Episode #039 · Tina Beliveau
When Your Gut Knows Before You Do
Sometimes the hardest voice to hear is your own.
Tina Beliveau’s life has been shaped by dramatic turning points. After struggling through painful teenage years and addiction, she got sober at 17 and began the lifelong work of understanding herself more deeply. That early commitment to personal growth shaped how she built her career, her business, and eventually her family.
Years later, after building a highly successful real estate team and achieving many of the industry’s most visible success markers, Tina found herself facing a different kind of reckoning. A professional partnership unraveled publicly, forcing her to step away from a business she had spent years building and to rebuild her life and identity from scratch.
What followed was a period of quiet, reflection, and recalibration. Away from the noise of industry expectations and constant input from others, Tina slowly began reconnecting with something she had ignored for years: the subtle signals of her own intuition.
As she and Kim discuss, learning to listen to your gut is rarely a dramatic lightning-bolt moment. More often, it’s a slow process of turning down the noise long enough to recognize what your body and instincts have been trying to tell you all along.
What Does Ambition Look Like Without Workaholism?
Tina Beliveau can point to a period in her career when the traditional measures of success were easy to see.
Her real estate business was taking off. She was earning more, achieving more, and climbing industry rankings. Success reinforced the drive that had gotten her there, and Tina kept going.
Years later, she can see how much of her self-esteem was wrapped up in being busy and successful. When much of what she'd built unraveled at the end of 2019, she had to examine those patterns without the achievements that had helped cover them up.
Six years into rebuilding, one question remains surprisingly difficult for her to answer: What does it look like to be ambitious without slipping back into workaholism?
Tina describes her current life as the best six years of her life in many ways. She became a mom. Her business is healthy and high-functioning. She achieved a longtime goal of buying a house in Hilton Head.
And part of her brain still tells her she peaked in 2016.
That was the year of peak earnings, achievement, rankings, and the kinds of accomplishments that are easy to quantify. Tina knows how to measure that version of success. She is still figuring out how to measure the one she has now.
“I’m capable of 10x, but I’m not willing to pay the price of 10x,” she tells me.
Rebuilding a Career After Everything Falls Apart
When Tina's professional partnership unraveled in 2019, leaving wasn't as simple as resigning from a job.
There were ownership issues, non-competes, and an ongoing legal matter. Tina felt her reputation was being publicly damaged while she was largely unable to respond. At the same time, the agents on her real estate team left amid the upheaval.
She describes the period simply: “It was dark.” The experience also forced Tina to revisit a decision she had made years earlier. She had entered the partnership despite reservations about whether she and the person she would be working with shared the same values.
Afterward, she found herself asking why she hadn't listened to those concerns more closely.
Tina could see that she had a history of looking to strong, directive personalities for certainty. Mentors who seemed confident about the path forward could make her feel as though she was doing the right thing. Her own signals became easier to override.
The environment around her amplified that tendency. She describes it as full of thought leadership and “guruism”—a lot of people with a lot to say about how things should be done.
Once she finally extricated herself from the company, much of that input disappeared.
How Do You Learn to Trust Your Gut Again?
Tina moved to a virtual brokerage and pulled back dramatically.
She stopped attending conferences and trainings. She didn't want meetings on her calendar. Her world became smaller: her husband, a few close friends, and the small real estate team she was rebuilding.
In that environment, she started noticing her own reactions again.
A proposed meeting could produce a visceral response. Other decisions brought what Tina describes as little “blasts” of intuition or feeling. She began recognizing how much her body had to say about what she did and didn't want—and how often she had previously overridden those signals because she couldn't logically explain them.
“I'll try and think things through when I really need to feel them through,” she tells me.
For Tina, learning to trust her gut has involved giving herself permission to act on information she can't always justify intellectually.
She is still someone who loves a playbook. She still compares herself to other people. She still wonders whether she's doing enough. But she's paying much closer attention to what happens inside her before reaching for someone else's answer.
What Does Reaching Your Potential Look Like in a Healthy Way?
Tina talks openly about what Instagram can trigger in her: Why is my following only this size? Why have only this many people bought my course? That person is doing this—why aren't I?
At the time we recorded, she was in the middle of a launch and intentionally pushing the edge of her own visibility. She wanted more people than ever to participate in a free boot camp she'd created, and the effort was bringing plenty of her old mental patterns along with it.
She had also started noticing small signs that the work was gaining traction.
The day before our interview, Tina made a list beside her desk: wins, gratitudes, and evidence of success.
She knows her mind is inclined to collect evidence of what isn't working. The list gives her somewhere to record what is.
Tina is still impatient. She still suspects her timelines for what she wants to achieve aren't particularly realistic. She still feels the discomfort that comes with pushing herself into something new.
So when I ask her the final question I ask every guest—what open question are you living inside right now?—her answer pulls together much of what we'd spent the previous hour discussing:
“What does it look like for me to reach my potential in the healthiest way possible?”
That tab, Tina tells me, will probably stay open.
Tina Beliveau
With over 20 years in the real estate industry, Tina Beliveau has built a boutique team in Baltimore, Maryland that has sold over 2,000 homes and $450 million in sales volume. She’s achieved that with a focus on relationships, organic social media, building strong systems, and community service. She also supports real estate agents who want to build businesses using her playbook, and does that through my podcast, a course, and private coaching. On a personal note: Tina ia a mom to Austin (4) and Samantha (2) and 3 dogs (it’s a zoo)! One of her life goals was to buy a home on Hilton Head Island, SC and she now run that as an Airbnb. For fun, she teaches a weekly spin class, and uses her marketing + technology skills to support several local nonprofits and Facebook communities.
