Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ashley Lemieux: How Entrepreneurs Can Overcome Loss, Heal, and Build a Thriving Business | Mental Health | E340
Mon, 03 Mar 2025
Ashley Lemieux’s journey is a masterclass in navigating grief as an entrepreneur. She became a mother overnight, only to lose the children she raised in a contested adoption. Years later, she was pregnant and hopeful, but a battle with sepsis led to the devastating loss of her baby boy. After years of running from grief, Ashley finally reached a breaking point. One day, she broke down, threw up her hands, and screamed, “I am here!” That mantra became a powerful reminder to stay mindful. In this episode, Ashley shares how the Clarity Mapping framework helped rebuild her life and teaches us how to shine, even through life’s darkest moments. In this episode, Hala and Ashley will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:11) Unexpected Parenthood and Loss (05:46) Clarity Mapping: A Guide for Self-Healing (07:56) Surviving a Health Crisis and Pregnancy Loss (11:01) The Power of Storytelling in Healing (16:33) Shutting Down a Successful Business (22:25) The Fear of Pivoting in Entrepreneurship (27:09) “I Am Here”: A Mindfulness Mantra (29:33) How Entrepreneurs Deal with Grief (36:54) Building a Sustainable Life and Business (38:57) Reframing Negative Thoughts and Habits (49:00) Distinguishing Grief from Trauma (52:08) Overcoming Fear in Entrepreneurship (56:58) The Five Daily Questions for a Growth Mindset (1:01:43) Why Mental Health and Inner Peace Matter Ashley Lemieux is a wellness coach, bestselling author, and founder and CEO of The Shine Project, an online community that provides women with support and motivation. Having overcome profound grief and loss, she developed Clarity Mapping, a tool for finding purpose, making mindset shifts, and gaining clarity. Through her podcast Healing Her, she helps others rebuild their lives after loss. Sponsored By: Shopify - youngandprofiting.co/shopify Airbnb - airbnb.com/host Rocket Money - rocketmoney.com/profiting Indeed - indeed.com/profiting RobinHood - robinhood.com/gold Factor - factormeals.com/factorpodcast Rakuten - rakuten.com OpenPhone - openphone.com/profiting Microsoft Teams - aka.ms/profiting Get the exclusive NordVPN deal now at → https://nordvpn.com/PROFITING. Try risk-free with the 30-day money-back guarantee Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Resources Mentioned: Ashley’s Book, Born to Shine: amzn.to/437SVEY Ashley’s Book, I Am Here: amzn.to/417DzNR Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Psychology, Wellness, Biohacking, Manifestation, Productivity, Brain Health, Life Balance, Positivity, Happiness, Sleep, Diet.
Chapter 1: What challenges did Ashley face with unexpected parenthood and loss?
We experienced a very unexpected contested adoption and we ended up losing the kids. The lack of purpose that I felt in my life is something that made it really hard for me to get out of bed in the morning. Until I got to the point where I was like, I have to figure out what my intention for my life is now. And so I started with one simple question every single morning.
Chapter 2: How did Clarity Mapping help Ashley heal?
And that question was, so that's when the concept of clarity mapping really started.
How did you get over the shame of starting a company and shutting it down?
We get scared of this idea of starting over, but you're not starting over. You can't. You have so much knowledge now, and so you get to now apply all of that into the next thing.
Do you feel like entrepreneurs deal with grief and stress differently than other people?
Something that is very common among entrepreneurs is
Yeah, fam, if you've ever struggled with grief, loss, trauma, feeling stuck, or just the occasional bout of seasonal depression, then today's episode is just what the doctor ordered. My guest today is Ashley Lemieux. She's the founder and CEO of The Shine Project, the author of books like Born to Shine and I Am Here, and the host of the Healing Her podcast.
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Chapter 3: What was Ashley's experience with a health crisis and pregnancy loss?
Ashley is an expert on grief and trauma recovery and has devoted her life to helping others reignite the light within themselves. Today, she's going to teach us how we can all learn to shine even through some of life's darkest moments. Ashley, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.
Hey, thank you so much for having me.
I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for joining me today. So I'm going to just jump right into it. For a lot of us entrepreneurs, our businesses grow out of something that we've struggled with in our own lives. And I feel like this has been especially the case for you. You've had a bunch of dark moments in your life.
So why don't we start off with the first one that I learned about when I was researching your story. It was in your 20s. You unexpectedly became the mother of two children. And then you had some traumatic experiences around that. Can you tell us what happened?
Yeah, so in our mid-20s, I was actually building my first company also. We were newly married and we didn't have kids at all in our radar at that time. And overnight, we became permanent guardians of two kids together. And for the next four years, we were a family in every sense of the word.
