And then, what felt something like out of nowhere, something stopped me completely. As if someone had put their arm across my chest. My body stopped, my legs couldn’t hold my weight anymore, and I dropped to my knees.

I started crying, sobbing… the way you cry when you are deeply sad or discouraged. It was a weird feeling, as if I had been cheating myself my whole life and had just figured that out.

You know when someone tells you that you hurt them, and maybe you never intended to, but you feel so bad about yourself? That’s the best way I can describe my feelings. It was a mix of feeling sorry, feeling shame, together with an aha moment…

A dear friend from the group saw me kneeling and came back. She wasn’t super far; she was also a little behind the whole group. She thought I had fallen. I couldn’t really speak. There were no words to explain what was happening. All I managed to say was that I was fine, I hadn’t fallen.

In a weird way, it felt so good to be seen like that. I was feeling broken, confused, guilty, and weak… She wasn’t judging me.

She just witnessed me. Then she extended her hand, without making any of it wrong. She was being something for me that I had probably never allowed myself to be. I felt it was ok to just be, and that I didn’t need to know better in that moment.

I had always been this person seen as the strong one, the one who has her shit together, the one who makes things happen, so being the confused, weak, and broken one felt like liberation.

The “out of nowhere” had actually been building.

That trip was beyond anything I had ever experienced. My presence in my own body, my thoughts, my emotions… it put me in touch with myself in ways I had never known. Every temple felt like uncovering a being that had been buried under all my goals and to-do lists.

I felt a power I didn’t know I had.

I knew things I had never been told, only to have them confirmed by the tour guide. I saw life from a perspective I didn’t know existed, and for a reason I didn’t understand, that perspective seemed more like reality than the whole life I was living.

Then I came home.

My father was at my house with my daughter and my partner at the time. They had prepared a welcome dinner for me, and I feel shame even saying this, but I couldn’t appreciate it. I was filled with anger, frustration… I was so upset with life. I felt a rejection toward everything and everyone around me.

At the dinner table, my mind was full of judgment. How can they live this life and think it’s normal? And then judging myself for judging them. I had just had this beautiful encounter with god, with life, with pure love back in Egypt, and here I was, with the people I love the most, judging that they should be and think differently than they are.

It felt so far from God, even further away than my previous version before this trip.

It showed up everywhere.

My first day back at work, I was so far outside of myself that I couldn’t turn on my computer. I had forgotten all my passwords, and I had forgotten where I’d written them down. It took me weeks to be able to interact with the world again, and that interaction never got to be what it was before. My sense of self dissolved. Why this, why that… the questions overflowed into every relationship in my life.

Maybe you’ve had a version of this for yourself. The minute you met your own light, and it was so bright it blinded you to the beauty of life. It doesn’t stay that way, but for a while, it can take everything.

Until that moment, I had been living my own version of spiritual awakening through meditation, yoga, breathwork, rituals, studying, reading, learning from teachers I admired.

Spirituality was a beautiful path of meeting myself and learning to manifest the life I wanted, because I had discovered I was a creator and could choose my own experiences.

Until that moment, it had felt more like a honeymoon… all romance, all possibility.

I was living by understandings I was learning, entertaining my mind with the possibilities.

But meeting my power the way I did on that trip turned my life upside down.

And this is the part I don’t often read out there. The path keeps evolving, but it isn’t always beautiful.

It brings shame, guilt, selfishness to the surface, and I have to face it. I am still learning that if I truly want to experience my light more, I need to be ok with my ugliness too.

Once you see your light, you can’t unsee it.

Maybe you’ve had your version of experiencing your light. Maybe, just like me, it didn’t get translated into external changes right away, but I know it keeps giving you hints.

You sense there is more… more that wants to be lived, not just felt.

For me, it meant I couldn’t keep limiting myself working for someone else. Part of my own transformation was going on a quest to build a business that would feed the quality of life I wanted to experience.

Having my spiritual life over here and my work over there felt like a lie to myself. Maybe for some people work is just work, and that’s fine.

Not for me. Maybe not for you.

Life is showing me that my business is also part of my spirituality, my path to evolution.

My business keeps healing me and helping me see where I can’t sustain my light yet.

There’s a tool Phil and I made for exactly this. It’s called the Harmony Map.

We built it years ago in Costa Rica, back when we were trying to answer one question. How do you build a business that works on the inside as well as the outside?

It looks at your relationship to yourself, and to the business, and to the divine, whatever you understand that to be. Nine energies sit across those three. About twelve minutes to take it.

The one you want to see is your lowest. That’s your breakthrough frequency, the place you feel the most resistance and have the most room to grow.

Take the Harmony Map

With love,
Carolina

What he wanted was simple. He wanted to keep exploring himself without giving up the life he liked living.

The hard part was that none of that exploring was paying his bills. He was diving deep with spiritual teachers, meditation, and martial arts, and he came out of it with a black belt in karate and no source of income. He had always assumed he would end up teaching intellectual history in a university, and he imagined himself with a pipe, a dog at his feet, and a grand fireplace. He also had no interest in the version of the path where you give everything away and go sit in a cave. In his words, he likes good Chardonnay and good-looking women.

So I said, okay, how do I maintain a life and still keep this personal exploration game going?

That question is the whole origin story. He didn’t start out with the intention of creating a methodology. He was funding deeper inquiry. So he asked around, found a friend who needed help organizing his office, and was able to make a huge difference for him. Then he got bored with that project and moved on to finding another similar job. Soon after, he learned that people who do that for a living are called “consultants”, and that they actually can get paid quite well.

What came next is David sharing the most people know in some form, if they’ve heard an interview or read his story before. A senior manager sat in one of his small workshops and asked him to build a training for his whole company, which became a pilot program for a thousand executives and managers at Lockheed in 1983 and 1984. He spent the next two or three decades training and coaching within organizations, thousands of hours in it, sitting desk-side with some of the busiest people on the planet. Eventually his advisors told him to write a book about it, so his first action was to order three books about how to write a book. He committed in 1997 and it took four years to get it done. He wrote it while working inside Goldman Sachs, where the method spread among the employees, and that was his proof it would hold up anywhere. The first weekend the book was out, a woman in Philadelphia picked it up in a Barnes & Noble, implemented the system over a weekend, and shared with David that it changed her life. That was when he understood that his system was scalable and could support people without him needing to be in the room sharing it. By his count Getting Things Done has now sold three million copies in over thirty languages.

So we had him on Sacred Business Stories to trace the arc, and there was a part of the story I was initially surprised by, but really expanded my heart.

David is an ordained minister in the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. Years ago he met his spiritual coach, a man named John-Roger, and stayed close to him trying to learn everything he knew, which he says he never got to the end of. What he learned there was how to send the light.

I’m sending the light to you guys. I’m doing that right now. So I’m meditating essentially all the time.

