Rachel Hollis: Manifest Success, Overcome Guilt & Manage Negative Feedback

High-Level Overview

Rachel Hollis returns to The School of Greatness at the end of what she calls, without question, the hardest year of her life. She is going through a public divorce after 18 years with her husband and business partner, Dave, and at the same time the pandemic wiped out the live events that made up most of her company's revenue. Lewis Howes asks her how someone who teaches confidence finds it when everything seems to be going wrong, and her answers are direct: it is going to be hard either way, so she may as well show up, and she finds her strength in the people who are counting on her.

The tone is frank, fast and often funny, with Hollis laughing at herself even while describing months when she could not get out of bed. She talks openly about the backlash she received online, why she feels no guilt about ending her marriage, and why she would never again let a relationship become part of a brand. The second half turns to business and money: what changed before her books took off, the conference conversation that reset her sense of what was possible, how she now decides what to say yes to, and where she wants to take her company. The conversation moves between personal confession, practical habits and entrepreneurial advice.

The Discussion Explores:

• Why the business, more than the divorce, was the most stressful part of her year, and how she pivoted
• Finding confidence by asking who needs you to win, not only why
• The backlash to her divorce, and why she calls the decision the most authentic one she has made
• What she would do differently about making a relationship public, and her view of social media
• Guilt, pain, and the small habits that carried her through the worst months
• Handling trolls and sudden fame by being unmistakably yourself and not reading comments
• Money mindset, a ten thousand dollar conference ticket, and the value of being around people operating at a higher level
• Saying no, staying focused on one thing, and why success takes longer than people expect

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

A year of pivoting, and where confidence comes from

Asked about the biggest challenge of 2020, Hollis surprises Howes by naming the business ahead of the divorce. She began the year with 60 employees, and easily 70 percent of her revenue came from live events, which stopped overnight. She can handle the emotional fallout of her personal life, she says, but in the business it is not only her family depending on her; it is 60 families. She describes the year as having her back against a wall and pivoting again and again. Her team was among the first live-event companies to move to a virtual conference, which worked, and has since leaned heavily into products, especially for the holidays. She has been an entrepreneur for 17 years, got through 2008 and 2009, and says she will always find a way.

Her confidence, she explains, comes from having been through hard things before. Her reasoning is that "it's going to suck either way" so it will hurt less in the end if she stays in the game and gives her best. For anyone who cannot see a way forward, her advice is to tie the effort to someone else. She has four children and a staff to think about, and she reframes the familiar question of purpose: "it's not what's my why? It's what's my who?" When you cannot find courage for yourself, she says, you can often find it for other people, the way a parent finds the strength to lift a car off a child.

The backlash, and refusing to carry other people's opinions

Hollis says her boundary is emotional: she stopped trying to please people online a long time ago. She gives two examples. After the election she posted a photo with Joe Biden, whom she had interviewed the year before, and says she lost about 100,000 Instagram followers. Her reaction was that she does not want a community of people who refuse to share life with someone who voted differently. The second example is the divorce announcement, which brought a backlash she had not expected, much of it from women and, she notes, aimed at her and never at him. Some people called her fake. Others demanded refunds for conferences they had attended years earlier, with one telling her they denounced everything she had taught them.

She turns the charge of fakeness around. Deciding to stop trying to make something work that was never going to work was, in her words, the most authentic decision she has ever made; staying to protect the brand would have been the fake thing. She also rejects the word failure. "My marriage didn't fail," she says. It produced four children, a period as foster parents, a close friendship and a great deal that they built together, and she argues that length of time should not be the measure of whether something succeeded.

When a relationship becomes a brand

Howes asks whether she would build a business with a partner again. Hollis does not regret going into business with her husband and calls them incredible partners. What she would never repeat is letting the relationship itself become a brand, which she says happened without her intending it. They hosted a morning show and a podcast together and talked through their struggles there for about 18 months, which is why the accusation that they pretended everything was perfect puzzles her. But a public audience becomes, as she puts it, a third member of the relationship. She recalls people saying that if the two of them could not make it, there was no hope for their own marriages, a burden she refuses to accept.

The subtler damage, she says, was to honesty between the two of them. When you are frustrated with your partner but a community expects you on a show that morning, you show up for the community, and everything becomes muddled. She says she cannot imagine dating at this point, but is certain that any future relationship will stay private. On social media more broadly, she thinks people will look back in ten years the way we now look back on children riding in cars without seat belts, amazed that it ran with no limits. She urges listeners to watch the documentary The Social Dilemma, while granting that social media is also a remarkable tool for building a business and finding your people.

No guilt, real pain, and what got her through

On guilt, Hollis is unequivocal: "I have zero guilt." She feels pain and grief, and sadness for her children, but guilt implies having done something wrong, and she believes the decision will let her family become its healthiest version. For people who do struggle with guilt, she suggests two questions. First, have you done everything you can to make amends? Most people who still feel guilty already have. Second, why are you still carrying it, and is it yours, or a load of shame someone else has put on you?

