The Cognitive Cost of Always-On Entrepreneurship ft. Keri Ford
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As an entrepreneur, have you ever struggled to turn your work brain “off”? Keri Ford is a mom of two, creative director turned award-winning executive coach, and the CEO and founder of Elevate with Keri. She is trauma trained and passionate about nervous system regulation for high-achieving women. Keri helps women bridge the gap between outer achievement and inner peace, teaching them how to build thriving businesses without burning out.
In this episode, Victoria and Keri dive into everything from trauma in entrepreneurship to the real cost of always being “on”. Keri shares how she went from corporate creative director to CEO and how each chapter taught her tools to get to the next level. You’ll walk away knowing how to recognize early signs of burnout, build resilience through regulated stress, and redefine what success looks like in your current season.
If you’ve ever felt the weight of constant decision fatigue, racing thoughts at night, or the pressure to maintain momentum no matter the cost, this episode is your permission slip to slow down. Whether you’re on your morning walk or taking a break between calls, this conversation will leave you feeling grounded with practical tools to use throughout your day. Grab your notebook and a fresh cup of coffee, because you don’t want to miss this one.
Introduction to Keri Ford
Keri Ford is a mom of two, former creative director, and ex-corporate leader who now serves as an award winning advisor to the world’s most influential women in business. She’s the founder and CEO of Elevate with Keri, a global wellness coaching company that empowers female founders and executives to achieve new heights. They do this through methodologies in nervous system regulation, neuroscience, performance, and an embodied approach in leadership. She’s also the founder of The Champagne Club, a private founders and investors dinner series with events across the country.
Keri helps high-achieving women quiet the noise, regulate their nervous systems, and unlock new levels of clarity, confidence, and performance in life and business. If you’ve ever found yourself lying awake at night with racing thoughts, Keri’s work will resonate with you.
Trauma-informed Leadership for High-achieving Women
Keri studied under Dr. Peter Levine, who created Somatic Experiencing. She worked through several years and hundreds of hours of training to learn how to help clients renegotiate trauma safely without reliving it. She took these skills into her business to support high-achieving female founders.
While this is a therapeutic modality, somatic work gets to the root cause inside the body. It impacts the nervous system at a cellular level, without having to re-experience the trauma. Somatic work shifts the mind and rewires how the body feels and responds moving forward.
Trauma Informed vs. Trauma Trained
Keri is trauma trained, which is different from being trauma informed. When you’re trauma informed, you understand the impact of trauma but aren’t trained to work with it directly. On the other hand, a trauma-trained practitioner has specific skills to identify, track, and work with trauma in the body. They’re able to help clients reprogram their nervous systems in a safe and effective way.
Trauma in Entrepreneurship
Trauma is not a buzzword, and it’s very common in business. Entrepreneurship is one of the most triggering personal development journeys you can go on. It brings up old patterns, wounds, and fears.
Keri explained this with an example. Imagine your business partner embezzled money from you and caused your company to collapse. Even if you’ve moved on, your nervous system will remember this. In the future if you start a new partnership, you might find yourself feeling uneasy or withholding information, because your body is protecting you from experiencing old pain again.
Self sabotage is a form of self protection. When you’re able to identify and rewire your subconscious responses, you can move forward faster.
Somatic Success®
Somatic Success® is a method Keri uses with all founders and executives in her programs. It helps women leverage their leadership archetype. Everyone has a default stress response, whether that’s getting snippy, picking fights, pushing people away, etc. Those responses limit their ability to grow.
Through this methodology, Keri identifies those patterns and helps her clients rewire them. The goal is to align external success with an internal sense of peace. Her clients should feel as good on the inside as their lives look on the outside.
Keri’s Journey from Corporate to Somatic Practitioner
Just like many CEOs, Keri’s career path was not linear—but she acknowledged that she was always collecting tools and skills along the way. She began her career in corporate as a creative director in New York. She still uses many of those skills in her business today, from designing her company’s branding to workbooks and worksheets.
Keri realized she wasn’t helping people the way she wanted to, so she took a leap of faith and left her stable corporate job to start over in Los Angeles. She took a job at a smoothie shop and got her personal training certification to make ends meet.
One day, she met a celebrity trainer who offered her a position at a private Hollywood gym. Clients at this gym included Gerard Butler, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Alison Sweeney, and Kaley Cuoco. Working with celebrities taught her that everyone is human and wants to feel strong, supported, and safe in their bodies.
Later on, Keri returned to corporate leading internal teams at Skechers and a real estate company in Atlanta. She learned to build strong teams, lead others, and manage growth. All of those previous experiences became the foundation for her work today as a somatic business coach.
The Cost of Being “Always On”
If you’re a business owner who struggles to truly unplug, you are not alone. You may find your mind wandering, planning, solving, and worrying. That constant mental activation creates chronic stress in the body.
This stress begins with physical symptoms such as migraines, jaw clenching, upper back pain, or insomnia. Those are warning signs from your nervous system that are often ignored, as stress is so normalized today. But the truth is, your company cannot thrive if your nervous system is not regulated. Without your health, you don’t have your business.
Most women wait until they hit a breaking point before addressing stress. Remember the signs are always there, even if they’re subtle. Part of Keri’s work is helping women listen sooner. Once you recognize somatic cues from your body, you can intervene early and prevent burnout. Pushing through discomfort is a superpower of entrepreneurs, but over time, that superpower can become their downfall.
Balancing Motherhood and Entrepreneurship
Protecting your nervous system when life feels chaotic starts with boundaries—setting and upholding them. That’s the biggest piece of advice Keri has for women balancing motherhood and entrepreneurship.
Sustaining growth requires scaling the right things with more regulation and trust. Keri encouraged women to start small, like with ten minutes of quiet meditation a day. Be mindful of how you feel, and take breaks when your body cues you to. She also says that this season with little kids is temporary, and sometimes success looks like slowing down—even if that results in a short-term revenue dip.
Redefining Success and Protecting Mental Space
There’s a line between healthy ambition and harmful overdrive, and it comes down to where you’re building from. When success becomes a way to chase worth, you’re building from a place of not being “enough” yet. When you build from there, no amount of success will ever feel satisfying.
Identify the wound underneath your ambition (needing to be seen, heard, valued, etc.), and build from a place of wholeness, not lack.
How to Manage Stress as a High-achieving Woman
Brains weren’t designed to handle how many decisions founders make per day. Every input shapes how you think and feel. Audit your input, and be intentional about what and how much you consume. As a founder, hire decision makers. Give your team the autonomy to make decisions you don’t need to make.
Avoiding stress completely is impossible, but you can learn how to leverage it. The goal isn’t to have a stress-free life, but to have a regulated response to stress. Stress builds resilience, and that resilience makes you unbreakable.
That notion is the heart of Keri’s trauma work. It’s not about erasing your past, but about expanding your capacity and trusting yourself to move through discomfort.
In Keri’s life, she personally handles stress through input management and self regulation. She sleeps in, takes Fridays off, and doesn’t follow hustle culture. She creates more than she consumes. She spends intentional time with her family.
She also works with a somatic mentor, who helps her do her own “inner housekeeping”. This work has kept her grounded throughout some of the hardest moments of her life, and she believes that if she’s figured it out before, she can figure it out again.
Keri’s success reframe to take with you is this: think about something that’s not working in your life or business and ask yourself, “What part of me doesn’t want this to work?”. That question reveals your unconscious beliefs or fears that could be holding you back from your next level. Sometimes success isn’t about more; it’s about removing what’s standing in your way.
Key Quotes
“If you don’t have your health, you don’t have a company.”
Keri Ford
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