Think of a WhatsApp message.

This is the messaging app that runs half of Brazil and most of the world. When you send a message, it shows two blue ticks the moment the person reads it.

Often you don’t get a response right away, and the mind goes straight to what is wrong?

As cool as it is to get almost any answer on a click, it is making us dissociate completely from reality.

You just worked on a new offer. Maybe you shifted your business drastically. It represents way more of you than anything you’ve ever before, and you just launched it to your list. It’s something new for you too. Your people are not used to hearing you speak this language. The email is sent.

Crickets.

The mind, well trained by the need for instant response, goes straight to again, what is wrong? And the first answer it reaches for is the offer is wrong. So you go looking for the next shiny object. You look at what others are doing, how others sound, what is trending.

I don’t want to say there is nothing wrong with your offer. But what I want to tell you is that there are many other things to look at before you question the thing you built with so much love, the thing that felt so true when you made it.

Maybe the link is broken. Maybe your emails are going to spam. Maybe you didn’t write clearly what you help people with or what problem you solve. Maybe your current audience is not the right buyer for this offer. Maybe the platform is wrong. Maybe the price, the format, the headline. Maybe you need to reach out personally. Maybe you need a collaboration to help you get in front of the right people. Maybe you need training in sales. Maybe (this happened to me) you accidentally blocked your entire calendar and nobody could book a call. (I know… awful… lol! But I learned.)

Work through all of that first. Thomas Edison failed ten thousand times before he found the working filament. He never concluded electric light was the wrong vision. He changed the method every time. He never changed what he was building.

Pivot the tactics. Never abandon the vision from the outside in.

Last week on Sacred Business Stories, we had a fascinating conversation with , and he shared a definition of addiction from his book The Power in Your Hands that I’ve been thinking a lot about since. It comes from Nikki Myers, founder of the Yoga of 12-Step Recovery:

“Anytime I reach outside of myself for something that can only be sourced from the inside, I risk forming an addictive relationship with whatever that thing is.”

In this need for quick response, we have lost our sense of self. Or maybe we never had it fully, and technology is making it worse.

The external orientation is real. The need for validation and approval is so strong in our society that it feels normal to look outside for proof that what you want is truly yours.

But the outside cannot give you that. It never could.

And now we have something new amplifying that reach. AI speaks with confidence in your most vulnerable moments… the morning when your launch flopped, the week when nothing responded, the hour when doubt is the loudest. In those moments, people are asking AI questions that only their soul knows how to answer. And the machine will answer. Convincingly. With authority. But what it gives you is a reflection of the fear you brought to the chat conversation, showing up in fluent, highly persuasive language. AI can validate your fears. It cannot see your potential. It knows patterns. It knows the past. It has never once seen who you are becoming.

Think of nature. When you plant a seed, you don’t get fruit the next day. And the fruit is not even the sign that the seed was right. The fruit is the result of the seed sitting in the dark, being tended, without any visible signs outside. When you planted the seed, you knew the fruit would appear.

Business and life work the same way. The sign that you are on the right path is not outer validation … it is an inner feeling that only you can recognize, because it honors everything you bring to the table.

Because it feels like home.

The desire exists in your heart. You have the vision. You feel alive in it. There is an energy being built up over time… especially when nobody likes your post, especially when you don’t get the results you expected. The silence is inviting you to go within even deeper, to reconnect with, or even discover for the first time, your own sense of self.

It is inviting you to change your perspective from looking outside for answers to looking within for them.

It is painful, because it goes against the personality built around external validation. But can you hold it long enough? Can you repeat to yourself that you matter, that this desire matters, that you deserve to have that?

Napoleon Hill spoke about this in his work on success. He called it the burning desire. What is a desire if not something you hold within you that you haven’t yet experienced in the physical world… something that expands you just by imagining it?

When you are living from external validation, the desire might not even be yours. You might be chasing what looks successful to others, what sounds right in a trending market, what AI confirmed for you in a vulnerable moment.

But to keep watering your plant while everything is dark and nothing is being seen, and still you can feel it so clearly, that is yours. And it has to be burning. That is the energy that builds resilience. That is what turns you into someone who can persevere, focus, and stay devoted to an invisible version of yourself rather than chasing the dopamine hit of the next good idea.

My teacher is a great example, and he inspires me a lot. He had a vision of building a school. For years he shared it in small rooms with five, ten people. He was told the model wouldn’t work. He stayed loyal to the vision and kept working through every practical detail. Thirteen years later, thousands of students, hundreds of thousands of lives touched.

He was not stubborn. He was in love with the process of discovering himself through the building of something real. He had a burning desire and he did not let the world tell him what was to be his. He created.

Your Sacred Business is inviting you to go back within, to find your own sense of self. To find your fire. That one thing that no wall, no silence, no rejection can make you stop.

Eventually the outer world will confirm what you know as truth. But you need to find your center first. You need to know who you are.

Your soul does not hand you the finished picture. It shows you the next step. Just the next one. And then the one after that, only once you have taken the first.

You might be rejected or left without response until you meet you, the real you. It’s not punishment. Don’t believe it isn’t to be yours. You are just being helped to build something from the inside out, and not the opposite.

The impact you want to create is yours, but more than how it will look, the question is: who are you in the center of it?

With Love,
Carolina

p.s. If you keep looking outside for proof that your vision is real, you will keep handing the answer to something that cannot see you. The Harmony Map is a mirror instead. It won’t tell you what to decide. It shows you where you are actually standing, which is the only place worth building from.

Explore Your Harmony Map

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on July 8th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Josh has spent more than 20 years in video production and photography. Put a camera in his hand and he drops into a flow state, and if you’ve followed us for a while you’ve already seen his eye at work, because he was here in Brazil recently taking photos of Carolina and me. He also quit drinking five and a half years ago. In April of 2025 those two threads met, and The Sober Creative was born alongside a weekly podcast that records its 60th episode this week, a growing body of essays, a community he calls the Sober Creative Collective, and one-on-one coaching built around a 90-day arc.

The Sober Creative almost didn’t exist. When Josh first launched on Substack it was as Clear Lens, a coaching practice for people starting video businesses, and the passion wasn’t showing up on the page. On one of our calls we asked him a question about sobriety and something lit up. He sent back a ten-minute voice message, and somewhere inside it he accidentally said the words “the sober creative.” We told him to go buy the domain that day. He did, and everything he’s built since grew from that memo.

In this interview Josh explains why alcohol works so well. It’s fast. You can walk into a store, swipe your card, and feel the effect within minutes, which makes it the most available answer to a stressful day there is. And the same speed is the trap. Stress arrives, you drink, you spend the next day low on energy and motivation, things settle down, and then stress arrives again. The loop can run for years while it drains the exact things it promised to give back. Josh doesn’t shame anyone inside this loop, because he lived there himself. He tracked his drinks and tried to control them, and when none of that worked he committed to one full year without it. At 90 days he already knew it wasn’t coming back into his life.

If you only know Josh as the calm presence hosting a weekly show, the story he tells about visibility will do you good. Years ago, inside ’s Fearless Mastery group, going around the room to speak filled him with dread. His last name starts with W, so he usually went last, and the anxiety had the whole meeting to build up for him. He wanted to run out of the room. When Leo asked him to lead one of the groups, the answer in his head was no. Then something shifted, he said yes, and leading that small group of five to seven people opened up everything that followed, including the podcast, and including putting himself in front of the camera after two decades behind it. As he put it, facing the discomfort “is way more hard in your mind than is actually in reality.”

And if you’re building something of your own, there’s a thread here for you too. Josh talked about his first year without dressing it up. The money didn’t come fully the way he expected, and he’s okay saying so. His production work carries the new practice while it grows, and he holds that as support rather than as a problem to solve. Then he said the sentence I’d put on a sticky note for anyone building from a calling. “One year is really not that long.” It takes time for people to trust you. Slow and steady is the whole strategy, and 60 episodes into year one, Josh is what that strategy looks like in a person.

What makes him rare is the pairing. He work revolves around something often wrapped in shame, and he does it by going first, sharing what’s going on with him before he asks anything of you. , watching live, put it in the chat: vulnerability is “pure gold” around a subject this loaded. He’s right. A person who goes first makes it easier for everyone else to look at their own pattern without flinching.

If part of you has been wondering, even a little, what a month without alcohol would show you, this conversation was recorded for that part of you. Josh’s invitation is smaller and kinder than the one you’ve been bracing against. Try one month. Stay curious. Watch what day three, day seven, and day fourteen have to teach you. And if drinking isn’t your subject, watch it anyway for the year-one truth, because if your practice is asking for more patience than you budgeted, Josh will hand you back some steadiness.

A few other threads from the full episode:

• What his old drinking friends decided his sobriety was (”just another phase he’s in”), and what actually changed between them instead

• The spectrum he sees in this work, from one drink a week to a bottle of vodka a day, and why the reason matters more than the amount

• The question he asks before anything else: what are you using it for?

• His therapist’s stat about how many podcasters never make it past episode ten (he records number 60 the day after this conversation)

• Wonder walks, the Collective’s first guest workshop, and the mini documentary series he wants to film with his podcast guests around the world

• The moment Gary’s comment about Ireland had Josh booking an imaginary ticket mid-answer

If this stirred something, Josh’s world lives at The Sober Creative on Substack. His homepage holds his essays, a free assessment, and an open door to a conversation with him. Tell him we sent you.

One more thing before you go. Josh’s method starts with examining a pattern before trying to change it, and we built a tool that does the same job for your business. The Harmony Map is a free assessment that takes about eight minutes and shows you where you’re standing across the nine frequencies of Sacred Business. It won’t tell you what to decide. It shows you where to decide from. If you take it, bring the same curiosity Josh has been talking about for the last hour.

Explore Your Harmony Map

Thank you , , and many others for tuning into this episode of In Full Light with and !

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on July 8, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Just enough to put the phone down. Stop needing to be available. Stop needing to respond right away.

Kids are off school here in Brazil for winter break. So while a lot of you are heading into summer, we are heading into a slower, colder season.

Just taking this extended weekend as an opportunity to be less online.

Happy July 4th to everyone in the US enjoying the long weekend. Happy summer to the rest of you up north. And happy winter break to those of you down here in the south, doing the same thing we are.

Wherever you are, I hope you get a few real days off this week. Off the clock. On with your people.

With Love,

Carolina

P.S. Watch your email early next week. Tuesday we’ll be announcing something to help ignite your independence :)

Her reaction was a flat no. “I’ve got goals. I’ve got visions. I’ve got dreams. I’m not looking to the past.” She was full speed ahead, committed to the hustle, and, by her own account, extremely disconnected from her body and her emotions.

But she left that session knowing the truth. And one thing led to another.

The psychic became her mentor. Every session felt like magic, and Nikki started calling her an earth angel. Then she noticed something that redirected her whole path: she was handing her power to those readings, the same way she’d once handed it to the books, the courses, and the podcasts of her self-help years. Around that time she heard the words Akashic Records for the first time, and the truth of it landed in her body.

From there, her guides walked her forward one breadcrumb at a time. Go into your records every day. Now start doing this for others. Do a hundred practice readings. Now start charging. “Every step it was like, wait, what?” She started at $50 a reading.

A decade later, Nikki is a Certified Intuitive Guide, Shamanic Healer, and Akashic Record Channeler, and she just opened Soul & Mind Alchemy, a private mentorship where she teaches women to access their own records, rewrite subconscious patterns, and receive shamanic healing, including soul and destiny retrievals.

And here’s the part that makes her rare in her field. A reading practice usually grows on return visits. Nikki watched her clients come back and come back, and she loves providing that service. And still she followed the nudge to teach women to do it for themselves. A psychic whose mission is that you stop outsourcing your knowing, including to her. “I’m not special,” she told us. “I may be special in the way that I teach and I empower, but I’m not special that I have this special golden key to the records. Everybody can do that.”

Her definition is the simplest we’ve heard: the Akashic Records are “your soul’s energetic library.” And the line she posted just days before we recorded says the rest. The Akashic Records aren’t mystical. They’re yours.

Then she told us a story that had all three of us covered in goosebumps. Working on her own relationship with being visible, she went into her records to heal what she called a witch wound. In a past life she saw herself as a town healer, an elderly woman who gave medicine to the women and children, and was taken from her home and hanged in the town square for it. She saw where the energy sat. And she went back in and rewrote the story. She connects that work directly to this lifetime, where using her voice is the thing she’s still practicing: she lost her voice last year, tried everything from speech therapy to past life regression, and is actively rewriting the story around the safety of being heard. Which makes the hour she spent with us its own kind of demonstration.

If you’ve spent years collecting the books, the courses, and the podcasts, and the answers still seem to live somewhere out there, this conversation was recorded with you in mind. Nikki would tell you the library you’ve been searching for has been open the whole time. And it’s yours.

A few other threads from the full episode:

• What her father said when she asked him what she was like as a child, and the survival strategy hiding inside being “the easy kid”

• Why she treats the inner child and the higher self as one relationship, never two separate practices

• Her favorite mindfulness practice, which happens at the kitchen sink

• The Carl Jung line she keeps coming back to, and what her guides told her about fate

• How she thinks about her “matrix work,” and why she’s grateful it carries the bills while her soul work grows

• The one thing she’d say to someone who has tried every healing modality and still sits with the thing unhealed

• The Wayne Dyer quote she closed the hour with

If you want to see how your own intuition speaks, Nikki’s Soul Signal Assessment is a short quiz that names your main intuitive strength, with a spirit animal twist. You’ll find it at NikkiHeals.com

Soul & Mind Alchemy

Soul & Mind Alchemy is your weekly guide to deep transformation, blending Akashic Record insights, subconscious rewiring, and soul-led strategies to help you clear blocks, trust your intuition, and create the life your Higher Self is calling you toward.