He said that in the middle of the interview, casually, the way you would mention the weather. He described spending afternoons in Amsterdam watching people get on and off the tram and sending light to all of them. He reads the New York Times and The Guardian every morning and sends light to every headline as he goes. He has no idea how much effect that has out in the world. But he is clear about the effect it has on him.

That’s a better thing to think about than to fret about it, worry about it, cry about it, complain about it.

None of this is in the book. I told him I had never heard him speak about any of it anywhere, and when I thanked him for going there, he answered with gratitude for having built a career that improves conditions for anyone who uses any part of it. The living it earned him is what gives him room to focus on the subtler stuff.

Two moments stood out.

The first came from a question in the chat. Someone asked whether letting go is the ultimate purpose of Getting Things Done.

Letting go is the ultimate purpose of life. Control is the biggest human addiction.

Coming from the man who built the world’s best known system for staying on top of everything, that is worth reflecting on. He shared that you cannot let go of something you haven’t look at directly first, and with honesty. Write it down, decide what you want to do about it, park it somewhere you trust that you can come back to, and your mind will stop chewing on it at three in the morning.

The second was the being and doing question, which Carolina and I both kept returning to.

It’s a false dichotomy. It really is. In order to really do, you need to be. In order to really be, you also really need to do.

He answered it with his own observations instead of speaking from theory. The people he has known across eighty years who most represent being are, in his description, highly productive and highly creative people who never stop making things. Then he went further and said everybody is already as spiritual as they ever need to be, and the only work left is recognizing it.

If you’re not sure what to do, clean a drawer.

Plenty of people we encounter with our work treat structure as the enemy at first. Lists feel like cages. Creating systems feels like the opposite of creative freedom. David lives life the other way around and is quick to say so. He calls himself a freedom-loving guy who plans as little as he can get away with, and he says people who meet him are surprised he isn’t buttoned down and corporate.

There are a whole lot of things I do that are not on any of my lists. But I have the freedom to do that because of my list. So I know what I’m not doing.

His list does not dictate his day. It lets him walk away from his day and go have a beer or walk the dog with nothing nagging at him once he shuts down. Which flips the belief a lot of people carry into their work, that getting organized costs you your spontaneity. In his experience it creates the space for it.

Then he spoke to the pattern underneath all of it. He said your world comes down to two things, completion and creation, and that he never invented the method, so much as recognized what people were already doing. Then he added the part that stung a little.

In our culture, most people have created a lot more than they have completed.

I see a version of that constantly with folks we encounter with our work. Five offers, four websites, a course that’s most of the way built, a newsletter that was kept up for two months before falling off. In my opinion, one of it comes from laziness. It comes from people who are genuinely good at what they do and keep starting new things because starting is the part that feels like progress. David’s answer is unglamorous. Go finish something small and watch what it does for you, and frees up in your life.

Getting Things Done was one of the first things I read during my tech years that gave me any relief from the chaos of a workday, and it helped me create the conditions to reflect and ask the questions about what I truly wanted. And that is a question I’ve kept asking that helped to set up the last decade of my work.

The new close, so you can read it without opening the file:

Near the end he described who this work actually reaches. The people most drawn to it are the ones who need it least, already organized and already competent, just hitting a capacity issue. The people in real trouble, he said, don’t think they need it at all.

Most people are in their comfort zone with their ambient anxiety, so they think they’re fine with what they’re doing.

Ambient anxiety is his term for the low hum of knowing there’s something you should be handling without being able to name what it is. He says people get addicted to it.

A lot of the people Carolina and I talk to live in that hum and would never use that word for it. They’re in motion. They’re good at the actual craft. And somewhere along the way they decided that structure is a threat to their essence, that lists and systems are in opposition with creativity and spontaneity that they bring to their work.

So the thing that would free them up the most is the one thing they often have the most resistance to looking at.

If that’s you, I invite you to take a closer look at this with the Harmony Map, a free assessment that shows you the energy behind what you’re doing and where your resistance actually lives.

Explore Your Harmony Map

You can find David writing at davidallen.substack.com and at gettingthingsdone.com.

David Allen

Watch the full replay. I promise you, the last fifteen minutes are the part you won’t hear anywhere else.

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on July 29th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

What you give. Who you help. How you show up.

But there’s a second way of relating, and a question that I believe is worth asking:

Your health. The hours you keep. Who you get to spend your precious time with.

I’m sure we can all think of people we’ve met in our life that have built something that looks really good on paper, and yet - when you look at who they had to become or what they had to sacrifice to get there - we say to our selves “wow, no thanks!”. Maybe you’ve even been in this situation yourself. The bank account is flush. The body is running on fumes. Relationships are struggling under the weight of the effort. And the default tendency that the world supports is to keep going, because we are taught that the hard part comes first and then we get to earn the right to a good life that will come later.

That seems to be the deal we’ve all unconsciously agreed to at some point along the way.

So we examine this foundational aspect of Sacred Business early with our clients, before any offer creation, before we look at pricing, before we look at growth tactics.

Because if you don’t answer that, life and the world will answer it for you.

And in my experience, the default of this answers it pretty badley.

A business that costs you your health, your presence, your aliveness, that’s not a true success. I don’t care what the numbers say.

If you’ve been telling yourself you’ll take care of yourself once the business starts taking off, notice how long you’ve been saying that.

The Sacred Business Harmony Map looks at three relationships at once: you, the business, and whatever you understand your calling to be. We call it your relationship with the divine. About 12 minutes. It shows you which of the nine frequencies is asking for your attention first. Service is just one of them.

map your business here →

Carolina (& Phil)

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

It's a question I keep asking. The answer keeps evolving. And every time it does, my life gets bigger.

The truth is, if we don’t ask the question, we’ll never know the answer. And most of us will die never having lived that version of ourselves.

I had a few beautiful conversations this week that inspired me to write this. One of them was with during our most recent episode of In Full-Light.

We asked him to share one thing he was proud of from building his business, and he said:

“I am proud that I decided to try.”

I shared the image that came to me as I listened to him describe his work.

I saw him walking into these organizations with a big bag on his back, full of hearts. And to every person he meets, he gives one back.

He brings heart back to corporations that are lost in their own heads. He puts connection and relationship at the center, where performance took over for so long.

And he told us he was only able to build what he built, and become who he is, because he did not choose the safe path.

This version of himself is an answer to a question he asked years ago, and the world is lucky he had the courage to walk outside the walls of his fears.

How many lives go un-lived because of fear? Fear that will most likely never materialize.

And even if it does, then what?

We’re so attached to outcomes that any result we didn’t want gets called a mistake. So we learn: if the result didn’t go as planned, I failed, and I shouldn’t risk it again. And that’s how the walls get built. Higher and higher, made of fear. We call staying inside them safety, and every step outside irresponsible.

This isn’t about being irresponsible.

In fact, I want to invite a deeper thought here. Researchers at Penn State tracked people who worry chronically and found that more than 90% of their worries never came true. For about one in four of them, not a single worry came true. The fear lived in the mind and nowhere else.

I wonder how much creative life force we waste inside our fears. How many adventures die in the name of safety.

