We were lucky to catch up with Rachel Brooks recently and have shared our conversation below.
Rachel, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
The idea for The Confident Woman® didn’t come to me because I was sitting down trying to create a business. It came from my life. It came from the years I spent trying to become the woman I thought I was supposed to be, only to realize that the version of success, beauty, achievement, and confidence I’d been chasing wasn’t giving me the freedom I was really looking for.
For a long time, I thought confidence was something I had to earn. I thought if I could get myself small enough, strong enough, disciplined enough, successful enough, or impressive enough, then maybe I’d finally feel secure in who I was. My background was in fitness, and for a season, fitness gave me structure, purpose, and a way to rebuild my life from the inside out. I became a fitness competitor, transformed my body, and learned a level of discipline I’m still grateful for today. From the outside, it looked like confidence. But beneath the surface, I was still carrying perfectionism, body image struggles, old wounds, and this internal pressure to prove my worth through how I looked, what I achieved, and how well I could hold everything together.
That tension became the beginning of my first book, Chasing Perfection: A Journey to Healing, Fitness, and Self-Love. Writing that book changed me because it forced me to tell the truth about the difference between looking confident and actually being free. I started to understand that the transformation I was searching for was never just physical. It was mental, emotional, spiritual, and deeply tied to identity. I’d spent so many years trying to fix the outside, when what I really needed was to come back to who I was before the world, my pain, my past, my performance, and my perfectionism told me who I had to be.
The Confident Woman® was born from that place. It started as a message and movement before it ever became a business. I wanted women to know they didn’t have to keep chasing some edited, exhausted, impossible version of themselves in order to be worthy of love, peace, purpose, or success. I wanted to create a space for the woman who looks put together on the outside but is quietly questioning who she is, where she belongs, and whether she’s enough. I understood her because I was her. In many ways, I still meet her in different seasons of my own life.
What made me believe this was worth building was the response from other women. Every time I shared honestly about perfectionism, identity, confidence, healing, faith, fitness, self-love, hustle, burnout, or the pressure to prove ourselves, women would tell me some version of, “Me too. I thought I was the only one.” That became my confirmation that this wasn’t just my story. It was our story. It was a much bigger conversation. There were plenty of people talking about fitness, personal development, business, confidence, and success, but I didn’t see enough people connecting those things back to the deeper question of worth and identity. Who are you when you’re no longer performing? Who are you when your body changes, your life transitions, the business shifts, the title is gone, the plan falls apart, or the version of life you built no longer feels like freedom? Those were the questions I couldn’t stop asking, and they became the foundation of my work.
The logic behind the business was simple, even though the path itself has been anything but simple. Women don’t need more pressure to become more impressive, more attractive, more successful, or more productive. Most of us are already carrying too much, doing too much, and measuring our worth against impossible standards. We don’t need to be told we’re not enough, and we don’t need to be sold another empty promise that convinces us we have to become someone we’re not in order to finally feel worthy. What we need is truth, language, tools, support, and a way back to ourselves. We need spaces where faith, confidence, and personal growth can coexist, where healing isn’t separated from ambition, where confidence isn’t reduced to appearance or achievement, and where success doesn’t require a woman to abandon herself in the process of building something meaningful.
That’s what excited me most about the idea. The Confident Woman® gave me a way to take everything I’d lived, learned, lost, healed from, and was still becoming, and turn it into something that could help another woman feel less alone in her own life and journey of becoming. Over the years, that message has grown through my books, podcast, digital products, journals, coaching, speaking, and community, but the heart of it has stayed the same. I help women remember who they are and whose they are, so they can stop proving their worth and start creating a life, business, and legacy that actually feels aligned with the woman they were created to be.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I’m Rachel Brooks, founder of The Confident Woman®, bestselling and award-winning author of Chasing Perfection: A Journey to Healing, Fitness, and Self-Love, host of The Confident Woman Podcast, and the creator behind a body of work that helps women come back to who they are and whose they are. At the heart of everything I create is a simple but deeply personal message: you don’t have to keep proving your worth, chasing perfection, or abandoning yourself in the pursuit of success. You can heal, rebuild, grow, create, and become, but you don’t have to lose yourself in the process.
I got into this work through my own life first. Before I ever saw myself as a founder, author, podcast host, or entrepreneur, I was a woman trying to make sense of my own story. I spent years wrestling with perfectionism, body image struggles, identity, faith, confidence, self-worth, achievement, and the pressure to look like I had it all together. Fitness was one of the first places where I learned how strong I could be, but it also became one of the places where I had to confront the deeper parts of myself I couldn’t outwork, out-discipline, or outrun. Becoming a fitness competitor taught me discipline and resilience, but writing Chasing Perfection taught me freedom. It helped me understand that confidence was never just about changing my physique or reaching a goal. It was about healing the parts of me that believed I had to keep becoming more in order to finally be enough.
