Navigating Imposter Syndrome – with Ashley Jangro

Angie Scheribel: Welcome back to Legacy to Liquidity, the Business Exit Podcast. I’m Angie Scheribel and I help mission-driven business owners sell their business with confidence, ensuring their mission lives on while they gain the freedom to create their next era of impact. And in this podcast, we talk about all things that business owners should be caring about if they ever plan on exiting their business. And I don’t mean just boring stuff, but the stuff that actually matters. I believe that healthy humans run healthy businesses that lead to healthy exits. And all of those three things are interdependent on each other.

Angie Scheribel: And today I have on this podcast a guest, a really good friend of mine, Ashley Jangro. Ashley is somebody I’ve known for over 20 years. She is a life coach and a counselor, and she has changed the lives of so many people that she works with — my life included, my family’s life, good friends of mine that she has worked with. So welcome, Ashley. Tell us just a little bit about yourself.

Ashley Jangro: Thank you, Angie. I’m so excited to be on your podcast. Thank you for having me. Like you said, I am a therapist and a life coach. I work with people to learn to manage their out-of-control minds, learn to handle their emotions so that they feel like they are in control as opposed to their brains or emotions. And I’m so excited to be here with Angie because she also has changed my life and my family’s life. She was in charge of selling my dad’s business so that he could finally retire. And that was amazing. She’s amazing at what she does, so I’m excited to be her guest.

Angie Scheribel: Hey, that’s fun. I didn’t even think about the fact that we both have that in common with each other.

Ashley Jangro: Yeah. We’ve done a lot together.

Angie Scheribel: We really have. Including raising babies.

Ashley Jangro: This is true. Very true.

Angie Scheribel: We’ve got pictures of our babies on mats next to each other under the little play toy things. We’ve done a lot of life together. All right. So one of the things I know I wanted to talk with you about, Ashley, is things that get in business owners’ way as they’re running a business. When I’m looking at business owners who are eventually thinking about selling, there are things they can think about mindset-wise that get in their way. And one of those is imposter syndrome. So many people I know — they don’t even have to be business owners, they can be any kind of professional — really deal with imposter syndrome. And I know you and I have talked about that before. Talk to me a little bit about what is imposter syndrome.

Ashley Jangro: Yeah. It’s funny, when you’re saying business owners, I’m like, it’s also for parents — any adult, I feel like, at some point has had imposter syndrome. It’s just this idea that everybody else knows what’s going on except for them. And it’s completely false. I often think it’s a made-up term to just describe incredibly normal feelings that everybody has.

Angie Scheribel: So somebody who has imposter syndrome in business, what are some of the things that they’re thinking?

Ashley Jangro: Are you thinking specifically of someone who’s thinking about selling a business, or someone who owns a business, or just somebody who’s in the corporate world? What are you thinking of?

Angie Scheribel: Yeah, that’s a good question. Let’s pick a scenario. Let’s talk about a business owner who is growing and scaling their business. It’s beginning to take off, make more money, make more profits, and they’re feeling like they’re a fraud, basically.

Ashley Jangro: This is so great, because I actually just got off the phone with somebody who just purchased another business. They’ve had a thriving business for years, but then they just purchased — she used the comparison, it was like a mom-and-pop shop purchasing Walmart — and she is suffering from massive imposter syndrome. So it’s perfect that you asked that right now. But I think what is happening there, or in what you just described, is someone is having to face something new. They may be going from solopreneur to managing a team. They may be going from a lower budget that their nervous system has had time to get used to, to a massive budget. They may have to add on new components that they’ve never seen before. So their brain is telling them, “You should know how to do this. You are a professional, you’re an expert, you should already know how to do this.” But they’re dealing with something completely new. So they suddenly feel like, “I’m not good enough. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Angie Scheribel: Mm-hmm. I’m pretty familiar with your coaching framework on working through thoughts, but let’s talk through the framework and how you walk people through it, and then what that would look like in this scenario — when you’re feeling like an imposter as a business owner.

