Entrepreneurship without Burnout with Shulamit Ber Levtov

Racheal Cook: Hey there, CEOs, Rachel Cook here, founder of the CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast. And today I have a very, very special guest. I am so excited to have this conversation with Shulamit Ber Levtov. She is someone who came into my world over a decade ago when I first launched the Fired Up and Focus Challenge, and she recently reached out to me wanting to talk about mental health for entrepreneurs.
And I was like, yes, absolutely, yes, because right now we are in the middle of yet again more unprecedented times where there is so much uncertainty, there is so much volatility going on in the world. There's so much that's hitting and impacting small business owners and we are especially in the place where if we don't watch our mental health, if we're not taking great care of ourselves, we will not be able to continue long term. We have talked on this podcast about burnout and how to prevent burnout. We have talked on this podcast about leveling up your self care about making sure that you are staying grounded so that you can lead as a grounded CEO instead of firing off very highly reactive, triggered responses to things that are showing up in your business.
And I'm really, really thrilled to have Shula here to talk with you today. So Shula is a culture change catalyst, speaking in education on the intersection of mental health and entrepreneurship. She works with women business owners to preserve their peace of mind as they ride the emotional rollercoaster of running a business.
She has been where you are. She has been an entrepreneur for over 30 years, has more than 24 years of experience applying therapeutic coaching and somatic tools to support women's mental health and personal growth. She speaks, teaches and consults on the intersection of entrepreneurship, mental health, trauma, financial psychology, and incubators, accelerators, business programs and conferences locally, nationally, and internationally as an award-winning entrepreneur, master's level, trauma therapist and trauma survivor with certifications in the trauma of money, financial, social work, and nonviolent communication and yoga.
Shula brings a unique perspective and approach to supporting women in business. I love this conversation with Shula. It was just such a wonderful reminder of how important this work is, and if you are feeling incredibly stressed out, if you are feeling incredibly reactive right now, this is something you're going to want to listen to because we all need the reminders to put ourselves first in our life first.
Business. All right. I can't wait for you to listen to this one everyone. I'm so excited that I got this email a few weeks ago from a longtime client who worked with me over a decade ago. But this is what happens when you are in business for the long haul. You end up reconnecting with people who came in and out of your life and your business.
And when Shula reached out to me, I was like, yes, please. We need to have you on the podcast to talk about mental health burnout, anxiety, all of the things that a lot of small business owners are struggling with these days. So Shula, welcome to promote yourself to CEO.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: Thanks, Rachel. I do have to say that you mentioned, you know, this is what happens when you're in it for the long haul, but this is what happens also when you Rachel teach perennial, perennially applicable principles, business principles. Right. That I continued to apply from the very first thing I did with you, which was the fired up and focus challenge twice, and it was free.
And it set the foundation for my day-to-day structures in my business. And then the training that I took, the business planning, training, and strategy still, you know, it set the foundation for where I am and it's because it's not, it wasn't responsive to like the trends of the moment. It was fully grounded and that's why I chose to work with you because you have MBA, you know, business. You're not a coach telling coaches how to sell coaching, you know?
Racheal Cook: Well, I appreciate that so much and I hear it so often. It's so funny to me. I created that in 2014, the fired up in Focus challenge, and it continues to be something that people are like, yeah, I remember I took the very first one way back when. And when you came into my world, you weren't known as the entrepreneur's therapist. No. So I would love for you to share a little bit of your story and how you got to where you are now as the entrepreneur's therapist.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: Sure. Thank you for asking. And it actually ties right in with the theme of mental health. So when I came to work with you, I was a yoga teacher, but also a therapist and I was integrating therapy and some of the yoga practices. I was a long time yoga practitioner. And I ultimately developed a group. A holistic clinic, a group practice where we had, including therapists, some of whom are also yoga teachers.
But at a certain point, actually it was August, 2020, completely unrelated to Covid. The business was flourishing. It was doing really well, but I was a wreck because on the inside, as many folks who are listening will know, you know, when you're wearing all the hats and doing all the things, it can be extraordinarily stressful.
