Our identities shift and evolve as we age and I’ve found clinging to the ego can do more harm than good.
I’ve been battling through a major business decision for over a year and have finally been able to come out through to the other side which I share in this episode. I had to listen to my body, say goodbye to the ego, and let go of the perceptions of others to finally reach this place of peace. I want to focus on the gain, not the gap and I encourage you to take a listen and see if your body is telling you something similar too.
Episode Resources
Read the Full Transcript ⬇️
00;00;00;00 – 00;00;30;11
Rebecca
My ego was so tied in with this fancy pants designer from Toronto who gets featured, who does incredible high-end spaces, who fills in the blank. I identified so much with that, even though I didn’t want to do it anymore. All right. I’m Rebecca Haigh, and I’ve built a successful interior design business by trial and error, podcasts, online courses, and so many freaking books.
00;00;30;14 – 00;01;00;26
Rebecca
Over the last decade, I’ve grown from an insecure student to having false starts to careers. And now I’m finally in the place where I want to be. Throughout my journey, it’s been pretty obvious that I’m passionate about business and helping other entrepreneurs do the same. Each week, I’ll share tangible takeaways from my own experience and the experiences of other badass women to help you build your confidence and change your business.
00;01;00;28 – 00;01;33;22
Rebecca
Hey hey hey, it’s Rebecca and you are listening to Resilient by Design. Today’s episode is a little bit different than you’re used to. I actually had a different topic scheduled to record for today, and then I had a conversation earlier with a student, a power process student, and we got to talking about death of the ego. We got really deep, and we stayed on an extra 30 minutes after the podcast recording, and I realized I need to record this.
00;01;33;23 – 00;02;07;05
Rebecca
This is a message that really resonated with Heather. We were diving into it and has been on my mind the last couple of years, so I really think it will be valuable to you, especially if you are someone who has recently transitioned from a corporate job or working for someone else, to launching your design firm, or someone who is teetering on the edge and dreaming of doing their own thing and afraid to let go of the status quo of what you know and what you live.
00;02;07;07 – 00;02;36;27
Rebecca
This is an episode for you. So let’s dive in, shall we? Here is the deal. We spend so much of our lives being defined by what we do. What we do becomes our identity. It becomes who we are. It becomes what we’re known for. And there’s a lot of conversation, I believe, around, especially men when they retire and how it can be very challenging for them because they’ve had this identity their entire lives, and then they retire.
00;02;36;27 – 00;02;58;05
Rebecca
And it’s like, who am I? What am I doing? I don’t have a hobby, maybe, or the identity shifts. And a lot of the times they say that when that happens, that’s when people get sick. They have heart attacks. And I’m only sharing this because I think it’s important to see the impact and how powerful it is to identify as something.
00;02;58;08 – 00;03;29;15
Rebecca
And when that’s taken away, it’s very uncomfortable. And the body and the mind don’t know what to do. That is the same thing that happens when you retire is what happens when you change careers, when you change jobs, maybe when you change employers, maybe when you go from being employed to being self-employed. And so I want to have this conversation because it’s something that has taken me some time to recognize and then sort of battle against and come through the other side.
00;03;29;18 – 00;03;49;24
Rebecca
So I recently announced on my newsletter, and if you guys aren’t on my newsletter, we’ll share a link here in the episodes. You guys can get on that. I send a weekly email every Friday. It’s usually where I announce things first, and I shared that in 2025, I am not taking on any more design projects. I am taking a sabbatical from design work.
00;03;49;26 – 00;04;11;07
Rebecca
Let me rewind a couple of years. When I first started doing the podcast and doing online courses for designers, I felt an immediate calling to do this work. There was just something it felt like inside my body. That was it just felt like hell yes, like 100% go. This is what I made for. This is my calling.
00;04;11;07 – 00;04;50;01
Rebecca
I’m driven to do this. It’s my passion, my purpose, and I want to do more of it. That was happening at the same time as I was running a thriving design firm. So lots of great projects starting to get bigger and better, projects growing, a really capable team, getting lots of press. It was on the outside everything anyone could dream of, but on the inside I was now being pulled in two different directions, trying to continue to grow, maintain, manage and thrive in this interior design business and then also trying to serve designers figure out online courses.
