#121 - The Mental Load of Entrepreneurship (& Why Authenticity Matters)

This Mental Health Awareness Month, we’re having a real conversation about the emotional weight of entrepreneurship.

In this solo episode, we explore the intersection between mental health, authenticity, identity shifts, nervous system regulation, and sustainable business systems, with an unexpected reflection inspired by Justin Bieber’s raw Coachella performance.

Because entrepreneurship is about so much more than strategy.

It’s learning how to:
→ trust yourself
→ navigate visibility
→ move through self-doubt
→ stop people pleasing
→ release perfectionism
→ and build a business without abandoning yourself in the process.

It's an invitation to think about time, stress, wellness, and what truly matters in life and business.

Inside this episode:
✨ Why entrepreneurs burn out from “performing” instead of the work itself
✨ The connection between nervous system stress and unclear business systems
✨ How funnels, automations, and routines can support your mental wellbeing
✨ Why authentic marketing does NOT mean trauma dumping online
✨ The hidden emotional work underneath entrepreneurship
✨ A powerful journal prompt to help you reconnect to yourself and your business

Key Reminder:
Your business should not require you to abandon yourself in order to succeed.

Journal Prompt:
“Where in my business am I performing instead of telling the truth?”

If this episode resonates with you, please share it with another entrepreneur who may need this reminder today. 

Connect with Deborah:
🌐 DeborahCSmith.com
📩 hello@deborahcsmith.com

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Mindset to Market is a Luminous Creative Production. If you'd like to learn more about our business coaching program and group coaching container, please visit us online at DeborahcSmith.com.

Mindset to Market is produced by Deborah C. Smith and designed to inspire and support big-hearted creatives in finding their own unique path, building a sustainable business, and creating financial, spiritual, mental wellness and abundance.

🎉 Work with Deborah Learn More
💕 Visit Deborah online at DeborahCSmith.com
💕 Follow on the 'Gram. @deborah_smith_coaching

