Valerie's breaking point came not through dramatic collapse but through her body's quiet rebellion. "I woke up one day and I just couldn't get out of bed. Like my legs just refused to move," she recalls. The shame was immediate—she couldn't even tell her co-founder partner what was happening. This physical manifestation taught her that burnout signals often appear as disconnection from our bodies. "I was amazed by how resilient our bodies are in keeping up the insane hours and the fake it till you make it mentality for many years, but then there comes a point where the body just says no more."

Valerie describes entrepreneurship as "a really big mirror to our inner world," reflecting back our deepest patterns and motivations. Her reflection showed someone "very much driven by a sense of external validation" who was "putting up a certain front as the accomplished young entrepreneur that always has an answer to everything." The dangerous part? "You move so far away from your true self that it just becomes very draining. It becomes very exhausting." This insight reframes burnout not as working too much, but as living inauthentically.

When pressed about whether anyone can truly thrive in hustle culture long-term, Valerie's answer is definitive: "Honestly, I think the hustle culture is complete BS. It doesn't work ever. There always something has to give." Whether health, relationships, or business quality suffers, the cost is inevitable. "We're not robots," she emphasizes. Many founders get addicted to the tunnel vision of pure production mode because "it's kind of nice because all you need to care about is just making sure your business works out. It's very single focused." But this addiction costs everything else.

Valerie's turning point came when her co-founder and partner delivered an ultimatum: "Either the relationship is done or you have to leave the business. It's one of the two and this just can't continue." The clarity was immediate and surprising. "I surprised myself definitely surprised him by announcing that I was going to leave the company, which none of us really expected but that felt like the truth in the moment." This decision taught her that sometimes external pressure creates the clarity needed for authentic choices.

Valerie's most practical breakthrough was abandoning time-based scheduling for energy-based productivity. "I started being a lot more productive that way, a lot less hours but a lot more results," she explains. "Instead of being like 'at 2 o'clock I need to be doing this, at 4 I need to be doing this,' it's like 'how is my energy right now and what is possible within that energy wave?'" This approach requires letting go of perfectionist control: "Let me accept that right now I'm not bringing the results I want to be bringing. So let me just step away and trust that I can come back later."

Valerie's business partnership demonstrates cycle syncing in action: "Me and my female business partner, we check in every week like 'Hey, where are you in your cycle? Does it make sense for you to be doing this? Should I be doing this?'" The energy differences are dramatic. During ovulation week, "anything is possible, but if you compare that with the week before your period, it feels like nothing is ever working, nothing's moving." Instead of fighting these natural rhythms, she now optimizes for them, scheduling outward-focused activities during high-energy phases and detail work during introspective periods.

Valerie developed a powerful practice to break conditioning around "supposed to" work patterns. "Sometimes on a Monday morning, I would purposefully not work just to be like 'I get to decide. It's Monday morning, doesn't matter. I'm creating my own time.'" This conscious rebellion helped retrain her nervous system to accept true freedom. "Most of us become entrepreneurs because freedom is one of our biggest values, but we impose all these rules on ourselves which are anything but free." The practice of intentionally not working when "supposed to" creates space for authentic choice.

I’ve recently been told that there are 2 ways to build/achieve success, the hustled way and the balanced way. Valerie chose the latter, of course, and is now the living example of how much more impact you can have on people if you constantly focus on being the best version of yourself. And to do this, sometimes (well actually always!) you have to let go of what doesn’t serve you. This is the hardest work you’ll ever do in your life. Far harder than building a company that drives you crazy, but the results are all worth the game!