Which is funny, because behind the scenes, I’ve been pretty far down the rabbit hole.

Claude with Obsidian. A Grok bot. ChatGPT routines. Plenty of experiments that taught me something, even when they didn’t earn a permanent place in my day.

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Instinct. And I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about it.

Here’s one feature I love: and I each have our own AI, and we’ve added each other as trusted contacts. Our agents can communicate and help coordinate things on our behalf.

That is very, very cool!

We each have our own context and our assistants can work together to get things done on our behalf.

But the part I’ve put the most thought into is what my AI has to work FROM.

A business has a lot of history. You’ve made decisions, changed your mind, learned what your clients actually need. Some of that lives in documents. Plenty of it lives in your head.

An assistant needs a way to understand which version of the offer is current, which draft is an experiment, and what you mean when you say, “That doesn’t sound like me.”

, who writes ROBOTS ATE MY HOMEWORK, helped me think this through in her essay How to build a world for your AI.

She’s one of my favorite voices in the ai space right now. I used that essay to help build the “world” my Instinct works inside.

For me, that meant giving my strategic documents, references, writing examples, and business decisions a home, with clear guidance about how to use them.

My voice belongs there. So do the principles I trust, our current offers, and the difference between an idea we’re exploring and a decision we’ve actually already made.

Otherwise, a beautifully written answer can send you moving towards something you already decided wasn’t the right direction.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

A person raises their hand with interest in our small group cohort program, Your First Yes. Their email conversation is in Gmail, their assessment results are in Notion, and the offer I’m prepared to share with them lives in Google Drive.

Previously, bringing that together meant opening tabs and reconstructing the conversation before I could make decisions on how I’d best like to communicate in service of someone making a decision.

Now I can ask the system to read the history, find where we left off, so I can craft a useful follow-up message without having to hunt for what the person has already shared with us.

In one evening of auction outreach, this setup helped prepare eight WhatsApp message links and 19 Gmail drafts.

I still crafted the words and assumed full ownership over what to send. But having the context cohesively in one place ready gave me a much easier place to begin.

If you’re experimenting with AI, start with one job you already do every week. Give it the sources you trust and describe what a good result looks like. Then test it on something you do regularly and already have a strong understanding about what the process should look like.

One call preparation brainstorm. One follow-up. An invitation you’ve been meaning to write.

You’ll learn more from that than another afternoon consuming more AI content. You’ve got to get your hands dirty and make it practical!

And this is a pattern I see well beyond AI.

You can have years of experience, thoughtful writing, and work that really helps people, while still struggling to answer, “How can someone buy this?”

The offer is half-written. Your Substack readers love what you share. When someone asks about working together, you’re still piecing the answer together.

All that depth deserves a clear path into the world.

That’s the thinking behind the auction idea Carolina and I shared yesterday: one private, 90-day build for someone who already has meaningful skills and experience.

We’d help shape the offer, build the invitation and emails WITH you, and use your Substack to bring it to the right people. Carolina will also support what comes up around being seen and receiving money for your work.

You’d have somewhere to be supported in decision making while you’re actually moving the ball forward.

We’re exploring an auction with bidding starting at $1. The winning bid would set the price.

If you’d like a clear offer you can put in front of real people, without having to piece every part together alone, read what we’re considering and tell us whether you’d bid.

Everything Is Connected,

Phil ❤️⚡️

Learn About The Auction

If you’re building a business from the heart but feel the walls going up around your next step, our free Harmony Map assessment helps you see what’s creating friction and where to bring your attention so you can move forward.

Take the Harmony Map

Who we’re celebrating: , turning five years of work into a deck you can use

This week I'm celebrating my friend and past client Toku McCree and the launch of Toku Tarot.

He's built a 78-card deck with a question on the back of every card. You don't have to know how to interpret tarot to have somewhere to begin. The question gives you something to explore.

One card is called The Beginner's Mind. Its question: "What do you want that feels impossible?"

Toku says this project has been five years in the making. He's spoken openly about the fear of what people would think of the deck, and of him.

Now he's putting it into the world.

And there's a part of this I'm especially pumped about. A long time ago, Toku and I talked about an opportunity for custom decks for communities. Now we're planning a customized version for Sacred Business Flow!

An idea we talked about is becoming something our community can hold and use.

So here's to you, Toku. For giving this work a form other people can explore. I'm excited to see where it goes. Check out the deck here.

Express Interest in Auction

Happenings

Your offer. Your Substack. Us in your corner. - Opens October 14

You have work you want to offer. Choosing the focus, naming the price, and sending the invitation keep getting in the way.

Carolina and I are opening one private spot for 90 days to build your offer, invitations and emails WITH you, and help you bring it to real people. We'll stay involved as you make invitations and refine the offer from what you hear.

$1 opening bid, not the final price. Bidding opens in the comments of Wednesday's launch post. Read the idea and tell us if you'd bid →

The Weekly Highlights

She had built a successful business doing work she loved, but slowing down still felt like guilt. One observation on our call made her shoulders drop, and it might explain why the success you’ve earned still feels so hard to enjoy.

Carolina's "hell no" to four days of live translation became a yes after a pause - a conversation about trusting yourself to begin before your experience gives you proof.

The Chinese Bamboo and Your Sacred Business

You keep writing, making invitations, showing up, and still the ground looks quiet. Our short animated film, Your Roots Are Listening, is for that season of your Sacred Business: three minutes and twenty seconds for anyone wondering whether their work is taking root.

Memorable Quote by

Confidence, in practice, is our tolerance for being seen mid-process

Source: Mia Kiraki, Confidently Creative? (Aug 17, 2026)

There was only one problem: the course was taught in Portuguese, and the teacher didn’t have enough English to teach Phil while also teaching everyone else.

A few days later, the teacher sent a message with a possible solution: you could hire a translator, or maybe your partner could come? She could translate, and she would get the certification too.

Phil shared the audio with me! My first thought was… Me? Translating live, simultaneously, for ten hours a day?

Hell no.

My mind had a long list of reasons why I should not go. I’ve never done this before. I don’t have a music background. I don’t even like translating. In daily life I mix up my words. I don’t think I can, or should.

And there was more. Phil was investing real money into this training. If I said yes and failed, I could compromise his experience. Having a real translator sounded like a better idea to me.

Every reason made sense. And underneath them was the fear of disappointing the teacher and Phil, who was so excited about this experience.

But something else was happening too, and I could feel it very clearly. My body was closing. There was a tightness, a contraction, a wall going up. I wasn’t only thinking “no.” I was protecting myself.

This is why body awareness matters so much.

When we are present in our body, we can feel the resistance and the protection building up. We can see it as something happening in us, not as the truth about us. Without that awareness, we don’t see the thoughts as thoughts. We take them as truth. They sound so reasonable: I’m not capable. I’ve never done it. In fact, I don’t even like it. So I’m not going to do it. And the door quietly closes.

We miss the opportunity to learn something new about ourselves. Maybe that opinion we had about who we are was never the whole truth. Maybe there are untapped skills that life keeps nudging us toward, and we don’t pay attention, because the thoughts got there first and we never took the time to question them.

