Your Business Is Not Your Worth: Tanya Wannemacher on Entrepreneurship, Self-Worth & the Messy Middle

What happens when your business becomes part of your identity?

For many entrepreneurs, a bad month doesn’t just feel like the business is struggling. It starts to feel like you are failing.

In this episode of Business Owners Unfiltered, Elias Crum talks with Tanya Wannemacher, founder and CEO of Mesh Coaching, about the mental, emotional and spiritual side of entrepreneurship. Tanya helps people understand how their thoughts, emotions and sense of self influence the actions they take and ultimately the results they create.

We discuss why the traditional entrepreneurial mantra of working harder, pushing through and doing more can eventually work against you. Tanya explains why action absolutely matters, but why sustainable action starts with understanding what is driving it.

One of the central themes of the conversation is worthiness. Can you separate your self-worth from the performance of your company without losing your ambition?

Tanya argues that your worth isn’t something you earn through revenue, success, recognition or achievements. Instead of the traditional Do → Be → Have approach, she proposes turning it around:

Be → Do → Have.

Who you are and how you see yourself influences what you do. What you do then influences what you create.

We also explore what Tanya calls the “messy middle”: that long period in entrepreneurship when you are putting in the work but cannot yet see the results. Just like planting something and continuing to water it before anything appears above the ground, entrepreneurship often requires continuing without immediate confirmation that what you are doing is working.

In this episode we discuss:

When healthy entrepreneurial ambition turns into overdoing and overthinking

Why entrepreneurs so easily connect business performance to personal self-worth