Tiny Brave Steps: Real Women. Real Fear. Real Courage Stories.

Kelly's Story: She Stopped Building Everyone Else's Dream

• Bernice McDonald • Season 1 • Episode 8

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For twenty years, Kelly Schuknecht was the woman behind the vision. 

Two CEOs. Two decades. She made everything happen — the platforms, the books, the speaking events, the brand. 

She was exceptional at it. And she was invisible doing it. 

Then, a company acquisition decided she wasn't needed anymore. The layoff hit her harder than she expected. Not just professionally. Deep down, in the place where we keep the questions we're afraid to ask out loud. 

Why didn't they think I was enough to keep? 

The morning after, Kelly made a decision. She wasn't going to go looking for one more person to be the person behind. She opened a spreadsheet, typed three words at the top — Can We Do This? — and started building something of her own. 

This episode is about what courage looks like when the wound is still fresh, and the story isn't finished yet. 

It's about the dream you've been writing down but haven't let yourself say out loud. 

And it's about the question Kelly's husband asked her on a hard day that changed the way she thought about fear. 

You're going to want to hear it. 

________________________________________________________________

 Connect with Kelly

Kelly's Book

https://authorityxfactor.com/ 

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Hosted by Bernice McDonald — Courage Architect, speaker, and author. 

Need to find YOUR Next Step through a hard thing you're facing? Have a simple conversation with the Tiny Brave Steps Generator AI:  www.tinybravesteps.com.

Connect with Bernice:  

Email: bernice@bernicemcdonald.com
Website: www.tinybravesteps.com

Join me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernicemcdonald/

If this episode moved something in you — leave a review, share it with a woman who needs it.

Do YOU have a Courage Story you'd like to share? Send Bernice a message. 

SPEAKER_01

The morning, after the worst professional moment of her 20-year career, she sat down and made a decision. Not a plan, not a five-year strategy, a decision about who she was going to be.

SPEAKER_00

I can't do this. I cannot do this to myself. I cannot go look for one more person to be the person behind.

SPEAKER_01

20 years of building other people's visions. Two CEOs, platform after platform, and in one sentence, one hard morning, she was done. Not with working, with disappearing. She opened a spreadsheet that same week, typed four words at the top. Can we do this? That spreadsheet still lives on her desktop today. I'm Bernice McDonald, and this is Kelly's Courage Story. Act one, wake up your courage. Here's what nobody knew about Kelly. Including Kelly, really. While she was doing her job impeccably, while she was helping her CEO build his platform, get speaking events, grow his thought leadership brand, while all of that was happening. She was journaling about something else. Every morning, same practice, same quiet hour before the day started. And in those pages, she was writing about a company, her company. Not in the someday maybe sense, in the specific sense. She named it, built a website, hired someone to create the website.

SPEAKER_00

I had visualization in there, like uh visualizing myself as the CEO of a company, and you know, these things that I was like, I was thinking through, but not really even verbalizing, not even, you know, not telling anyone that I was really thinking that. I just I was, I just wasn't like even putting any like words to it.

SPEAKER_01

An entire year before she lost her job without even fully knowing why yet. She wasn't hiding the dream exactly, she just hadn't let herself claim it yet. Fred, the voice we know as fear, talks all of us out of the things that we want most. Fred had a very specific argument for Kelly, and it sounded reasonable. You're good at this, you're valued here. You've never had a negative performance review in 20 years. This is safe. Why risk it? So she stayed. She kept showing up, she kept executing, she kept believing the company would find a place for her after the acquisition. And then two and a half years in they let her go. It wasn't a mass layoff, it wasn't a restructuring that took everyone with it. It was specific. You're in marketing, we don't need you. And here's what Kelly told me that I want you to sit with for just a second.

SPEAKER_00

I do. I have these like deep like emotional wounds from that. Like, why didn't they like me enough to keep me on? Like, why couldn't they, you know, have worked with me? Like, didn't they see my value? Like, you know, all of these things that I um that I've struggled with, nothing indicates that there was a problem. So, like, how did this happen?