So I paused and asked myself: What am I protecting myself from? I got curious about the wall I was building around that invitation. I also got curious about whether I could actually do it.

Instead of I can’t, the question became can I? Is it possible for someone like me to hear one language in one ear while speaking another at the same time?

I didn’t know. But I chose to give this curiosity more space than the wall, and slowly my thoughts began to shift… hmmm, maybe I do like the idea of meeting the version of myself who could do that. Or maybe the version who can’t do it at all.

Curiosity is the gate.

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I said yes. But I had to detach from the outcome. I was honest with Phil. I told him I would translate to the best of my abilities, and that, in the worst case, he might need to take the course again. I didn’t promise I would be good. I didn’t need to.

I was also making peace with the possibility that it would not be for me, or that maybe I would enjoy it in a way I had never thought of before.

What I felt was a different kind of confidence. Not I know I’ll succeed. It was:

I trust myself to go through this experience, whatever the outcome.

I didn’t need to know how it would end before I could begin.

The training was more than forty hours, ten hours a day, with the teacher speaking nonstop. Was it perfect? Not at all. I asked him to slow down. I told him when I didn’t know a word, or didn’t understand what he meant. I was honest about where I was, and the teacher and the whole group met me there with so much kindness.

And I did it.

What surprised me most was the presence. With someone speaking in one ear and my own voice coming out in another language, there was nothing else in my mind. It was pure presence, and it let me meet myself in a different way. Those days were mindfulness at its best.

Not only did I learn I was capable of translating that way, but I also received hidden gifts from the course itself. I discovered aspects of myself I had barely noticed before and now want to explore.

This kind of confidence, the one that lets you take on a challenge like that for the first time, is available to all of us, but most of us have forgotten it.

We usually talk about what I call outer confidence. It’s the confidence that comes from proof: you’ve done something many times, you have results, you know you can deliver. Or it comes from external validation: a law degree, a recognized certification, the example of people who walked the same path before you. That confidence is real, and it has its place.

But there is another one. Inner confidence. We are all born with it. Watch a child trying something for the first time. There’s no proof and no certificate, just presence, curiosity, and play. Somewhere along the way we forget it, and we start believing we need permission from the past before we can step into the future.

Why does this matter?

Because when you are building a business around your own work, you are stepping into something you haven’t done before. Your experience shaped the framework. Yes, you are sharing skills you have learned throughout your life, but more than anything, you are helping people overcome challenges you overcame for yourself.

No one has walked your exact path before you. At the beginning, you may have years of experience, but no proof yet for this particular expression of your work. Inner confidence lets you begin. Many people never start because they are waiting for proof that can only come from doing it.

Your curiosity about who you might become can be bigger than your fear of failing. And failing is also okay.

I’m not saying I want to become a translator now. That’s not the point. But I discovered a skill I had no idea I had. If I decided to take it further, that’s when outer confidence would come in: I would take courses, learn the techniques, practice, and develop it. Inner confidence opens the door. Outer confidence builds the house.

Life is always talking to us. Sometimes it’s an invitation we didn’t ask for, something we never planned, something we think we don’t even like. But ‘I like it’ and ‘I don’t like it’ can be old opinions, or borrowed ones we’ve never questioned. Your Sacred Business is inviting you to meet more of you.

So the next time you feel the walls going up, pause. Feel it in your body. Ask what you are protecting. Then get curious about who you would be if you could. What small step would let you find out?

What is life inviting you into right now that an old opinion keeps saying no to?

With love,

Carolina

If you’re building a business from the heart but feel the walls going up around your next step, our free Harmony Map assessment helps you see what’s creating friction and where to bring your attention so you can move forward.

Take the Harmony Map

Who we’re celebrating: 8 powerful beings turning their magic into one clear offer

This week I want to celebrate eight people who said yes to themselves. They chose to bring clarity to one offer and start putting it into the world.

We just kicked off our Your First Yes cohort, and we could all feel the connection, even though most were meeting for the first time.

For a community to be built, something has to bring everyone together. For us, it’s building from the heart.

We want money. We are here to build profitable businesses. But money alone is not enough. The business has to support work that matters to us and the life we want to live: more authentic, slower, more connected.

The offers taking shape have that “ohh, that was the missing piece” feeling. For some, they bring more coherence to an already amazing business. For others, it feels like home: finally being able to articulate their magic clearly.

It’s beautiful to witness.

So here’s to all eight of you. For choosing one offer. For being willing to bring it to real people. For giving your magic a chance to become something people can say yes to.

The world needs what you have to give. And your work deserves to support the life you want to live.

If you’re ready to turn your magic into one clear offer people can say yes to, join the waitlist for the next Your First Yes cohort.

Join the YFY Waitlist

Happenings

Market and Sell with Confidence · October 26–28

You know your work has value. Then it’s time to name the price, and the walls go up.

Join Carolina for three live sessions to practice describing your work, saying your price, and making a real invitation—even before you feel ready.

$99 for all three sessions. Replays included. Join us →

The Weekly Highlights

Success without the rush

She had built a successful business doing work she loved, but slowing down still felt like guilt. One observation on our call made her shoulders drop, and it might explain why the success you’ve earned still feels so hard to enjoy.

A $2,000 investment led to roughly $20,000 in revenue, but Phil couldn’t count on a dollar of it when he said yes. Here’s the question that helped him decide whether he was being financially cautious or waiting for proof that could only come after he moved.

The Chinese Bamboo and Your Sacred Business

You keep writing, making invitations, showing up, and still the ground looks quiet. Our short animated film, Your Roots Are Listening, is for that season of your Sacred Business: three minutes and twenty seconds for anyone wondering whether their work is taking root.

Memorable Quote by James Stephens

Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.

She has another job, she takes care of someone in her family, and a busy life just like almost all of us. But underneath all of it she carries a deep desire to have something of her own… to own her time and help more people. She is extremely gifted. She has already helped people, real people, with real, specific problems.

She knows she can help. She just won't call it a business yet, because it doesn't yet make enough to sustain the life she wants to live.

Her biggest challenge, she told me, was time. So in her mind, the problem was a lack of hours. We hear this often — but in reality time is usually not the issue.

Clarity is.

We hear all the time that you don’t have clarity before you walk, you gain it as you walk. But there is a clarity that is born out of a decision you make, and that is the one people most often never make for themselves.

When I started my business I had a full-time job, I am a mom and I had a life as busy as anyone’s. All I could give my little side gig was four to five hours a week. And I decided that would be enough.

I also decided from the very beginning that eventually this side gig would become my full-time job.

That second decision mattered more than the hours, if you’re building for sustainability, that clarity from the beginning is everything. With only five hours a week you can make a lot happen, if you know clearly what you want.

I’m glad I let those five hours be enough, because they grew into something. Years later I no longer have the full-time job, and Sacred Business Flow is my main source of income. I own my schedule more than I ever have, our business keeps growing, we have a thriving community and private clients and I don’t need forty hours a week to keep it expanding.

