“I have a lot of things to prove to myself. One is that I can live my life fearlessly.” Oprah Winfrey

I’ve always had this deep compassion for people struggling with addiction or mental illness. We are all struggling with something, at least they have the courage to live their struggle out loud, for the world to see. Most of us just secretly struggle. Putting on a pretty face and underneath the fakeness is the acuteness of our pain.

Everyone has a secret pain.

Everyone is addicted to something. Maybe your addiction has a prettier colour to it or looks more appropriate in social settings, but addiction is addiction nonetheless. How we judge one as better or worse, as hierarchical to another matters not. Who are we to judge that one person’s pain is worth more or less than another? Pain is pain and addiction is addiction.  Addicted to vanity, praise, constant stimulation, ego, work, working out, anger, drama, consumerism, the perfect house/life/mate, gambling, drinking, drugging. The list goes on and on.

We seek out antidotes to our pain – anything to make it go away. Addictions. Ways to not have to be fully present. Ways to not have to feel.

The difficulty of it is that the only real way out, is through. Trying to outrun yourself never works – because everywhere you go, there you are. If you really want to transform it, whatever your addiction is, you have to do the thing you are most inclined not to do. You have to choose to feel, choose to be uncomfortable, choose to go deeper and connect further and be vulnerable and conquer yourself. You have to retrain your brain, and make a different choice and be willing to face yourself and tell the truth and fight your way through to a new normal, a healthier normal.

Struggle can be an addiction, too.  And as we crest out of what has been an arduous, challenging and unbelievably difficult journey for the past 18 months to build this company and right this ship and we are moving into a new dimension of stability, I can feel my own inner conflict around it.

Truthfully, I don’t know how to be in a place of stability. I’ve been fighting and struggling and working hard my whole life to get to this place. I know how to fight. I know how to work hard. I know how to conquer insurmountable odds and maneuver through crisis after crisis. I know what it feels like to be struggling to get somewhere, to be constantly at war and to never be at rest.

And I see myself, here, at this place I have been pushing to get to my whole life, and unable to fully be here. I am afraid to let go of struggle. Afraid that if I relax, if I trust, if I let go of the fight, something will come and hit me like a freight train. I have to keep my guard up. Struggle is an environment I have swum in, drank up and slept in the nook of. Struggle has felt normal, oddly, safe.

Adrenaline my constant companion, suffering always at my side.

Now I have to let it go.  I have to get uncomfortable again and face myself again and find a way to recontextualize what normal is and redefine myself.

Who am I now?

It feels shameful to say it all outloud like this. I don’t know why. Maybe I think as a CEO I should have it all together all the time, or that I’ll be crucified on someone’s cross who thinks I should. But as one of my favourite mentors and coaches says, “leaders are easy to recognize, they’re the ones with arrows in their backs”.

The truth is, none of us has it all together. And until we start telling the truth about what it really takes to build Greatness, I truly believe we are doing our younger generations such a disservice. 10% of the challenge is having a good idea, the rest is building who you are as a leader and your leadership – and that means constantly redefining yourself, being willing to go first, being brave enough to tell the truth and pivot and go to the scary places to be completely uncomfortable and have to let go of  everything you think about yourself and everything you define yourself by, through or from.

All we can do is get up each day and give our best, be our best, strive for our best and forgive ourselves when we mess it up, do what we can to make it right, course correct and keep going. Letting go of anything that no longer serves us, like shedding layers of inauthentic self in a lifelong quest for who we really are.

I feel the freedom in my heart as each layer fades away. Sometimes that freedom is close, sometimes it is just a whisper calling me to be brave enough to let more go. Let struggle go. Embrace stability. Find a new normal. Redefine, recontextualize, renew. Start again.

Krystine McInnes is CEO and Project Director of Athena Farms and Grown Here Farms. Stewarding purpose-driven, change-making projects with a focus on Planet, People, Profit and a commitment to Sustainable Business models.

“I always knew I was destined for greatness.” Oprah Winfrey

Just take the next step.

The world is so loud sometimes. Conflict, demand, pressure. Everyone wants something from me I can’t give them, or if I do give them what they want, it will break me. Too many demands, not enough units of me to go around. Forgiveness is in short supply, there’s no room for error. Any sign of weakness, some vulture is prepared to rip it apart. Demand for this, demand for that.

The pressure and the weight of the expectations can be stifling at times.

And the noise gets louder, in my experience, the closer you are to a breakthrough.

