The Viral Scandal Causing Female Founders to Pause.
Navigating visibility & controversy as a female founder is more perilous than ever. The story dropped & my DMs flooded with both newer & accomplished female entrepreneurs experiencing freeze mode in growing their business & brand visibility confidently, intentionally, & consistently.
“The internet never forgets”!
Social media is so unforgiving”!
It’s been impossible to escape the viral memes, videos, & pictures of the CEO of Astronomer & his HR mistress, infamously dodging the Jumbotron as they’re caught canoodeling at a Coldplay concert (both married with children). Immediately, he cowers down, abandoning his mistress to protect his identity & she covers her face & turns around to dodge the spotlight.
Just when they thought it couldn’t get any worse, the lead singer says, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re very shy.” While it may feel satisfying for some to see two people many consider privileged take a massively public tumble for their actions, there’s an additional, hidden, insidious layer to this (especially for female entrepreneurs growing their businesses through social media).
The layer is confirmation to your subconscious mind (way more worried about your survival than your success) that greater visibility slaps a neon target on your back, potentially ruining everything (business-related & beyond) that you’ve worked hard to build & massively care about.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at how this scandal & your everyday observations may be keeping you in a season of plateau & three simple ways to consistently grow your business confidently.
For many female founders, the national spotlight on these two brought their fears of visibility to life.
Fear of Getting More Eyes on Your Brand & Services Personified.
The exposed CEO affair has done more than just become a global meme. It’s the personification of a quiet fear keeping many in a state of business plateau. Even for the most seasoned & accomplished woman in business, there’s something deeper that the Astronomer CEO & HR “work wife” getting caught cheating at a Coldplay concert represents.
Check out their odds of being in this situation:
Approximately 50k people attended that Coldplay concert.
The Jumbotron only captured a handful of people at that concert that evening. (They happened to be one).
Frontman (Chris Martin) called out the likelihood that it was an affair based on their guilty AF reactions.
The internet continues breathing life into it (including countless viral memes & even this post), keeping the pain & embarrassment for their loved ones fresh with salt continuously rubbed in.
🚨It’s ringing the alarms to pull back the content creation that delivers greater brand awareness in the interest of self-preservation (Hello Amygdala Hijack, presenting as, “I’m too busy to hit record content”).
🚨It’s canceling out your rational prefrontal cortex. (Hey there freeze, anxiety, & avoidance delivering that feeling of resistance that easily becomes labeled as an action not being “in alignment”). This is a huge reason I see so many women invest thousands into poorly timed, fluffy, nice-to-haves, like building a business on frequency, but that’s a topic for another post.
🚨It embeds its tentacles into your subconscious through confirmation bias, saying, “See, another example shouting the more eyes on us means greater risk of people finding (insert your quiet insecurities here).
🚨It manifests as allowing employees to drag smoke from the fires in their personal lives into your daily operations, making the air & culture feel heavy.
🚨It presents as investing in a new time & labor-intensive strategy with learning & implementation curves that stop you or your team from hitting goals that keep you profitable.
🚨It keeps you in small bubbles, rejecting opportunities to take bolder actions that have the power to move your vision forward years ahead of projections.
Navigating visibility & controversy as a female founder doesn’t have to slow down your opportunities to get more of your best clients happily tossing their credit cards into your payment processor for the chance to work with you.
The most successful women know a widely understood truth, but often don’t speak openly about (outside of intimate, carefully curated circles) that I’m sharing with you. They know that business strategy will only take you so far before it becomes little more than a costly distraction for not consistently pushing against your growth edge so that your capacity to create, hold, & expand success & wealth grows with your ambitions.
If growing your business is as simple as ticking off boxes of to-dos, you’d be beyond your most audacious goals by now.
But, there are Four Core Subconscious Success Dynamics that you run every past, present, & anticipated future experience through, making your brain turn even the simplest tasks in building your business feel as heavy as running across a football field with an elephant on your shoulders. Read more about them & how mastering these four dynamics impacts your business here.
Three Simple Ways For Female Founders to Confidently Grow Their Brand & Business With the Risk of Controversy.
If your business isn’t consistently growing, it’s dying. Repeat clients/customers & new ones are the lifeline to your business. Saying yes to fear (it can look like continuously pushing back a deadline until a “better time,” deciding not to make a strategic hire, or not fire an employee who has become a heavy anchor to the daily operations & goals of your business) lights the match that will eventually torch your business. As with most things, it’s a choice & you have options.
My favorite ways for helping my primal brain feel safe with ever-expanding goals are:
- Journaling: Journaling is one of the most powerful personal growth practices, but it’s often done in ways that barely scrape the surface of what it can help you accomplish in life & most certainly in your business. Seeing tremendous growth in your business using time-efficient, powerful journaling boils down to three things:
- Relevant & Impactful Questions✅
- Radical honesty as a form of self-love✅
- Action that goes beyond awareness that’s measurable & feelable.✅
First, much like using AI, what you ask & input impacts the usefulness of what you get from it. Asking questions like, “What would I do if I were guaranteed to succeed,” or ” What’s my money block,” won’t get you the more profound understanding & 2x-10x the profits, peace, power, & impact you want.
Pulling questions from Pinterest, journals with prewritten prompts, & Chat GPT/Claud (I know a few people using them as “coaches”) leads you on a wild goose chase with scattered pieces to find & make sense of, or a BFF who affirms you more than it delivers you the types of truths that make your growth inevitable. I find that the issue many have with asking potent questions is limitations on where to focus for entrepreneurial & personal upleveling.