The eight-hour workday has nothing to do with how we actually work. It comes from a Welsh mill owner who, around 1817, coined the slogan “eight hours’ labour, eight hours’ recreation, eight hours’ rest” a humane push against the brutal 12-to-16-hour factory shifts of his time. The number we all inherited was designed for assembly lines and for protecting people from exploitation.

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It was never a measure of how long a human can do good work.

The brain doesn’t run on a flat line, it works in cycles, like everything in nature. The researchers who studied elite performers, the ones at the very top of music, sport, and chess, found they didn’t grind endlessly. They worked in intense bursts of sixty to ninety minutes, and then they rested. Which tells me that if you know where you’re going, sixty minutes a few times a week can take you really far.

Time is easy to blame because you can see it. Clarity is invisible, sometimes it feels clear in your head, but your actions aren't yet coherent with where you're going.

If you have five hours a week and you’re not making progress, it probably isn’t the hours. If I handed you thirty hours inside the same system, you’d most likely still be stuck.

More time poured into a lack of clarity just gives you more room to spin. You cannot out-hour a fog.

Maybe you are still looking for the words to explain what you do and how you help, and yes, this requires you to walk the path, talk to people, and keep refining. But more than that, a lot of people hold a desire to turn their side gig into a full-time job or their main source of income, but they haven't said that out loud. What I mean by that is: state to the universe what you want, and work on your belief system to make this goal very, very clear.

This will guide your actions.

Real clarity saves you time but also makes you uncomfortable.

taught me to ask a single question:

The answer is almost always small and something you can do in ten or twenty minutes. But it challenges your identity. It makes you uncomfortable. And the lack of time comes from spinning five hours over whether you should do it or not, when the action itself would take you less than ten minutes.

If you have three or four websites, you don’t need another one. If you’ve taken course after course on how to grow your audience and still aren’t making meaningful revenue, you don’t need another course.

What you need is one clear offer and to invite people into your world actively.

Clarity isn’t hard because it’s complicated. It’s hard because the clear thing is usually the vulnerable thing.

When your priorities are foggy, you could have all the time in the world and still not move forward. You bounce between half-finished tasks, and every time you switch, part of your attention stays stuck on the last one. The day ends, you’re drained, and you swear you didn’t even do much — and you’re right. That exhaustion is what convinces people they need more hours. What they actually needed was to know which one thing mattered.

So if you only have five hours a week to build your business, that’s perfect. Five hours a week took me from a side gig to a fully sustainable business.

Clarity starts with a decision: how do you want this business to serve you?

If you want your side gig to sustain your life, the actions are different than if you are just wishing for some extra cash.

There’s no right or wrong — but with the same hours available, you get to direct the outcome. You can run a hobby on five hours a week, or start a powerful, profitable business on those very same five hours.

The difference isn’t the time. It’s the focus, the intention, and the aligned actions you take.

With Love,

Carolina

If you’re not sure where your five hours should go, that’s what the Harmony Map Assessment is designed to reveal.

In eight minutes, it looks across clarity, confidence, and purpose to show you where your work is getting tangled and where your attention belongs next.

If something meaningful keeps calling you and you’re ready to stop waiting, start here:

Take the Free Harmony Map Assessment →

Who we’re celebrating:

from Resilient Mental State

Celebrating Kyle and his amazing 30-day plank challenge! Every month he offers a fitness challenge to his audience, and his consistency is inspiring.

I signed up, and to make it my own and something I could commit to, I decided I’d do it every time I went to the gym. I started the month sick, and I have a lot going on that’s affecting my regular gym schedule too. But I showed up, imperfect, and I still am, to the best of my ability. And every time I did, I felt on top of the world. Five minutes playing with different types of planks.

Thank you, Kyle, for being such an example of consistency and resilience.

I once heard something that captures how this feels: want an easy life? Do hard things. A great reminder to keep challenging ourselves.

Thank you for your service to the world.

The Weekly Highlights

Asking for help is an act of courage

For many years, I needed to prove to myself that I could do things alone. I think it was part of building my own sense of worth. Feeling capable. Feeling independent. It was an important phase, a long one, and I needed it.

But as I get older, I see how unhelpful it is to keep living that way.

When I do it all alone, my fight or flight stays on. There’s a constant bracing. Always on the go, never quite feeling supported.

So I’m learning how brave it is to ask for help. In every area.

How much more fun it is to build a business with people who share my values, instead of building it inside my head. How good it is to have help at home, and more space to enjoy my kids. How helpful it is to have a place to talk about the patterns I can see but can’t change on my own.

I understand the instinct to try it yourself first. I had it too. Let me see how far I can get on my own. And I’ll own it: it took me way too long to learn that going alone wouldn’t take me far. Not in business, and not in the rest of my life.

Doing it alone showed me what I was capable of. It could never show me what I couldn’t see. You can’t read the label from inside the bottle.

So if you’ve already tried on your own. If, like me, you needed to see how far you could go, and now you don’t have time to waste. If you’re done struggling alone. If you value the journey, and you want to be out of your head and into your life.

If there’s something in your heart you want to offer, and you need help finding the right words for it, naming the real transformation, so others can finally understand what you do.

If you want feedback from people who have walked the path you want to walk, and from a small group of smart people building amazing things alongside you.

If you want accountability to show up, to invite people, to put yourself out there, without feeling alone or lost in your thoughts.

Your First Yes is for you.

Here’s what Fleur shared with us right after our first call together:

The current cohort is full. There’s a waitlist, and if this speaks to you, We’d love for you to add your name. We’d love to support you in the next one.

Join the Your First Yes waitlist

Your Roots are Listening …

If you’ve been showing up for work you believe in and wondering whether anything is growing, we made this for you. 💛

Carolina imagined this little film from the old bamboo fable, and I brought it to life with AI. It’s called Your Roots Are Listening. Take three quiet minutes to watch it with the sound on.

And if someone comes to mind while you watch, please share it with them. They may need the reminder today.

Memorable Quote by Seneca

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it

I had questions.

How do I send full, rich sound from Traktor through Zoom while Carolina guides the movement from another microphone? What am I supposed to do with years of Spotify playlists that don’t simply appear inside professional DJ software? How do I begin experimenting without buying a small mountain of tracks I may never use?

The answers exist online.

I could ask AI how to configure Zoom. YouTube could teach me what every button on my controller does. There are more tutorials, playlists, equipment reviews, and technical explanations available than I could consume in a lifetime.

And I joined a live course with two beautiful humans.

Because access to information isn’t the bottleneck.

I need a structure that turns scattered tricks into skill. I need experienced eyes on what I’m doing, people who can answer the question underneath my question, and a place where I’m expected to practice.

One of our teachers explained that he and his partner had learned to DJ through years of experimentation and friends showing them isolated techniques. When they created this training, they had to work backward and ask:

That landed with me.

There is a massive difference between collecting instructions and becoming capable.

AI made information abundant. Implementation is still the bottleneck.

On a recent community coaching call, someone was describing a new offer she wanted to create.