SPEAKER_01

20 years of excellence, not one negative review, promotions she never had to ask for. And still, why didn't they keep me? That question doesn't have an answer. Corporate environments, as Kelly says, are their own world. You can do everything right and still get cut. But knowing that doesn't stop the question from echoing or hurting. What the wounded, and this is where Kelly's story gets really important, is force her hand. Because when you are carrying a dream that quiet, sometimes it takes something that painful to make you stop waiting. Act two, embrace who you are. The morning after Kelly did what most of us would do. She went into survival mode. Okay, ten job applications a day. That's the plan. That plan lasted one day, and that's when these words came out.

SPEAKER_00

I can't do this. I cannot do this to myself. I cannot go look for one more person to be the person behind.

SPEAKER_01

That's not a business decision, that's an identity moment because what Kelly was really saying in that sentence wasn't, I don't want another job. She was saying, I know who I am now, and who I am is not the person behind. Not anymore. That's the shift. This is where she woke up to herself. She opened the spreadsheet, typed the four words, and started building. Here's what I want you to notice about how Kelly embraced who she was. She didn't wait to feel confident. She didn't wait until the website looked good. She didn't wait until she had all the answers.

SPEAKER_00

My stuff looked like a mess for the first, you know, six months, right? It was like, don't go to my website because it looks terrible, you know. Like it was like, but I needed to focus on bringing in clients before I could worry about my website, right?

SPEAKER_01

She showed up as an established business while she was still figuring out what that meant. She used we when she was still a team of one, she created packages, she joined a community of agency owners. She said yes to things she hadn't done before, and then figured them out after she said yes. And she gave this a name. Kelly's Strange Jewel, the thing she'd been doing for CEOs for 20 years without realizing it was her superpower. She called it the authority X Factor.

SPEAKER_00

I had I had spent 10 years in publishing. I had from there, I had um worked in marketing. But one of the conversations I had early on led me to think about like who I was, what I had done, what people thought of me, like what I had become known for. And um, you know, and and so I thought about like in my role with my boss in my previous company, he was a thought leader. And I helped establish, helped him establish his thought leadership platform. So I helped him with, you know, getting speaking events, uh having a book in hand, right? Like uh getting on podcasts, doing LinkedIn content. Like so, all of these things I was doing for him, that's where I was like, I can turn this into a service offering that we do for different people.

SPEAKER_01

The skill she'd used to build someone else's platform was her gift. That was always her gift. The wound of the layoff just finally made her point it at herself. At three, stand up for you. Building a business in the first year is not a motivational poster. It's a mental wrestle.

SPEAKER_00

Would I have had the courage to do this if the universe hadn't pushed me off of a ledge? Probably not. But that force, that that moment in my life forced me to have courage and to finally step into the role that I was supposed to be in.

SPEAKER_01

Kelly does not make it sound like anything other than what it was.

SPEAKER_00

I never, um, not that I never believed, but like I just always doubted. You know, I tried to like go move forward as if it was going to be successful. And yet, you know, I think you there's this constant struggle as an entrepreneur of, is it gonna work? Like it has to work, is it gonna work, you know, like you're back and forth. There were clients lost.

SPEAKER_01

There were people trusted who shouldn't have been. There were hiring mistakes, there were moments when the first client walked out the door and the old wound reopened immediately. I'm not good enough, I can't do this. And through it all, Kelly kept standing up for herself, not loudly, not even dramatically, but in the exact same way she'd started.

SPEAKER_00

Make decisions quickly, and if it's not the right decision, we can change it later, but I've gotta keep moving forward.

SPEAKER_01

One decision at a time. Keep moving, don't overthink. If it's wrong, fix it later. Just keep moving. One tiny brave step at a time. One of those moments that cuts through all the noise when she was in the middle of a hard stretch and questioning everything.

SPEAKER_00

He asked her a simple question. My husband said to me recently, he owns a couple of businesses, and so he has been dealing with the ups and downs uh of entrepreneur life. He had said to me, like, you know, remember how you felt when you were in your job, like how miserable you were. And he's like, you know, these um, you know, you have a bad day or whatever. He's like, You're choosing your hard, right? Like, do you do you want to go back to that and be um miserable in your nine to five? Or do you want to have some bad days where you like question yourself? And, you know, it's like, um, you know, choose your heart. It's still gonna be hard. It's gonna be a different kind of hard.

