Unfiltered Live: What Reinvention Really Looks Like
A Substack September conversation between Sarah Stone and Teresa Fracasso about resilience, starting again, trusting the “not yet”, listening to yourself and building the kind of community that makes the internet feel human again.
Teresa Fracasso, joins us from Saudi Arabia for a conversation that quite literally crossed the world, but what made it particularly interesting was that despite living in different countries, building different businesses and arriving at Substack through very different circumstances, it quickly became apparent that the two of us had experienced many of the same things.
We had both moved countries.
We had both experienced chapters where the life we knew changed dramatically.
We had both discovered that resilience isn’t necessarily something you know you possess while you are using it.
And we had both arrived on Substack at a point where we were thinking about what comes next.
Teresa describes her own story with the words, “I went through fire, I came out building,” and after starting her Substack at the end of March while still living in Rome, she began writing openly about her life, her upbringing and some of the experiences that had shaped her, only to discover that sharing those stories was unexpectedly therapeutic and, perhaps even more importantly, that they resonated deeply with other people navigating their own transitions and setbacks.
And that became the starting point for a much bigger conversation.
Because what does resilience actually look like when you are living it?
Maybe resilience doesn’t always look like strength
We often talk about resilience retrospectively, once the difficult chapter has passed and we can stand on the other side of it and construct a neat story about what we learned, how strong we became and how everything eventually worked out.
The reality while you are inside it can feel very different.
For Teresa, resilience began very early in life and, for a long time, looked much more like survival than strength. Growing up in a difficult home environment meant becoming highly attuned to what was happening around her, and discovering horseback riding gave her something she would only understand much later: movement became a way of regulating herself long before she had the language to describe what she was doing.
That distinction became incredibly important during our conversation because resilience can so easily become synonymous with pushing through.
Keep going.
Work harder.
Don’t give up.
Be stronger.
Except sometimes the resilient thing isn’t to keep pushing. Sometimes it is to recognise that your body has been telling you something your mind has been trying to override.
It is setting the boundary.
It is walking away.
It is changing direction.
And, sometimes it is admitting that the thing you have invested enormous amounts of time, money and energy into is no longer the thing you should continue pursuing.
Teresa talked about learning to distinguish between the moments when perseverance was genuinely serving her and the moments when she was responding from an old pattern of survival, and that has become central to the way she now thinks about resilience.
Resilience doesn’t always mean enduring more.
Sometimes resilience means recognising what is happening, reframing it and deciding what you want to do next.
You don’t always recognise your own resilience while you’re living it
This was where Sarah’s experience of moving from the UK to New York entered the conversation, because when she looks back at that period now, resilience is an obvious word to use, but it wasn’t necessarily a word she would have used at the time.
Moving countries meant starting again without an established friendship circle, without the familiarity of the systems she had always known and, despite technically sharing a language, discovering that even British and American English can occasionally make you feel as though you are speaking two entirely different languages.
At the time, it didn’t feel like an inspiring story about reinvention.
It felt more like standing there asking:
How am I going to make this work?
And perhaps that is something we don’t talk about enough when we celebrate people who have successfully reinvented themselves.
Starting again can be exciting, but it can also be deeply disorientating.
You can be incredibly capable and still find yourself in a situation where all the things that once made you feel competent have suddenly disappeared.
You don’t necessarily know that you are becoming resilient.
You’re simply solving today’s problem.
Then tomorrow’s.
Then the one after that.
Eventually you look back and realise that somewhere along the way, you built an entirely new life.
Where is your energy actually going?
One of the unexpected crossovers in our conversation came through movement and energy.
Teresa’s work has been deeply influenced by movement and the relationship between what is happening physically and what is happening mentally, while Sarah’s own journey after moving to New York unexpectedly led her towards sound healing, energy work and eventually what she called creative feng shui, which later evolved into the wider philosophy of intentional living.
The connection between those two approaches was surprisingly clear.
Both are asking us to notice where our energy is going.
Sarah had previously co-founded Female Success Network, where so much of the conversation was naturally about success, but one of the things she began to recognise was that it is entirely possible to become so focused on succeeding in one area of your life that everything surrounding it begins to suffer.
Your business may be thriving while your health isn’t.
