Courtney Harkness was the one who held everything together.
She co-founded a wireless infrastructure company with her husband and ran it as COO, scaling it past $50 million and sitting across the table from the biggest carriers in the country. She married him at 24, straight out of college. Twenty-one years and two kids later, the marriage and the company were still the same structure — build one, and the other came with it.
Her husband was having an affair with one of their employees. She found out during the divorce. Because her personal life and her business were never separate, both collapsed in the same moment, over the same negotiating table. The private equity investors had a word for the version of her that wouldn't step aside quietly: unreasonable.
In this episode, Courtney — former COO turned divorce and life-transition coach, and author of the forthcoming book Unreasonable — walks through what it costs to build a marriage, a company, and a self all inside one channel, the specific shame of a successful woman watching her life implode where everyone could see it, and the negotiating discipline — the 24-hour rule, no sudden moves — that got her through a high-conflict divorce.
This is where validation dependency hides inside competence. When capability is the currency you trade for being chosen — in the boardroom, in the marriage, in the room — there's no part of your identity that isn't for sale. We trace where that wiring gets installed, what "it's fine, everything's fine" was actually covering, and why the moment Courtney stopped performing and got honest was the moment she started to rebuild.
If you've ever built your worth into something so consolidated that losing it would take you down too, this one is about you.
GUEST INFO Courtney Harkness — Divorce & Life Transition Coach; former COO Book: Unreasonable (forthcoming, Fall 2026) Instagram: @courtney.harkness
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Host: Andi Johnson — Instagram @advance_with_andi
Take the Validation Pattern Quiz — link in bio.
