Salesy.

What does that word even mean?

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

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

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

The charge is in us.

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

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

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

Whether or not it’s actually truth.

So the question was never “is it true?”

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

Just notice the incoherence:

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

Read it again.

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

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

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

I’d call it givy, just for fun :)

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

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

Change the meaning you are assigning changes everything.

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

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

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

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

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

But I wasn’t always feeling this way.

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

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

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

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

I judged them from the top of my tower.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You already know it doesn’t.

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

Almost with an obsession for it.

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

Simply Notice it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you entertain this possibility?

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

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

Go Give.

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

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

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

With love,

Carolina

Explore Serve & Receive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two things stood out from the conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Kamb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few other threads from the full episode:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch the full conversation here: [LINK]

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

The Wise Body

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

By Jane Riccobono

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

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

Zero.

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

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

The Outreach Method

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And guess what?

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

the one you’re most afraid to message

So here’s how to pick where to start.

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

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

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

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

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

try this this week

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

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

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

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

if you’d rather not do this alone

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

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

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

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

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

Join Radiant Flow

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

Phil (& Carolina)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A rope is only tight when both sides pull.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am selfish too.

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

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

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

Selfish and altruistic at the same time.

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

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

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

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

And that was okay too.

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

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

We do it all day.

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

We try to build businesses out of one half.

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

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

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

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

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

I am.

With Love,

Carolina

Who We Are Celebrating

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

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

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

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

Things I’d like to share

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

Read it

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

Read it

Memorable Quote

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

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

It has run this way for thousands of years.

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

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

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

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

the $3,000 forecast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I got my version of the check early

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

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

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

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

What am I actually here for?

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

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

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

What is my life actually about?

where I see it differently than Vishen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the answers that came back

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

Nobody named a beach.

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

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

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

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

seven mornings

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

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

And notice where you feel those answers in your body.

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

Explore Serve & Receive

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

Phil (& Carolina)

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

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

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

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

How often do we do that?

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

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

Off I go in my own ignorance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which means most of us are not creating our lives.

That is what 50% responsibility actually is.

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

And so you stay.

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

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

Working on your reactions means pausing there. Getting curious.

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

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

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

Nothing on the outside changed right away.

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

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

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

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

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

With love,

Carolina

Recommended Readings

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

She’d been trying to build her business for a decade, and it hadn’t worked, and she had an answer for every part of why.

✔️ The marketers she hired failed her.

✔️ The whole world runs on a belief system stacked against her model.

✔️ Her energy type means traditional marketing can’t work for her.

✔️ She has health challenges.

✔️ People won’t invite her in because of her strong opinions.

Every reason was real to her. And every reason lived somewhere outside of her.

At a few points during the conversation I asked her, in different ways, what part she played in any of it. Where, from her own side, the difficulty might live. She couldn’t answer. She kept going back to who she’d worked with, or what the market wouldn’t do for her. Eventually I ended the call, because there was nothing for me to do there.

You can’t help someone who has placed the entire cause of their life circumstances outside their own reach.

I’m not telling you this to make her wrong. I’m telling you because I recognized it. I’ve done it in my own life. We all have.

It points us towards the idea I actually want to talk about, which is that you are 100% responsible for your life.

Here’s what usually happens when people hear that. Their shoulders go up. They get defensive. It lands as a weight.

If it’s all on me, then I’d better be perfect.

If it’s all on me, where does grace fit, where does the divine fit, am I just alone in here making the whole thing happen?

ran an embodiment class on this the other day in our Radiant Flow community and watched a room full of capable people feel that exact heaviness the second the phrase showed up.

So let me take the weight off first, because I believe that the weight is a grave misunderstanding.

Responsibility is not a grade. It’s not a score you get marked down on. The word, if you slow down on it, is response-able.

The ability to respond.

And the thing it stands opposite to isn’t failure. It’s a reaction.

A reaction needs a past in order to exist. We react by running a pattern we already have. Something happens, and before we’ve actually met it, the old story fires in our mind and we’re off, defending, explaining, blaming, and shrinking.

That’s what the individual on the call with me had been doing for ten years. She wasn’t responding to her business. She was reacting to a recurring story about why it couldn’t work, and the story was airtight, and airtight stories don’t allow for new outcomes.

There are two types of reactions.

One is the obvious one: the blowup, turning cold, losing it, the stuff we already call reactive.

The more subtle one is the one that actually runs most businesses into the ground. It’s every unconscious action that isn’t aligned with where you say you want to go. You say you want the online business, then you book the new client into the old in-person model out of habit. You say you want to build something for the long-haul, then you chase short-term wins with 100% of the time you have in a week. That’s reaction too. It just doesn’t look as dramatic as the first kind.

Now the part that requires honesty, because I don’t want this to be interpreted like a personal development or spiritual slogan.

100% responsibility does not mean everything is your fault. A chronic condition is very real. I experienced one for almost a decade.

A hard market is real. Some people carry headwinds that others don’t. It’s not that you caused everything that has happened to you in your past.

The point is that there’s one variable you always have control of 100% of the time, which is how you respond, and that turns out to be the one thing that determines the most about what happens next in your life.

You can have a real constraint and still own your response to it. The constraint is in front of you. The excuse is behind you, in the story. It only lives on if you keep giving it new life.

So why does taking this on feel heavy, if it’s supposed to be freeing?

Because most of us, when we reach for responsibility, accidentally reach for control instead. We don’t just own our part. We try to own everyone’s part. We do our work and then we do the other person’s work too. We try to manage how it all turns out, and how other people feel, and whether they make the choice we would make. That isn’t responsibility. That’s control, and it never ends, and it will ultimately wear you out.

Real 100% responsibility is lighter than that, not heavier. It’s owning what is actually yours and letting other people own what is theirs. It’s choosing your response and then letting the outcome breathe. Carolina put it simply:

the power of it isn’t “I will make this happen.” It’s “I will allow this to happen.”

That’s a different meaning entirely that what I believe most people assign. It responds to where you’re going instead of forcing it into being.

And it doesn’t mean going at it alone. Being fully responsible includes allowing yourself to be supported when it shows up. Some weeks the most responsible thing you’ll do is to let someone help you out.

The practical version of what I’m describing here is almost embarrassingly simple. Before you act, get underneath the reaction. Find the place within you that isn’t running the old story, and respond from that position. You can put a hand on your chest and actually feel for it. You can ask one question: where am I reacting right now? Not where is the world wrong. Where am I running an unhelpful pattern?

When you ask it honestly, you catch yourself in the script. The market’s not right. I don’t have the audience. This is too hard. It should be faster than this. All of it is reaction. All of it is past-bound. None of it is a response to the thing you said you wanted to build.

The person I spoke to all that call never got to that question. She had built a whole worldview around the answer being somewhere else, and she defended it to the end, and the cost of operating from within that view is that nothing can ever change.