Sometimes it can be blinding. Debilitating. Paralyzing. Suffocating. But only sometimes. Most times it is exciting, challenging and empowering to meet pressure with focus, chaos with clarity and to make the impossible possible and push yourself to grow to the next level of leadership, stewardship and consciousness. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

But I would never tell someone to build a company they kind-of cared about. If you don’t love it, if you aren’t prepared to surrender everything you are, everything you have in you and to push yourself to a breaking point again and again and again – don’t do it.

I should qualify that. Something most people often don’t understand, particularly those who have many opinions about who, what and how I’m doing things, is that I am not in the game of business. I hate business, frankly. Can’t stand it for the most part. View it as a necessary evil. Something I’m required to do in order to get what I want. I am not in the business of business. I am in the business of building Greatness.

And Greatness isn’t for the fickle, the faint of heart, the weak stomached or the half-committed.

Each new level brings more challenges, more problems, more pressures and more conflict. Are you prepared for what it will take, what you’ll have to give and how much of yourself you’ll need to transform to get there?

You cannot build Greatness and not completely transform yourself in the process. It is impossible. You will turn yourself inside out more than a few times along the way – you have to push yourself, discipline yourself, focus yourself, manage your mind, direct your thoughts, believe in yourself, set your consciousness and conquer your sabotage. Or you won’t make it.

The lines are not blurred at this level of the game. Black and white. An inch out of alignment, at this level, is a mile in consequence.

Everything matters. Every step matters. Every distraction has consequence.

And when you hit a wall and you can’t go around, under, over or move it. You will have no choice but to go through it. One painstaking, heart-wrenching, bone-crushing step at a time.

Walls can be made of all sorts of things. They can be made of your history, your belief systems, your fears, your insecurities. Your haters, your mistakes, your bad choices, your failures. They can be made from external sources or internal. They can be 5 feet thick and 10 feet tall, or 2 inches in all directions.

Walls are designed to keep something in or keep something out.

And the thing about most walls is, you can’t really move forward when you’re faced with one. They keep you stuck. You can spend a lot of time being stuck. Trying to figure out a way around, but in the end: the only way out, is through.

And so forward we go.

Just taking one more step. And then another. Like breathe. In…and out. Forward.

Krystine McInnes is CEO and Project Director of Athena Farms and Grown Here Farms. Stewarding purpose-driven, change-making projects with a focus on Planet, People, Profit and a commitment to Sustainable Business models.

“I don’t think of myself as a poor, deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who from an early age knew I was responsible for myself and I had to make good” Oprah Winfrey

Business is no place for a woman.

Truth be told, I agree. Business isn’t a game women invented, men invented it. It’s the modern day equivalent of caveman survival of the fittest – competition, sword swinging, fighting, conquering, dominating.

A game where their ego’s have dominion and can battle it out for who will win. Kill sabertooth, drag back to cave. It’s survival driven instinct for men.

But as a woman, it’s downright exhausting. Being pawed at by men all day. Having to weed through deception, hidden agendas and decipher who is authentic from who is a con artist (which in my experience, more cons than artists exist in the space of business).

I hate it. Truthfully. I find it draining to always have to have my guard up, filter through the massive, and I mean massive, array of egos that consume the business world, to keep making mistakes because I trust the wrong people and I’m just so very tired sometimes, I leave myself exposed and vulnerable to some shark with an agenda.

I see business as a necessary evil. A means to an end. Something I have to endure in order to get what I want. It is a sacrifice, personally, one I pay gratefully because I am so clear about where I’m going and why.

As a woman in business, you have only a few options if you want to play the game. You need to learn the rules better than they do, so you understand the game you’re in and can navigate yourself safely. It doesn’t come naturally for most women to fight, compete, dominate and destroy. So, you need to know the rules or you’ll get crushed in the undertow.

Next, you have really only 2 options: 1 – you put on your masculine pants, get your sword out and start fighting with the men. In my experience, this leads to women being burnt out, exhausted, alone, and all of their relationships destroyed. It is a sure way to lose the game. And, even if you win the game financially, you typically lose the bigger game of life, sacrificing everything just for that one thing, ending up alone, bitter and with your relationships in shatters.

Men are directional, they need their ego’s to fight lions and tigers and bears. It’s part of their genetic, biological make up. An ego for a man is what allows him to protect and defend, to charge into battle and risk life and limb.

But for women, we are relational. Everything for us is relationship. And, as one of my longtime coaches and mentors always says, ego is the number one killer of relationship for women.

