Yvonne Heimann [00:00:00]
You're at your desk. The business you build is still sitting there, waiting for you to run it, but you haven't touched it in days. Grief did that. Or Burnout did, or both. You did the launch, you did the planning, you did everything the coaches told you to do. And then life happened, and none of it mattered for a while. That heaviness in your chest, when you look at your inbox, it has a name.
And I promise you, it's not called weakness. You've already tried pushing through it. That hasn't worked. By the end of this episode, you'll understand how business confidence actually rebuilds after a season that nearly took your business down. My guest calls it the heart framework, a five-part approach to leading a business through grief. Without losing yourself in the process.
This is She Is A Leader, the show for women entrepreneurs who lead with heart and won't fake their way through a hard season. If this is your first time here, welcome. I'm Yvi, and today's guest built her framework around and out of her own hardest year.
Yvonne Heimann [00:01:17]
Debi Lynn is a business resilience strategist, certified grief educator.
Best-selling author and TV host dedicated to helping women entrepreneurs rebuild their confidence, leadership, and business momentum after life's greatest challenge. Through her signature heart framework and heart lead awakening movement, she equips women to transform grief, burnout, divorce, caregiving, and other lives and other lives distortion. There is the tongue twister.
And other life disruptions into renewed purpose and lasting success. As the host of Heart Led Resilience, Debi inspires audiences with practical strategies and authentic storytelling. Her mission is to empower women to lead with courage, create meaningful legacies, and build lives and businesses that thrive with resilience and heart.
Welcome to the show, Debi. So happy to have you today.
Debi Lynn [00:02:09]
Thank you so much for having me. It's it's an honor and a pleasure to be a part of this and to get to talk to your guests today.
Yvonne Heimann [00:02:15]
Now, I'm curious. You call yourself, or one of your titles, is Certified Grief Educator as well as business resilience strategies. Most people would never put those two titles on the same business card. What brought you to combine them?
Debi Lynn [00:02:37]
Well, to give you a brief synopsis, so for twenty years I worked in grief due to I lost a four-month-old son in my twenties and lost a job the very same week. And so I helped parents who had lost a child. I worked for funerals, I worked at churches, and helped a lot of people in grief. But what I realized as a business trying to offer grief or to coach for grief, a lot of people just didn't, they weren't ready to pay for it. So what I learned in the process is because I was running a business and I learned that number one, you have to heal from the inside out to be able to run your business. So I started integrating the grief along with the business resilience because that's how I was able to keep my business going. I had to understand the grief that I was going through and I had to give myself grace and patience to heal from the inside in order to move forward in my business.
Yvonne Heimann [00:03:50]
I already mentioned before. You have a framework called Heart. I would love to hear number one, what does it stand for? What what does it really do? And when did you realize you needed to build that?
Debi Lynn [00:04:08]
So heart stands for heal, embrace, awaken, reclaim, and transform. And I didn't come up with the framework in the initial stages. What I learned and what I was going through, I realized that I had to heal first. And so many of us, especially when we're in business and maybe we're also working or for me I was going through the grief plus I had two other children at the time and I didn't know how I was going to move forward. But what I did know is that I felt like I was living with a great big black cloud surrounded me and holding me tight. And it's like I'm trying to move and move forward because I was always taught suck it up buttercup keep pushing push harder that is what we're told throughout our lives unfortunately that works for a person as an individual it does not work for business because it ourselves affect our decisions our movement our momentum.
And so the healing started, and because I do everything with heart led, I'm all about learning from the inside and teaching women to learn and listen to their selves because our bodies give us messages. And so that's how the heart framework came about. And you know, once you heal.
You have to embrace what you're going through. You have to give yourself grace, as I was stating before. And then once you embrace those moments, then you can awaken to who you're becoming, not who you were, because you will never be that person you were. And then you reclaim yourself and your passion of why you started that business to begin with. And that's when the transformation happens.
Yvonne Heimann [00:06:40]
That and you say you help women rebuild business momentum after a life's unexpected challenges. So we know life is life, right? So unexpected challenges are always gonna happen. And I'm curious, can you walk me through what that actually looks like for you? What did your business look like on that worst week?