You don’t have to live there. You get to respond. That’s the whole invitation with 100% responsibility, and it isn’t a burden. It might be the lightest thing you choose to practice with all year.

Phil (& Carolina)

If you want to see the patterns you tend to react from, that’s most of what our Sacred Business Archetype Quiz shows you. You can take it here.

Take the Quiz

after i posted about it

Last week, before I’d worked any of this essay out, I posted a raw note about that call. It ended on a question I couldn’t answer fully in that moment. I used to believe staying was the generous move, and now I’m not so sure. What came back taught me as much as the call did.

offered a nice reframe. When you’re moving someone toward something that isn’t already available to them, their defenses go up.

pointed me at the two parts worth getting curious about, the part of me that couldn’t stay, and the part that would have stayed and kept appeasing. drew the line between kind and nice, and added something helpful: if you end up working with 100% of the people who reach you, you’re probably not asking the right questions.

Several people said some version of trust your gut and protect what you’ve built. put words to the hard part, that we have to give ourselves permission to accept our intuition and move on, even when it isn’t easy. , , and agreed, and was straight up about it. Every time he gave a possibly toxic client a chance, hes regretted it in the end.

, who was on the call with me, reflected back something that I didn’t initially see, that the way I kept asking questions was its own kind of care. and named the thing I was practicing by posting about it, telling the uncomfortable story instead of only sharing the wins.

I also found something I didn’t love. There was some ego in my response on that call. I pride myself on getting through to people with blocks like hers, and that day it didn’t work, and it stung. That’s this whole essay turned back on myself. I had a part in that experience and the best move is to own it.

Who We Are Celebrating

helps people 45+ plan their Camino de Santiago journey. Having completed 12 Caminos, she lives along one of its routes in Spain, volunteersannually on the route, and guide others from feeling overwhelmed to confident and ready.

Things I’d like to share

Worth Your Attention

Rebecca Weston hated exercise and never felt athletic. She’s now walked the Camino de Santiago 15+ times and helps people over 45 do their first.

The card said goddess. She said no way. hid her magic from her family for ten years. Then she named her business after it.

Memorable Quote

“When you accept 100% ownership all the time, period, no exceptions ever, that gives you agency to respond instead of react... You go from being at effect to being at cause.” -

This newsletter was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on June 6th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

That sounds harsh, so let me slow down. Too much Netflix feels indulgent, like we are wasting time, like we are giving our energy to something that isn’t going to give us something back in return. Inner work on the other hand, feels like devotion to something higher. You’re pulling cards in the morning, sitting with what surfaced in last night’s dream, calibrating your energy before the day starts. Nobody would call that hiding out. It’s a form of doing the work.

But ask one question of both at the end of the week. What didn’t happen while you were doing it?

If you’re the person I’m writing to, the inner work you’ve done is real. Most of it wasn’t by choice. The dark nights lasted longer than anyone warned you. There were stretches where the call pulled you out of ordinary life completely, and what developed in those stretches is real too. You have the ability to read energy. You see what’s underneath what someone is saying before they’ve named it. The people you work with feel that depth right away, because they don’t get held like that anywhere else in their life.

And the inner work has become the primary place you spend your days. And in many ways that’s where you stay stuck.

Here’s the dynamic, and see if you recognize it. Every time the outer goal is in reach, something deeper comes up that needs processing first. You sit down to write the post and your energy is off. You get ready to follow up with the woman who asked about working with you, and something surfaces that needs clearing before you can be visible like that. The moon’s wrong. It’s winter and you’re honoring the season. There’s one more piece to heal, and then you’ll be ready.

That moment never arrives. And if we can be very honest for a moment, with this perspective strongly held, it never will.

A man in our community is a channel and an energy healer. The depth he carries is real, I’ve felt it personally. Here’s what he told me about building his business:

“Anytime I sort of get some little bit of momentum, the fatigue is the physical aspect, sort of crash and stop me.”

His body shuts the whole thing down before the work can reach anyone. Years of inner work, and the outer work is still waiting on the other side of a not-yet-ready feeling that’s been too strong to push past.

Another client said it even more plainly. We were talking about the part of her work that would put her in front of people, and she said,

“I’d shut the door on that.”

Not slammed it. Just shut it, years ago, and the inner work made the closed door feel like a choice instead of a loss.

You’re not doing any of this in bad faith. Every excuse comes wrapped in something true. You actually are sensitive. The energy of being visible actually does cost you something. Your body actually does respond before your mind can weigh in. None of that is wrong. What’s wrong is if any of it has become permanent permission to not act.

I’ll own my version of this too. For years, my fear of public speaking wouldn’t let me share my message from the heart. I couldn’t get on a Substack Live. I couldn’t lead a workshop. Even an interview would throw me off. And I could see what it was costing me. The service I felt so connected to, the desire to help people that brought me into this work in the first place, was getting cut off at the knees by a fear I kept treating as a fact about me.

It took a while to admit what was underneath it. I was getting in my own way, and the way I was doing it was by making myself more important than the work. My readiness, and how I’d be seen, placed ahead of the people the work was for. Hiding can look humble. It rarely is.

And the pattern of not acting has verifiable reasons. For years, your system learned that being seen wasn’t safe, so it built a beautiful place to live and experience safety.

You’ve trained yourself to read the tightening in your chest as guidance not to act instead of as the pattern it is. Sometimes it is guidance. Often it’s just protection doing what protection does.

There’s a way to tell the difference. A real pause has an expiration date. You pump the brakes, you give it the time it’s asking for, and you name the next action so it’s waiting for you when you’re done. “I’m sitting with this until Thursday, and then the email is going to go out”. Staying in hiding has no next action. The door just stays shut, and after enough years you no longer even see the door.

But the pattern has a cost, and the cost is the work itself. The thing you came here to do stays inside you. It keeps getting more refined, more developed, more true. We were on an interview recently with our friend , and she shared something one of her teachers told her years ago:

“Information is just a rumor until it’s in the body.”

That’s what happens to a gift that never gets delivered. It stays a rumor. And it never finds its way to the people it was meant for. You can feel them. You’ve thought about reaching them more times than you could count. The gap between what you carry and what’s reaching the world has gotten too wide to keep ignoring.

Here’s something to consider. You have a body. If your work were meant to live purely in another dimension, you wouldn’t be in one. You are here reading this, which means the work is meant to happen in physical matter, with the rest of us, in human form. Not above the 3D. In it. The work becomes the descent.

Naming the pattern is where breaking it starts. Once you can see the deeper thing arriving right on schedule, every time the required outer action gets close, you get a choice you didn’t have before. You can process it later. The email can go out today. Your nervous system isn’t going to feel fully ready before you act, because acting is the thing that builds the capacity. You build it by doing the thing, not by preparing more to do the thing.

And your depth doesn’t get left behind. It comes with you in the descent in service to those who need to experience it most.