How many versions of heaven never get to exist in the physical world, because we become our fears.

Because we build a life from fear-based decisions.

In the name of a false sense of safety, we live disconnected from our essence, settling for a mediocre life and calling it responsible.

But how can that be?

To be responsible means to be able to respond. And if you’re living a protected life ruled by your fears, you’re not responding at all. You’re only reacting. Not even to reality, but to an old version of yourself. A version that learned life is something you survive, not something you build.

Who am I without my fears? I am discovering myself in this process, and I can’t stop asking the question.

If you’re honest, the answer reveals a path. The path of your soul.

Age doesn’t matter. I believe this is a timeless question, and it’s never too late to find the answer.

The freedom, the abundance, the sense of service you’re looking for lives exactly where your fear is. There are no shortcuts.

Who are you without your fears? You are someone grounded in your truth, connected to spirit, living a life guided by your inner wisdom.

If you haven’t asked this question yet, now is a great time. Don’t rush the answer. Bring safety to your system before you ask, and open up to receive.

With Love,

Carolina

Asking the question is easier when you know where you’re standing.

The Harmony Map is a short assessment that looks at nine frequencies across three parts of your life: you, your business, and your connection to the divine. It shows you which ones are operating as strengths and which ones represent a personal breakthrough. Most people find at least one place where fear has been making the decisions for a long time.

That’s a good place to start asking more questions from.

Take the Harmony Map

Who We Are Celebrating This Week:

Marc Engel is our guest on this week’s episode of In Full Light, and we’re celebrating him for the deep work he does in supporting his clients, and his willingness to step into the unknown.

He runs The Third Space out of Bangkok, where he works with founders and creative leaders on team chemistry.

Prior to starting his coaching practice, Marc had a good career in asset management in Switzerland, foloowing a structured path, and with the safety it promised. Then a breakup knocked him sideways, and one afternoon he was sitting in front of a Bloomberg terminal looking at the charts and realized he couldn’t care less about any of it. He walked away from the whole setup and started over.

Mac challenges his clients to look one level deeper.

Things I’d like to share

Memorable Quote

“We Suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” - Seneca

🎥 Watch the full conversation above. Subscribe to catch every episode.

Outline

(01:09) – Marc names what he actually does, and it isn’t what his clients think they’re hiring him for

(02:14) – The appreciation game with a 170-person team in China, and the woman who ended up in tears

(04:56) – “Stop carrying the system and start to catalyze it.” The one line he’d put the whole practice on

(05:36) – The three levels a team moves through: the individual, the team, the organization

(10:06) – A leader begged him for another process workshop. He spent the morning on something else entirely

(12:13) – Why he says a strategy problem is often a chemistry problem wearing a disguise

(22:42) – The breakup, the Bloomberg terminal, and the day the old career stopped mattering

(25:16) – “Corporate with heart.” The three words a studio manager used that named his whole gift

(36:20) – Tarzan. The visibility exercise he was mortified by, and the moment a facilitator said “there you are”

(43:45) – The two tools he built to put language and numbers on the part of a team you can’t see

(52:50) – The bigger vision, and why Bangkok is the small version of it

My takeaways

The problem people bring him is almost never the problem. A leader came to Marc at the start of the year worn down. She’d been running workshops on her team’s broken process for over a year, bringing in facilitators, booking sessions, and nothing moved. She wanted one more process workshop. Marc said let’s try something else first, spent the morning on connection instead, and got people to say the thing they’d been sitting on. Then he left. The next day he asked what happened.

“Within two hours in the afternoon, we were able to resolve that issue.”

A year stuck on a process that sorted itself out in two hours once the room could talk to each other.

Marc works mostly with founders who are performance people, ambitious and driven and good at what they do. That preference takes them a long way, and then it hits a ceiling. What he’s learned to look for underneath the ceiling is the part nobody wrote on the whiteboard.

“Many things that show up as a strategy problem are a chemistry problem in disguise. Just look a level deeper.”

We talk about this constantly at Sacred Business Flow, just aimed at one person instead of a whole company. The Substack that won’t grow. The offer that won’t launch. The surface problem is rarely the real one, and the real one is usually a level down, in the part you’ve been avoiding.

The work started with a breakup and a Bloomberg terminal. Marc had a good career in asset management, with good people and good money, the structured path a Swiss upbringing sets you on. Then a personal relationship ended and knocked him sideways, and he remembers the day like it was yesterday. He was sitting in front of the financial charts, looking at the numbers.

“I was looking at it and I was like, wow, I couldn’t care less. That feels so empty. That feels so meaningless in that moment.”

He called the pain a mirror, a clear judge of what’s worth paying attention to and what isn’t. I know that room. For me it was a health scare instead of a breakup, and it was snowing, and I was asking him the same question he was asking himself: why am I doing this. Different situation, same question. And once you open that one, what do I actually want, there’s almost no going back.

Security turned out to be mostly a story he was telling himself. Growing up in Switzerland, Marc said, everything is set up for you. Follow the classic path, get educated, and things generally turn out fine. That comes with a promised safety on every level, financial and otherwise, so walking away from it meant walking away from the thing he’d been taught would keep him safe. In his third year a huge client dropped inside two weeks and the old fear came right back up. And still, this is what he found.

“It was also interesting to notice how much of that on some level is an illusion. I actually don’t need that much of it.”

Carolina and I both felt this one. We put our safety in the job, the apartment, the country, the next number. When you go your own way, that sense of safety has to start coming from you instead of from the setup around you. Marc said it lands as less risky than the mind claims, because once you’re honest about what you want, it starts to feel like the only path you can walk anyway.

Even the confident ones are still learning to be seen. I asked Marc about visibility and he laughed and said he’s always loved the spotlight, no issue there. Then he told the Tarzan story. In an early coach training, a colleague handed him the quality of Tarzan to embody, loud and jumping around, and half of him was mortified while the other half knew it was exactly what he needed. He played with it. It was terrible at first. Then, in the debrief, he was the first to speak, interrupting, going all in.

“One of the facilitators, she said, oh, Marc, hey, there you are. Suddenly, I was there.”

There you are. He’s five and a half years in, running workshops and publishing frameworks on Substack, and he still calls being seen a path he’s on. That’s the honest version of visibility, and it’s the one worth trusting.

One question to sit with

Marc works on the part of a company nobody measures, how the people in it actually connect, and he says it’s often the highest leverage point in the business and the last place anyone looks. So here’s the question to sit with. The thing that’s slowing you down right now, the one you keep trying to fix at the surface, what would you find if you looked one level underneath it?

Watch the full conversation above. If Marc’s way of seeing teams lands for you, his Substack, The Space Between, is where he writes it all out, and he built two short assessments to show you where you stand. Both are linked below.

