The Lyons Den

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.

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.

07/23/2026

A lot of overwhelm comes from treating every part of a problem you encounter as though it needs to be solved immediately.

You start with one thing that actually needs your attention, but within a few minutes you are also thinking about everything it could affect, what might go wrong later, how other people may respond & what you will do if none of your plans work.

Obviously, some of that is necessary. You can’t make good decisions without considering what might happen next.

But sometimes we call it “planning” when really you’re asking yourself to mentally complete an entire process before you’ve even started it.

And at that point, considering every possibility is not really helping you.

It’s just making the first step (and every one afterwords) feel much harder than it actually is.

Most of the time, you don’t need to know exactly how you are going to handle everything.

But there is usually ONE thing you can do with the information you have right now.

Planning still matters, but so does knowing when to stop planning & start doing.

The first step will not answer every question you have, but it will probably give you better information than thinking about the same problem for another hour.

And way better progress.

07/16/2026

One of the more frustrating parts of building anything is realizing how little of it is actually within your control.

You can do great work & make smart decisions.

You can be the most consistent person you’ve ever met.

And people can still say no & deals can still fall through and then suddenly something you’ve spent months creating needs to be rebuilt.

That’s just business.

And obviously you still plan & do everything you can to avoid unnecessary problems.

But there’s a point where trying to make your branch completely secure becomes its own full-time job.

So yes, plan well.

But at some point, the only thing left to trust is that you’ll figure out what to do next.

07/09/2026

I don’t think most people struggle because they don’t know what they want.

I think they struggle because they haven’t really looked at what their life would have to look like if they were serious about getting it.

Because it’s easy to imagine the end result, but much harder to picture the phone calls you’d have to make instead of putting them off.

The nights you don’t sit down in front of Netflix because there’s still something you said you’d finish.

The mornings where you get up & do the thing anyway, even though absolutely nothing about today feels different from yesterday.

The life where you still have emails, errands, laundry, dinner, decisions, and a brain that would rather do literally anything else.

It’s strange how quickly those things become “just today.” Then “just this week.”

Then somehow they’ve become the way your weeks usually look.

Nothing felt impactful enough to change the direction you were heading.

Until you look up & realized it already had.

06/25/2026

It’s almost second nature for us to start treating a level of inconvenience as information.

If something comes together quickly, you trust it more than you probably should.

If something takes longer, feels like it’s moving slowing, needs another conversation, another follow-up, another boring little adjustment, it feels like it must be because of the idea itself.

And you know what, maybe, sometimes, it is. Some things feel off because they ARE off.

But a lot of the time, nothing’s wrong.

It’s just slower, harder & messier than you pictured, way more annoying than it had any business being.

That’s when you have to realize that you don’t always get to choose the version of the process you would have preferred.

You only get to choose how much meaning you attach to the fact that it’s less convenient than you expected.

And sometimes the only thing to do is stop stop fighting how it’s showing up & just keep moving through the part you’re in.

06/18/2026

Our minds are very, very good at rebranding fear into due diligence.

That’s why a self-imposed limit can sound so reasonable.

The hesitation feels logical from the inside, that you’re just “being smart about this,” when what you’re really looking for is certainty.

The timing keeps needing to be “right.” The decision keeps getting pushed into some future version of the business where everything is calmer and nobody has opinions etc etc etc.

Because of course there are reasons, there are always reasons.

Some of them are even probably valid, which is what makes it hard to recognize when you’re doing it.

“That’s not really for me” sounds a lot better than “I’m scared to try it”

It sounds like you’re being self-aware, rather than self imposing limits you don’t actually need to have.

Hate when the call is coming from inside the house, but here we are.

You don’t have to pick up.

You think you’re starting a company because you’re good at something.Then suddenly you’re learning how to sell it, expla...
06/11/2026

You think you’re starting a company because you’re good at something.

Then suddenly you’re learning how to sell it, explain it, protect it, price it, manage it, fix it, market it, and answer for it when something does not go according to plan.

You can have a moment where you feel so proud of what you’re building, and then three hours later you’re dealing with some random problem that makes you wonder if you know anything at all.

You can take a day off & still be thinking about something you haven’t handled yet, or have a great week and still already be stressed about what needs to happen next.

Behind almost every visible success is a long stretch of doing things that felt repetitive, uncertain, inconvenient, or completely unrecognized at the time.

People love talking about freedom when they talk about owning a business, and yes, there is freedom in it.

But there’s also a level of responsibility that follows you around in a way a normal job usually doesn’t.

The success is real.

So is the sacrifice.

And if you want to build something that lasts, you have to be willing to respect both.

This, my friends, is why entrepreneurship is not for everyone.

06/04/2026

Isn’t it funny how generous we can all with patience….. right up until we have to give it to ourselves?

We can be patient with traffic, with friends, with food deliveries, with other people needing a little time to figure things out.

But if our own progress takes longer than expected, suddenly we’re questioning our entire life plan.

We want the work to show.

Immediately.

We want to know it’s paying off, while we’re still doing it.

And maybe that’s part of why progress feels so uncomfortable, because the proof we’re looking for usually comes after the part where we needed it most.

Because although it would be nice to know that all the effort is actually doing something, that’s just not how life works.

Evidence only comes after all of your effort.

You have to just keep going, at your own pace, most of the time without proof that what you’re doing is working.

Always remember; quick results don’t usually mean quality results.

05/28/2026

There are things in life you can absolutely multitask.

You can fold laundry while listening to a podcast, or answer a text while waiting for coffee.

But trying to build your business while your attention keeps getting dragged sideways every few minutes isn’t going to get you anywhere.

You open something important, get halfway into it, check one notification, reply to two emails, remember another task, then spend the next hour feeling extremely busy without actually finishing anything.

You feel busy & productive and yet somehow you’re still behind.

Because the things that are important, the tasks that’ll actually cause the changes you’re working towards, usually need deeper thought, judgment, and a little bit of patience, which is hard to give when your attention is split into pieces constantly.

Multitasking is useful ONLY when the task barely needs your attention.

Your business should not be getting the leftover pieces of your focus.

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