If you recognized yourself in this, the pattern has a name. And a named pattern is one you can work with. It’s one of five Sacred Business Archetypes we’ve mapped after hundreds of calls with people doing this work. The quiz takes a few minutes and names the pattern that’s been running your business.

Explore Your Pattern Here

Phil (& Carolina)

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on June 3rd, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

She had just quit her last job, a six-figure systems engineering role, and was making about $1,000 a month helping her tarot friends price and package their services. She was also ten years into hiding her witchcraft practice from her staunchly conservative family.

What she wanted was to teach magic. The reality creation work she’d spent years learning in her Wiccan circles and her Western magic training. And she wanted to stop hiding while she did it.

Which is why the card was a problem. Coming out of a decade in the closet, with a Catholic father and hardcore conservative parents, goddess was about the last word she wanted on her front door.

I can’t call myself that. Are you freaking kidding me?

That’s what she said to her husband, who was sitting next to her reading his book. He kept reading. “Yeah, that’s the only thing you can call yourself.” And in that moment she made the decision that shaped everything after. She wasn’t going to hide the magic practitioner anymore, and she wasn’t going to make a big deal of it either. The business became Marketing Goddess. Her email signature read “bright blessings and massive success.”

What came next is the part people in the online mentoring world already know in some form. Elizabeth became one of the first mentors of the high-ticket model back in 2008 and 2009, spent nearly two decades mentoring conscious entrepreneurs through the growth phase, up to six figures and beyond, and wrote the book Seven Figure Goddess.

So we had her on Sacred Business Stories this week to trace the arc. The part most people don’t hear is how long the real work waited.

At the very beginning, Elizabeth got a clear directive. She’s Wiccan, she took oaths, and as she tells it, the goddess tapped her on the shoulder:

“You’re going to be a part of this movement to bring magic to the mainstream.”

She figured business coaching was the on-ramp. But when she put the manifesting work front and center, two things surprised her. She was bored. And she got a second directive that she wasn’t done with the business coaching, because pieces of the reality creation work were still being learned through it. So she went back to it for another eight years. Only last year did the instruction change.

Now’s the time to release the business coaching. It served its purpose. You’re the magic teacher from here on out. Applied to business.

Nearly two decades between the directive and the green light. She used to tell her husband she felt like she was moving through mud. He told her she was like a tank. “No woman wants to be called a tank,” she said. Then he drew her a picture of one, because she does not stop. “I’m really grateful to myself for having that skill, and I’ll just put that on the altar for someone who wants to pick that one up.”

Two things stood out from the conversation.

The first was her answer when we asked about her essay on 100% responsibility, which she names as her top value.

It means accepting 100% ownership of everything in your life, period. No exceptions, ever.

She’s careful with it. It’s an edgy concept and she says so up front. Taking ownership is different from taking the blame for what other people do, and she’s not asking anyone to pretend systemic conditions don’t exist. The point is choice. As she put it, you go from being at effect to being at cause. Responsibility, the ability to respond.

The second was a line she got from one of her NLP teachers.

Information is just a rumor until it’s in the body.

If you’ve spent years learning and your business still doesn’t reflect what you know, that line is for you. Her method for getting knowledge into the body is unglamorous. Regulate before the hard thing, regulate after, celebrate. Then make the action small. “Do the next small thing, because that starts to train your brain and your body that you can do the next thing and the next thing.” In her model, only the action that actually moves the outcome brings a creation from the non-physical to the physical.

One piece of advice came up more than once, and she applies it to herself first. She does offers and messaging for a living and still hired help on her own message two months ago.

There comes a point where you need to get the outside eyes. You really do.

The reframe worth naming from her story is about time. Most of us would read eighteen years of business coaching as a long delay on the way to the real work. Elizabeth reads it as the training. “It’s okay to not have it look exactly like you think it’s going to look. It’s okay to take your time and develop the body of work that really matters while you are serving fully.”

If you have a version of this, a body of work waiting while you do the work that pays, her story says the two aren’t in conflict. The waiting is where the work gets built.

You can find Elizabeth’s book, Seven Figure Goddess, as a free download at 7figuregoddessbook.com, and she’s now writing on Substack.

She speaks mostly to people who feel like they’re at an income ceiling, whether they’re just starting out or sitting at $500K or a million.

Catch the full replay. The responsibility section alone is worth the hour.

Thank you , , and many others for tuning into Sacred Business Stories with and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

The Creator Frequency

Tools + teachings to Be the One Who creates big outcomes on command, faster than you thought possible. Western magic + neuroscience meets modern reality creation. For conscious entrepreneurs, creatives + leaders up to BIG things in biz and life.

By Elizabeth Purvis

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

She has now walked the Camino de Santiago more than fifteen times.

She first heard about it back in 2000, watching Shirley MacLaine talk about a book she’d written about a walk across Spain. Rebecca filed it away as a someday thing. Twelve years later she did it for real: a thirty-seven day walk, because at the time she thought that was the only option. Three days in, she had the answer to a question she hadn’t fully known she was carrying. By then she was hooked.

For years after that, people asked if she’d ever lead trips or build a business around it. For a long time her answer was no. The Camino was hers. Then our community came across her inbox, recommended by of Zen Habits, and she decided it was time.

The part that took the longest wasn’t the logistics. It was worth. Rebecca grew up Catholic, grew up volunteering, grew up giving herself freely. So she carried a quiet assumption that her knowledge wasn’t the kind of thing people pay for. There are a thousand free resources about the Camino. What did she have to add? It took her a while to land on the obvious answer. She’s walked it fifteen times. She’s lived on it. She volunteered on it. She speaks Spanish. Carolina kept naming it back to her, plainly: your knowledge, your skill, your worth. Until Rebecca’s own question flipped. Who am I not to share this?

You can hear what that flip is worth when she talks about the people she’s helped. A family of five recently left for the Camino. The wife had never been to Europe. Neither had the kids. Rebecca planned the whole thing. And she has people now who tell her, in so many words, “I would not have done the Camino were it not for you.” She tears up saying it.

Here’s the part that maps onto anyone building something. Rebecca doesn’t build the whole program first and then go looking for people. She builds as she goes. With her first group, she made the documents as the trip needed them and sent them out. She borrows the minimum viable product idea from her teaching days, when you could pour hours into a fifteen-minute presentation only to find out it was the wrong one. “You don’t have to have it all planned perfectly in order to do it.” Her trips are even built that way: she walks with you the first three days, then leaves you to the rest, because doing it on your own is part of the point.

Most people who come to her ask the same thing first. Can I physically do this? Under that sits a quieter question. Can I do this at all? A woman on last year’s trip had a knee replaced eleven months before she walked. Rebecca once met an eighty-nine year old man walking it with his three sons. So a lot of her work isn’t logistics at all. It’s helping someone believe they can, then handing them enough real answers that the belief holds. There’s a line she first heard out on the trail: don’t let your fears load your pack.