About Marc Engel

Marc Engel is the founder of The Third Space, where he helps founders and creative leaders find the sweet spot between performance and relationships, what he calls team chemistry. Originally from Switzerland and now based in Bangkok, he spent his early career leading a team in asset management before a turning point moved him into coaching and leadership development. He writes a Substack newsletter called The Space Between about his frameworks and the stories behind them. He’s also built two assessments: the Team Chemistry Map, which scores nine dimensions of a team’s chemistry, and an individual leader assessment built around three “games,” the inner game, the relational game, and the cultural game. You can find both, and everything else he does, through his Substack.

The Space Between

For founders and creative leaders looking to scale without losing their soul.

By Marc Engel

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

So I asked him a different question.

Do you actually know who your hundred people are?

Because the fact of the matter is that when you’re just getting started building an audience, you can truly take the time to get to know them. Who they are, why they have chosen to give you their attention, what projects they’re working on.

Then I asked him a question that I believe is actually even more important.

Forget your subscriber count for a second. How many allies have you created?

Not followers. Allies. People who would recommend you, refer you, people you’ve had a conversation with and shared some mutual excitement with.

Colleagues.

I told him that I believe that this is the biggest opportunity on Substack right now, and most people don’t even see it right in front of them.

There’s a huge relational field available right now, and my working hypothesis is that for most people, their relational field is directly correlated with the results they are getting (or not getting) in their business.

the invisible web

Recommendations are nice. But a recommendation is still kind of passive. I can sit here and click a button for you. I never have to have a conversation with you, and you feel good, and maybe you click the button back. That’s fine. It’s just not very relational. It sounds relational, and its a better automated mechanism that most platforms afford you. But still not truly relational. And if you’re only showing up to broadcast, throwing your work into the void and never building real meaningful relationships, that’s usually where things start to break down.

What I’d suggest you focus on is a little bit different, and doesn’t even really feel like a “business metric”.

How many new friends can I make this month?

How many more people can I actually connect with?

Find one interesting conversation a week and have it, then check back in with me in ninety days and let me know how your business growth is going.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that once we allow ourselves to get out of our own way. said it well this week in response to one of my notes:

one connection a day becomes compounding evidence.

Related to “business” in this way has worked quite well for us, but it’s pretty hard to explain until you experience the shift for yourself. and I have created a web of relationships operating around us that’s mostly invisible, happening below the surface. Authors who recommend us. People who get on a call and tell us something like “someone mentioned you, or, I saw you on that Substack live”. I get a message from someone telling me they thought of us, and they would like to connect us to somebody else. It’s relationship driven. It’s community driven. And it completely shifts the experience of the work.

A couple weeks back I made posted a note about doing laundry here in Brazil, of all things. It took on a life of it’s own. People like and playing along, jokingly leaving comments like “I’m coming over”, “I’ll host next time”,
I’ve got a boat somewhere in Europe”. And a handful of the folks on that thread I feel a real sense of friendship with. Not close friends in the traditional sense, but, I like what they are up to, they seem to dig what we do, and if there’s an opportunity to share them with a client that is a good fit for them, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.. It’s alive. It’s a real “human thing”.

None of that came from a well planned out growth tactic. It came from following my own curiosity about people. When I go read someone’s work and tell them I love what they’re doing, it doesn’t feel like work, because it’s coming from a real question I want to answer. and I chatted about this on an episode of Sacred Business Stories, that something can be both authentic and strategic at the same time. The two aren’t in opposition to each other. The subscribers and the followers and even the clients tend to show up of their own free will when you’re following your own threads of curiosity and wonder.

what we came here for

Here’s what connects everything I’m sharing with you here, and it took me a while to see it clearly for myself. The connection I’m telling my client to go create with his audience is the same thing most of us came here for in the first place. And it’s exactly what I’m watching us hand over to the machines.

Most of us didn’t come to transformation work, or to our creatorship for the money alone. We came for the self-expression. Personal evolution. Service.

To share of our creative self and to experience ourselves in the act. For some autonomy and personal freedom over how we work and choose to make a living.

And now I’m watching us hand exactly that over to the machines in the form of AI. We automate away the very “tasks” that would have built the connection and allowed us to experience ourselves as creator. And in the process, we run the danger of creating the conditions for ourselves that mirror the exact thing we were seeking to escape when we left the more traditional workforce. If we aren’t careful, there will be no room left to express our desires that brought us here to this moment in the first place.

I wrote a note to myself earlier this morning of something I’d like to explore more deeply. We’re craving connection more than we ever have as a society, connection and a sense of belonging. And at the same time we’re pushing our technical capabilities as far as they can go, engineering away the exact moments that could have created the conditions for that organically.

the mechanization of the mind

There’s a bigger picture here that ties together the seemingly disconnected topics I’ve touched on so far in this piece.

I’ve been revisiting the work of Dr. Alberto Villoldo, and the wisdom of the Q’ero people, who are the direct descendants of the ancient Incas in the Andes of Peru. Villoldo writes about Homo Luminous, a new kind of human he thinks is emerging within our lifetime. Where Homo sapien is basically thinking man, Homo Luminous is closer to the enlightened one, living in harmony with the world and nature.

So what does this have to do with what AI is doing to us right now?

Call it the mechanization of the mind.

AI can handle logic and data and thought patterns better than most of us ever could or ever will. And as it takes the purely intellectual work off our plates, it forces us to examine the harder questions in life.

If a machine can replicate human thinking, then its even more evidence that we are far more than being our own bundle of thoughts. This is the ultimate mirror, and if we allow it to, it can serve to guide us further into our own humanity. A shift to the heart. In a crisis of meaning you have to anchor somewhere, and the only place left is in what the machine can’t replicate.

Your presence. The real empathy that only passes between two people who are actually paying attention to each other. has been leaning into this same question this week, that our real power comes from our relationship to self and to Source, not from making everything about us.

We regulate through each other. We co-regulate. And it happens in a thousand small moments most people never notice. The drive-through window, the cashier, waving to the security guys downstairs, the little nod when you walk into your building. Researchers call these weak ties, and there’s good evidence they carry more of our sense of belonging than we give them credit for. One by one we’re automating each of these moments away, in the name of efficiency, in the name of how excited we are about what’s suddenly possible. Every one we remove leaves a small vacuum where connection used to be. brought attention to this this week in the notes:

the isolation of building alone starts to feel like part of the job.

There’s a race on right now to build the first one-person, billion-dollar company. I suspect someone will get there sooner rather than later. I just keep asking, for what?

And this isn’t really new. It didn’t start with AI. I love that here in Brazil you can still walk down the street to a shop that sells nothing but cleaning supplies. The little specialty stores, the print shop on the corner. In a lot of American life those quietly disappeared under Amazon and the big-box stores, and I am currently watching the same thing starting to arrive here now through Mercado Libre. It makes me sad to see how Brazilians are chasing the fruit of what I perceive to be a failed experiment in the US.

the creative tension

So what is my own stance on this, because I use AI tools every day.

