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

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

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

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

No F-ing way. The buck stops here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read that again if you have a chat window open.

Two moments from the interview stood out.

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

Shannon’s read on it was extremely sharp:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The advice underneath all of it:

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

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

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

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

The Sacred Ebb by Shannon Algeo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All decisions can be undone.

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

Two moments from the conversation stood out.

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

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

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

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

Be you. Don’t be me. I’m already me.

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

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

You are the CEO of you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Matt runs a boutique email performance agency. He helps entrepreneurs make sure their emails actually land in inboxes instead of spam. It sounds dry. But oh so important.

Most first-time creators don’t think about deliverability until they have a problem. They build an audience, they send emails, and suddenly half their emails are landing in promotions or they’re getting spam complaints they don’t understand. By then, the damage is harder to undo.

Matt is the person you call when that happens. I’ve called him. When we were moving our list from ActiveCampaign over to Kit and connecting it with Substack, when we needed to understand what was actually happening with our email health, and that’s when I reached out.

What makes Matt different is that he can explain something genuinely technical and boring and make it clear. He doesn’t overcomplicate it. He doesn’t hide behind jargon. He just says: here’s what’s happening, here’s why it matters, here’s what you do about it.

What We Talked About

We went deep on how email performance actually works. Not the copywriting part. Not the psychology. The mechanics. The infrastructure. The stuff that determines whether your best email ever written lands where people can see it or disappears into the void.

We talked about:

• Why your sender reputation matters more than most people realize

• What happens when you import a list incorrectly (and how to catch it)

• How to keep your email health strong as you scale

• What to look for if your deliverability starts dropping

• Why the platforms you choose (ActiveCampaign, Kit, Substack, whatever) have different capabilities for protecting that health

The conversation was technical. But it was also practical. Matt has built his entire business around the reality that most founders and creators don’t know this stuff exists until they need it.

Why You Should Listen

If you’re building an audience and you send email, this is relevant. Not because you need to become an email infrastructure expert. But because you need to understand the baseline. You need to know when something’s off before it becomes a crisis.

Matt also has a gift for making complex things sound simple. That’s rare. And if you ever hit a deliverability wall, you’ll want to know who to call.

He’s building at deliverabilitynow.com. Subscribe to his newsletter. It’s good.

For context, Billy is the guy who supported the creation our messaging foundation for Sacred Business Flow back when we were too close to it to see it ourselves. Author of Simple Marketing for Smart People. Creator of the Five Lightbulbs framework, which we still apply almost daily. He just launched a new Substack called Fractal Faith, and the conversation we had with him went somewhere I wasn’t expecting.

Most marketing conversations stay in tactics. This one started in tactics for about six minutes and then went somewhere I rarely hear marketers willing to go.

Billy uses a metaphor early on about fish, water, and what we’ve all been swimming in without realizing. I’d heard him use the metaphor before, but the way he applied it to the entire marketing industry stopped me. Where he takes it from there is the part I want you to hear from him directly.

He also names a single question, near the end, that he says will tell you whether your marketing is crossing a line or not. One question. He gives it to you in a simple sentence you can sit with for yourself.

Carolina said something in this conversation I had almost forgotten about her. She confessed she rejected marketing entirely for the first three years of her previous business. Why she changed her mind, and what she heard from Billy that supported her own growth, is a pretty nice moment in the episode.

And there’s a story Billy tells about leaving his energy industry job at twenty-nine, expecting his side business to take off. What actually happened next, and the phrase he uses to describe that in-between place, is worth pressing play for if you are feeling stalled out right now.

Another fun surprise connection was hearing about ’s influence on Billy’s journey, after just having him on the show a few weeks ago.

The whole thing runs about fifty-five minutes.

If you’ve ever caught yourself avoiding marketing because something about it felt off, or you’ve quietly wondered whether there’s a way to do this work without giving up your dignity or theirs, this is the conversation for you.

For more from billy, check out his new substack at Fractal Faith and marketingisanargument.com

Phil (& Carolina)

Fractal Faith

I used to find reality puzzling. Christianity was the missing piece.

By Billy Broas

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

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 5, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work there.

We sat down with last week. About twenty-five minutes came through in the replay. The first fifteen didn’t. Substack swallowed the opening. Honestly, I was pretty gutted, and I sat with the recording for a few days wondering whether to share the replay at all.

Then I caught myself.

This was a conversation about beginning before you’re ready and shipping the imperfect thing. And I was about to scrap it because the recording wasn’t perfect lol.

Honestly, Leo’s been someone I’ve considered a friend for years now. So here it is.

Imperfect, missing the opening, but still some great food for thought, as Leo is one of the wisest dudes I know. I listen to what this guy has to say, and you should too.

A few things from this conversation I think are worth drawing attention to:

There’s a moment where Leo names a particular trap AI is setting for ambitious people, and and interesting framing. He calls Claude his “best cheerleader.” Why he frames that as a problem is the part you should check out.

Carolina asked him about fear and resistance. He answered with a sewing project he’s been working on for years. (Yes, sewing.) Where he took that, and how he tied it back to his own Substack, was also a great moment worth watching.

And toward the end, he answered a question about growth in a way you might not quite expect from someone who’s built the audience he has. The line started with “growth is a loaded topic for a lot of people.”

The whole thing runs about twenty-seven minutes.

If you’ve ever caught yourself opening twelve tabs because Claude told you all twelve ideas were brilliant, this one’s for you.

Phil (& Carolina)

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

The Zen of Doing

A book in progress, on doing hard things with ease, by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits.

By Leo Babauta

She writes a Substack called Robots Ate My Homework. Half Armenian, half Romanian. Film studies in London, two master’s degrees, a decade in B2B content marketing, a content agency built with her husband, and now one of the most interesting voices on AI on Substack.

Her tagline says it. AI with brains, taste, and an unreasonable amount of depth.

And then, somewhere around the twenty-minute mark, she turned a question back on me.

I don’t want to set it up too much. The full exchange is on the feed and it’s worth hearing in her voice. What I’ll say is this. The question pulled at a habit I’d already been quietly questioning. The moment that followed left Carolina and me looking at each other across the call. The line that closed it landed in one short phrase I haven’t been able to put down since.

That’s one of three or four moments in this conversation that really made me go “woah”.

Among the others.

She doesn’t write tutorials. Her brain, in her own words, is 99% on the creative side, and her code “fights back” when she vibe-codes. So when AI shows up and the rest of the field is racing to explain it, she’s doing something else entirely. She lets the trend sit. Watches what people say about it for a week or two. Then connects it to a book or a film or a note she jotted down on a different day. The newsletter that comes out of that process sits on three pillars I think most people writing about AI right now are missing. I won’t spoil them. They’re worth hearing her name.

She also said the thing substack writers don’t usually like to admit on a podcast.

She started Substack as an outreach engine. The first posts were about her product. Then something shifted and she stopped pitching. When I asked her how she made the call, her answer was a single sentence and one of the cleaner reframes of “strategy” I’ve heard in a while. Carolina caught it before I did.

And on connection, which is the thing most people on Substack are quietly anxious about, her advice was almost embarrassingly simple. The kind of simple you only earn after ten years.

The conversation runs about thirty minutes.

If any of the above is making you curious, watch the the full episode above. Mia’s publication is Robots Ate My Homework. Both worth your time.

And if you’re wondering what her question was, you’ll have to listen.

ROBOTS ATE MY HOMEWORK

AI systems that sharpen your mind, your work, and your taste without turning you into another robot in the circus. Yes, the robots ate your homework, but they kept the good parts.

By Mia Kiraki 🎭

What he wanted was simple. He didn’t want to keep spending his life on work he hated.

The hard part was that his real estate brokerage had just become the first business he’d ever built that made more money than his big-law job would have. He had something to prove with it. And now, recovering from brain surgery, he was thinking hard about everything he didn’t actually want to spend his life doing.

“I’m not doing this anymore.”

Those were the words. Shocking, in his telling, because of the family he now had to feed. But clarity arrives fast when you’ve just been that close to the edge.

What came next is the part most people already know in some form, because Brian is the founder of Copyblogger. He built three seven-figure no-employee businesses in three years, combined them into what became an eight-figure software and hosting company, did $70 million in sales between 2007 and 2017, and sold in 2018. Then, at an age when most of his peers were talking about retirement, he started a Substack called Further, built for the generation that employers start pushing out the door somewhere between 58 and 62.

So we had him on Sacred Business Stories this week to trace the arc. The part most people don’t hear is what happened before the wins.

He’d quit law in 1998. His first business failed. It was an email newsletter company, which, as he pointed out, is roughly the same thing everyone on Substack is doing in 2026. He just got there 28 years too early and didn’t understand how to sell anything. He thought you monetized content with advertising. The dot-com crash ended it for him, and in his words, that was a mercy killing.

Then he read one line in Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing.

“The Internet is the greatest direct marketing medium the world has ever seen.”

That was the sentence that reset his path. He taught himself copywriting and studied direct response going back to the 1920s. By the time he launched Copyblogger in 2006, he was treating the internet as a relationship game rather than a publishing one.

Two things stood out in the conversation.

The first was a quote that’s stuck with me since we recorded.

Apply that anywhere you like. AI, Substack, the dopamine feed on whatever platform ate your morning. The useful question is what side of you a given tool tends to amplify.