She had a thoughtful process. There was plenty she could teach. She was trying to decide how much information to include and how to price it.

Then she named the real promise: within four weeks, the thing her clients had been postponing would finally be booked on the calendar.

That was the offer.

Her clients weren’t buying four weeks of information. They were buying the structure, support, and momentum required to make something happen.

I think this distinction matters more every with each passing day.

AI has made information nearly infinite and instantly available. Whatever you want to learn, you can get an explanation in seconds. You can ask follow-up questions, request examples, simplify the language, and generate a plan before your coffee gets cold.

This is wonderful.

It also means information alone carries less value than it used to.

The valuable part is increasingly what happens after someone understands.

Can they decide which advice applies to them?

Will they practice long enough to develop real ability?

When the plan meets an actual human being, an actual market, or an actual nervous system, can they adjust?

Most importantly, will something become real because they learned it?

Your clients probably don’t need another library of information

This doesn’t mean courses are dead or that people should stop learning.

My DJ training includes lessons, demonstrations, music, and technical instruction. I need every bit of that.

The information has its place because it belongs to a larger container. We practice. We bring questions. Our teachers watch what we’re doing and help us correct it. At the end of the course, we will DJ for one another.

There is a point where hiding behind the lesson is no longer available.

You have to touch the equipment.

You have to make the transition between two tracks.

You have to let someone critique your set.

This is the question I would ask about almost any transformational offer now:

What will be operating in someone’s life when this is finished that isn’t true today?

Maybe the offer is live.

Perhaps the difficult conversation has finally happened, or the book has reached an editor. Someone who has spent years struggling to make a decision may now know exactly what they’re choosing.

That is where the value lives.

Your frameworks still matter. Your knowledge matters. The depth of your training may be exactly why you can see what someone else cannot.

And your client is rarely buying access to everything you know.

They’re buying the change your knowledge helps them make.

We built Your First Yes around this

This is the principle Carolina and I built into Your First Yes, an eight-week experience for thoughtful, capable people who already have meaningful work inside them but haven’t yet turned it into one clear offer, real invitations, and a paying client.

We built it the same way we teach.

We started with conversations. We listened carefully, shaped the offer, put a real price on it, and invited people to join before announcing it to our full list.

The first cohort filled.

Now we’re turning our attention toward helping those participants get results. We’ll watch what works, pay attention to where they need more support, and let the lived experience improve what comes next.

We haven’t announced the date of the next cohort yet.

If you have a real body of work and want support turning it into a clear offer people can say yes to, you can put your name on the early-interest list.

Join the Your First Yes waitlist →

Information may help you see the path.

Movement is how the path gets made.

Join the Your First Yes waitlist

Who we’re celebrating:

This week, we’re celebrating Pinkie from AI Meets Girlboss, who recently became a Substack bestseller and then joined us to lead a workshop for members of the Sacred Business Network.

Pinkie has spent ten years working in branding. She now helps independent creators use AI to build recognizable brands without hiring a full agency or turning visual identity into a second full-time job.

Her workshop was excellent!

She showed us the four decisions that keep a brand from being reinvented every time you publish: who you are, who you’re speaking to, how you sound, and the visual world that carries the message.

Her advice for anyone beginning was refreshingly simple. Start with voice. Once you know what you stand for and who you’re talking to, choose one visual symbol and a color that people can begin associating with you.

Taking this approach can definitely make content creation faster. Once the important decisions have been made, you stop staring at an empty canvas and debating every font, illustration, and cover image from scratch.

The complete replay is now available inside the Sacred Business Network, our paid Substack community, along with our private podcasts, workshops, and member conversations.

If you want a brand that feels distinctive without disappearing into months of branding work, this is a genuinely useful place to begin.

Join the Sacred Business Network and watch the workshop →

Join the Network

The Weekly Highlights

The Exact 6-Step Visual Branding Workflow Pinkie Uses With Every Client

Most AI-generated brand visuals look random because people begin generating images before they have made the underlying decisions. Pinkie shares the clarity-first process she uses to turn a loose idea into a repeatable visual system.

If AI keeps changing your images, every cover feels disconnected, or creating one image takes longer than writing the post, save this one.

AI Meets Girlboss

The Exact 6-Step Visual Branding Workflow I Use With Every Client.

This is a Front Row and Branding Flock resource. If you're building your visual brand with me, this is your reference document — come back to it at every step of our process together. Not a Front Row member yet? Join here…

Read more

8 months ago · 44 likes · 11 comments · AI Meets Girlboss 🦩

Can a Paid Substack Actually Replace Your Salary?

Our paid Substack brings in roughly $10,000 a year. That is meaningful income, and it remains a small part of our larger business.

In this essay, I ran the numbers behind replacing a $5,000 monthly salary with paid subscriptions, including the audience size, conversion rates, fees, and financial runway most cheerful bestseller stories leave out.

It’s a realistic look at when a paid publication can support you and why building close to the work is often the steadier place to begin.

Mose: Live in Florianópolis, Brasil

This set has been in my ears as I begin my ecstatic dance DJ training. It’s a beautiful example of music becoming a journey rather than a collection of tracks.

I’ve been listening closely to the way Mose lets the energy build, soften, and gather again. If you want something to accompany a long walk, a slow Sunday, or a little movement in your own living room, begin here.

Memorable Quote by

It was held inside a beautiful construction, shaped like a dome. Everywhere you looked there was a rich detail. Nothing was left to chance. You could see how much thought had gone into it, how much love and care, how every element had been chosen on purpose.

Around us were many instruments. Some I had never seen before and still can’t name.

There was a set of bowls made from seven different metals. And a hand drum so gorgeous it stopped me. More than how it was built, what called my attention was the tuning. Hours and hours of someone’s work in that alone.

Some of the drums were made through ritual and carried a long distance to get there. The djembe was built from wood ordered all the way from Africa.

There was a rainstick, hand carved. I don’t know how many hours it takes to make something that beautiful. Days, probably.

One instrument had been made by the teacher himself.

He orders the strings from Japan. The small pieces come from Europe. The wood is a specific, high quality one, all cut by hand. It takes so long to build one that he can’t make more than one a month.

Why am I sharing this?

Because everything in that room, put together, was worth thousands and thousands of dollars. But the money was the smallest part of it.

What filled that room was the hands of many artists. The hours of many humans working in pure love with their craft. You could feel it. It was alive. Not only from the sound, but from every choice of material. The story behind every piece.

Nothing was plastic. Nothing was about quantity. Everything was about quality.

The drums were made with natural leather. In every step of building, the relationship with the earth was honored. Nothing was rushed. In that room there was no space for the ready to consume, the fast produced, the cheap.

Hold something plastic in your hands and notice how it feels. Then hold something carved from wood and notice how that feels.

It is a completely different energy.

It made me pause and ask myself a question I want to ask you too.

What world are we contributing to?

Because good things take time. They cost energy, they cost hours, they cost money. I have come to believe we need fewer things, but of much better quality.

And every time we choose the cheaply made, the fast produced, the plastic, we are feeding a world that I don’t think any of us really want to live in.