And while I had good systems and structures in place, I was missing some of the elements that I needed, and the toll on my mental health was quite significant. And so there were a couple of pivotal moments, which for the sake of brevity, I won't detail here, but they were kind of a wake up call and ultimately I decided to exit that business.
It's still running, but I'm no longer associated with it. And take a month of stress leave. Reconsider what? How do I want to focus my skills now? And I thought about my personal experience with mental health and business. I thought about all the other entrepreneurs I had met in your program and other programs who talked, who would whisper to me because it's not something we talk about.
So they would, because I was a therapist, they thought I was approachable and would tell me about their stress and their mental health challenges. And I thought. There's a gap. We need mental health professionals who understand the impact of entrepreneurship on mental health and how to mitigate, given the conditions we work under.
The traditional advice doesn't work for us as entrepreneurs, as business owners, as self-employed folks, and that's how the entrepreneurs therapist was born.
Racheal Cook: It's amazing and I love that you saw that gap and that need because you're absolutely right. I think this is something a lot of small business owners feel very like unsupported in general.
They lack that support system, that community, people that can really help them navigate the ups and downs and you know, we all join networking groups or masterminds or things like that, but when it comes to more serious mental health challenges. You really need to have somebody who understands trauma, who understands anxiety, or OCD or depression or any of these things that can become very debilitating in a business setting, like running a small business.
They can kind of take you out for periods of time, and unfortunately, I've watched not only a lot of people go through these ups and downs, but I've seen a lot of people exit because they didn't have the support that they really needed to continue going.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: Yeah, a hundred percent. It's sad. It's sad because the way, and I know you teach differently, and at the same time, the running a business takes place in a, in a system, right?
In a way, a way of thinking where hustle and extraction and productivity, toxic productivity prevail. And so even though people are supported in their business programs and thinking about things differently. When you choose someone who shares your values, you still are operating your business in a system that is counter to slow business, careful business, business that meets your needs and not some external standards. But the conflict between the two creates a lot of stress for people because then they start, especially women entrepreneurs, I have to say. They doubt themselves. They doubt the validity of their business.
They doubt their capacity. They think I'm a crappy business owner. Why aren't things going well for me? Instead of recognizing like the water and that they're swimming in and the role that that plays and actually part of the work of mediating the mental health impacts of entrepreneurship when I work one-on-one is to support people in distinguishing between what is actually your quote unquote fault and how where is it that external factors are affecting you? And you are feeling those effects, but it's not because you are at fault.
Racheal Cook: That is so important and I a thousand percent agree with what you're saying. It's interesting because as I've continued on my own business journey and really as I started my own work doing like anti-racism work, anti-capitalism work, all of these things. You start to really see how much hustle culture has actually damaged our perception of what small business and entrepreneurship should be.
It has all these promises of you're going to have so much money, you're going to build this massive empire, but at what cost? Right? And it really ignores the systemic, especially here in the us the lack of systemic support. And that provides even more stress on small business owners, especially like you said, women, small business owners, the things that really impact us.
Yes, we have very little access to business funding or business support, but we also have lacks of access to healthcare, to childcare, to all these systemic things that hold us back from getting where we want to go. So it's really interesting when you start to see that, you know, and you start to, for me, deprogram, the MBA out of myself, which was very much like the hustle culture, the very typical capitalist corporate structure.
Now shifting to how do we make things actually sustainable for us on a very human level? How do we make sure we are actually cared for when the structures in our society aren't there to support us. It's a big lift. And one of the things I really wanted to talk to you about Shula is I find in the entrepreneurship space, especially the space, I'm, there's a million coaches out there, but I hear over and over again people getting frustrated because when they bump up against something in their business, they're blamed that it's their mindset.
Your mindset is the reason you're not getting where you want to go. I want your take on this.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: Steam is coming out of my ears. Oh my goodness.