The second was about values-based marketing. Brian made the point that values aren’t automatically good. Greed is a value. Figures like have audiences because they’re marketing with precision to the values of those audiences, and it’s been okay on the internet for a long time, in his words, to be awful. Which means writers who sit on their message because they’re worried about being disliked are making the problem worse. They leave the space empty. Somebody fills it. Usually not someone you’d want doing the filling.

His advice to anyone hesitating was unfussy.

“If you try to create generic content because you’re afraid to say anything that matters, you will not succeed.”

The shift Brian made after the brain surgery is worth naming clearly. He stopped building from an energy of having something to prove. He started building something he actually cared about. The irony, as he put it, is that the decade after that shift is the one that produced the $70 million.

Which reframes a belief a lot of people carry into their work. The idea that purpose and practicality pull in opposite directions. Brian’s experience says they pull in the same one. The decade he made his most purpose-aligned decisions was also the decade he made the most money.

You can find Brian writing at news.further.net.

Further: Live Long and Prosper

Stop hoping for some mythical "golden years" retirement. Start building a location-independent business at midlife that lets you live anywhere and maximize your freedom and happiness... right now, in your prime.

By Brian Clark

He speaks mostly to 45 to 70 year olds who aren’t ready to retire and aren’t going to be allowed to coast much longer either. Gen X, in his framing, is the canary in the coal mine for what happens next.

Check out the fully replay. He doesn’t waste the hour.

That instinct to translate complexity into something a real person can actually use has followed her ever since. It’s in the way she practiced medicine. It’s in the patient eBooks she made long before “content creation” was a thing. And it’s in The Habit Healers, her Substack publication that crossed 50,000 Facebook followers in just two months and keeps growing because it does something most health writing doesn’t: it starts from where people actually are, not from where we assume they should be.

This conversation with Laurie was honest in the best way. She didn’t pretend her path wasn’t messy. She talked about the soul-crushing side of military medicine, about the fear that lives inside every pivot, and about how a patient who started with two push-ups on a kitchen counter now does 60 in a row. That last one I loved. Because that’s exactly what this show is about.

Show Notes

[00:00] — Welcome & Who Is Dr. Laurie Marbas

Laurie is a board-certified physician with an MD and MBA who has been writing and creating content online for over a decade. She founded The Habit Healers to bring metabolic health science into everyday language, paired with small, actionable protocols people can actually follow. She started on Substack in January 2025 and has grown quickly by applying the same thinking she used to survive medical school: break it down, explain it clearly, and make it fun.

[00:02] — Growing Up Without a Map

Laurie grew up in a home without health insurance, with parents who didn’t finish high school. When her four-year-old sister got sick and had a surgery that changed her life, Laurie decided at age ten that she wanted to be part of that. Nobody handed her a roadmap. Her stepdad hadn’t finished school. Her mom had her at 19. What she had instead was the decision that those facts weren’t reasons to stop.

• She learned early that when people said “you can’t be a doctor,” she didn’t compute it. She moved on.

• Her grandmother was one of the adults who reflected a different possibility back to her

• The gap between what people around her had done and what she wanted to do became fuel. She just kept going.

[00:04] — Drawing Cartoons Through Medical School

Starting medical school with children aged five, three, and ten months old, Laurie had to find a faster way to learn. Rote memorization wasn’t going to work. So she started sketching out complex medical concepts in cartoon form, as a memory tool. Friends noticed. She started making them for others. By the time she graduated, she and her co-authors had published six books in a series called Visual Mnemonics. The skill she developed to survive school, breaking down complicated ideas into something simple enough to draw, became the skill that runs her entire practice and publication today.

• She later created patient eBooks to replace the confusion people left appointments with

• The cartoon logic carried forward: clear, visual, honest

• “I made my way through medical school drawing cartoons. Take it for what it’s worth.”

[00:08] — Joy

When Carolina asked Laurie about the relationship between joy and healing, this conversation opened up. Laurie described joy as what happens when you’re deeply in your work, when flow comes easily and curiosity pulls you forward. The true joy, she said, is watching someone understand something they didn’t understand before. Seeing a comment where someone changed something because of what she wrote.

• “It’s the doctoring through words, in a sense, but it’s more than that because you’re touching lives you can’t see in a clinic”

• She described ripple effects from her writing, one reader teaching something to another, who then came back to tell her months later

• She’s not trying to reach 50,000 people at once. She’s trying to reach one person well, and trusting that the ripple goes somewhere she can’t track

[00:12] — Identity Shift

Laurie was active duty Air Force after medical school. She found herself in a system where she had little control, doing work that was hollowing her out. She called it soul-crushing. She made the decision to leave. The military is stable, predictable, and safe. She watched colleagues stay because the alternative was terrifying. She chose the terror instead.

• That pivot required accepting uncertainty, something she keeps returning to as a pattern

• Her husband’s question has followed her through every transition: “Are you still enjoying what you’re doing?”

• She described creative identity as something you keep choosing. When the old path stops fitting, you choose again.

[00:20] — Tinkering, Testing, and Growing 50,000 Facebook Followers in Two Months

Laurie sees every platform as a variable worth testing. She grew a dormant Facebook page from around 9,000 followers to over 50,000 in roughly two months by treating it as a funnel into Substack. The entry point is a free seven-day mini course. From there, readers move into her paid School community where she shows up live weekly. The structure is clear: free content, Substack list, paid community. Three layers. No guessing where someone is supposed to go.

• “Facebook has 2.8 billion users. Substack has 35 to 40 million. If you can figure out how to funnel from there, you open something up.”

• She resurrected a stale page she’d largely ignored; it had been sitting at the same number for ten years

• The move was building qualified traffic. Content that attracts the wrong reader is just noise with more followers attached.

[00:26] — Radical Acceptance and the Nervous System

This was the section of the conversation that Carolina connected to most directly. Laurie described how she learned to stop letting her past dictate her present, and how that shift changed things. She wasn’t dismissive about hard things. She said clearly: her home growing up was not ideal. She had people in her life who balanced that out. But she made a decision at some point to stop holding her story as an identity she lived inside.

• “I honor your past, but you cannot let it continue to dictate your future”

• She wears a ring inscribed with “this too shall pass.” The good times. The bad times. All of it moves through.

• Real regulation, she said, is being present enough to notice the story you’re telling yourself before it runs away with you

[00:28] — How Tiny Habits Build the Confidence to Change

One of the most grounded moments in the conversation was a real patient story. Someone who had never exercised in her life. Laurie gave her one instruction: two push-ups on the kitchen counter. Two months later, that patient was doing 60. She showed Laurie her arms on a video call. “I challenge anyone to go do 60 push-ups and not find that challenging,” Laurie said. Starting small is the actual path to the bigger thing.

• Small wins create the proof of capability that people who have never had it genuinely need

• The CAN framework she uses: is the habit Clear, is it Actionable today without extra gear, is it Nourishing for you right now?

• What was nourishing at 35 may not be nourishing at 55. The habit has to fit the actual life.

[00:41] — Reps, Detachment, and Why Content Succeeds

Laurie published something on Substack every day for the first six months. Not because it was perfect. Because 180 reps in six months is what weekly publishing takes three years to match. She was very direct: you can’t be emotionally devastated every time something doesn’t land. You put everything into it, publish it, and then let it go. She had a useful image for this: stand outside, look up at the sky, and register how small the post actually is in the context of the universe. Then keep going.

• The articles that convert, she’s found, are the ones written for a specific reader with a specific problem. Not the ones optimized for conversion.

• “That energy follows through with your words.” Writing to help and writing to sell feel different to the reader.

• She pulls reader feedback into new posts. Testimonials, outcome stories, successes they’ve shared with her all become content, with permission.

Key Quotes

“It’s the doctoring through words, in a sense. But you’re touching lives I can’t see 50,000 people in a day, but I can send out a post.” — Dr. Laurie Marbas

“The moment you believe you deserve it and you start taking action, you shift. You start seeing opportunities. And you enjoy it, but you don’t hold on to it either.” — Dr. Laurie Marbas

“Those are the ones that convert. Those are the ones that people share. You’re walking in with a different intention and you get a different outcome.” — Dr. Laurie Marbas

Resources Mentioned

• Atomic Habits by James Clear (Laurie interviewed James Clear approximately seven to eight years ago)

• Visual Mnemonics series — six textbooks co-authored by Dr. Marbas during medical school, designed to help medical students retain complex information through visual learning

• Zen Habits (blog by Leo Babauta) — referenced in context of early blogging strategy and the value of volume and consistency in building an audience

• Russell Brunson’s funnel frameworks — mentioned as an influence on Laurie’s multi-platform approach to moving audiences toward Substack

• The CAN Framework — Dr. Marbas’s original tool for evaluating whether a habit is right for someone right now: Clear (is it specific?), Actionable today (no extra setup required), Nourishing (is it right for where you are in life?)

Where to Find Dr. Laurie Marbas

Laurie’s Substack publication, The Habit Healers, is the best place to start. She recommends searching for the article “The First Habit I Prescribe as a Doctor” to get a feel for her philosophy. The publication uses a newspaper-style layout, with the most-read articles visible on the left side. She publishes four times a week across metabolic health, behavior change, and healing habits, all translated from clinical science into things you can actually do today.