Ashley Jangro: Yeah, I use the same framework no matter what the situation is. It could be parenting, it could be relationships, it could be anything, and it applies to this specific situation. It’s ARROW. That stands for awareness, emotional regulation, reframing, and taking ownership of outcomes. So what I would recommend a business owner do is first just become aware — like, “I’m carrying a lot of tension in my body, I’m carrying a lot of stress.” Or the spinning that’s happening in my brain, where my brain is giving me these different stories. So just developing that awareness that something is off right now. And that would sound like, “You don’t know what you’re doing. You are not good enough at this.” Just creating that first awareness, where somebody can take a step back, breathe, and notice what’s going on in their brain, is sometimes enough. So when they see “I’m thinking I should be better at this and I’m not good at this,” then they realize, “Well, I’ve never managed a team before. Of course it’s going to create some discomfort in my body. Of course it’s going to create some anxiety. It’s not a problem. It doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m doing.” Sometimes just that awareness is enough.

Ashley Jangro: If it’s not enough to just sit there and eavesdrop on your brain and notice what narratives are going on there, I would have somebody go into emotional regulation. So noticing what emotion is coming up for you. Is it anxiety? Is it fear — maybe a fear of failure? Is it insecurity? What is the emotion that’s in your body? And then just noticing it’s normal, of course it’s going to happen, looking at it without any judgment and without placing any meaning on it. If you notice you’re feeling insecure, that doesn’t mean you’re not going to be good at the new role you have to step into. So just noticing that emotion, allowing it to exist in your body, creating peace around it, relaxing and breathing into it. It sounds so silly because these are such simple tasks, but it’s so powerful when you notice, “This emotion is driving how I show up, and I’m tense all the time.” When you take a minute to become aware of the narratives and the emotion and then just relax into it, sometimes that’s as far as you need to go. Feel free to interrupt, ’cause I can get on a soapbox here.

Angie Scheribel: Yeah, I was going to say — that whole idea of actually learning to sit and feel whatever comes up. As odd as it is, you’d think that’d be something that’s common, but it’s not. That’s something I learned from you. And what’s the statistic? If you actually sit and feel the emotion, it’s very short-lived?

Ashley Jangro: Yeah. Studies have shown that it lasts about 90 seconds. If you just sit there and allow the emotion to exist in your body, it comes up like a wave — really, really intense — and then begins to subside. But it generally lasts about 90 seconds. And what we do, especially as business owners thinking of a thousand things at any given time, is we just keep plowing through. We’re maybe aware — “Okay, I’m feeling super anxious, I’m feeling super stressed” — but we do one of four things. We react to it, which might look like yelling at a family member or hanging up on somebody. We have a big reaction. We can resist it, which looks like shoving it down, pretending it doesn’t exist, and white-knuckling through it, which is what most of us do. We can avoid it, which looks like overworking. It might look like picking up our phones and getting on Instagram. It might look like drinking a glass of alcohol.

Angie Scheribel: Right. So you can’t feel it quite as much.

Ashley Jangro: Yep. Numbing with substances. It might look like diving into your email and taking care of the easier tasks so you don’t have to face what you’re feeling. And you might hear yourself saying, “I’m just really stressed,” or “I’m really overwhelmed,” when in reality, if you paused, became aware of what’s going on in your brain and your body, and then allowed that emotion to flood through you — and it feels intense, it feels really strong. I always use the phrase “it’s uncomfortable but not unmanageable.” It’s not usually a 10 on a scale of one to 10; it might be a six of discomfort in your body. But it lasts about 90 seconds. So you allow that emotion to wash through you. And then what happens in your brain at that point is you have access again to your prefrontal cortex. It’s like coming out of fight or flight, because you’ve allowed that emotion to metabolize. So it begins to subside, and then you can dig in: “Okay, what stories am I believing that are creating that emotion?” That’s the reframing piece. You move into, “What narrative am I believing?” And that would sound something like, “Because you’ve never done this, you’re not going to be good at this. Because you’ve never managed this much money, this big of a budget, you’re going to mismanage it.” It’s going to be some narrative that’s creating that emotion of anxiety or insecurity or failure in your body. You’ve been in this position before. What are some of the stories you had in your mind when you were experiencing imposter syndrome?