By Nikki Kountouriotis

One more thing before you go.

Every guest on In Full Light is someone in our community. Carolina and I do private work all year with a small number of clients. She holds the body and the nervous system. I hold the strategy, the structure, and the path to getting clear, getting seen, and getting paid.

If you have a message of your own that hasn’t made it into the world yet, and something in Nikki’s conversation stirred it, we’d love to explore what working together privately could look like. We’ll tell you the truth. If we don’t think we can help, we’ll say so.

Book a conversation with us here.

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on July 2nd, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

She wasn’t planning to leave Substack. She just wanted to know that she was making strategically sound decisions for the future of her brand.

So here’s the answer, because theres a good chance you probably typed “substack seo” into Google to get here and you have a bit of anxiety over this if you’ve decided to go “all-in” on Substack.

Yes, SEO on Substack works. Your posts live on real web pages that get indexed by Google. Substack generates a sitemap for your publication automatically, gives you SEO settings on every post, and lets you connect Google Search Console. Writers rank Substack posts on the first page of Google search results every day.

And also, there are some limitations that are good to know about. Substack was built at the beginning as an email-first approach, which means search engines were not the primary focus. If you know the specific limitations, you can work around them and get great results. If you don’t, you’ll conclude the whole thing is hopeless, which is roughly the conclusion that coach handed my client, which was super unhelpful.

This guide covers the whole picture. What Substack does for you, what the SEO options inside each post actually control, what the actual numbers say about AI search (the GEO and AEO conversation), and the publishing strategy we now use for Sacred Business Flow that ends the “borrowed land” debate completely. It’s written for the writer, solopreneur, coach, or creator running a Substack newsletter who wants more eyes on their work without having to become a search specialist, or pay someone to handle this aspect of their online business.

Carolina and I run a Substack publication of around 30,000 subscribers (Sacred Business Flow), grown organically, alongside our own website. Everything below comes from our experience of running both.

Does SEO on Substack actually work?

It does, and Substack describes this in its own help center documentation. The platform handles the technical aspects behind the scenes so that every publication gets indexed and ranked. Clean page structure, a sitemap at yourname.substack.com/sitemap.xml, and fast pages that Google is able to crawl.

That’s the part the platform does quite effectively without you needing to do much of anything at all. The part you need to own is everything around what determines whether a specific post ranks in a way that attracts your audience. The keyword you target, the quality of the writing, the title, the links pointing at it.

Which is the same situation you would be dealing with whether you use WordPress, Ghost, or any other separate website builder. No platform ranks your writing for you. The difference with Substack is that some levers are simpler (the technical setup is handled) and some are limited (more on that in the AI section).

One more thing worth naming before we get to the practical details. SEO work is slow. It’s good to be thinking in months, not weeks. If your growth has stalled this month, SEO work is like a seed that you plant now and harvest later, not the thing that saves the day when you are having a bad month. That’s not a Substack limitation. That’s how organic search works everywhere.

Where the borrowed land warning holds up, and where it doesn’t

I want to take the coach’s comment seriously instead of just dismissing it, because there’s a real observation buried inside it.

Let’s start with the part it gets right. If your publication lives at yourname.substack.com, every link you get from elsewhere points at a subdomain of substack.com. The brand equity in every search result and every browser bar accrues partly to Substack. And if you ever leave, the ranking history tied to that subdomain doesn’t come with you the way a custom domain would.

That’s a real trade-off. It’s worth knowing.

Here’s where the comparison to Instagram falls apart.

On Instagram, your audience is an algorithm’s audience. You can’t contact your followers directly, you can’t take them with you, and the platform decides who sees your work each day. If Instagram turns the dial down, you have no recourse. That is borrowed land in the true sense.

On Substack, your audience is an email list. You can export every subscriber as a CSV file today and email them from any tool tomorrow. The single most valuable asset, the direct line to your readers via your email list, is fully portable and fully yours.

So the most accurate version of the statement is this. The Substack subdomain is “rented”. The audience is owned. A coach who collapses those two into “borrowed land, just like Instagram” is missing the entire mechanism that makes Substack different, and I’d gently hold everything else they say about platforms up to the same light.

And the “rented” part has an easy fix that costs $50. We’ll get there.

The SEO options inside every Substack post

When you open a post’s settings, Substack gives you a small set of SEO controls. My client noticed these and asked whether they mattered for Google or for Substack’s internal algorithm. Her instinct was right, and so was the answer she’d already gotten: these are for Google.

SEO title

This is the title search engines display, and it can differ from the post title your subscribers see in their inbox. Your email audience already knows you, so the inbox title can be curious and personal. The SEO title is for strangers typing questions into Google, so it should carry the keyword directly and stay under 60 characters. Sprout Social’s analysis of Substack SEO found headlines between 40 and 60 characters earn a 33.3% higher click-through rate.

SEO description (the meta description)

The meta description is the two lines of text under your title in Google search results. It doesn’t directly change your rank. It heavily influences whether a person clicks. Write it like straight forward ad copy, one or two sentences that tell the searcher exactly what they’ll get, with the keyword included because Google bolds matching words.

The URL slug

Substack lets you edit the URL of every post before you publish. Cut the filler words and keep the keyword. A short, clear URL like /substack-seo-guide beats a 14-word sentence in both search visibility and shareability.

These settings take about ninety seconds per post. The number of writers who skip them is the reason a little care here puts you ahead of a surprising amount of your competition.

How search engines see your Substack publication

Understanding this part will save you from scrolling through a lot of confusing Reddit threads.

Google sees your publication as its own small website that happens to sit on Substack’s platform. You don’t inherit substack.com‘s domain authority in any meaningful way. Your subdomain builds its own reputation, link by link, post by post.

This is why brand-new publications sometimes feel invisible in organic search for their first months. Google is still learning that your corner of the internet exists and deciding how much to trust it. Every inbound link from other websites speeds that trust up. Every indexed post that people find, read, and stay with tells Google your content resonates.

It’s also why “does Substack rank well?” is the wrong question. Some Substack publications rank beautifully. Others never see a search visitor. The variable is rarely the platform. It’s whether the publication or writer wrote something searchable and earned links back to it from other publications or reputable online sources.

Keyword research for writers who have no desire to do SEO

You don’t need paid tools to start. You need to answer one straight forward question. What is a person typing into Google that your post is the best answer to?

Here are a few practical ways to approach this, and these are the same seo techniques I use personally:

• Write down the questions your readers and clients actually ask you. Real questions, in their words. Each one is a keyword.

• Type your topic into Google and read the “People also ask” boxes and the autocomplete suggestions. That’s Google telling you what has search volume, for free.

• Look at what already ranks. If the first page for your phrase is all major publications, pick a more specific phrase. You’re hunting for questions where the current answers are thin, and you know you have a interesting, unique point of view.

Then match one post to one keyword. Not five keywords per post. One post, one search intent, answered better and with more specificity than anything currently on the first page.

Notice this is doing a different job than your regular newsletter. A newsletter issue is for the readers you have and going deeper into relationship with them. A search optimized post is for the new readers you don’t have yet. Both belong in your publication, and knowing which one you’re writing changes how you write it.

Writing a Substack post that can rank

The essence of it, is high quality content aimed at a question people actually search. But a few things are important to focus on, and they’re the same practices that work on any blog post, no matter where you have chosen to publish.

Answer the question fast. Put a clear, direct answer in the first few paragraphs, then go deeper below. Searchers bounce off long introductions, and Google notices the the number of people leaving without scrolling or longer time spent on the page.

Make the post long enough to offer a comprehensive answer to the reader. The posts that rank for competitive phrases usually run well past a thousand words, and the length is a byproduct of covering the question so completely that the reader never needs to hit the back button.

Use post headings. Break the post up with descriptive section headings, and reach for an itemized list when you’re walking through steps or options. Include a related phrase in a heading wherever it flows naturally. Headings help readers scan and help Google map what the post covers.

Tag your posts. Substack’s searchable tags categorize your writing, and they give readers, search engines, and Substack’s own discovery surfaces one more way to find related articles in your catalog.

Write for evergreen value that is not time-bound. Personal essays are the soul of a newsletter, and they almost never pull search traffic. Evergreen content, the how-to guides and explainers that stay relevant for years, is what compounds in organic search. My approach to this is simple: keep publishing the writing your subscribers love that build a strong connection and inspire action, and add searchable evergreen pieces at whatever cadence you can sustain over time.

Give your images alt text. It’s an accessibility kindness first to those who need it, the relevant keywords in it are one more signal about what the page covers, and it helps your images get found in search, which is another doorway into your publication.

Writing for search engines vs writing for real humans

There’s a difference between writing that ranks and writing that compels someone to act. Search-focused writing answers a question thoroughly and neutrally. Persuasive writing makes an argument, tells a story, and invites a decision. teaches that marketing is an argument, and most of what we publish is exactly that, an argument made with care for the real human receiving it in their inbox.

So here’s how we think about this at Sacred Business Flow. The overwhelming majority of our writing is for the person reading it. Essays, stories, and teaching pieces that build relationship and inspire action. And then we choose specific topics, like this very guide, to also structure for the robots. When a question has real search volume and we know we can give the best answer available, we write the piece so both audiences are served. The human gets a complete answer in a voice they can trust. Google and the AI engines get the structure they need to find it and surface it in ways that will attract new audiences to our publication.

If you try to write every piece for the robots, you’ll likely feel that you are losing your voice and boring the readers you already have. If you never write for them, you leave a compounding source of new readers sitting on the table. A small number of deliberately chosen search pieces, living inside a publication full of writing in your own voice, is the balance I would suggest striving for.

Internal linking, the practice almost nobody is using for Substack SEO

Every time you publish a new post, link to two or three of your older related posts inside the body, and go add a link to the new post from at least one older one.

That’s internal linking, and it does three jobs at once. It keeps readers inside your publication longer, driving them deeper into conversation with you. It helps Google discover and re-crawl your back catalog. And it tells search engines which of your posts relate to which topics, which sharpens how your whole publication gets understood.

Your archive is an asset. Writers sit on years of Substack content with no links between any of it, which leaves each post needing to stand alone. Weave the catalog together and the older pieces start receiving new life instead of being seen once to never see the light of day again. While you’re in there, update anything stale. Google favors content that stays current.

Internal linking is a great use for AI. Simply feed it your sitemap and ask it to find 2-3 optimal internal linking opportunities.

Our sitemap for example is https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/sitemap.xml

Backlinks still carry the most weight for SEO

Substack’s own documentation says this directly. The best way to improve your ranking is inbound links, links from other websites pointing at your publication.

For a newsletter writer, the realistic paths look like this:

• Guest posts and collaborations with other writers in your space, which Substack makes unusually easy through guest authorship and recommendations. Hosting a guest writer works in reverse too, introducing their audience to your work and bringing you new subscribers.

• Being interviewed on podcasts and blogs that link to your publication in the show notes.

• Adding your publication link to your own website, your bio pages, and your profiles on social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Writing things worth citing. One genuinely useful guide earns more links over time than fifty announcements.

• Repurposing your long-form articles into Notes and short posts on your social channels, with each version pointing new readers back to the original.

A quality warning that Sprout Social’s guide also flags. Low-quality backlinks, the paid-link schemes and spammy directories, can hurt you. If someone offers to sell you a hundred links, just say no.

Collaboration, the most underrated Substack SEO strategy

Almost everything in that backlink list has one thing in common, and it’s worth calling out. Collaboration.

Guest posts, interviews, recommendations, cross-posts. Every one of them is a relationship first and a backlink second. The writers who grow fastest on Substack aren’t the ones trying to outsmart an algorithm. They’re the ones consistently in conversation with other writers and other audiences.

Our live show, Sacred Business Stories, has become one of the biggest authority builders we have. Every episode is a collaboration with a guest who shares it with their own audience. Every episode page is a piece of content that earns links and mentions over time. And every conversation deepens a relationship that leads to the next guest post, the next recommendation, the next introduction. The SEO value is tremendous, and it arrives as a side effect of relationships we would want to be building anyway.

If reaching out to potential collaborators feels uncomfortable, start with the people you already know. I wrote about the hundred contacts you haven’t messaged for exactly this reason.

Should you pay for the custom domain?

Substack charges a one-time $50 fee to connect a custom domain, so your publication lives at yourdomain.com instead of yourname.substack.com.

If you’re taking search seriously, this is the best $50 you will ever spend for one reason. Every backlink you earn from that day forward builds authority on a domain you own. If you ever leave Substack, the domain, the links, and the ranking history all move with you to whatever platform hosts you next.

This is the structural answer to borrowed land. With a custom domain, Substack becomes a tool hosting your owned property rather than a landlord. The subdomain trade-off from earlier in this guide simply stops being a thing.

Two caveats here. Your emails still send from Substack’s infrastructure regardless. And if your publication already has years of history on the subdomain, the switch involves a transition period while Google re-maps everything, so it’s better done sooner than later. I recommend all our clients to set up a custom domain as soon as possible when they launch their Substack.

GEO and AEO, what the AI search numbers actually show

My client also asked about GEO, and this is where I want to be as precise as I can with my answer.

Quick translation first if you don’t know the meaning of these terms. SEO is ranking in classic Google search. AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) are about getting your work cited when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Google’s AI Overviews a question. Same goal as SEO, being found, just in a new context.

The data for this can be a bit sobering. Michael Brito at Zeno Group analyzed 1.7 million AI prompts in early 2026 and found Substack content earned about 0.07% of all citations. Medium earned five times more. The AI engines lean heavily on established institutional sources, freely accessible pages, and consolidated domains. Substack’s paywalls, email-first structure, and thousands of fragmented subdomains all work against it.