00;04;50;08 – 00;05;17;12
Rebecca
How can I help designers? What can I do for the podcast? Spending more and more time in the online space. And so I was feeling pulled in multiple directions. I started to fill my time more and more with coaching and podcasting, and I was somewhat neglecting my design firm. It was starting to show because things were slipping through the cracks, and I wasn’t as on the ball with the design business as I used to be, because I really was being called to do this other thing.
00;05;17;15 – 00;05;44;27
Rebecca
And I remember speaking with my coach over a year ago and saying, I just don’t know what to do. And she said to me, you can’t be 100% in both businesses. It’s not humanly possible. You need to make a decision. Either you carry on this way where you are being pulled in two different directions and you do your best to grow, or you have to cut one off and go all in on one of them.
00;05;44;29 – 00;06;10;23
Rebecca
My accountant told me, you need to stop doing the online business because it is not that profitable. She was not wrong at the time and stopped neglecting your interior design firm. This is where the money is. Look at the numbers and immediately in my body I felt defensive. I felt like, what does she know? I’m going to show her I could grow this online business.
00;06;11;00 – 00;06;37;24
Rebecca
I mean, she was just reading the writing on the wall. It was just numbers. And I understand now why she said that, but at the time I took it personally and in reflection, it’s because my body was feeling intuitively like that’s where I wanted to go. And I didn’t like it when someone told me the opposite. But I did like it when someone said, you should go all in on coaching, I would get excited and then full stop.
00;06;37;28 – 00;07;02;09
Rebecca
This is where the ego comes in. So if you’re multitasking, get back to me here. This may resonate with you. You may relate to this immediately. I thought about the idea of no longer doing design projects and I thought, oh my God, I couldn’t do that. All the ideas, all the things were going through my mind. But I’ve spent nearly a decade building this firm.
00;07;02;16 – 00;07;25;10
Rebecca
I’ve built a name for myself in the city. I have, you know, garnered all this incredible press and all these amazing projects. I’m finally getting my dream projects. I’m finally working with my dream clients. I finally have the inner workings of a system that my team can follow. And I’ve worked so hard to get here, I feel like I’m throwing it all away.
00;07;25;12 – 00;07;50;19
Rebecca
Can you relate to that? That feeling like you’re throwing it all away by going in a different direction? And I really grappled with that for months, if not more than a year. But my actions were showing me in the world or anyone who was paying attention that coaching was for me. The online business was for me, teaching was for me.
00;07;50;21 – 00;08;15;01
Rebecca
And so finally, last year, I recognized I needed to kill my ego. I need to recognize that the only reason now that I am holding on to these design projects, despite everything that I said, is because I am so concerned about how it is perceived to everyone on the outside. I’m concerned about what my family is going to think.
00;08;15;01 – 00;08;49;18
Rebecca
I’m concerned about what interior designers are going to think. Are they going to want to learn from me if I’m not actively running 10 to 15 projects a year? I was concerned about what my colleagues would think. What are the other interior designers in my industry going to say? They’re going to say, what, are you crazy? And so my ego was so tied in with this fancy pants designer from Toronto who gets featured, who does incredible high end spaces, who fills in the blank.
00;08;49;20 – 00;09;15;05
Rebecca
I identified so much with that, even though I didn’t want to do it anymore. My question to you today is what are you doing that you really don’t want to do anymore? And in some ways, you know, in your heart of hearts is holding you back from really pursuing where you want to go. What is that? Maybe it’s time to leave it behind.
00;09;15;07 – 00;09;37;14
Rebecca
And so for me, moving into 2025, I made a bold decision. It is one that I did not make lightly. It is one that I have been thinking about for over a year. One that I even consider doing in 2020. If you could imagine, in 2020, my inner knowing said to me, you’ve got all this money in the bank right now, Rebecca, because we had such a profitable design year and of course everything was kind of on lockdown.
00;09;37;14 – 00;10;03;08
Rebecca
So we were kind of in this weird limbo phase, right? I didn’t have a lot of projects in the pipeline at that time. They were starting to trickle in. I thought to myself, I’m really loving the podcast. I’m really loving teaching designers. What if I just stop taking on design projects and I use those hundreds of thousands of dollars that I had saved in my business bank account to float me for the next year or so while I really grow this online thing.
