There's days I wake up and feel like I've completely lost my purpose. My alarm goes off at 5am and I snooze it until 5:20, and instead of bouncing out of bed like I do when there's excitement about the day ahead, I crawl out and think, why am I even up? It's fucking 5am. And then I quickly start my morning routine, not because I want to but because there's something inside me, a burning desire to succeed, a willingness to never give up no matter how hard it gets. That feeling is built over time, with consistency and commitment, even when there's zero evidence anything is changing. This is resilience. And resilience is built through the hard times.

Why is ambition such a dirty word? When I started franchising Haus of Vitality, I had two locations operating and had just announced the third. I was still working at the shop myself and juggling being a mum, doing treatments on clients, managing staff and expanding and scaling a franchise— a regular client arrived as I was settling her into the massage chair. "Athird location," she said, "how will you handle that?" I was slightly shocked, not because I was surprised that's what people would think, but because there was no praise or best wishes— just a sheer "you can't handle this" vibe.

It's still the best piece of advice I've ever been given. I was sitting at my mother-in-law's dining table, a glass of champagne in hand, listening to her and her friend talk about events, food, travel, and finally we got on the topic of business, I could talk about business for days. This particular friend had driven up from Batemans Bay — a real estate agent, confident, sassy and self-made, the kind of woman I wanted to be, she owned more than one agency and had loads of advice to share.

It was one of those weeks where I felt like I'd been dragged across burning hot tar, tied to the back of a truck. We were so close to closing a deal that felt like my life depended on it. It didn't — but at the time, every fibre of me believed it did. Between that and the day-to-day grind of single parenting, I was truly, fully, fucking exhausted.