So anyone telling you Substack is an AI visibility machine isn’t telling you the entire story. But the practical moves that are completely in your power help balance out any potential downside, and they’re mostly the same exact actions you would take for good SEO:

• Keep your best explanatory content outside the paywall, because engines can’t cite what they can’t read.

• Answer questions directly, near the top, in simple, straight forward language. AI engines quote clear, quotable passages.

• Get cited by other websites. The engines trust sources that the wider web already links to and mentions.

• Fill out your About page so both readers and machines can tell who you are, who you serve, and why you’re credible.
  

And notice the pattern. The fragmented-subdomain problem is a platform problem. Which brings us to the structure that solves it.

A long-term platform decision that ends the borrowed land debate

Here’s how we actually have things set up at Sacred Business Flow, and what I’d suggest to my client as the long-term play when the timing is right.

First, a note on order of operations, because this trips a lot of people up. It’s likely you’ll want a standard website at some point. But if you’re a solopreneur trying to wear all the hats, keeping things simple and starting with Substack is usually the way to go. We only switched to our current publishing strategy about two and a half years in. We value simplicity, and we had many other things to get into place before we could effectively manage both a publication and a full brand website, which also had to be built using SEO best practices to be worth the effort. and her story of going from CEO to all-in on Substack is a good reminder of how far the platform alone can carry you.

Our own website is the “canonical” home. This just means that long-form essays and guides publish there first, on a domain we own, where all search authority compounds for us. Then the piece goes out through our Substack newsletter and publication to our community, with a link back to the original. Substack does what it’s genuinely world-class at, distribution, community, recommendations, and the network effect of Notes. The website does what Substack is average at, compounding search equity and AI visibility on owned ground.

You don’t need to start there. The right sequence depends on where you are:

1. Just started writing? Stay on the free subdomain. Apply everything in this guide. Prove to yourself that search traffic is worth pursuing before you spend anything.

2. Growing and committed? Pay the $50 for a custom domain. From that day, everything compounds on land you own.

3. Running a real business and looking to create more momentum? Consider the dual setup, a separate website as the canonical home plus Substack as the distribution and community engine. It’s more work. It’s also the only version where no platform decision can ever touch your foundation for growth.

At every one of those stages, your email list remains the asset that makes the whole question less dramatic than it sounds. The list comes with you no matter what.

Set up Google Search Console before you optimize anything

If you do only one technical thing after reading this, do this one thing, because you can’t improve what you can’t see.

Google Search Console is Google’s free tool that shows which queries your publication appears for, your impressions, your clicks, and your average position in search rankings. It’s the difference between guessing and knowing whats working.

Substack supports it directly. In Google Search Console, add your publication as a URL-prefix property. Choose the HTML tag verification method, copy the tag, and paste it into the Analytics section of your Substack settings. Save, then verify. With a custom domain you can verify at the DNS level instead. Substack’s basic stats tell you about your subscribers; Search Console gives you the valuable data about the strangers visiting your publication through search results, and Google Analytics can be layered on later if you want even more visibility.

Then let it starting collect information. After 30 days, look at which posts are getting impressions and for what queries. That’s Google telling you where you’re already receiving visibility, which is exactly where small improvements often produce the fastest results.

Keep an eye on your Substack stats alongside it, where your traffic actually comes from and how your followers grow. And don’t dismiss your open rates in all of this. An audience that opens your emails is a brand people recognize, and recognition feeds every search click you’ll ever earn.

The 80/20 of Substack SEO settings

I want to be clear about something before handing you a checklist. Remembering to fill in every SEO title, edit every slug, research every keyword, and write every meta description can feel incredibly tedious. And for someone already wearing many hats, tedious extras become one more reason to give up on publishing altogether.

This is why we don’t put a ton of emphasis on these settings with our clients until they’ve proven to themselves they can publish consistently. That consistency for your audience is so much more important than getting every one of these settings right from day one. A publication that shows up every week with nothing optimized will beat a perfectly optimized publication that went quiet in month two, in Google’s eyes and in your readers’ hearts. The same principle sits underneath attracting aligned clients consistently: your steadiness is the ultimate strategy.

The settings can also be backfilled. You can hire someone like a virtual assistant down the line to go back through your catalog and fill in SEO titles, descriptions, slugs, and alt text.

At the same time, if you are resourced and willing to do these things earlier on, you receive the gift of time being on your side. SEO value grows as posts age and links accumulate, so the pieces you set up well this year continue to work for you every year after. Just never let the settings become the reason you stop publishing out of overwhelm.

A first-month plan if you just started doing SEO work

What turns search traffic into new subscribers

One last piece to mention, because ranking is only half the goal. A search visitor is a stranger in the middle of a question. They came from Google, not from being a loyal follower, and they’ll leave the moment the question is answered unless you give them a reason to stay.

So end every searchable post with a soft, clear next step. What your publication is about, who it serves, and an invitation to subscribe. Substack puts subscribe buttons everywhere, and on a post built for search that button is doing its most important work, converting one-time search traffic into subscribers who then get everything else you write, no algorithm in between.

That’s the win you are optimizing for. SEO brings you a stranger. The email list, the part you own outright, keeps them, and helps them become a loyal reader of your Substack publication.

My client’s question was a really good one, and the fix isn’t dramatic. It’s following this simple playbook. Keep writing the content you know your community loves reading, add searchable evergreen pieces with the seo settings filled in, claim your space with a custom domain when you’re ready, and let the compounding effects start to kick in. You’re not on borrowed land. You’re on a platform with a rented storefront and an owned mailing list, and now you know exactly which is which.

Phil (& Carolina)

One more invitation before you go.

Sometimes a growth stall is related to a technical challenge, and tactics like I describe above will get you moving again. Sometimes it runs deeper than SEO. You’re publishing good work, you’ve read the guides, and something underneath keeps interrupting your consistency right when things start to build momentum. I’ve seen this enough times to name it: strategy without nervous system work stalls, and nervous system work without strategy never quite lands.

That’s the work and I do together with a small number of people each year in our Serve and Receive Private Partnership. Two experienced set of eyes on your business (and Substack if you are building here), the strategy and the part of you that needs to show up consistently to gain momentum. If something in you read this guide and said “the settings aren’t my real problem,” you can read about the private work here.

And if this guide was all you needed today, go take action with it! That’s a good outcome too.

Explore Private Work

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on July 1st, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

had already done the hard part. He’d published his research, written his thesis, and turned years of study into a direction for his book our relationship with technology. Then a friend told him he had to try Claude as a writing partner, so he opened it and fed it his question and his plan.

It handed back chapter titles. Mini chapter descriptions. Catchy ones.

And reading through them, he experienced a hollow feeling. Are these my ideas? Is it mirroring back what I fed it, or is it writing the book for me?

He’d spent years putting the pieces in place to be in a position to write this book, and now a machine was offering to do the one part he most wanted to do himself.

No F-ing way. The buck stops here.

He drew his line in the sand and wrote the book by hand. In the opening pages he tells the reader plainly that it was written by him, without AI. He used it to track down citations he already knew existed, and that was it.

Some of Shannon’s story you may already know. More than fifteen years teaching yoga and meditation, a long-running podcast called SoulFeed, co-founding We Human, an earlier book called Trust Your Truth. And his latest, The Power in Your Hands: Liberate Yourself from Attachment to Technology, came out June 2nd. He’s a psychotherapist and a poet, based in Ojai, and he narrated the audiobook himself.

So we had him on Sacred Business Stories this week, and the conversation kept coming back to focusing on the machine most of us now keep in our pocket.

Shannon’s explanation about what a large language model (LLM) actually is was very articulate. He calls what it produces “high-quality appearing slop” in many cases. It could say anything, and it always says it in a convincing way.

He points to Zachary Stein, the psychologist behind the AI Psychological Harms Research Coalition, who describes a shift from the attention economy to the attachment economy. Social media went after our attention. AI, in that framing, goes after our attachment, the part of us that reaches outside itself to feel seen and safe.

Which is the whole thesis of his book. He leans on a definition of addiction from Nikki Myers, the founder of the yoga of 12-step recovery.

“Anytime I reach outside of myself for something that can only be sourced from the inside, I risk forming an addictive relationship with whatever that thing is.”

Read that again if you have a chat window open.

Two moments from the interview stood out.

The first was related to something I wrote about earlier this week. A couple of mornings before we recorded, one of our clients sat at the end of a long day and asked Claude whether he could make a real living doing his work. It told him no. Not much money in it, quite a difficult field to make money in. By morning he was talking about a different plan. We opened a fresh chat window in a different tool, asked asked a different variation of the question, and received an opposite answer. Same individual at the center of the conversation in the same week getting two very different answers.

Shannon’s read on it was extremely sharp:

“We are looking outside of ourselves to a higher power-like figure to see us, to soothe us, to make us feel safe.”

The machine gets things wrong, sure. The deeper problem is the authority we often hand it almost without question, to decide who we are and what we’re allowed to want or create. The answer was never meant to be found in a chat window. It lives within the client’s own intuitive knowing, who has already been shown by his own results quite a bit of evidence that he is great at the work he has chosen to take on.

The second was about what lets a person take feedback or constructive criticism and keeping their own center:

“Having ego strength allows me to receive feedback and test it against my own inner knowing.”

Shannon isn’t anti-feedback, and he isn’t anti-technology. He was on a video call the whole hour, and I felt we had a nice connection. His argument is that you should ask what a given tool amplifies in you, and whether you’re using it or being used by it.

His own answer for himself is to create intentional friction. He keeps his iPhone off, in a box, all day, and carries a Light Phone with no apps and no internet. Not because everyone should, but because the apps were built by behavioral psychologists to be frictionless, and the only counterweight is friction you build back in on purpose.

The advice underneath all of it:

We should do whatever we’re doing with a reason and with intention.

Shannon’s story reframes a belief that shows up all over creative work. The idea that the answer about whether your work is worth doing lives somewhere outside you, in an expert or a machine that speaks with 100% conviction. His creative process around writing his latest book is a perfect example of this. The satisfaction of having made the thing himself was extremely meaningful to his own sense of self, and he wasn’t willing to hand that over to a machine.

If you’ve been using ai to make important decisions about your work and your calling, this interview is a good place to start putting the pen back in your own hand.

You can find Shannon at shannonalgeo.com and writing at The Sacred Ebb on Substack.

The Sacred Ebb by Shannon Algeo

Resonant word medicine from the heart—tending to the tides of our inner depths as we flow forward into new seasons of growth.

If this stirred something within you, the private work Carolina and I do is for the person who wants guides, not another voice to outsource their inner knowing. We support the development of your business structure and the nervous system side, but in the end the important decisions stay yours. Start a conversation here.

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on June 28, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

That feeling kept building. The more I kept doing things the way I knew how, the more I found myself hitting the limits of the structure I had created. And that structure wasn’t reflecting where I could go, instead it was reflecting where I had been.

Soon my limit got very clear.

We don’t realize how much the way we charge people is connected to what we perceive about ourselves. A whole professional identity gets built around that. The system you built for your business tells a lot about you, and shifting that system will actually shift the limits of what you believe you can experience.

The structure I had on the outside was a reflection of an old belief. Who I was when I started my business was very different two or three years in. That structure was what felt safe to my system at the beginning of my journey and it was also what was keeping me small.

Three years in, I knew I wanted more impact, more money, and more fun. But I had reached a limit. And if I wanted more, I needed to become more or undo the ceiling I had built for myself.

For a long time, I charged by the hour.

When I thought about charging more, I would multiply session price times the number of sessions, package it differently, call it something new.

But I was operating inside the same belief. I just changed the way it looked on the outside

It felt like I was doing something different, but identity-wise, nothing had shifted.

My brain was wired: if I needed more money, I needed to give more time.

The system doesn’t just limit your income. It limits your thinking. When your business is structured around how many hours you can serve people, your entire way of seeing yourself as a business owner gets shaped by that structure.

You measure your worth in time given. You think “more revenue” and your brain immediately says “more clients.” You stay in permanent delivery mode, with no space — not just in your calendar, but in your own mind — to think about where you actually want to go.

That is a real limit I hit, and I see it with many people.

Internal belief made external structure. And then the structure reinforces the belief. You can do all the inner work and still be living inside a system that was designed by a smaller version of you.

We often grow internally, expand mentally, and yet struggle to rebuild the new structure. That’s the expansion in action. And this is where people stop, convinced they can keep going just the way they are.

The sensation when I considered charging significantly more felt like dishonesty. Like I was asking for something I hadn’t earned. What I didn’t see at the time is that I had built my worth on a unit of measurement — time — that had nothing to do with what I was actually creating for people.

And because I didn’t want to feel dishonest, I convinced myself my way was the right way.

The shift happened when I stopped looking at what I was giving and started looking at what people were receiving. (I’ll be honest… I was coached to think differently. I didn’t see that for myself.)

Not just the transformation itself, but what it cost them to stay where they were. When I changed the unit of measurement, everything else changed with it.

Not just the price… the way I saw myself and the work I was meant to be doing.

I felt it in my body before I understood it in my mind. A release, like muscles I didn’t know were braced finally letting go. Almost like a shower of golden light relaxing every part of me. I knew there was more — and the bracing I had been doing was to keep a belief alive that wasn’t serving me anymore.

It had felt like the right thing to do because I didn’t know any different.

This is not at all about raising prices.

Changing how I charged was an invitation from life to a whole new identity — and with that identity, a whole new life.

My ability to imagine expanded. The aliveness in my days shifted. More excitement, more possibilities, more creativity. Changing my prices and then building a new coherent structure in my business allowed me to express the cumulative inner work I had been doing for years, work that had been squeezed into a small container by my old structure.

As I was restructuring my business, I was building capacity in real time in my nervous system. I was becoming a bigger vessel for life.

This is hard work. It’s not easy to shift.

