Is it a strategy problem, or a “who am I without this” problem?
I should know because I white-knuckled my way through this for a decade.
When God told me to pause my podcast, I was annoyed but I could deal. Eight years without missing a single week and now He wanted me to just… stop? Right as things were taking off? Fine. I didn’t love it, but I could hold my breath for a season.
When He told me to pause the mastermind I’d been running for twelve years – a mastermind that had people who already paid for their spots – I got a little squirmy. That was a massive revenue stream and also, it was kind of my whole thing. People knew me for that. Taking it away felt like someone revoking my credentials.
When He told me to walk away from the biggest contract I’d ever signed – a dream partnership with one of my all-time favorite authors and speakers, a very (very, very, very) lucrative situation – that’s around when I started to feel something I didn’t expect.
It wasn’t fear about money, really. Michael and I had planned well. We’d be fine.
It was something worse. It was this panicky, grasping feeling of… then what am I? If I’m not running the mastermind, if I’m not hosting the podcast, if I’m not advising at the highest level, if I don’t have the contract or the title or the stage… who is Liz Hartke? What does she even do? What would I say when someone asks me at a dinner party? (Like I go to dinner parties).
And that right there – the panicky grasping – is the thing I want to talk about today because I think it’s running the lives of about 90% of the driven people I know without them realizing it.
I spent years thinking I had a strategy problem or a systems problem. Or maybe it’s a delegation problem. No, must be a “boundaries” problem (that was a fun era… I read a bunch of books on boundaries and set approximately zero of them). I kept going to masterminds, hiring coaches, buying courses, tweaking my offers, optimizing my schedule, all in pursuit of this elusive “freedom” that every business guru promised was waiting on the other side of the right strategy.
And some of that stuff helped, genuinely. I’m not going to trash the entire industry (well, not in this article, anyway), but none of it solved the actual problem because none of it was designed to.
You can’t strategize your way out of an identity crisis, and that’s what I was in for the better part of a decade without knowing it.
Here’s how I know it was an identity crisis and not a business problem… when I was in those “I need better strategy” seasons, I’d get the strategy, I’d implement it, and it would work. Revenue would go up, systems would improve, the team would stabilize and I’d feel good for about two weeks before the same restless, anxious, something-is-off feeling crept right back in.
Sound familiar? Because every entrepreneur I’ve ever advised who has this particular affliction describes the same cycle. Fix the thing, feel better briefly, dread returns. Fix the next thing, feel better briefly, dread returns. It’s like putting fresh paint on a house with a cracked foundation and wondering why it still feels unstable. The paint is fine, babe, the foundation is the problem. And the foundation is your identity.
I want to tell you about a client of mine because his story kind of blew the lid off this for me as I was in research mode for my book.
This man built an incredible company. Multiple seven figures, solid team, the kind of business other entrepreneurs point to and say “that’s what I want.” He came to me because he was exhausted and wanted help restructuring so he could work less.
So I started doing what I do… asking questions, poking around, looking for the bottleneck. And every single thing I suggested – delegate this, hand off that, take a sabbatical, let your team lead for a quarter – he had a reason it wouldn’t work. His team wasn’t ready. Nobody could sell like he could. The whole thing would collapse without him.
After almost an hour of this, I just asked him point blank: “What if your team is ready, your business would survive without you, and the real reason you won’t step back is because you don’t know what you’d do with yourself if you did?”
His got quiet and then said… “I really don’t want you to be right… but I think you might be.”
He didn’t have a strategy problem, he had the dreaded “who am I without this?” problem.
And that problem had been running his entire life – the 60 hour weeks, the inability to delegate, the constant need to be the smartest one in the room, the checking of email at 11pm, all of it – for years. The business didn’t need him there at 11pm. He needed the business at 11pm because without it, he didn’t have his footing in the other areas of his life.
He was confident in his sweet spot at work – he’d been focused there for years – but didn’t know who he was in his own family.
“My dad worked a lot and was never really that great at the whole dad-thing,” he told me tearfully, “maybe that’s true for me, too.”
His identity had tipped so hard towards successful business guy that he felt like a fish out of water everywhere else. Rudderless.
I remember closing that conversation thinking… oh no… I think that might be me too.
I think this happens a lot to driven people – especially people who started building young or who grew up feeling like they had something to prove (hi, overachieving Italian firstborn, reporting for duty) – in such a gradual way that you never see it coming.
