Build Forward with Lisa D.

This summer, I made a call that cost me a piece of my identity: I closed the co-working space, even knowing it meant hard conversations, community judgment, and a rough August on paper.
In this episode I’m walking through why I did it, the four stages every business actually moves through (simplify, stabilize, strengthen, scale), and how I’ve learned to sit with discomfort instead of mistaking it for failure.
If you’re in the messy middle of simplifying something in your own business right now, this one’s for you.

The business that was supposed to give you freedom…is now the thing keeping you from it.
When I started my business, I wanted more flexibility, more impact, and the freedom to build a life on my own terms. Instead, I built a business that depended on me for almost everything.
In this episode, I’m sharing the story of how I got there and how I started finding my way back out of it.
We’ll talk about the trap I fell into quietly: saying yes to every opportunity, adding more services, solving more problems, and slowly building a business that’s harder to explain, harder to lead, and WAY harder to step away from.
Then, I talk about the framework I’m testing to make sure I’m able to stay above the business and not in the business, and how its played out over the last 2 years. Want to keep the conversation going? Find me on social media: @lisadivirgilio

Every January, we’re sold the same story: new year, new you. Bigger goals. More discipline. More effort. More motivation.
And every February, so many of us are quietly wondering what went wrong again.
In this episode, I’m breaking down why New Year’s resolutions fail so consistently, especially for ambitious, burned-out women. Spoiler alert: it has nothing to do with discipline, consistency, or willpower and everything to do with the fact that resolutions are built on exhaustion, guilt, and unrealistic expectations.
We’re talking about:
Why you can’t outrun burnout by “wanting it harder”
How resolutions prioritize outcomes over foundations
Why women never start January with a blank slate
The difference between growth and punishment
And why stability always has to come before scaling
Instead of asking “What do I want to achieve this year?” I’ll walk you through a completely different approach, one rooted in capacity, nervous system regulation, and sustainable progress. You’ll hear the three questions that actually matter, why “stabilizing” one area of your life is more powerful than chasing ten goals, and how to build a foundation that real change can finally stick to.
If New Year’s resolutions have left you feeling behind, broken, or ashamed year after year, this episode is for you. You’re not unmotivated. You’re not failing. You were just handed a system that was never designed to support you.
This is the Build Forward way: calm, intentional, and sustainable.

In this raw and honest episode, I’m sharing a story I’ve never fully unpacked publicly: the moment a woman from my past accidentally sent me a screenshot of my engagement post with the caption: “Is she serious?”
It was years after my first marriage ended abruptly, years after rebuilding myself from the ground up, and on the very day I thought I’d finally stepped into a new chapter with peace. Yet one careless message from someone I hadn’t worked with in ages cracked open an old wound, the wound of being doubted, judged, whispered about, and underestimated.
This isn’t just a story about an old colleague or a mean-spirited message. It’s about the pressure so many women in leadership carry: to be liked, to be approved of, to be palatable, to never ruffle feathers even while building something big and brave.
If you’ve ever rebuilt after heartbreak, been the topic of someone’s group chat, or felt the sting of being underestimated, this one is for you.
The real work - the work no one sees - is learning to move from “I’ll show them” to “I trust myself.”

If I wasn't busy, I felt invisible.In this episode of Build Forward, I’m talking about the addiction no one admits to: the rush of chaos. When you’re deep in burnout, stability starts to feel boring, so you keep saying yes, keep adding more, keep chasing that next hit of excitement just to feel alive. But all it’s really doing is keeping you stuck.
I’ll share how I realized I was fueling my own burnout, why chaos can feel like comfort when you’ve lived in it too long, and how learning to love stability became my biggest breakthrough.

You hit the goals. You built the business. You climbed the ladder.
So why doesn’t it feel like success?
In this episode of Build Forward, I’m talking about the achievement trap: that quiet place where everything looks good on paper, but somehow, it still doesn’t feel like enough. I’ll share what happens when accomplishment becomes addiction, how I fell into it myself, and the shift that finally helped me redefine what “success” actually means.
 
If you’ve ever looked around at the life you worked so hard to build and wondered, “Why doesn’t this feel better?” then this one’s for you.

I used to believe that hitting seven figures would give me freedom, safety, and power, but I learned the hard way that you can have a million-dollar business and still be broke, stressed, and barely paying yourself.
In this episode, I break down why chasing revenue is the wrong game, why profit is the real measure of stability, and three practical steps you can take right now to start building profit into your business.

Burnout Isn’t About Working Harder.
Here’s my raw admission. I burned out hard. For years, I thought the answer to every challenge was more. More hours. More hustle. More energy. But chasing more without defining enough was the recipe for collapse.
My biggest breakthrough was learning that success does not come from raising the bar higher and higher. It comes from knowing where the bar should actually be.