Angie Scheribel: Yeah, absolutely — I was just thinking through that. The scenario that comes to my mind is when I most experienced imposter syndrome, when I was working at the M&A firm I worked at previously. This company sold middle-market businesses. Their minimum was a business that would sell for fifty million dollars, up to about a billion dollars in valuation. Those were the companies we worked with, the business owners we spoke to, the businesses we sold. And I was hired by the owner of that firm to do strategic business development, to oversee his strategic partnerships. And he was like, “I’ll teach you everything you need to know about M&A. I don’t need you to know any of that. I need somebody with your skill set — your people skills, your understanding of people and relationships and business development and sales.” So that’s what we did. He brought me in. And then suddenly I’m in a room — it was a virtual room, it wasn’t actually in person — but I’m in a room with people who own 250-million-dollar businesses. And all of a sudden it feels like I’m out of my league. Like, who am I to be here? I don’t know anything. That was probably the biggest time of my life where I was like, “I’m an imposter. What am I doing here?”

Ashley Jangro: Yeah. And it’s so interesting, because if you took that moment to become aware — “Okay, I’m holding tension in my body, I don’t feel good in this room” — what would you have said the emotion was there?

Angie Scheribel: Insecurity? Is that an emotion?

Ashley Jangro: I think the base emotion behind that is fear. So you’re feeling fear, and the narrative you just said was, “Who am I to be here? What am I doing here? I don’t belong here.” And then when you pause and you’re like, “What does that mean, I don’t belong here?” — if you pause to think about that for a minute — why didn’t you belong there?

Angie Scheribel: ‘Cause I didn’t own a hundred-million-dollar business. Because I wasn’t nearly as successful as these people. I didn’t know anything — that’s what it felt like. That was the thought behind it.

Ashley Jangro: Yeah. And so if we had been working together, if I were your coach, I would say, “Okay, then why are you there? If you don’t belong there, why are you there?” What would you have answered?

Angie Scheribel: Because the skill set that’s needed from me in this room has nothing to do with owning a hundred-million-dollar business. My people skills, my human skills, are what’s needed in this room. My ability to strategize and connect with people and see what they need — that’s what’s needed in this room.

Ashley Jangro: Yeah — that you were uniquely brought there by the owner of the company because of that skill set. They didn’t need another person with a $250 million business in that room. There’d be no reason for them to be in that room. They needed your skill set. So that’s the reframing. But none of us think about that. We never pause and think, “Okay, what story is going on in my head that is driving this fear?” Instead, we just keep white-knuckling, pushing through — “I’ll just fake it till I make it, I’ll try to hide any fear I’m having, and I’ll just show up and put a smile on my face.” But if you pause — “Okay, my brain is telling me I do not belong here. So why am I here?” — then you would realize, “I do belong here. And the fear I’m experiencing is normal. I’ve never been around people who own $250 million businesses. Of course I’m going to feel nervous.” So it’s accepting that fear that’s existing in your body, allowing it to exist, not trying to fight it, not trying to react to it or avoid it, not pretending it’s not there — just allowing it — and then identifying the narrative. So reframing the narrative that is driving that emotion. It doesn’t mean you’ll instantly feel like you belong there.

Angie Scheribel: That would have been a lot cheaper than the path I took.

Ashley Jangro: Which was what? What path did you take?

Angie Scheribel: Ultimately, I went back to school. I made sure I was qualified to be in the room. I got a master’s in business, because I wanted to know that I knew what I was talking about — that I understood the ins and outs of all the conversations.

Ashley Jangro: And it’s likely you would have made the same decision anyway. You may have decided, “Okay, I do belong here, and I want to know more.” It’s just a different energy. You may have gone back to get your MBA with a different energy.

Angie Scheribel: Yeah, that’s true. I think ultimately I did eventually feel like I owned my spot in the room, and it came from the confidence of doing — getting results. I was performing in the job I was given and had a lot of results. And so I’m like, “Yeah, I obviously know what I’m doing here.”