You start building because you genuinely love it. The business begins as an expression of something real in you – a gift, a calling, an obsession you can’t shake. But somewhere between year one and year seven (give or take another handful of years), the business stops being something you DO and becomes something you ARE. And I think we don’t notice that shift because it feels like growth. It feels like “I’m all in!” which the entrepreneurial world celebrates like it’s a virtue when sometimes it’s actually a warning sign that you’ve fused your entire sense of self to your Stripe dashboard.
Once that fusion happens, everything starts to change. A lost client isn’t a business setback anymore, it’s a personal rejection. A slow quarter isn’t a revenue dip, it’s proof that you’re slipping. And stepping away – even for a maternity leave, even for a sabbatical, even for your own health – feels physically dangerous because some part of you believes that if you stop producing, you stop existing, too. Yeesh – what pressure!
I lived in that place for a really long time. Long enough that when God started pulling things out of my hands, my first instinct wasn’t “okay, I trust You” – it was “wait, but that’s my thing!” (I covered the full play-by-play of that whole pruning situation in my last article here if you want the extended director’s cut of me negotiating with God like a used car salesman.)
The fact that my first response to God removing lucrative opportunities from my plate was an identity crisis and not a faith response tells you everything you need to know about where my foundation actually was. It wasn’t on Him. It was on my output.
Here’s where I could get preachy, and I’m going to try really hard not to because I’m genuinely still untangling this in my own life and I don’t think it would be appropriate to stand on a soapbox that I just recently crawled off of (I have milk stains on my shirt and very little moral high ground to speak of, let’s be real).
I think God cares less about what we build and more about who we’re becoming while we build it.
But I will say this…I think God cares a lot less about what we build than we think He does. I think He cares enormously about who we’re becoming while we build it and our willingness to be His vessel as we go, no matter the curveballs. And if the building is making you more anxious, more absent, more dependent on external validation, and less available for the people and the purpose He actually put in your life… the building has become an idol. A really productive, culturally celebrated, tax-deductible idol, but still an idol.
Having your business called an idol when you’ve spent over a decade pouring your soul into it is not the most pleasant realization.
I’ve been in this new season for about seven months now. Stripped down, green again, writing on a platform I had to Google how to use. Filming YouTube videos like a total amateur. Homeschooling five kids with varying degrees of competence (mine, not theirs). Working maybe ten hours a week on things that feel genuinely mine to carry in this season instead of sixty hours on things that looked impressive from the outside.
And here’s the wild part that I almost don’t want to say because it sounds like I’m trying to sell you on my lifestyle, and I promise I’m not, I’m just telling you what happened…
I know who I am now. Or at least, I’m getting reacquainted with her. She’s a mother who’s actually in the room for the mundane moments and not just the highlights. She’s a wife whose marriage has more oxygen in it than it’s had in years. She’s a woman whose faith is no longer a compartment she opens on Sundays but the actual operating system of her life.
But she’s also a writer. Turns out I really love this, like, a lot. Who knew that the thing God was redirecting me towards would be the thing that made me feel most like myself? Actually, He probably knew, because He’s God and everything, but it took me stripping away every other identity I was hiding behind to find the one that was actually mine.
It took the humbling experience of stripping away and asking God to write my story to unearth what was actually meant for me.
Desperate prayers of “God, who do you say I am?!” to hear the truth over the years of lies I had started to believe.
My name is Liz, and I am not my business, my successes, my losses, or even my talents. It took me about fifteen years and a near-death experience and many conversations (pleading sessions) with God to figure that out, but I got there.
If you’re sitting with that restless, something-is-off feeling and you keep trying to solve it with better strategy… maybe the strategy isn’t the thing. Maybe it’s just a means to an end, but if the end is not congruent with what He’s calling you to, does the means really matter?
I don’t want to leave you with a can of worms and no solution. I want to infuse hope!
This is not a five part exercise accompanied by a clear mission statement. This is actually where you become unshackled. Where you get to pursue the goals and vision and whatever else with a freedom like you’ve never tasted before! It’s not about walking away from it all, it’s about walking with God as the version of yourself you were always made to be.
There’s no pressure here, just an invitation to true peace. A pursuit without your worth tied up in outcomes, opinions, or performance. What a gift!
Want to know the coolest part? When you release the identity that has been trapped in who the world has always said you are, you meet the version of you who God says you are, and that version of you? Unstoppable!
Love + Prayers
Liz
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