The Habit Healers

There’s no shortage of health advice. What’s missing is translation. Here, research becomes clear protocols and tiny actions you can implement immediately. Need a place to start? Begin with One Tiny Healing Habit on Substack.

By Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

A Note From Our Community

This is what Sacred Business Stories is for. The version with three kids and no one in your family who’d done it before. The version where you leave the military because the safety stopped feeling like safety. The version where 2,000 YouTube videos exist before anything looks like momentum.

Laurie reminded me of something I believe deeply: the habits that heal your body are often the same ones that lead to your most meaningful work. Small, clear, nourishing action. Repeated. With some willingness to release attachment to the outcome.

If anything in this conversation landed for you, specifically the part about knowing you have something real to give and still finding it hard to move, I’d love to talk.

We hold Integration Calls for exactly this. It’s a real conversation about what you’re building, what’s stopping it, and whether there’s a fit between where you are and how we work.

→ Book an Integration Call

Thank You

Thank you , , , , , and to many others who joined us live for this conversation.

We’re in this together.

P.S. All previous Sacred Business Stories episodes and Substack posts are archived on our publication. If someone shared this with you and you want to stay connected, subscribe below. It’s free to start.

Subscribe now

Sacred Business Stories | Weekly Substack Live Recap | Guest: , Somatic Therapist, Writer & Founder of Danza Medicina

Morena Cardoso has spent the last decade leading immersive movement laboratories across 15 countries under the banner of Danza Medicina, working with the female body, ancestral healing, and what she calls “the old ways.” She’s built a following on Instagram. She’s written a book. She’s completed a master’s in clinical psychology. And at the peak of her visibility, she stopped. Completely.

Not a little break. Not a social media detox weekend. She canceled her entire agenda, went offline, and disappeared for a year and a half while the internet kept moving without her. What she came back with, and why she left in the first place, is the kind of story that makes you put your phone down.

For anyone building a business that’s supposed to feel like them, this conversation is worth sitting with. Morena brought a high level of honesty to the show. Extremely non-performative. She told us where she struggled, where she’s still figuring it out, and why she’s grateful for every year that makes her a little less interested in rushing.

Show Notes

[00:00] Welcome & Introduction

• Morena Cardoso is a somatic therapist, writer, and founder of Danza Medicina, a movement-based healing practice she’s led across 15 countries

• Sacred Business Stories was created to give people permission to restart from where they are, not from where they think they should be

• Phil opens by asking Morena to share the behind-the-scenes story, the part people don’t see when they encounter her work today

[01:50] A Body That Felt Everything and Didn’t Know What to Do with It

• Morena’s path began with lifelong hypersensitivity. She felt the world in her body before she had language for it

• She started in hotel management, realized quickly it wasn’t hers, and followed a pull toward yoga and body-based practice

• A trip to India changed the direction. She started meeting people who were living a way she hadn’t seen modeled anywhere in her upbringing

• Her first real driver wasn’t helping others. It was surviving, and making sure she could take care of herself and her son without asking permission from anyone

[05:00] Building Danza Medicina: What She Was Actually Looking For

• She didn’t set out to build a program. She wanted to create something that didn’t exist yet because she needed it herself

• “I want to create sacred spaces for us because I was urging to receive it.” That line explains everything about how the best work gets built

• She traveled to meet the grandmothers, the abuelas holding ancient wisdom, before she started teaching anything

• Returning to Brazil, she had to reckon with her own identity as a white, middle-class woman working in spaces adjacent to indigenous and ancestral traditions. She went back to school instead of around it

[08:00] What Authenticity Actually Looks Like in Practice

• Morena was born spontaneous and learned, over time, to shut that down. Business was a process of unlearning the domestication

• The shift came through humbleness, not performance. She wasn’t trying to be right or recognized. She just noticed she wasn’t alone in what she was feeling

• “I started naming it. And they could say, oh, I feel the same. And I was like, oh really.” That recognition is what built connection before anything else

• She watches for the moment she starts controlling results rather than creating from truth. That’s her signal to step back and ask why she’s doing it again

[10:30] The Sabbatical: What Made Her Stop

• At the height of her work, 100,000 followers, events across 10 countries, Morena canceled everything and went dark for 18 months

• The decision wasn’t strategic. She went through a spiritual ritual after losing four pregnancies in a row. Medicine had no explanation. Something in her body did

• She spent two months camping on her land, making fire, praying, and sitting with the grief as a doorway rather than something to manage away

• The answer she received was simple: go back to taking care of yourself. You’re not that important. Stop nourishing others before you nourish yourself

• She describes it as an ego death. The persona she’d built over years had to come apart so she could find out who was underneath it

[18:00] Fear, the Calling, and How to Tell the Difference

• She had very real fears about money. Her family didn’t come from wealth. Not working meant not knowing if the bills would get paid

• She draws a clear line between the calling and the mind. The mind offers reasons. The calling doesn’t negotiate

• “When you hear that deep calling inside, everything goes in a proper way. Not necessarily a good way. But in a proper way. We learn what we have to learn.”

• Her advice for anyone trying to hear their own signal through the noise: stop. Not metaphorically. Stop. “We’re so afraid of stopping. We live in this performative life all the time.”

• She shared that she took the Harmony Map assessment during this conversation and said it surfaced answers she hadn’t expected, along with new questions worth sitting with

[22:30] Coming Back

• A year and a half later, her baby was 40 days old. She looked at her husband and said she was ready

• Her first post was a photo of herself with a nine-month belly and a mask. The caption, translated from Portuguese: “For reborn, we need to learn how to die.”

• It received 15,000 likes. Her words: “Oh shit. They’re still there.”

• Not everyone stayed. Some people had grown attached to the old version of Morena and didn’t follow the new one. New people came. The ones who’d been there for ten years grew with her

• Coming back with a psychology master’s degree, a new baby, a changed voice, and a changed Instagram algorithm, she had to learn again from something close to zero. She calls it “a little bit analogical.” It was harder than starting

[33:00] The Fire vs. The Big Log

• There’s a stage of building a business that runs on excitement. It creates fast, burns hot, needs constant fuel. That’s the small kindling

• There’s another stage that requires putting the big log on. It’s slower. Less exciting. Sometimes tedious. But it burns long enough to build something real

• Morena, at 40, says she no longer has the energy for perpetual intensity. She’s building the biggest project of her life right now, and most days it doesn’t feel electric. It feels like work

• “I am now mature enough to hold space for that.” That sentence is worth writing down

• Phil connects this to his own practice with the Harmony Map, now on its 13th iteration in a year. Not 13 reinventions. 13 deepenings of the same thing

[40:00] The Project in Bahia and What Comes Next

• Morena is building a physical center in Bahia, Brazil: a research space, a dance space, and an art residency on 22 hectares of Atlantic forest with 1 kilometer of clean river, shared with three close friends

• It’s the first time in her life she’s building something material. She doesn’t hide the dream. She talks about it openly because she believes that’s part of how it becomes real

• She continues to lead international Danza Medicina labs for those who want the full embodied experience. In her words: “I can speak well, but honestly I do much better when I’m silent and just holding space.”

• To connect with her work: find her on Instagram and follow Danza Medicina

Key Quotes

“I want to create something that doesn’t exist because I need it. I need to be with women, I need to dance, I need to make fire and sing around the fire.” — Morena Cardoso

“To be reborn, we need to learn how to die.” — Morena Cardoso (the caption on her return post after 18 months offline)

“When you hear that deep calling inside, everything goes in a proper way. Not necessarily a good way. But in a proper way.” — Morena Cardoso

Resources Mentioned

• Danza Medicina — Morena’s immersive movement practice (Instagram: @danzamedicina)

• The Business Harmony Map — the 10-minute assessment Morena mentioned taking before this conversation; it maps nine internal patterns and shows you where your business energy is most out of balance

• Sacred Business Flow — the work Phil and Carolina do with purpose-driven professionals who are ready to build something aligned and lasting

Where to Find Morena Cardoso

• Instagram: Search Danza Medicina

• Upcoming work: International Danza Medicina labs in 2026 (limited due to focus on the Bahia land project)

• The big project: A healing, research, and art residency center in Bahia, Brazil, on 22 hectares of Atlantic forest

A Note Before You Go

Morena mentioned something during this conversation that I want to sit with you for a moment.

She took the Business Harmony Map before we spoke. She said it surprised her how many answers came up just from answering the questions. And then, just as fast, new questions rose.

That’s what the Harmony Map is designed to do. Not give you a label to screenshot. Not push you toward anything. Just help you see the pattern that’s been quietly running your decisions, so you can start designing around who you actually are, not who you think you’re supposed to be.

If you’ve been in business for years and still feel like something invisible is slowing you down, that’s worth looking at. Eight minutes. Easy.

Take the Business Harmony Map here →

Thank You

To , , , , and many others who joined us live and to those catching the replay, thank you for being here.

A special thank you to Morena for her honesty. For sharing not just the success, but the losses, the silence, the fear, and the slow work of coming back to herself. That kind of openness is rare. It’s also, as this episode makes clear, exactly what connection is built on.

P.S. Every episode of Sacred Business Stories is available in our archive. If this one resonated, you might enjoy this one with . There’s a lot of honest conversation about what it actually looks like to build this way.

What’s Next: We’re back next week with another Substack Live conversation with . Subscribe if you’re not already, and you’ll get it in your inbox the moment it’s live.

Until then.