When someone has time and money fused together, their identity gets built around constant movement. Being in sessions, always serving, always available, that is how worth gets proven. Free time doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like falling behind.

But it goes deeper than that.

The things I wanted most, more money, more time, more joy, more ease — were actually registered as unsafe in my nervous system. Not consciously. Not logically. But underneath, my system had learned that those things weren’t for me, weren’t safe to have, weren’t something I could trust to last.

So the structure I built protected me from them. My pricing kept me busy enough to never have to find out what would happen if I slowed down. My calendar filled itself so I never had to sit with the discomfort of spaciousness.

The busyness wasn’t a symptom of ambition. It was a form of protection.

This is why shifting the price alone changes nothing. If the things you want are unconsciously marked as unsafe, your system will find a way to keep them at a distance — a new package with the same rate underneath, a full calendar with no room to think, a raise followed by a quiet slide back to where you started. You hit a hard ceiling.

The real work is making it safe inside your nervous system to have what you want. Safe to slow down. Safe to charge for transformation rather than time. Safe to be seen as someone who holds that kind of value.

When that shifts, and you take new actions, the structure follows. And the upper limit moves with it.

Then life happens. You grow, new desires surface, and the whole thing asks to be looked at again.

Rinse and repeat.

With Love,

Carolina

If this stirred something, it's the work Phil and I do most closely with a small number of people, one at a time. If you're curious what that could look like for you, let’s have a conversation where we just look at what's actually in the way.

Explore working with us privately →

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on June 30, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Could someone actually make a good living doing what he does?

It came back with a no. Not much money in it. Hard field. And by the morning he was already talking about a different plan, pointed in a new direction.

I get why. The answer felt like responsible research. It felt like he was doing a form of due diligence.

so I checked too

I’ll tell you exactly what I did next, and I won’t pretend it was a neutral experiment. I was fired up. I care about this guy, and we’ve spent months building his belief in what he’s creating, slowly, brick by brick. Watching one late-night prompt knock the wind out of all that was hard to witness.

So I opened up Gemini and I went looking to see what I would get back. Fresh window, no history, nothing it knew about me. I asked it warmly, the way you ask when you’re rooting for a yes. It gave me one. A real living, it said. Easily six figures and beyond even, with a good strategy and some dedication.

I tipped the scales on purpose, to show him how little it takes. I asked about the same line of work, the same offerings, in the same week. Two machines, and two totally different outcomes.

And here is the part I made sure he heard. My yes is not the truth, any more than his no was. “Easily six figures and beyond even” could be its own kind of fantasy, with a trapdoor built right into it. The machine just handed each of us the story we walked in carrying, tidied up nicely so it looked like a fact. The author Stuart Wilde has a line for this. If you keep thinking the way you’ve always thought, you wind up where everyone else is going. My client asked from a position of doubt and got doubt back. I asked from possibility and got possibility back. The question carries the answer inside it.

why it agrees with you

I’m not anti-AI here. I use these tools every day, which is exactly why this one worries me.

, who teaches what he calls critical AI literacy, puts it in a way that stuck with me. Your AI wants you to be right more than it wants to be accurate. And the more it knows about you, your past chats and the way you talk to it, the more agreeable it gets. Which is why my blank window mattered. I had stripped out everything it could use to flatter me, and it still bent to the tone of the question.

, who writes Robots Ate My Homework, puts it well. "The models don't disagree on the facts, but on what the facts are about." So, if this is true, then the work isn’t about picking the right output. The work is discerning clearly what you are bringing to the prompting session.

None of this is new, by the way. We have been building mirrors and mistaking them for clear guidance for a very long time. The oracle at Delphi told Croesus that if he went to war he would destroy a great empire, so he marched off and destroyed his own. The horoscope. The survey you take to confirm what you’d already decided. The second opinion you keep looking for until someone finally agrees with you. AI is just the latest addition to the party.

I fell victim to the same thing, and it cost us

None of us are immune to this. Let me tell you a quick story of somewhere this happened to me recently.

We have a tool called the Harmony Map Assessment. We’ve been sharing it with our audience for almost three years now. People show up on sales calls gushing about how accurate it was, and how seen it made them feel. It works. We know it works.

But being the humans that we are, we were looking for ways to “grow faster”, and there’s a lot of data and credible sources in the market that will tell you that short quizzes connect with new audiences better.

And with AI, when I stressed tested an idea about whether to implement a second shorter quiz, agreed with every piece of that.

So we built it, started pointing a majority of our “call to action” placements at it instead of the thing we’d spent years getting right.

The numbers dipped. Nothing too dramatic, just a clear backwards slide that told the truth. We had chased a best practice that belonged to somebody else’s business. We ran in circles down that side path for a while before we stopped, regained trust in our own path, and brought the Harmony Map back into the forefront where it belongs.

If you want a prediction from me about this whole moment, that’s it. AI is going to have a lot of us chasing our tails. Actually, that’s not really a prediction. It’s definitely already happening. There’s a line usually credited to Henry Ford.

“Whether you think you can or you think you cannot, you’re right.”

AI is just the newest, fastest way to reinforce your own belief patterns.

the noise of the crowd

And it isn’t only AI that does this.

Just yesterday I had a call with another client, someone with more credentials and more raw talent than she gives herself credit for, and she was drowning. Not in doubt exactly. In advice. This coach said one thing, that program said another, a newsletter she follows said a third, and somewhere underneath all of it was her own quiet voice she couldn’t quite hear anymore.

So I told her the thing I’ll tell you. Turn the other voices off for a while. All of them. Mute the coaches, mute the courses, mute the feeds. And yes, that may need to include me as well at some moments of your journey.

Because you cannot hear your own voice in the noise of the crowd, and the AI is just the loudest, fastest addition to it, the one that answers in a tenth of a second and speaks with such conviction that so often we read it as absolute truth. My assessment of your situation, informed by years of professional experience is not the truth either. It’s one more voice. A voice that cares. But still one you might need to set aside in order to hear yourself and cut through the external noise.

where he was really asking from

Which brings me back to where my client was sitting when he asked AI the original question that prompted this essay.

He wasn’t on steady ground. He was at the end of a long day, tired, a little numb, in that warm middle Carolina names, where you’re not in the fire, but also not at peace, just hoping someone will make a hard decision for you. You can’t hear yourself from there. You can’t hear yourself from inside the fire either. I wrote earlier this week about the still ground, the best place to make an important decision from. He wasn’t asking from the still ground.

And the “this doesn’t feel right in my body” that he was so sure about was probably just the discomfort of hard work being done for the first time, not a sign to make a u-turn.

Here’s what I love about how Carolina holds this. She and I didn’t even read his situation the same way. I heard the call toward a pivot and wanted him to slow down his decision-making. She heard it and got curious, wondered whether his gifts could fold into something new. Neither of us holds the answer for him. Two people who love him and what his work represents, but the only one who gets to ultimately choose is him. Don Miguel Ruiz wrote that whoever controls the belief controls the dream. The whole point is to keep that control in his own hands. Not to hand it to me, or to Carolina, or to a chatbot at midnight.

one thing to try

So that’s the catch with asking important questions to ai, a coach or consultant, or even a friend or family member. Seek and you shall find.

You often get back a reflection of whatever you walked in to the conversation carrying.

I want to be clear, because this would be easy to misread. I’m not telling you to put the tools down. And this isn’t the old promise about thinking positive and watching the universe deliver. Manifestation says the cosmos pays out on good vibes. This is less magical than that. The machine is just handing your own framing back to you.

What I’m telling you is simpler, ultimately more rewarding, and definitely harder to stay the course with. Keep the decision making for yourself.

So try this. Next time an answer lands a little too easily on top of what you were already afraid of, or already hoping for, treat that as something worth taking a second look at.

Turn down the volume on external voices for just a little bit. Get yourself to steadier still ground. And if you do ask again, ask in a way that doesn’t already assume the answer, then watch how the reply moves when the question changes. Underneath all of it, listen for the voice that was yours all along.

Where are you letting something outside you make a decision you already know is yours to make? And what would you do next if no screen could tell you that you were wrong?

You probably knew before you asked.

Phil (& Carolina)

If you want a mirror that shows you where you actually are, instead of the story you walked in carrying, take the Harmony Map. It’s the assessment I mentioned above. It won’t tell you what to decide. It just shows you where you’re standing, which is the only place worth deciding from anyway.

Take the Harmony Map →

Who We Are Celebrating This Week: Michele Gill

This week we are celebrating on the release of her brand new assessment, The Mind Heart Body Resonance Map. Discover which part of you - mind, heart, or body is asking for care right now. A reflective assessment to find clarity, insight, and your next step toward becoming more free and fully alive. Explore the assessment here.

Things I’d like to share

on bringing heart to the workplace as the world’s first Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia.

on how the tool you trust to think with is tuned to take your side, and how to make it argue back.

Slow AI

Your AI Agrees With You, Even When You’re Wrong

Your AI wants you to be right more than it wants to be accurate…

Read more

16 days ago · 57 likes · 6 comments · Dr Sam Illingworth

on the case for working with the differences between AI models instead of hunting for the single best output, told through two old stories about language.

ROBOTS ATE MY HOMEWORK

A failed universal language explains why you keep picking the wrong AI output

I read an article in Harper’s this month about the history of Esperanto, a language built with the hope of ending all language problems…

Read more

16 days ago · 38 likes · 16 comments · Mia Kiraki 🎭

Memorable Quote

"Uncertainty is our basic state of existence, not something to be got through to the certainty beyond." -

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on June 27th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

The way I understand it is this: The way of being, the beliefs, the habits, the personality that created the life you have now, that won’t take you somewhere different.

It built from where you are. It can’t take you where you’re going.

When we first started Sacred Business Flow, we defined a very clear structure. It came from what we believed at the time, and it was built to do one thing: get the business off the ground.

And it worked.

We built a thriving community. A full coaching practice. Private clients. Three years and over 25,000 more subscribers later, it was still the structure we were running.

Structure is what gives shape to your business and to your life. Within those limits, you find flow. And I mean that literally.

Flow only happens inside a structure.

Without it you’re not flowing, you’re drifting. The two feel the same from the inside, loose and unforced, but one moves toward something and the other just spreads out and arrives nowhere.

You don’t fix the flow. You adjust the structure.

So structure isn’t the enemy. That’s the part people often get wrong. They hear structure and they think rigidity, pushing, force. So they drop it, call that freedom, and then wonder why nothing moves forward for them.

The problem isn’t structure. The problem is that we get so used to the ones we built that we stop asking the only question that matters: is this still serving me?

We pay an expensive price when we don’t ask. In the wrong structure, what you love can become the thing that drains you. You start to resent the work you used to love, not because the love is gone, but because the container is failing to support it. The passion isn’t the problem. It just has nowhere to go.

You also don’t realize that maybe you’ve changed and what you did before is no longer what you want to do now, and that’s fine too.

That’s how I knew. We reached a point where we were sold out for months. We couldn’t take a single new client. The work was taking more hours than we could give to the business. The thing we built to serve us had started serving itself, and we were feeding it.

One of the principles of Sacred Business is simple: the business serves you, not only the other way around. You feed it with your evolution, and its growth has to feed you back. The moment that exchange goes one way, something is broken.

We’re not in this only to grow for the sake of growing.

We’re here to feel alive in the work.

A business that drains you and pulls the life out of you isn’t a successful business, no matter what the numbers say. And the trap is that you can keep going anyway.

You know how to do it. You’ve done it for years. You can lose the love for it completely and keep running it on memory, because the structure has gone quiet and automatic, like a second nature you don’t have to think about.

That’s the real reason it’s so hard to change. The old structure is loud. It’s clear. It worked. It’s become the way you operate without deciding to. So it doesn’t announce that it’s time.

You have to notice.

It was on a walk in Cusco that we finally saw it. Not in a planning session. Walking. Moving.

The container we’d built wasn’t serving our essence anymore. There was more to share. More people to serve. Just not this way.

And it’s not only the business. When I moved back to Brazil, I knew exactly what I needed, and I built a structure for it. It served its purpose completely. It’s the same structure I’m operating in now. And I’m not in the same place anymore. The structure hasn’t changed. I have. My body feels it before my mind admits it.

I am in the middle of a crisis of structure, in business and in life. Not on the other side of it. It’s extremely uncomfortable, having to operate inside the old structure while building the new one at the same time. The pull to be where I am not is loud, and if I don’t coach myself, I could drain into dissatisfaction, frustration, exhaustion, trying to keep the old thing working until the new one takes full shape.

This is where most people stop. In the transition. In the discomfort.

They get pulled back to the old structure because they can’t hold their center, and the old feels easy. Your mind will tell you it’s the right way…

It is not. If it were, you wouldn’t feel the pull toward something different. You can go back to the old and numb yourself and call that life. But the desire doesn’t leave. It waits.

And if all of that weren’t enough, there’s AI, speeding everything up. Work we were certain we had to do ourselves is now being handled in minutes. The ground we built our structure on keeps moving under us. AI isn’t going away, and it isn’t the enemy either. But it asks for discernment. Ask it the right questions and it can hold up the new structure you’re building. Hand it the wrong ones and it will quietly rebuild the old one faster than ever, and convince you that’s progress.

So the structure expires from two directions now. From the inside as you grow, and from the outside as the world shifts. Asking the question isn’t a once every few years luxury anymore.

It’s the new normal.

But to actually change a structure, you have to slow down. This is a requirement. Because in the rush, you cant and won’t build something new. You’ll grab the old structure and rearrange it. Move the furniture. Add a room. And you’ll tell yourself you’ve built something new when all you’ve done is renovate the thing you’ve outgrown.

Real change asks more of us. It asks for presence. Awareness. A kind of attention you can’t give at full speed.