Think about that for a second. When these women think the only way to compete in business is to put on their ego’s and fight with the men, not only do they work against their natural strengths, but they destroy the very core thing their heart hungers for, which is relationship.

And for men, when a woman shows up who is pretending to be a man, with her ego flying high, her sword out and her shield up, they do what they naturally know how to do. They fight her, defend against her or destroy her.

Or 2 – you find a way to maintain your feminine essence, leverage the rules of the game to your advantage and surround yourself with people who will defend, protect and drive forward against the incessant noise of the business world in which you are in to achieve the goal you have in mind.

When a woman shows up as a woman, in her feminine power, with a group of men, they know how to be in relationship with her. They will, for the most part, naturally want to protect and defend her, if they are good men.  If they are snakes, con-men, have a self-serving agenda that involves your destruction or leveraging you to their advantage, or are psychologically damaged in some way, when you show up as a woman, in your feminine power, they will immediately either attack, react or repel. And in either of those cases, you’ll have weeded out a potential snake before he makes his way into your garden.

Showing up in your natural, feminine essence is a massive win from every direction, helps your intuition guide you and your natural gifts and power keep you safe and ensure you have the right team around you.

I speak from a laundry list of mistakes and experience on that one – having had so many snakes in my garden it was an infestation. I wish someone had given me this wisdom 15 years ago, thankfully, I have had the sage wisdom from the mentors in of the Living in Balance program for women entrepreneurs to help me navigate this for the past 10 years.

What we have forgotten as women, what society has beaten out of us and business has made no room for, is that our greatest strength lies in our femininity and our vulnerability and our core gift of relationship. If we learn how to leverage it.

If we could see that business is a game for men, it’s all about checks and balances, who is keeping score and the measure of success for them is money, or wins, or whatever. Cool. Got it.

For women, it is relational. So we are entering a domain that does not play to our strengths, with rules we did not invent. We need to understand those rules, build a team around us that we are in relationship with, and leverage those rules and our gift of relationship, to our advantage to succeed.

Rather than ending up as burnt out, bitter, angry, alone women who are entrenched in their own egos and masculinity.

I know this all sounds a little controversial. But after over 15 years in business, having sat on numerous boards as the only woman, with powerful, ego-driven men, had many different male business partners, and built numerous different projects with men and been under the direct, malicious attack of many psychologically imbalanced men who have wanted my total and complete destruction, I will say with much surety that it is true.

It isn’t about saying one thing is better than the other. We are just different. And when we can understand those differences, celebrate and include them, we can learn how to leverage them to succeed.

I think equality is a bit of a joke. I never want to be equal with a man. That would take away all of my strengths as a woman. We are different. It is the polarity of our differences, when we bring them together, that create so much magic in the world. When feminine meets masculine – creation happens, life is born, new ideas are generated, new ways of thinking birthed.

To whitewash the strength of our feminine gifts and attempt to make us equals only dilutes and depresses this magic.

One of my favourite things is to see an empowered man in business. I love how much they love it, how they play the game, compete and battle it out, how they navigate themselves, how they think and process information, make decisions and direct themselves. I admire it, and I honour it.

But under no circumstances do I want to compete with it, nor do I aspire to be like it.

It takes a monumental amount of courage to honour yourself in an environment that not only doesn’t encourage this way of thinking, but doesn’t really have a frame of reference for it. And a huge amount of trust too.

But what I promise you, if you can find the courage, the trust and the commitment to honour your truest essence, in business, you will be unstoppable and your results will be exponential. And men will gather around with perplexed and confused bewilderment as to how it was possible. Women are powerful, so much more powerful than we, or our society or business culture, give us credit for. We are multi-dimensional and exponential. We are soft power, we are the intuition, the unseen magic. We are the vessels of creation itself. Think about the power that that holds.

It’s time that we, as women, find our inner strength, voice and honour who and what we are at our core, and use it to create impactful, purposeful change on the planet.

Krystine McInnes is CEO and Project Director of Athena Farms and Grown Here Farms. Stewarding purpose-driven, change-making projects with a focus on Planet, People, Profit and a commitment to Sustainable Business models.

“There’s no easy way out. If there were, I would have bought it. And believe me, it would be one of my favorite things!” Oprah Winfrey

One of the greatest illusions of success is that there is some easy way. Some fast track, some secret, some get-rich-quick. So many people spend their whole lives trying to look the part. Making it seem like their lives are just champagne and yacht parties and sleeping until noon and that somehow, if you have that, it means you’re successful.

