When I first started Steady Parade, I was nervous to publicize it, especially on LinkedIn. There was something daunting about telling my professional network, former coworkers and people from college, that I was unsubscribing from corporate life. I didn’t think I was better than anyone, I just knew I couldn’t be there anymore.

I worried so much about their opinions when I first left, and that same need for approval came creeping back in when it came time to announce the business. I felt like I was trying to communicate from the other side, and at the time, that divide felt difficult to bridge (honestly, it still does sometimes).

I realize now what separates us. And it’s evident in our weekends.

I used to be there. Weekends were an escape, respite from the corporate grind. I imagined that even a mere mention of work would summon the monster that is Slack pings, back-to-back Zoom calls, and the disassociation that making it through another day required.

Weekends were the bright spot in a calendar packed with 1:1s and client calls where I would speak for 2 out of the 30 minutes. Where performance reviews and who got the end-of-quarter promotion didn’t matter.

A blissful day at the beach, the ability to keep the laptop shut and my phone buried at the bottom of my bag. Playing peekaboo with the Sunday scaries as the final sunset of the weekend rolled around.

As an entrepreneur, the weekends feel different. As I build something of my own, detaching from work is not as simple. It’s not something I realized I was signing up for, but now I’m more confident in owning this identity.

The difference between working weekends and taking weekends off? Ownership.

Ownership to me isn’t about being in possession of something. It’s about embodying an identity. When you’re working for someone else as an employee, that kind of embodiment requires labor. For me, it felt like daily mental gymnastics to spend my best hours working towards someone else’s dream.

And I know not everyone feels that way about a stable paycheck (I talked all about this last week). It takes a whole lot of mental gymnastics to decide to leave the comfort and stability of corporate life, too.

These days, even if it’s a weekend, it’s not too long before my business comes up in conversation. The topic usually comes up in one of two ways:

This very exchange happened over the weekend at the beach. And I noticed that speaking about work didn’t feel like trying to tiptoe around a sleeping giant. Instead, I got to talk to someone I just met about making the jump from corporate to consulting. Our paths are actually really similar, I’m just one year further into the journey. I don’t stop being a business owner just because it’s the weekend, and that’s actually something I take a lot of pride in.

It’s time to use ads as a client-getting system, not a backflip to stick. If you've ever spent money on ads or posted on Instagram and genuinely had no idea whether it was working, this is for you.

There’s one spot left in my cohort for business owners who want to run their own ad campaigns with real confidence that it’s money well spent. Join the interest list and I'll send you everything you need to know. There’s only one spot left, and we start next week!

Is there an identity that you’ve been building up the confidence to own? Maybe it’s something you’ve been working on, on the side. Or something you’re secretly really proud of but your coworkers don’t know about.

Somewhere this week, when someone asks what you do, lead with the identity that you’re growing into instead of the one on your LinkedIn profile.

Notice how it feels to say it out loud. Ownership doesn’t start when you quit your job or hit a revenue milestone. It starts when you stop waiting for permission to claim the identity.

I recently told my therapist that I don’t like taking business advice from men because they don’t understand what it’s like to run a business as a person with a hormonal cycle.

Some might call that man-hating, but for me it’s more about self-compassion. I know that in many ways, I would never expect myself to keep up with the same day-after-day grind that a man (whose hormones are the same every day) can.

I actually realized, though, that many men have created the blueprint for working smarter, not harder. And Dan Sullivan is someone whose advice I really appreciate.

I’ve already shared my insights from reading his book 10x is Easier than 2x. That book was actually published after Who Not How.

In my first year of business, things moved at the speed of me. And for a while, that was kind of the point.

But Who Not How reframed something I'd been doing without realizing it. Sullivan's central idea is simple: stop asking how you're going to get something done, and start asking who can help you do it. The "how" mindset keeps you as the bottleneck. The "who" mindset turns you into the visionary.

What I didn't expect was how much this connected to ownership. When you're an employee, you're someone else's "who." You execute the how. Building your own thing means you finally get to be the one who decides where your energy goes and who you invite into the work alongside you.

And as my business grows, I’m so excited about bringing in more “whos.”

Networking at the beach reminded me that the version of you that’s been building something on the side deserves an introduction.

And if owning that identity means finally having a predictable client flow (with ads that actually work) my June 3 cohort has one spot left for you.

Here’s to stepping into the “you” that you’re growing into.

Stay Steady,
Molly

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