You may be achieving professionally while feeling disconnected personally.
You may be continually moving forward without ever stopping long enough to ask whether the direction you’re moving in is still the direction you want to go.
That was the premise behind Sarah’s approach to creative feng shui and intentional living: rather than simply creating a vision board filled with things you hope to acquire, what happens when you look at the whole picture and ask where you actually want your attention, intention and energy to go?
Teresa’s experience brought another dimension to that question.
Because energy needs boundaries too.
Your gut may know before your spreadsheet does
Teresa spoke openly about one of the harder lessons she has learned: sometimes we know something isn’t right and proceed anyway.
The business partner.
The opportunity.
The collaboration.
The relationship.
The thing that looks perfectly sensible on paper but somehow doesn’t feel right.
For Teresa, part of learning to trust herself has meant recognising the difference between genuine intuition and old wounds that create a desire to belong, to be chosen or to feel seen.
There had been times when her gut was saying don’t do it, while another part of her was saying yes because the opportunity appeared to offer something she had once felt was missing.
That insight eventually became hugely important as Teresa and her husband navigated one of the biggest reinventions of their lives.
In 2020, they invested everything into opening their dream studio in Rome.
They opened in January.
Two months later, they had to close.
Suddenly, the business they had invested in and believed would provide their future income couldn’t operate as planned, yet letting go of that version of the future initially felt even more frightening than holding onto something that clearly wasn’t working.
Then a client from Saudi Arabia suggested that what they were doing could have enormous potential there.
So they explored it.
A possible investor appeared.
The possibility of moving countries began to feel real.
They even started preparing their children for a move.
And then the investor disappeared.
Eventually the answer came back:
Not at this time.
It could easily have been the end of the idea.
Instead, it became the beginning of a two-year lesson in what resilience really looks like.
There were yeses.
Then nos.
Then another possibility.
Then another no.
Until eventually the right sponsor appeared and the move that had once seemed almost impossible became their reality.
What if the answer isn’t “no”, but “not yet”?
This became one of our favourite ideas from the conversation.
Because we are remarkably quick to interpret a closed door as evidence that we have chosen the wrong destination.
The proposal wasn’t accepted, so perhaps the idea is bad.
The person said no, so perhaps we aren’t ready.
The opportunity disappeared, so perhaps it wasn’t meant for us.
The numbers aren’t growing quickly enough, so perhaps we should stop.
But Teresa’s journey to Saudi Arabia offered a very different interpretation.
Sometimes the destination can be right while the timing, person, partnership or route is wrong.
Sometimes no really means not this way.
And sometimes it simply means not yet.
There is an important distinction here because this isn’t about blindly pursuing something forever while ignoring all evidence that it isn’t working; Teresa’s story was also about listening, adapting, reframing and recognising when an investor or opportunity that initially appeared to be the answer was actually wrong for them.
The belief remained.
The route changed.
That is a very different kind of resilience.
It isn’t stubbornness.
It’s the willingness to stay connected to the possibility while remaining flexible about how you get there.
Teresa described eventually reaching a point where her mind, soul and gut were all saying yes, even when people around her questioned the decision, and two years after those initial conversations she and her family are now living the chapter that once existed only as a possibility.
Success includes the parts that didn’t work
One of the things we both kept returning to was how easy it is to edit failure out of the story once something succeeds.
We tell people where we ended up.
We don’t always tell them about the investor who disappeared.
The business that closed.
The collaboration that cost us money.
The decision we wish we’d made differently.
The months when we didn’t know what was going to happen.
The things we tried that nobody bought.
The moment we nearly stopped.
Teresa made the point that success is also part of failure, because every period of progress inevitably contains setbacks, and sometimes we need to experience those setbacks ourselves before we genuinely understand what it takes to build something.
We think that is particularly relevant on a platform such as Substack.
It is very easy to arrive here, discover writers with tens of thousands of subscribers and compare their visible chapter ten with your invisible chapter one.
But you don’t know what came before.
And equally, somebody reading your work may have no idea how many versions of you existed before the one they see today.
That is why Sarah’s philosophy behind Starting From Zero has never really meant being zero.
You can start from zero followers.
Zero subscribers.
Zero customers.
Zero contacts in a new country.
Zero experience on a new platform.