Having things but being empty on the inside – isn’t success. Looking the part, but having a superficial life, disconnected from purpose, isn’t success.

And anyone that has built up an illusion of a life, without a deep sense of purpose and service to something greater than themselves, in my opinion, has wasted a life.

We were not built for easy ways. Ease is one of the greatest inhibitors to growth there is.

Ease will make you lazy, will convince you that you’ve done enough, will wrap you in your own ego so far and so wide that you’ll start to think your superficial, egotistical life is what the real world is. Ease will lull you into complacency and complacency is where dreams go to die.

Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Welcome discomfort. Have the courage to stand at the fork in the road between the easy way out and the hard road in and choose the hard path. It is the right path.

I have never taken the easy road. I have never taken the complacent path. And although it has been hard, I have had to let go of so much I could almost not bare it, had to step into the unknown again and again and again, keep surrendering, keep searching, keep confronting myself, keep moving forward through sometimes crippling, paralyzing, heart stopping fear, I would not trade any of it for an instant.

It can be lonely. Isolating. Alienating. Holding yourself to a standard that most of our Western society, instant gratification, reality-tv culture doesn’t have the discipline for. All of our media push the easy road, all of our advertisements and supermodels and the engine of commerce that wants to make sure you stay exactly where you are. Stuck in unrealized potential.

Complacency loves company. It seeks out agreement. Groups of friends who enroll each other in their own superficiality. Feeding each other’s ego. Enrolling each other in their story about how acceptable it is to stay exactly where they are. Arrogance is not confidence.

It takes courage.

If I could give a new entrepreneur one gift, one thing that would set them apart, that would catapult them to the next dimension of success, it would be this: there are no easy roads. Every door is marked no exit. It is a pursuit, a commitment, a deepening consciousness. A test. You will confront every monster in your own closet. And you will want to quit, a lot. You’ll say it’s too hard, it’s too long, you can’t do it, you can’t take any more, it’s too tough, you aren’t smart enough, you aren’t good enough and life will kick you down and knock you back and right when you think you’ve taken all you can take, it will hit you again.

It isn’t supposed to be easy. If it was easy, you wouldn’t want it so badly. If you you didn’t have to fight for it, if you didn’t have to earn it, you wouldn’t value it so much. If it was easy, you wouldn’t do everything it took to get it and then give everything it took to keep it and protect it.

If it was easy, there would be no reason to conquer yourself. No reason to push beyond your limits and your boundaries, to make the impossible possible.

Nothing about where you came from, what you didn’t get, who didn’t support you or how you were or weren’t raised matters. Nothing about your history, your story or your education make much of a difference.

The question comes down to whether or not you have the tenacity, the discipline, the fortitude, the commitment, the perseverance, the courage, the leadership, the consciousness, the willingness, the humility and the heart to get up every, single day and start from 0. To work for it, steadily, without falter, with your whole heart and soul in the room. You do not need a PhD, a trust fund, a million dollars, a good family, a proper education or a righteous upbringing to do those things. They are equal opportunity talents that every, single person can access.

Anyone can have a great idea. But not everyone can be a great leader.

There are no easy roads. And your weaknesses will become your greatest strengths. Your adversities your greatest teachers and you will look back and see that every, single thing in your life was designed to push you to be Great, if you are brave enough to stay the course. Life is always bringing you to a place of goodness. Struggle always building you to strength. If you have the right perspective.

Build your character, build your leadership, deepen your consciousness, know your purpose. And stay the course. You will not be defeated, if you just take each day, one breathe at a time, forward, onward. One foot, one step, after another.

Krystine McInnes is Director and CEO of Athena Farms and Grown Here Farms. Stewarding purpose-driven, change-making projects with a focus on Planet, People, Profit and a commitment to Sustainable Business models.

“We can’t become what we need to be by remaining what we are.” Oprah Winfrey

To continue to reinvent yourself is one of the greatest gifts we have. We get to decide what we make the things that happen to us mean about us. We decide what we hold on to, what we believe about ourselves, what we give our power to.

It’s the greatest gift we have. Perspective. The ability to choose who we are and what we’ll become.

And it’s one of the scariest at times. To change your mind. To decide that you are going to let go of all of the things you’ve been told about who you are, your family history, the expectations, judgments, ridicules and opinions others have placed on you. That you are going to free yourself from the chains of your circle of influence, your family, your history and your story – to step into the unknown and redefine yourself. To no longer have a past you are handcuffed by, only a future that you are creating.

