When your business isn’t gaining momentum, do you know what is actually broken?

We talked about:

• the three places most businesses get stuck: the offer, the conversations, or the invitations

• how to diagnose which one is holding you back

• why a “disguised invitation” is not an invitation

• how making offers helps fine-tune your audience

• why highly capable people often struggle to choose one clear direction

• the difference between doing the job, the business, and the busy

• how the wrong scoreboard can make meaningful progress look like failure

A few lines that stood out:

• If people don’t understand what you do, you have an offer problem.

• “I’d be happy to help sometime” is not an invitation.

• Not now does not mean not ever.

• A lot of what feels productive is simply the busy.

• You cannot hold yourself to a commitment you haven’t made measurable.

In the full replay, Phil also shares:

• the “Frankenstein strategy” that happens when you combine advice from too many different people

• why unsubscribes after an offer can be good news

• how one personal outreach campaign produced more than $30,000 in retreat sales

• what to do when past clients have stopped opening your emails

• the simple numbers that reveal whether your business is truly moving

• and the uncomfortable question underneath it all:

  Are you building the business, or staying busy enough to avoid it?

If you’ve been working hard but still can’t tell why the results aren’t coming, this conversation will help you find the signal you may have been missing.

Read more

Carolina and I were in Austin, Texas, for a mastermind retreat. Our business was brand new, and we were standing in front of a group of our peers.

We played music.

We guided them through a heart meditation.

And all the while, I was trying to keep one hand behind my back or pressed against my side so nobody would notice it shaking.

This was a new identity for me.

I had spent years in the business world. I knew how to talk about marketing, funnels, and strategy. Now I was standing beside Carolina, asking a room full of people to close their eyes and drop into their hearts.

I remember wondering how they were going to see me.

Would they think I had lost the plot?

Would this change how they saw my business experience?

Could I really let people I respected see this part of me?

My body was offering a pretty clear vote.

Get off the stage.

But underneath the fear, I knew there was something worth sharing.

So I returned to the simplest thing I could find.

Service.

If this experience might help someone, my job was to share it as clearly as I could.

My hand kept shaking.

I kept going.

The spiritual version of hiding at the pub

I thought about that moment this week while listening to a teaching from one of my teachers, Jayem.

He was talking about effortlessness, a word that gets used often in spiritual circles.

Sometimes we use it to describe a life where the right opportunities arrive at exactly the right moment. The clients find us. The words come through. Nothing requires too much effort because we are aligned with the divine.

There is truth in that experience.

There is also a version of it that gives our comfort zone a spiritual name.

Jayem gives the example of someone who is afraid to speak in front of 500 people. The person decides the speech is not important after all and goes to the pub instead.

From the outside, that might look like surrender.

Perhaps they have released the need to prove themselves. Perhaps speaking no longer feels aligned. Perhaps life is asking them to rest and trust.

Or perhaps they are scared.

Spiritual language can make almost any decision sound wise while fear is actually making the decision for us.

That is the trouble with resistance. It rarely introduces itself honestly.

It tells us we are waiting for clarity.

It says the timing is not right.

It convinces us that needing courage means we have left the flow.

Then Jayem offers a very different definition:

“Effortlessness means simply that you abandon the resistance to what love requires in each moment.”

I felt into that.

Because love may require something that challenges you.

It may ask you to give the talk while your hand is still shaking.

It may ask you to send the email that makes your work easier to find.

It may ask you to explain what you do in language another person can understand.

It may even ask you to make an offer and let someone answer.

The meaning we give the invitation

An invitation does not arrive with a spiritual meaning attached to it.

Neither does marketing.

They become heavy under the meaning we place on them.

If I believe marketing means bothering people, I will recoil each time I sit down to write.

If I believe making an offer puts my worth up for a vote, every invitation will feel dangerous.

If I have decided that good, spiritual people should never need to sell, telling someone how I can help will create conflict inside me.

That conflict can feel like guidance.

It can feel like intuition warning me to stop.

Sometimes it is.

And sometimes I am feeling the weight of my own judgment.

This is one reason our inner work and business work cannot be separated.

You can learn the mechanics of making an offer in an afternoon. You can choose the words, write the email, and add the offer link.

