She won't let you hide no matter how hard you try

You sit down thinking you know who you are. You leave changed.

The first thing you notice when you sit down with Anjel B. Hartwell is not what she says but how little room there is for anything untrue to survive in the conversation. She listens in a way that makes you feel seen and awake. And then without warning the version of yourself you arrived with simply dissolves. A sort of rebirth, but not in a freaky way.

I had been on her podcast, Wickedly Smart Women, and remembered leaving that experience with the sense that something had been permanently reordered in my brain.

When we sat down again, this time with her as my guest, there was no small talk or, at least not that much. Ok. Maybe a little. We scooted past the usual chitchat and hopped right in because Anjel’s story is, in many ways, not a typical entrepreneurial arc. But then again, in some ways, it is.

She is, at her core, a creator and artist. She is an author and storyteller, a serial entrepreneur and leader. She is a gatherer of women and a spiritual healer. She is so comfortable in her skin, it can be disarming.

But her life, before all of this, was not ambiguous. It was built with intention and discipline. It was the kind of life that reads clearly, in bold print with orderly subheads and pull quotes. Twenty years in real estate. National chairperson of a trade association. Development projects that required both vision and stamina. A marriage and a child. An ordered life that made sense until one day it didn’t.

The Life That No Longer Held

Things didn’t fall apart all at once for Anjel. It was a slower roll like bald tires on a last road trip.

“Five years… another horrible thing is happening, and then another horrible thing is happening,” she said. “There was a lot of death.”

And then, almost in passing, she mentioned her son. Something that happened to him and the life she had intentionally constructed began to feel wrong.

The transformation started with a ski injury. Recovery led her to yoga and a few months into that practice, her “third eye opened.” She thought she was losing her mind.

“I had this experience where my third eye burst open. I saw angelic beings,” she explained. Her fellow yogis walked her through it and explained the significance of the moment.

“I left my business partners. I left my life partner. I left the identities I had created for myself.”

In its place a new, more meaningful construct.

“My artist came out. My author came out. My performer came out. The healer part of me came out. All of these latent parts that had not had air suddenly came online. I spent years unpacking my old identity and putting it in the fire.”

Building Something That Doesn’t Fracture You

She didn’t stop building, not really. She simply built in a different, more constructive way. She moved into the online space in 2008 and began mentoring women around the world. She built businesses, platforms, and audiences.

“I was the first independent podcaster that I know of to sell a podcast and the attendant brand that went along with that.”

She is a serial entrepreneur in the truest sense. When I asked her how she holds onto her spiritual clarity while building wealth, she clarified the question (in typical Anjel style).

“Preserving the enlightenment is non-negotiable. I am only where I am now because of my spiritual practices.”

Then she rewrote the premise entirely.

“Wealth, to me, is founded in the word ‘well.’ If we are only looking at wealth as if it was just all about the money, then we are missing the point.”

She spoke about time, health, imagination, exchange, and relationships as resources that must be held together, not traded off.

“If we are not looking at all of those resources as the definition of wealth, then we’re only pursuing maybe ten percent of what’s possible.”

About the Manosphere Because, I Mean….

The rise of the manosphere – the dominance of male voices in entrepreneurial influence and the algorithmic pull toward a very specific version of power – needs to be addressed. It’s hanging over all of us like a turd pinata ready to burst. It's disturbing and dangerous in its flagrant toxicity, so I lobbed the question.

“We have to first admit that it’s there. Awareness is the first step towards healing,” But then added, “What you focus on expands.”

She pointed to her own work as evidence of a different approach. Her first podcast, Men on Purpose, was created after a lifetime of encounters that had shaped her experience of men.

“I shifted my focus away from the problem and started to focus on men who were on purpose. I’m not saying to gaslight ourselves. But we can’t build what we want by only pointing at what doesn’t work.”

She’s right about that. As a society, we tend to focus on the wrongness of something rather than figuring out how we can change that wrongness.

“Only focus on what’s yours to do. Because part of what can happen is we become so overwhelmed by the fires.”

The Thing That Stayed

Near the end of the interview, we talked about leaders and what makes a great one. I told her the story about an inspiring CEO I had interviewed – Kevin Hancock. He lost his ability to speak when his vocal cords were paralyzed by a rare disease. It’s a moving story and it hits me in the solar plexus every time I talk about it. Anjel listened to the story as she watched me tell the story.

“What that says to me about you is that what you’re here to do is to find the precious and the rare and to elevate that. Your calling is to lift other people’s voices.”

It was the first time I have openly wept in a podcast interview. It’s that thing she does when she changes the trajectory of your day because with Anjel, there is no hiding. No matter how hard you try.