It is hard. It may alienate some of the people closest to you. Most people are too afraid to let go of what they know, too afraid that if they let go of the people they’re attached to, they’ll be alone.  Afraid of change, afraid of the unknown.

But great leadership requires greatness – and greatness requires that you constantly reinvent yourself, challenge yourself and grow your consciousness. You cannot be a great leader and not be constantly moving your consciousness forward.

You have to be willing to live in discomfort, to constantly be gripped in fear and move forward anyway, to push your leadership, keep growing your consciousness and constantly be looking inward, forward and for ever increasing depth.

It is a commitment to a purpose-driven life, a commitment to a deepening consciousness, a commitment to something greater than yourself.

Nothing about my story makes any sense. No one would believe the auto-biography if they read it. I come from, literally, nothing – a small town raised, out of control wild-child with no discipline, no moral grounding, no family ties, no parental influences, no role models, no mentors, no self-respect, no feminine wisdom. Mildly educated, without a compass to guide me, no influences to support me and no teachers to lead me. With a heart that was filled with rage, trauma and deep, sustained, emotional wounding. The greatest goal set for me to be a good secretary and get married.

I rarely look in the rear view mirror, life is always moving forward, evolving, and so are we, but even typing these words I can feel the shame, guilt and embarrassment about where I come from rising. I don’t know why. Maybe because I think it should look a certain way. Maybe because now it’s written I can’t unwrite it, now the whole world will know my shame, know my secret self. Now they’ll know how fragile and vulnerable I am and they’ll use it against me – business is a rough environment.

Maybe I just like the idea of being like everyone else sometimes. Sometimes I don’t want to be so different. I don’t want to talk about these things – I am compelled to write this blog and yet I hate that I write this blog. I don’t know why, but there it is. Shame.

I have no pedigreed background. No happy family history. No proud parents shuffling me off to a pre-paid college education. No solid moral fiber from mentors to guide me on my path. No support, no direction, no guidance, no hope.

Who am I to be a leader? Who am I to run a multi-million dollar company? Who am I to talk about these things, look at where I come from. Look at who I have been. Look at what I have done.

Alone, scared, traumatized, fearful and angry with nothing but this one, simple, thing that made all the difference to who I would become. The ability to choose for myself what I would make it mean about me.

Who am I to be a leader and run a multi-million dollar company? Who am I not to be?

It took years of dedication, commitment, perseverance, a willingness to look at the darkest most awful parts of myself, to try and fail, to risk and lose, to build steadily and with focus over a long period of time. To never quit. I had to teach myself discipline, teach myself self-love, teach myself commitment, teach myself to still my mind, teach myself to build integrity and morality, to learn how to manage my sabotage and direct my focus – to be in relationship with my power and steer it, rather than it steering me. It took a lot of stumbles.

To build it all, lose it all and then start again. And to not let the losses and the stumbles become what frames my decisions moving forward. Sometimes, when you’re pushing your consciousness forward, you’ll experience more loss, sometimes more loss than you think you can take. And you have to have the courage and the tenacity to stay the course, to not let those losses affect the purity of your heart, the steadiness of your commitment, your trust in life or your willingness to risk again.

I had to seek out sages and wisdom keepers to teach me what they knew. I read every book written on psychology, self-improvement, self-development, quantum physics, business, leadership, spirituality, religion, love, economics. Books saved my life, truly.

I learned how to address my emotional traumas in a healthy way, how to forgive myself and others, how to change the inner dialogue in my mind, how to transform those ingrained, brainwashed belief systems, how to find mentors I respected and would listen to.

How to let my anger go. How to cleanse my karma. And, finally, how to listen to my inner wisdom, feminine knowing and intuition and let it guide me, forward. When you come from a broken past, you can’t trust your intuition – nothing is safe. You have to heal that trauma first – to trust life again, to trust yourself again, to trust love again.

I decided who I was going to be. I decided to be self-directed. I decided to change my mind about who, what and how my experiences shaped me. What I made it all mean about myself. I chose to reinvent myself and to use the platform of where I had come from as the framework to catapult me to where I’m going.

Everyone has a story – no one better or worse than someone else’s. They are all just the cards we are given in this life. Our job is to do the most with what we have, to find the truest most authentic expression of ourselves, from wherever it is that we come from.

To constantly be moving our consciousness forward and to then share what we have learned to help others to do the same. When you get, give. When you learn, teach.

Krystine McInnes is CEO and Director of Athena Farms and Grown Here Farms. Stewarding purpose-driven, change-making projects with a focus on Planet, People, Profit and a commitment to Sustainable Business models.