But you are not zero.
You bring the skills, mistakes, relationships, intuition, resilience and experience from everything that came before.
Sometimes the dominoes are already being placed
At one point, our conversation moved into something more intuitive.
Sarah shared an analogy she had been given earlier that same day during a personal reading, which described the different experiences, decisions, relationships and chapters of her life as dominoes being carefully placed into position.
When you are standing close to them, each domino can look separate.
This business.
That move.
That person.
That failure.
That skill.
That unexpected conversation.
That thing you learned years ago and haven’t thought about since.
But from further away, there may be a pattern forming that you simply cannot see yet.
And eventually one domino falls and the next connects with another, and suddenly all those seemingly unrelated pieces begin moving together.
Whether you interpret that spiritually or simply as the accumulation of experience, we both recognised the idea immediately.
Teresa had created a manifestation board before ever moving to Saudi Arabia containing images of community, opportunity, sunshine, desert and family, and over the following two years those ideas became increasingly connected with the opportunities she noticed and the decisions she made.
Not simply wishing something into existence, but training your attention towards what matters and then recognising possibilities when they appear.
Perhaps reinvention often looks like that.
You don’t wake up one morning and become somebody completely different.
You collect pieces.
You follow curiosities.
You survive things.
You learn.
You meet people.
You change your mind.
You start again.
Then eventually you look backwards and realise the pieces were connecting all along.
But not every opportunity deserves your energy
Perhaps one of the most valuable parts of Teresa’s story was her willingness to talk about an experience that looked impressive from the outside but taught her something very different internally.
She co-organised an international conference for entrepreneurs in Dubai with around 90 people attending from around the world, and while she remains proud of having done it, she also came away recognising how often she had said yes when she wanted to say no, how much she had over-given and how repeatedly her gut had been telling her that certain parts of the experience weren’t right.
Financially, she made nothing from it.
And she isn’t ashamed to say so.
Because the lesson was worth talking about.
There is an important message there for anyone building a business, particularly in an online world where we’re continually presented with collaborations, partnerships, speaking opportunities and invitations to become part of something.
Being included doesn’t automatically mean an opportunity is valuable.
Exposure isn’t always payment.
Gratitude doesn’t create an obligation to keep saying yes.
Being invited into the room doesn’t mean you have to stay in the room.
And community should not require you to continually deplete yourself to prove that you belong there.
That experience helped Teresa become much clearer about the kind of community she did want.
Which brings us to Substack.
Maybe this is what online community was supposed to feel like
This was perhaps where our experiences overlapped most strongly.
Neither of us came to Substack looking for another social media platform.
In fact, Teresa was wonderfully candid about not particularly liking traditional social media at all.
What she found here felt different.
She could write about the difficult parts rather than simply presenting the polished ending.
She could have thoughtful conversations in the comments.
She could discover other people’s ideas and genuinely respond to them.
She could create her Sunday Signal and subscriber chat, encourage people to share their latest Notes and articles, read them and actively participate in their work.
She could meet people she would never otherwise have encountered, including Sarah, and build relationships that weren’t dependent on being in the same city, country or even time zone.
For Teresa, Substack began to feel like somewhere she could enter a genuine flow state, partly because the stories she was discovering weren’t only the glossy “after” pictures of people’s lives, but included the difficult middle too.
And perhaps that is what both of us are enjoying most.
The human exchange.
There is space for vulnerability here because you can share the short thought in a Note, have the conversation in the comments, then go deeper through a long-form article, a podcast or a Live like this one.
The relationship doesn’t have to end with a like.
It can become a conversation.
And a conversation can become a relationship.
You don’t have to niche yourself into somebody you no longer recognise
Towards the end of our Live, we talked about what advice we would give somebody who is new to Substack and trying to figure out how to make it work.
Teresa’s answer was refreshingly uncomplicated:
Be yourself.
Don’t become so consumed by finding the perfect niche that you edit away the very things that make your perspective interesting.
Don’t wait for the perfect article.
Don’t imagine everybody else knows exactly what they’re doing.
Write.
Publish.
Learn.
Do it again.
Because the article gets better by writing the next article, just as Lives become more natural by going Live and podcasts become easier by recording episodes.
Perfection isn’t the prerequisite.