Ashley Jangro: So confidence comes with action. That’s one of the easiest ways to really believe a reframe. We’re taught all the time that you can just think a new thought. I don’t believe that works at all. You have to have that thought-feeling alignment. It has to feel true to you. If you just try to lie to yourself and make yourself believe something you don’t believe, it doesn’t work. Closing your eyes and saying over and over again, “I belong in this room. I belong in this room. I belong in this room” — that’s totally not going to work if you don’t think you do. But when you start building evidence for why you do, that’s what changes your beliefs. In your case, you built the evidence by getting another degree and having these sales under your belt that provided evidence to you. You could have found evidence in other ways. You could have really focused on believing you belonged in the room because you had been brought into the room. But you went and found evidence.

Angie Scheribel: Yeah, for sure. Results gave the evidence. And I was going to say that the knowledge and the confidence that came with going through the school process was invaluable as well.

Ashley Jangro: And a piece of that reframe — the last letter there, where you take ownership of your outcomes — is that you get to decide who you want to be. In your case, you were like, “I don’t feel as though I have the evidence for this, so I’m going to go build it.” You could decide, “I’m okay not believing I belong in that room yet, and I’m a learner.” In taking ownership of your outcomes, you could say, “I want to believe that I’m there to learn.” It’s deciding who you want to be and how you want to show up in this situation. And when it comes to imposter syndrome, it might be, “I’m going to let people know, hey, I’m pretty new at this and I want to learn from your wisdom.” It might not be that, but you get to decide, because you have control over the narratives and over the emotions that are in your body.

Angie Scheribel: Sure. Going back to the feeling-the-emotions piece — the other night I’m trying to fall asleep. I’m in bed, eyes closed, and you know when you wake up with a random panic, and you’re like, it’s something totally irrational? I can’t even remember what I was panicked about, but I was about to fall asleep, woke up, and I’m in super panic mode over who knows what. My brain is racing and there are all of these things happening, and I’m like, “Wait, I know what to do with this.” I feel that panic in my belly. So I’m taking my mind and trying to locate it in my belly, and I’m like, “It feels like it’s back and to the left.” I’m not verbalizing this, I’m just feeling where it’s at. And I’m like, “It just moved up. It just moved left. It just moved out of that area.” I was chasing this feeling around my belly. And then — I just fell asleep.

Ashley Jangro: I love that. And that’s the tool I always teach. It sounds so silly and so simple — you can teach it to a four-year-old. But it’s, “Okay, where is that emotion residing in your body?” And then I love to find the outline of it, because as the emotion begins to dissipate in those 90 seconds-ish, I can’t really find the outline anymore. So it’s evidence to me that it’s working. I find all the physical characteristics of it. And this is for two purposes. Because when you’re finding an emotion in your body, you can’t spin out. I had one of those 2 a.m. moments the other night where I woke up and I was like, “I’m not living the life I want to. I wanted to be traveling more. I wanted to live in another country by now. I’m a failure. I’m going to grow old without ever having lived outside of Colorado in my entire life. I’m failing, my life’s over.” And first of all, I’m like, my guard’s down, it’s 2 a.m. — of course I’m going to feel this. So accepting it. But then finding that panic in my body. That’s the first reason: then my brain can’t spin out. Now I’m losing track of the second reason. One, so that I can’t continue to spin out. But two, just to show my body that this emotion’s not an emergency. This isn’t a problem. It’s okay that I feel panicked. And just in doing that — accepting it and allowing it — I’m regaining access to my prefrontal cortex. In that fight-or-flight moment, I’m all up in my amygdala, my emotion center. I cannot think rationally. They can see it on an MRI: when you’re in that moment, you lose connection to your prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for planning, decision-making, thinking rationally, all of that. So by getting calm — I think of it as calming a barking dog — you’re calming your body down, and then you have access to your prefrontal cortex again, and you can think rationally. Now, in your case, you fell asleep by the time you actually did that. But if this was happening during the day, you would have access again to your prefrontal cortex.

Angie Scheribel: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so going back — we’ll use your example. Somebody just bought a business, and they’re feeling like a total imposter. Let’s work through that framework. So what’s the A, awareness?

