Caryn Meininger explores how entrepreneurs build businesses on a mask shaped by parental expectations, survival pressures, and corporate burnout. Many founders unknowingly construct ventures around a false self, internalizing external shoulds until they forget who they actually are. Shedding that persona is the first step to building something real.
Society tells us we need to be a certain way. Our parents dim our light to fit in. What is their comfort in their box of this is how it should be versus removing the shoulds?
It's more about letting go of those versions of ourselves that we thought we should be or that we thought we had to be. It happens in really subtle ways. And most entrepreneurs that I come across don't realize that they built a business on that facade, that they built a business from that mask. Because most of us, when we create a business, we're doing so from survival. I was in corporate, became a mom, and I was like, I just can't keep dropping my son off at daycare every day. I just want to be with him. And so it was this like, do or die type of feeling. And it was like, okay, I will become whoever I need to be to make that work.