Debi Lynn [00:07:00]
My goodness. On the worst week to give you a a really I'll paint the picture. Imagine a 25-year-old girl, because I really felt like a girl, who just lost a four month old son. Her job, she moved a thousand miles away to move close to her parents, thinking that her parents were gonna help her.
She arrives, and her parents say, you made your bed now, lie in it. So that was literally my worst moment. I'm standing there with two kids. The one is in a pouch because he's 14 months old, and then my daughter. And so I'm standing there and really started bawling, and it's like, okay, what am I gonna do? And that was the worst moment right then and all I could do is I looked up and it's kind of like seriously? You know, like what am I gonna do? And I had to figure it out. I had no choice. I could either keep moving forward or I could just end it. Now in one of my worst moments, I the two kids were laying in the bedroom next door, and I took a bottle of Tylenol and a whole bottle of wine, and I was gonna end it because I didn't think I could take care of these two kids after losing my son and realizing that I don't have time to grieve because I'm in survival mode. I have to keep going. I have to put food on the table. I have to find a job. So imagine all that stress all at once on top of you and people telling you you gotta keep going and you'll get over it. It's it's just gonna take time. What a bunch of hogwash. you know that too. But so you know, and in those moments, you overthink the simplest decisions. You don't trust yourself. You don't even know yourself anymore. I can remember looking in the mirror and not recognizing the woman staring back at me. Like, who am I? What am I doing now? What am I to do? And
Carrying the responsibilities of raising the two other kids and finding a job and literally not knowing where to turn. Those were probably my most mo worst moments. But I remember one night crying, laying on the floor, because the two kids were in a bunk bed. I didn't have anything else. I was laying on the floor in a sleeping bag.
And just, you know, contemplating, thinking, you know, how we do when it's at night 3 a.m. What am I doing? And literally asking myself, who am I now? But also remembering that my father telling me as a young girl, you can do anything that you set your mind to because you matter.
And those words of wisdom in that moment made me realize I had to get up and move. It was up to me. There was no one going to rescue me. So I had to figure it out. And that was probably the beginning of heart-led awakening because I was determined at that time.
Even though I felt like I had lost all my confidence, who I was and where I was going, in that moment, I had a glimpse of I can do this.
Yvonne Heimann [00:11:35]
Now, a lot of business coaches tell women to separate their personal life from their business. However, you are literally saying the opposite, that healings comes healing comes first, right? Our personal life is part of our business. And I'm curious, where specifically came that idea that take from? And what was it that happened where it's like, no.
They're they're not two separate things, they're one.
Debi Lynn [00:12:08]
Well, I think when I really realized it was number one, because I was doing it all alone. so I'm, you know, my person of who I am, who I'm who I was, who the world is expecting me to be, and now who I am now. And all of those things
Are all these different thoughts that come into our heads all at once? And as an individual plus a business owner, you have to discern, number one, who you are and why you started your business. Because you're still that individual. Yes, you're running a business, but in order to run that business,
You have to get back to who you are inside and why you're doing this. Because now your perspective has changed. Possibly your confidence. I know mine did. I overthought everything. I couldn't sell anymore. I just I was so afraid to make any decision because it might be the wrong decision. So that's when I learned that me as a person and a business owner is one and the same. And how can I run a business over here and make those decisions and the momentum to move forward if I can't make the decision of who I am and why I'm doing the business to begin with? How can I possibly help that person who's coming to me?
As my business, I can't. That's why we have to heal from the inside. And our body gives us signals to do that. And when we're not thinking in decisions and confidence, it's our body protecting us, putting us in protective mode so that we don't make the wrong decisions, but we try to figure out.
Where am I and how do I start moving forward? And the only way you can, and my favorite saying is, you cannot heal what you do not feel.
Yvonne Heimann [00:14:40]
Ooh, ooh Okay, I felt that one.
Yeah. Yeah, if you hm yeah, if you put it in a box and you shove it somewhere and you don't feel it, you're never gonna heal it. Yeah. Never heard that one before, but my god, yes.
Now, you talk about leading with heart and resilience, but I also presume there is a version of lead with heart that becomes an excuse to avoid hard business decisions. How do you tell the difference?