Ashley Jangro: Yeah, becoming aware. “I’m holding a lot of tension in my body. I’m snapping at people. I’m stressed. My shoulders are up here. My jaw is tight. My stomach hurts. I’m not doing okay.” And then sitting back and saying, “Okay, what is the feeling here? What are the narratives?” So it’s starting that process of, “I’m feeling fear. What are some of the narratives driving that?” Usually, outside of imposter syndrome, 90% of the time I feel like the thought that’s driving someone’s emotions is, “I have too much to do. I’m overwhelmed. There’s too much going on.” And just by processing through that — relaxing into the emotion, finding the narratives — you can get through it. In imposter syndrome, you become aware, “I’m holding all this tension.” And then you decide to take a moment to pause: “All right, I’m going to dig into what emotion is driving all this, and what thoughts are creating that emotion.” So just becoming aware that you’re not doing okay. That’s the first step.

Angie Scheribel: Mm-hmm. Okay. And then the next one — you said ARROW. So next is an R? Reframing?

Ashley Jangro: Yeah. So my daughter’s in a sign language class right now, so I’m signing it as I go, because we’re practicing the alphabet all the time. The A is awareness, then E is emotional regulation. I think most of the time when we talk about CBT or therapy, one of the things we do is immediately try to—

Angie Scheribel: What’s CBT?

Ashley Jangro: Cognitive behavioral therapy.

Angie Scheribel: Okay.

Ashley Jangro: I think a lot of times in coaching and therapy, we immediately jump to, “Okay, let’s think differently.” And in my personal experience, it doesn’t work, because it becomes another strategy to avoid emotions. So in ARROW, we go from awareness to emotional regulation. That’s finding and naming the emotion, allowing it to exist in your body, and then processing it, which is what you just described — finding it, describing the shape. I think of the color, the temperature, the movement of it. Is it moving fast or slow? That’s my favorite tool to use to process an emotion.

Angie Scheribel: Mm-hmm. So that was emotional regulation. And that’s really just sitting and actually feeling it. It might take 90 seconds of discomfort, but—

Ashley Jangro: Yeah. And some of the other tools I use to emotionally process: on a scale of one to ten, how intense is this? What I’m doing, again, is thinking about the emotion in order to allow it to exist in my body. So out of the four options, I’m not reacting, resisting, or avoiding — I’m allowing.

Angie Scheribel: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s so powerful, because for so many years, with that resisting or avoiding, you’re just held down, weighed down by this panic, this underlying thing you don’t want to look at. You don’t want to address it. So you’re moving around it. You’re rearranging your life to be more busy, to not think about it, so that you don’t have to deal with it. And it takes ninety seconds.

Ashley Jangro: I think of the number of decisions I have made to avoid ninety seconds of an uncomfortable emotion. And it’s wild to me.

Angie Scheribel: It really is a superpower. Even just last week I made a dumb mistake at work. And I could have spent the whole day trying to avoid it, walking around feeling stupid about myself, walking around in shame. And I was like, “Yeah, that was a dumb mistake.” So I sat down and felt the failure, or whatever that emotion is, for literally 90 seconds, and then I’m like, “Okay.”

Ashley Jangro: And you feel like you’re going to die, like you might throw up. But you allow it to sit there in your stomach, find it, and then you’re like, “This is not the end of the world. I can sit here.” It’s literally a superpower. When you’re willing to feel embarrassment, shame, fear, any of those, you can do anything.

Angie Scheribel: Truly. And I came out of that and I was like, “Okay, it’s time to live with the consequences, figure out how you’re going to fix it,” and I could just move on without any underlying panic.

Ashley Jangro: Yeah. And then if somebody says something to you about it and you feel that shame wash up again, you just feel it again, and it’s a little bit less intense. As you practice that, the really intense emotions lessen in duration, intensity, and frequency. As you teach your brain, “I know how to handle that emotion,” it lessens in those factors. It might continue to come up, but then you sit and process again, and you’re able to re-access your prefrontal cortex and act accordingly. It’s so unbelievably powerful. I feel like it’s the secret to the universe.

Angie Scheribel: I used to feel like it’s a superpower. We’ve been in networking meetings where you get into little small groups — “What’s the one tip you’d give to anybody?” And I have literally said that. And nobody takes me seriously, Ashley. I’m like, “Literally sit and feel your bad emotions for sixty seconds. I promise it’s life-changing.” And their answer is, “Cold plunge.” My answer is not trending.