Racheal Cook: It makes me so angry because most of the time, sorry, Savannah is walking around behind me. I don't know if you can hear her little toenails clicking on the floor.
Most of it's so, it's such a like farce, that they don't actually have anything real to support people other than to say, well, you just need to work on your mindset more. To me, that says most of the time they don't know enough about business or about strategy or about that person's business, but I also think they're lumping mindset in with actual mental health challenges, actual other challenges that people are having.
So I want to hear your take on this.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: Well, I do, I do agree that we actually, how we think about things has a significant impact on how we behave and that we can change how we think about things. But there's a process to that. And so, you know, again, to start, discernment is one of them. What is it that, what is it that is located inside me and what is located outside of me?
And then put putting the shame and blame that you're feeling around what's outside, actually outside where it belongs. And then you can sort of exhale, but then there's the pain or the difficulty or the distress of how you're affected by all these difficult things. So we need to then care for that distress to offer ourselves, like this is the thing I say to everybody.
There's nothing wrong with you. How? Because women come to me and say like, I don't understand what my problem is. Why am like, why am I upset? Why am I anxious? Why am I depressed? Either this is, it is what it is. So what's my problem with it? Or what am I broken? Because I've been fine up until now. And the thing is.
How you're feeling now is exactly what we would expect. Someone who's been through what you've been through and who's experiencing what you're experiencing now. That's exactly how we would expect you to feel. So you might feel crappy and there's nothing wrong with you. I, and I integrate this into every talk I do, every podcast interview I do, every work I do with every one-on-one client, every program I teach, everything, because it really starts there.
So the first thing you can say to yourself is to acknowledge that I'm feeling distressed. Just the acknowledgement of like, right. Okay. That's what's happening right now. I'm feeling distressed. And then even now, just I'm taking a breath, you know, because it feels good to do that. And you might find that that's what happened.
And then the next thing you can say to yourself is, there's nothing wrong with me. Being a business owner is hard work. So of course there are going to be hard moments. Working and trying to lift a business under current conditions, is extraordinarily difficult. So no wonder I'm going to feel stressed or anxious or depressed or afraid.
No wonder. No wonder it's absolutely okay and normal to be feeling how I'm feeling. And that's the way you can begin to start with the mindset work. Because for example, you can be thinking, coming into something, you know, you can be throwing your hands up and have this panic look on your face and being like it.
How do you change your quote unquote disaster mindset? Well, first of all, you care for yourself and just make the little move that I described, and then you can maybe say, okay, so certain things about this are not going the way I want them to. Right? I'm feeling panicky and stressed about my business and it's okay.
So what's my next right step? And again, that's a beginning to change the mindset from, it's a disaster to, okay, the problem isn't solved, but what can I do right here, right now for myself? And the next step might be, for example, if they're in your programs and they have a one-to-one relationship with you, is to book a call with you.
To say, I've account, I've encountered a barrier. Something's happening and I need support to talk it through. You can get on the, get on Voxer with your biz bestie. You can show up at your next therapy appointment, whatever the very next right step is. It's very hard to see when you're freaking out, right?
Racheal Cook: Yep.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: So that's just an example of quote unquote mindset work on the fly.
Racheal Cook: I love that. And this is something I have learned over the years, you know, because I think as a business owner, there's so much coming at us. It's really easy to get quickly triggered and to then start feeling bad, especially when there's so much messaging out there that you have to stay high vibe.
You have to have, you know, only positive mindset. And the reality is shit is going to be hard sometimes. Sometimes shit's going to hit the fan, sometimes something's going to go wrong. Sometimes you're going to disappoint somebody or you're going to have a conflict of some sort. But if you are trying to stay in business for the long haul, you've got to learn how to manage yourself. And you've got to learn how to manage your emotional state. And that means recognizing the trigger. Like you might not ever be able to stop getting triggered. Right. But you can always, like you said know how to resource yourself when you are getting triggered.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: Well in business quite rightly, because business is a survival situation, business and money are tied to self-worth and survival.