But if some part of you believes the whole thing is manipulative, needy, or spiritually suspect, those mechanics will never feel effortless.

The armor will keep coming up.

So you soften the language until nobody can tell what you are offering.

You share helpful ideas but never give people a clear way to work with you.

You wait for someone to ask, hoping the right clients will somehow recognize an offer you have never fully made.

Then you call the waiting alignment.

Your hands may still shake

There is another passage in The Way of Mastery that says life begins when we look through the eyes of forgiveness and choose to embody love regardless of what anyone else is doing.

For me, that is where effortlessness begins.

Judgment requires armor.

If I have judged other people for making offers, I will expect the same judgment when I make one.

I know exactly what I have thought about the person who emails too often, talks too openly about money, or seems to turn every conversation into a sale. Now I am afraid that making any clear invitation will put me in the same category.

So I hold back.

My fear of being judged is often built from judgments I have already made.

Forgiveness loosens some of that armor.

It allows me to see that marketing itself has never been the problem. I can release the tactics that feel forceful and choose a way of inviting people that reflects who I actually am.

It lets the other person be free to decide.

And it lets me make a clear invitation without turning their answer into a verdict on my worth.

This does not guarantee that my hands will stop shaking.

It means the shaking no longer gets the final word.

That day in Austin, I did not reach some perfect state of surrender. I was still frightened. I was still trying to hide my hand.

But for a few minutes, service mattered more than the story in my head.

There was something we wanted to share.

There were people in front of us who might receive value from it.

And love, in that moment, required becoming visible enough to give it.

That was enough to keep going.

Maybe effortlessness has less to do with waiting for life to remove every obstacle.

Maybe it begins when we stop adding our resistance to the challenge already in front of us.

Your next expression of love may be a meditation.

It may also be an email, a conversation, or a clear offer.

The presence of effort does not tell you whether the action is aligned.

The more useful question is:

What would become possible if you stopped resisting what your work is asking of you now?

Find where the resistance is coming from

If your deeper work matters to you, but bringing it into the world still feels harder than it should, the Harmony Map Assessment can help you see why.

It looks at the relationship between you, your business, and the divine to reveal where the friction is strongest and where your attention belongs next.

It takes about eight minutes, and it is free.

Take the Harmony Map Assessment →

See the pattern. Find the friction. Move your deeper work forward.

Subscribe now

Earlier this week, I asked a Paqo in Cusco whether I should spend more time marketing.

He spread coca leaves across a table.

I realize this is not how most business newsletters begin.

But the last week has not been especially ordinary.

The story really began three nights earlier, on August 8.

Carolina and I joined a shamanic bonfire led by Miguel Kuntur Andino at Aldeia do Holon, here in the mountains of Brazil.

Miguel greeted the four directions. He sang as the fire burned beneath a sky full of stars. We made offerings of tobacco and passed the cachimbo sagrado, the sacred pipe, around the circle.

When it came time to make my request, I asked for one thing:

Show me the next clear step in my work.

I went to bed that night feeling strangely at peace with all the mysteries of the universe.

Three days later, I was on Zoom with Maestro Raúl in Cusco, watching him spread coca leaves across a table.

The familiar summer slowdown in the coaching industry had arrived at the same time as a deeper question I had been carrying about the future of my work and how I serve people

Sacred Business Flow has always lived at the intersection between practical business building and something harder to put a label on. The deeper work. The inner shifts that change what we are willing to share, create, and invite people to walk alongside us with.

Lately, I had felt called to go further into that second part. I needed to know whether that calling meant changing direction or bringing more depth to the direction we had already chosen.

So I booked a coca leaf reading with Maestro Raúl of the Inca Medicine School.

The reading began with my health and soul. Eventually we came to the business.

One leaf sat slightly apart from the others. Maestro Raúl read it as a small loss of soul or life force near the throat, the same place where I had undergone thyroid surgery three years earlier.

According to Maestro Raúl, the leaves showed something encouraging.

“It’s a good work,” his translator told me. “It has steps. There are many clients. The spirits from Hanak Pacha… they like your job.”

The path was aligned. My way of approaching it was in need of more alignment.

Then came my real question.