There was a sound healer in that training who already charges for his sessions. Sound healing is not his only source of income.

He had invested a few thousand in the training and bought a few new instruments. And he told me: here I am, paying all of this, and the most I can charge is around $100 dollars.

People won’t pay more, he said.

This is not about a sound healing session. It is not even about how much his time is worth. What it made me think about is how much incoherence lives in our daily choices when they are guided by an unhealthy relationship with money.

I see it often with gifted practitioners. The inner fight to charge good money for something so valuable.

People struggle to charge in a way that can sustain their work. And they struggle to pay in a way that sustains the work of others too.

There is a race to the bottom, and whoever charges the least, or nothing at all, wins the prize of being generous. Is that helping anyone?

I don’t mean the person who truly can’t right now. Some limits are real. I mean the rest of us, who could, and still don’t.

I don’t think money is the problem. I think our relationship with it is. We were made to believe money is evil, that wealthy people are greedy.

But is that true? We live in a world where we need money to live. So if we need it anyway, how can we use money to build the world we actually want?

I want to build a world where I can support the handmade, the organic, the rituals, the people who took the time to build something, the artisan, the plants that were not poisoned to grow fast.

And that begins with valuing someone else’s work.

What if more of us could afford quality things, because more of us were choosing to pay for them? When I pay well, the maker can keep making. And they can pay well too.

The care keeps moving.

I learned once that I would only be able to charge premium for my work if I was willing to pay premium for someone else’s.

This is true.

I believe in accessibility. But I don’t think we are playing this game right. It was never about making the good thing cheaper. It was about building lives where more of us can actually afford the good thing, without asking the maker to bleed for it.

What if the question is not how do I charge less, but how can we all make more?

Because healing our relationship with money is tied straight to building a world that can last.

It is not sustainable to eat food with nothing left in it. Real food takes more time, more hands, more land.

It is not sustainable to keep making plastic the way we do, while good wood costs more, because it is not endless and does not grow fast.

It is not sustainable to work two or three jobs, sixty hours a week, just to cover the basics.

None of these are separate problems.They grow from the same root. A world that wants everything cheap and fast, and forgets what that costs.

A machine can make a thousand things in a minute, so one of them can be sold for a dollar. No hands in it, no hours, no story. That is what this race to charge less is doing to us.

Money runs through all of it.

So I come back to the same question. What world are you contributing to? Maybe it begins in the business you are building: in what you let yourself charge, what you are willing to pay, and what your choices make possible for the person on the other side.

With Love,

Carolina

You may recognize the tension being named here: wanting to serve with integrity while building a business that can actually sustain the work.

The Harmony Map Assessment helps you see where your inner values and outer business may have fallen out of coherence, what is creating friction, and where your attention belongs next.

Free • 8 minutes • Immediate personalized results

Take the Free Harmony Map Assessment →

See the pattern. Find the friction. Know where to begin.

Take the Free Harmony Map Assessment →

Who we’re celebrating:

Miguel Kuntur Antino

I am celebrating a man devoted to service and love.

They say we are the average of the five people we surround ourselves with. I want to be surrounded by people like him.

He was our sound healing teacher this past week, and I don’t have words for how much he inspired me. Not only through his teaching, but through who he is.

He has built a successful business anchored in his values, grounded in his respect for Mother Earth and the Great Spirit.

Our businesses are built on similar values. And I love seeing more proof that a real business can be built on integrity, love, and alignment.

It confirms my own path, and I am sure the path of many of you reading this. Money for its own sake was never the goal. We need it, we want it, and still, value and integrity sit at the center.

Celebrating more of that, on this beautiful planet we share.

Way to go, Miguel. Thank you for all of it.

The Weekly Highlights

Sitting on a Bench: Our conversation this week on Self-Authorization

If building a business were easy, far more people would be doing it. I know many more people who want to build one than people who actually do.

Self-authorization is a big part of why. It stops people before they start.

And it is rarely one decision made on one day. It is a slow opening. A softening of a system that has spent years running on external validation, waiting for someone else to confirm we are allowed.

Building a business is not easy. But it is deeply fun, and the life you build around it is even better.

So if you already have a business and you want to take it to the next level, or if you simply carry the desire to build one, this conversation is for you.

Also this week: if you’re building your audience here on Substack, I broke down how SEO for Substack actually works — worth a read if organic growth is on your mind.

Memorable Quote

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.
Richard Bach

And I have almost no idea what I’m going to do with it.

Music was my first passion. I was a full-fledged band geek, trumpet in hand, playing in a national honor band and imagining that somehow music would become my life’s work.

My mother imagined something safer.

Her brother had spent his life as a professional musician, with all the financial ups and downs that can come with that choice. She saw a smart kid who might become a doctor or lawyer. I don’t blame her for wanting stability for me.

I tried criminal justice. Dropped out. Went back for music business. Left again when an opportunity in concert production came along.

I spent some time in that world, but never quite found my footing. The version of the music industry I encountered didn’t fit who I wanted to become.

Still, the music never really left.

Now I live in the mountains of Brazil, tinkering in the little studio I created here. I keep wondering how music, sound, and frequency might support the emotional arc of entrepreneurship and help people move through the moments when insight alone isn’t enough.

The idea is muddy.

Most of the money I’ve made came through the structural side of business: strategy, marketing, offers, growth. Sound can feel pretty woo-woo beside all that.

Will people understand it?

Will they want it?

Who am I to guide anyone through an experience I’m only beginning to understand myself?

Those questions have made it easy to keep tinkering privately instead of creating the space to find out.

So this training is my first stand.

I’m going to develop some real capability. I’ll work with other people, experience what sound can transmit, and discover what happens when I stop studying the possibility and put myself inside the work.

I’ve crossed this threshold before.

My first consulting client owned seven hearing practices in Ohio. He had seen what I was doing to bring patients into my own practice and kept asking me about it whenever we met at regional conferences.

“Could you help us do that?”

My first instinct was resistance. I had never been a consultant. I knew the approach worked for me, but I had no proof I could reproduce it for someone else.

A coach helped me see the value and told me to charge $2,500.

It felt really freaking scary.

I accepted anyway.

I trusted his experience before I had enough evidence of my own. Then I trusted myself to serve the client well, figure out what I didn’t yet know, and make things right if anything went wrong.

A lack of confidence is often a symptom.

The direction may still be blurry. The next step may require a capability you haven’t built yet. And sometimes you’re demanding certainty from yourself before you’ve had enough contact with the real world.

The work calling you rarely arrives as a fully formed offer with proof attached.

It takes shape when you give it something concrete, bring it into conversation, and pay attention. Do people understand it? Where do they lean in? What feels valuable enough that they would pay for help?

Then you refine.

The right support helps because we’re often too close to our own work to see it clearly. You need people who will take the idea seriously, help you find its clearest and most valuable expression, and tell you the truth when part of it still needs work.

Every pass through that process gives you more capability and more evidence.

That is how confidence begins to replace speculation.

Your next step may be much smaller than my 45-hour training. It may simply be seeing what is actually creating the friction.