If you’ve been carrying something you already know how to do, expertise built over years that you keep deciding you’re not ready to charge for or put in front of people, this conversation is for you. Rebecca didn’t wait until she felt ready. She started before the thing was built and let it take its shape as real people showed up.

A few other threads from the full episode:

• “You can’t plan an epiphany,” and what the Camino tends to give you instead of what you came for.

• Why she only walks people for the first three days, then lets them go.

• The one person she’s met in fourteen years who said never again.

• What she tells people who are eyeing a cruise to Alaska instead.

• How she helps people cut through the flood of Camino advice online, and why five hundred strangers telling you which shoes to wear is the problem, not the help.

• The monthly group she’s building to bring the Camino’s lessons home, whether or not you’ve ever walked it.

• The bet her own family placed on her first walk.

Curious about the Camino, or about the way Rebecca helps people get there? She’s at thecaminocalls.com and writes on Substack. Start as an observer. Look around. See if it moves you.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into In Full-Light with and !

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

Burgers and sandwiches. Refined French cuisine. Asian dishes you’ve never seen before. Modern combinations, stuff you never thought was possible to eat.

You decide to choose something you’ve never tried.

You ask for a Brazilian feijoada, seems interesting, totally new to your palate. (it’s delicious btw)

Something about it excites you, even though you can’t explain why.

The waiter comes, takes your order, and says: great choice, I’ll have the kitchen start on that right away.

Awesome. You’ll wait.

Five minutes pass.

And something shifts inside you. A quiet voice starts asking questions you don’t have answers to.

What if you don’t like it? What if you make the wrong choice? You’ve never had feijoada before, what if you’re missing out on something better?

This isn’t really about the food. It’s the fear that you’ll get it wrong. That you should already know what you want before you’ve had the chance to taste anything. That clarity is supposed to arrive before the experience, not through it.

So you call the waiter back.

He’s already on his way to the kitchen, but he turns around. Patient. Unhurried.

“I was just about to put in your feijoada order,” he says, “but I can absolutely change it. What would you like?”

You think about that fresh Italian pasta. Homemade, simple, tomato sauce. Classic. Safe. Something you know.

“The pasta, please.”

He nods and walks away.

Less than five minutes later, the doubt comes back. Stronger this time.

What am I doing? I really wanted the feijoada.

You call him back again. He comes. No frustration, no judgment, he simply listens and does what you ask.

Back to feijoada.

This goes on for hours. Feijoada. Pasta. Feijoada. Something else entirely. Back and forth, round and round, the menu open in your lap like a problem you’re trying to solve with your mind instead of your body.

The waiter never tires of you. He shows up every time you call. He holds the space for every change of mind without making you feel small for it.

But hours have passed now.

You are hungry.

And you still don’t know if you like feijoada. You don’t know if you actually want the pasta either. You haven’t tasted anything. You haven’t learned anything. You are exactly where you started, except now the afternoon is gone.

And in business, it’s not the afternoon that’s gone. It’s the year. Sometimes it’s five.

Nowhere in that restaurant, and nowhere in that menu, was there a rule that said you only get one chance to order. No one was keeping score of your choices. The kitchen was never going to run out of plates.

The only thing standing between you and knowing what you love is the willingness to taste it, to experiment, and to dislike it.

This happens in business all the time.

So many people work in their business for five years, even longer, and in the fear of making a mistake they never order anything. They are not clear about what they do or what they like.

They avoid failure so completely that they never succeed.

And then there’s another trap. Some people do order the feijoada. They try it, they don’t love it and then they don’t use that information for anything. They think that because they chose feijoada, they have to keep eating it. That the choice is permanent. That changing means they failed.

But life is always evolving. You are always evolving. Your business should be evolving too.

You don’t need to make every mistake. But you do need to try things that won’t work, because that’s one of the most powerful ways to get clarity on what is truly yours.

You already know you need to move. You’ve known for a while. Knowing has never been the problem.

Doubt kills manifestation.

And I want to be honest with you. The doubt didn’t come from nowhere. It came from somewhere real. A business that didn’t work before. Someone who told you your ideas were too much. A version of you that learned early that being wrong had consequences.

The doubt made sense once. It was protecting you.

It’s just that protection and growth cannot live in the same body at the same time.

It spreads your energy, creates incoherence, feeds self-sabotage. And yes, it takes courage to go all in on something. That’s real. But here’s what’s also real:

I’m not going to tell you there’s no risk. There is. Trying something real costs something real. But staying stuck has a cost too, and that one never shows up on an invoice. It shows up in who you’re becoming, slowly, quietly, while you wait to feel ready.

Loving feijoada or hating it, eating it should be a reason to celebrate. From that new space, with that new information, you keep moving. You adjust. Less salt, more sausage, less sauce, more beans.

Or you change it entirely.

You love the feijoada? Great. You don’t? Also great.

Manifesting something, only to realize you don’t like it, moves you faster in the direction of what you truly want than staying in your head ever will. Your head is a dangerous place. It can fool you for years, even decades.

Because now you know. You moved. You experienced something. You own it.

After the feijoada, you have so much more information about what you like, what you don’t, about who you are. And this is the whole purpose of manifesting.

It’s not the thing itself that changes you. It’s the transformation you went through by making a choice, waiting for it, tasting it, adjusting, and ordering again.

We are not wired for that. In fact, we are not wired to live life. We are wired to stay safe, and staying safe has never once made anyone feel fully alive.

But you are reading this. Which means some part of you already knows it’s time to order.

With Love,

Carolina

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

What a fun workday ahead of me, and what a joy to witness wins like that.

I was flooding with gratitude. I looked outside the window and the only thing I could say was thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thanks, life, for so much.

I sent a message to , expressing my joy and gratitude for having him as my partner in this adventure.

Then I felt like writing this.

This is for you if you feel discouraged, frustrated, so fearful that you will never get there. That your work life drains your energy and always has. That you know there is more but you just feel lost about how to get there.

This is also for you if you do what you love but your financial goals never really stabilized to support what you need for an abundant life for you and your family.

It is possible, but don’t give up. Don’t trade what is in your heart for anything. Don’t let fear and disappointment make you believe this is not for you.

It is.

I thought I was a lost case. I thought I would never fully love my work. That this was the reality of most people, anyway.

Don’t believe that.

If you had asked me 10 years ago if I would be doing what I do now, I would have never guessed.

But if I look back and reassess what brought me here?

I would say resilience.

Never giving up, and following all the signs that I could possibly perceive that my heart was always right. Never allowing my thoughts of fear and frustration to dictate how my life would unfold. Instead, I used them as fuel to discover different ways of consciously creating what I wanted and allowing life to surprise me.

Being around people who believed in the same thing I did was huge. It was a way of reminding myself: some people are doing it, so I can too. I am not crazy, I am not alone.