Debi Lynn [00:15:20]
Well, I think number one, it's it's going back to the basics to be honest. asking yourself, who am I? I matter, but who am I? Why did I start this business? You had a passion when you started that business. What is it? You have to get back to the basics of why you started that. And we also have to look at
And one of the things that I incorporated when I was learning resilience is what I call my joy jar. When I was mad at the world, when I blamed God for taking my son, I started realizing that I had to change my mind in order for me to move forward and to get back to the passion of who I am and who my business serves. So I started creating a joy jar where I found one moment of joy every single day, no matter how sad, mad, glad I was. And each week I would read them. And the perspective and the mind, how it changes when you really look at those little things. And maybe it's a simple smile, maybe it's that.
Warm cup of tea that just soothes all the way down. It doesn't matter, but it's that one moment of joy. And when you start realizing that, and you're grateful for just getting up, making it through another day, it's just one simple step at a time. You don't have to do the whole picture, you have to take one, one step at a time, one moment at a time.
Yvonne Heimann [00:17:20]
Now, I always I love mere framework, right? So when I saw you have your own framework, I'm like, that's my my kind of girl. and also we know that planning and intentions and frameworks are great on an everyday, right? When when things are either way great or when they are okay. How does that framework show up on a bad day?
When your clients are doing everything right and things are still not working.
Debi Lynn [00:17:54]
Well, and you will have bad days, right? We we will, but to go back to heal, because healing is is the beginning. So you want to acknowledge the pain, acknowledge what's happening, and give yourself permission to feel, to release, and to begin that healing.
Because you have to feel the pain in order to move through it, to embrace it. And then you accept it without any shame or judgment. Because remember, the pain that you're feeling is different from anyone else. Nobody feels pain the same way. So you have to give yourself grace without judging.
And in you you embrace the story of where you are, but also acknowledge the strength that you have in the woman that you're becoming.
And then awaken is we're reconnecting. We're reconnecting with ourself, our identity, because I remember I lost my identity. I didn't know who Debi was. I couldn't answer that. If you would have asked me, I would have said, I have no idea. God help me, I have no idea. But we have a dream that we've still have in our head.
It might be pushed back a little bit. It might be clouded like mine was, but we still have those dreams and those passions and that purpose. So we want to awaken the parts of us that we can in the moment. And it might be a slimmer of hope. It might be just okay, I remember this dream, but it's about this tall right now. But it can blossom again by giving yourself the grace. And then when we go to reclaim, we're taking back our confidence because at that point we're starting to get it back. And then we create the ability to make those decisions better and easier because we're back to knowing who we are.
Not completely. It could take a year. It took me three decades. Okay, it didn't happen overnight. And then when you get to the transformation, I feel like that is where the healing has happened. You're going back to your passion. And that's when you can really completely feel what you've gone through because you have to accept it, and that's when the full transfer na transformation is possible. But you will have those bad days. But I would say keep that joy jar and remember that you cannot heal what you do not feel.
Yvonne Heimann [00:21:30]
Now, if if a woman is listening right now and her business has stalled because life fell apart, whatever happened, what's the one thing she should do this week? Not eventually, not in the year, not in six months, but this week?
Debi Lynn [00:21:47]
The first thing that she needs to do is recognize that her business has stalled, right? Because the first thing is recognize, and then I would say write down three things that you feel are the most important priorities for you today to take one step.
Because it's all about taking those small steps. And it could mean that she needs deeper, that she needs to heal from her heart first. She needs to heal herself first. But only she can answer that. And so for me, when I take on clients, I really like to delve into, you know, is it mostly the business or is it you?
Because I still say it's one one and the same. Yes, they're two separate entities, if you will, but you are the business, right? You are the face of the business. You are the business. So if you're not where you need to be in your heart and in your mind, then you cannot run your business the way you intended it to run.
Yvonne Heimann [00:23:15]
Now, Debi said something that's going to stay with me. Healing and success success are not opposites. You don't have to pick one or the other. So if grief or burnout has your business on pause, that pause isn't proof you're behind. It's proof that you are human and that you are still here. Confidence comes back with the right framework.
So send this episode to one woman you know who is quietly holding it together while her business waits for her to come back. She's just gonna need to hear that today. And I'll see you in the next episode. Bye everybody.