That is what the Harmony Map Assessment is designed to reveal.

In about eight minutes, it looks across clarity, confidence, and purpose to help you see where your deeper work is getting tangled and where your attention belongs next.

If something meaningful keeps calling you but still hasn’t taken clear form, start here:

Take the Free Harmony Map Assessment →

Who we’re celebrating:

This week, we’re celebrating Tara Cousineau and the launch of her new private coaching offering.

Tara works with people who already know how to succeed.

They’ve built real careers and earned the trust of others. Yet behind many of their accomplishments is an exhausting private bargain: pressure keeps them productive, self-criticism protects the quality of their work, and nothing is allowed to feel finished for very long.

They don’t want to lose their ambition.

They want to make decisions without reopening them, finish excellent work without endlessly perfecting it, and finally experience the satisfaction their success was supposed to bring.

That is the change Tara helps people make.

Her private coaching is designed to help accomplished people keep their edge while pursuing excellence from self-trust instead of fear.

Tara has opened a small number of private coaching places this fall.

If you’re tired of needing pressure and self-criticism to perform at your best, she invites you to a private conversation about where that pattern is costing you and what could change.

The Peaceful Perfectionist

How do we know when a challenge is too much?

Read more

a month ago · 9 likes · 3 comments · Dr. Tara Cousineau 💛

The Weekly Highlights

If you keep explaining the tool while leaving yourself out of the transformation, read this. Carolina shares how mistaking self-erasure for humility put a ceiling on her business, and what a client could see in her that she still refused to claim.

If you know your work helps people but still struggle to explain what you actually do, read this. I share what happened inside the first Your First Yes Roadmapping Call, and the three questions that helped years of meaningful work begin to take one clear shape.

Memorable Quote by

At the end of September he’s launching his book, Return to Real, and he spoke to so many of the cravings I feel most of us are carrying right now. Returning to real touches every area of our lives, our relationships, how we build a business, how we eat, how we serve, how we write, how we live.

The internet and technology made our lives easier in so many ways. But little by little, they were also taking us far from what real is.

At some point Ryan spoke about his craving for nature, for his hands in the dirt, and I felt it in my own body. I am tuning in to that same desire as I sense the next chapter of my business and my life wanting to be born.

And it made me wonder…

What would a healthier, more real relationship with building a business online even look like? How can I feel more of what I feel in nature, even when I am not in it?

Technology is great in so many ways. It’s what lets me sit here in Brazil and reach someone in England and share a tea together, eye to eye across the world. That’s a gift. So the question for me isn’t whether to leave. The question is how to return to real without abandoning the good.

As with many things in life, the problem is never the problem. As I sat with what returning to real means to me, I realized that the wound underneath so many of these cravings is our relationship with time.

Technology made us tap into an illusion that things should be faster than they really are.

Life is not a click, and it shouldn’t be.

The go-go-go that never ends. It doesn’t matter how much you run, it’s never enough, and you’re always late.

In a click you get food. In a click you buy something. And now, with AI, in almost a click you get a sales page, robust in features, empty in energy.

Maybe just returning to the idea of divine timing could give us a healthier, more fulfilling relationship with all of it. We are losing our ability to wait, to gestate. We are being led to believe the world is fast, and maybe all of our disconnection comes from exactly that.

What if part of returning to real is to rescue the sacredness of gestating something? Of waiting, even being bored, expecting something we don’t know when it will come. And sitting longer in the unknown?!

A few weeks ago my son brought home a bean wrapped in a piece of cotton, something he’d planted at school. Day after day, we watched that bean grow and transform. New leaves came. And weeks later, something that looked like a whole new bean emerged.

We were in awe of the process. And not once did he ask me, “Mom, shouldn’t the bean be bigger by now? Why is it taking so long?”

Children don’t carry the illusion of being late for life. They don’t fear missing out. Their sense of urgency is a different creature entirely. They crave the now, and when we are pulled out of it, they scream to bring us back!

I remember when I was a kid, my dad had a camera, and we only had 24 shots. Sometimes 36. We had to really pause and choose the pictures we would take. And then it could take months before I finally held the photo in my hands.

But the wait was full of joy and expectation. It was fun to imagine how the pictures would turn out.

Now? The same object gets 25 shots. I press the button as fast as I can, I move without even thinking, and I see the picture instantly on the screen of my phone.

Where is the care? Where is the attention?

As I share this, I am reflecting because I am not standing on the other side of it. I am right there in the very middle. A few cravings are very loud in me now, and I am learning that they carry gold: they are inviting me back to my real.

The more I read about AI, the more I catch my thoughts telling me I should be somewhere I’m not. I should write faster. I should have a team of 50 agents working for me. I should produce more. More, more, more. Argh.

I don’t think the answer is to ignore it. But I do think we could be more thoughtful. Fast for what? Optimized for what?

A baby isn’t born before nine months. Good things take time, and there is joy in the process. I read once that the universe is so perfect it created time in this dimension to keep us alive — imagine if everything you thought manifested in a click; with all the thoughts we have, we’d all be dead by now.

There is a gift in the wait. And for me, returning to real has everything to do with that.

I love watching nature, reconnecting with the divine rhythm of things. Everything feels slower, and yet everything gets done. So much happens at once, and there is an order inside what I would sometimes call chaos.

I don’t have the answer, but maybe healing our relationship with time is part of it, part of how we hold the life in person and the life online, the life in nature and the life in the city; the life that sometimes asks us to move faster, and the life that also invites us to slow down and notice.

These are the questions I want to keep exploring… What does returning to real mean for me? How do I use technology in a way that supports my own way home? What are the small, daily choices that keep the real in me alive?

Ryan shared something that I resonate with a lot, and I would call myself lucky to be already choosing that for me and the people who get attracted to my work. He said we may be moving from a dopamine era into an oxytocin one.

It made me believe, more than ever, that a business worth building can only be built from love. From connection. From listening to the voice in you that points toward a path no one around you is walking, because that is the way to your own version of real.

For me, building a business was never a fast food project, and it shouldn’t be treated like one… even if we’re often led to believe it is. That it’s about moving fast, about more, about shortcuts, about optimizing all the time.

It isn’t. It’s sacred. It’s an expression of who you are. It matures, it evolves, it reveals itself to you as you walk. It has its own divine timing.

A delicious process of discovery, of adventure, of returning home, a process of listening to what God wants to bring into this world through me.

So why rush? No rush, and no pause either.

I am building, I am active, I am being and doing in my business but I am not running on a hamster wheel. My business supports the real in me, and, interestingly, it keeps inviting me to become more and more real.

The overnight successes you see are years of work no one witnessed. The money that seems to flow easily was built on a foundation of giving without receiving, for a long time. The clarity you hear in someone’s voice was gestated through years of trying, refining, listening. The thousands of followers came after years of no claps at all.

Like a seed. You plant, you care, you water — every day — and in its own time it grows, it becomes visible.

Real is what makes us feel whole. A conversation without a filter, eye to eye. A breath that fills the entire body. A business that supports the life you want to live. A meal you take the time to enjoy.