That realization became the foundation of my brand. The Confident Woman® started as a message, then became a book, then a podcast, then a community, then a business, and over time it’s continued to grow into a larger movement around identity, confidence, faith, healing, freedom, purpose, and legacy. My work serves women who are tired of living from pressure, performance, and perfection. These are often women who are strong, capable, ambitious, faith-fueled, and purpose-driven, but somewhere along the way, they’ve learned to measure their worth by what they do, how much they carry, how much they achieve, how much they give, or how well they can keep going even when they’re exhausted.
Through my book, podcast, digital products, journals, coaching, speaking, and community, I help women slow down long enough to tell the truth about where they are, what they’ve been carrying, and who they’re becoming. Some of my work is reflective and healing-centered, helping women rebuild confidence, process old stories, and reconnect with their identity. Some of it is faith-based and purpose-driven, helping women remember that their worth isn’t something they have to earn. And some of it is entrepreneurial, helping women build sustainable, values-aligned lives and businesses through digital products, affiliate marketing, passive income strategies, and systems that support the mission rather than consume the woman behind it.
The problems I help solve are not always the obvious ones on the surface. A woman may come to my work because she wants more confidence, clarity, consistency, discipline, direction, or freedom, but underneath that is usually something much deeper. She’s questioning who she is after a hard season. She’s burned out from trying to be everything to everyone. She’s tired of chasing a version of success that looks good but doesn’t feel like peace. She’s carrying shame, grief, pressure, or old stories that have convinced her she’s behind, too much, not enough, or somehow disqualified. My work helps her name those things, release what was never hers to carry, and rebuild from identity instead of insecurity.
What sets my work apart is that I don’t teach confidence as a surface-level concept. I don’t believe confidence is just about how you look, how you dress, how loudly you speak, or how much you accomplish. To me, confidence is deeply connected to identity. It’s knowing who you are when life changes, when your body changes, when the plan falls apart, when success stops feeling like freedom, when the title is gone, when the applause stops, or when you’re standing in the middle of a season you never saw coming. My work is rooted in lived experience, faith, truth-telling, and the belief that personal growth shouldn’t become another way for women to shame themselves into becoming someone they were never created to be.
I’m most proud of the fact that I’ve continued to show up with honesty through many different seasons of my life. I’m proud of writing Chasing Perfection, which became a bestselling and award-winning book, and of using my story to help other women feel less alone. I’m proud of building and sustaining The Confident Woman Podcast for years because it’s become a place for real conversations about confidence, calling, healing, identity, entrepreneurship, faith, and becoming. I’m proud of the digital products, journals, and resources I’ve created because they give women a practical place to begin, whether they’re rebuilding confidence, creating a new rhythm, starting over, or learning how to stop proving and start living from truth.
More than anything, I want people to know that my work is not about pretending life is easy or turning hard seasons into perfectly polished highlight reels that look beautiful from the outside but hide the mess, the questions, and the work it took to get through it. It’s about being honest with yourself, telling the truth, finding the lesson, and choosing to become without abandoning yourself. My own story has included healing, loss, reinvention, ambition, burnout, grief, faith, business, marriage, caregiving, identity shifts, and seasons where I’ve had to rebuild from the inside out. I create from the places I’ve lived, the questions I’ve had to wrestle with, and the freedom I’m still learning to walk in.
The heart of my brand is helping women stop chasing who they think they’re supposed to be and come home to who they were created to be. Whether someone finds me through a book, a podcast episode, a journal, a digital product, a post, a conversation, or a program, my hope is that she feels seen, strengthened, and reminded that she has permission to create her own story from a place of truth, faith, confidence, and freedom.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
One of the biggest lessons I’ve had to unlearn is that my worth is something I have to earn, prove, perform for, or protect by constantly becoming more disciplined, more successful, more impressive, more put together, more productive, or more capable. For a long time, I didn’t even realize I was living that way because, from the outside, it looked like all the qualities people tend to celebrate: ambition, discipline, drive, resilience, and personal growth. The challenge was that those traits, while valuable in themselves, were also masking a deeper belief that my worth depended on how much I could achieve, accomplish, or become. It looked like I was becoming the best version of myself, but underneath it, there was still a part of me that believed if I could just do enough, achieve enough, look enough, serve enough, build enough, or hold everything together well enough, then maybe I’d finally feel safe in who I was.