What kept me moving wasn’t only resilience in the hard moments. There was always an excitement about where I was going. Gratitude for where I am, yes, but always a pull toward something bigger than what I currently believed I could have.

And instead of pushing that away, I learned to make it safe. To build enough capacity in my system to hold the desire without making myself wrong for not having it yet. To let it exist with kindness and care, not force it down in the name of staying peaceful where I was.

This is actually the work we do in Radiant Flow, our embodiment community within Sacred Business Flow. Building that capacity so the desire doesn’t have to be suppressed or desperately chased.

It can just guide.

The other part was action. Challenging the beliefs my body held as absolute truth. And often, taking a step before I could fully see the ground. There is a saying: you take the step and the universe gives you the ground.

It’s true. And it’s terrifying.

But it’s how I found my way into something I could never have planned.

Now, I meet my inner child in my workdays. Playfulness, curiosity, wonder. Those are not exceptions to my days, they are mostly alive in my everyday life. Those are no longer feelings I feel only when I’m traveling or on vacation.

They are part of a normal Wednesday when my agenda is full of calls and mostly a whole day in front of the computer.

Uniting joy and money. That hasn’t been an achievement I unlocked. It’s been a gift. One I had to make myself available to receive.

I don’t need to be miserable making money or broke doing what I love.

I can love what I do and make money at the same time. This is my game and I create the rules.

So do you.

The answer is in your heart. Your mind will challenge you, until it jumps on board, because the feeling is so strong you can’t deny it.

Looking back now, I can see that every wall I hit was actually building something. The things that worked and the things that didn’t were all moving me in the same direction, because I never let the desire to experience more of my essence die.

So when you say “that didn’t work,” I want to invite you to pause there. Didn’t it? Or did it just not give you the result you were measuring for in that moment?

If you have a clear intention of where you’re going, nothing is wasted. The failed launch, the client who said no, the thing you built that nobody bought. All of it was building capacity, sharpening something, preparing you for what’s coming.

But there is one condition. You have to stay in it. You can’t land on “it didn’t work” and go quiet. You need to decide that you will believe this is for you too.

It doesn’t matter how long it will take.

As long as you’re moving, as long as your heart is still in it, it’s all serving you.

I am so pleased I never gave up. I would do everything again just to be where I am now. And I know deep in my heart, it keeps getting better and better.

Aliveness, joy, fun, enthusiasm, and money-making can walk together.

With love,

Carolina

Who We are Celebrating This Week:

This week we had the honor of getting to know a little more, and her beautiful project to create a space that supports women in reconnecting with their joy.

Michele’s approach is unique. She meets you exactly where you are, and there is no one-size-fits-all recipe. Through experimentation and embodiment, she guides her group in a safe space to reconnect with joy.

Why does this matter?

In my opinion, this is the medicine for everything. Someone operating in joy is generous. They think about community, about support. Someone operating in joy sees the world as a playground and will do everything they can to contribute to making this planet a better place.

I love this: if you don’t know where to start, start with yourself. Work on reconnecting with what brings you joy and aliveness. That’s my path too, and it changed my relationship with life, affecting my health, my work, and everything else.

Things I’d Like to Share

on Sacred Business Stories

Sam is a huge inspiration to me. I use his example with clients all the time. I call him the master of connection and here’s why.

He is genuinely interested in other people. He loves to support creators on Substack, and he does it with a wide open heart. What does he get from that? I’m sure his own joy of being such a generous human being. But he also receives real support, deep friendships, and has experienced major growth in his publication over the last year.

If you want to understand what real connection looks like in practice, pay close attention to what Sam is doing.

Slow AI is not about learning to prompt better. It’s about learning how to relate to AI in a way that supports your thinking and makes you smarter every time you sit down with it.

Memorable Quote

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop - Confucius

New Here?

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

She finally stopped trying. Now she is building something called The Joy Club Way.

On Episode 5 of In Full Light, Carolina and I sat down with Michele to talk about the work she is stepping into and the inner shift that made it possible. Michele is a developmental psychologist and an educational psychologist, with a yoga teacher certification and 30 years of spiritual study layered underneath the academic work. Her credential list is long enough that she has been questioning whether she has any business writing about joy at all. Her answer to that question is the whole episode.

Michele shared about how she volunteered to teach Intro to Psychology at a prison. She did not just teach the textbook. She showed her students how to use what they were learning to find more freedom inside their cells. Their final projects, she said, blew her away. And the line she said next was the one we kept coming back to.

“I felt more joy there than I felt in church, for sure.”

Michele is not running a positivity program. She has chronic illness. She has years of meditation she does not actually enjoy. She knows what it is to sit with grief and rage and the long stuckness that nobody’s 10-minute walk after dinner is going to fix. Her definition of joy is sturdier than that.

“Joy is a sense of being connected to your purpose, to being oriented towards growth, to being present and to being connected.”

What makes Michele rare is that she has the academic credentials to be a one-trick specialist, and she refuses. She wants the mind work, the heart work, and the body work in the same conversation. She wants developmental psychology and contemplative prayer in the same room. She references both Joe Hudson and Thomas Keating in the same sentence. The integration is the work. The thing she is moving away from is the part of her career that asked her to hide.

If you have built a career around credentials and you can feel a quieter voice asking you to bring more of yourself into the room, this conversation is for you. If you have been told to optimize, add the 10-minute walk, fit the meditation in, and you can feel that the prescription is the problem, Michele has a different way of thinking about all of it.

A few other threads from the full episode:

• Why Michele thinks the yoga modification is not a consolation prize, and what teachers miss when they prescribe a pose instead of meeting the point of resistance

• The Joe Hudson line she keeps coming back to: joy is the matriarch of emotions, and she will not enter the house unless her children come too

• The Steven Pressfield War of Art passage about resistance, and why scaffolding is her answer to getting unstuck

• The fourth-grade girl with the lowest IQ in the room, the poem she wrote, and the moment Michele declared her the class poet laureate

• A cold bath, a yoga modification, and a nutritionist’s diet plan walk into the same problem: when a teacher confuses the goal with the practice, students start overriding their own inner wisdom

• The Frozen 2 song Michele says brought her here, and why she still will not sing it (yet)

• The mind, heart, and body framework underneath The Joy Club Way, and the three forces that derail each of them

• Her closing line for everyone listening, which is the opposite of every productivity message you have heard this week

If you want to follow Michele work, subscribe to her Substack, The Joy Club Way. She is building in public and the goodies only reach subscribers, not followers.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 26, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Not a dramatic dissatisfaction. A dull, persistent one. The kind that doesn’t make noise but never fully leaves.

For the longest time I thought there was something wrong with me.

Why can’t I like anything I do? Why don’t I even know what I like?

I remember my mom telling me years ago how hard it was for her to understand what I was going through. She said: this was never really a thing for me. I knew I wanted to be a psychologist, so that’s what I did. She always knew.