Phil

New to Sacred Business? Start Here

What if it isn’t?

You read it back, you hear nothing from the outside world, and you decide to wait a little longer until it’s better, until you’re clearer, until the timing is right.

When first spoke honestly in a bible study group, the man who went next said something he’d never said to anyone. Mac didn’t cause that by being inspiring. He caused it by going first, and he understood precisely why. He built Porn Free Millennial from inside the situation it addresses, a Substack publication and podcast about recovery from pornography addiction, before the divorce was final, before his own story was over, before anyone was reading. He stopped for two years. Then he started again. He publishes it every Monday from his RV, alongside a corporate job he hasn’t left. The light, he says, is a great disinfectant. Once you get it into the light, it starts a process. Things start moving to where you can’t just be in the same place anymore.

He realized in that room that sharing his story might just open up somebody. That if he went first, the person sitting next to him might say something he’d never said before. When you’re teaching something or sharing about yourself, he said, it calls you to elevate how you live your life. You can’t keep talking about something you’re not living into. What that looked like when five people were listening and the numbers said stop is what this conversation is about.

Show Notes

[Segment 1] — The Platform and Why It’s Named That

• Porn Free Millennial addresses a topic most people won’t name publicly. Mac chose the name deliberately and doesn’t soften it.

• His framing is honest from the start: this is his subject, his wound, and he offers it as a service.

• The directness of the platform name sets the tone for the whole body of work.

[Segment 2] — Where It Started: Age 10 Forward

• Mac’s story began at age 10 and ran through marriage and into divorce. He is specific about the timeline.

• He was caught, not confessional, six months into his marriage and handled the moment badly. He’s honest about that.

• The secret didn’t break the marriage on its own. Managing the gap between who he appeared to be and what he was doing created the damage.

• Mac describes having a public identity built on trustworthiness while carrying “this separate self I wasn’t too proud about.”

[Segment 3] — Built It, Stopped, Then Started Again

• Mac created Porn Free Millennial in 2021 while still married and nearly two years sober. He stopped before he launched it publicly.

• A relapse after a cross-country move cut him off from his therapist, his bible study group, and his closest friends at once. Rebuilding those structures in a new city took longer than the gap they left.

• He didn’t actually start publishing and podcasting until May 2023, after the divorce. The platform sat dormant for nearly two years.

• The lesson isn’t about willpower. It’s about structure: the support system that makes the work possible is not optional, and it doesn’t travel automatically when you do.

[Segment 4] — The Bible Study Moment That Changed Everything

• Mac shared something vulnerable in a group bible study. The man who spoke after him immediately shared something he’d never said out loud before.

• Mac recognized the pattern: going first creates permission. When one person stops managing their image, the people around them become capable of something they weren’t capable of before.

• This moment became the operating principle of Porn Free Millennial: the platform exists because going first is contagious.

• Mac’s words: “I shared something really deep. And what I noticed was, it was like the next guy after me shared something really private and something that they were struggling with. I think that was one of the first times I really realized, wow. If I shared something about my story, that might just open up somebody.”

[Segment 5] — The Fear of Talking to No One

• Mac’s first article got 20 to 30 reads. His first podcast episode got 5 downloads on day one.

• The fear wasn’t that people would judge what he was saying. It was that nobody would hear it at all.

• One friend reached out privately after listening. Mac decided that one person was worth more than any number the platform wasn’t giving him.

• Carolina named the pattern: a reader will sit with someone’s work for a year in silence, then write to say something changed. The silence wasn’t indifference. It was process.

The question Mac eventually stopped asking: What if no one is listening?

[Segment 6] — How to Build Through Collaboration

• Mac’s approach: interact with someone’s work before you ask for anything. Leave comments, engage with their posts, let them see your name before you reach out directly.

• His most effective collaborations came from unexpected intersections, a film professor, a medieval art historian, an AI specialist, not from chasing people in the same niche.

• Starting with a collaborative article is lower friction than a podcast invite. It builds trust and gives both people a finished piece of work before committing to a longer format.

• The worst someone can say is no. Mac is direct about this. Most people never ask because they haven’t made peace with that outcome.

[Segment 7] — The Growth Move He Didn’t Plan

• A single Substack Note featuring a Duncan Trussell quote brought roughly 90 new subscribers. Mac did not predict this.

• Substack Notes, not long-form essays, drove his biggest single growth moment on the platform.

• The practical point: stay consistently visible in small ways and stop trying to engineer what spreads.

• His Monday newsletter, consistent and unremarkable in ambition, proved more valuable over time than any single spike.

[Segment 8] — What He Offers Now

• Mac publishes a weekly newsletter every Monday, runs a bi-weekly podcast trending toward weekly, and writes Porn Free Poetry, one poem per month.

• He offers one-on-one coaching starting with a free Zoom discovery call, available through his Substack about page.

• He has an accountability software partnership with Ever Accountable, with a 20% discount linked on his about page.

• Mac runs all of this alongside a corporate day job from his RV. He hasn’t quit to pursue the platform. He’s building it while the day job is still there.

• His words on why consistency holds: “When you’re teaching somebody something or sharing stuff about yourself, I think that calls you to elevate how you live your life. Because I don’t wanna be talking about something if I’m not living into it.”

Key Quotes

“People would see Mac. You’d look at me and be like, oh, hey. That’s Mac. He’s trustworthy. He tells the truth. He’s honest. He has integrity[...] But at the same time, I had this separate self that I wasn’t too proud about.”

Mac Dohm

“I shared something really deep. And what I noticed was, it was like the next guy after me shared something really private and something that they were struggling with. I think that was one of the first times I really realized, wow. If I shared something about my story, that might just open up somebody.”

Mac Dohm

“When you’re teaching somebody something or if you’re sharing stuff about yourself, I think that calls you to elevate how you live your life. Because I don’t wanna be talking about something if I’m not living into it.”

Mac Dohm

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

Porn Free Radio: podcast hosted by Matt Dobshutz, one of the original voices in the porn-free recovery space. Mac credits this show with starting his recovery.

Ever Accountable: accountability and content-filtering software. 20% discount available on Mac’s Substack about page.

Porn Free Millennial Episode 50: Mac’s interview with Matt Dobshutz, cited as one of his best episodes.

Substack Notes: the short-form posting feature Mac used to generate his single largest subscriber growth event.

Duncan Trussell: comedian and podcaster. A Trussell quote shared as a Substack Note produced Mac’s biggest single growth moment on the platform.

Where to Find Mac Dohm

Mac built Porn Free Millennial from inside the exact situation it addresses, before he was ready, before his own story was over, and before the numbers gave him any reason to keep going. If you’ve been sitting on something that feels too personal to publish, he’s worth your time. Here’s where to find his work.

Substack: Porn Free Millennial (weekly newsletter, bi-weekly podcast, Porn Free Poetry series, Reflections)

Porn Free Millennial

My goal is to share my relationship with porn and why I decided to remove it from my life. If you've ever had the thought or have taken action before to quit porn, subscribe to receive tips and encouragement to help you on your journey!

By Mac

Mac said that teaching something calls him to live into it. He can’t talk about what he’s not doing. That’s not a standard accountability trick. It’s a specific consequence of going public with the thing you’re still working on.

This conversation left me with one question. What would you have to live into if you published what you’ve been holding back? Not what would change for your audience. What would have to change for you.

Mac’s through-line was that what costs you most to keep hidden is often what someone else needs to hear first. If this conversation named something for you, the Harmony Map can tell you what pattern is underneath it. Ten minutes. Free.

Take The Harmony Map

That’s the confession made on Sacred Business Stories this week. And if you’ve ever found yourself knowing exactly what you should do next while watching yourself not do it, this conversation was for meant for you.

Kevin built CopyChief into a powerhouse community over 11 years. Live events with 300 people flying in from Australia and Asia. Legendary industry names jamming on stage at after-parties. A coaching program that actually worked. By any external measure, he’d made it.

Then he walked away from all of it.

The Problem Nobody Talks About

Here’s the conventional wisdom: build the thing, scale the thing, optimize the thing, repeat. Success is a straight line from hustle to growth to more growth.

Kevin’s experience tells a different story.

Somewhere around year seven, the business that used to feel like play started feeling like obligation. His emails had to go through five people before he could send them. He was banned from pushing any buttons in his own software. The guy who built his success on spontaneous connection couldn’t wake up with an idea and share it anymore.

“It started to feel a bit like a machine,” he said. The purity was gone.

This isn’t just Kevin’s story. It’s the story of every creator who followed the playbook perfectly and ended up trapped inside their own success.

The Middle Passage Framework

Kevin discovered a concept from psychologist Dr. James Hollis called the Middle Passage. It works like this:

Your first adulthood is built on one reference point: your childhood. You either try to live up to what you experienced or do the exact opposite. You create roles, chase significance, build identities. This is natural.

Then one day you wake up having achieved everything you set out to achieve, and something whispers: “Is this it?”

That’s not a crisis. That’s an invitation.

Hollis calls it the transition to second adulthood. And the hard part? There’s no workbook. No 90-day calendar with little exercises. No roadmap telling you what the other side looks like.

You just have to let go of any expectation for what life might have waiting for you.

For Kevin, this meant ending a 25-year marriage, closing his business, and sitting in the uncertainty while everyone around him assumed some crime had been committed.