And everything that we did revolved around raising the kids, giving them the opportunities that as a parent, you want them to have. And all of us were under the impression that we would be together forever, for always. And during the final steps of the adoption process, we experienced a very unexpected contested adoption. And during that time, we ended up being in court for two years.
I just remember the life inside of me. It felt like someone had taken a vacuum and just sucked it all out. We were in court all the time, depositions, high stress. No one knew what was going to happen. And we ended up losing the kids. I was actually on the other side of the country for work and it happened fast. I didn't even get to come home and say goodbye to them.
And that was almost eight years ago now. And it rocked our world in a way that I did not know how to come back from, or if I even wanted to figure out how to come back from it, to be honest.
Can you help us understand how you ended up with these kids in your 20s? And then are they now back in your family or the court took them away and you just never saw them again?
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Chapter 4: How can storytelling aid in healing from trauma?
I didn't know how to focus my time and my energy anymore. It didn't matter at that point because my business was running. It was okay for me to step away for a little bit. It did not matter if I got out of bed or not. There was no one I needed to feed breakfast to or to get to school or to bathe at night or to tuck in.
And I stayed in bed for a long time until I got to the point where I was like, I have to figure out what my intention for my life is now. And so I started with one simple question every single morning. And that question was, what is my intention today? Because today, right now in this moment was all I could focus on. So that's when the concept of clarity mapping really started.
I became a series of five questions that I answered every single day to help give me purpose and direction and clarity on who I was and what it is that I wanted to be rebuilding so that I could create tangible steps forward to start building that thing.
And one of those tangible steps was that you decided to have your own children. And so you and your husband started to try for a baby and that led to another traumatic experience. Are you comfortable to share that with us?
Yeah, we waited. I think it was about four years after the loss of the older two kiddos to feel like we were at a place where we were ready to continue to try to grow our family. I didn't want to go back into motherhood feeling as broken as I felt because I knew that that would impact the next child that we were to bring into our family.
And I had so much healing that I needed to do in order to be ready for that. So We were so intentional about what the next steps of growing our family look like. And we decided the end of 2019 that it was time to grow our family. So that is when we moved from Nashville back to Phoenix. We were like, okay, we're ready to go back home. We want to be by my family.
We want solid roots there so that when we have more kids, we're close to family and they get that experience of growing up around cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. So we moved home and right when we moved home, we found out that we were pregnant. And obviously we were so excited. And it just felt like for the first time in several years that there was this new breath of life being born.
breathed into our lives again and that there was forward movement and the grief was still there, but also now there was joy and hope and an opportunity to keep living our lives. And I know no one likes to talk about this time, but I feel like 2020 was a great equalizer for all of us because we can say 2020 and everyone's like, yeah, that year freaking sucked. for me, right?
And it sucked for all of us for various reasons. And for us, we moved into our home in March of 2020, the same week that the pandemic had shut everything down. And so that also meant that doctor's appointments when you were pregnant, everything kind of changed. And so it kind of felt scary for a moment to leave the house being pregnant.
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Chapter 5: Why did Ashley shut down her successful business?
The one thing that we know about grief and trauma is that most people spend their entire lives avoiding the reality of the pain. And the one thing that if all of us did in this area of our life where we feel grief, that would change the trajectory of what we're able to do next is acknowledgement. We have to acknowledge what we've been through and also what it feels like inside of us.
And it might sound so simple to say that, But having it be simple doesn't mean it's easy, which is why the majority of people never get to this place where they're able to acknowledge it.
So if we can start there, then that allows us to have more freedom in acknowledging what has happened and the hurt it has caused us so that we can stop avoiding it and then create a plan that feels safe for us to heal and And to be able to experience the world again in a way that feels safe so that we can create forward steps.
And I know that for you, you've shared your story on podcasts like this, on your own podcast. You wrote a memoir. How did actually sharing, like you were just alluding to it now, how did actually sharing your story help you heal?
I think that for so many of us, we carry these stories. Sometimes there's shame attached to it. Sometimes there's so much pain attached to it. But what we know is that when our pain can leave our bodies, whether it's writing our story down and no one else even reads it, we know that that helps facilitate healing.
So many of us suffer in darkness and our stories just need to be brought to light, to be acknowledged, to be received, to be validated. And as I've been able to share my story, what... has been so beautiful and I think is the greatest privilege of the work that I do is that it helps give other people permission to share and acknowledge their stories.
So I get so many stories sent to me by other women who have gone through really hard things who are like, I've seen your story and it's given me courage now to be able to share mine and walk through what that means for me. And what we know is that healing happens fastest in community.
And so when we can create communities that understand each other and have shared respect and validation for the pain that other people go through, we're able to heal faster.
Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of 'I Am Here' for Ashley?
I love that for you. I love the fact that you were able to do that even with a young child and you've been able to grow your career so successfully. Your podcast is very popular now. You've got two books. So it's awesome. And you actually started as an entrepreneur even before... you started teaching other people about grief and being an author.
