Which version of you is running your business right now? It might be your inner 16-year-old who thinks networking is stupid, or your inner 6-year-old who learned the only way to be seen was to prove how smart she was. Your nervous system doesn’t really care whether you call it mindset or trauma — it’s going to do what it’s going to do.
In this episode, we talk with Nicole Lewis-Keeber, MSW, licensed clinical social worker, ICF-credentialed coach, and certified Dare to Lead facilitator, about how childhood trauma and nervous system responses show up in the way we run our businesses. Nicole spent 18 years as a therapist before launching her own business 12 years ago, and she’s been carving out space for this conversation ever since — even when therapists told her she couldn’t talk about trauma outside the therapy room and coaches told her to stop using the word entirely.
We get into how our inner children influence everything from sales to visibility to pricing, why urgency is usually a trauma response, and what it looks like to pause and figure out who’s actually making the decisions in your business. This is a practical, honest conversation about what’s underneath the discomfort and what to do about it.
How childhood trauma shows up in business decisions we don’t even realize we’re making
The inner stories impacting Nicole and Jessica’s experiences
The difference between a nervous system response and a strategic business decision
Why urgency in your business is almost always a trauma response worth pausing on
Visibility was hard before digital culture — now it’s a whole different animal
Reframing sales outreach as a kindness when everyone’s nervous system is overwhelmed
The trap of trying to fix an entire broken system through your one small business
Black-and-white thinking about platforms, AI, and marketing as a trauma pattern
Taking pauses away from the dopamine drip of the 2026 information landscape
Getting clear on what you actually want from a platform before you let it into your nervous system
“Your nervous system doesn’t give a shit what you call it. It’s just gonna do what it’s gonna do. Many people are walking around with traumatized nervous systems that don’t really realize what they experienced was actually trauma. It doesn’t have to be a big catastrophic thing. It can be smaller — like micro moments that add up. If you want to do something in your life that feels scary, which starting a business feels scary, those adaptations and patterns are probably going to show up. So let’s figure that out.” — Nicole Lewis-Keeber