Ashley Jangro: Yeah — getting up early in the morning, or taking care of things that take less than two minutes. They have all these hacks, and you’re like, “No, feel your negative emotions. Be willing to feel.” And they’re like, “That’s weird. Next.” But think about why you won’t do big things — why you won’t go speak on stage, or go after the job you truly want, or whatever. At the end of the day, it’s because you don’t want to feel a negative emotion.

Angie Scheribel: Hmm. That’s true. That’s powerful.

Ashley Jangro: And when you know how to feel a negative emotion, you can do anything.

Angie Scheribel: Yeah, it’s true. I think about that all the time. Worst case scenario, the worst thing that can happen is a bad emotion.

Ashley Jangro: And once you process that emotion, you’re left with the narratives. And then you can challenge the narratives with a rational brain.

Angie Scheribel: Fair. Okay — I feel like people are totally getting real friendship, real conversation here, because we’re going all the way around and looping back. So we’ve been to A, we’ve been to E — emotional regulation. And we have this conversation about once a week, where we’re like, “It’s so amazing. Think of all the things we’ve done because we learned to process our emotions.”

Ashley Jangro: It’s true.

Angie Scheribel: All right, so now we’re moving on to R.

Ashley Jangro: Yep. And that’s the piece I call “reframe to retrain your brain,” because what we believe is reality is just a series of patterned thoughts. Back before we had awareness and memory, we began to see the world in a certain way, and those became neural pathways that formed what we see as reality. So all of our thoughts come through this filter that our brain calls reality. We think we’re looking around at the world observing facts, when in reality we’re interpreting facts to create our reality. Does that make sense? That got pretty convoluted.

Angie Scheribel: Well, it’s like whatever you were trained to think, however you were brought up, that becomes truth to you. And if you question that, you can choose to believe something different.

Ashley Jangro: Yeah. So it could be, “Okay, that person’s mad at me,” as evidenced by them slamming doors and stomping around. And that is your reality: when people do that, it means they’re mad or irritated. And your brain shortcuts that. So now you don’t even think through why you think that person’s mad — you just think that person’s mad. You don’t think of all the reasons your brain is interpreting it that way. So when you’re doing this process — you become aware that something’s not okay, you process your emotions, you emotionally regulate — then you get to the reframe to retrain. You draw up the narratives that created that fear, that anxiety: “I think someone’s mad at me,” or “I think I’m not good enough to do this.” You bring into your awareness what those narratives are, and then you can reframe the situation to retrain those neural pathways.

Angie Scheribel: Mm-hmm. So what would that look like in terms of imposter syndrome, if you’re reframing?

Ashley Jangro: Yeah. So you bring up the narrative. What you just did was realize your narrative was, “Who am I to be in this room?” First of all, you’d answer that, and get to the bottom of what sentence is making you feel like you don’t belong in this room. You keep following it down until you get to the essence of why it’s creating insecurity in your body. Sometimes I ask myself, “So what?” So: “Well, I’ve never owned a $250 million business.” So what? “So therefore I don’t have the skills necessary.” Okay, so what? “So they’re not going to respect me.” Whatever it is, you keep getting to the bottom of it. For you, the bottom of it was, “I’ve never owned a $250 million business.” So again, if I were coaching you, I would say, “Okay, so what does that mean?” And we get to the bottom thought that’s driving the fear, and then we challenge it. I’d say, “Is that true? Do you believe that thought? Do you like it? Do you want to believe it? Is it helpful to you?” And as I ask all those questions, your brain naturally begins looking for another explanation. It’s sort of like — wait, who are our listeners? I think we’re safe — it’s sort of like when you first realize Santa Claus is not real. I don’t want to say that if there are any little ears listening.

Angie Scheribel: Probably not.

Ashley Jangro: Trigger warning: I’m going to talk about Santa.

Angie Scheribel: Isaac’s in the room — he’s really upset.