So slow down enough to ask the honest question. The structure you’re running right now, the one that’s gone quiet and automatic, the one you don’t even think about anymore, is it serving where you’re heading, or keeping you where you are?

And if you loved it once and it drains you now, you already have your answer.

And if you’ve never thought to ask, that’s an answer too. It means you’re not building your life. You’re surviving inside it, believing you don’t have a choice.

You do.

With Love,

Carolina

p.s. If this named something you have been feeling, and you sense your own structure requires revisiting, that is the work we do most closely with private clients. If you would like to have a conversation about where you are and what is ready to change, you can book a call to explore working with us one on one. Book a call to explore private work →

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on June 25th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

She worked for , at a company she loved and called home.

But one day, she had to walk into his office and tell him the work wasn’t for her anymore.

What she wanted was pretty simple. Not a better title. She wanted to stop spending her days on work that made her feel like she was no longer herself.

The hard part was that nothing was wrong on paper. She’d built a good career in agencies across two decades, San Francisco to London to New York. Walking away from advertising meant walking away from the thing she was good at, with no promise the next thing would pay. And she knew herself well enough to know she’d chase the next sexy job title if she did it alone. So she hired a coach.

When Gary asked what she wanted to do instead, she didn’t name a department or a title.

“I only care about the people here. I care about the heartbeat”.

What came next is the public part. Gary made her the world’s first Chief Heart Officer. She’d told him she never wanted to do HR. He told her she’d learn it and hire a great team around her, which she did, and she renamed the department People and Experience. She’s run it ever since. When she joined Vayner in May 2014, the company was around 400 people. It’s about 2,200 now, across the globe.

We had her on Sacred Business Stories this week. The part worth examining closely is what that pivot actually asked of her, and what she’s done with it since.

When Gary handed her the role, she asked him two questions. First, what are we building? His answer: we’re building the single greatest human organization in the history of time. Then, how do I know if I’m successful? His answer stuck with her.

You will touch every single human being and infuse the agencies with empathy.

Years before any of that, she’d done a harder version of the same leap. A CEO in London called her in San Francisco and needed her in two weeks. She’d been in San Francisco sixteen years. It was home. She was almost forty. She called her grandmother, who lived to 101, and got one line back.

All decisions can be undone.

So she sold her bike, sold her car, put the rest in storage, and within two weeks was the lone American walking into a stuffy British agency, knowing no one. That pattern, saying yes and trusting she could handle wherever it landed, is the same muscle she used later to walk into Gary’s office.

Two moments from the conversation stood out.

The first was something she did with that sixty-person team, back before she was Chief Heart Officer. She scrapped show-and-tell at the team meeting.

Let’s just start bringing in poetry or songs or song lyrics.

She said it turned into something like a liberal arts curriculum the whole team built together, out of people being who they were instead of reporting which campaign hit which number. The point wasn’t the poems. It was giving people a way to be themselves at work without being asked to perform. You can borrow this anywhere a team has gone flat, anywhere connection got replaced by status updates.

The second came up when she talked about people who tell her they want to be just like her. She stops them.

Be you. Don’t be me. I’m already me.

It sounds simple. It runs against most of what gets sold as professional development, which is usually a quiet instruction to become someone else. Claude’s whole case, and the title of her book, is that becoming that version costs you the thing that made you worth hiring in the first place.

The way she frames the starting point of the book is one line.

You are the CEO of you.

The belief worth challenging is that being professional means putting on a mask, and that productivity and your real self pull in opposite directions. Claude’s career says they pull in the same one. She didn’t earn the title, the team, or the results by becoming someone polished. She earned them by refusing to.

Carolina named it in the conversation. Productivity isn’t attached to a mask. You can give results and still be the person with a song stuck in her head all day. The masking doesn’t make the work better.

You can find Claude at claudesilver.com, and her book, Be Yourself at Work, has been out since October.

She speaks mostly to leaders, and to anyone trying to build a workplace where people don’t have to leave themselves at the door. If you run a team, or you’re the one quietly wondering whether you can stop performing at work, she’s talking to you.

Check out the full replay, glitchy video and all. The roughness turns out to be the point in the end.

Thank you to , , and many others for tuning into episode 048 of Sacred Business Stories with and !

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on June 24th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Then she started one.

That contradiction sits at the center of this conversation. Joey is a professional certified coach, facilitator and retreat host with over fifteen years behind her, living in rural Cornwall about a fifteen minute walk from the coast path, working with values-driven midlife women in sustainability and social change. She started her coaching business while moving four hundred miles from London to be with her now husband, in a part of the country where the opportunity wasn’t going to hand itself to her. She trained, she moved, and she opened the doors all at once, carrying hard beliefs around what business meant.

The work was changing her mind in public. As she puts it, business can be a real source of good, and lots of companies do real harm, and both of those are true at the same time. She didn’t resolve the contradiction by picking a side. She built her own way of doing it instead.

The world she works in runs on a particular story: the problems are hard, so the work has to be hard, so you grind, you isolate, you burn out. Joey agrees the problems are hard. She just doesn’t think approaching the work as if it’s hard makes the problem any easier to solve. “The energy that we approach something with is also the energy that it’s imbued with,” she says. Push harder and that’s the energy you build into what you make. So she works the other way: with other people instead of alone, and with some joy in it, because we’re human beings and we need joy.

Joey describes years of avoiding visibility, dodging opportunities, building reasonable stories about why staying invisible was fine. Then she describes working at it the way you’d turn an object over in your hands, looking at it from every angle, again and again, until something gave. What she landed on, she says with a laugh, is “I’m here to be seen, man. We’re all here to be seen.” A year ago she wouldn’t have accepted the invitation to this episode. She’d have had a perfectly reasonable excuse. She showed up anyway.

If you are someone doing work that matters, in a culture that keeps telling you it has to cost you everything, this conversation is for you. If you’ve been treating the grind as the price of doing good, Joey makes a great case that the joy isn’t a reward you get at the end. It’s the thing that makes the work last, and the thing that makes it worth doing at all.

A few other threads from the full episode:

• Why she says resilience on your own is “a bit of a mirage,” and what she puts in its place

• The Paul Simon lyric about drifting that names her whole first decade of working life

• The moment in a coaching room, not coaching, not being coached, that moved her to tears and rerouted her career

• “There is no done. There’s no destination. It’s just a chapter to a chapter to a chapter.”

• The walking retreats she’s starting this summer on the Cornwall coast path, and the three ingredients she’s putting together

• Why she calls herself “a curator of the fun,” and what changes when you hold the work that way

• What she’s most proud of, and why it has nothing to do with results

Watch the full conversation here:

If anything here lands for you, Joey’s main home is Substack, and she’d love a connection. Subscribe here:

Thriving Changemakers

with Joey Clifton. For purpose-led people writing the next chapter of their lives and leadership.

By Joey Clifton

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into this episode of In Full Light with and !

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on June 24th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Brad ran Intuit for eleven years. He’s the president of Marshall University now, and he sits on Amazon’s board. I was inviting him onto the Sacred Business Stories show. Simple ask. And I noticed something in my body I hadn’t felt in a while. I was feeling small.

Put me in a room of coaches or online service providers and I’m steady as can be. I’ve worked in this world for a decade, made good money in it, and I can speak with authority and confidence in a way that allows my shoulders to stay relaxed. But the vision Carolina and I have for Sacred Business Flow reaches beyond the comfort of that room.

And the second I aim at creating a conversation with someone like Brad, I notice myself shrinking on the inside.

This was a ceiling that I couldn’t see for myself until recently. I think we all have a version of it, running underneath our days, that remains mostly invisible to us.

What got me to hit send wasn’t a pep talk. I didn’t hype myself up. I got underneath the fear first, to a place that I was able to experience my own steadiness, and I sent it from there. He said yes, by the way. Scheduling TBD.

That place is what I want to talk about. I’ve come to think of it as the still ground, and the more I work with clients the more I’m convinced it sits underneath almost everything else. You find it first. Then you build from that space. Then you use your relationship with it to help guide you in knowing when theres a real reason to pause, or when it’s just fear showing up again.

a reaction needs a past

teaches a version of this in her embodiment classes we offer within Radiant Flow. A reaction, she says, needs a past. It’s the old story firing before you’ve looked at what’s actually in front of you. The thought of sending that email to Brad brought up every version of me that ever felt not-enough in the past. None of that was happening on the computer screen as I considered my words. It was happening only in my mind as a remnant of my own personal history.

So the first move is to get under the story. Not to argue with it, not to push it away. Just to drop beneath it, to the part of you that was there before the fear had a name.

This is also where taking 100 percent responsibility for your own experience stops feeling heavy. Inside the reaction, taking responsibility feels like carrying everyone and everything at once. From the still ground it gets light, because you own your part and you let other people own theirs. Carolina calls the power there “allow, not make.” You stop forcing an outcome and start responding to what you actually want, with steady footing.

You can’t think your way to this with logic alone. You get there through getting in touch with the body. A few slow breaths before you open the laptop. A walk before the call. Whatever it takes for your nervous system to register that you’re safe, before you make a big decision, or take the very next step.

build from there, don’t chase

Once you’re standing on that ground, the way you are able to move forward changes.

From fear, you chase. You take the fast money, you discount yourself to close the deal, you grab the quick win because your bank account balance dipped for three days and you really want it to show a different number. I know moves like this well. I built a business past a 100K a month running on exactly this style of engine, and it nearly cost me my health.

From the still ground, you can take the quick win and lay the rail for the long game in the same motion. You can start holding yourself as the prize. Same business, same week, same sales dashboard. The only thing that changes is the ground you’re standing on when you make the next move. If you are on still ground, your intuition will speak to you loud and clear. You just need to listen.

This is the part that’s easy to skip. You do a little breathwork, feel calmer, then go right back to building from the same scarcity. The ground isn’t a retreat or a hiding place you go when the world gets loud, or you are feeling overwhelmed. It’s the place you act from.

the same stillness tells you when to leave

This is where it gets useful, and perhaps a little dangerous.

The still ground is also how use discern a true pivot from a temporary escape from discomfort. Carolina also has a word for how to read the situation. Flat. When you sit in stillness and look at the bigger picture, the thing you’re building, and your relationship with it feels flat from that calm place, that’s useful information. It might be time to change direction. When it still feels alive within you, but the daily work is hard, that’s not a signal to quit. That’s the work asking you to hold the plank a little longer.

The trap is reading the situation from within a burning room instead of from solid ground. Get yourself to safety first. Then take stock of your situation. In the middle of a rough launch everything feels flat. Of course it does. You’re spent and maybe your numbers are down from last year. Decide from there and you’ll walk away from something that still has life and call it intuition.

So make your assessment from stillness, never from within the fire. And move slowly. This is not the time to move fast. A real change of direction deserves the same care you used to arrive at the vision in the first place, not a snap call on a bad afternoon when everything feels like shit.

the thorn that stopped hurting

There’s a version of this that’s harder to catch, and it’s the one I keep finding in myself and in the people I work with in our community.

Michael Singer, in The Untethered Soul, writes about the inner thorn, the tender spot a person can build a whole life around protecting. Carolina put an image on it during our last Wonder Questions call. A splinter that’s been under the skin long enough stops hurting. You’ve built ways to work around it without touching it directly. You hold yourself a certain way to keep from pressing on it, and after a while you don’t feel it at all. You barely notice it.

That invisible ceiling with Brad was one of mine. It didn’t hurt. It wasn’t loud, or staring me in the face. It was simply running in the background as a comfortable feeling about who I am qualified to work with, and be in relationship with. There was no sharp fear to drop beneath, because it had stopped registering as fear. It was just operating below the surface of my everyday decision making about who to reach out to next for our show.

That’s the catch with the still ground. Once you get good at finding peace in your everyday experience, peace itself can become the place you hide. The most spiritually practiced people I know are often the most skilled at staying safe and calling it being centered. The ultimate peace is death. If you want to be alive and making things as a creator, stillness can’t mean retreat.

So Carolina asked our community an even sharper question on that call. Am I at peace because I’m protecting the thorn, or am I at peace because I finally took the leap towards something important?

I think most of us equate peace with quiet, stillness, and a slow, gently feeling, and that’s the trap. In this scenario, one is the calm of staying safe behind the desire you’ve never let yourself get close enough to touch. The other is the calm that arrives on the far side of a brave action, once you’ve already leapt off the cliff instead of backing away from the edge.

You tell them apart with the same flat-versus-alive read that I mentioned in the launch example. Real peace is not devoid of life or movement. The hiding kind is flat, and it’s been flat so long you stopped noticing it was there. You just have to slow down enough to be honest about which one you’re standing in.

what to do before your next real decision

So here’s one small thing, the one I’d love for you to try in your own life.

Before your next real decision that you need to make in the business, take stock of where you’re standing. Get to the still ground first. Take the walk, take a few breaths, do whatever drops you below the story. Then, from there, ask yourself these two questions:

Is this flat because it’s genuinely a chapter that has run it’s course, or flat because I’m protecting something I stopped allowing myself to feel years ago?

And, do I need this, or do I want it? In my example, the Brad email failed the need test. I didn’t need to send it. But the want was incredibly real, even with the fear sitting right next to it. That was enough for me to know I needed to hit send.

Stillness is not the prize you earn at the end of doing something hard. It’s the ground you do the hard part from, not the reward for finishing it. You find it. You build momentum from it. And every so often you use it to feel a splinter you’ve been protecting for years, and you start to work it out gently.

If you try this before your next real decision, I’d like to hear what came up. What did you notice when you got still and ask? Reply to the email or drop it in the comments on Substack and tell me. I would love to hear what you’re sitting with.

I’ll send you all tweezers in the mail. Keep an eye out.