So when your survival or your self-worth is threatened, you're quite rightly going to have the appropriate nervous system survival response. Okay. So it's completely normal and actually good and beneficial to have this kind of response, whatever your response is, to whatever bad thing is happening.
But the thing around positive vibes, what really gets me about that is when the positive vibes only crowd responds quite negatively to stress and pain and difficulty by squashing it, by making it wrong and bad. And I want to flip this whole toxic positivity thing on its head, the positive response. This is where you can be positive.
The truly positive response to stress and difficulty negativity, right, is to say, oh, hello. I can see that I'm in distress. I can see there's some distress here. Let me be kind to myself. That's the positive response to a quote unquote negative situation. That's how you turn something negative in quotes into something positive is by bringing kindness, and this is as much to your friends and family and your kids as it is to yourself that that's the true.
High vibes only is to respond with kindness to whatever's there, especially distress and difficulty.
Racheal Cook: Yes. I think this is so important, like before we take it, because that's where I see entrepreneurs self-sabotaging a lot. They get triggered by something and instead of doing that sort of self acknowledgment, oh, this is what's happening to me, and taking a moment to resource themself in whatever way they need, whether it's calling their therapist or a friend, or a coach or whoever doing something to get grounded.
They go into reaction mode and then it's like they take a shovel and dig themselves a little deeper and it just kind of can spiral even more. Right? And this is something that I feel like you, you just have to first know that there's a different way to do it. There's a different way. Instead of digging yourself deeper if something's happening, you don't have to react immediately.
You can always pause and get some support. But especially right now, I feel like people they're either reactive, so in that fight or flight or they're freezing up. And this is another challenge I'm seeing, especially right now cause they don't want to mess it up. They don't want to do something wrong. Right. You know, we have so much going on in the world, so many different breaking news things, hitting all the time. But it can make some entrepreneurs freeze and there does come a point where you can freeze maybe for a little bit, right? Long term, your business will survive if you just shut down.
So how? How can someone who is maybe finding themselves in that, where instead of having that trigger reactiveness, they're shutting down. They're stuck. Yeah, they're stuck. How would you recommend people get out of that?
Shulamit Ber Levtov: In general, what I would recommend is, you know, you, you recommend CEO dates on a regular basis.
Right. I do weekly, monthly, quarterly reviews and, and then I do like six months in a year. So I'm assuming that people who are listening to you already have the idea of checking in with their business on a regular basis. And the way I teach mental health in business for entrepreneurs is that you identify what your KPIs are for your mental health, what your lead and lag indicators are.
That is to say what affects your mental health. Like what has an impact on your mental health that's external to you, and what are the things you do to care for yourself? So those are your lead and lag indicators. Once you know what those things are, once a week when you do your weekly review, you take a little five minutes and you just look at your list of indicators.
Orient yourself to what's happening and how you're affected by it, and what is it that I need to do in the coming period, assuming a week to make that, to make sure that I am in general resourced. Because you, you're, I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of the window of resilience. Where most people's nervous systems kind of float up and down between this space in which they have capacity, and there are ups and there downs, but they're never overwhelmed.
But when you're overloaded, you end up outside your window of resilience. And then this is where we find the fight, flight, freeze fa responses occurring, but to roll it back before the crap hits the fan. If you are checking in with yourself on a regular basis once a week to see how am I doing actually, where am I in my window of resilience, right from zero to 10, where am I?
Am I doing well? Am I like 10 out of 10 and ready to, you know, freeze or flop or freak out when you know that ahead of time you can intervene. Not only in the moment, but also as a baseline. Like there are baseline things we do in our business that just keep the business going. There are baseline things we need to do to care for ourselves.
And once you have a system instructor to support you in doing that, then you can be attuned to yourself and you can intervene earlier and with much greater impact so that most of the time you won't end up in the extremes of reactivity. But if you are freezing what will often happen, people feel really shut down.