Transcript

Here's a question for you. What do entrepreneurship, mental health, Justin Bieber, and really good funnel systems have in common? And the answer, honestly, is a lot more than you might think because all of them eventually force us to confront the pressure of performance and the importance of authenticity and the reality that a sustainable success in life requires support. So I've got a juicy thought-provoking episode for you this morning on this topic and grab a notebook if you're interested in the journal prompt that's coming at the end that's gonna help you navigate some of this stuff. Hey there, welcome to the Mindset to Market podcast, your go-to space for practical tools and solutions to the everyday challenges of being a creative and soulful entrepreneur living in a material world. I'm your host, Deborah Smith, a holistic business coach and marketing strategist with 17 years of experience. I help my clients bust through mindset blocks and learn daily marketing practices that balance personal wellness with financial growth and impact. I'm here to offer you support with creativity, mindset, practical how-tos, and getting into imperfect, messy action so you can experience daily breakthroughs as you grow. If you're a purpose-driven entrepreneur building an online business, you're in the right place. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the Mindset to Market podcast. This is Mental Health Awareness Month. It's May 2026. Um, and honestly, I've been thinking a lot lately about stress, identity, authenticity, and sort of the emotional weight that so many entrepreneurs and solopreneurs in particular are carrying behind the scenes. Because there was a time before now when we were not living in a 24-hour cycle of being online, being on all the time and constantly just polishing and presenting. But the reality is that now we are living in a world where, you know, we're constantly being seen and witnessed and so sort of there's a filter around everything we do and say. Even when we're being our authentic self, we're still kind of packaging it up to be presentable, right? So this comes with a toll And part of the reason that this comes up for me and it's so present for me is because of what is happening behind the scenes in my personal life, which many of you already know this, but if you're listening to this show for the very first time, uh, my mom suffered a stroke about five years ago, and now she lives in a memory care facility. She has dementia, and she's experienced memory loss. And so I spend a lot of time around elderly people and people navigating neurodegenerative illness. And I'll tell you something, this really changes everything. Uh, it changes your perspective on really just absolutely everything. So for me, it changes the way that I think about time and how much time we actually have here in these bodies. It changes the way that I think about stress and what creates stress in our lives, in our work, in our bodies, and it changes the way that I think about what really matters, like what actually really matters. And honestly, it has made me even more committed than I was before to helping other entrepreneurs create businesses that actually support their lives and the lifestyle that you wanna be living instead of consuming you whole, because we really are only here for so long. Uh, and I think entrepreneurship forces us to confront that truth a lot faster than most people, because entrepreneurship is not just about strategy and marketing and learning how you can sell something online, although it very much is all those things, and I want to talk about all those things. But entrepre- entrepreneurship, to me, I think, is very much about identity work, right? You have to learn how to trust yourself. You have to learn how to make difficult decisions. You have no choice. You're going to be making difficult decisions every single day. It's about learning how to handle visibility and being seen differently than you might have expected, right? It's learning how to navigate rejection, really face failure, and then get back up the next day and continue working. Uh, it's learning how to keep showing up when you feel totally overwhelmed, you feel uncertain, life is throwing you curveballs, you're exhausted for one reason or another, or maybe doubting yourself. There's just so many challenging emotional phases and aspects to, to entrepreneurship. You're not just building a business, you're actually becoming a person who's capable of holding a business. And that process can be deeply emotional, even though, you know, it's so interesting because it's like business. Oh, it's all about, you know, it's just business. It's just, you know, handshakes and dollar bills. And, but actually it's, it's identity shift. It's deeply emotional work. And so there's so many levels and layers of identity shifts that happen as an entrepreneur, especially again, as a solopreneur, because, and the reason I say that is because when you're working on a team, you're bouncing ideas off of other people, you're getting feedback and you're inside of a combustion chamber of energy and ideas. But when you're a solopreneur, you often are working in a bit of isolation. I mean, hopefully you have a peer community and a network of people that you can reach out to and chat with and trade notes and just commiserate with, or, you know, retreat with. But very often solopreneurs are working alone, like actually doing the work on your own. So again, it can be very deeply emotional. You start to outgrow old versions of yourself. You realize that people pleasing is unsustainable and is going to actually just cause you constant problems. You realize that perfectionism and this idea that you're going to get something right every time or that you should be aiming to perfect something is physically exhausting, mentally exhausting, and also