Should I place more of my energy into studying the Paqo path now, or focus on the visibility and marketing needed to strengthen the existing business?

More leaves were cast. More prayers were spoken. Maestro Raúl and his translator studied the pattern.

Mama Coca’s answer was clear.

“You need to focus now in the marketing, publicity, in all the things that you need to do… to have more incomes. To be more visible.”

The spiritual studies could begin later, with more stability beneath them.

Even the shaman told me to market.

Also in the past week, Carolina and I began working with another kind of magician.

Years ago, a client started calling me “the wizard,” and the nickname followed me through the marketing world. Still, every wizard occasionally needs counsel from another practitioner of the craft.

I had known this particular business coach for nearly a decade and had long suspected there might be a moment when working together would make sense.

This was the moment.

The conversations quickly helped us separate what was essential from what had become tangled. Ideas became decisions. Decisions became things we could build.

Then, the following night, a bruxa preta appeared in my bedroom.

Here in Brazil, this enormous black witch moth is considered a sign of good fortune. “Enormous” is not poetic license. Its wings were wider than my hand.

And then, last night, came the spiritual surgery.

In my dream, I was sitting on an examination table with Carolina nearby. A doctor took my blood pressure and told me I was perfectly healthy. But she saw something strange in my blood and called in another doctor.

“This will only take a minute,” she said.

The second doctor pushed her hand down my throat.

My whole body gagged as she pulled out a large rubber bag that had somehow become lodged behind my airway.

“This was the problem,” she said.

The sensation was so physical that I woke up choking.

I lay there trying to understand what had just happened. The image felt unmistakably connected to expression and to something that had been obstructing the fuller truth of what I wanted to say.

Make of the moth, the leaves, and the dream what you will.

On August 8, I had asked for the next clear step.

Then the answer began arriving through coca leaves, wise counsel, a black moth, and a dream so physical it woke me up choking.

Any one of those things could have been coincidence.

Together, they formed a pattern I could no longer ignore.

No single spiritual sign handed me an airtight business plan.

Clarity came through the convergence of wise counsel, practical structure, the body’s strange intelligence, combined with a willingness to act.

This is so much of what Carolina and I mean when we talk about building a business from the inside out.

The inner work matters. It has to lead somewhere.

The dream may show you what has been blocking your throat chakra and your expression. You still have to open your mouth and speak.

Clarity often arrives this way. The heart, the evidence, and the right counsel begin pointing toward the same next action.

Then your job is to just do it.

So that is what we have been doing.

Something new is beginning to take shape inside Sacred Business Flow. Parts of it are already becoming tangible. Other parts still need to earn their place through testing, questioning, and refinement.

I will not give you a grand reveal yet.

I will only say that we are following the thread of inspiration and building what this newfound clarity is asking us to build.

You will hear more when it is ready.

For now, perhaps the question is simpler:

What has become clear enough for you recently, where the next answer can only come from taking action?

This week, it took a fire ceremony, a Paqo, wise counsel, a bruxa preta, and a very strange dream to reveal a pattern I could not fully see from inside my own work.

You can start with eight minutes.

The Harmony Map scores the nine frequencies shaping how you move and identifies the one most seeking balance. The pattern quietly influencing your decisions, visibility, and ability to follow through.

Because the friction is rarely where you think it is.

Free. Eight minutes. Immediate results.

Take the Harmony Map and see what has been shaping your actions.

Take the Harmony Map

Who we’re celebrating:

When Josh came to us, The Sober Creative did not exist.

He was a videographer searching for his next chapter. Together, we clarified the deeper work and built the business from scratch.

Today, more than 1,000 people follow his work.

This week, he interviewed Hunter Biden.

We had been challenging Josh to reach higher with his invitations. He did. Then he earned the trust required to create an honest, deeply human conversation.

Hunter’s response?

“That was the most beautiful introduction I’ve ever gotten.”

This is what clear work and courageous invitations can open up for you.

We are so freaking proud of you, Josh.

Listen to the conversation.

Happenings

A small result doesn’t always mean something is wrong.

Sometimes the work is resonating with your audience, but you’re using the wrong scoreboard, or trying to make the wrong business model carry your success.