They feel maybe depression, they might feel shame also. And the antidote, especially to shame and these kinds of shut downy things is as in when you're able to do, is to reach out for a sense of belonging and connection. So you don't even have to address the issues in your business yet. The very first step is a self-care, or we might call, we might call it a regulation step.
Of offering yourself that sense of connection where you are seen and held with kindness and care by someone so that then the self-criticism can slow down a little bit. The, you can start to come awake a little bit in the warmth, like it's like a plant that got frost and you put the sun on it and the frost melts and the plant kind of stands up. It's a bit like that. When you offer yourself a sense of connection and belonging with someone else, you, you can come back to yourself and back to your sense of yourself. And then again, at that moment it would be to ask yourself, what's the next right step here? But the very first thing is caring for your nervous system and your emotional state, not taking steps in your business.
Racheal Cook: I think this is so great that you just shared this and I heard two things I want to ask for examples for. So what I heard was, you've got to know what like your self-care checklist. What is it that you need to take care of yourself? Which I know sounds so simple to everyone listening, but in reality, like I find a lot of us are so used to putting ourselves last on the list.
And when we get stressed out, those self-care things, the basics, sleep, hydration, eating, well, you know, all those things kind of fly out the window when we're stressed out. But I'm also hearing like you need to pay attention to maybe some red flags. Like what are your red flags when
Shulamit Ber Levtov: red and green?
Racheal Cook: Yeah. So what gets you in into those, you know, highly stressful states. Yeah. Versus what keeps you calm and regulated.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: Yes, a hundred percent. And a lot of people like don't really know. I, a long, long time ago I had a client who, this is like an anonymized kind of like amalgam. This client is amalgam of stories and experiences of, of a number of clients. But I'll say I had this one client who had experienced an injury unrelated to work and was, suddenly unable to cope with all the stressors of every day and didn't understand why they didn't what was the matter with them, and it was only really two sessions of working together because in the first session, they realized, oh, the thing I used to do was play squash. I loved it. It was fun. It was social, and it enabled me to move my body. It was my meditative time that really gave me the capacity to address my week.
And the fact that I can't do squash anymore means I have no other coping. That was my only coping mechanism, and I didn't even realize that's what it was. And now I'm like, oh, the light is on. I'm injured, so I can't play squash right now, but what am I going to put in its place and what's life going to look like as I continue to recover?
Right? Unless you actually know that squash was your thing, and when you lose, it's like during Covid, right? There were so many of us who lost access to our coping mechanisms, didn't really realize that those were the things that kept us going. And if you didn't take an inventory, if you didn't pay attention.
This information wasn't available to you in a way that you could use it, but if you know, you know and then you're empowered, right?
Racheal Cook: Absolutely. I think this is a level of self-awareness that we all need, and unfortunately I see a lot of people that are just so used to self neglect and aren't aware,
Shulamit Ber Levtov: and this is why I'm saying it has to be integrated into your business plans. Absolutely. And processes. You do it when you do your business stuff because you and your business are not separate.
Racheal Cook: Absolutely. And I also find, you know, this is why in our CEO date checklist we have, what is your self care for this week? Yeah. Who are you connecting with this week?
Because I truly believe, and I've seen over and over again, that's why we completely restructured the way we run my business, is because there is something incredible about bringing a community of people together where they can co-regulate. And I didn't even know that's what we were doing until one of my therapists in the program said The reason why the retreats are so great is cause everybody's co-regulate, everybody's, you know, feeding off of each other's energy in a, a really positive, beautiful way.
And I think for a lot of small business owners, they're very isolated.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: Yes.
Racheal Cook: They, they lack that real community and support system, and I think this is something that is so important to talk about because we aren't meant to do this alone.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: No.
Racheal Cook: We just aren't, we aren't meant to do life alone business. You can't run that by yourself. Alone. It's nearly impossible. Like we all exist within commun some sort of community, but being connected to that community is really, really powerful. When we're thinking about our coping mechanisms as small business owners, I often hear from people they don't have time. This is the excuse they like to give.