SPEAKER_01

Choose your heart. Now that line is important. It's not saying everything will be fine, it's not saying that fear goes away. It's saying hard is not a reason to stop. Hard is not a sign you made the wrong choice. Hard is just the terrain. And you get to decide which kind of hard you want to walk through. The hard of somebody else's rules, somebody else's vision, somebody else's decision about your value, or the hard of building something that's entirely yours with all the uncertainty and the bad weeks and the 3 a.m. doubts that come with it. Kelly chose her hard, and she keeps choosing it. Act four, create your impact. Two years later, Kelly has an agency, a team, clients, a book coming out, and guess what the name is? The authority X Factor about the exact journey that she's been on. She speaks, she teaches other business owners how to build the platform she spent years building for someone else, and she's also still in it, still on the journey, still measuring distance between where she is and where she wants to be.

SPEAKER_00

I know I am where I'm supposed to be. So, like, even when you know, when I do have those bad days or bad moments, this is what um I actually like three months before I lost my job, I had like this just feeling I cried for like hours, and then I like and then I just had this piece that I was like, the next thing's gonna be better. I just I knew that at that time, and I still like am on this journey of like not feeling like it's better yet. I've had this feeling that like I know it is going to be better, and I just have to keep like um working towards what that better is going to be.

SPEAKER_01

That's the honest thing about courage as a practice rather than a destination. The wound from the layoff. The why didn't they keep me? Kelly told me she still carries it, she's still processing it, she's still hurt and still angry about it a year and a half later. And she's built something real anyway, not because the wound healed, but because she chose to walk with it.

SPEAKER_00

But it doesn't make the pain go away. It still hurts and it's still been really hard for me. I love sharing the success of the business that I've grown in the last year and a half because I know that people see it. It's been fun to like build this and go, hmm, like this could have been yours. You could have, you know, I could have been doing this for you, but you didn't see, you know, you didn't see me and you didn't see what I was, you know, capable of doing. And so now it's like, well, then I'm gonna do it for myself.

SPEAKER_01

There's something Kelly said near the end of our conversation that I keep thinking about. I asked her what she'd say to the woman who is still in the behind-the-scenes role, still carrying a dream but hasn't let herself name it yet, still waiting for the right time.

SPEAKER_00

If you are like that person behind the person, if you are, you know, a support person in your role, but you have these dreams of doing something else, you know, you want to start your own business or, you know, whatever, whatever that was. You want to write a book, you wanna do something um different, you have to start doing things that make you uncomfortable. And it could be an hour a week, like start doing the things that you're um that you're putting off, like because you're never going to accomplish those things that you want to do if you don't prioritize it.

SPEAKER_01

An hour a week, not a grand plan, not a dramatic exit, not a perfect website or a flawless pitch deck. An hour committed. That's where it starts. Kelly's spreadsheet is still called Can We Do This? Two years in the answer is yes. She can. She did. She's still doing it. Kelly's story isn't the kind with a clean ending. And I think that's exactly why it matters. Because most of us aren't at the end either. Most of us are in the middle of something, carrying a dream we haven't fully claimed, still feeling a wound that hasn't fully healed, still wondering if it's going to work. What Kelly shows us is that courage in the middle of a story looks like a spreadsheet named Can We Do This? A messy website you put out anyway, a decision made quickly, changed later, made again. A morning practice where you write the thing down before you're ready to say it out loud. Not because the heart goes away. Because the right kind of heart is one you chose. That's where your tiny brave step lives today. Not at the end of the field, in the middle of it. You can find Kelly at KellyShookneck.com. Her book, The Authority X Factor, is available on Amazon. And she has a personal brand quiz. A great first step if you've been thinking about stepping into your own spotlight. I'll put the link in the show notes, so be sure to check it out. I'm Bernice McDonald. This has been a courage story. Thank you for joining me. If you'd like to know what your next step is, be sure to check out my own personally created AI called the Tiny Brave Step Generator. You'll find it at www.tinybrave steps.com.