Practice is the process.
Sarah’s answer complemented it perfectly.
Don’t post and run.
Restack somebody else’s work.
Recommend someone.
Leave a thoughtful comment.
Spend five or ten minutes showing some love to another writer’s post.
Be the kind of commenter you would love to find underneath your own work.
Message someone.
Start the conversation.
Because if enough of us behave that way, we create a ripple effect in which growth doesn’t only happen through algorithms, but through people actively helping other people feel seen.
And perhaps those two pieces of advice belong together.
Be yourself, then go and be interested in other people.
It might be one of the simplest Substack strategies we’ve found.
What we both took away from this conversation
We began by talking about reinvention, but somewhere along the way we realised that reinvention doesn’t necessarily require becoming an entirely different person.
Sometimes it is the opposite.
Sometimes starting again is about stripping away everything that no longer fits and becoming more honest about who you already are.
It is understanding that resilience doesn’t mean endlessly pushing through.
It is knowing when to listen.
Knowing when to move.
Knowing when to wait.
Knowing when a no is telling you to stop and when it is simply telling you not yet.
It is recognising that the chapters that didn’t work are not embarrassing detours from your success story, but often the very experiences that make the next chapter possible.
And perhaps most importantly, it is trusting that starting over doesn’t erase what came before.
The skills are still there.
The experience is still there.
The relationships are still there.
The lessons are still there.
You are still there.
Maybe we aren’t continually starting from zero after all.
Maybe we’re simply rearranging the dominoes.
7 takeaways to take into your own next chapter
1. Redefine resilience.
Before automatically telling yourself to push harder, ask whether resilience in this situation means continuing or whether it means pausing, changing direction, setting a boundary or listening to what your instincts have been telling you for a while.
2. Turn “no” into a better question.
Instead of immediately interpreting a setback as this isn’t going to happen, ask whether the answer might actually be not yet, not this person or not this way. Teresa’s move to Saudi Arabia took two years of changing circumstances before the right arrangement finally appeared.
3. Check where your energy is going.
Look beyond the obvious measures of success and ask what your current ambitions are costing elsewhere. A business can be growing while your wellbeing, relationships or creativity are being depleted. Progress should be considered as part of the whole life you are building.
4. Listen when your gut and your actions disagree.
If you repeatedly feel resistance around a partnership, opportunity or situation, become curious about it rather than immediately overriding it. Ask whether you’re saying yes because it genuinely feels right or because you want approval, belonging, recognition or the feeling of being chosen.
5. Stop hiding the setbacks from your success story.
The business that closed, the proposal that failed, the collaboration that made no money and the opportunity that disappeared may contain more useful wisdom than the things that worked immediately. Don’t be ashamed of the messy middle.
6. On Substack, be yourself before you worry about your niche.
Write the next article instead of endlessly perfecting your positioning. Your voice becomes clearer through using it, and your publication can evolve as you discover what you genuinely want to say.
7. Don’t publish and disappear.
Give five or ten minutes of your attention to somebody else’s work, leave the thoughtful comment you would love to receive yourself, Restack something worth sharing, recommend someone, reply to people and start genuine conversations. Community becomes valuable when we contribute to it rather than simply asking it to grow our numbers.
Continue the conversation with us
If Teresa’s story of resilience, reinvention and turning setbacks into possibilities resonated with you, you can continue the conversation with her on Substack, where she writes openly about the experiences that shaped her and what she has learned about resilience, movement, transitions and creating possibilities from the chapters we don’t necessarily choose for ourselves.
Subscribe to Teresa Fracasso on Substack
And if you have found your way here through Teresa or through one of our Substack September conversations, you can join Sarah at Starting From Zero, where the conversation is about starting something new, starting again and recognising that even when the numbers say zero, you are bringing a lifetime of experience with you.
Start here and subscribe to Starting From Zero
Throughout Substack September, Sarah is going Live every weekday, creating more of these unscripted and unfiltered conversations with people from across Substack, and if this Live proved anything, it is that sometimes the best conversations happen when we stop trying to make everything perfect and simply press the button.
So perhaps we’ll leave you with the question we’re both taking away from this one:
What if the thing that hasn’t worked out yet isn’t telling you to give up, but asking you to find another way?
