Your engine is burning out, and revving harder and harder isn't helping.
You're feeling anxious and emotionally unsupported.
You know you need to develop a nurturing relationship with yourself, because the negative self-talk has gotten out of hand.
You’ve tried mindset work before, and made some progress….
But clearly not enough, or you wouldn’t be reading this.
Partnering with someone like me, someone who can demonstrate what it looks and feels like to be in co-creative supportive environment, allows you to experience a new way of being with yourself.
One that doesn’t trigger your inner fight/flight/freeze response.
This opens up possibilities for how you move through your world.
You know what happens when you finally know how to be with yourself gently?
When you begin gracefully carrying the emotional burden of entrepreneurship?
You feel:
My full name is Shulamit Ber Levtov.
You can call me Shula for short. My pronouns are she and her.
Because running a business is hard on your mental health, I support women business owners to care for their mental and emotional wellbeing in an era of relentless stressors that can make you want to lose your crap on the daily.
This helps them set the foundation for sustainable success and show up fully as their CEO-self in their business.
I've been an entrepreneur for over 30 years, and a mental health professional for over 15 years. I have lived experience of mental health struggles and trauma,
Just like you, I know what it is like to have sleepless nights over your business.
And I’m here to help.
I didn’t set out to become The Entrepreneurs’ Therapist.
But looking back, it feels inevitable.
I’ve lived the mental health struggles so many people face. I’ve known the blankness of depression. I’ve had thoughts of taking my life, and even a plan, once. I’ve navigated trauma, raised a child solo while living in a domestic violence shelter, and relied on social assistance to make ends meet. Later, I built a successful business—and then chose to walk away from it in service of my own wellbeing.
These are the stories that shaped me.
In the summer of 2002, I got meningitis. For 24 hours, I wasn’t sure if I would live.
Physically, I recovered. But mentally I didn’t. As an unrecovered trauma survivor who prioritized functioning, much had been held inside, but now it all cracked open. What followed was a long stretch of trauma-related “acting out.” I didn’t have the tools I needed to manage the tidal wave of pain and fear that followed such a close brush with death. And back then, no one was talking about trauma in a way that meant I could recognize my own experience in it, as something that could live in your body and show up in your behaviour.
It took a therapist who specialized in trauma, along with time, care, and a lot of inner work to make sense of what I’d lived through. But eventually, I did.
Many years later, I became a therapist. Not because I was “healed,” but because I learned how to be with my woundedness. As Michael Stone once said, “What makes us great healers is not that we are healed, but that we know how to be with our woundedness.”
That became the foundation of my work: helping others be with theirs, too.
Fast forward to August 2020. I was leading a thriving group therapy practice. On paper, things looked great: financially sound, community-oriented, packed with free workshops and good intentions.
Behind the scenes, I was falling apart.
I was doing the jobs of at least three people (sound familiar?). I was seeing clients, running the business, doing all the marketing and admin and still trying to be a decent parent and partner. My staff weren’t meeting their commitments, and I felt like I had to hold everything together. Hustle culture told me to push through. And I believed it.
Until I couldn’t anymore.
I snapped. First at a staff member. Then at my beloved. I didn’t recognize myself, and neither did they.
That’s when my own therapist stepped in and said the thing I couldn’t yet admit: “You can’t go on like this.”
And he was right.
Exiting the business prematurely and without a plan, I told myself this was a failure, at first. But in truth, it was one of the bravest things I’ve ever done. I took a leave. I took care of my health. I went back to solo practice.
In that pause, I realized something no one talks about nearly enough: Entrepreneurship and mental health are inseparable.
We write business plans, marketing plans, financial forecasts, but where’s the mental health plan?
Here’s the truth: mental health struggles aren’t a personal flaw in business owners. They’re baked into the job. The pressure, the uncertainty, the emotional labor… it’s a lot. Pretending we can power through it without consequence? That’s not resilience. That’s denial.
So now, this is my work.
As The Entrepreneurs’ Therapist, I support other business owners in working through the emotional toll of leadership, burnout, and in building something that doesn’t cost them their wellbeing. I also advocate for systemic change, bringing mental health planning into business education, incubators, and entrepreneurship programs.
Care for founder mental health is a core business strategy.
Good mental health is a founder’s strategic edge.
The crap will still hit the fan.
That’s the nature of owning a business.
But…
You can manage your mindset.
You can work with your emotions instead of having them run the show.
You can be gentle with yourself (for real this time, so that you can actually feel it).
And, learning to do so will create results for you AND your clients, and set the foundation for sustainable success in business.
Here’s how you can work with me.
Because running a business is hard on your mental health, I support women business owners to care for their mental and emotional wellbeing and their money psychology, in an era of relentless stressors that can make you want to lose your crap on the daily.
This helps them set the foundation for sustainable success and show up fully as their CEO-self in their business.
My vision is a world in which people in distress are met with love. My purpose is to shine love in to what can sometimes seem like a very dark world.
I fulfill this purpose through my mission for my work, which is to transform the entrepreneurial eco-system to include care (IOW love) for the whole human business owner as a business priority and an integral part of business planning and processes.
I do this by supporting women business owners 1:1 and through speaking, teaching and consulting on how business owners can integrate care for their mental and emotional well-being into their business planning and processes, setting the foundation for sustainable success in business and in life.
I have a Masters degree in Counselling and Spirituality, and am a Registered Social Worker in the province of Ontario. I'm Dare to Lead™ trained, a certified trainer in both Focusing and Nonviolent Communication, a certified Trauma of Money facilitator and Certified Financial Social Worker, certified in the Tapas Acupressure Technique, and a certified Kripalu Yoga teacher (retired). I also am certified as a PR6 Resilience Coach, am trained in Tara Mohr's The Coaching Way, and have a certificate from Positive Psychology in Realizing Resilience. I have certifications in REBT and SFBT.
I'm an award-winning entrepreneur, and a graduate of the York Entrepreneurship Development Institute, Starter Company Plus Business Bootcamp, Mark Silver's Heart of Business, Racheal Cook's Yogipreneur, and other business and entrepreneurship trainings. Maggie Patterson of Staying Solo has been my long-time business mentor.
Unrelated to my current profession, I have a diploma in radio and TV broadcasting. Earlier in my life I worked as a radio technician, writer-broadcaster and producer for CBC radio. I love podcasting today as much as I loved radio. In the early 1990s I owned the only Steadicam east of Toronto.
I'm an inveterate and proud nerd. I love learning. I was a certified French-to-English translator, and have loved languages since I was a child. Right now I'm learning Yiddish. I can speak French and Spanish, and have studied German, Welsh, Hebrew and Latin.
When I'm not meeting with clients, writing my book (on women, entrepreneurship and mental health), or resting, I am learning to sing bluegrass and old-timey style or knitting while listening to audiobooks. My two favourite literary genres are feminist sci-fi and contemporary romance—especially with characters and authors who are LGBTQI2S++, Black, Indigenous and of the global majority. I'm an enthusiastic newbie knitter (but honestly it’s just an excuse to buy yarn), and I love a good knit-along or song-along.
