BUILDING THROUGH IT
What it actually takes to build a company while your own life is still remaking itself.
People often assume my reinvention was about becoming more confident.
It wasn’t.
I have walked into boardrooms my entire career believing I belonged there. I have negotiated acquisitions, led companies, made impossible decisions, and trusted my instincts long before someone else validated them.
My name is Erika Hanafin Austria. I have run this playbook for two decades. What changed at forty-two was not my confidence at work. It was my confidence in my own life.
For years, I could defend a business strategy in five minutes. I could not defend a personal decision without collecting opinions first.
A therapist. A friend. A family member. Another article. Another sign. Another opinion. Somewhere along the way, I had accepted the idea that everyone else was more qualified to interpret my life than I was.
I wasn’t apologizing for my ambition. I was apologizing for my knowing.
The question I get most from women who are building something is not how did you get through it. It is how did you build through it. How did you keep publishing while the marriage was ending. How did you launch a workbook the month you were signing separation papers. How did you sit on a board and interview a podcast guest and pack lunches and trademark an idea on the same Tuesday.
The honest answer is not more discipline. Discipline is what everyone assumes and it is the wrong tool. Discipline was the first thing that broke.
What actually held was operator posture. The exact operator posture I had already trained for twenty years inside companies. The one that says a decision belongs to the person closest to the work. The one that says vague objectives kill teams. The one that says you do not add a new initiative without first cutting an old one.
The rebuild was not the introduction of new skills. It was the application of the skills I already had at work to the parts of my life I had been running like a well-meaning intern.
The version of me who left the marriage was not braver. She was not more sure. She was the same operator who had negotiated five acquisitions, sitting down inside her own life with the same notebook.
She wrote a P and L for her time. She wrote a scope of work for her mothering. She wrote a decision log for the two-house rebuild. She defined the constraints and stopped pretending they were negotiable.
She named the metric that mattered, which children got which parent on which weekday, and everything else moved to make it possible. That is not resilience. That is prioritization. It is what any operator does when the ground moves and the mission stays.
The empire that came out of that year did not come from grinding harder. It came from cutting harder. Every brand I now run was built on top of a no I said the year before. No to the speaking gigs that were flattering but off-mission. No to the consulting client who wanted me to be someone else’s COO instead of my own. No to the workbook I had promised myself I would write in a form I had already outgrown.
No is how the yes gets a runway. That is not a mindset shift. That is a resource allocation shift. It is the same operator move I have made a hundred times inside companies. I had just never trusted myself to make it inside my own life.
The identity I grieved hardest was not the wife. It was the woman who thought the plan was a form of love. The woman who mistook the plan for safety. The woman who believed that if she just executed hard enough, the version of the life she had projected would arrive on schedule.
Grieving her was harder than grieving the marriage. Because you can name a marriage. You can put a marriage in a folder called before. But you cannot put yourself in a folder called before. You have to keep walking around inside her. You have to keep meeting her in the mirror at forty-two and choosing not to be her anymore.
The identity I did not know I was going to discover was the one who could hold both. The operator who could also love. The mother who could also lead. The woman who could run an acquisition and still cry over the way her nine-year-old bonus son said her name for the first time.
Not either / or.
Not a version of me who abandoned the ambition to soften into the mother, and not a version of me who abandoned the mother to protect the ambition. Both. At the same time. On the same Tuesday morning. Same body. Same life.
The thing I stopped apologizing for was my knowing. The thing I started saying yes to was the morning walk with my husband and the baby, outside, early. The breakfast the kids eat together, every morning. The workout that is mine.
Every empire I have ever built was built inside the small window before the day starts running someone else’s script. That window is not a productivity hack. It is a governance model. It is how you keep the mission from getting outvoted by other people’s requests. If you cannot find the window, you do not have a discipline problem. You have a design problem. And design problems get solved on paper before they get solved in your body.
The women writing to me right now who are trying to build something in the middle of their own rebuild do not need me to tell them to keep going. They know they are going to keep going. What they need is the framework that turns keep going from a feeling into an operating model. That is what I finally wrote down.
You do not have to keep going alone. You do not have to keep starting over from the same place. You just have to run your life the way an operator would run it. And operators, the good ones, run things on frameworks. Not on willpower.
I wrote the framework down. It lives with the rest of my tools at in my Library, for the morning you are ready for it.
MOMumentally,
Erika Hanafin Austria
Founder · MOMumental Moments® · The PHASE™
Publisher · MOMumental Reinvention
Board Member · Luminary · Pepperdine University SEC · Next ChaptHER
@erikahanafin · @thisisphaseco