The problem is never the problem. Behind everything we call fake and disconnected, there is a deeper wound: in the illusion that we must rush because we are losing time, we lose the only thing that makes us real — the present moment.

Everything meaningful takes time. Real is how much we can enjoy the process.

With Love,

Carolina

Take the Harmony Map and discover what your business is asking for now.

Who we’re celebrating:

Ryan Levesque has spent years helping entrepreneurs listen more closely to the people they serve.

His Ask Method changed how many of us think about understanding a market.

Now, he is asking a different question:

How do we remain fully human in an age of artificial everything?

Ryan’s new book, Return to Real, launches September 29.

This week, we sat down with him to explore real connection, trust, AI, and the tension between listening to the market and what he calls:

“The contrarian voice of your heart.”

That conversation inspired Carolina’s essay this week and gave language to something many of us have been feeling: the future may not belong to whoever creates the most.

It may belong to those who create what feels most human.

Ryan has once again found language for a shift many people can feel but cannot yet name.

We are grateful for the conversation and excited to share his work with you.

Explore Return to Real

Happenings

The Clarity Compass began as a simple spreadsheet we used with clients who were carrying too many good ideas and struggling to choose what deserved their attention now.

It worked.

People began leaving with one clear focus, what could wait, and their next three actions.

So we released the spreadsheet version publicly.

Then we listened.

The feedback confirmed that the underlying process was strong, while showing us how much more useful the experience could become.

So we custom vibe-coded a massive upgrade.

The new Clarity Compass guides you through the entire decision, helps you compare what your business needs with what your heart wants, brings in your Harmony Map results, tests your decision, and turns your choice into three dated actions.

The short video below shows you some of what we built, but not all of it.

Because this is how we believe useful things become real:

You begin with something simple.
You place it in people’s hands.
You listen.
Then you build the next version from what the work reveals.

Explore the upgraded Clarity Compass.

The Weekly Highlights

If you’re building toward a revenue goal without asking what happens when it works, read this. Phil shares why he shut down a $100,000-a-month business and the question that can keep success from quietly building you a life you never wanted.

Memorable Quote by

Scary and exciting.

And yours to choose, though most of us forget that part.

Deciding where you’re going, and believing fully that you’ll get there, is one of the most alive feelings there is.

It’s like planning a trip.

You pick the place. You buy the ticket. And somehow, every day before you leave becomes a little more fun.

You picture the food, the streets, a slow afternoon with nothing to prove. If you’re like me, choosing the hotel and planning the itinerary fills your heart with joy.

The date is set.

You know where you’re going.

And even though you haven’t left yet, the journey has already begun.

Building a business should feel more like that.

More often than not, it doesn’t.

Maybe your Monday doesn’t feel like a runway.

Maybe it feels like going in circles. A lot of open threads. Several good ideas competing for your attention. And the sense that, despite all the motion, you’re not much further along than you were last year.

Why does planning a trip make the present feel so alive before you have even touched the ground at your destination?

Because the destination is clear.

Let’s say you’ve decided to visit the Atacama Desert in Chile.

By the way, it’s gorgeous and absolutely worth the visit.

You chose it because you want that experience.

Then you bought the ticket.

Now it isn’t hope anymore. Your whole body knows it’s happening.

You don’t wake up every morning wondering whether you’re going. You don’t spend weeks researching five other countries just in case. You know.

Because the destination is set, the next moves become clear.

You don’t look for tours in Argentina when you’re going to Chile.

You know what to search for.

You know what to book.

You also know what to say no to. If someone invites you to a gathering on the dates you’re traveling, the answer is simple.

That energy is clarity.

Clarity creates coherence. Coherence concentrates your energy. And concentrated energy moves things.

The doing starts going somewhere.

That is the whole thing.

When the direction is clear, action stops feeling like running in circles and starts feeling like getting closer.

That is what makes the days leading up to a trip so enjoyable. The energy is building. Every small action confirms that the experience is becoming real.

I know people who have been in practice for years but have never chosen their Atacama.

They have real skill. Real gifts. Meaningful work.

But they have never committed to one destination.

So Monday becomes more of the same.

Another idea. Another offer. Another possibility kept alive.

It makes me think of a friend who likes to say he keeps all his drawers open.

Every drawer holds another possibility he could pursue.

Paris. Atacama. Egypt. New York. Maybe Japan.

Keeping them all open feels like hope.

It also feels like exhaustion.

Because none of those possibilities receives enough devotion to become real.

My friend told me that keeping all the drawers open wasn’t helping him build something meaningful. It was scattering his energy. He was tired. He wished he had one thing he loved enough to focus on.

I know that feeling.

That was me too.

Without a clear and exciting destination, we can spend years moving without ever experiencing momentum.

Eventually, one drawer has to become a clear yes.

I am going to Atacama.

Of course, that is easier said than done.

The moment you choose, the mind goes nuts.

What if it’s the wrong destination?

What if I don’t like it?

But Argentina is amazing too.

What about Paris?

And I’ve always wanted to see Australia.

The business version sounds like this:

What if this isn’t the right offer?

What if I can’t pull it off?

What if my clients don’t understand the shift?

What if choosing this means losing all the other possibilities?

If I had listened to those voices, I would never have gone to the Atacama.

And I would never have built a business on my own terms either.

Deciding on one direction is scary.

The body contracts. The mind speeds up. Doubt arrives right on cue.

But you don’t have to make those feelings wrong.

You can let them be there and keep walking.

The Atacama is the destination.

I’m heading there.

Every clear action tells me I’m getting closer.

And if I arrive and discover I don’t like it, I am free to choose again.

But then I will choose from experience.

I went to Atacama. I learned something real. Now I want to explore Japan.

That kind of clarity cannot be born from thought alone.

The market can’t respond to the offer you keep reconsidering.

A client can’t say yes to the invitation you never make.

You can’t discover what works while keeping every possibility safely inside your head.

At some point, movement has to replace speculation.

The fear may not leave.

It simply stops driving.

Then you can begin building a business that supports your delicious life, reflects your gifts, and makes the journey itself feel more alive.

You don’t need every drawer open to feel safe.

You need one place that is yours.

And a ticket.

You don’t need anyone’s permission to buy it.

That part was always yours.

With love,

Carolina Wilke

Who We Are Celebrating This Week

Coming Wednesday: returns

We’re celebrating Ryan Levesque, whose ASK Method changed Phil’s trajectory and whose forthcoming book, The Return to Real, offers a timely vision for building a more human future.

Now he’s returning for a much deeper conversation about his forthcoming book, The Return to Real.

After a $70 million deal collapsed overnight, Ryan moved his family to a 200-year-old Vermont farm, began growing most of their own food, and rebuilt his relationship with business, technology, and life.

His conclusion is striking:

In a world flooded with AI, automation, and digital slop, real may be the ultimate strategic advantage.

We’ll explore why the best things in life don’t scale, what it means to optimize for oxytocin instead of dopamine, and how to use technology without letting it replace what makes us human.

Happenings

Sitting on a bench Series

You can spend months working harder on the wrong problem.