impossible. And you realize constantly trying to prove yourself is just going to create more of that anxiety under the surface and stress in your nervous system. Eventually you will hit a point where you simply cannot carry the performance anymore. And this is what got me thinking about Justin Bieber because I saw, I saw clips from the Coachella performance. I was not there in person. I would not necessarily call myself like a true fan. I don't know enough of his music to, to go there, but I've listened to lots of his songs and loved them. And he's obviously, you know, a sort of a genius musician and he's very talented. But what struck me about the clips were not necessarily the music, but his sort of raw honesty. It was like almost, you know, hard to witness in, in the sense that he was just so stripped down on the stage. He shared all this footage and, and told stories and kind of like put these struggles from his young life and with mental health and kind of what he's been through emotionally over the course of his public career on videos. Like literally he was playing his laptop on, on stage and showing these videos on screen. And if you haven't seen it, you can just Google Justin Bieber Coachella and check out what I'm talking about. But he's up there with like no set, just him and a laptop and a screen. And he's singing these songs and showing these videos and kind of sharing this vulnerable challenges that he survived. So he really presented the part of his life that he survived. And it was so honest and just raw, and it just felt really human. It felt really relatable in a way that I was just... I was honestly surprised because it's Coachella, and who would expect that? But it was just not polished. It was not manu- manufactured. Um, of course he planned it, but it wasn't over- overly curated, you know what I mean? It was just honest. Whether you're a fan of, of Justin Bieber's or not, honestly, it doesn't matter because I think the deeper truth underneath that moment is just very clear, which is that nobody can perform forever without paying a price for it, and nobody can carry and wear a mask 24/7, and nobody can constantly maintain an image that isn't fully aligned with who they really, truly are. Eventually, your nervous system just gonna tell the truth on you. And you see this happen all the time to entrepreneurs who have been trying to keep up a public face for so long that doesn't align with who they've either become or eventually realize they always were. And then they start to peel back the layers and s- and show their true selves because they've reached a level of popularity, financial stability, and/or fame where they feel safe enough to do it. But I think most people who own an online business right now, now who are working as a service provider or, you know, a program cr- course creator, somebody who's teaching and working with people and using the online space to market themselves, we feel pressure to always be on. You feel, you know, a pressure to always appear like you're successful so that y- potential clients will see you that way, to always appear to be positive or have the right answer, right? You're always creating something new. You've always got something. You've got... You know, you're visible. You're inspiring. You're consistent. But honestly, behind the scenes, you're a human being who's got a real life with real ups and downs and struggles. And so a lot of entrepreneurs are just carrying this enormous mental and emotional stress That is basically being torn apart by being a real human who's got a real life, but feeling like they need to compartmentalize and only show the shiny, happy moments because they are using that as a tool to attract people. But interestingly, I think it's way more attractive to just be who you actually are. And I believe a lot of entrepreneurs, they're not burnt out from the work itself, right? They're not burnt out from doing the work. They're burnt out from carrying the pressure of trying to pretend to be someone else and maintain this image or hold it all together and keep up with the pace of the internet, which is relentless. Trying to prove that you are successful enough, smart enough, polished enough, all that stuff, healed enough, right? You're healed enough. You're productive enough. You're getting it all done. It's freaking exhausting. And so this is exactly why I talk about systems, routines, boundaries, automations, you know, and simplifying like, like a broken record because while I love to be productive, I don't want to be productive just for productivity's sake to prove that I can like check all the boxes. By the way, I used to be like that, but that has drastically changed because I know that building out a system in your business is going to eliminate a lot of the guesswork and create something that you'll feel stable enough with, that you feel confident enough with, that you feel clear enough about, that you can actually be yourself. So literally building a system, like a step-by-step system for how you do what you do, how you market your work, helps to reduce a lot of stress in your life. So I know I'm hopping around a bit between, you know, entrepreneurship and Coachella and, and all, but they, they really do intersect around performative behaviors being, becoming relentless and unsustainable. Whereas when you have a routine system inside your business, that's how you reach out to people, how you build audiences and connect with people, and how you present yourself, uh, and it, it's based on who you, who you truly are, that one of the elements of your system is, feels like a yes in my body, feels like something I could do every day because I enjoy it. You know, when you're really baking those variables into creating your business, it lowers your stress, right? So I'm not obsessed with, you know, productivity and all those things that are part