Not me.

I remember watching her face, confused by my confusion. And then turning that confusion back on myself. If even she can’t make sense of this... it really must be me.

Maybe this is you too. And if it is, you are not alone. This is real. It doesn’t mean you are broken.

But I didn’t know that.

I did vocational tests and rolled my eyes at the results. Went over every course at every university around me and felt nothing. Not even a flicker of yes.

I picked tourism because I loved to travel, then hated the industry. No time, no air, nothing of my own.

Then business management, because if you don’t know what to do, go generalist. At least you’ll fit somewhere.

Even without knowing what I truly loved, I gave everything I had to whatever was in front of me. I was succeeding. On paper, I was doing great.

But nothing felt natural. Nothing ever felt like mine. You know that feeling… I was born to do this…. nah… not me.

And there was that voice. You know the one. Why don’t you just like what you do. Why can’t you enjoy it. Out of everything in the world, nothing? You are so complicated, so fussy, so hard to please.

Why are you the only one this lost?

I believed it.

So I made a deal with life. Make money here, enjoy there. Stop complaining in between.

It worked. Until it didn’t.

The dissatisfaction kept growing. The headaches too. The few weeks off a year were never enough to breathe. I was always waiting, for the weekend, for the vacation, for the time when I didn’t have to be there. And sucking it up in between.

I had accepted this as truth. This is just life.

But underneath the acceptance, something quieter knew better. A feeling I couldn’t shake, that it wasn’t right to live like this. I just had no reference for anything different. The people around me either genuinely loved what they did, or they did it for the money and complaining about it was ok.

Both options felt foreign to me.

I wasn’t either.

My life didn’t change overnight. But somewhere along the way I got tired of asking what was wrong with me. And something shifted, not overnight, not dramatically.

I just got curious.

Open to something I didn’t know was possible. Willing to stop making myself wrong for the confusion, the frustration, the dissatisfaction that had lived in me for so long.

From self-attack to curiosity. That was the move.

And life started responding. Slowly. In ways I was finally ready to see.

That I didn’t have to choose one thing. That I could take all the parts of me, and combine them into something entirely mine. Not a path someone designed. A container I built. One that finally felt natural. That felt like ease.

I didn’t need to fit anywhere.

I needed to build something that fit me.

With Love,

Carolina

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

He was a tenured full professor with a PhD in atmospheric physics, a decade of public engagement behind him, a science & poetry blog that had peaked at a quarter-million views a year, and a past life as an award-winning playwright. He didn’t need this to pay for anything.

What he wanted was simple. He wanted to give people honest, accessible information about AI at the exact moment the digital divide was about to widen.

The problem with that opening promise was that he was about to spend twelve months learning everything he didn’t know about marketing, pricing, and what a paywall actually does for a creator’s ecosystem. His friend of Robot Stole My Homework, who he’d met through Substack, kept teasing him about it. He didn’t know what B2B meant until about six months before we recorded this episode . And the more he sat with that line in his first post, the less right it felt.

“I think having the confidence to be able to realize that your truth can change with you as you evolve, that’s quite difficult to square.”

Those were Sam’s words on the show. He said them about the day he decided to start charging for Slow AI. The irony is that the moment he changed his mind was the moment Slow AI started becoming what it is now.

The part most people already know is the growth. Sixteen thousand subscribers in under a year. Just under three hundred of them paid at £100 a year. Paid members get access to a monthly webinar curriculum that ends in an accredited continuing professional development certificate, the kind you can write off as a tax expense or stack as actual credits. He runs a Slow AI Live every Monday with his friend from . He just crossed a thousand followers on TikTok, where he does investigative AI journalism. He’s also the author of Gen AI in Higher Education.

So we had him on Sacred Business Stories this week to walk back through how he built it. The part most people don’t hear is what he had to change his mind about along the way.

The arc starts long before Slow AI. PhD in atmospheric physics. Then years on the intersection of science and theater. Then a decade of using poetry to platform the voices of marginalized people in science. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, he saw the next problem coming. AI was going to widen the divide between those who had access and those who didn’t, and there weren’t many academic voices speaking about it in a way regular people could use. That was the gap Slow AI was built into.

The decision to charge came after a hard internal conversation. What would a paid product even look like? Should it exist at all? He kept circling back to something he’d learned years earlier as a working poet. He used to do school workshops and talks for free until another poet told him that doing free work was taking paid work away from the people who needed it to be their living. Free, done by the people who didn’t need to charge, dilutes the field for everyone else.

“There is more than enough room for everybody to succeed in everything.”

That’s the line he kept coming back to. Once he stopped treating charging as the opposite of generosity, he found the structure that worked. £100 for the year. £25 for the month. He set the annual rate to filter for subscribers who’d stay locked in for the full curriculum, not subscribers cycling out at month two.

Two things stood out from the conversation.

The first was the line he said about evolving.

“Your truth can change with you as you evolve.”

That’s a pricing story on the surface. There’s a wider permission slip underneath. Most people who start a publication put something in writing on day one and feel locked in by it. They build a brand around the version of themselves who wrote that first sentence. Sam’s experience says you’re allowed to write a line in July, learn for nine months, and rewrite it. The product gets more clear and refined. The audience gets established. The first promise was a messy first draft in a sense.

The second was a daily practice he described for staying connected at sixteen thousand subscribers.

Two habits, every day. One restack of someone outside his usual bubble, because the Substack feed mostly shows you the people you already engage with and the algorithm needs to be pushed back against. One thank-you note to a creator whose work he wants to platform. He’s honest that this got harder past five thousand subscribers and harder again past ten. The practice is still there, deliberate, against the grain of what the algorithm wants to feed him.

The shift Sam made between the first post and the sixteen-thousandth subscriber is worth bringing attention to. He stopped treating service and money as opposites. He realized that charging was a way of not diluting service for everyone else who had to make a living from this. The audience that locked in for a year at £100 was the most invested audience he’d ever built.

Which reframes one of the most stubborn beliefs in the creator economy. That authenticity and strategy pull in opposite directions. Sam’s twelve months say they pull in the same one. Again, in my opinion, the most strategic thing he did was charge fairly. The most authentic thing he did was change his mind in public.

You can find Sam at Slow AI on Substack, on TikTok at @theslowai, and at samillingworth.com.

Slow AI

Knowing when to use AI and when to leave it the hell alone.

By Dr Sam Illingworth

He speaks to academics, educators, and working professionals who want to make informed decisions about AI without being sold the latest prompt-engineering hack. If that’s you, the curriculum is built for you.

Watch the full replay. I think you’ll love getting to know Sam.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into Sacred Business Stories Episode 44 with and !

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

The chapter that’s been on my mind since our most recent community Wonder Questions call is the one about pendulums.

what a pendulum is

When a lot of people think about the same thing for a long time, all that thinking turns into a kind of pull on the people who keep thinking about it. Zeland calls these pulls pendulums.