I don't have time to take a break. I don't have time for rest. I don't have time to you know, do the self-care things. They love to use the, I don't have time, excuse as if someday that time is going to magically manifest and it's never going to. But what do you say to people? Because I know you've heard that before too, people love the don't have time, excuse.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: Yeah. And this is part of the discourse around self-care that is so deeply problematic that you have to engage in self-care. Because if you do, then you will be well. And if you're not well, it's your fault cause you didn't engage in self-care. And I know many, many women business owners really value mental health and emotional wellbeing and physical wellbeing.
It's not that they don't care about it, but that they aren't able to prioritize it because of the fear response around survival, that business stuff. This is what happens when we're in scarcity. When you're in scarcity of time and money, your thinking is in a tunnel that's focused directly on the survival moment, and any of the longer term goals are outside the tunnel.
And so this is again, why I say that mental healthcare for entrepreneurs needs to be integrated into your business plans and processes. And so that means rethinking what self-care means. Self-care is taking the 30 seconds to do the little thing that I described at the beginning of this call.
You have nobody, nothing is going to happen in two minutes. When you take that, that moment to place your gentle hand on your heart space, take a breath or two and acknowledge what's happening, and validate your experience. That's all it takes. It could also take like a five minute chair dance, which is a mood, a mood induction technique.
You pick a song, you shut all your notifications down, you close your eyes and just wiggle in your chair while you've got the headphones on. Listening to a song, it, it's walking to the bathroom, going to get a cup of tea and standing looking outside the window while you hold the cup of tea in your hands.
What we need is moment by moment experiences that rather than intellectually, physiologically engage our senses and our body. To count and that send us the, oh, it's okay. Message to counterbalance, the constant onslaught of the dings and the emails and the clients, and the tasks, and the deadlines, and the due dates, and the meetings and the notifications, right?
Those are all demand messages. And so the, the, as far as I'm concerned, the name of the game is these micro moments in the course of your day to rethink self-care. It's not spas, although it Yes, go spa. I mean, it could be, yes. But it's, it's that and more. It's self-kindness. It's how you actually relate to yourself and it's the little moment by moment experiments in the course of your day that send you the message.
Oh, that's right. There is no bear. I'm not a bunny. My inner bunny's freaking out, but I can soothe and nourish that bunny and it only takes a couple minutes, but a couple minutes, many times a day in addition to some of the other bigger things that we do,
Racheal Cook: and I think this is where a lot of entrepreneurs get very stuck in like all or nothing thinking, like it doesn't, it's, it's kind of like a workout doesn't count if it's not an hour long.
I'm like, well, sometimes a five minute walk is what you got, you know, and this is something I think our whole society has just pushed so hard that you have to go big or go home, all or nothing. Little things don't seem to matter as much as doing the big trip to the spa or whatever. But I agree with you a thousand percent.
I do think it's finding those little pockets of peace through your day, giving yourself these little micro breaks. I find that's really what keeps me grounded. And also having those little spaces of transition time are so important for me, like transitioning from home life to work life to home life, those types of things.
I find, I remember your rituals Yes. Are so essential. Especially because, you know, trying to get kids out the door is hectic in the morning. If I were to go from getting kids out the door to sitting down to the computer right away, but I haven't taken my time to go on my walk, get myself something to eat.
Coffee is not breakfast everyone. Coffee is not breakfast. Like if, if I were trying to just go, go, go straight into it, I'm like, then I'm starting my day with my brain racing. And that just triggers all sorts of anxiety and stress that I don't need. That's not how I want to show up for my business, or for my clients, or for my team.
So I love what you're saying here. It's those little pockets of peace, those little moments of finding calm, finding grounding, just as it becomes more important.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: Yes. And coming back to what you were saying about deconstructing idea at the beginning, you know about deconstructing ideas of about how things should be in business and what success means and what you need to do in order to succeed.