Phil (& Carolina)

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

She writes books. She gives energy healing sessions. She has decades of experience with families and parenting. Years of expertise. Thousands of results.

And she told me she felt like the most lost person in the whole world.

“I need clarity,” she said. “I am so confused.”

For the past three years she had been trying to build a new structure for her new way of helping people.

We spent almost two hours together. I reflected back to her what she already knew but could not reach, because she was not asking herself the right questions. I just asked the right questions.

I reflected her own answers back to her, and helped her see there is an order to the things she was trying to do, the order that makes it all work.

I also helped her see a few patterns in her current identity that were sabotaging the change she wants.

She thought she was lost because she didn’t have all the pieces. She realized she was feeling lost because she didn’t know how to put them together.

This is a big difference. It shifts the whole “priority list.”

In one, your actions reflect your opinion that you are not enough, that you need to do more, you rush, you do more, you get exhausted.

In the other, you slow down, because now you know you already have everything, you feel enough, you take less actions, more challenging ones but with more results.

You, me, just like this woman, are a complete puzzle. Right where you stand.

The pieces are all there. They are just mixed up, and some are turned upside down. Some are organized around an identity that no longer serves you.

It does not mean they are missing. You simply cannot see how to reorganize them.

But they are there.

She had hired help before. She hired someone to sell her books. Someone to grow her social media. Someone to market her practice.

And even with all of that, she felt a disconnection. Always rushing. No clear vision. No systems. All the parts of her business refusing to talk to each other.

So much effort, and not the results she expected.

She even tried AI. She found some good advice on YouTube too. But the more information she gathered, the more confusion she felt.

AI made it worse, right after it made it feel better.

It sounded like she was moving toward clarity. But AI could not see what she could not see. She was asking it the same questions she had been asking herself for years, giving it the same inputs.

AI gave her elaborate, confident answers that felt like new direction.

It was just her own confusion, written in good words.

None of the help was wrong in itself. The order in which she hired them was the issue.

In the middle of confusion, the mind goes looking for more information.

The premise underneath confusion is usually, “I am missing something.” So the energy you emit is connected to “I need more before I have a successful business. I need more before I can even reach clarity.” So you do more. You rush more.

Most of the people we work with, and even the people we talk to on connection calls, have all they need. They are enough where they are, even though they don’t feel this way.

But they do need to shift their current structure in order to experience their wholeness and take action from that space, and you get that by clarifying your vision.

They need to reorganize the very thing that gives them a sense of self. This is the hard work.

Back to the lady I was helping.

Her ideas to restructure her new business were coming from her old identity. She had good ideas, and she was acting on them. However, her ideas were coming from her comfort zone (which means her current identity), so the results she was getting weren’t really moving her forward.

They were keeping her where she is.

If you asked a social media person, she is doing well. If you asked the book-selling expert, she is also doing well, doing all the things she should.

When you compare her actions to what she is trying to create, they are incoherent.

But to her, they felt like good actions. Without realizing it, she was taking the same kind of actions that took her where she already was.

The few actions I brainstormed with her cut her current action list by 80%. Revising her schedule around her new identity and her new clarity gave her about 50% more time.

But the few actions she needs to take now challenge her in ways her 1000 actions never did. She feels fear. She is now facing a lack of confidence that wasn’t there before. She has to say no to things she would have easily said yes to. And this is the gift, this is where the transformation happens.

She feels lighter now. She is finally making progress, and she knows where she is headed. She is excited. She is also very scared.

People think clarity feels like certainty. Often it feels like fear. Because the moment you see clearly, you also see the one thing you have been avoiding.

That is not a step back. That is the work finally pointing the right way.

With Love,

Carolina

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Who We Are Celebrating

I want to celebrate the wonderful work does on Substack.

This past week she gifted me the most beautiful sketch, drawn alongside a whole group of other powerful women on the Substack Runway. She gave me a look she named Sacred Alignment Flow, an ivory and teal blazer-gown with gold harmony-map embroidery. Seeing myself drawn that way, with that much care, was so much fun. It lands differently than words do.

If you want to see the other women she featured, click here.

Pinkie is a visual brand strategist for solopreneurs building with AI. As she puts it, she is the most fun you'll have learning AI branding, and you'll come out looking like a real brand.

She has more than 1,400 flamingos building full brand systems that drive consistent subscriber growth. Click here to visit her publication.

Things I’d like to share

Sacred Business Stories with

This past week I had the joy of meeting Steve Kamb on our Sacred Business Stories. His energy is contagious, and you can tell he is acting on purpose. He founded Nerd Fitness, built it for seventeen years, and then did something most founders never do.

He demoted himself, and then he fired himself, so he could get back to the writing he loved.

His new book, How to Try Again, brings up important topics for anyone trying to reach a goal they have failed at before.

What stayed with me was how he relates to failure.

He talks about it in a way that helps us all feel proud of ours instead of hiding them. He even built a wall online where readers add the things that didn’t work out, because most of us cram those down while everyone around us is busy looking successful.

Come watch the full conversation. It is well worth your time.

There is often one thing. One person. One action that would move you forward and leap you ahead in time.

And it is usually the one we avoid.

We don’t reach out to the person who could truly help us.

We block. We get scared.

We run every worst-case scenario in our heads before sending the message and then… we don’t do anything we remember we forgot to do dishes.

No more excuses, let’s move through resistance together!

This coming Tuesday, June 23 at 2pm EST, we are gathering with our community for a reach-out. Together we will take that action, reach out, and shift the energy around the thing we have been avoiding.

Because moving through resistance doesn’t need to be forcing it can be light and fun!

This is a benefit from our Radiant Flow, our embodiment community where we meet twice a week, to bring some light to topics we often avoid, to question our opinions and to move our body to create safety within and by doing that we build capacity, capacity to take action towards what matters to us.

Memorable Quote

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Salesy.

What does that word even mean?

When we hear someone say, “I don’t want to sound salesy,” it could mean a hundred different things. And yet we rarely stop to ask.

Through old lenses, through someone else’s experience, through beliefs we picked up somewhere, we decide what a thing is and we never check whether that decision is helping us or hurting us.

Because the charge was never in the thing. Sales, money, marketing — they all hold neutral energy.

The charge is in us.

And we sit so close to our own judgment that it stops looking like a judgment at all. It starts looking like reality.

But nothing has any meaning until you decide what it means.

You assign the meaning. And then that meaning becomes true for you, true enough to silently run behind the decisions you make in business, and true enough to shrink your life…

Whether or not it’s actually truth.

So the question was never “is it true?”

The real question: is it helping me? Is this belief contributing to building the life and the business that I actually want? Or is it quietly keeping me small in the name of so-called integrity?

Just notice the incoherence:

“I don’t want to sound like I’m selling… but I want to make the sale and get paid for it.”

Read it again.

You want the fruit and you’re at war with the tree. You want to receive, and you’ve made the giving wrong.

So let’s go back to the word. The origin of the word “sell” is to give.

That’s the original meaning before all the charge, before the eye-rolling, before “salesy,” it simply meant to give, to hand over, to offer. So if we rise above our opinion for one second, salesy isn’t a sin, isn’t bad, Salesy is just… eager to give.

I’d call it givy, just for fun :)

So maybe you won’t have a problem with sales if you change what sales means to you. What if sales is the most honorable act towards making a service available to someone who needs it?

And what if asking for money in exchange for that service was the most honorable act of allowing someone to pay for something they truly need and show their appreciation? Giving and receiving at its best.

Change the meaning you are assigning changes everything.

And forget about what others will think. Their opinion is their own movie, their own story, and so often doesn’t have any relationship to you at all.

Again, we need to pause here and ask are we going to allow other people’s beliefs to limit us from serving from our heart and sharing something that is truly important to us?

Why would you do that? I am sure this is not what your essence is guiding you towards.

I am becoming unapologetically salesy. In fact, I probably don’t sell nearly enough because I love what I’ve built, a business that feels good on the inside and that keeps feeding a life I am excited to live, and I want to help more and more people to do exactly that.

Why on earth would I not offer you that if that’s the help you need?

But I wasn’t always feeling this way.

I had a very strong negative opinion about marketing. I thought it was forceful, fake, and beneath me. I wanted my business to grow without it, purely on essence and good energy.

And then I hired a coach because my way wasn’t working, and I saw the truth: How I was operating wasn’t from integrity.

I was operating from my ego. I wanted the top of the mountain without walking up it. I wanted the result without doing the work. My opinion about sales and marketing was more important than my relationship with service.

I had watched people sell in ways that didn’t land for me, and instead of saying “that’s not my way,” I said “that’s the wrong way.” I judged these people as pushy, fake, and inauthentic.

I judged them from the top of my tower.

I wasn’t doing anything myself to move myself beyond my limitations, and I was judging the ones who were putting themselves out there, likely in the best way they knew how from their level of understanding. And in my judgement, I was making their actions so wrong in my head, that I didn’t want to be seen as looking or sounding anything like them. But on the inside? I was definitely desiring their results.

The one doing the judgement, standing in fear of being judged. Hmm …

But, in reality, who am I to cast judgement on others like that?

I don’t have the ability t see inside anyone’s internal landscape. I don’t know if they’re honest. I don’t know if they’re aching to help with every bone in their body.

I don’t know their heart. My condemnation told me nothing about them.

It only told me about me. And it was the wall I was hiding behind. “I’m not like those salesy people” was a very comfortable cage I built.

So let me say it softly, and then let me say it straight.

If someone out there decides you’re “salesy” and recoils, then that’s a scene in their personal movie.

It’s playing out on the screen in their head, not yours. And the only question that matters is: does living inside their opinion help me to offer up my gifts?

You already know it doesn’t.

Does avoiding sounding “salesy” help your financial situation? I invite you to reconsider and redefine the meaning that sales holds for you. Start showing up like someone who is eager to give, to serve, and to love unapologetically.

Almost with an obsession for it.

You can feel this in the body, by the way. That contraction right before you make an offer ,or the avoidance of writing the email altogether. Yeah - that one inviting people to discover what you do that you’ve been holding off on for three months.

Simply Notice it.

Then ask these questions directly: is this keeping me safe, keeping me small? Is this helping me to find more clients? to help more people? expand my life experience?

You don’t have to sell like anyone else. In fact, please don’t. Instead, do you.

But you do have to find your own way without apology, with clarity, in truth, to say: this is what I have to give, and this is what it’s worth.

Right now, someone has the exact problem you know how to solve, and they cannot find you. Because you decided you shouldn’t talk directly about your services, an that somehow people should just magically discover you on their own.

It feels so much safer to you in this moment, and its costing the people you care about everything.

So take the opinion that you hold - “I don’t want to be salesy” - and turn it back inward, where the real answers live.

Is it true? You can’t even know until you allow yourself to go there. What if there is a future version of your experience where “sales” feel naturals, with the same level of joy and satisfaction that you currently feel when you are helping someone.

Can you entertain this possibility?

If a belief is blocking your ability to give, it is not humility. It’s ego protection. And now you get to choose what you’re loyal to: the judgment, or the gift.

Then write the email. Make the offer. Say the price out loud.

Go Give.

And if you need help building your business from your heart, if you want to monetize something you hold close, then that’s exactly how we help. Phil and I help you with the structure, the order of operations, the foundation, everything that’s helpful to have in place if you want to get real results when you start sharing your message on Substack or social media.

We help you with your fears and your resistance. We help you build confidence and reconnect with the inner guidance that’s probably already telling you: go ask for help.

You don’t have to do this alone. If you need what we can offer you, we’re here.

With love,

Carolina

Explore Serve & Receive

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on June 16, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

He needed the job. He also could not make himself care about it.

What he wanted was to stop spending his life on work that wasn’t his. He just didn’t know yet that the answer was already sitting in him.

The book he kept reading in the car was the 4-Hour Workweek, and one day a question landed. What’s something I’m good at or love, and a group I’m a part of? He typed “nerd fitness” into Google, nothing came up, so he bought the domain and started writing. The articles were bad at first. Then he learned that if he wrote the way that was fun for him, jokes, Lego photos, the geeky references nobody else was mixing with nutrition, people actually showed up. A Google algorithm change sent traffic through the roof. The accidental blog turned into a company. Seventeen years, a team that grew to forty-five people across twenty-five states, and somewhere in there the writing he loved got buried under meetings, payroll, and quarterly planning.

So I demoted myself, and then I fired myself, so that I could get back to writing.

That’s not a line you hear often from a founder. He’d spent five years trying to be a less-bad CEO, waking up every day telling himself to push through. Eventually he admitted the truth. He wasn’t helping the company by forcing himself into a job he wasn’t built for, and he wasn’t helping himself either.

The public version of Steve is the one a lot of people already know. He’s the founder of Nerd Fitness, the site that helped self-described nerds get in shape without the intimidation of a CrossFit box or a big-box gym. At its peak it pulled a million and a half visits a month. His story shows up in Atomic Habits. This week his second book, How to Try Again, hit shelves, published by St. Martin’s Press.

So we had him on Sacred Business Stories the day after the book launched. The part most people don’t hear is what it cost to write it, and what was happening in his life while he did.

Four years ago Steve told his agent he wanted to write again. He spent four months on a proposal for another Nerd Fitness book, the safe one, the audience he already had. His heart wasn’t in it, and his agent passed. Then on January 1st an idea arrived. Everyone goes all in on a New Year’s resolution. All becomes nothing, every time. What about a book for the moment three weeks later, after you’ve already given up?

He signed the deal in 2023. The book was supposed to be out in January 2025. It came out earlier this week in June 2026, twenty drafts later.

Three things hit in close succession while he wrote. A skin cancer diagnosis, the good kind, scooped out of his scalp. Nerd Fitness losing eighty percent of its traffic as Google changed and AI started scraping the content, with nothing he could do to bring it back. And an amicable but heartbreaking divorce. The book stopped being a tidy guide about restarting a workout and became something closer to the truth.

