are in the resonance business. If you want to create resonance, you need to create the vibration that then allows others that vibrate on that same vibration to come to you. But if you push, you're right back in your old behavior pattern and the energy vaporizes. That, my friends, is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Is to sit here and to believe and know that my call with a complete catastrophic breakdown leads me to the space of breaking through to something I have no idea what it is, how big it is, but I am being asked to believe. Wasn't that the theme of Ted Lasso? Isn't that the theme of every religion, every spiritual concept, every face, faith-based idea? What do you really believe in? And with that comes then the testing. So what we're doing now, and and you know, I'm being so open because I want you to test it out. And you want, you know, come and tell me if it works or not. So we're doing masterclasses. We thrown out the webinar format. And we are now making them literally Zoom interactive formats with learning and interaction and conversation to really understand where people are at. We are looking into where people, what their emotions are, where they're feeling stuck. I want to hear what this really looks like. I always wonder: is what I'm hearing really true? What is somebody struggling with? And so my next masterclass is on AI, artificial intelligence. And that comes from, you know, again, Rachel just point blank asking me. He's like, hey, can you show us where you use AI and how you use it and what you've learned? For me, this is like, I'm a prestigious person. AI was made for me. You know, it just fits seamlessly in into everything that I already do. Duh, but it may not be for you. So you're invited. Uh, go to your businessmc.com and we have a couple of classes we rotate. So depending on when you're listening to this podcast, uh, sign up so that you get on the list and we can tell you when we are running the next one on it. But we're running one on the forges, the business stages, we're running one on diagnosing where your business is at and what might be misaligned, and then we're running one on AI, we've done one on selling. So we've got a couple of them that we're rotating, and I'd love to have you in there. So that's really my show for today. Were you to let go of this idea of what you thought this would look like? Can you lean in to believing that what will emerge is better? What would it take for you to have that kind of faith, belief system in yourself, in a religion, in a spiritual concept? I don't really care. People have a different way of going at it. I do believe in God. I know things are connected, I get very clear, clear information. And that's what I'm here to share today is if you're in a tough spot, don't give up. And if you are seeing the breadcrumbs, pick them up, follow them, see where they lead you, and believe that you're here to make an impact and that it's not for nothing, that there is a way, but that because the world is changing in such a dramatic transformational moment, that perhaps your time has not arrived yet, or your time is just emerging, or your center stage is just coming forward. And that's my message for you today. And uh, over this weekend, I will be going and finishing this list. So I have it out of my hair that I'm gonna go on vacation to Germany. And I hope you're gonna get some much-needed time off and some rest. And when we see each other again, then we'll go ahead and we'll hopefully see you in a masterclass or in a program. Or if you need a SAS, a CRM, reach out to us. We made it super affordable. We made it very easy. We have a whole team that follows it, but I'll leave that for another time. I just wanted to really share with you where I'm at right now and uh give you a fire update. I can see there is a light. It's ever so small, but we're walking toward it. I appreciate you. I thank you so much for your time, for your support, for your love, for your care, for you being here, for supporting this. And please do leave comments, share the episode if you know somebody who's a bit in a funk right now or is trying to get out of something or doesn't know how to, you know, get out of this static moment. And I'll see you again next time. And goodbye.