of entrepreneurship just for the sake of it. But the clarity that comes from, you know, a reduced level of stress in your physical body is, helps with your productivity. When you have decision fatigue, it destroys your creative energy. You know, when you're living in chaos and operating in chaos and throwing spaghetti against the wall, rolling the dice, you know, like sort of gambling with the algorithm, that creates a feeling of overwhelm that lo- that increases your stress, right? And so when your business has no systems, when your offers are unclear, when your content has no pathway, when every single day feels just reactive, like you're reacting to whatever's happening. Someone started a trend, I have to do that trend. Everyone's on LinkedIn, I have to be on LinkedIn. When you're constantly like reinventing the wheel, like, oh, this whole audience wants that, I'll create that instead of doing what I do. Your nervous system never gets to rest. You're performing for potential clients that you don't even know are a good fit. It's just, it's unsustainable, right? You can only perform for so long something that is not aligned with who you truly are. So I'm bringing this up because I was thinking about it, and then I realized it was Mental Health Awareness Month, and I thought literally entrepreneurship can become either emotionally unsustainable if we're not intentionally creating support structures for ourselves, or on the flip side, we can figure out and learn and make the investment in building a system and getting the support that we need, and we can see the exact opposite. It can be healing. It can be something that builds a beautiful lifestyle that supports your mental, physical, and emotional wellness. I like to remind myself and my clients about the importance of self-care just as often as I can, because before I was solely focused on systems and marketing, uh, I was the operations and marketing person for a juice bar business that I owned, um, which was the product of studying holistic health and wellness. So I was really adjacent to the wellness industry and doing everything I could to walk my talk, right? So hydration, daily movement, um, a positive mindset, you know, believing in yourself, having daily routines that support your health, wellness, and the lifestyle you wanna live, getting a great night's sleep, like rest. And that's where we transition to the sort of technical aspect of marketing, which is the automations, the funnels, and the clear pathways. Because when you have systems set up that can be on when you're not on, it helps to tremendously to lower that stress, right? So when you know if somebody new comes into your world that they're gonna get a warm welcome in the email, and that it aligns with the current messaging that you're sharing online, and that you're, you know, it's gonna allude to paid offers while you're sleeping or on vacation or whatever, when the funnel then moves them automatically to the next step, and if they're interested, they can consume a slightly larger piece of content. Maybe it's, you know, still free. Maybe it's a podcast or something, a lead magnet. But that then the next step is that you're going to introduce to them a little bit more about you, that they're going to learn about your paid offers and what you do to help people, you know, your programs, whatever. All while you're not involved. You still haven't even necessarily met this person. That is relieving. It lowers your stress because you can trust that you've got a system in place that's going to handle a lot of your communication pieces, right? And then clear pathways. When new people come into your business world, if you know that your system is set up to just move them very simply and easily to the solution that you provide for their problem, you can sleep better at night. You're like, you know what? I don't have to be awake or on 24-7 because I've got things in place that support me, period. So they're not really separate conversations. I know I'm, you know, I am jumping around a little bit today, but it's all connected. You know, the reason that I teach and work on simplifying systems is because I want businesses to feel more sustainable for people. I want women to stop feeling like they have to hustle themselves into the ground in order to make money online. I want entrepreneurs, solopreneurs to stop believing that they have to constantly perform worthiness in order to succeed. It's a huge disconnect, right? Like you have to appear to believe that you're worthy and that you're confident and that you're a leader, but you're a human being and you're dealing with all these other things. And so it is performative on some level, right? And that authentic conversation comes up. People are always like, you have to be, just be yourself, be authentic. Well, you know, authenticity does not mean that you need to trauma dump online. It does not mean that you need to share every private detail of your life. It doesn't mean you need to expose yourself constantly in order to build connection. But I do think people can feel the difference between someone who's performing and someone who is just grounded in their truth and telling you their truth, right? The goal isn't to become perfectly healed before you go out there and show up. It's just to stop abandoning the part of yourself that is living a different reality while you're building something new. Like that's the work. I'm going to say that again, because even as I was just saying that, I was like, that's it. The goal is not to become perfectly healed before you present yourself online. That's just not possible. And it would, it's impossible. But can you stop separating yourself into pieces and abandoning the parts of yourself that are not okay while still showing up and doing good work? And I'm not pretending that it's easy. The integration that goes into