In next week’s live conversation, we’re talking about how to tell the difference between:

• a real problem and an emotional interpretation

• early traction and failure

• a good offer and a business that can actually support your life

And we’ll leave you with simple actions you can take this week to create clearer momentum.

Add the Live to your calendar →

The Weekly Highlights

If business advice keeps making you feel like the problem, read this. Carolina names the difference between discomfort that expands your horizon and strategy that pulls you away from who you are, so you can build a business that actually supports your life.

Want to know when discomfort means you’re growing and when it means your business is pulling you away from yourself? Become a paid subscriber and join the Sacred Business Network to watch the full conversation.

Subscribe now

Memorable Quote

“It’s a practice until you share it.”
— , Sober Creative Interview

You need to know which one you are actually going to move forward with.

If you have several legitimate directions competing for your attention, the problem is not a lack of possibility.

It is that your time, energy, and focus are being divided between all of them.

So we built The Sacred Business Clarity Compass™.

In about 30 minutes, it helps you take the ideas, offers, projects, and possible directions in your head and turn them into:

One clear focus.
What can wait.
Your next three actions.

It uses three lenses: what your Harmony Map is showing you, what the business evidence says, and what your heart already knows.

Not to make the decision for you.

To help you see it clearly enough to choose.

$7. About 30 minutes. One decision you can actually move.

Get The Sacred Business Clarity Compass™ →

Explore the Compass

In every spiritual teaching I’ve ever touched, ancient to modern, the same thing is said: we build our world from the inside out.

Our reality is our own.

It’s shaped by our thoughts, our emotions, our desires. Two people can be in the same place, the same house, the same event, and be experiencing two completely different worlds.

I don’t question this.

Life has shown me, over and over, that this is true. It has shown me when I am feeling like a powerful creator and even when I am not. Reality is created by us. Sometimes in a very interesting way.

Have you ever looked at your kid and thought, he’s going to spill that milk everywhere, and in the very next second, there it goes? Milk on the floor, on his clothes, across the table? lol… this happened just few days ago.

I laugh when that happens. Those little instant manifestations.

When we’re present enough, we see it all the time. A thought that becomes real. A person who reaches out right as you think of them. A desire that shows up, or something you didn’t want, unfolding right in front of your eyes.

And yet, when it comes to building a business, we’re wired to believe the opposite. Social media and the internet do a great job of showing us the recipe for success.

Just do this and tcham, you’ll get what you want.

The idea is born inside us. Even the ready-made recipes admit that much.

But then they tell you the rest lives outside. Post every day. Pick a lane and never leave it. Hook them in the first three seconds. Build the funnel, nail the offer, show up whether you feel like it or not. Be louder. As if we were all robots chasing the same outcome.

Two things get lost in that.

First, almost no one stops to define what success actually means to them. So we get sold on something we don’t even want.

And second, life is happening at the very same time you’re building the business. So when you can’t keep up with the recipe, it makes you feel wrong, behind, and you start to question whether your calling was ever even for you.

I rejected marketing and business-growth strategies for years. And the more time passes, the clearer it becomes: I believe in building a business from the inside out. I don’t reject strategy but I don’t buy in becoming a robot or having my whole life built around my business, my business should be built around my life.

Would you agree?

I reject the quick promises.

I reject “just do what I do and you’ll get results,” with no context, no you in it. I reject “just stay consistent and it’ll happen.”

I reject ignoring one of the most beautiful gifts your business can give you, the gift of transformation.

I reject the idea that business is separate from the rest of life, that you make money here even if it makes you feel like shit, and then live how you can with the hours you have left.

I rejected all of it. And I still built something real.

Something that supports the quality of life I want to experience: the travels, the delicious restaurants, time with my family, time to retreat, to take courses, to study, to slow down. A business I wake up excited for, that connects me with amazing people and lets me serve the way I love.

Which means the rejection was never the thing holding me back. It was pointing me somewhere.

If you feel tired and fed up with marketing and general business-growth advice, you are not delusional, and you are not wrong.

It's just not for you.

This mentality of treating people like robots is not part of the world you are creating.

Almost seven years into building my own business, I learned that business is no exception to the rule. It can and should be built from the inside first.