Like a lot of us have this sense of urgency that comes from the survival, imperative, right? And that's right, it's right and good that we should have this survival imperative. And once we orient to ourselves like, oh yes, I can see that my survival imperative has kicked in and it's making me think I need to rush and I need to pressure myself.
I have to work at a very demanding pace. You can say hello to that part of you that's worried for your safety and your security and acknowledge that yes, of course you're, and of course, like my safety matters and the idea that I have to do this that way. While there is the safety imperative, there's also the idea, the external ideas that we absorb unquestioned and like.
We are, none of us, I can safely say none of my clients are aiming to build huge multinational corporations. Those kinds of businesses are the minority of businesses. 80% of businesses in Canada, and I think it's the same for the US as well, are small to medium sized businesses who have fewer than 10 employees.
Many of them, the majority women owned. We are not up against some deadline with an initial, what do they call it? An IPO, you know, or things like that. There may be moments when we have that, but as a general rule in our day-to-day, that's not our situation. And to reorient to the fact that actually I'm choosing to, I don't, there is no external timetable.
There is my timetable and I can stay faithful to my timetable and my values and that's where having the cup of tea or the cup, even your coffee in the morning. Like for me, it's a latte, a homemade latte, and I like, and I take like a half an hour with that in the morning and I get up on purpose in order to be able to have that quiet time where I orient myself to my values and to my own sense of time and space and my own business.
And I would recommend that everybody take this moment as part of their ritual where they remember in the true sense of remembering, they put back together the pieces of their own value system and and say, and reorient and go, right. That's the idea about rushing. Is not my idea. That's not how I do things, right.
This is how I want to do things. I'm going to do things this way. Right? And then you get grounded in your values and your way of doing things, and then you can move forward in the way that you want.
Racheal Cook: Yes. This is why we need to keep talking about this because I find so many of the like business icons out there they were the ones who rushed for the IPO, who were focused on, you know, scaling these massive organizations, selling their businesses for millions or billions of dollars. And that's great for them. But the vast majority of small business owners are not trying to do that. They're trying to build a business that pays them a great livelihood with a great lifestyle, and actually allows them to take care of their people, the people they love and take care of themselves. We're not trying to build like the next Amazon here. So why are we working like we are, why are we trying to model something that's so out of alignment with what most people are actually wanting?
It doesn't make sense to me, but I think again, it's so easy to get kind of caught up in that hustle culture because it's dominant. The predominant thing. And also I want to say like for a lot of women entrepreneurs we're really the first, I want to say the last 20 years of entrepreneurship has been the biggest push for women entrepreneurs.
So a lot of women entrepreneurs have not had models to follow. They haven't seen anyone doing what they're doing. Even though we have had some great women CEOs in the much larger business space, you know, books are written about them. We talk about Sarah Blakely to Death. We talk about Oprah to death, but we sometimes really struggle to find role models of women who are doing it differently.
And I find it's often because the ones who have the life you want and the business you want are, are very quiet and under the radar. They're not trying to make a lot of noise about it, so you kind of have to seek them out a little bit to find those role models and realize it is possible for you to do that too long term with your business.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: And a little parenthesis, there are seasons even in our businesses when we do work hard and long, harder and longer, because there are moments when that's appropriate. The main message is that that's not how we should be living.
Racheal Cook: It's a season.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: It's a season.
Racheal Cook: Yes. I love that we just said that in unison. It really isn't a season, and I think that's what I'm really wanting people to know as we're going through this current season.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: Yes.
Racheal Cook: We'll get through it. Right. It reminds me so much of the pandemic, a lot of the emotional response I'm seeing from small business owners right now reminds me so much of the pandemic just because there was so much uncertainty. Buying behavior changed a lot. People were slowing down their, their buying for a while and then it ticked back up. But I think when you're in business for a long time, you've been in business for a long time, I've been in business for a long time. You start to realize like business is cyclical, and this idea that it's just going to be like a straight line skyrocketing up all the time is unrealistic for a lot of businesses.