The Real Shift

Carolina asked Kevin a question that stopped the conversation for a minute: “How do you deal with both the spark of inspiration and the need for consistency?”

His answer: “I need to be close to the thing I’m writing about and feeling.”

This is the opposite of what most business advice tells you. Step back. Get out of the weeds. Be the visionary floating in the hot air balloon while your integrator handles the details.

Kevin tried it. He hired brilliant integrators. It never worked.

Because some of us aren’t wired to be separated from our work. We need to feel it in order to create it. And pretending otherwise just delays the inevitable burnout.

The real insight came from Carolina:

“You’re not going to figure it out with your mind. You’re going to figure it out as you walk.”

Kevin wanted that line embroidered on a pillow.

He’s sitting on five completed interviews for his new channel. He knows exactly what he should do. He has a decade of experience telling other people to just start and see what happens.

And he still hasn’t promoted it to his list.

What This Means for You

If you recognize yourself in Kevin’s hesitation, here’s what he said to try:

Pull out a pad and paper. Get away from devices. Write out the things you actually love doing in your business. Then think about how you could emphasize those and shed the rest.

Simple. Not easy.

John Carlton once told Kevin:

“There’s no promise you’ll come back from burnout.”

That warning lands differently for anyone who’s been grinding for years, running launch after launch, building something that somewhere along the way stopped being theirs.

The Declaration

Kevin made a public commitment during the conversation: before his 56th birthday on February 23rd, he’ll release his first episode of Paid to Create on Substack.

I put it on my calendar.

August 18th, 2026, he’s coming back to show us what he built in six months.

If he’s saying any of the same things then, in his words, “I’ll not only be much skinnier because I won’t be eating anymore. I’ll be really annoyed with myself.”

We’re holding him to it.

Where to Find Kevin

Kevin’s been quietly building on Substack and he’s about to go loud. Here’s where to follow along:

Paid to Create — His new channel interviewing creative business founders about the calling, the craft, and the commerce. First episode drops before February 23rd. Subscribe now so you don’t miss it:

Paid To Create

Kevin Rogers's (founder of Copy Chief) new home for deep dives on how D2C products get from you

By Kevin Rogers

Men in the Middle Show — The podcast he co-hosts with Joe DeRoma about navigating the Middle Passage. They recently interviewed Dr. James Hollis himself, the psychologist who wrote the book on second-adulthood transitions. If anything Kevin shared today resonated, start here:

Man in the Middle Show

This newsletter compliments the Man in the Middle Show with Kevin & Joe where we have no BS conversations about men living in midlife.

By Kevin Rogers

Kevin spent 11 years creating one of the most generous communities in direct response marketing. He’s one of those rare people who made his career by genuinely helping others succeed first. Whatever he builds next, it’ll be worth watching.

One Question Worth Asking

Kevin’s story reveals something that rarely gets said out loud: the gap between knowing and doing isn’t a knowledge problem. It’s a pattern problem.

If you’re stuck in that same loop, wondering why you can’t seem to do the thing you know you should do, maybe it’s time to get curious about what’s actually happening underneath.

The Business Harmony Map takes 5 minutes and shows you which of the 9 fundamental frequencies is creating your sticking point. It won’t tell you what to do. It’ll show you what’s getting in the way of you doing what you already know.

Take the Harmony Map →

Because Kevin was right about one thing: you can’t think your way to the answer.

You find out who you are by walking.

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

Subscribe now

This is part of our Sacred Business Stories series — weekly conversations with people who are building businesses that align with their deepest truth, not just their training.

In this episode, we sat down with , a midwife and founder of Wisebody, who is building a healthcare practice for women who know they deserve better and are ready to trust their bodies again — without abandoning medical support.

Jane’s story is going to land especially deeply if you’ve ever felt “too sensitive” for the way your industry does things.

When the system becomes a source of injury

Jane didn’t leave healthcare because she stopped caring.
She’s leaving it in the traditional sense because she cared too much to keep pretending 15-minute visits were enough.

Day after day, she would sit with women whose bodies were clearly speaking:

• Tears that showed up before words

• Symptoms that didn’t fit neat boxes

• A quiet sense that something deeper was trying to be heard

There’s a word for what happens when your job asks you to ignore that kind of truth over and over:

Moral injury — the pain of participating in something you don’t fully believe in.

Jane realized she could no longer treat her work, her values, and her body as separate projects. Something had to change.

Trusting the wise body (hers and theirs)

A thread that runs through everything Jane shared:

The body isn’t the enemy. It’s the conversation.

Instead of fighting symptoms, she started asking:

• What is this pain trying to protect?

• What is this fatigue saying about the pace of your life?

• What happens when you’re actually heard, not rushed?

That’s where Wisebody came from — a space where:

• Spirituality is welcome

• Medical training is respected

• And a woman’s own body wisdom is central, not an afterthought

This is the same move so many of our people are making in their own fields:
refusing to leave parts of themselves at the door just to stay employable.

You can’t build a new way alone

Even after leaving the system, Jane tried to build her new practice by herself.

Her honesty here was striking: she talked about how lonely and confusing it was to try to create an entirely new kind of care structure while unlearning the old rules.

She reached a point where she realized:

• Strategy alone wasn’t enough

• She didn’t just need “more information”

• She needed support while she implemented a truer vision

That’s a pattern we see in almost every sacred business:

• Deep training? ✅

• Real skill? ✅

• Willingness to serve? ✅

• Actual support for the transition? ❌

Sacred work asks a lot of your nervous system. Trying to do it as a one-person ecosystem is often the invisible bottleneck.

A question for you

Jane sees health as part of our transformation path — your body as a guide on the journey you’re meant to walk.

Swap “health” for “business” and it’s the same:

Your business is not separate from your life.
Your patterns are not separate from your results.
Everything is connected.

So here’s the question I’d invite you to sit with after listening:

Where is your body already telling you that the way you work isn’t quite right anymore?

And a second one, if you’re honest enough to hear it:

What kind of support would actually make it possible to build the business you keep thinking about?

Listen to the full conversation

You’ll hear us explore:

• Leaving a system that doesn’t fit (without burning everything down)

• How to work with your body instead of overriding it for “productivity”

• The difference between burnout and moral injury

• Why trying to DIY a sacred business usually stops working at a certain level

If this is where you are right now…

If you’re in that in-between place — no longer able to do things the old way, not yet supported in the new way — that’s exactly who we created our Serve & Receive private partnership for.

It’s a 12-month container where we:

• Map the pattern that’s been running your business (using the Harmony Map)

• Design a business around who you actually are now

• Walk with you through the first year of implementation so you don’t disappear when it gets confronting

👉 Book a Serve & Receive conversation

No pressure, no hard sell. Just an honest look at what’s going on under the surface and whether this kind of support is the right next step.

With love,
Phil & Carolina

We brought Bob on Sacred Business Stories for this special author spotlight because we kept bumping into his ideas with our own clients. The ones who struggle hardest with sales are almost never missing skill. They’re missing permission, the internal kind, to receive what they’ve earned. Bob has spent decades naming that exact problem. Here’s what he said.

Show Notes

[00:00] How This Conversation Happened

We found Bob on our subscriber list. He’d been reading Sacred Business Stories for over a year without saying a word. That’s the kind of person he is: paying attention, showing up, no fanfare. Carolina and Phil share how the conversation came together and why Bob’s framework fits our community like a glove.

[02:12] The Core Idea: Value Before Profit

Bob breaks down the difference between price and value. Price is a number. Value is what the buyer actually experiences. His example: an accountant charges $1,000 but saves you $5,000 in taxes, hours of your life, and the peace of mind that it was done right. She gave more in value than she took in payment. You’re thrilled. She’s profitable. Both parties walk away better off. That’s the first law, and it’s the one most people get backwards.

[07:06] The Five Laws

Law of Value: give more in value than you take in payment, including the experience, the empathy, the attention, not just the deliverable.

Law of Compensation: your income scales with how many people you serve and how well.

Law of Influence: place other people’s interests first, not as self-sacrifice, but because that’s how trust gets built. As Bob puts it: “nobody’s going to buy from you because you have a quota to meet.”

Law of Authenticity: your most valuable gift is yourself, but Bob pushes back on the modern hijacking of that word. Authenticity isn’t “no boundaries.” It’s acting congruently with your value system.

Law of Receptivity: giving and receiving aren’t opposites. They’re breathing out and breathing in.

[14:08] The Receiving Block Most Entrepreneurs Won’t Name

Bob called out the unconscious anti-prosperity programming most of us absorbed before we were old enough to question it. Society, media, school, family, all of it installed the belief that making money from something you love is somehow wrong. He calls self-sabotage what it is: an inability to receive what you’ve earned. His advice? Make a deliberate study of prosperity. Read the teachers who help you make the unconscious conscious: Randy Gage, David Nagel, Ken Honda, Sharon Lecter, Bob Proctor, and others who specialize in dismantling these blocks.

[16:44] “Does It Make Money?” Is a Great Question. Just Not the First One.

We asked about the tension between purpose and profit. Bob didn’t soften it. Don’t start with “will it make money.” Start with “does it serve? Is there a market?” If yes, then ask the money question. If it won’t make money, you’ve got a hobby. Hobbies are fine. They’re just not a business.