The real skills of building a business aren’t the ones we’re sold.

They’re deep care. Honesty. Authenticity. A big desire to help. Alignment with what actually matters to you. More connection with your heart.

Expanding your network through meaningful connection. Getting to know people your heart senses are building worlds similar to yours.

And yes, a willingness to be seen. And yes, a willingness to feel uncomfortable.

But not the discomfort of forcing yourself into something that isn’t you. Not the ache of doing what everyone else does and hoping it works.

The discomfort of your own expansion. Of listening. Of slowing down enough to hear your own intuition, and then actually moving on it.

Because the discomfort of growth is not the same as the discomfort of doing something that isn’t aligned. One expands you. The other slowly erases you.

That’s the business I built. Listening to my inner wisdom, paying attention to the signs of life. And yes, I got help.

Not because I was searching the outer world for solutions, but because my inner clarity attracted the people who could show me what I couldn’t see. When they reflected it back to me, it felt like home, not like hustle.

Your business will bring the success you’re looking for, the external life you want to experience. But more than that, it will heal you on many levels.

Your relationship with your own power. With the parts of you that you don’t accept, or reject. Your relationship with money and abundance.

Your ability to honor yourself. That one is big.

A successful business is born and grows out of pleasure. Out of what makes you feel alive. Not out of the hustle we’re all made to believe in.

I want a business that honors my values. That honors my relationship with nature, my kids, my family, my cycles, my sacred pause. That honors and supports the experiences I want to have in this life. And this is the business I am building.

A business that serves my life, not a life that serves the business.

Business is not different from anything else. It is meant to be built from the inside out.

Just like everything else.

We were sucked into an industry that wants us to believe success is reached from the outside in.

I’m not playing this game. And you don’t have to either.

So let’s enjoy this. Let’s have fun, make good money, and build businesses that contribute to the world we want to see more of.

Life is meant to be fun. And i’m fairly sure that includes the business too.

With love,

Carolina

What do you do when the usual business-growth advice stops feeling true in your body?

We talked about:

• why Carolina rejected most mainstream growth advice from the beginning

• the hidden cost of rejecting structure entirely

• the difference between aligned strategy and becoming a robot

• why healing doesn’t only happen in retreat, but in movement

• how to tell the difference between growth discomfort and misalignment

• what it means to build a business that serves your life instead of a life that serves your business

A few lines that stood out:

• The energy behind the action matters more than the action itself.

• The healing happens when you come back down the mountain and face life.

• The discomfort is not always telling you to quit. Often it’s asking for refinement.

• Your vision is not your next step — but it should shape your next step.

In the full replay, Carolina also shares:

• how she built her first practice by focusing on one next client at a time

• how language and identity shaped her visibility in Portuguese vs English

• why stop consuming may be one of the most powerful business moves you can make

• and the practical question we keep coming back to:

  What do you truly want?

If you’re trying to build something real without abandoning yourself in the process, this one is for you.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into episode 01 of Sitting on a bench.

Read more

I remember the talk in my head. How am I going to pull this off? Looking around at my current clients, my current network, I couldn’t really see how people would say yes to a big offer.

My business model wasn’t working for me, and the thought of changing it was exciting, but at the same time it triggered a lot of doubts.

Would anyone pay?

That’s a lot of money. Are people ready to commit to a 6-month journey with me? Why me?

The talk inside my head was crazy, and exhausting. It took a lot of self-control to just do it anyway and not listen to that voice.

But once it’s done, oh boy. It feels good.

The number my coach suggested was 9k. And as much as I loved that number on paper, I felt in my body how much I didn’t believe it. Just thinking about it brought such discomfort that I almost lost the ability to stay with my own thoughts. I became them.

So I had to find a number that was uncomfortable, but also a stretch.

A number that was more than just the sum of my sessions pre-paid as a package. A number that felt like I was finally charging for my real value, and for the transformation I provide. One that excited me with new possibilities for the life I wanted, and still contracted my body with a little bit of fear.

My number was very close to 5k. And I did it. And I did it again.

Then the number went up. And every time I raised it, the formula was the same: excitement and fear, present at the same time. Challenged and grounded.

That’s the sweet spot.

