Not Every Hard Season Is Your Business Story — How to Find the One That Is

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Most women haven’t lived through just one hard season. Here’s how to know which chapter is actually the one worth building a business around.

Most women I work with have not lived through one hard thing. They have lived through several — a difficult marriage, a health scare, a financial collapse, a season of caregiving that hollowed them out, a career setback that reshaped how they see themselves. When I introduce the idea of building a platform from lived experience, the question that follows almost immediately is not “am I ready” — it’s “which one?”

That question deserves its own answer, separate from the readiness question. You can be fully healed from three different hard seasons and still have no idea which one belongs at the center of your business. I want to walk you through how to choose, because picking the wrong one — or trying to build around all of them at once — is one of the fastest ways to end up with a platform that feels scattered instead of magnetic.

I want to say plainly that having more than one story is not a burden, even though it can feel like one when you’re staring at a blank content calendar unsure where to start. It usually means you’ve lived a full, complicated life, and it means you have more raw material than most people ever get to work with. The task in front of you isn’t scarcity. It’s selection.

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Why This Decision Trips Up So Many Women

The instinct, understandably, is to reach for the biggest story — the one with the most obvious drama, the clearest before-and-after. But the size of a story and its usefulness as a business foundation are not the same measurement. A story can be enormous and still not be the right one to build around, if it doesn’t connect to a specific audience with a specific need.

The other common mistake is trying to hold all of them at once — weaving the marriage story and the health story and the career story into a single, sprawling personal narrative. I understand the instinct; all of it happened, and all of it shaped you. But an audience cannot follow five threads at once, and a business built on “everything that ever happened to me” tends to attract everyone a little and no one deeply.

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The Filter: Ask Which Story Has an Audience Already Waiting

Here is the single most useful question I ask women in this exact position: of everything you’ve lived through, which experience do you get asked about the most — unprompted, by people who are not being polite, but who genuinely want to know how you got through it?

That question tends to surface the right answer faster than any amount of internal reflection, because it points you toward where the demand already exists. You do not need to invent an audience. You need to notice which chapter people are already leaning toward when they hear even a small piece of it.

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A Simple Way to Compare Your Chapters

If more than one story is genuinely calling to you, run each one through the same four questions:

• Which story do I have the clearest lesson from — not just an outcome, but an actual, teachable takeaway someone else could apply?
• Which story is fully healed, per the Embarrassment Test — steady to tell, understood, boundaried?
• Which story connects most directly to the expertise or offer I actually want to build — is there a natural next step for someone who resonates with it?
• Which story, if I’m honest, do I actually want to keep telling for years? Because a platform built around a chapter you’re privately tired of will show up as fatigue eventually, no matter how good the content is.

Whichever story scores highest across these four is very likely your answer — not because the others don’t matter, but because this is the one with both the clearest lesson and the most sustainable energy behind it.

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What to Do When Two Stories Tie

Sometimes the filter doesn’t produce a clean winner — two chapters score nearly the same, and you’re left no closer to a decision than when you started. When that happens, I’d add one more, more practical tiebreaker: which story more directly supports the specific offer or platform you actually want to build right now? A story might be equally healed, equally compelling, and equally in-demand, but if it doesn’t connect naturally to the direction you want your business to grow, that’s a meaningful reason to set it aside for later, even temporarily.

It’s also worth asking which story you have more supporting material for already — more reflections written down, more conversations already had, more of the groundwork already laid. Momentum is a legitimate tiebreaker. The story that’s slightly further along in your own thinking is often easier to build the first season of content around, even if the other one is, in some abstract sense, equally strong.

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You Don’t Have to Discard the Others

Choosing a primary story does not mean the other chapters disappear or become off-limits forever. It means they are not the foundation. They can still show up as supporting material — a detail in a different post, an aside in a podcast episode, context that deepens a later piece of content. What changes is which one gets to anchor your brand identity and your core offer.

I think of it the way a house is built: you need one foundation, poured once, that everything else is framed onto. You can still have multiple rooms with different purposes. You just cannot pour five foundations and expect the house to stand.