I really want to protect the creative tension of the writing process. We’re meant to experience this! I had a client this week tell me her head was practically exploding, because I’d asked her to sit in the unresolved part of her own creative process instead of skipping straight to an answer, from me as the expert or from the AI. Allowing yourself to “skip” that deeper work that is asked of us is a huge temptation now. AI collapses time. We want it NOW!

But the growth I’m actually here for can only happen when I let myself stay in it the tension. To wrestle with an idea, put it down on paper or with a voice note, come back to it, and not feel compelled to seek an immediate resolution. Rilke said the artist’s work is not to count or to reckon, but to ripen like a tree that doesn’t force its sap. And that our own judgment has to come from deep within us and cannot be forced or hastened by anything.

That’s the opposite of what the machine trains us to want and expect.

A few people in our community named similar threads this week. , wanting more joy in the process and less fixation on the destination. , with a sharp edge:

if you’re only enjoying something for what it earns you, you’ve already stopped enjoying it.

shared that rebuilding trust with yourself looks unimpressive while you’re doing it. We want the grand return, and instead it’s keep one small promise to yourself today.

So where do I hand over the keys to AI?

On the things I genuinely wouldn’t have the capacity or desire to do otherwise.

Our Substack live show, Sacred Business Stories is a good example. It’s a weekly organic, unscripted, raw conversation between me and Carolina and a guest. It’s almost like having a coffee together somewhere while other people are invited to tune in. I love this part so much. It’s easily one of my favorite parts of my week. I just don’t have the hours to hand-write a recap of it the way I write an essay like this one, so I let AI do the heavy lifting on that task.

That’s honoring the tool for what it is.

, who teaches critical AI literacy, has a warning I trust here: your AI wants you to feel right more than it wants to guarantee it’s own accuracy. So I do my very best to keep my usage downstream of the creative process. It amplifies the idea’s I’m exploring each week, but its not a point of origin.

, who wrote The Power in Your Hands, has a great litmus test for your relationship with technology. Before you interact with the machines, ask whether the way you’re about to use it will bring you relief or resolve. Same tools, supporting the opposite direction.

your own line

What Shannon suggests is a helpful line in the sand for me. The trickier part is what happens when we start trying to draw the line for each other.

just rolled out an AI detector, built with , that scores how much of a piece was written by a machine. This is in response to “Claudefishing” or the act of passing off AI-generated text as your own original, human-written work to trick readers into believing they are establishing a genuine human connection. I understand the impulse to label this as “bad” and cast judgement upon those using AI to write.

We love to polarize. To turn anything we can into yet another way of “othering” each other.

It’s “I’m a writing purist”, “you use AI”.

But I’m of the opinion that there is creative expression present on both sides of that line, and yes, there’s real slop in the middle, and there’s even some deliberate misuse meant to trick a reader.

That last one is a problem we are seeing more and more, with LinkedIn being a great example. For the most part, though, I think people are doing the best they can to express themselves authentically. Neurodivergent people. People writing in a second language. Carolina’s first language isn’t English, and she uses AI to check her grammar, and some of the phrasing isn’t native to her, and she owns every word of it.

And that’s how I see it. The conversation shouldn’t be about AI or no AI. We should focus on ownership, and whether there’s a real human on the other end of the connection. Are you willing to stand behind your words on the screen?

We’re all awkward toddlers in a brand new world right now, learning to walk in it. And we learn to walk we are inevitably going to make mistakes, as each of us seek to find our our own line. So I’d rather we drop the judgment of each other and instead choose to turn the line of questions inward.

What is it to be human? What is it to be in real relationship with this technology? How do I let it draw the best of me out and stoke my creativity, instead of dampening it, or driving me to move at a pace thats unsustainable to the point that I can longer stand to keeping showing up?

That’s what I hope the “how I made this” note Substack is going to let us share can offer us. Not a purity test. An invitation to get clear on your own line, and keep sharping it instead of allowing ourselves to go on autopilot.

, writing about belonging, says that

“this ignorance of our belonging to the sacredness of life is recognized as the root of suffering.”

I think that’s sort of what this entire moment we are engaged in with AI is asking us to remember. And he also shares in the same breath something practical:

remain process oriented rather than goal oriented.

So here’s something small you can practice with this week. Stop counting the numbers that you’ve been measuring your worth by. Choose a different measure.

How many new allies did you create? How many conversations did you have that left you better off for it?

Go have one of those conversations, the human kind, the one you can’t automate and would never want or choose to.

and I are going live about this idea later today. We’ll be talking about how he believes in a world racing to automate everything, human connection is turning into a real defensive moat in business. I think he’s right, and I think it’s more than a moat. I believe it’s the reason most of us came to be here in the first place.

Your business won’t be saved by the machine. And I encourage you to keep building it the same way successful ones that came before have been built.

Brick by brick, in relationship person by person. With humans in the fold.

The irony is that now this is an opportunity that many of us are failing to see as we have become more under the spell of AI and the allure of forward progress.

Here are two questions I invite you to answer this week in the comments.

Where are you potentially automating away the very connection you were seeking that brought you here in the first place? And most importantly, who will you be reaching out to this week?

The relational field I talk about in this essay isn’t separate from the rest of your business. It’s tied to how clear you are on what you’re actually building, how seen you’re willing to be, and whether you feel ownership of your own self-expression. When one of those is off, the connections don’t come easily, no matter how many notes you post.

That’s what the Harmony Map measures. It’s a short assessment that looks at nine energies across you, your business, and the bigger why underneath it, and shows you where things are flowing and where they’re stuck. Most people find the block isn’t where they thought it was.

Take the Harmony Map assessment here →

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on July 21st, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Next Monday I will start going to the gym, three times a week. I am excited.

Two months later you are still paying and still not showing up.

I will stop eating sugar.

By day three you forgot about it completely, and you are back to eating sugar as before, if not more.

I will start an online business, Substack is my place, I will post once a week.

After three essays, abandoned.

Now think about a promise you made to someone else.

You call a dear friend and the two of you decide to start jogging together, twice a week. One month in, you get sick. You can’t go.

What do you do?

You call her. You explain. You try to reorganize. Let’s move it. Let’s cancel this week. But the next time it’s on the calendar, you show up.

You never just don’t show up and leave your friend standing there waiting.

It would be extremely rude.

And yet we do exactly that to ourselves, all the time and the price is higher than you think.

Imagine it again.

You decide to start jogging, three times a week. One month in, you get sick, so you don’t go. Then the next time comes and you skip it too, without even asking yourself why.

Nobody was waiting. So nobody was let down.

Except someone was.

Every time you break your word with yourself and don’t even name the reason, you take a chip out of your own power. And then you wonder why you struggle with consistency.

Consistency is not a discipline problem. It’s a relational problem.

Here’s a different way of looking at it.

You are already consistent. Look at the work you’ve been doing for years, the business you run on autopilot, the one that takes most of your time and most of your energy. You show up for that one every single day. You never miss.

So it was never about discipline. You have plenty.

You’re consistent with what already exists. You’re unreliable with what’s trying to be born.

And there’s a reason for that.