What happens when life doesn’t go the way that you expected, and you’re beating yourself up because something you worked on didn’t work out?

The word he uses for that stretch is treading water. Not making progress, but not giving up either. Doing the bare minimum to remind himself he was still there. A friend, the author , gave him a phrase for the way out of it. Maximum Steve. The weird, specific combination of his experiences and his jokes and his obsessions. When he leaned into that, the book worked. When he tried to sound like someone else, it sagged. He’s about eighteen months into writing as Maximum Steve now, as he tells the story.

Two things stood out from the conversation.

The first was a question he asks himself before he commits to anything.

Don’t just ask, is the juice worth the squeeze. Also ask, do I like juice?

His point is that in an internet business, the reward for getting good at something is that you have to keep doing it. If you only push through a thing so you can be done with it, success is a trap. It means more of the thing you didn’t want. So the better question isn’t whether you can do it. It’s whether you’d be glad to keep doing it for years.

The second was about failure, which is the first chapter of his book on purpose.

Failure is the most human thing we can do, outside of breathing and complaining about traffic.

He tells a story in the book about visiting the Museum of Failure, where the last exhibit is a wall of Post-it notes, strangers writing down the things that didn’t work out. He found it freeing. His problems felt private and unsolvable until he saw how common they were. He built his own version at howtotryagain.com/fail, a digital wall where readers add their failures, because most of us cram them down while everyone around us is busy projecting success.

What are the things that you’re willing to keep doing for as long as it takes to share your message?

The thing Steve’s story reframes is what resistance actually means. For five years he treated his dread of running the company as a weakness to power through. It wasn’t. It was information. Life was telling him, with flashing lights, that he was doing the wrong job. The moment he stopped forcing it and went back to the one thing he’s uniquely good at, he became a better version of himself at work, even though the company got smaller and the traffic kept falling.

He’s also stopped planning a specific future. He used to build toward a detailed five-year vision. It didn’t survive contact with reality, so now he takes it a week and a day at a time, and says that’s working better than the plan ever did. As he put it, if the cost of information is going to zero, the thing left worth paying for is a real human connection. That’s what he’s betting on.

You can find Steve at howtotryagain.com, where the book lives, and reading his weekly essay on Substack.

Steve Kamb

Helping busy people navigate chaos & try again while staying imperfectly human

He writes for the people who have always prided themselves on working harder to solve a problem, right up to the moment that stops working. Or, as the line at the top of his book puts it, for the rest of us who don’t wake up at 4am to run fifteen miles barefoot and take an ice bath.

I’ll add one personal note. I used Nerd Fitness more than a decade ago, back when getting in shape felt like a club I wasn’t invited to, and Steve’s writing helped make it feel possible. Watching him talk about firing himself to get back to that writing was its own kind of proof. Check out the full replay. It will be well worth it.

And thank you to , , , , and many others for tuning into this episode of Sacred Business Stories with and !

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Part of the medicine is in telling the story and being heard.

Jane is a women’s health nurse practitioner and a former midwife. She runs a private practice in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, sees patients by telehealth across New York State, and does health coaching for women online. She’s the founder of Wise Body Women’s Health, and she writes The Wise Body on Substack, where she describes her work as the place where medicine meets the sacred.

The center of the conversation was the midwife model, and what happens when you stop limiting it to birth. Midwives, she explained, approach birth as a process that mostly happens on its own. The job is to support it, to watch carefully for the thing that genuinely needs intervention, to trust the body first and intervene second. Then she said the line that turns a birth philosophy into a way of practicing all of medicine. We have more information than we’ve ever had. Getting information isn’t the problem anymore. Knowing what to do with it is.

She had the research to back it up, which mattered to her. She told us about Centering Pregnancy, a kind of group prenatal care where a midwife sees a whole group at once. There’s a study, she said, that found the more facilitative the midwife was, the less she talked and the more she drew the participants out, the better their birth outcomes were. Being listened to and being able to share with each other had a real, physical effect on how the births went. “If you need the science,” she said, “it is there.”

She holds the science and the invisible in the same hand, loosely, without letting either one cancel the other. The placebo effect is her favorite example. Even people who know they’re in the placebo group of a trial tend to do better than people who got nothing at all. Maybe, she said, that means our intentions and our inner energy have something to do with what physically happens in our bodies.

On her own About page, Jane calls herself the nurse, the midwife, and the witch. Not witch as charlatan. Witch as in the wise women healers who knew you can’t separate the body from the spirit. She brings the hormones and the anatomy and the pharmacology, and she brings the candle, the breath, and the willingness to sit with someone for longer than fifteen minutes. She won’t accept the choice between real medicine and real reverence, and she’s building a practice that proves you don’t have to make it. Carolina said it plainly in the conversation: she’d want Jane as her own doctor, because Jane gets the invisible and is actually qualified to speak to the science.

If you’ve ever sat in a fifteen-minute appointment, telling your whole story to someone typing on a computer who never looked up, and walked out feeling like a collection of symptoms instead of a person, this conversation is for you. And if you’re someone who has quietly carried both a clinical mind and a spiritual one, and assumed you had to keep them in separate rooms to be taken seriously, this one is for you too.

A few other threads from the full episode:

• Why she left the mainstream system, and the trade-off between her own wellbeing and her patients’ that she says burns good practitioners out.

• The “secret light workers” she remembers on the labor and delivery floor, doing quiet blessings between deliveries.

• What she means when she calls industrialized medicine a game of telephone, even when it looks efficient from the top.

• Phil’s own cancer scare at the Mayo Clinic, and the new doctor who reversed everything twenty-four hours before surgery.

• The circle she wants to build into her practice, where patients heal in a group instead of one at a time.

• The one thing she says she’s most proud of, and it isn’t a result.

• Who her health coaching is actually for, no matter where they live.

Watch the full conversation here: [LINK]

You can find Jane at her Substack, The Wise Body, where she writes about women’s health, yoga philosophy, and what she calls practical mysticism.

The Wise Body

The Wise Body explores the intersection of women’s healthcare, yoga philosophy and intuitive wisdom. Readers receive tips and insights based on practical mysticism to help them reimagine wellness for the modern world.

By Jane Riccobono

Thank you , , and many others for tuning into this episode of In Full-Light live with and !

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Zero.

He wasn’t confused about how to send a message. He’s a grown man with a phone. Sure, he had a few strategic questions we addressed, but he knew the names, he had the contact information, and the list was right there in front of him. And the list just kept sitting

If you’ve got your own version of that list, this is for you. There are two parts we are going to unpack together. Paid subscribers will receive the outreach method, which I think you’ll find is very simple to implement. The second is the reason the outreach often sits there undone, and that’s the part I’m hoping you’ll get some fresh perspective on here.

The Outreach Method

It’s four simple steps, and none of them are hard to get started with:

• How to bucket your list so 100 messy names sort themselves into who you should message first

• The one rule for matching the channel to each person, so your message lands warm instead of like a pitch

• The exact one-line ask I send, the kind you can answer in three seconds and so can they

• The opener to use when you reconnect with someone, instead of asking for a referral, which feels productive and quietly goes nowhere

And if you've been reading us for a while, upgrading helps us keep the majority of our writing free and open to everyone. We're full-time creators, and paid subscribers are what makes that possible.

Subscribe now

Upgrade to read the full method and join us for the monthly Wonder Question calls. (Learn more)

now the part that’s actually in the way ...

Everything above is simple to implement once you have the system in place. I’m sure reading about it took you only a couple minutes. So why does the list often sit there with no forward movement?

Because sending the message means being seen as the person you’re becoming. And that person doesn’t feel real to you yet.

A woman on the same call gave us the clearest picture of this I’ve heard in a while. She ran into someone on the sidewalk. Well connected, sociable, exactly the person who’d love what she’s building. And the person asked her, friendly, “so what are you up to these days?” The single best opening she could have been handed. And she said nothing about the work. It didn’t even occur to her. In her own words, it’s still not real to her what she is creating. She walked half a block after the end of the conversation before it landed:

“I can’t believe I didn’t say anything.”

And that’s the nervous system doing its job. Freezing on sharing is a form of protection. The moment you stand up and say “I’m the one who does this now,” you’re on the hook for it, and often there’s still a part of you would rather keep you safely unseen than let you carry that weight.

This is the half of the work that lives in the body, the part Carolina holds with our work in Radiant Flow, and a better outreach script simple won’t touch it.

What starts to create the shift is what I would describe as a practice. You can’t think your way into something feeling real. The conscious choice to reach ou in spite of feeling the fear or wobbly feelings is what makes it real. Being seen as the new person, again and again, is how you become that person.

And guess what?

The steady stream of booked clients are downstream of that. The first job of the message isn’t to land a client. It’s to simply let one more human being know this is who you are standing for, and that the message exists

the one you’re most afraid to message

So here’s how to pick where to start.

Run down the list for the name that brings up the most fear. Maybe you’ll feel it in your solar plexus, or your gut. For me it’s a fiery feeling in the chest.

Often the name that comes up isn’t the most logical one. Again, look for the one that drops your stomach a little. Steven Pressfield built a whole body of work on this. Resistance shows up strongest right where the most opportunity often lives. The contact you least want to message is usually the one who could change your entire path forward in getting traction with your business.

You can play this guy two ways, and both are perfect.

Warm up on the low-stakes names first and build some forward momentum.

Or walk straight into the fire with the “scary” one, because once you pull that band-aid off, every other name on the list is going to feel so much easier.

try this this week

If this is a challenge for you, don’t aim to message a hundred people this week. Open the list and pick the one name you’ve been avoiding. Send the binary ask. One message. “Got an idea I thought of you for. Can I send you a quick note about it?” Something that small.

Then watch what happens to the other ninety-nine after you do. They tend to get a lot lighter.

I still feel the freeze some days myself, especially around anything new. It doesn’t fully leave. It just stops running the show once you’ve shown yourself, one sent message at a time, that you can do the thing and survive being seen doing it.

You’ve got the list. You already know which name I mean.

if you’d rather not do this alone

If doing your outreach feels heavy, do it with us instead.

Next Tuesday at 11am pacific / 2pm eastern, we’re running a live workshop inside our Radiant Flow community. Carolina will open us up by settling the body, because the freeze we just talked about lives in your nervous system.

Then I will walk you through the method. We’ll make our lists together. Then, with the power of having a community doing this work alongside you, you’ll send one meaningful message that needs to be sent.

And you’ll leave with clear next steps for the next ones that need to be scheduled. Those who attend live will also walk away with a claude skill workflow to help them organize their personal outreach on an ongoing basis.

Radiant Flow is our embodiment membership, $67 a month: twice-weekly sessions, a vibrant heart-connected community, and live workshops like this one. If you’d like to be there, you can join here:

Join Radiant Flow

And if you’d rather just send the one message on your own, do that. What matters most is that you take the next step forward from here.

Phil (& Carolina)

The one that says who do you think you are. This isn’t for you. You’re not enough.

For a long time I thought the answer was to make the other side louder. To start a battle in my head.

Yes I am. This is for me. I’ve got this.

The problem is that I was just feeding the war, making one side right and the other wrong, and it never actually ended.

And the voice I was fighting never left. It just went quiet. It stopped shouting and started to hum, under everything, like the fridge you forget is running until the day it clicks off.

Whatever we fight or avoid gets bigger. (Tell yourself not to think about a blue elephant and see how that goes.)

Here is the picture I keep coming back to. A tug of war. And when you really look, both ends of the rope are in your own hands.

One hand pulling I am enough, I’ve got this, I’m building something real. The other hand pulling I’m not enough, who am I, this will never work.

A rope is only tight when both sides pull.

So the harder I yank the good end, the harder the other end digs in, or the whole thing goes slack. Every time I crank up the positive, I’m quietly feeding the negative. I’m making the war bigger. And I’m the one in the middle, holding both ends, getting tired.

That was the thing I had to see. The cheerful voice was never coming to rescue me. It was the proof. I don’t stand in my kitchen telling myself “I’ve got this” before I pour a glass of water. I only reach for it when some part of me is already sure I can’t.

There’s research on this, if it helps. People who already doubted themselves felt worse after repeating “I am a lovable person” than the ones who didn’t repeat it at all. The kind words just pointed at the gap.

I recently had an experience that made this so clear to me. It isn’t about business at all.

My dog. A Yorkshire, fifteen years old. This year she got sick. She went to the hospital in December, and again in May, and the second time it was clear she had lost most of what made her life hers.

And the vet said it. You might want to consider euthanasia.

I don’t know if you have ever had to make that kind of choice. What I noticed is that no matter what I picked, I felt selfish.

Let her go, and I’m selfish. I want my time back. I want the relief.

Keep her here, and I’m selfish too. I want her to stay because I can’t bear to lose her. Maybe one more medication. Maybe she’d be fine.

There was no version where I wasn’t selfish. The vet and the woman at the desk kept gently telling me all the reasons I wasn’t. And my body kept saying, no. I am being selfish. I’m there thinking, is this my inner critic? Am I a bad person?

I was pulling the rope from both ends. Refusing to be selfish, and then building a story to prove I wasn’t.

So I got quiet and I asked my body. Should I let her go? And my body said yes. And honestly, holy shit, because now I had to actually follow through and do it.

I cried. I was so sad. And I still felt selfish, still building my case. The war was on.

Then something in me went, hold on. You are selfish too. But you are not only selfish.

I am selfish too.

And the moment I let it be true, something shifted. I could feel the alchemy of it. I didn’t win the argument. I dropped the rope.

And here is the part I only understood later. I didn’t drop the rope by letting go early, or by rising above it, or by deciding to be the calm one who doesn’t pull.

I dropped it because I finally let both ends stretch me all the way.