00;10;03;10 – 00;10;29;06
Rebecca
But I didn’t do it. But guys, I had the thought, oh, if only I had listened to myself how different it would be right now. But I can’t focus on that. It’s not a regret. I obviously wasn’t ready, but my inner knowing, my intuition and this is the way well. So stick with me. Your body knows. Your soul knows what’s your calling and what’s the next step for you?
00;10;29;09 – 00;10;57;27
Rebecca
When I was 28 years old, I didn’t want to be a coach or an online business person. Like, no thanks. I wanted to be a fabulous designer. Things change and that’s okay. And if you’re caught up in a job or in a life where your identity is so tied to what other people think of you, even though you don’t even really love it anymore, I challenge you to do the work to look within and determine, is this for me?
00;10;57;29 – 00;11;18;18
Rebecca
Maybe you’ve been straddling that line between working in your full time job and taking on design projects on the side. I know a lot of designers listening. You know, they’ll try and squeeze in the projects in the evenings and weekends, or maybe they’ve cut back their work at their hours at work and are able to sort of start to grow their business a little.
00;11;18;21 – 00;11;51;06
Rebecca
Maybe you’re actually ready to take that leap of faith and go all in this year. It is still early. The year has just begun. Maybe it’s time. And so the death of the ego is letting go of what other people think, and caring. Caring what they think they’re going to think, what they’re going to think. Regardless. There are probably a bunch of people out there who are like, Rebecca is frickin crazy.
00;11;51;08 – 00;12;24;10
Rebecca
Like, I haven’t even photographed my last project. It was epic. It was so beautiful, if I do say so myself. And I loved it, but I didn’t love doing it as much as I loved doing this. And if anything, I now know. And I’ve finally realized that by going all in, in this next phase of my life, this next journey into online entrepreneurship and coaching and teaching, I now have the time to dedicate to do it even better, to get better.
00;12;24;15 – 00;12;49;18
Rebecca
I’m going to be helping more designers. And guess what? I have so much more knowledge now that I have all these designers and community sharing what they’re going through to share with all of you than I did when it was just me running my design firm. Because now it’s no longer just my experience. It’s my experience. Plus all these hundreds, if not hopefully soon, thousands of designers that are going to come my way.
00;12;49;21 – 00;13;10;20
Rebecca
And so I am allowing myself to be in the game. If you’ve read that book, the gap in the game is by Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan. It’s a great book. It’s really about your mindset and leaning into the positive. Focusing on the glass is half full, but where am I? Am I in the game? What is good about this?
00;13;10;27 – 00;13;30;26
Rebecca
Let’s not focus on the gap. Yeah. Let’s do it. Yeah, there’s challenges with what I’m doing. And can I always go back? Yes. If the best project comes to me in a month, will I consider it? Probably. I would really love to design for myself and be able to do my own home and buy a new house and build that frickin farmhouse finally, all in due time.
00;13;30;28 – 00;13;52;16
Rebecca
But what I really want to do, and it’s my calling, is this. And I’m going to share one last nugget of wisdom. Actually, I just realized I don’t typically do my own nuggets. I should do this. This is fun. My last nugget of wisdom for you today is to consider, as we’re nearing the end of the very first month of the year.
00;13;52;18 – 00;14;20;24
Rebecca
Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you need to make a living doing it. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you need to make a living from doing it. For me, just because I’m really good at interior design does not mean that needs to be my primary source of revenue for you. It might mean just because you’re a kick ass, I don’t know, H.R.
00;14;20;24 – 00;14;49;21
Rebecca
Consultant doesn’t mean you need to do that to make a living. Here’s the reality. We’re good at a lot of things, and you don’t have to spend your entire life just doing one thing. Have fun, live a little, and let go of what’s holding you back. Not working or, you know, is no longer for you. If this episode resonated with you, I would really love it if you told me in a DM.
00;14;49;21 – 00;15;15;21
Rebecca
I always love to hear from listeners. Leave us a review on iTunes. It would mean the world to me. We’ve got a lot happening in February. I’m really excited to support designers in a brand new way, so stay tuned and just remember, you got this. I’m always here rooting for you. CSM the Resilient by Design podcast is produced by Vera Marcus, edited by Abby Ser, KTLA, and hosted by yours truly, Rebecca Hay.