You have tried to move toward the new thing before. You promised yourself you’d do it. And when it got hard, you fell back into the old business, because the old business works.

It catches you. It always catches you.

So you never had to sit with the broken promise. You just quietly stopped.

But the promise still broke. And it broke again the next time. And each time, the part of you that was supposed to trust you got a little quieter.

Now moving toward the new thing feels impossible. Not because it is. Because you no longer believe you.

There is a gap.

The promise you say out loud is usually the one you really want. The gym. The less clients and more money. The book. But the one who will execute is already checked out.

Martha Beck, who spent decades studying this exact pattern, says integrity just means being one thing, whole and undivided. The opposite isn’t dishonesty. It’s duplicity.

Two of you, living in the same body. The one who says “I’m starting Monday,” and the one who already knew she wasn’t going to follow through.

If you did this to your friend, would she keep trusting you? No. She’d move on and find another running partner.

That’s whats happening in relationship with your future self.

Your future self is a real accountability partner. Maybe the best one you have. But you got so used to saying something and not following through that the trust is gone, and now it runs underneath everything, in your inability to show up for the things that matter most to you.

The flame is still there. It’s waiting. But it has to be rebuilt.

So what do you actually do?

Not the grand gesture. The grand gesture is how you got here.

A woman I know understood this. She kept telling herself she’d build a whole program. Market it, call people, launch it. And every time, the voice underneath said, “You’re not actually going to follow through.” So she didn’t.

To win her own trust back, she stopped promising the big thing.

She promised three reach-outs a day.

And she’s doing it.

It looks small. It’s not. She is keeping her word, honoring it, and getting her power back one kept promise at a time.

It also helps to not do this alone.

The old business has gravity. It pulls you back. Being around people who are building something new too is what counteracts that pull. It’s one of the reasons we built our community. Entrepreneurship is lonely enough in the daily action, and when you’re trying to show up for the new thing instead of falling into the old one, it helps to be surrounded by people doing the same.

But even then, you can only go as far as you’re willing to take yourself.

We do things to ourselves we would never do to anyone else. Somewhere along the way we learned that self-abandonment is fine. That putting everyone else first is generous.

And in that, we killed our own trust. If we don’t trust ourselves, who will?

I’ve broken these promises too. This isn’t a lesson I learned from a distance.

So before you push harder, stop and look at where you don’t trust yourself. Not to punish you. Just to see the pattern that’s been keeping you small.

Break the pattern and unlock the power, as one of my teachers would say.

Say you will do it. Then do it.

Your power isn’t gone. It’s just waiting on the other side of a promise you actually keep.

With Love,

Carolina

Not sure where you’re breaking your word with yourself?

That’s what the Harmony Map is for. It reads nine frequencies across three areas: you, your business, and the divine. Your lowest one is usually the exact place you keep going quiet on yourself. Takes about eight minutes.

Take the Harmony Map

Take the Harmony Map

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.

You have built something real. It works. The clients come, the money comes, the reputation is there. From the outside, nothing is wrong.

And you can see your clients with your eyes closed.

Your business is working fine, but it is slowly numbing you inside.

If that is where you are, I want you to know something first. There is nothing wrong with you. Ten, twenty years of doing something well will do this to almost anyone. The structure that got you here was built by a version of you that no longer exists. Of course it feels tight now.

But there is a whisper. And it will not leave you alone.

There is more.

wrote a line that I come back to often, to make sure I am heading in the right direction:

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”

Resistance feels like a wall.

And it is a wall. But it is a wall you were made to climb.

Not because climbing is noble. Because you cannot get over it with the strength you are already using. It will ask you to reach for something you have never needed before.

That is what the wall is for.

Which is why the wall is also information. It shows up at the exact border between who you have been and who you are becoming. That is why it feels so uncomfortable.

It is not telling you that you are going the wrong way. It is telling you that the old identity is fighting for its life, because it knows there is not room for both.

In a feel good world, we are taught that if something feels hard, it must be wrong. But it is not wrong. It is you outgrowing your current container of beliefs.

Your mind will hand you every reason to turn back. It is too hard. It is too complicated. It is not for you. Success built that way is not real success. Most people believe the story.

They stop.

They go back to something they already outgrew, and they tell themselves they made the mature choice.

Pressfield calls this rationalization. We spend our days building beautiful arguments for why the comfortable thing is actually the wise thing.

And here is what makes it so convincing. The rationalization does not feel like fear. It feels like clarity. It feels right.

Pressfield made a list of what reliably brings resistance out of hiding. On the list is the launching of any entrepreneurial venture or enterprise, for profit or otherwise.

Then he explains that resistance is present in:

Read that again.

Even if you have been in business for years, even if you have a practice of decades, restructuring is like giving birth to something new. It requires a different person, that desire is coming from your higher nature.

So it brings a lot of resistance. You are not adjusting a strategy. You are asking a twenty year old identity to step aside.

I am in this right now. Phil and I are building something new.

I am not ready to share the details. But three years in, we have more desires. We have grown as people. There are more possibilities on the horizon.

Is it exciting? Oh yes. And it also brings a lot of resistance.

It is new, and because it is new, we meet resistance. This is not in the autopilot bucket like other parts of our business. Some days it feels like it does not want to get made.

We shake. We dance. We move the body.

And then we sit down and do it anyway.

That is not a beautiful answer. It is the only one I have found that works.

You can prepare for resistance, you can soften it, you can meet it with kindness. But you only move through it by moving through it.

Before this we had to stop. We paused. We reassessed. We reconnected with what we actually want to build, not what we already know how to build. And then we chose.

Sometimes you have to slow down to go faster.

Now, the thing I want to be honest with you about.

When Pressfield says you give up immediate gratification, I do not want you to hear that as give up pleasure.

You are giving up the cheap version of it.

The Candy Crush version. Click, sound, reward, hit. Your brain lights up and nothing in your life has changed. You launch another cute little thing, and nothing really moves for the long term.

That is not what I am asking you to leave your comfort for.

I will not see the results of what we are building tomorrow. It takes months. And in the meantime, this is what is actually here: aliveness, and excitement, and fear, all living in my body at the same time. The pleasure and enjoyment of discovering more of myself and what I am capable of.

That is a different relationship with pleasure entirely. It is not the reward at the end. It is what it feels like to be the one choosing. It is what I wake up to every day, choosing again, and finding out how powerful I am.

Pressfield says one more thing, and it is the reason I am writing to you at all.

The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference.

So if you are feeling all of this, if the pull to rebuild is huge and terrifying and will not shut up, that is not evidence that something has gone wrong.

It is evidence that the love is still in there.

You did not lose it. You built a structure that had nowhere to put it.

You are allowed to want more. You are allowed to outgrow what you built. You do not need anyone’s permission, and you are not going to get it, so you may as well stop waiting.

Do not let fear keep you in a warm numb life.

I am not going to tell you what to do here.

But I will leave you with this.