This is not “keep doing what you’re doing and just charge more.” There’s a whole understanding behind the formula, one that builds up in your business. You need a system in place for it to work. It’s a well-thought-out process.

But it’s replicable.

Later in my journey, I watched a client who wanted to transition from corporate to entrepreneurship build a business for the first time and, right off the bat, charge 15k.

I celebrated that. His first win was bigger than mine, which means I must be doing something right.

And he did it again.

The number itself doesn’t matter. We all start from different points. What matters is that you’re saying yes to yourself, and to what’s important to you.

You want more time with your family. You want financial freedom. You want to help more people. You have the power to create that for yourself. It will challenge you and it will make you uncomfortable, but it’s worth it.

The version of yourself you meet on the other side of this is liberating.

Having your business built to support your life, instead of building a life to support your business, is where it’s at.

And raising your prices doesn’t mean helping fewer people. (Remember, this is not about doing things the way you always have and just charging more.)

Once you understand how it’s done, it will make complete sense, and you’ll only have one question left: why didn’t I do this earlier?

With love,

Carolina

What We Are Celebrating This Week:

I'm celebrating a return to our core (happy and fun colors)

Since the beginning of our journey here on Substack, we’ve been experimenting with images and colors.

We thought AI was helping us (but….nah) and without noticing, it was carrying us further and further from our own core.

Small tweaks, small iterations, year after year, and one day you look up and realize you’ve landed somewhere far from your essence. It’s kind of crazy how it happens.

Not in one big wrong turn, but in a hundred tiny ones.

This is exactly what the protocol I’m sharing with you today is for. I built it for us too, in this very moment, for clarity, focus, and aligned action and it helped us see just how far we’d drifted from our original frequency.

We're proud of what we've built. A Sacred Business, profitable, joyful, and fun, aligned with what we believe business should be, and the same way we help others build theirs.

But somewhere along the way, in chasing the feedback and the optimizing, our brand started slipping away from us.

So today I’m celebrating back to the beautiful original colors we’ve had and loved.

Which is why I want to share our images with you again, the ones we love so much.

The colors. The joy. The ones that reflect what Sacred Business actually is in its essence.

Our website is back in alignment too.

This is us, finding our way back to the center. Yay!! Check it out! It’s BeAuTiFul!

Things I’d like to share

Work on your energy first - Protocol attached

Working on your energy is probably one of the smartest things you can do. The most powerful people I know don’t just take more action, they take action from the right place.

Same effort, different energy, completely different results. When your field is clear, the work moves. Doors open faster. The right yes comes at the right time.

Flow isn’t luck.

It’s what happens when your energy and your action are pointed in the same direction.

So before you push harder, tune the field first. I use sacred geometries, geometric patterns that emit a frequency of what you want.

This one comes from a labyrinth carved into the floor of a 13th-century cathedral, walked for centuries as a moving meditation, a prayer made with the feet. And a labyrinth is not a maze… it has no dead ends, no wrong turns.

Only one path, always leading inward. You cannot get lost in it. Every step, even the ones that seem to curve away, is walking you back to your own core.

In everyday life that path is easy to lose under noise and distraction. This geometry helps you reorganize your field: it clears the mental clutter, restores clarity and focus, and brings your energy back into coherence, so you move beyond procrastination and momentum becomes your natural state.

As you set up the protocol, do it as an act of intention.

Build it, then journal alongside it. Once the noise settles, come back to what you actually want and, just as important, to what you will no longer tolerate in your life. That's where real focus comes from. Not from forcing action, but from remembering who you are. Set your intention, connect with what you want, and let inspired action come to you.

When it does, follow it. :)

Memorable Quote

You get in life what you have the courage to ask for - Oprah Winfrey

She wanted people to find her. Twenty years of expertise and almost nobody knew the work existed.

She’s sharp and capable and busy, so it looked like a time problem.

Then on a call with Carolina and I, she said:

“I come from a very ‘business is evil’ place. And a welcome series and lead magnets doesn’t get a lot more businessy than that.”

Every week in her mind, she was declining to become the kind of marketer who represents everything “evil” to her. And every week the list stayed exactly where it was while louder people with less to say kept getting more clients.