A pendulum has forward pull to keep going. It stays alive by pulling energy out of the people who pay attention to it. It doesn’t care if you agree or disagree. Both put energy in.

Some pendulums are easy to spot. A sports rivalry, for example, or a political argument. For example, right now in Brazil trading World Cup stickers has crazy momentum. The malls even have special areas set up for people to trade.

Others are harder to see. Your Substack feed is one. Your Stripe dashboard in the middle of a mini-course launch is another.

When you're caught in one, it doesn't feel like a “pendulum”. It feels like your own thoughts guiding you. Sometimes even an intuitive hit.

three ways to tell you’re caught in an unhelpful pendulum.

The first one is energy. You spend half an hour scrolling and you feel tired. You didn't move your body. You didn't even talk to anyone. But you have the experience of less to give to the work you wanted to do today.

Next is your attention. You sit down to write the thing you meant to write. Instead, you end up replying to someone else’s post or comment which was just a little bit triggering. The work you planned for today slides into tomorrow.

The third one is a feeling of urgency that shows up out of seemingly nowhere. The feeling that you need to respond to something right now. The urgency feels like something you own. Most of the time, it actually belongs to the pendulum from an energetic perspective.

If you can learn what that urgency feels like in your body, and how it touches your emotional center, you can catch it before you act on it.

fighting makes it stronger

The first move most people often make is to push back. They write a long reply about why the intention behind the comment is wrong, or they mute or block the person who sent it and walk off feeling slightly better.

That action helps a little.

When dealing with a pendulum, fighting and agreeing are the same thing. They both require energy being invested. You can spend an hour writing a takedown of someone’s bad idea. What you’ve done is give the bad idea another hour of life.

This is why someone you can't stand can sometimes take up as much of your time in your life as someone you love. You read every post they put out. You complain about each one. Either way, the hours have been spent. The pendulum doesn't care which side you're on.

how to actually stop one

You stop a pendulum by not pushing against it. That’s the whole technique.

When the urgency shows up, you don’t have to act on it. You let the feeling pass and keep doing what you were doing.

In real life, this looks like leaving your phone face-down for a minute when everything within you is screaming to grab it. Or seeing a post that’s getting a lot of attention and choosing not to write one like it just because it would do well for the algorithms . Nothing has to change externally. What changes is the internal stance you choose to adopt.

two questions

When I feel that urgency now, I ask myself two questions. They are simple.

Question one.

“Is this feeling coming from what I actually care about, or is it coming from whats coming into awareness?”

Sometimes the answer is the first one. The urgency is real and I should act. Most of the time, that’s not the answer.

Question two.

“If I weren’t under the pull of an external force, what would I actually want to do?”

This one is more useful. The answer often surprises me. There is an opportunity to choose differently.

not caring is also a trap

Most of us never get good at this because we think the only way to stop being pulled is to stop caring. That isn’t true.

Not caring is its own pendulum. It’s a heavy one. You have to keep reminding yourself that you don’t care about things you actually do care about. That takes effort, and the effort drains you.

What Zeland calls neutrality is something else. Neutrality means you care about something without giving it your energy. You can still respond and you can still act. You just don’t get pulled around by what’s in front of you.

It feels like reading a comment on something you wrote and noticing the small urge to defend yourself. You let the urge pass through before you reply. Then you reply, or you don’t. The reply tends to be better. And you don’t lose the rest of the day to the task.

what this has to do with your business

Your business is one of the strongest pendulums in your life. Most people assume the actual work is what wears them out. Then they look back at their week and notice the writing or coaching took just a handful of hours. The rest of the time went to obsessively checking the sales dashboard and reading the group chat of their favorite community to size themselves up against what other people had done.

A lot of people and I work with have spent years doing inner work. They think if they keep going deeper, the pull of negativity will stop. The inner work matters. But it usually doesn’t break a pendulum.

What helps is changing how you relate to the forces at work around you. You can keep posting on Substack and stop allowing your energy to swing with what you see being published on the platform. You can keep watching your sales dashboard without letting it decide what kind of week you had. From the outside, you can’t tell the difference. Inside, the stance is different.

Sometimes for success to become more stabilized in our client’s businesses, all they to focus on is stopping from bleeding energy into the parts of their business that pull their focus away from the things that matter. The strategy is often fine. The patience to stay with day by day ordinary parts of running their business is being draing by things they didn’t even realize were robbing them of their energy.

try this for a week

Before you check anything, ask yourself one question. “Is this me, or is this what I’m about to look at, pulling on energy?”

Don’t change what you do. Just answer the question.

The first week I tried this, my Stripe number dipped for three days, then came back. The writing got better my sleep got better too.

You are not as free as you think you are. The part of you that doesn’t want to hear that is the part the pendulums rely on to keep them going.

That’s worth thinking about.

Phil (& Carolina)

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

Most people building a business only ever know the first one.

If you’re building online, you have to be seen so the right people can find you. There’s no one-size-fits-all recipe for that, and there are many ways to go about it. But in every way, visibility challenges us differently.

In last week’s Radiant Flow class, we tried to experience visibility from neutrality. Because like everything in life, we give a charge to things based on our own experience.

Visibility, on its own, is neither good nor bad, just like money. It carries the meaning you give it.

But it lands differently in each of us depending on how we perceive it. And based on that, we either take action, or we don’t.

Two ways of seeing visibility

From a business perspective, visibility is your ability to be seen so people know you exist and can solve a problem they have.

From a spiritual perspective, visibility is a natural quality of your soul.

Your soul didn’t come here to hide. It came to make the light visible through you, through your body, through everything you create. That is visibility in its purest form.

So what is being visible, if not the act of coming home to yourself and letting someone witness it?

Being visible isn’t performance. It can be executed from that space. But when you find your music within, you want others to experience it. It doesn’t come from forcing or needing. It comes from the desire to experience yourself naturally without protection, without defenses.

The problem: these two perspectives rarely meet

“If I want a business, I need to…” - and there’s a long list of things you should do.

That’s why many gifted people never fully build one. They refuse to play the game of performance that successful people seem to be playing.

But what if you could have a successful business and still operate from the feeling-home energy of visibility? What if you could be consistent, disciplined, and build something real without needing, forcing, or proving?

Visibility doesn’t change when it hits the business world. It gets challenged. By the charge in the field. By all the “you must,” “you should,” “that’s how you do it” advice out there.

You, as a creator, get to choose: do you want to experience visibility as performance, or as a natural quality of your being?

A Sacred Business is where both versions finally meet

Where being found by the right people and feeling at home in yourself aren’t two separate things. They’re the same movement.

You are not committed to posting on social media three times a day. You are committed to your own light. And that changes everything.

Hiding isn’t the answer either

Hiding carries the same exhausting energy as performance. In both, you’re not flowing - you’re protecting yourself.