This is also, practically, a relief once you see it clearly. Choosing one story to anchor your platform doesn’t mean the rest of your life becomes off-limits material forever. It means you’re not trying to introduce yourself five different ways to the same audience in the same month, which is exhausting for you to produce and confusing for anyone trying to understand what you’re actually about. One clear foundation lets everything else you eventually add feel like it belongs, instead of like a series of unrelated announcements.

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How I Chose Mine

I have lived through more than the story people know me for. There have been other hard seasons — financial ones, professional ones — that shaped me just as much as the infidelity and rebuilding of my marriage. When I was first building Sherley’s Show, I genuinely considered building it around a different chapter entirely.

What settled it, in the end, was exactly the filter I described above. The marriage story was the one people already asked me about, unprompted, at gatherings, in DMs, in quiet conversations after church. It was the one I could speak about steadily. It connected most naturally to the audience I wanted to serve — women rebuilding relationships and, eventually, women rebuilding their sense of what they were capable of. And honestly, it was the one I still wanted to be talking about years later, which not every chapter passes.

The other chapters didn’t disappear. They still show up — in a passing reference during a podcast episode, in a detail that adds texture to a blog post about something else entirely. But they were never going to be strong enough on their own to anchor an entire platform the way the marriage story could, and it took running them honestly through this comparison to see that clearly, rather than just defaulting to whichever one felt most urgent on a given day.

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The Right Story Can Change Over Time

One more thing worth naming: the story that anchors your platform today doesn’t have to be the one that anchors it forever. Plenty of women build a strong foundation on one chapter, spend a few years there, and eventually find that a different, later chapter — sometimes one that hadn’t even happened yet when they started — becomes the more resonant one. That’s not instability. That’s growth, and it’s allowed.

What I’d caution against is switching foundations too early, out of restlessness rather than genuine evolution. Give a chosen story real time to prove itself — a year, at minimum — before concluding it was the wrong pick. Most of the time, what feels like the wrong foundation is actually just the normal, slower-than-expected pace of building anything real.

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This Is the Deeper Work of Pillar One: Recognize

Choosing the right chapter is the more advanced layer of Pillar One — Recognize. The first layer is identifying that a given experience holds value at all. This second layer is comparative: identifying which of several valuable experiences deserves to be the one you build on. Both are part of the same pillar, and both are foundational to everything that follows in Release, Rebuild, Reframe, and Revenue.

If you have been stalling out not because you lack a story but because you have too many, I want you to hear that this is a solvable problem, not a sign you are unfocused. Run the filter. Trust what people already ask you about. The right chapter usually reveals itself faster than you expect once you stop trying to use all of them at once.

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Key Takeaways

• Having lived through multiple hard seasons is common — the challenge isn’t finding a story, it’s choosing which one anchors your platform.
• The strongest signal is what people already ask you about unprompted. That points to where real audience demand already exists.
• Compare candidate stories on four criteria: clearest lesson, healing readiness, connection to your intended offer, and whether you’d want to keep telling it for years.
• Choosing a primary story doesn’t mean discarding the others — they can still support later content, just not anchor the brand.
• This comparative decision is the deeper layer of Pillar One of the Trauma-to-Profit™ framework: Recognize.

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Call to Action

Start With Trauma-to-Profit™ (T2P™)

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Hear these ideas in conversation across all three formats — the Real Talk Series with Sherley and Kalief, Conversations with Sherley and Kira, and Interviews with guest experts.

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Sources

Internal Sources

Transform Pain into Power: Unlock Your Business Potential

Build Authority With Your Story: Trauma-to-Profit™ Explained

Trauma-to-Profit™ Framework Overview

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Sherley’s Show provides an atmosphere where every woman is comfortable growing into their best self. Sherley’s Show is a no judgment podcast where we discuss how to rise strong out of all types of obstacles that come with relationships. Through personal life experiences and discussions ranging from infidelity, trust, forgiveness, sex, heartbreak, self love, therapy and more, we offer words of empowerment as you strive to build and maintain all of the relationships in your life. You may be going through something that is unique and difficult. Sharing your story gives others comfort and could also be helping someone else. Let them know they are not alone. Everyone has a story, do not let fear hold you back.

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