Then he flipped the frame: “Where was it that we learned that having fun and making money are dichotomous? We learned that from society.” Carolina added her research into the Portuguese word for work, trabalho, which comes from tripalium, an instrument of torture. That landed in the room.

[23:01] Selling Is Giving. Literally.

The Old English root of “sell” is sellan: to give. When you’re in a sales conversation, you’re giving time, attention, counsel, empathy, and value. A pitch is something you do to someone. A sales conversation is something you do for someone. Bob’s take on people who say “I hate selling”: “They don’t hate selling. They hate what they think selling is.”

[25:14] Promoting Yourself Without Losing Yourself

Phil asked Bob about feeling overly self-promotional. Bob’s answer: if you’re consistently giving value, your audience would be glad you told them about your product. The key is tying every promotion to how it benefits the other person. That’s not spin. That’s service with a clear invitation.

[27:08] When Giving Doesn’t Seem to Be “Working”

The question so many of our people carry: what do you do when you’ve been giving for years and it hasn’t come back? Bob broke it into two causes. The first, covering 95% of cases: you’re providing value as you see it, not as the market sees it. Value always lives in the eyes of the beholder. The second, covering the remaining 5%: you’re not letting yourself receive. You’re not asking for the order. And asking for the order isn’t a necessary evil. It’s an act of service, because you’re inviting someone to act on something they already told you they want. Bob added something that hit: “The chances are they actually need you more than you need them. They are one customer. But to them, you are that one solution.”

[33:17] Take Action the Same Day

In the book, Pinder tells Joe he must apply each lesson within 24 hours. Phil connected this to what we call co-creation: you learn something, you act on it, you receive feedback, and then you adjust. Bob confirmed that an idea without action is just entertainment for the mind. A go-giver is also a go-getter. Just not a go-taker.

[36:06] Michael Singer and the Highest Use of a Life

Bob shared a quote from Michael Singer’s Living Untethered that he keeps taped to his computer: “The highest thing you could do with your life is to make it so that every moment that passes before you is better off because it did.” He reads it every day. It gave Phil goosebumps. It gave us something to sit with long after the recording stopped.

Key Quotes

“Shifting your focus from getting to giving is really where it all begins.” - Bob Burg

“They don’t hate selling. They hate what they think selling is.” - Bob Burg

“The highest thing you could do with your life is to make it so that every moment that passes before you is better off because it did.” - Michael Singer

Resources Mentioned

The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann (1.5M+ copies sold, 30+ languages)

Living Untethered by Michael Singer

The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer

The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer

Prosperity teachers: Randy Gage, David Nagel, Sharon Lecter, Lisa Peterson, Ellen Rogan, Ken Honda, Derek Kinney, Bob Proctor

Where to Find Bob

Visit burg.com to subscribe to his Substack column The Daily Impact, read free chapters from any of his books, and explore his work.’

Bob Burg's Daily Impact

Each weekday receive a brief message designed to inspire you throughout your day and add value to your journey toward professional success and personal fulfillment.

What This Means for You

Everything Bob described, the receiving block, the value misalignment, the guilt around charging, the inability to ask for the order, these aren’t random struggles. They’re patterns. And they connect directly to why you might know exactly what to do in your business but still can’t seem to do it consistently.

The Business Harmony Map measures 9 frequencies across three dimensions of your life and business and shows you the one pattern creating the bottleneck.

If you’ve taken the assessment and want to understand what your results mean for your next move, book a free Integration Call with Phil and Carolina. We’ll look at your specific frequencies together, talk about what’s working and what’s not, and tell you honestly what we think would help, whether that’s us or not.

Book Your Integration Call

Thank you to Bob for his time and his generosity, and to everyone who joined live or caught this on replay.

P.S. The full archive of Sacred Business Stories lives right here on Substack. If this one stuck with you, send it to someone who needs to hear that giving and receiving were never at war with each other.

Subscribe now

Thank you , , , , , and many others for joining us for this special edition of Sacred Business Stories with and !

Get more from Phil Powis ❤️⚡️ in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

You need 300 people who’ve actually talked to you.

has spent 15 years testing this idea across multiple six-figure launches, an e-commerce exit, and 45 countries traveled with a laptop. Her take: 30,000 passive followers who occasionally skim your content are worth less than 300 people who actually know your name.

On this week’s Sacred Business Stories, she explained why most people fail at audience building. It’s not a strategy problem. It’s a visibility problem. And fixing it is simpler than you think.

The Real Reason You’re Not Growing

Jo runs strategy calls with aspiring entrepreneurs. She keeps seeing the same pattern.

“What’s blown me away is how much creativity and talent people have,” she told us. One client had 20 published books on Amazon. Solid work. Real effort. But the books weren’t selling.

Jo asked the obvious question: Who’s your audience?

Silence.

“That seems to be the sticking point. I’ve got this creativity and talent to build stuff, create stuff, launch products. But I stop when I have to go and actually build an audience.”

Creating products feels safe. You can do it alone, in private. Telling people about them? Being visible? That’s where people freeze.

Here’s what Jo said next that stopped me:

“I think people feel that they have to reveal themselves in some way in order to do that.”

That’s the real barrier. Not strategy. Not tactics. The fear of being seen.

The 300 vs. 30,000 Rule

Jo’s been in online business since 2010. She watched Facebook go from a place where you could actually talk to people to a content farm where engagement means nothing.

Her take:

“You could have 30,000 people on your list. If you haven’t engaged with them, if you’re not connected with them, it’s 30,000 people who are just maybe reading your stuff every now and again.”

Compare that to 300 people you’ve actually talked to. Responded to. Connected with.

“That is so much more valuable than 10,000 people who you never speak to and who just occasionally watch a video.”

I shared my own experience to back this up. My first online business generated multiple six figures consistently for years. The most I ever had on my email list? Fewer than 1,000 subscribers. Never broke that number. The difference wasn’t scale. It was clarity. Every person on that list knew exactly why they were there. The relationship was strong.

The math isn’t about reach. It’s about depth.

The 30-Day Challenge That Actually Works

Most people sit around wondering what brilliant insight to post. What amazing note will make people subscribe?

Jo’s challenge flips that completely.

For 30 days, don’t post your own content at all. Instead:

Find people whose work resonates with you. Comment on their posts. Restack notes you find interesting and add why it mattered to you. Share other people’s stuff. Respond to comments on your own page like a human being, not a content machine.

“If you did that a couple of times a day for the next 30 days, you would start to increase that engagement and that relationship building without a shadow of a doubt.”

This isn’t theory. It’s how Facebook worked in 2010 when Jo built her first audience. It’s how Substack works now. The platforms that let you actually connect with people are the ones worth your time.

One more thing: don’t use AI to respond to comments. “You can tell it a mile off,” Jo said. “Don’t do it.”

Nobody’s Watching Your First Videos (Use That)

Jo shared a stat: around 935,000 videos get uploaded to TikTok every hour.

Her point? When you’re starting out, nobody’s watching. That’s not a problem. That’s freedom.

“Those first videos you do, nobody’s watching. Nobody cares. It doesn’t matter. Just do it.”

She found a content creator named who’s now everywhere in the UK, doing street interviews, promoting his book. She went back and found his videos from four or five years ago.

“They were terrible. Absolutely terrible. He was falling over his words. Talking about really boring stuff.”

But he did two-minute videos every single day. For years. By the time anyone noticed, he was good. Now he’s got ads in tube stations.

Nobody saw him practice. They only see him now.

The Ego Trap for Experienced People

Jo’s been doing this for 15 years. She’s had six-figure launches, sold an e-commerce business, built and rebuilt multiple times. And she still struggles with this:

“I can’t look like a beginner again.”

New platform. New rules. New skills to learn. Her ego says she needs to show up as the expert. That keeps her from being transparent about what she’s still figuring out.

The shift came when she realized something: people don’t want to learn from untouchable experts anyway.

“I think people want to learn from people who are like them. They want to relate. They want to feel that you’re going to trip up.”

Someone once told her: “Jo, I learned just as much from the things you get wrong as I do from the things you get right.”

She shared a story about one of her first webinars. Seventy people showed up. Great success. Then she couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. She’s fumbling, shaking, and finally admits on camera: “I’m ever so sorry, guys, but I can’t figure out how to turn this webinar off.”

Someone came on and helped her. She thought it was over. Turned to her husband and swore. Then the comments started rolling in: “We’re still here, Jo.”

She’d been sharing her mistakes all along. That’s why people trusted her.

One Goal. Everything Else Feeds It.

Jo still uses Facebook. But not to grow her Facebook page.

“My goal is to increase my Substack subscribers. That’s my goal. Facebook feeds that goal.”

She sees people spread thin across five platforms, trying to grow all of them at once. They post everywhere, respond nowhere, and wonder why nothing’s working.

Pick one goal. Let every other platform serve that goal. You won’t get overwhelmed. You’ll stay aligned. And you’ll actually make progress.

The One Thing You Must Do

Jo’s final point was urgent enough that she interrupted the wrap-up to say it.

“If your goal is to monetize, please build that email subscriber database. It’s so important.”

Platforms change. Facebook in 2010 felt like Substack feels now. Eventually the marketers descend. The algorithms shift. The magic fades.

But if you have an email list of people who actually want to hear from you? They’ll come with you when everything else changes.

“Whatever you do, please build that email database.”

About Jo

Jo Barnes runs The 50 Plus Nomad Club on Substack. Her motto is “Adventure never retires.”