The second aspect of journaling effectively is how honestly you’re willing to answer the questions. When your actions and beliefs don’t match, the brain scrambles to resolve the tension, often by adjusting beliefs (not actions) to protect the ego. Ironically, we want people to keep it real with us, yet we lie to ourselves more often than anyone can lie to us. When your actions and beliefs don’t match, your brain scrambles to resolve the tension, often by adjusting beliefs (not actions) to protect the ego. This keeps you in the same patterns, reaping the same results. Fighting for your current identity is a normal instinct of self-preservation, which your brain is wired for. I find that initially making a smaller commitment, even fun micro identity shifts, helps speed up willingness to jump into the deeper identity & belief shifts.
The third aspect of getting the most from journaling for your business growth is realizing that journaling itself is an action, but it merely brings you to awareness. Plenty of people are fully aware of their patterns, make no changes, & are content with their current results or comfortable in their familiar pattern of chasing their tail in circles.
You’re here for results you can measure & feel. Yet, this is typically where most stop & feel accomplished because they have the awareness & assume they’ll proceed more mindfully. But most of what we think and do daily is automatic, patterned, and stored in the same subconscious system that regulates heart rate or blinking. Mindfulness without tracking, understanding, and refining only offers a false sense of progress.
They’re not separate. They’re parallel systems. Here’s how:
The same system that speeds up your heartbeat when you’re scared also triggers your “I’m not accomplished enough to sit at this table” thoughts when you’re about to take bold action.
The sovereign, emotionally intelligent, successful women I work with use a 15-minute audio journaling practice explicitly made for female entrepreneurs, laid out in a way that connects the most impactful dots, bringing profound awareness to their subconscious thoughts, beliefs, identity, & patterns (even if they’re not in the mood to put pen to paper). It puts the judgmental left side of their brain in a relaxed state, allowing them to honestly find where their patterns, identities, & responses come from & how to repattern them without forcing their nervous system into fight, flight, or freeze protective modes. With their personalized action plan & 1:1 guidance forward, they take tailored actions that honor their current capacity for change, their goals, & the business that they want to support their ideal lifestyle. Click here to read more about how working together in Journal to Power looks & feels.
2. Get on & off social media: With algorithms that can feel like trying to wrangle slippery seals into a bathtub, many are looking for alternatives to social media (one of the reasons I’ve returned to blogging). Let’s be honest: social media promises connections but often delivers a false sense of it & increases feelings of isolation (especially for solo-operating female entrepreneurs). While social media greatly benefits growing your business, it also contributes to shiny object syndrome, comparison, & Imposter Syndrome, potentially creating a more complex path to consistently filling your business with great clients & opening up to more elevated opportunities.
Getting off social media alone & making local alliances with other businesses can be the identity shift you’re overlooking. Arranging an intimate meetup with local companies, leaders, micro-influencers, etc. can accelerate recognition of your brand, your authority, & your conversions.
Stepping into the identity of a master connector takes the edge off when you feel like a walking marketing & sales machine. It creates more of what you need as a human—other real humans (no need to question if they’re AI, bots, or scammers from a distant country).
A sense of personal satisfaction comes from forming local relationships & having local clients that even a large social media following can’t match. The levels of intimacy, outcome vs. input, & identity shift are unmatched.
3. Create Your Safety Protocol: While the internet can seem like the Wild West regarding feeling safe from being misunderstood, cancelled, or targeted, creating safety works with your brain’s natural desire for self-preservation. Here are a few easy ways to ensure your brain feels more like a swaddled baby in the arms of a loving, competent parent, rather than the occasional dream of being naked in public:
- Anchor Into Clear Values: When your brand stands on unapologetic values (not just vibes), you create internal alignment. This calms the nervous system because your prefrontal cortex knows the mission, and your amygdala has fewer unknowns to scan for threat.
- Practice “Prefrontal Posting”: Post from your PFC (logic, long-term thinking), not your limbic system (reactivity). That means: ❌No emotional dumping. ❌No trying to defend to win favor. ❌ No performative positioning. ✅Use messaging as directional leadership, not self-protection.
- Develop a Nervous System Strategy: Growth isn’t just planning. It’s conditioning your body to be seen, misunderstood, even attacked, without collapsing (even parlaying it into unforeseen opportunities). Tools like journaling & Journal to Power do precisely this: building capacity for healthy discomfort so you can hold & expand greater power.
- Build Psychological Safety for Yourself: Know your truth, audience, and red lines. Don’t center every strategy around avoiding judgment; it’ll water you, your brand, & messaging down. Often, disagreement offers an opportunity to show yourself & your audience how you handle your authority, expertise, sovereignty, & emotional intelligence in a way that rapidly builds trust & respect for you.
Make Visibility in Business Your Trusted Partner in Growth
At the time of publishing this post, the Astronomer CEO cheating scandal is over a week old & already, the speed-of-light newscycle is cooling it off. In fact, the way they’re turning this PR disaster into gold (with a touch of humor, which always helps) is pretty damn genius. The company has gone from obscurity to the spotlight because of the CEO & HR mistress’s bad behavior. Rather than ducking & hiding (like they did on the Kiss-cam), they’re leaning into the embarrassing, but relatable moment of human imperfection using Chris Martin’s ex-wife, Oscar-winning actress & wellness mogul, Gwyneth Paltrow as the company’s “very temporary spokesperson.” There are no excuses, no apologies, but more of an “OMG, how wild was that?! And while you’re here, here’s a bit about us” that felt approachable rather than cringe.
To read more about Astronomer’s masterful PR maneuver, click here for the Inc. article.
As you grow your brand, your services & enter into new markets, you have the power to train your brain to see visibility as the trusted hire who champions your mission & serves as a powerful, loyal brand ambassador. Which of these tips will you be implementing?