Fatherless Fathers Day with Colleen Mckay, Grieving a Parent, Building a Business: Navigating Complex Loss as an Entrepreneur

About this episode

This episode features a conversation with Colleen Mckay about navigating grief and entrepreneurship after losing a father to illness.

"Healing isn't about running back to who you were before tragedy struck—it is about integrating your grief into the new, expanded version of yourself." Building a business, launching digital courses, and serving high-level clients requires an immense amount of creative and operational energy. But when your world is shattered by the death of a parent, high-capacity female founders often default to a dangerous pattern: "The Strong One Syndrome." Out of survival, they force themselves to stay hyper-resilient for their teams, their clients, and their families, while their internal world completely crumbles under the weight of unexpressed pain. In this honest and business-minded conversation, host Nicole Weston sits down with Colleen McKay—Transformational NLP Coach, Business Growth Strategist, and founder of Transcending Minds —to expose the unpolished reality of navigating a complex loss while running a company. Colleen shares her raw experience of losing her father to lung cancer and COPD, the psychological weight of processing a "preventable" medical decline, and the exhaustion of trying to fix business problems using tools that cannot fix heartbreak…

People in this episode

Host: Nicole Weston

Guest: Colleen Mckay

Topics covered

• grief
• entrepreneurship
• father loss
• personal growth
• resilience
• mental health

Keywords

• grief
• entrepreneurship
• fatherless
• loss
• resilience
• mental health
• personal growth

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• Grief Isolation & The Good Girl Act: Finding True Belonging with Erin Kent · August 12, 2026 · 40 min
• Maternal Addiction & Creative Alchemy: Healing the Inner Child with Karli Corandos · July 31, 2026 · 52 min
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