In hiding, you protect your light from being experienced by many. In performance, you protect it too by being seen only through the lens you think the world will accept.

Both drain you.

What we truly want is to come home to ourselves. To open our hearts and serve. To help others from that space.

I’m learning that being seen, for me, is allowing more of my light to shine. And when I do that, something unexpected happens . I see that light more clearly in others, too. That feels like ease. Openness. Aliveness.

Your business deserves that version of you.

And your soul deserves a business that serves as a container for your light to be seen.

With love,

Carolina

Who We are Celebrating This Week:

and his upcoming book, the Wellbeing Equation

Things I’d Like to Share

Conversation with founder of Second Callings

Eva built her business from the heart, and now she helps others find their second calling. It takes courage to step fully into that and I love being around happy people building fun, profitable businesses that make them feel whole in their expression.

One thing Eva said stayed with me:

You can start a brand new business and still have the old pattern running underneath it. A new dream, same old energy in charge.

The real work isn’t just naming the pattern - it’s going deeper than the label. That’s exactly what she helps her people do.

An inspiring read this week: I Lost Myself Building the Thing I Dreamed Of — by

A raw, vulnerable piece for anyone who feels uninspired, disconnected, or a little lost inside the version of themselves they worked so hard to become.

Sage Marinelli

I Lost Myself Building the Thing I Dreamed Of

This might be the most vulnerable I’ve ever been online, but I thought sharing it might inspire someone else who feels uninspired, disconnected, or a little lost in the version of themselves they worked so hard to become…

Read more

a month ago · 12 likes · 10 comments · Sage Marinelli

New Here?

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.

Carolina and I spent close to forty minutes with Bronce for an author spotlight, and the conversation centered on a moment that changed his trajectory going forward

During the pandemic, he was limited by the number of patients he coul see. He moved to telehealth, and his calendar filled in a way it had never filled before. He capped his schedule at nine people a day, five days a week, and even at that pace he started having to turn people away. Long-time clients calling back, asking for an hour, and he had nothing left to give them. In his words, “in my world, that was a little bit of a sin.”

That sentence is the seed of his book.

The book is called The Wellbeing Equation. He has been working on it since the pandemic. He told us he wrote it to 240,000 words before he knew how to stop. He’s now cutting it down to publish at fifty or sixty thousand. He got an agent last October, after thirty years in private practice, and as we recorded this his proposal is currently in front of publishing houses.

What strikes you about Bronce, the second you start talking to him, is the rigor underneath the warmth. He spent ten years getting through his psychoanalysis training. He doesn’t speak in slogans. When we asked him for the one thing in his wellbeing framework, he gave us three (sleep, diet, exercise) and then refused to call it three things. He calls it one thing, because the body and the mind have to be functioning before any of the higher work becomes possible.

His central image is what stayed with us. Bronce describes everyone’s wellbeing equation as a fingerprint. The components are universal. Sleep, food, movement, connection, spirit. But the way they combine is yours alone. Most of the advice you’ve absorbed in the last decade has been someone else’s fingerprint pressed onto your life. His book is an attempt to give people permission to find their own.

There’s a moment about halfway through the conversation where he turns the questions back on us. He asks how we built what we built. How Carolina and I work together. What the experience has been like inside the container. It’s a generous move from a guest, and it’s the move of a working analyst. He doesn’t perform expertise. He listens.

A few other threads from the full episode:

The Trifecta of Wellness, and why he refuses to call it three things.

What he means when he says writing this book has become a spiritual journey.

The phrase “experiments in living,” and why he keeps returning to it.

The five-word sentence Carolina gave him near the end that he said would change how he thinks about waiting: “holding the pose.”

What he might write next, sparked by listening to us describe our partnership in real time.

Subscribe to his Substack and read his pinned essay, “Your Wellbeing Equation is Like a Fingerprint” here. When the book launches, his readers there will be the first to know.

The Wellbeing Equation | Bronce J. Rice

Psychoanalyst | Psychologist | Health & Wellness Coach dedicated to helping you understand and enhance your wellbeing.

By Dr. Bronce Rice

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.

and I spent an hour with her on Episode 003 of In Full Light, and the conversation was the kind that doesn’t really leave you. Eva is the founder of Second Callings. She works with midlife professionals who built a good life, hit the markers they were told to hit, and now feel something else stirring. Her job is to help them name it, see the pattern that has been running quietly underneath everything, and build the work that fits who they’re becoming.

She did not arrive at this work in a straight line.

Eva’s father died when she was fifteen. He was a physician, a dreamer, and he left blueprints for a hospital on the dining room table. Plans he never got to build. Eva spent the next three decades trying to make her time matter in his honor. She went to business school because her mother was struggling with finances after he died and Eva promised herself she would never not understand money. She built businesses that looked successful from the outside. She fainted at her desk once from exhaustion. She gave from a cup that was empty for so long she forgot what a full one felt like.

Five years ago she started circling the work that is now Second Callings. She could not quite step into it. She kept editing, kept hiding, kept telling herself she’d be ready when she was ready. Eventually she stopped trying. She surrendered the whole thing to God, the Creator, in her words. She said whatever you want me to do, I will do it. I have no desire.

And then a door she did not expect opened. An opportunity came to manage some investments. The part of her resume she had been most ashamed of, the finance training she resented for two decades, became the thing that funded the launch of the work she was born to do. She told us she can’t quite recognize her life now.

The reason this episode matters for our community is not just the story. It’s what she’s doing with it.

There is a moment in the conversation where Carolina asks her what she wishes more people understood about her work. Eva’s answer is the cleanest articulation of a pattern we see constantly. Most people, she says, know the label. I’m an achiever. I’m a perfectionist. But naming the pattern doesn’t change it. You can build a whole new business with the same old energy running underneath, and it will just hustle in a different costume. The real work is slower. It’s quieter. It goes deeper than the labels.

She also said something about authority that I want to underline.

She used to equate her competence with her income. If she wasn’t earning, she wasn’t good. The marketing world made it worse by selling proof-of-competence through screenshots. What she has come to believe, and what she now offers her clients, is that the credential people actually want is lived experience. They want a guide who has been where they are standing. Not a curriculum. A witness.

If you are someone who built the life you were told to build, and you feel something quieter and truer trying to surface underneath it, this episode is the kind of conversation you’ll want to sit with twice.

A few other threads from the full episode:

• The Care framework she built during her pause year, and the moment of internal safety it depended on.

• Why play is not a reward you earn at the end. Why it has to be part of the process or the process eventually hollows out.

• The Autopilot Assessment that names the pattern running in the background, and why she designed it as the first step.

• Her 25-year vision, including the conversation she is currently having with her university about bringing this work into education.

• The phrase she used that we keep coming back to: “We are a once-in-a-lifetime cosmic event. There is nobody like you.”

Thank you , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

This episode 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.