Ashley Jangro: I hope he knew. But once you know Santa’s not real, you try to look at the magic of Christmas, but you can’t see it the same way. So once I’ve challenged your thought that you don’t belong in the room, it’s hard to continue believing that you don’t. You’re like, “Wait, hold on, I kind of actually do. I was brought here because I have these specific skills.” And if you don’t believe it, you’re not going to be able to reframe your thought to retrain those neural pathways. But you find an alternative way of perceiving things that better serves you than the narrative that was creating the fear.

Angie Scheribel: Mm-hmm. Okay. And then what’s the O?

Ashley Jangro: Taking ownership of your outcomes. That’s where you decide: Who do I want to be? How do I want to show up? Do I want to continue thinking I don’t belong here? Because that might serve you. Maybe you decide it does serve you to feel like you don’t belong, because that’s going to put you in a learning mode — in a position where you can learn from people. Probably not if it’s creating a huge amount of fear, but you might be able to reframe it in a way that serves you. So it’s really looking at, “What do I need to feel to show up the way I want to?” Because our feelings drive our actions. What do I need to feel to show up as the person I want to be? What do I need to believe to feel that? And can I believe that with the facts that exist?

Angie Scheribel: Sure.

Ashley Jangro: So it’s really deciding who you want to be.

Angie Scheribel: Yeah. So that’s where you’d put — I went back to grad school. Me owning my outcome was — I don’t think I went back because I believed I wasn’t supposed to be in this room, because even before I went back to school, I was like, “No, I for sure deserve to be in this room. I’m proving my place here by the results I’m getting.” But I was also like, “There are pieces of a deal, pieces of business, that I don’t understand, and I want to know that I did it all. I want to fill in the gaps of my knowledge.” So I went back to school because I didn’t want anybody else to be responsible for what I was in charge of learning. Does that make sense?

Ashley Jangro: I think that’s amazing.

Angie Scheribel: Right? I want to own my education. I want to know that I know what I’m talking about, and whatever I don’t know, I want to learn it. So I put myself back in school so that I could know all the different pieces. And then in that process of going to school, I’m like, “Wow — first off, I’ve grown my knowledge. I know so much. And two, being able to manage school while working full-time while being a mother and a wife — there is nothing I can’t do.”

Ashley Jangro: Yes, that’s right. So it also built that belief. And I think a lot of things came from that too, because you realized you didn’t necessarily want to be in that room. You wanted to be serving a different demographic of business owner that didn’t have $250 million. You wanted to be available to that individual. So you took ownership: “Maybe I belong in that room, but I don’t want to.”

Angie Scheribel: Yeah, totally. So now I get to bring the strategy and all the things I learned in that space to people like your father, who did not have a $250 million business — maybe in his heart he did — and sell it to an awesome buyer.

Ashley Jangro: Yes. Yep. That’s so good. I love — I have watched you use the skill of processing your emotions and managing your thoughts around certain narratives in a way that has allowed you to build something amazing. And I’m always impressed with how you chose to believe, first of all, that these really basic skills would be the superpowers that I kept saying they were. And then you applied them and used them to build something huge.

Angie Scheribel: Mm-hmm. It all started with a little coaching with Ashley.

Ashley Jangro: So glad. Me too.

Angie Scheribel: Okay, so that’ll do it for today. There was another limiting belief I wanted to tackle, but maybe we’ll just have to do that in another one, Ashley.

Ashley Jangro: Yeah — part two.

Angie Scheribel: Why don’t you tell people how they can find you, how they can get a hold of you, how they can work with you?

Ashley Jangro: Perfect. Yeah. I currently have a group coaching program that is open to whoever would like to join. We meet every Tuesday at 10 Mountain time, noon Eastern, and you can find that by going to ashleyjangrocoaching.com.

Angie Scheribel: All right, thanks for listening. If you’re a business owner thinking about selling now or someday, this podcast is here to help you understand how to build, position, and sell your business for maximum value. But more importantly, it’s about what comes next — because a successful exit isn’t just about selling a company. It’s about creating the freedom, the resources, and the clarity to build the legacy you want for your family, your community, and the causes that matter most to you. And by this lesson, it’s about making sure that you’re the person who can build the business and take it to that next level. If you’d like to connect, you can find me at angiescheribel.com. Until next time.