There's going to be those ups and downs, those ebbs and flows, and over time the line goes up, but it doesn't mean you're not going to like have some seasons where you have to do a little more Like right now. You might have to show up more. You might have to be more visible. You might have to do more personal outreach than you had to a couple years ago.
But it's a season. It doesn't mean it's forever. It will change and evolve and people and their behavior will change and evolve. So knowing that gives a lot of freedom, I think, to the small business owners who are feeling like, why is nothing working? Why is everything feel so hard right now? It's just a season.
You'll be okay. We'll be okay.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: And I think also, what okay means. We have to take a look at that as well. There was a time in my business when I lost access, access to all credit. It was the last Friday in February in the afternoon, I sat down to do my bookkeeping for that month and opened my bank's website and all my credit had been frozen and I was facing having to do things cash only.
Just to jump to the end, it turned out okay, but in the moment I was freaking out. But I was also 50 and thank God I was, because in that moment I could look back over my life and see that I'd been through much adversity. Much adversity, like many women have been, have experienced much adversity and difficulty in their lives.
And I saw that even though many things didn't turn out the way I had planned, or the way I had wanted to or the way I hoped that they would, and it wasn't all roses and butterflies ultimately I, me, myself was okay. And my sense of myself was okay. And that's the thing I think that I want people to take away from really difficult times.
In addition to the fact that there's nothing wrong with you is to consider that even if your business does fail, you still will be okay. It'll be difficult and painful. I'm not saying it'll be a picnic. But I invite you to look back for the evidence that you have been in, in okay through all these difficult things in your past, including in your business, the ups and downs, and to know that like you can be, it's within you to be okay even if the worst were to happen and you had to close your business, that you can come out okay.
Racheal Cook: And this is what I have also seen my own experience, just the way I react to things now in my forties, very different from how I react to things in my early twenties or early thirties, even when I was a new business owner.
Because you didn't know what you didn't know. Right? And you also honestly, starting a business the first few years, there's so much you don't know and there's so much you don't know about yourself, right? Like there's so much you don't know about what you're made of, how capable you are. And that's something I'm always thinking of for small business owners, women, small business owners, like we are so much more capable than we give ourselves credit for. Oh yeah. We are so much more creative than we give ourselves credit for. We can figure this out, we can figure this out, this moment in time when things might feel stressful, things might feel uncertain. Do we know exactly what's going to happen? No. But are we capable? Can we figure things out? Absolutely.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: For a lot of people, I say things like that too, and it doesn't land, right? Like when you tell somebody that they're, they look great, and you can tell that it's not their, their truth or their reality, even though everybody else who looks at them would say the same. Right? That your dress is beautiful and it compliments your skin color perfectly. The person you can just tell, and this whole thing about everything's figureoutable and you will be okay.
In order for that to really land, you have to first, and I've said this a couple of times already, and I'm going to say it again. First, acknowledge the difficult emotions. I'm freaking out. This is painful and difficult. It's very scary. And that's a moment of kindness to yourself. And then you can say, this is okayness.
Relating to myself in this kind way is okayness. I will be okay. I can figure this out.
Racheal Cook: So good. I think that is the perfect note to wrap up our conversation. I so appreciate you taking time to chat with me today, Shula. If anyone is interested in learning more about working with you or how they can get more from you, can you please share where to go and we'll make sure to link it up in the show notes.
Shulamit Ber Levtov: Sure. So my website is shula.ca, S-H-U-L-A and.ca because I'm in Canada. And a great way to connect with me is to subscribe to my newsletter, shula.ca/newsletter. And I don't do a lot of launching or selling on that newsletter. It's mostly conversations like this and or podcasts, you know, where I've been, where we are having conversations like this.
It's support for your journey as a, as an entrepreneur with your mental and emotional wellbeing. So I invite you to subscribe.
Racheal Cook: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining me. This was such a great conversation. I would love to hear from anyone who listened to it. Make sure you come check out Shula's work at shula.ca.