At 53, she’s currently backpacking through Brazil, heading to the Amazon, then Colombia and Central America. She’s also running a new e-commerce business and recently launched travel challenge cards on Amazon.

If you want a practical picture of what building on Substack actually looks like, she recommends her post on how to make $2,600 a month in your first year. It follows a fictional character named Jane through 12 months of realistic growth: 47 followers by month three, a $9 PDF launch, small workshops, layered income. No hype. Just math.

Find her at club.the50plusnomad.com or search “The 50 Plus Nomad” on Substack.

What Jo’s Insight Means for You

Jo kept returning to one idea: most people don’t fail because they lack strategy. They fail because they won’t be visible. They won’t engage. They won’t start while they’re still uncertain.

The 300 people who matter aren’t going to find you while you’re hiding. They find you when you show up, talk to them, and keep showing up even when you’re still figuring it out.

Resources Mentioned

Books: The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

People: , Frank Kern, , Jeff Walker, , James Clear

Thank You

Thank you , , , , , and many others who joined us live with and ! And thank you, Jo, for sharing so openly.

P.S. All previous Sacred Business Stories episodes are in our archive. Each one covers what actually happened behind someone’s business, not just the highlight reel.

Subscribe if you want next week’s conversation in your inbox. We do this every week because watching others figure it out, including the stumbles, helps you figure out your next move.

Subscribe now

If you read this and felt something click, your results will show you exactly where that pattern lives. 8 minutes.

Take the Harmony Map Assessment →

This isn’t a regular episode of our show. It’s an Author’s Spotlight to support the launch of his new book, The Road Less Triggered, and to share his work with as many people as we can.

Kelly is a clinical psychologist, author, and coach who’s been featured on The Five Love Languages and Today Show. But what grabbed our attention wasn’t his resume. It was his core insight: connection doesn’t break down between people. It breaks down within them.

That idea is really imporant in how we think about relationships, and the way we show up when things get hard. Which is why we wanted this conversation to happen.

Show Notes

[00:00] Why We Brought Kelly Back

We don’t do this often. But when someone’s work directly applies to everything we teach about sacred business, we make exceptions. Kelly’s framework for staying open-hearted during conflict is too practical to keep to ourselves.

[03:00] The Core Problem: Wanting Connection While in Protection Mode

Most of us spend most of our time wanting to connect while simultaneously protecting ourselves. It’s a form of self-sabotage we don’t know we’re doing. Kelly calls it the grind of trying to connect when our impulse is actually to protect.

When you close off and switch into protection mode, you lose access to creativity, communication, empathy, patience, and forgiveness. All the things you need most.

[07:00] The New Year’s Resolution That Actually Stuck

End of 2020. COVID year. Kelly blew up his business partnership, damaged his closest friendship, got so triggered one afternoon he went on a frustrated bike ride and broke his arm in two places.

Then he found a quote from Michael Singer: “Do not let anything in life be important enough that you’re willing to close your heart over it.”

That hit harder than the asphalt road had. He made a resolution going into 2021: moment to moment, notice his heart closing and try to keep it open.

The word “try” was important. He knew this would be hard.

[10:00] The Peaceful Pivot Process (3 Parts, 9 Steps)

Kelly spent five years developing what Michael Singer couldn’t teach him how to do. The result is a framework for turning triggers into togetherness:

Part One: Get Calm

• Sense your conflict coming using your body

• Disrupt your defensiveness (watch your urges instead of wielding them)

• Cultivate calmness before attempting connection

Part Two: Get Free

• Get familiar with what’s hurting in that moment

• Trace the story of that hurt throughout your life

• Learn to feel it instead of defending it

Part Three: Get Connected

• Show up and express yourself

• Stay curious instead of critical

• Give yourself compassion so you can express it to others

[12:00] The 80% Earlier Warning System

Here’s the research that caught our attention: your body gives you 80% earlier warning that your heart is about to close than your thoughts or behaviors do.

Kelly calls it interoception. Your sixth sense. You use it all the time without realizing it. When someone asks how badly you need to go to the bathroom, you use interoception. Your consciousness travels to an organ, does an assessment, reports back.

You can harness that same superpower to notice when your heart is closing before you’ve already closed it.

Everyone feels it differently. Some people feel it in the center of their chest. Others a little to the left, the right, down in the sternum, or in the gut. But it’s always somewhere between your waist and your temples.

No one has ever said their toes cramped when their heart started to close.

[19:00] The Mexico Story

One year after starting his open-heartedness practice, Kelly’s family came back from a chaotic Christmas trip to Mexico. Machine guns. COVID restrictions. People extorting cash just to get back into the country.

His daughter looked at him and said: “That must be why every time something went wrong, I looked at you and felt safe.”

Kelly realized the practice wasn’t just changing him. It was changing the people around him even when they weren’t doing anything.

A soothed nervous system soothes nervous systems. A calm soul calms souls. An open heart opens hearts.

[26:00] You Only Control You (And That’s the Point)

The part of us that wants to change the other person will feel deep injustice at this. But the wisest part knows we can only control ourselves.

When you’re part of a pattern and you change your part, the pattern changes. Family systems theory shows this clearly. When one part of a system changes, the other parts first resist, then adapt.

You are the environment in which your people live and move and exist. When that environment becomes calmer and safer, it influences how they show up.

[31:00] Start in the Empty Parking Lot

Kelly’s driver’s ed teacher used to say: “When I’m done with you, you’ll be able to drive on LSD.” He meant Lakeshore Drive in Chicago. But they didn’t start there. They started in an empty parking lot at the community college.

Same principle applies here. Start with the small disappointments. The weather you didn’t want. The traffic jam. The cancelled plans.

Kelly’s son tested positive for COVID on Christmas Day. They had to cancel the family gathering. Then his wife tested positive on New Year’s. More cancelled plans.

These disappointments became training ground. If you can’t keep your heart open to small frustrations, how will you handle the really big ones?

[34:00] A Book That’s Actually Fun to Read

Kelly wrote a novel within the non-fiction. At the end of each chapter, you follow two fictional characters through a coaching session where they work through the exercises.

His wife cried reading chapter six. That’s when he knew it worked.

The book is built around the three-part process with nine steps total. But instead of dry descriptions in a box at the end of each chapter, you get story.

[42:00] Building in Public

Kelly brought each chapter to his Substack community during development. Monthly calls where they told him what worked, what didn’t translate, what was too complicated.

His Substack is on its third name since 2023. That evolution reflects how much his understanding deepened as he built this in front of real people.

[45:00] His Biggest Hope

By the time someone finishes the first chapter, Kelly wants them to have a new lens they can’t take off. Just to walk around noticing: my heart closed there. And there. Opportunities for transformation are everywhere.

The ambitious version: he wants this book in as many hands as possible because our big human experiment is at a critical point. We’re going to have to take responsibility for showing up with open hearts if we want to miss the tipping point.

The longest longitudinal experiment in human history out of Harvard has shown definitively that above every other factor, our sense of togetherness with our people determines our happiness.

And here’s the kicker: how many times has being triggered resulted in more togetherness in all of human history?

Zero.

Key Quotes

“Connection doesn’t break down between people. It breaks down within people.”

“A soothed nervous system soothes nervous systems. A calm soul calms souls.”

“How many times have we ended up more together as a result of being triggered in all of human history? Zero.”

Resources Mentioned

• The Road Less Triggered by Dr. Kelly Flanagan (March 2025)

• The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer

• roadlesstriggered.com — Pre-order and get the first chapter immediately plus a 90-minute masterclass

• Harvard’s longitudinal study on happiness and togetherness

Where to Find Dr. Kelly

Substack:

Thank You

Thank you , , , , , and many others who joined us live and shared this conversation. Special thanks to Dr. Kelly for being generous with his time, his work, and his willingness to come back twice.

P.S. Want to explore past editions? You can check them out here.

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This week he shared what happened. Turns out his ChatGPT success in December 2022 came after a music label at 18, seven years of curation, and a ghostwriting gig in Berlin. The viral post was in many ways the result of a decade of practice.

Show Notes

[00:00] - Why He Keeps His Personal Brand Impersonal

His siblings don’t know what he does. He doesn’t find backstory relevant to daily content. This conversation is an exception.

[04:35] - Video Games to Content Creation

At nine, Ruben got obsessed with Guild Wars character builds. He wrote French blogs, realized the English forum had more readers, taught himself the language through Arctic Monkeys and comedy clips. The pattern: experiment, figure out what works, teach.

[09:00] - The ChatGPT Post

November 30, 2022. Berlin coworking space. He tested ChatGPT, spent a week reading academic papers, translated jargon like “few-shot prompting” into plain language, posted on LinkedIn. One million views in one post. 100K followers in three months. Then he went full-time.

[14:30] - The “Go All In” Myth

If you can’t build something while employed, you probably can’t build it without a paycheck either. Financial pressure makes you desperate. He overlapped a fintech job, ghostwriting, and personal content before making the leap.

[20:45] - What “Master AI Before It Masters You” Means

Not fear-mongering about replacement. The real problem: average output is now free and instant. A $1,000 article from 2021 looks like “just some words” today. The only path forward is taste so specific it can’t be replicated for free.