The backstory is layered because it didn’t start with business. It started much earlier, in the places where I learned to measure myself by how well I could perform, please, achieve, or keep going. Fitness became one of the first visible places where that showed up. I loved fitness, and I still believe it can be such a powerful tool for healing, strength, and self-respect, but there was also a season where my body became another place I tried to prove that I was enough. Competing, transforming my physique, becoming disciplined, and pushing myself gave me confidence in some ways, but it also revealed how much of my identity had been attached to control, appearance, achievement, and external validation.
Then, as I moved into writing, podcasting, business, and entrepreneurship, I had to face the same lesson in a different form. It was no longer just about my body. It became about success, visibility, productivity, income, impact, consistency, and trying to build something meaningful while quietly carrying the pressure to prove I was worthy of the calling, the platform, and the work. That’s where I started to see how easily personal growth can become another performance, and how easily ambition can turn into self-abandonment when we’re building from insecurity instead of identity.
I’ve had to unlearn the belief that exhaustion is proof of commitment, that overgiving is the same as love, that success will finally quiet the ache of not feeling enough, and that confidence comes from having everything together. It doesn’t. Real confidence, at least for me, has come from learning how to tell the truth, come back to God, come back to myself, and stop building my life from the fear that I’m behind, disqualified, or not doing enough.
That lesson has become one of the deepest parts of my work because I know I’m not the only woman who has lived this way. So many women are carrying the weight of being strong, capable, ambitious, faithful, dependable, and needed, while quietly wondering who they are when they’re not producing, proving, achieving, or holding everything together. I had to unlearn that my worth was tied to my performance so I could help other women begin to unlearn it too. That’s why my work is so rooted in identity, confidence, faith, healing, and freedom. The goal is not to become some polished version of ourselves that looks impressive from the outside. The goal is to become whole, honest, rooted, and free.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
I think what helped me build my reputation within my market is that I’ve always been willing to lead with the truth of my own life, not just the polished lesson after everything has been neatly wrapped up. My work has never been about pretending to have all the answers or positioning myself as the woman who has perfectly mastered confidence, healing, faith, business, or success. It’s about being honest enough to say, “This is what I’ve lived, this is what I’ve learned, this is what I’m still learning, and maybe this can help you feel less alone in your own becoming.”
Building a reputation is a slow, steady process; it’s built through consistency, trust, and letting the message mature as you do. For me, it started with sharing my story through Chasing Perfection, then continued through The Confident Woman Podcast, my digital products, journals, writing, speaking, and the conversations I’ve had with women over the years. I didn’t build my brand around a trend. I built it around a message I couldn’t get away from: women need to know who they are and whose they are, so they can stop proving their worth and start creating a life that actually feels aligned with the woman they were created to be.
I also think my reputation has come from not separating the parts of a woman’s life that are actually connected. Confidence is connected to identity. Identity is connected to faith. Faith is connected to purpose. Purpose is connected to the way we build, lead, love, work, heal, create, and show up in the world. A woman may come into my world because she wants more confidence, but what she often finds is a deeper conversation about perfectionism, burnout, body image, grief, ambition, success, calling, freedom, and the pressure to become everything for everyone. I think women have trusted my work because it gives depth and meaning to things they’ve felt but haven’t always had the words to say.
What has helped me most is staying close to the real woman I’m here to serve. I know her because I’ve been her. I know what it feels like to look strong on the outside while quietly questioning yourself on the inside. I know what it feels like to chase achievement and still wonder why it doesn’t feel like peace. I know what it feels like to rebuild after life shifts, loss, disappointment, burnout, and identity changes. And because I create from lived experience, not just theory, my work tends to meet women in a very honest place.
I’m proud that my reputation has been built on depth, trust, and truth-telling more than shiny objects or loud noise. I’ve stayed committed to meaningful conversations, long-form storytelling, podcasting, writing, and creating resources that help women slow down, reflect, heal, and take the next honest step. The market is full of experts, quick fixes, formulas, and promises to help women become more successful, more productive, more visible, or more impressive. My work has always been more interested in helping women become more rooted, more whole, more free, and more aligned. I think that’s what people have come to know me for, and it’s what I hope they continue to feel every time they encounter The Confident Woman®.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.iamrachelbrooks.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/iamrachelbrooks
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/iamrachelbrooks
- Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/iamrachelbrooks
- Soundcloud: rachel@iamrachelbrooks.com
- Other: https://www.iamrachelbrooks.com/podcast
Image Credits
Meredith Gradishar of Zoom Theory Photography