The Audit that Undid Me

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By the time I finished, I was well on my way to overwhelmed, maybe even a little depressed by what I saw. I felt foolish. For all my education, my expertise, my decades of experience, I felt like I had almost nothing concrete to show for it. I sat with that feeling longer than I want to admit, turning it over, letting it convince me of things about my own competence that were not actually true, but felt true in the specific, disorienting quiet of that afternoon.

I felt trapped, too, in a very specific way. I had retired that year due to my health. I received a monthly pension, but I desperately needed to increase my income, and the business I was counting on to do that suddenly looked, on paper, thinner than I wanted to admit. I remember doing the math more than once, hoping I had misread a number somewhere, recalculating totals that refused to change no matter how many times I added them again.

That painful exercise did produce something useful. I streamlined my entire consulting practice down to one lead generation method, one sales call, one offer. But even with that clarity, I found myself doubting the whole thing, second guessing decisions I had already made, wondering whether the streamlining itself was wisdom or simply another form of avoidance dressed up as strategy.

I want to be honest about how strange it is to feel simultaneously foolish and still somehow certain that the work mattered, that the calling underneath the numbers was real even if the structure supporting it clearly was not yet. Those two feelings do not resolve each other. They simply coexist, uncomfortably, for as long as the audit's aftermath lasts.

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Then God spoke one word into that spiral. Hagar.

I immediately thought of Genesis 16:13. God sees me. I was not lost on His radar. He knew exactly where I was and would come to my rescue. All I had to do was hold on.

The audit had exposed real gaps. But I remember the specific relief of that word arriving, not because it fixed the numbers, but because it reframed what the numbers actually meant about my situation. Exposed and abandoned are not the same thing, even though they can feel identical in the moment you first see the full scope of what needs fixing.

I think about that season often now, particularly the version of myself who sat at that kitchen table feeling like a fraud despite thirty years of genuine experience and expertise. I understand now that the audit was never actually evidence against my competence. It was evidence of a structure that had not caught up yet to what the competence deserved to be supporting. Those are very different diagnoses, even though they felt, that afternoon, exactly the same.

Here is what I think leaders miss about honest self-assessment. The feeling of foolishness that shows up afterward is not evidence that the audit was a mistake. It is often evidence that you finally looked closely enough to see the truth instead of the story you had been telling yourself about your own effectiveness. Most of us avoid that kind of look for years precisely because we suspect, correctly, that it will not be comfortable.

Feeling exposed by an honest look at your own business is not the same as being abandoned in it. Sometimes the exposure is exactly what precedes the rescue, because you cannot be found in a place you refuse to admit you are standing. I did not enjoy that afternoon at my kitchen table. I am grateful for it now, in the way you become grateful, eventually, for the appointments that told you the truth before the truth became too expensive to still fix.

I think about the specific shame that showed up uninvited during that season, because I do not think I have been fully honest about it until writing this. Shame has a way of attaching itself to numbers, as though a thin bank balance were a referendum on character rather than simply a structural gap waiting to be addressed. I caught myself, more than once, quietly comparing my business to peers who appeared, from the outside, to be thriving effortlessly, a comparison that told me nothing true and cost me a great deal of unnecessary suffering while it lasted.

I do not think that comparison instinct ever fully disappears. I have simply gotten faster at catching it now, faster at reminding myself that I am seeing everyone else's highlight reel against my own detailed audit, an unfair contest by design. The peers who looked effortless from the outside were very likely sitting at their own kitchen tables at some point, doing their own version of that same uncomfortable math, simply not in a season where I happened to be watching.

What I did with that season, eventually, mattered more than what the season did to me in the moment. I did not abandon the business. I did not decide the calling had been a mistake, though there were a few dark hours where that thought crossed my mind more seriously than I want to admit. I simplified. I rebuilt. I let the audit inform the next version of the structure instead of letting it convince me there should not be a next version at all.

I think that distinction matters more than almost anything else I could say about that season. An honest audit will always surface uncomfortable truths. What determines whether those truths become fuel or a final verdict is what you do with them in the weeks immediately following, while the sting is still fresh and the temptation to quit quietly is at its strongest. I did not feel brave during those weeks. I simply kept showing up to the rebuilding, one unglamorous decision at a time, long before I felt like the rebuilding was actually working.

-- Dr. Rhonda