The Lyons Den

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The Lyons Den A Powerful Membership Community For Ambitious People
Founded by Emily Lyons
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The Den is the place where fierce entrepreneurs connect, build and grow. We are passionate about supporting new entrepreneurs to help them succeed in this ever-changing world of business. No matter what stage you’re at in your business journey, we want to be a part of your success story.

10/15/2026

The hardest part of hard work isn’t even the work itself.

It’s continuing to put in the same effort when the results you’ve been working toward are nowhere to be seen.

Because after a while, it’s hard not to wonder whether all that time, energy, & money you’ve invested is actually getting you anywhere.

And when something finally DOES work, it’s almost second nature to look back & only credit the handful of decisions or opportunities that seemed to change everything.

But would any of those things have turned out the same way if they’d happened a year earlier?

Probably not.

You were still figuring things out back then.

You were going through the process of making mistakes you wouldn’t make today, learning things you didn’t even know you needed to learn, & getting better at things that weren’t producing any obvious results yet.

And when you’re in the middle of all that, it’s nearly impossible to appreciate how much you’re actually gaining from the experience when you have so little to show for it.

But all those attempts are changing what you’re capable of, even if they haven’t changed your circumstances yet.

The reason those last few swings make such a difference is because of everything the hundreds before them taught you.

10/08/2026

You can pray for something, work out exactly how you want it to happen, tell everyone what you’re going to do, plan & prepare for months, & still forget that none of those things actually MAKE it happen.

Wanting something badly doesn’t create any progress towards what you want.

You can have the perfect plan, the best intentions, & genuinely believe you’re ready for an opportunity, but none of that means much if you’re standing still when it comes.

Sometimes you have to chase it.

Sometimes you have to make the uncomfortable call, follow up again, put yourself out there when you’d honestly rather not, & keep going long after the initial excitement has worn off.

And sometimes, even after all of that, things STILL don’t work out.

You lose the client or something you were so sure was going to happen just falls apart.

It sucks, especially when you know how much effort you put into it.

But putting in the effort means that even when things don’t go your way, you don’t have to sit there wondering what would’ve happened if you’d actually tried.

And that’s worth your time, every time.

10/01/2026

You can recover from a bad investment, a missed opportunity, a rejected proposal, a partnership that went sideways, even a financial setback.

But lost time?

Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Every single hour you spend is an investment.

Everything you do with your time, is a trade.

Scrolling for an hour? You just traded an hour of growth for an hour of distraction.

Overcommitting to things that don’t serve you? You just traded your energy & peace for obligation.

Being busy & being productive are not the same thing.

One fills your schedule, the other fulfills your life.

Be cognizant of how you choose to spend your time.

Because every choice you make today determines whether you’re building a future you’ll thank yourself for, or one you’ll wish you could redo.

09/24/2026

Success itself really is simple.

It’s everything you encounter along the way that isn’t.

The periods of time where it feels like literally anything & everything is actively working against you, no matter what you do.

When you face challenge after challenge, both personally & professionally, to the point where you start to wonder if you’re really doing the right thing.

Which, when you’re asking it from a place of complete exhaustion, the answer is going to feel like a no.

Because everything looks different when you’re tired enough.

The problem feels bigger & your progress feels smaller, if not halted entirely.

Even the parts that you were once excited about start looking like another responsibility you’re dreading that you volunteered for.

Of course, even if you’re in that state, that doesn’t mean you should ignore the doubt if there’s valid evidence behind it.

Just be careful about allowing the circumstances you’re in to get the final say.

Because as annoying as it is, sometimes 10 bad things happening in the same month are just 10 bad things happening in the same month.

You don’t have to turn every difficult period into a verdict on where you’re going.

Sometimes, you just have to keep going.

09/17/2026

Nobody walks past a new restaurant and says, “This is ridiculous. Food already exists.”

Nobody sees a new clothing brand launch & wonders why they bothered because we already have shirts.

And yet the second it’s OUR idea, suddenly the existence of another person doing something remotely similar feels like conclusive evidence that the opportunity is gone.

It’s quite a leap to go from “someone already does this” to “there’s no need for this.”

Those are VERY different conclusions.

If people are already buying something, using something, talking about something or paying somebody to solve a particular problem, that can actually be incredibly useful information.

There is already demand.

And people don’t care nearly as much about who got there first as they do about who’s doing it better, or who they trust more.