Selfish and altruistic at the same time.

Both true. Both mine. No apology. The problem was never the two sides.

It was making one of them the enemy, the one I had to fight off to be okay. The moment I stopped making one of them wrong and the other side better, there was nothing left to pull against.

I let her go. I did it for her, she was in pain. And I did it for me too. Both true. Both okay.

The most honest part. The first time I walked back into the house, I told Phil what a relief it was that I didn’t have to clean her pee off the floor anymore. And I watched myself judge me for saying it. That was selfish.

And that was okay too.

So why am I telling you this in a letter about your business?

Because it’s the same voice. I’m enough, I’m not enough. I’m generous, I’m selfish.

We do it all day.

We do it most when we go to raise a price, and the voice says, who are you to charge that. So we lower it and call it generosity. But what if it’s just true. I want to be paid well and I am generous too.

We try to build businesses out of one half.

The half that has it right, that feels ready, that never looks greedy or unsure. We spend ourselves hiding the rest, exhausted, pretending we are not also the other thing.

But you are. You are the one who gets it right and the one who gets it wrong. The generous one and the greedy one. And you don’t get free by picking the nicer half, or by climbing above the whole mess.

You get free by letting both sides stretch you, all the way, until you can hold them at once without apology.

The inner critic is there for a reason. So is the cheerleader. The light is not somewhere above the two of them. It is what is left when you stop apologizing for either one.

I’m not trying to be enough. I’m not fighting not enough.

I am.

With Love,

Carolina

Who We Are Celebrating

This week we’re celebrating , who just reached bestseller status with her publication, Robots Ate My Homework.

If you caught her on Sacred Business Stories back in April, you already know how she thinks. Mia writes about AI the way almost nobody does. Not prompt tricks, but how to keep your own thinking, taste, and judgment intact while the machine does the grunt work. She pulls from psychology, narrative, and culture and turns it into something you can actually build with the same day.

Bestseller is a real marker, and she got there by refusing to sound like everyone else. Congratulations, Mia!

Read her: Robots Ate My Homework · · Her Sacred Business Stories episode: On Boredom, AI, and Closing the Loop of Wonder

Things I’d like to share

I decided to revisit this interview with . And why do I connect his message to what I just shared with you?

If we make this war inside so big and so important, how can we truly serve? He talks about not making your business about you, and it is so true. But we do.

Why?

Because we are so inside the war that it reflects in the business too.

If everything is about you, what you like, your opinions about social media and marketing, your avoidance of discomfort, and the image you want to have, when will you ever find the time to pause and let what is trying to emerge become real? To guide you?

Bob Burg is someone I admire, and it was an honor to be with him for this interview. There is gold all through what he shares.

I am bringing this gem to this issue in case it opens some powerful perspectives in you about what service really is.

This one pairs strangely well with today’s letter. The forecast is that a monthly check covers your bills and sets you free, but Phil experiences his own version of that at one point and found the question of what his work was actually for only got louder. Worth sitting with if you’ve ever wondered which parts of your work you’d keep doing with the paycheck gone.

Read it

The practical cousin to this letter. It’s about catching the reaction before it runs you, the old story firing in your body before your mind catches up. If the tug of war here resonated, this is where the noticing begins.

Read it

Memorable Quote

"The most self-interested thing you can do is to put your self-interest aside." — , Sacred Business Stories Interview

This newsletter was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on June 12th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on Sacred Business and inner work, there.

It has run this way for thousands of years.

Then the government showed up with good intentions. They brought in pipes for the water. Machines to help with harvesting the grain and milking the cows. This led to five or six hours of daily work for the villagers disappearing almost overnight.

From the perspective of the average American and their relationship with work, and especially manual labor, you might expect a celebration around something like this. But Vishen points out that what usually happens in situations like this is almost the opposite. The walking three kilometers a day and the pounding of the grain was never just a chore for these people. It was the fabric of their daily lives and a source of deep connection amongst their community. These activities were where the conversations and the joyful singing happened, where a boy learned what his role was in the society, and how he could be of service. The point Vishen is leading us to can be wrapped up in this powerful quote:

“What was a simple society becomes an impoverished society. What shifted? Identity.”

With this story in mind, I want to move on to talk about a version of this that might be coming for the rest of us who have grown accustomed to our own way of life and occupation.

the $3,000 forecast

The video I’m describing is Vishen reporting back on his experience at Abundance 360, ’ mastermind for founders. I’ll do my best to quickly summarize the story he’s trying to paint for us, and the predictions (or plans) that were being made by leaders at this event:

We are beginning to see AI replacing jobs across every industry simultaneously, which is not something we have ever experienced in modern society. It was predicted that governments will respond with a monthly check, around $3,000, which will be funded by taxing the robots that begin to take the jobs. And then this will lead to a massive deflation, because robots will be able to make things so much cheaper. It will get to the point that $3,000 buys what a middle-class salary buys today. Diamandis and Steven Kotler go deeper on this prediction in their new book, We Are as Gods.

Maybe the timeline is off. Maybe the amount of the check is different, or never comes at all. I’m not asking you to bet on the forecast. And I’m not fully sure where I stand on it either, other than it’s a fascinating idea to explore.

What I’m asking you to sit with is the question it brought to mind for me, because Diamandis names it himself, on stage, in the middle of a lot of optimism for the future. He called it the biggest crisis we’re about to face. A crisis of meaning.

Almost every argument about UBI assumes that if the bills are covered, the problem is solved. Cover the rent and the groceries and people are free.

There’s a lot of good to be explored around this idea, but I also know from my own life and direct experience that it’s not quite that simple.

The full video is below, and it’s fascinating. The three phases, the Alaska model, what a phone would have cost in 1980. Watch it when you’re done here, because the rest of what I’m sharing here is about some ideas that are almost skipped over completely.

I got my version of the check early

In my thirties I built a Facebook ads consultancy past $100k a month. More money arrived each month than I knew what to do with. By most of the world’s standards, I was living the end goal, the place where work is supposed to stop being necessary.

As my bank account balance climbed, my stress climbed with it, and so did the weight of everything I was now responsible for. It was an accidental business, an opportunity I was riding like a wave, and never something I’d chosen with any true sense of purpose. And somewhere in those years a question showed up that I began to wrestle with.

Is this even what I’m supposed to be doing?

This question led me to learn Vedic meditation. I went on retreat in Costa Rica with a coach I trusted and sat with the bigger version of the question.

What am I actually here for?

Because I couldn’t see a life where I just kept going at the pace I was moving, doing the work I was doing. Work is where most of our days go, and I wasn’t willing to squeeze my meaning into the small chunks of time left around it. The work itself had to be in service to something greater.

The warning signs kept piling up, in my health and in the rest of my life, until I eventually burned out. A cancer scare followed, and the whole thing came crashing down around me. The search that started on that retreat years ago eventually became the basis for the creation of Sacred Business Flow.

So when Vishen says, “if you identify meaning with work, you are going to go into a mental health crisis,” he’s describing a place I’ve been. The money arrived. The questions I was asking myself grew louder.

What is my life actually about?

where I see it differently than Vishen

Vishen’s prescription is to stop attaching meaning to work. Find your meaning somewhere else, because work is going away.

I think that’s half right. And the half that I believe is wrong is pretty important to explore too.

Go back to the village. The women walking together to get water were working. The singing didn’t happen instead of harvesting the grain. It happened alongside it. Their meaning lived in the work itself, done together, in service to the people in their community that they loved.

When their work was taken away, it also took away the sense of connection between these members of the community.

So the way I see it deviates slightly from Vishen’s perspective. I’ve believed for quite some time that it’s problematic if you are assigning your meaning to a paycheck.

But what about the work that you would still choose if there was no paycheck in sight?

There’s a word for that kind of work. A calling.

To be clear, the “for-free” question isn't about working for free. Plenty of you are doing this work now and still need it to pay the bills, and that's exactly my point. This becomes a test that finds the work worth getting paid for.

Carolina and I call this Sacred Business, building from the desire in your heart and serving it with devotion. The work you’d keep doing even if a $3,000 check covered everything. The decade ahead can take the paycheck from a traditional employer, and maybe the job with it. What it can’t take is work you’ve chosen on purpose, because that choice was never resting on the foundation of money as the sole reason for getting up every morning.

Many people already understand this, and are living from this space now. You don’t need the predictions in this video to come true to benefit from knowing what that work is.

I am living into this now. Most mornings there’s a pull toward the chair, an I get to do this. And I’ve watched the same thing switch on for clients the moment they lock onto their version of it.

the answers that came back

A few days ago I asked a question on Substack. What’s the one part of your work you’d keep doing even if it never paid you again? Not the mission-statement answer. The actual task. The thing your hands would miss.

Nobody named a beach.

would keep doing deals. He loves the back and forth of a negotiation, which made me smile, because deals are literally about money and he’d keep running them with the paycheck gone. would keep teaching people how to be safer and more confident in their own skin, and he named the condition himself: even if it never paid.

would keep coaching, for the moment a person sees their own situation in a new light. would still write and teach. reads the Akashic Records every day and isn’t planning to stop. For it’s the questions, the ones that walk someone back to the source of what hurts. would keep sitting with people while they say their bigger hopes out loud. pictured himself with a camera in one hand and an NA drink in the other. And would keep listening for what’s underneath what a person says out loud.

answered too. Embodiment classes. I didn’t have to ask.

Every one of those answers is work. Real tasks, most of them done in service to other people. Not one of them needs a salary attached to keep its meaning, and not one of them disappears when the check arrives. The village had it the whole time.

seven mornings

Vishen ends the video with a question borrowed from his own talk, Soul Pact. If your work became optional, what would you want your life to be about? Not the answer you think you should give, he says. The real one.

Here’s the experiment. Every morning for a week, write your answer to that question. Don’t try to build out any grand plans. Just answer it as honestly as you can for seven days in a row. Notice any patterns you start to see showing up.

And notice where you feel those answers in your body.

Some of you will do this exercise and find the answer already matches the life you’re currently living. Keep going. If yours doesn’t match, and you want to explore that, this is exactly what Carolina and I help people do.

Explore Serve & Receive

Either way, you don’t have to wait for any government to act. The question is already available to work with. Find your answer now, while it’s still a choice.

Phil (& Carolina)

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on June 10th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

In my early stages of awakening to the possibility that I could create my life, I heard this phrase from my teacher: you are 100% responsible for your life.

My first reaction was, humm... not really.

In my knowing and certainty I thought, I am 50% responsible. If I am in a relationship, the other person holds the other 50%. In most situations I have zero control. So what he is saying doesn’t make full sense.

How often do we do that?

We are so sure about ourselves that a sentence holding so much truth in it makes us react and defend our limitations without even trying to understand what it actually means.

I heard it. I thought I understood the words. I reacted. I felt right. Labeled. Done.

Off I go in my own ignorance.

For a split second, before the resistance came, there was something else. A warmth. A recognition. The feeling of remembering who you are before all your conditioning got there first. Like truth landing in your body before your thoughts could argue with it.

But the reaction was so loud it silenced that feeling almost immediately.

There was an opening. I just didn’t know it yet.

So I made the concept wrong instead of getting curious about the part of me that didn’t believe I was capable of creating my life.

I remember sitting at my desk, staring out the window, eight or more hours a day, feeling the disappointment of a life that didn’t fit. Feeling like I was wasting something. Not knowing how to change it. And somewhere underneath all of that, not really believing I could.

Because if I wasn’t responsible for creating my life, then I needed everything outside me to change first. The relationship. The circumstances. The timing. And so I waited. And the life I actually wanted stayed this quiet longing that never quite went away.

We are not broken for living this way. There is actually science that explains it.

Neuroscience tells us that roughly 95% of our decisions, actions, and emotions operate below conscious awareness. Your brain isn’t reacting to what is happening right now. It is predicting based on what happened before and responding to that.

The unconscious mind runs on past experiences, old wounds, stored beliefs, and emotional imprints you may not even remember. What you feel in your body before your mind catches up, that tightening in your chest, that heaviness in your shoulders, that is the 95% making itself known. Your past, running your present, in real time.

Which means most of us are not creating our lives.

That is what 50% responsibility actually is.

A comfortable place where you do your best, and when you hit your limits, something outside you holds the other half of the blame. The relationship. The government. The environment. That split gives you permission to stay exactly where you are.

And so you stay.

Understanding your reactions is the doorway to choosing differently. But you cannot work on what you cannot see. And the way you start to see it is through your body.

A person walks up to you and you answer before you even think. A situation arises and something tightens in your chest before your mind catches up. That is the old program firing. Your past making your present decisions for you.

Working on your reactions means pausing there. Getting curious.

Was that what I truly wanted to say? Is that feeling telling me something real, or is it an old story? Is there a different way to meet this moment?

That pause is where 100% responsibility actually lives. Not in controlling what happens to you. In choosing what you do with what arises.

The shift for me came when the frustration of where I was became bigger than the heaviness of owning my own life. Something opened. I started asking a different question: who would I be if I could believe I were solely responsible for creating something I actually loved?

Nothing on the outside changed right away.

I was still sitting at the same desk, looking out the same window. But the present that once drained me started feeding me. I could dream again. I could feel the excitement of experiences I actually wanted to have. And for the first time, there was a real sense that those things could happen. That where I was, was the perfect starting point for where I was heading.

That is what 100% responsibility gave me before it gave me anything else. Not a new life. A new aliveness inside the one I already had.

This is not a concept you understand once and move on from. It is a living practice. No matter how deep you go, there is always a fresher way to meet it. Because the unconscious runs deep and the patterns are old.

But the moment you stop waiting for the outside to change first, something moves.

Are you clear on your vision? And are your actions, not your intentions, actually moving you there?

With love,

Carolina

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This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.