So Carolina offered her a different way to look at it. A welcome sequence is showing someone around your house. The lead magnet is the gift you hand them at the door.

I watched her whole body relax on camera.

“I can relate to inviting someone into my house.”

Then she got the rest of it herself.

“And then the lead magnet is the gift.”

Months of being stuck started loosening up in about ninety seconds.

Here’s what I want you to take from that.

Her instinct was correct. She just had it aimed at the entire category instead of the part that deserving of it. What she was actually refusing was manipulation, and nobody had ever taught her to tell that apart from marketing as a broader category, so she threw it all out the window and stayed invisible for another year.

I spent years in the bowels of persuasion. Funnel hacking, psychographics, all of it. I know exactly which tactics work and I decline to use most of them, not because they don’t work, but because of what they cost my inner experience. So when I tell you the welcome sequence isn’t one of them, I’m telling you as someone who was fluent enough to have chosen otherwise.

She doesn’t have to become a marketer. She’s someone who invites people into her house and hands them something at the door. That was available to her the whole time.

says it well:

“Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interests first.”

The lead magnet was capable of doing exactly that the whole time. She just couldn’t see it as a gift while she relating to it as a manipulation tactic.

The gap between what you know you should do and what you actually do is almost never discipline. Most of the capable people I talk to are aimed slightly wrong, and effort at the wrong target feels 100% like grinding. The same effort, set at the right target, barely feels like work at all.

That’s what the Harmony Map is for. Eight minutes. It doesn’t hand you a flaw to work on. It shows you the strengths to be leveraged, and the one place where breakthrough lives.

See where you’re aimed →

You’ve got the expertise. You’ve done the inner work. Let’s go.

Phil (& Carolina)

Take The Harmony Map

She was out for a walk when she ran into someone she knew from her past. Well-connected, generous, and exactly the kind of person she’d been hoping to connect with about her new business for months. They stopped, had a friendly chat, and the acquaintance asked her the easiest question in the world.

So what are you up to these days?

The door, wide open. All she had to do was walk through it.

Instead she kept it light. Talked about the weather, more or less. Then they said their goodbyes and went their separate ways.

She got about half a block down the street before it hit her.

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

Pay attention here. It isn’t that she has nothing to say. She has a real calling. She’s already built the business, secured a lease on a physical property, and in every way is further along than she tends to give herself the credit for.

But it isn’t fully real to her yet. Getting there, but not fully. And it’s really hard to speak to something that doesn’t quite feel real yet, so when the moment came, there was nothing there to anchor her.

I watched her tell this to the group and I recognized it on the spot, because I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit.

We treat clarity like a ticket you have to show at the door. Get clear first, we tell ourselves, and then we’ll put ourselves out there and finally share our message.

We have it backwards.

You don’t get clear and then get seen. You get seen, over and over, and that is how it becomes real. The sidewalk conversation you’re dreading is how clarity gets created as a gift from life. It will never arrive beforehand, waiting politely for you to feel ready.

And the cost of waiting is subtle, which is what makes it dangerous. Every “so what do you do?” you deflect teaches your body and nervous system that the work still isn’t yours to claim. The identity stays theoretical. The opportunities keep passing by, unclaimed.

For what it’s worth, this is the whole reason Carolina and I build our offerings the way we do. People come to us certain they need to be clear before they’re allowed to begin. They don’t. The only threshold that has ever mattered is a calling that won’t let you go, and the willingness to bring it forth. The what and the how, we build together. That part it really helps to have someone in your corner to figure out. If you feel that pull and you’re done waiting to feel ready, this is where we help people cross it.

So here’s the one thing I’d love you to do today.

Think of the last time someone asked what you’re up to and you minimized what you shared, or simply didn’t say a thing about it. What did you wish you’d said?

Reply or tell me in the comments. Say it here first, where it’s 100% safe. Better to find the words here than half a block too late.

Phil (& Carolina)

What came out was anger.

Carolina and I had booked five days out there to be with nature on purpose. We wanted to look at our own foundation. See what was being asked of us next. We were in a one-room cottage with a dirt road running down to the gate, with a handful of horses and cows grazing just past the window. First real quiet in nature I’d had since moving to Rio.