this kind of healing through entrepreneurship is it's an embodied experience. It's something that takes time and a willingness to do it, right? You have to be willing to show up and do it. So it's the deeper work that is always underneath entrepreneurship. And so honestly, it comes up all the time inside my coaching containers. In many of my one-on-one client relationships, we face these obstacles together, right? We, I know what it feels like to have doubts about whether or not an offer's gonna land or whether or not a program is gonna sell. I know what it feels like to navigate contracts, sales conversations where you're a little uncomfortable, launches, you know, visibility when you're not feeling 100%. Uh, so we talk about these things all the time inside my group coaching program foundations, and I care deeply that my clients feel supported around, like, living, being a real human being while also trying to connect authentically and, and honestly with the people that they wanna work with. So it's important that they feel grounded, you know, feel clear, and that they're building a business that can actually support their mental health, their emotional wellbeing, so they're not building a trap. You know, there is a solopreneur trap, and that's building something that you think is gonna succeed but isn't exactly what you really wanna be doing. So that's a whole nother episode. Uh, we'll, we'll get back to that one. The solopreneur trap should be an episode. But a huge part of that, that, that authenticity piece and that de-stressing and that mental health and mental wellness is having a system in place, period. It helps you keep work moving forward even when you're having a hard time. Life's gonna life. There's gonna be seasons when you feel strong and energized and like, "I got this. I'm crushing it. I am a leader. I'm out there on stages. I'm speaking, you know, I'm going live. I'm s- doing all the things," and you're gonna feel it and, and you're riding the wave. And then there's going to be seasons where you feel overwhelmed, emotional, uh, uncertain, plain old tired or stretched too thin or, or, or somebody... an, a loved one is gonna have a crisis, and they need you to be there for them, so you become unavailable. Like, that's human being. That's being human. So, but your business should not require you to abandon yourself in order to still succeed. You need a system in place so you don't have to be on all the time, uh, to build something meaningful. Um, I start, I feel like I'm starting to preach. You don't have to be constantly performing either, right? You don't have to become someone else in order to succeed. That's my dream. That's my goal. So you simply have to build it in a way that allows you to stay connected to yourself and to other people while you're growing. There needs to be some space, some flexibility, some breathing, some honesty about, yeah, I'm... That's why I love to say, like, do it messy, right? Doing it messy is so, it's actually so brave. It's so hard. You're, you're saying, "I'm willing to be seen as... I'm willing to fail in front of other people. I'm willing to, um, try something and not get it right the first time." All that stuff, uh, plays a role in your mental health. So- Okay, so I did wanna give you guys, um, a writing prompt that, to take away from this. I would love to hear your thoughts on this conversation. How do you feel about social media? Um, do you have... Do you feel that it adds more stress to your life? I'm just curious. Do you feel like, you know, you're having to perform as opposed to being your authentic self? So here is your journal prompt. The question I think it is worth pondering is, where in my business am I performing instead of telling the truth? So where in your business are you showing up and, and wearing a mask? And yeah. And then ask yourself, what feels heavy right now in my business? What am I trying to maintain that doesn't feel aligned anymore? What would feel simpler? There's always an easier, simpler way. How can I make it easier? How can I make it more fun? And ask yourself, what would better support your nervous system if you could change something, right? What symptoms, what boundaries or routines would help you feel a little bit more like yourself again? For some of us, that's gonna be getting back to eating a certain meal plan, right? For some of us, that's gonna be getting a certain type of sleep, you know, bringing a process back into your business that made you feel really grounded and aligned. Um, for some people it might be hiring help. It may be, you know, hiring a VA or working with, you know, a, a coach or, or just hiring a, a, a person to work for you. Because your, your business should ultimately support your life, not disconnect you from it. So with these prompts, and to go back to the main one, just to re-say the main one, where in my business am I performing instead of telling the truth? I just invite you to think about it. I will also think about it and use the prompt and, and let's take actions during this mental health awareness month that really truly support us in building businesses that feel sustainable, that feel like we could keep doing it, keep showing up. So thank you so much for being here with me this week, and for listening. If this episode resonated with you, I would love for you to share it with somebody who may benefit from it, another entrepreneur perhaps that needs the reminder to check in with themselves on, in this way. And I will see you next week, same time, same place. Um, grab the link in my show notes if you wanna book a, a drop-in call with me, and I will really look forward to hearing from you. Oh, and by the way, you can also email me at hello@deborahcsmith.com and learn more about the work I'm doing on my website, which is deborahcsmith.com. Until next week, as always, my friend, may you be vibrant