When a business isn’t gaining momentum, the breakdown is usually happening in one of three places: the offer, the conversations, or the invitations.

In Episode 002 of Sitting on a Bench, we show you how to identify which one is actually holding you back, why “I’d be happy to help sometime” isn’t an invitation, and how the wrong scoreboard can make genuine progress look like failure.

Plus, Phil shares how one simple outreach campaign produced more than $30,000 in retreat sales.

Things I want to Share

Your problem may not be a lack of ideas.

It may be that you have too many legitimate ones.

The Clarity Compass helps you decide which one deserves your attention now, what can wait, and the next three actions that will move it forward.

Give us $17 and 30 minutes.

One sale can feel insignificant.

Until you learn to read the math behind it.

Before you change your offer, abandon your idea, or decide your audience isn’t interested, ask one question:

Is this actually a bad result, or merely a small one?

Your hands are shaking. The email feels heavy. Every part of you wants to wait until the invitation feels effortless.

But what if the discomfort isn’t telling you to stop?

What if it’s revealing the judgment that has made marketing feel so difficult in the first place?

Memorable Quote

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

He spread coca leaves across a table.

I realize this is not how most business newsletters begin.

But the last week has not been especially ordinary.

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

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

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

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

Show me the next clear step in my work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Maestro Raúl, the leaves showed something encouraging.

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

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

Then came my real question.

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

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

Mama Coca’s answer was clear.

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

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

Even the shaman told me to market.

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

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

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

This was the moment.

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

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

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

And then, last night, came the spiritual surgery.

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

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

The second doctor pushed her hand down my throat.

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

“This was the problem,” she said.

The sensation was so physical that I woke up choking.

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

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

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

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

Any one of those things could have been coincidence.

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

No single spiritual sign handed me an airtight business plan.

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

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

The inner work matters. It has to lead somewhere.

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

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

Then your job is to just do it.

So that is what we have been doing.

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

I will not give you a grand reveal yet.

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

You will hear more when it is ready.

For now, perhaps the question is simpler:

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

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

You can start with eight minutes.

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

Because the friction is rarely where you think it is.

Free. Eight minutes. Immediate results.

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

Take the Harmony Map

Who we’re celebrating:

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

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

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

This week, he interviewed Hunter Biden.

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

Hunter’s response?

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

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

We are so freaking proud of you, Josh.

Listen to the conversation.

Happenings

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

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

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

• a real problem and an emotional interpretation

• early traction and failure

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

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

Add the Live to your calendar →

The Weekly Highlights

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

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

Subscribe now

Memorable Quote

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

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

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

Would anyone pay?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the sweet spot.

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

But it’s replicable.

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

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

And he did it again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

With love,

Carolina

What We Are Celebrating This Week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our website is back in alignment too.

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

Things I’d like to share

Work on your energy first - Protocol attached

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

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

Flow isn’t luck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When it does, follow it. :)

Memorable Quote

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

What came out was anger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and Bliss were my two lowest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m here now.

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

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

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

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

Take the Harmony Map

The result is yours. So is what comes next.

Phil (& Carolina)

Who We Are Celebrating This Week:

Slow AI is #1 in Generative AI on Amazon!

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

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

Memorable Quote

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am proud that I decided to try.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

And even if it does, then what?

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

This isn’t about being irresponsible.

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

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

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

Because we build a life from fear-based decisions.

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

But how can that be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Love,

Carolina

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

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

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

Take the Harmony Map

Who We Are Celebrating This Week:

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

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

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

Mac challenges his clients to look one level deeper.

Things I’d like to share

Memorable Quote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But lately, I stopped enjoying it.

I had to pause and ask why.

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

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

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

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

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

I noticed the same pattern on the other side.

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t want to dismiss the what entirely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’d love to hear it in the comments.

With Love,

Carolina

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

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

Take the Harmony Map and see what it reflects back.

Explore the Harmony Map

Who We Are Celebrating

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things I’d like to share

In full Light with

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

The conversation is full of gold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Love,

Carolina

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

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

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

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

so I checked too

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

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

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

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

why it agrees with you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the noise of the crowd

And it isn’t only AI that does this.

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

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

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

where he was really asking from

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

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

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

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

one thing to try

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You probably knew before you asked.

Phil (& Carolina)

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

Take the Harmony Map →

Who We Are Celebrating This Week: Michele Gill

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

Things I’d like to share

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

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

Slow AI

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

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

Read more

4 months ago · 57 likes · 6 comments · Dr Sam Illingworth

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

ROBOTS ATE MY HOMEWORK

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

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

Read more

4 months ago · 38 likes · 16 comments · Mia Kiraki 🎭

Memorable Quote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But they are there.

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

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

So much effort, and not the results she expected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the lady I was helping.

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

They were keeping her where she is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Love,

Carolina

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Who We Are Celebrating

I want to celebrate the wonderful work does on Substack.

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

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

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

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

Things I’d like to share

Sacred Business Stories with

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

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

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

What stayed with me was how he relates to failure.

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

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

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

And it is usually the one we avoid.

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

We block. We get scared.

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

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

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

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

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

Memorable Quote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A rope is only tight when both sides pull.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am selfish too.

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

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

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

Selfish and altruistic at the same time.

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

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

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

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

And that was okay too.

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

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

We do it all day.

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

We try to build businesses out of one half.

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

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

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

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

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

I am.

With Love,

Carolina

Who We Are Celebrating

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

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

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

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

Things I’d like to share

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

Read it

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

Read it

Memorable Quote

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

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

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

✔️ The marketers she hired failed her.

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

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

✔️ She has health challenges.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ability to respond.

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

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

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

There are two types of reactions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phil (& Carolina)

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

Take the Quiz

after i posted about it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who We Are Celebrating

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

Things I’d like to share

Worth Your Attention

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

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

Memorable Quote

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

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

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

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

Thanks, life, for so much.

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

Then I felt like writing this.

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

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

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

It is.

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

Don’t believe that.

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

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

I would say resilience.

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

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

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

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

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

It can just guide.

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

It’s true. And it’s terrifying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So do you.

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

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

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

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

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

It doesn’t matter how long it will take.

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

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

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

With love,

Carolina

Who We are Celebrating This Week:

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

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

Why does this matter?

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

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

Things I’d Like to Share

on Sacred Business Stories

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

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

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

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

Memorable Quote

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

New Here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two ways of seeing visibility

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

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

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

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

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

The problem: these two perspectives rarely meet

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

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

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

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

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

A Sacred Business is where both versions finally meet

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

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

Hiding isn’t the answer either

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

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

Both drain you.

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

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

Your business deserves that version of you.

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

With love,

Carolina

Who We are Celebrating This Week:

and his upcoming book, the Wellbeing Equation

Things I’d Like to Share

Conversation with founder of Second Callings

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

One thing Eva said stayed with me:

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

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

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

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

Sage Marinelli

I Lost Myself Building the Thing I Dreamed Of

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

Read more

5 months ago · 12 likes · 10 comments · Sage Marinelli

New Here?

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