Now, some people might say, but Lovey, you hired these people.

Mm-hmm. You managed these people. Correct. This is also where the trust trigger comes back in. Because then I stopped trusting my decisions. I stopped trusting my lens. So I started questioning myself. I internalized before I ever externalized anything. So I was also having moments where I was beating myself up like, man, what are you doing wrong? And I would tap in with my mentors and my friends and my fellow entrepreneurs, CEOs, and do temperature checks. Like, all right, let me explain the situation to you right now. Here's how I handled it. Should I have done this differently? And here's the thing. I also surround myself with people who tell me the truth. So I would check in with my entrepreneur friends and ask the temperature checks, knowing that they would tell me the truth, knowing if I'm the one, if I'm the drama, because I was like, am I the drama? Am I the one that's not doing what I should be doing? And each time they would look at them like, no, objectively speaking, that person's wild. Like that person's out of pocket. I'm Jessi Hempel, host of Hello Monday. In my 20s,

I knew what I wanted for my career. But from where I am now in the middle of my life, nothing feels a certain. Work's changing, we're changing, and there's no guidebook who are thinking deeply about work and where it fits into our lives. We talk about making career pivots, about purpose and how to discern it, about where happiness fits into the mix, and how to ask for more money. Come join. Listen to Hello Monday with Jesse Hempel wherever you get your podcasts. to meet the increasing demands of your customers? With AgentForce and Salesforce DataCloud, you can deploy AI agents that free up your team's time to focus more on building customer relationships and less on repetitive, low-value tasks. That's because DataCloud brings all your customer data to AgentForce, no matter where it lives, resulting in agents that deeply understand your customer and act without assistance. This is what AI was meant to be. Get started at salesforce.com/data. So the book comes out. It is a bestseller. You went into crisis mode. Yes. Is crisis mode a comfortable place for you? No.

Crisis mode is an anxious place for me because I don't like to operate in crisis or chaos. And I try to live life in a way that mitigates that. So I'm very organized in general. Like I'm very much great type A Capricorn. We need spreadsheets. We need SOPs. I have an SOP library. We do. We're not late on credit card payments. We are the most organized planning people. We do not operate in chaos so when it comes to us it is anxiety producing it was bad but here's the funny part little trauma came out that week in the middle of me doing press i fired somebody literally like got off the today show stage i got off i got off the today show stage or was it Hoda and Jenna? I don't know. One of those. Or Tamron Hall. I don't know. I was in New York doing press and tour stuff all week. I fired somebody in the middle of my week. It was like, you have to go. So I was down to two. And I fired my director of operations end of June. And I was down to one. It was just down to one. And I said, well, the crumbling has happened. Now is the rebuild. I was very clear. I was like, oh, I had to wipe the decks because I was learning all these lessons at once. And all the lessons pointed to one, sometimes you have to crumble for the rebuild to happen. If you do not crumble, what makes you rebuild? And obviously there were certain things I need to put in place that were not in place. And then the number three, I feel like there was all sorts of spiritual lessons around surrender. Okay. Because sometimes you can put all the things in place. You can do all the things you're supposed to do and it still won't work. And in that moment, let it go. Surrender. So all of that was happening and I was very clear it was happening. So I was like, well, I tried everything in my power. I was pivoting. I, me as a leader, I used all leadership skills I had. I'm a much better leader now also because I went through that, but just in general, I used every skill I had, every form of empathy and compassion, every form of, you know, performance review and every form of the thing that people would tell us on LinkedIn to do everything. I tried everything, everything. I tried it. It did not work. And I was like, OK, release. Let it go. Did you grieve? I didn't have time. Did you ever have a period where you just like you had to step out of the world? Because you're a public figure. Yes. What was also happening at the same time, so when I fired everybody by end of June, in July, I launched the Book Academy. Now, why I did that two weeks after I fired everybody?