I’d been up a couple of hours already, studying. I’ve been working through Jayem’s Way of Mastery for about a year. Most mornings it’s where I start, and it helps me stay grounded.

That morning it did the opposite, and by a little after 6am, sun coming up, I had a lot I needed to get off my chest.

I started ranting about how our marketing sounds like every other spiritual business coach out there. About how I’ve been holding back what I actually believe, trying not to offend anyone. I’ve tried saying it differently. Softening the language. Finding the angle that doesn’t put anyone off.

About how three years in, I still can’t shake the feeling that what we’re here for is bigger than helping someone grow a spiritual business. I think more than that, we're here to show that business can be a pathway of healing. Not just a pathway to success. A pathway back to the heart. And with that feeling, a familiar itchy discomfort in my body. The fire rising in my chest when I can’t bring a tension to resolution.

The next morning I woke up at three. Like someone had thrown a switch.

Carolina was still fast asleep. I carried a candle to the far side of the room and sat down with it, so as not to wake her. That day I was on lesson six. The four keys of the kingdom. Desire, intention, allowance, surrender.

And for just a few precious minutes, the veil went up.

I don’t have better words for it than that. It didn’t last long. It felt like union. Its an experience I’ve had before and the thing I still find myself reaching for, hoping it will stabilize in my day to day reality.

Only one day had passed between those two mornings. Nothing too out of the ordinary about either of them. Same room, same candle, same book, same horses standing outside in the dark. But something had shifted underneath.

We built the Harmony Map years ago. I took it many times while we were testing it and I honestly can’t remember what my first result was.

But interestingly enough, since we have been looking at our own foundation during our time on this work retreat, Carolina had suggested we both take it again. See where our breakthrough lives.

And so I took mine this morning, right before I started writing this.

Love and Bliss were my two lowest.

Here’s what Love looks like when it’s out of balance, straight from our own definitions:

Pulling back when it's time to be seen. Keeping your story to yourself. Being your own harshest critic.

That’s me. Saturday morning. 6:44am. Furious that my marketing sounds like everyone else’s.

Love and Bliss sit directly next to each other on the map. They both belong to your relationship with the divine.So the marketing wasn’t the problem. My relationship with God was.

The map knew. I just hadn’t looked in a while.

Your lowest frequency is your breakthrough frequency. That’s not new. It’s what the map has been sharing with people who take it from the beginning. Saturday morning I was on the floor about hiding. That’s Love out of balance, almost to a T. Sunday morning the veil went up. Make of that what you will. That’s just the order it happened in.

A lot of teachers will tell you that you already have everything you need. You’ve already arrived. Theres nowhere to go, nothing to do. I believe them. And I still experience lack from time to time. For a long time I took that as evidence I was failing spiritually. There’s a shame that comes with that. It’s subtle but it’s there.

The map asks a smaller question. Where are you this week in your relationship with yourself, business, and the divine? And whatever comes back lowest is a hint at where you might benefit from doing some work.

Yesterday morning I got up and went straight into sales and marketing training. Carolina and I are considering implementing a model that we believe will allow us to serve in a whole new way. Around 7pm that night I found myself standing in the shower and it came to me that I hadn’t spent a single minute with God all day.

That’s Bliss out of balance. Busy building the thing, and losing touch with the intentions underneath.

I closed my eyes under the water, took a deep breath, and prayed.

I’m here now.

I tried to keep shame out of it and give myself some credit for catching my state of disconnection at all.

The horses are still out there. The candle’s still burning. I think maybe that’s enough for now.

I’m sharing this story because the map gave a shape to something I wasn’t fully seeing in myself. And it might do the same for you.

If you want to see yours, the Harmony Map is here. Takes just a few minutes. Free. What comes back is simple. Your lowest frequency. And what it looks like when it’s running the show.

Take the Harmony Map

The result is yours. So is what comes next.

Phil (& Carolina)

Who We Are Celebrating This Week:

Slow AI is #1 in Generative AI on Amazon!

Congratulations Sam. You continue to inspire us with everything you put out.

The man who wrote Getting Things Done on why control is the biggest human addiction.

Memorable Quote

"The older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I'm far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me." - , Big Magic

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on July 31st, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

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.