How I built a soulful business when I thought I couldn’t
In 2012, I was crying on the bathroom floor.
I was heading toward divorce after 17 years of marriage. My career, the one I'd invested almost 25 years in, was unraveling in ways I couldn't control. I had a young daughter who needed me steady, and I couldn't picture what my future looked like anymore.
Therapy helped me through the worst of it. And then a cousin recommended a life coach, and that's when everything shifted. Not because someone told me what to do, but because coaching showed me something I hadn't understood: my circumstances didn't determine the quality of my life. I did, based on the way I was thinking about them. And I had so much more agency than I realized.
That realization changed the trajectory of my entire life. It led me to become a coach myself, to spend five years as an executive leader at one of the largest coaching organizations in the world, and eventually to build my own business and create my own coaching certification.
But between that bathroom floor and where I am now, there was a belief I carried for years that almost kept all of it from happening.
Why I Believed I Didn't Have the "Entrepreneurial Gene"
For a long time, I was convinced that entrepreneurship was something you were born with. That it was a gene, a hard-wired trait, like being naturally athletic or having perfect pitch. You either had it or you didn't. And I believed, deeply and without question, that I didn't.
This wasn't an abstract idea. I had evidence. In my twenties, I opened a retail store. I ran it for a couple of years and ultimately closed it. And my brain filed that away as proof: See? You're not an entrepreneur. Remember?
So when I left my corporate career and fell in love with coaching, I pursued it with the quiet assumption that I'd always need to work inside someone else's business. And honestly, that belief led me somewhere extraordinary. It's the reason I became a candidate for executive leadership at The Life Coach School. I wasn't looking to leave. I was all in on someone else's vision because I genuinely believed I wasn't built to carry my own.
I'm not mad at that belief. It gave me one of the greatest experiences of my career: five years of training thousands of coaches, studying what makes coaching effective, and building programming that changed people's lives. Life Coach Magazine recently featured my certification story, and looking back on that chapter, I can see how every piece of it was preparing me for what came next.
But eventually, that belief had to go. I explored this on Jackie Murphy's Studio CEO podcast, where we talked about why mindset is the real ceiling on business growth and why you can't outwork beliefs quietly working against you.
The Moment I Knew the Belief Had to Change
When my role at The Life Coach School ended, I was devastated. It was painful, and the grief took real time to heal. But underneath the pain, something else was emerging that was undeniably true: I never wanted to work for someone else again.
I wanted to be in charge of my legacy. I wanted to decide what my days looked like, what my values were, and how I showed up in the world. After 13 years in a corporation and five years building someone else's vision, I wanted to build my own.
And I knew, immediately, that I could not bring the "I don't have the entrepreneurial gene" belief into that future. You can't hold "I want to create my own legacy" and "I'm not built for this" at the same time. They're competing intentions. One of them had to go.
So I went to work on the belief. Not in a hurry. Not with a checklist. With the same tools I teach my clients: journaling, asking myself honest questions, and giving myself the time and space to let something new become true.
What if I'm wrong about this? What if that's no longer true? What if something else is true about me now?
How to Dismantle a Belief That's Been Running Your Life
I want to be specific about this, because I know many of you are carrying a version of the same belief. Maybe it's not about entrepreneurship. Maybe it's "I'm not a leader" or "I'm not the kind of person who charges for this" or "I'm not qualified enough." The mechanics of dismantling it are the same.
First, I stopped being in a hurry. Beliefs that have been running for years don't dissolve in an afternoon. I gave myself permission to sit with the discomfort of not knowing yet who I was becoming, without rushing to fill the uncertainty with someone else's plan.
Second, I surrounded myself with people who could help me hold the new belief before I fully believed it myself. I sought out communities, programs, and friendships with people who were building businesses from a place of wholeness rather than hustle. I wanted to be in conversations that would help me believe in what I was creating, especially on the days I couldn't believe in it alone.
Third, I let myself experiment. I changed my mind a lot in those early months. I tried things that didn't work. I let go of ideas that looked good on paper but didn't feel right in my body. I didn't get attached to any single approach. And I'm really glad I didn't, because what I was building needed to be mine, not a carbon copy of what had worked for someone else.
I shared this whole story on Jamie Berman's podcast, and one thing I said that surprised even me was this: I would tell my past self that her instincts were spot on. To take her time. To experiment. To heal. To find her own way.
What Building a Business from Wholeness Actually Looks Like
Here's what I've learned that surprised me most about entrepreneurship: there is so much freedom in it, and there really isn't one way to do it.
I used to think that to be successful, I needed to become a certain type of person. Salesy. Polished. Always-on. I thought there was a version of an entrepreneur that worked, and I needed to conform to it.
The opposite turned out to be true. The more me I made my business, the more it worked. My business gets to look the way I want it to look. It can feel the way I want it to feel. It can carry my values, my personality, my pace, my terms.
I keep my certification small. Nothing is recorded. I'm in the classroom for every session. I work alongside my students rather than handing them a curriculum and disappearing. That's not the scalable thing to do. It's the right thing for me to do, and it's the reason my students have the experience they have.
I make decisions based on what I call a "full body yes." Not a spreadsheet yes. Not a "this is what the marketing expert told me to do" yes. A full body yes, the kind where you know in your bones that this is aligned, even if you can't see an example of it anywhere else. I went deeper into how this works on Jenna Harrison's podcast, The Uncommon Way, where we talked about what happens when you override expert advice and start trusting the instincts that are already calling you forward.
Just because you haven't seen it done your way doesn't mean it can't be done. You get to go first.
What I Would Tell Any Woman Who Thinks She's Not Built for This
If you're reading this and you have a pull toward coaching, toward building something of your own, toward creating a life where you're in charge of your legacy, but there's a voice that says "you're not the entrepreneurial type" or "who are you to do this" or "you don't have what it takes," I want you to hear me clearly:
That voice is a belief. It is not a fact. And beliefs can change.
I know because I changed mine. I went from crying on a bathroom floor to building a six-figure coaching business that feels fully mine. Not because I suddenly discovered the entrepreneurial gene. Because I stopped believing I needed one.
The real requirements are simpler than you think: the willingness to be honest with yourself about what you want, the courage to try things that might not work, the self-compassion to stay with yourself when they don't, and a community of people who will believe in your vision while you're still learning to believe in it yourself.
That's what I built the Golden Coaching Certification Program™ to be. Not just a place where you learn coaching skills, but a place where you learn to trust yourself, to lead from your values, and to build something that's actually yours. It starts with self-coaching, because you can't hold space for someone else's transformation if you haven't been willing to do the work on yourself first.
Whether your next step is coaching yourself through the beliefs that have been holding you back, or preparing to coach and lead others, I'd love to meet you.
Learn more about the certification →
With immense appreciation & gratitude. Always.
About Katie Pulsifer
Katie Pulsifer is a Master Certified Life Coach and the founder of the Golden Coaching Certification Program™, a training program for women who want to learn how to compassionately coach themselves and others to create extraordinary results. She specializes in working with high-achieving women who look great on paper but feel unfulfilled, helping them rebuild self-trust, make aligned decisions, and stop postponing the life they actually want. Katie's coaching is grounded in neuroscience, radical self-responsibility, and the belief that your worth is inherent, not earned. Featured in Life Coach Magazine →