You had a successful jewelry business, but then you pivoted and you decided you wanted to become an expert on grief. So how did you decide to make that change? What was the thought process behind that? You know, I've got a lot of entrepreneurs tuning in who are probably product-based entrepreneurs.
And what kind of differences did you see between having a product-based business to now having more of like a personal brand business and an audience-based business?
I was. Something that all product entrepreneurs know is that it is a freaking grind. You are grinding so hard to meet your bottom line. We were doing shows all the time, wholesale trade shows, holiday trade shows. And when we moved to Nashville, I reached this point where I was like, this isn't how I want to be spending the rest of my life. I want to be riding.
And it's really hard to be founder, CEO of a product-based company. that was on the trajectory that we were on and then also be able to do the other work that I really wanted to do. And so I had to make some really difficult decisions, but at the end of the day, what I've always wanted is to help people.
So whether that was through jewelry or now through writing and podcasting and my personal brand, I knew that I had to make a pivot. So I started writing more. And my first step was getting a book agent, which, and I'm such a believer in when you are in alignment with that next step, sometimes things happen to help facilitate that step.
So once I made that decision, I literally opened my inbox the next day. And I had an email from one of the top literary agents in the country asking me if I'd ever thought about writing a book before. And I was like, okay, if this isn't my sign for the next step, I don't know what it's going to be. But there also was this grief of...
Closing the chapter on my jewelry business, we were sold in large department stores like Hallmark and we had a large headquarters in downtown Phoenix. And so that also meant I felt like I had to let other people down because my course was changing. But looking back, I can't imagine not making that decision.
That was going to be my next question, because there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there tuning in that might not have a business that either fits their life goals, where they're feeling burnt out, they don't even like working on their business anymore, or their business is just not successful, just not taking off, you know, 99% of startups fail.
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Chapter 7: Do entrepreneurs handle grief differently?
I think the place where we fail the most as entrepreneurs is we stay in the wrong place for too long because our ego gets in the way of it. And we miss out on really what could take off for us and feel in just such alignment that would not only help us, but other people to be able to serve others more because we are on a path that actually... working.
And so that's something now I actually help women in their own clarity maps in high level entrepreneurs, because this is one of the things I love so much is how do we help you pivot when you are in this season of having no idea what to do next? How do you find that clarity and the confidence and the strategy to support it so that you can move forward?
This is a great segue to talk about your latest book. So your first book was a memoir. It was called Born to Shine. And your next book is called I Am Here. And that's more designed to help others navigate their own experiences of grief and trauma. Clarity mapping is a big part of that. We're hopefully going to dive deep into that later on in the conversation.
But first, you say the biggest life lesson that has come to your life has been the phrase of three simple words, I am here, which is the title of your book. Why are those words so meaningful to you?
They're meaningful to me because for so long, I didn't want to be here. And I did everything to try to avoid the feeling of being here, whether that was numbing out with social media or food or traveling or spending money or working too much or being in bad relationships, whatever that thing was to distract me from the other pain that is what I latched onto.
And once I got to this point, we were actually in Europe on one of our runaway escapades of trying to escape it. And I remember being in Milan and next to me sat a mom and a daughter and she had just lost her tooth. And she was about the age of the daughter who we had lost in the contested adoption. And I remember watching the joy between the mother and the daughter over this lost tooth.
And I just started sobbing. Any composure I had left, it was gone. I wanted those own moments with this human that I loved so much that I knew I was never going to have again. And so I remember I got up from my spot and I started running towards this little apartment that we were staying at. And it was as if someone put a brick wall in front of me. And was like, stop.
You can't keep running like this. You can't. You have to face these feelings. And I probably look like a crazy American tourist, which I totally was. But in the middle of this square there, I threw up my arms. And I yelled, I am here. I am here. And I just started crying. And I just, that became this mantra for me that I still hold onto of, I don't want to run away anymore. I want to be here.
I am here. And so now what does that look like? And how can I support myself to be able to get through these things so that I don't keep running away from this life that I've been given?
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Chapter 8: How can entrepreneurs pivot their careers despite fear?
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Do you mean our current beliefs and like current thoughts, or are you talking about memories or those two different things? talking about our current thoughts.
So what we know about our thoughts is we have somewhere around 90,000 thoughts a day. And out of those thoughts, somewhere around 80, 85% are negative. And the majority of those negative thoughts are reoccurring. So then these negative reoccurring thoughts that we have every single day are creating this belief system, this internal world where if we say, I'm not good enough,
Or I'm never going to get out of this situation. Or man, I make stupid decisions. Or I don't like how I look in the mirror. Whatever those stories are, become truly what we believe about ourselves and the world around us. Now, of course, it is impossible to live in an internal world where we don't have negative thoughts. We're human.
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