[26:00] - Engineers Are Breaking Down

Since Claude Code’s Opus 4.5 release, thousands of engineers are posting on Twitter asking what they’re even for. They can build anything in hours. Problem: they don’t know what to build. The excuse is gone. What remains: do you have taste?

[30:00] - Play Like a Kid

Every cover on his newsletter features a child. Pick one task. Use one AI. Don’t obsess over tools. Get small wins first. We’re monkeys who need rewards.

[34:00] - AI Forces Us to Be More Human

When Excel files and basic writing become automated, we go deeper. In the 1900s, 90% of Americans worked in food production. They couldn’t conceive of refrigeration, let alone the internet. Freed from survival labor, humans built things nobody predicted. Same pattern now.

[40:00] - “I Am Just a Text File”

He spent two hours answering Claude’s questions about his opinions, boundaries, writing style. Result: a markdown file, 1,000 lines, that captures his taste. Upload it anywhere, and AI writes like him. His grandchildren could talk to digital grandpa.

[43:00] - Animating His Grandmother

His mom lost her mother at 12. A handful of black-and-white photos. Ruben colorized them, created two-second animations. Sent one. His mom called crying. Her mother was moving.

[49:00] - Substack Must Stay Protected

On LinkedIn, maybe half his comments are AI-generated now. He compares giving everyone AI tools to handing a rifle to a monkey. Paid access and ID verification are coming. He’s not against it.

Two Quotes

“The more you forget about making money, the more money you make. Real traction doesn’t happen when you focus on the money.”

What You Can Do Today

1. Build your taste file. Spend an hour answering questions about your opinions, boundaries, what you’d never say, how you’d phrase things. Save it as a document. Upload it to your AI projects.

2. Pick one AI task and play. Not the perfect tool. Not comprehensive mastery. One thing. Approach it like a nine-year-old with a video game.

Resources Mentioned

• Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech (Ruben watches it yearly)

• Claude Code with Opus 4.5

• Cursor ($20B AI coding company)

Where to Find Ruben

Substack newsletter, twice weekly, Wednesday and Sunday. 100 breakdowns per year. Most is free.

How to AI

Stop reading about AI. Start mastering the "How". I share step-by-step tutorials, copy & paste prompts that work with real-life examples. Subscribe to two free articles a week.

By Ruben Hassid

One Thing I’m Still Thinking About

Ruben said his grandchildren could have real conversations with digital grandpa someday. Then he paused and said he doesn’t know how to feel about it.

Neither do I.

What about you?

How This Was Made

This recap was built by uploading the show transcript as well as rambling my own thoughts via Wisprflow into a Claude custom project, containing our voice guidelines, then edited through four rounds: structure, skeptic audit, linguistic cleanup, and open-ending. The conversation took 56 minutes. The recap took longer. Thanks to for the tips on skepticism, and liguistics :)

Ruben’s right. Taste takes time even when AI does the typing.

She plants a lemon tree.

This week on Sacred Business Stories, we sat down with , a Substack Bestseller, Penguin author, and international speaker who turned rejection into reinvention. At 41, with no network, no personal brand, and recruiters who couldn’t see her value, Veronica made a decision that changed everything:

“If people can’t see my value, then I have to show it to the world.”

Three years later, she runs what she calls a “Frankenstein business”: four published books, a 13,000+ subscriber community, digital courses, coaching programs, and speaking gigs across the globe. All built from scratch. All built in public.

But here’s what I really appreciated about Veronica that I learned from this conversation. Veronica doesn’t wait until she has clarity to take action. She takes action to find clarity. That shift alone might be worth the price of admission.

Every week, we write about getting clear, getting visible, and getting paid. Inner patterns and outer strategy. Join 25,000+ creators & entrepreneurs:

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Show Notes

[00:00] The Origin Story

Veronica spent 15 years climbing the corporate ladder at companies like Apple and Estee Lauder. She thought that was her path. Then the pandemic happened, and she found herself locked out of Hong Kong for over a year with her young daughters (ages 3 and 5) while her husband stayed behind with their dog.

In Australia, she hit a wall. No one valued her experience. No network. No credibility.

[06:00] The Lemon Tree Philosophy

The name isn’t just clever branding. It’s the core of everything Veronica teaches.

“When life gives you lemons, not if, but when, use the seeds not just to make lemonade, but to plant your lemon tree.”

Her first book, The Lemon Tree Mindset, came from documenting her own corporate-to-solopreneur transition. She turned her chaos into a framework others could follow. That’s the power of building in public.

[08:00] Being Your Own Boss Doesn’t Make You a Good One

This hit home. Veronica shared a recent post where she reflected on how solopreneurs often treat themselves worse than the worst corporate boss they ever had.

Working while sick. Showing up when they’re having a terrible day. No self-compassion. No boundaries.

Her insight: being your own boss is about setting frameworks and protecting your time. Nobody else will do that for you.

[12:00] Clarity Comes From Doing, Not Thinking

Most people want to find clarity before they start. Veronica flips this entirely.

“You find clarity by doing things. You start writing and very often you have these mental chaos and ideas start to become something or nothing. But doing helps you find clarity.”

She didn’t have a niche when she started. She just wrote. First on LinkedIn. Then Medium. Then pitching podcasts. The shape of her business emerged through action, not planning.

[16:00] Fear Is a Feature, Not a Bug

Veronica intentionally puts herself in situations that scare her. Every year since starting, she’s done something she’s never done before: live sessions, launching in Spanish (her native language, which gave her more imposter syndrome than English), digital courses, bigger stages.

Her reframe: Instead of asking “what’s the worst that could happen,” she asks “what’s the best that could happen.”

If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re probably just playing in your comfort zone.

[23:00] The Multilingual Business Challenge

This got interesting. Veronica speaks six languages and now runs her Substack in both English and Spanish. She’s noticed more creators asking how to write across multiple languages.

But here’s the twist: she found more imposter syndrome in her native language than in English. “In my own language, it’s like, oh, this is not okay.” In English, she could afford mistakes as a foreigner.

Carolina related. She’s writing in Portuguese now and says it feels like discovering a different version of herself.

[28:00] Authentic Connection in the AI Era

Polished content used to signal success. Now everyone can make polished content. So what actually differentiates you?

Being human. Being real. Sharing the mess.

Veronica flew to Singapore for a book launch that was, in her words, “a bloody disaster.” Less than 10 people showed up. They didn’t even have book copies. She could have pretended it didn’t happen. Instead, she wrote about it.

The response? People thanked her for being real. It made the whole thing achievable and human.

[36:00] Two Tactical Strategies That Actually Work

When we asked for something practical, Veronica delivered:

Collaboration. Find someone to collaborate with. Guest posts, live sessions, interviews, panel discussions. She runs collaboration days where her premium members share what’s working, pitch ideas, and partner up. This alone has driven massive growth.

Public Speaking. Even if it’s not your main thing, becoming comfortable with your voice opens new possibilities. Webinars, masterclasses, cohorts, corporate workshops. She filmed her digital course on an iPhone at home. Not polished. Just real.

Key Quotes

“When life gives you lemons, not if, but when, use the seeds not just to make lemonade, but to plant your lemon tree.”

“You find clarity by doing things. Very often people want to find clarity first and then do things. What I have found is that you often find clarity by doing things.”

“We are not a newsletter. We are not a writing business. We’re a people business.”

Resources Mentioned

The Lemon Tree Mindset by Veronica Llorca-Smith (Amazon Bestseller, Finalist in 2024 International Book Awards)

The Anti-Procrastinator by Veronica Llorca-Smith (Penguin)

Where to Find Veronica

Substack (English): The Lemon Tree Mindset

Substack (Spanish): El Limonero

Website: veronicallorcasmith.com

LinkedIn: Veronica Llorca-Smith

Veronica invites you to not just read her content, but get involved. Join the chat. Show up for live sessions. Her premium community runs regular collaboration masterminds where members share what’s working in 2026 and pitch partnership ideas.

The Lemon Tree Mindset 🌳🍋

I help you turn your hobby into a creative business. Strategies to grow your community, monetize your creativity and build a lifestyle business. Substack Bestseller | Penguin Author | Public Speaker

By Veronica Llorca-Smith

Ready to Transform Your Patterns into Breakthrough Results?

Here’s what we’ve found working with hundreds of entrepreneurs: the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it isn’t a strategy problem. It’s a pattern problem.

The same patterns that show up in your personal life, the ones that keep you stuck in analysis mode or avoiding visibility, those show up in your business too. Everything is connected.

That’s why we created The Sacred Business Harmony Map. It identifies which of the 9 Frequencies is blocking your growth and shows you exactly what to work on first.

If you’d like to explore working together, book your free Integration Call. We’ll walk through your results, connect the dots between your inner patterns and outer challenges, and show you what working with us could look like.

Because your breakthrough isn’t just about business success. It’s about becoming who you’re meant to be through the vehicle of your work.

Book Your Integration Call Here →

Thank You

Thank you , , , , and many others who joined us live from around the world: São Paulo, Hong Kong, and everywhere in between.

And to Veronica, thank you for sharing not just the wins but the challenges, the doubts, and the messy middle. That’s what makes this real.

P.S. Missed previous episodes? All our Sacred Business Stories recaps are available here. We invite you to explore.

What’s Next: Hit the subscribe button if you haven’t already. Every week we bring you conversations with entrepreneurs who are building businesses that honor both their values and their vision for life.

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