Her advice on pain is to accept that it will hurt for a while and to cling to moments of joy. She tells a friend at the start of her own divorce that "it's going to get good again, but not for a while." Some days coping meant a run; other days it meant a whole birthday cake and a bottle of wine for dinner, and she says she is gentle with herself about that. She coaches herself constantly, telling herself she will come out of this stronger.

The most useful practice came when she grew tired of crying. She noticed that the day's mindset starts the moment you become aware of being awake, and that most people immediately think of their problems and then reach for their phone and add more. After watching a Joe Dispenza video, she began lying still before any other thought and picturing the life she is heading toward. At first she could only see as far as tomorrow, then a week, then a month, and she says she can now see a year ahead. She compares it to casting a fishing lure and hooking something that pulls her forward through the day. On the worst days she held on to two habits: drinking her water and moving her body every single day, even if that meant stretching or dancing in the garage for 20 minutes.

Trolls, sudden fame, and being unmistakably yourself

Hollis says this year burned away the last of her people-pleasing. When her book exploded, she felt like she was on a runaway horse while the public decided who she was. People were then shocked by things she considers obvious parts of herself. If she could do it again, she would make who she is evident every single day so that no one could be confused. She quotes a saying of Dave's: "people are only upset when they're surprised." Her example is a conservative actress who recommended her book, bringing a wave of new followers who were then furious when Hollis posted a photo of herself with a glass of wine. She decided it was better to lose them early.

For anyone creating online, her view is blunt: "Trolls are the price of admission." Her solution is not to read comments at all. She admits unkind remarks do hurt, so she does not consume them, and she does not read the praise either, because she thinks that is how people start believing they have figured everything out. Howes adds his own experience of online criticism and an idea he calls hindsight now: deciding in advance that you will look back on a hard period as something that worked in your favor.

Money, a conference seat, and who you spend time around

Asked when money began to flow, Hollis says the year before was simply head-down work. She had been in conversation with her reader for a decade, learning how she wanted to be spoken to, and she credits the success of her books to that and not to marketing or publicity. She uses a saying from her company: you can knock down a tree of any size if you keep chopping long enough. Her advice to business owners having a hard year is "you have to stay fixated on where you are going, not what it is" while still looking honestly at the numbers.

She did hold a limiting belief about what a business could earn. For three years she had tried and failed to pass a million dollars in revenue. She saved for a year to buy a ten thousand dollar ticket to Tony Robbins's Business Mastery event, where a scruffy-looking man beside her asked what her revenue was, a question that shocked her because her family never talked about money. She told him about 830 thousand; he casually said his company was at around 19 million. Simply learning that an ordinary person could do that, she says, shifted her world, and the next year her revenue went crazy. The value of the ticket was the people in the room, not the stage. She tells a similar story of urging a friend who aimed for 10 million to go for 12, which the friend passed by August. For those without such people nearby, she points to the internet and YouTube as a way to learn what is possible.

Saying no, one focus at a time, and the vision for Rise

Hollis measures every opportunity against the life she wants a year, five years and ten years from now. If it does not fit, the answer is no, whatever the money, because of the energy and distraction involved. She says she will not ride the runaway horse again, and offers the line that gives the episode its title: "Success is a slow process. And so many people drop out of the race because they want it to be overnight." The people who succeed are the ones who keep showing up.

That focus shapes the company. Until January the whole staff is working on one thing, holiday products, because she believes results come when everyone rows in the same direction. To people with ten ideas she says you cannot do them all at once, quoting Don Miller of StoryBrand: "if you confuse, you'll lose." Her Quibi show, which she says was a top five show on the platform before it shut down, she counts as a win for the relationships and for proving that women wanted teaching combined with lifestyle content. Looking ahead, the Rise brand remains the heart of the business: virtual conferences, the first of which she says drew 53,000 people from 83 countries, and the Rise app, which she describes as "fitness for people who hate fitness." She intends to sell Rise someday for a number she already has in mind.

Rest, three truths, and greatness

What is missing from her life, Hollis says, is rest, and she is about to take a week alone in Hawaii. Howes recommends leaving every device at home, as he once did. She explains that she looks after herself deliberately, with therapy, walks, naps and time with friends, because operating at this level takes the kind of intention a professional athlete brings. She says she does not operate with much fear and keeps returning to what is true: her children are healthy and the people she loves are safe.

If she could speak to herself before the divorce, she would say it is going to be okay. Her three truths are that "you are in control of what happens next" and that you can get through whatever is happening, and that "nobody else gets to define you." Her definition of greatness today is evolving as a person, which she sums up as "leveling up consistently as long as you are alive."

Conclusion

This is a portrait of someone rebuilding in public and refusing to apologize for it. Hollis's approach comes down to a few plain convictions: hard seasons hurt no matter what you do, so you may as well keep showing up; strength is easier to find when others depend on you; other people's opinions are not yours to carry; and the first thoughts of the morning are worth guarding. Her business advice follows the same line, with honest numbers, one clear focus, better company and patience. Listeners may or may not share her view of her own story, but her central point is hard to argue with: success comes slowly, and most of it belongs to the people who are still there after the bad year.

This is a summary of "Rachel Hollis: Manifest Success, Overcome Guilt & Manage Negative Feedback" from The School of Greatness, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.