Somewhere in your week there is a thing you keep not doing. You know exactly what it is. You have a very good reason for not doing it, and the reason sounds like wisdom.

Just notice how much love is buried underneath it.

With Love,

Carolina

P.S. if any of this is stirring something in you, here is one available next step for you to consider.

We made a map. It shows you which of the three relationships is challenging you right now: the one with yourself, the one with your work, or the one with something greater. You answer a few questions, and you get to see in one coherent picture where the resistance is strongest.

Take a look and see what you find.

See your Harmony Map here.

Explore Your Harmony Map

And before you even finish celebrating it, this thought shows up: where’s the next one coming from?

You know this feeling. You’re a couple years into what you are creating, maybe more. You’ve helped people create significant results. By most measures you’re already finding your way towards success. And still, as your weekend is coming to a close, you very often find yourself checking the bank account balance with some experience of dread. And wondering why the business you’ve invested all of your heart and soul into building doesn’t feel like solid ground under your feet.

Where are you taking the seat?

the three jobs the ego keeps doing

I’ve been relating this to a teaching I recently read called The Three Beliefs of Ego. The ego, the small self that thinks it’s separate and in charge, only ever does three things, and it does them continuously. It builds and defends an identity. It protects that identity from threat. And it reaches for control over the outcome.

Identity. Self-defense. Control.

Here’s how this applies to your business. Those three jobs are the exact three ways you get pulled out of the creator’s seat. And by the creator’s seat I mean two things. First, the steady inner place you make things from when your worth isn’t riding on how they will be received by others. And two, assuming the posture of someone who is building a business from a full cup instead of from scarcity.

You already know what it feels like to take that seat. You’ve been in it. It’s from where the work flows effortlessly and theres a strong, steady undercurrent of confidence. The trouble isn’t that you can’t find your way there. You know how. The trouble is you keep getting pulled back out, by identity, by self-defense, by control.

Let me walk through all three, because your business will continue to drag each one into the light for healing whether you ask it to or not.

Your Identity

Look at your bio. Look at the letters after your name, the modality you trained in, maybe even a lineage you came up through.

For a lot of us, a credential becomes the whole of what we rest our value on. “I’m a certified insert whatever modality you want here.” Your skillset is strong. The training has made you competent and well prepared to help others. But somewhere along the way the toolkit stopped being something you use and became who you think you are. Which also means every time there’s a struggle to get more clients, it doesn’t necessarily feel like a marketing gap. It might feel like a verdict on you.

Picture a kaleidoscope, a slightly different version of you living in the mind of every person who’s ever met you, each one colored by their own history. Which version is the true one? None of them. There’s no single you to defend. There’s a freedom in that. If there’s no single you to protect, then you have nothing to defend. You can play your role, and play it well, without needing it to be representative of the whole of who you are.

I feel my own version of this. I’m genuinely at home in the solopreneur world. But the thought of reaching out to a Fortune 500 CEO used to make me feel small, like I didn’t somehow belong in that conversation. That smallness wasn’t the truth about me. It was just a story I’d told myself about who I could reach out to. I sent the message anyway for a conversation, and the answer was yes. There was never really anything stopping me other than a belief about my identity.

This is your relationship with yourself, the YOU frequencies from the Harmony Map, gone quiet. You have a voice that’s yours. Your life, your story, the way you actually see people. You keep discounting it as “not the real credential,” waiting for a permission that only you can hand yourself. That waiting is the identity striving showing up. It keeps your worth tied to the credential you believe you have or don’t have, so you keep overlooking where the value actually comes from, which is you.

Self Defense

You draft a new post. But you choose to not publish it, at least not yet.

You continue to tell yourself you are letting the right people find you, that you don’t need to push, that you’re holding a it all as presence. Some of that is genuinely true. And some of it, if you’re willing to look, is self-protection, and a use of spiritual language to make yourself feel better about it.

This truth can hit close to home for those of us who are choosing to operate in a conscious, awake, healing world. Spiritual language can make for a beautiful hiding place. “Non-attachment” can mean you’ve done your inner work, or it can mean you never truly have done the hard work of asking the question why more people aren’t interested in your offers. “Let it come to me” can be trust in divine flow, or it can be the fear of allowing yourself to be seen in your own light.

I catch myself doing this too sometimes. I pride myself on being someone who helps people see through their own stories. A while back I had a discovery call with a woman, and I couldn’t get through to her, couldn’t get through to the thing that actually mattered. And I watched myself get defensive. Not because she attacked me. Because the call rubbed up against the exact identity I’m most attached to, the one who sees clearly, and the moment that identity felt threatened, I stopped being present and started protecting it.

That’s how you spot it. Self-defense and identity are the same striving seen from two different angles. Whatever you rush to protect is the self you’ve tied your worth to. On the Harmony Map this is directly connected to the Love frequency. Gay Hendricks calls one version of it the Upper Limit, or the belief that you have to dim your own light so you don’t outshine someone. Fear of being seen rarely shows up consciously as fear. It very often shows up as a very reasonable, very logical reason not to post.

Control

Now the big one. For me, this is the one that shows up most often of these three.

Your nervous system is wired for motion. Slowing down doesn’t feel restful, it feels unsafe, so you fill the space. Another social media platform. Another mini-course. Another duct-taped stack of tactics with no system underneath, a Frankenstein business that’s always asking for your attention and never quite creates momentum. You’ve confused motion with progress because motion is the thing that keeps the fear quiet in the background. On the map, that’s the Simplicity frequency begging for attention, and the Faith frequency set aside in the name of control.

Underneath it is a craving for certainty. If I just do more, it’ll be safe. But in reality, you are never really just looking for the next sale. You want the state of safety you believe the next sale will give you, the feeling of being okay, of the ground holding. And that state can’t be reached by grasping harder, because that exact grasping is what signals to your body that there’s no solid ground beneath you.

This is what Carolina holds in our work, and it’s not an afterthought. Strategy without nervous system work stalls. You can know exactly what to do and still not do it, because your body treats “slow down and build one thing with intention” as danger, and pushes you straight back into doing more. A plan you can trust might not be the only missing piece. It maybe that you need to learn to stay with the discomfort of uncertainty long enough for a plan to work.

Here’s the freedom available to you now. Your business isn’t causing this. Your business is revealing it. Every revenue drop that spikes your anxiety, every good month that sends you scrambling for the next, is showing you exactly where you still don’t trust that you’ll be okay.

back in the creator’s seat

So here is the reframe I want to leave you with, and it’s the opposite of “fix your mindset.”

There is no better tool for meeting these three illusions than building a sacred business. Not the meditation cushion. The business. Because the business won’t let you hide. It meets you in your identity, your defenses, and your grip, and it asks you to lay them all out on the table one at a time and says, look at this.

I believe your business is providing the perfect set of conditions to undertake the deepest work available to you.

You don’t have to kill your ego to get your seat back as creator. You couldn’t if you tried. You just need to stop handing the seat over. Hold your role without thinking it’s all of who you are. When the fear of being seen shows up, post anyway. And hold your plan loosely enough that a slow month doesn’t throw you off your entire game.