Almost everything we buy, use, eat, watch or subscribe to had competition before it existed.

Being late to an idea is very different from being too late for it.

09/10/2026

You can’t say you want success & then treat it like a hobby rather than a priority.

At some point, what you say you want has to show up in what you actually do.

Your results don’t care how good your intentions were or how much you meant to get around to something.

They are a direct result of what you repeatedly DO.

If you’re not getting where you want to go, maybe it’s time to be brutally honest with yourself about what you’ve actually been doing.

Maybe the goal actually needs more of your attention or maybe you’re just trying to focus on too many things at once, maybe something you’re doing needs to change.

Or maybe you simply haven’t been doing it consistently for long enough yet.

Whatever the answer is, use that information and adjust.

You’re a work in progress, as we all are.

We’re human beings, but also human becomings, constantly working our way toward the next version of ourselves.

You don’t get to You 2.0 in one giant leap.

You get there by continuing to practice being that person until, little by little, day by day, you realize you’ve become them.

08/27/2026

Something can be unfortunate for you without being unfortunate in general.

Which can be a really, really hard thing to remember when you’re the person inconvenienced by it.

We experience everything from such a narrow little point of view. Biased by our experiences, our timing, our plans, our expectations, and our version of how the day was supposed to go.

So of course, anything that gets in the way of that feels like a problem.

But the world isn’t really organised around whether something worked out for us personally.

The same change that disappoints one person can create an opportunity for someone else.

The thing you wish hadn’t happened might be exactly what another person needed.

And sometimes, with enough distance, you even end up becoming that other person yourself.

Looking back at something you were once so incredibly frustrated by, and realizing you wouldn’t undo it now.

In the moment, you would’ve traded it for any other reality, but now you realize just how integral it was to creating the reality you’re enjoying currently.

So maybe not everything needs to be immediately sorted into good or bad.

Sometimes it’s just something that happened.

Sometimes, you’ll only understand what it meant later.

08/20/2026

Starting a business isn’t logical.

Risking your savings isn’t logical.

Trying again after it flops? Definitely not logical.

But logic doesn’t build movements.

People do, when they decide to trust their gut more than what ‘logic’ says.

Logic would tell you not to waste your time.

Logic also said bees couldn’t fly.

The bees said... watch me 😉

Watch what can happen when you decide to bee unreasonably committed to the thing they say can’t be done!

Because sometimes “impossible” is just a way of saying “no one’s pulled it off YET”

08/13/2026

When you’re doing something new, it feels like progress.

When you’re doing the same thing for the hundredth time, it feels like you’re standing still.

Even if that one repeated thing is the reason your business is getting better.

There are parts of building & even running a company that just stop being interesting after a while.

You’ve already figured out how to do them, you know they work and there’s really no new problem to solve or immediate reward for doing them particularly well.

Yet, you still have to keep doing them.

Which is hard for ambitious people, because we naturally enjoy the things that feel like expanding.

The new ideas or bigger opportunities or a decision that you can see the difference from right away.

There’s just much less immediate satisfaction in repeating something you already know how to do.

Especially when you have to wait a lot longer to see what all of those fairly uneventful decisions actually created for you.

But if you stay with them long enough, eventually you’ll notice that your circumstances have changed in ways that would have felt enormous a few years earlier.

You can afford the trip or take the afternoon off or hire the person you needed!

You can turn down something you once would have accepted purely because you needed the money!

Those moments are so unbelievably exciting!

The decisions that paid for them, usually aren’t.

08/06/2026

The language people use around their own businesses tells you a LOT about how much permission they feel they have to take themselves seriously.

Until they do, it’s “a small project” or “something I’m working on,” even when it takes up most of their time, energy & mental space handling client work, making sales decisions, fixing things behind the scenes & worrying about payroll.

As though the business only becomes “real” once it reaches a certain size.

And yes, calling yourself a CEO can feel oddly uncomfortable when there is no big office, no large team & no version of the business that looks the way you pictured it would by now.

But none of that changes the fact that you built it, you run it & you are responsible for what happens next.

The title is not meant to describe how impressive the company looks.

It describes the role you are already doing.

You don’t have to pretend the business is further along than it is.

You also don’t have to keep speaking about it as though it barely counts.

Please don’t wait until the business feels big before you stop making yourself sound small.

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