So here’s the one thing I’d invite you to try this week. Nothing to fix, nothing to add to your list. When that restless feeling shows up, a sense of dread, creating more busyness to feel a sense of motion, the drafted post you won’t send, just name which of the three it is showing up. Identity, self-defense, or control. Say it to yourself. That’s all you need to do.

You’ll be surprised how often naming it is enough to take your seat back as creator.

And when you want to see some other patterns that might be at play, which of the three relationships is imbalanced, your relationship with yourself, with your work, or with something greater, that’s what the Harmony Map is for. You can map how your nine frequencies are operating right now and see, in one look, how to take your seat as creator. Explore the map here.

Phil (& Carolina)

Explore Your Harmony Map

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on July 14, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

We tend to think pleasure lives in the moments we’re not working, and the pleasure in the working day is the one of getting things done.

I wanted to sit with that a little longer. I don’t think I hold all the answers, but my feelings tell me I can definitely open up more to experience more pleasure on a daily basis.

Pleasure is a feeling good in the body, caused by an experience you enjoy, that brings a sense of relaxation and engagement at the same time. And it’s easy to think pleasure just comes from choosing the right thing to do.

I do something I like, and pleasure follows. We read everywhere: do what you love.

But when I started looking closer, it felt to me like we are missing a lot in how we could be experiencing our lives.

We live in a society trained to associate the sense of self with the doing. The more you do, the better.

How you do it? It doesn’t matter much, as long as it’s done.

But just think of how long you spend doing things, and if in the middle of the task we are just pushing harder, what is the life that we are living?

It became clear to me that the what doesn’t overcome the how. The how carries more weight than I gave it credit for.

I love pottery. It relaxes me, it brings me joy, I get fully engaged in it. Pottery goes straight into the bucket of things that give me pleasure.

But lately, I stopped enjoying it.

I had to pause and ask why.

It wasn’t that I fell out of love with pottery. It’s that my class fell on Tuesday nights, one of my busiest day. I’d have to drive downtown right when I usually eat dinner, and I’d end up in bed later than I like. The class runs two and a half hours, and most weeks I don’t even stay for the whole thing.

I’m too tired. I just want to slow down. It wasn’t relaxing anymore.

But it was important to me to have pottery in my schedule, as it was one thing I was doing for myself, so I was getting it done…

Compare that to a Saturday morning class (when I could) I enjoy the drive downtown. I’m fresh. I’m fully present, fully engaged.

Same pottery. Same me. Completely different experience. Experiencing pottery on a Saturday morning was night and day versus a Tuesday night.

I noticed the same pattern on the other side.

I don’t enjoy organizing my documents for taxes, and I have to do that every month. For a long time I scheduled that for a Friday morning, and I’d push through it just to get it done. The pleasure only showed up once the task was over, like a relief. Ahh, it’s done.

When I asked myself, what is my relationship to enjoyment in this task? Can I ever enjoy that? I moved it to Monday mornings instead. And somehow, I’m enjoying it. Not just the relief of finishing it. The actual doing of it feels easier, even pleasant.

This might sound simple. But after our class, it hit me how often we build our schedules around what makes sense, or what we think can realistically get done, without ever asking what would actually feel good.

In the disconnection from the body, we set ourselves to be robots, to push through and just get things done, forgetting that life happens in between.

So now I’m asking a different question. How do I build a routine full of pleasurable moments, even on the days when the what doesn’t fit in the bucket of “I like this”?

I don’t want to dismiss the what entirely.

If you’re building your own business and dreaming of a day when you no longer have to do the things you don’t enjoy for most of your day, that question still matters.

Ask yourself what you truly love. But even before you get there, there’s a question that matters just as much.

How can you shift your energy right now, in the what you already have, when the what isn’t a choice yet?

As simple as it sounds, the how shifts your energy. And shifting your energy opens the field for other things to become possible. It actually helps you connect with the what more easily.

Maybe you don’t think you have a choice, but here are some ideas of how you can shift how you do things now. Like me for example, just reorganizing your schedule around your real energy levels, not just what fits on paper.

Adding a small ritual before the activities you find hardest. Playing music while you work. Adding movement in between long stretches of sitting. Giving yourself a break in the middle of the week, even something like a date with yourself that will be followed by a task you enjoy less.

Small as they sound, these things change how you move through everything you do. Pleasure isn’t meant to be felt only at the end of a task.

This isn’t about only doing what you love. It’s about finding a way to love everything you do.

I don’t want you to move through your day just checking things off, numb, like a robot. I want you to feel your day while you’re living it, not just when it’s finally done.

What is your relationship with pleasure right now? Is there something in your life you stopped enjoying, not because you fell out of love with it, but because of how or when you’re doing it?

I’d love to hear it in the comments.

With Love,

Carolina

P.S. Pleasure is the source you create from. And it’s easier to change how you move through a day when you can see where you’re moving from in the first place.

That’s what the Harmony Map gives you. A free assessment, a few minutes long, that reads where you stand right now across the nine frequencies of your business and life. It won’t tell you what to decide. It shows you where you’re deciding from.

Take the Harmony Map and see what it reflects back.

Explore the Harmony Map

Who We Are Celebrating

A couple of weeks ago we had the great opportunity to have a conversation during our Sacred Business Stories with Shannon Algeo. It was such an inspiring and eye-opening conversation that Phil and I keep talking about it.

He is a writer, psychotherapist, and poet, American and Irish, based in California. He teaches at Esalen and Kripalu, hosts the SoulFeed podcast, and leads digital liberation retreats that help people come back to their own presence and attention.

He brought a way of holding technology that feels like what I am looking for more. Sometimes I just feel I want to disappear from it, throw my phone away, and close my computer for longer than I usually do.

I came to realize in this conversation that I need clearer boundaries with that. His question is simple. Am I using the tool, or is the tool using me?

He showed us the box he keeps his iPhone in, and I just loved that idea.

It’s not about rejecting technology, but not allowing it to distance me from my own essence, and I think lately I feel guilty of that. Since our conversation, a few things have already changed, and I am already feeling better.

If any of this stirs something in you, go find him. His book, The Power in Your Hands, is about freeing yourself from attachment to technology, and it reads like it was made by hand, because it was.

You can read his ongoing writing at The Sacred Ebb on Substack.

If you want to watch the episode, I am posting it here for you. It’s worth every minute of it.

Things I’d like to share

In full Light with

Another great conversation we were lucky to have this past week, with Josh Woll, the founder of The Sober Creative. He shares his approach and how he helps people explore their relationship with alcohol, staying open, curious, and led by exploration.

The conversation is full of gold.

If you are looking to explore your own relationship with alcohol, and why you choose what you choose, he could be a great ally. He has a natural ability to be vulnerable and to create safe containers, and with a subject as delicate as alcohol, that matters a lot.

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.

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

a month 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

a month 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.