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

22 days 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

22 days 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

2 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.

There’s a call we host every month that we’ve barely talked about here in our newsletter. Starting today, that changes.

It’s called Wonder Questions. Over 200 of you are in the Sacred Business Network at this point, and a group of us shows up live for it every month. It’s an hour long. We pick a passage from a teacher we’re sitting with. Carolina or I read it. Then we open a few questions that don’t have right answers. People share what’s actually alive for them in their business and their life. We listen. We respond. An hour later you've seen something about your business or yourself that you couldn't see when you first joined the Zoom.

Once a month from here on out, I’ll be sharing what came up on the call. Not what individual people said. That stays in the room. But the teaching we sat with, a few thoughts from Carolina, and a few from me.

So here’s what happened this month.

We read from a book called Reality Transurfing by Vadim Zeland. The passage was about pendulums.

A pendulum is what happens when a big group of people get worked up about the same thing at the same frequency. Think sports games, social media, the news, a political fight. Once enough people are feeding the same emotion at the same frequency, that energy starts to behave like its own thing. It pulls more people in. And it feeds on whatever attention you give it, including the attention you give by being against it.

The person who can’t stop hate-scrolling and the person who can’t stop telling everyone how bad social media is are stuck in the same pendulum. Energy is energy. The pendulum doesn’t care which side of the argument you’re on.

The way out is what Zeland calls disengagement. Disengagement is more subtle than it sounds. You don’t have to leave the situation. Your external behavior can stay the same. What changes is on the inside. You feel the pull and you don’t latch on.

This concept has been one of the more useful things I’ve read over the years for how I approach my own business.

After so many conversations with people building heart-led businesses, I see the same rollercoaster everywhere. You get into a high state. Vision work, a great coaching call, a moment of real clarity. You feel like you are on the top of the mountain. The next day you crash. A week later you’re doubting the whole thing. Then you’re back up. Then back down again. That’s the same pendulum, just one you set in motion yourself.

Carolina shared on the call that freedom doesn’t sit on either side of the pendulum. It sits in the middle, in what she calls neutrality. You’re there with people, warm and paying attention, and you’re just not getting swept away by the river.

She told a story to make it real. A few years back she was in the middle of a divorce, had moved countries, was Airbnb-hopping with her kids, and had just lost a big chunk of her money. Her mom came to visit. Carolina was bracing for sympathy. Her mom took one look at her and said, this situation is so bad, all we can do is celebrate. Let’s go drink a beer. They went and got a beer. They laughed about it. The pendulum broke right there.

For me, the practice has shown up most around sales. I used to tighten up the second a sales conversation got real. Now when I notice that pull, I get up from my desk and put on music. I dance for 30 seconds to a minute. It looks ridiculous if you saw it. It also works. My body remembers it has a choice.

That’s what the call kept circling back to. You don’t have to fight what’s pulling on you, and you don’t have to withdraw from things. The work is simpler than that. Remember what isn’t yours, and choose what frequency you actually want to be in.

This kind of conversation is why we built the Network. There are plenty of places online to talk about funnels and pricing and Substack growth. There aren’t many where you can sit with people who already understand what it means to build a business from the inside out, and explore the actual questions that change how you show up in the work.

If you want to be in the room for the next one, we just put up a new page for the Network. You can see a bit more about the types of folks that show up for these calls, read what they are actually like, and decide if it’s a fit.

Join the Sacred Business Network →

See you on the next one.

Phil

Who We are Celebrating This Week:

Gary writes for midlife people who feel a pull toward something more. His Substack is about reshaping your life to fit who you are now, not who you had to be to get through your thirties. Practical, grounded, and worth a read if you're in that stretch.

Gary runs the Life Design Collective. He’s our latest member to join the Sacred Business Network, and we are so glad to have him in the fold.

The Life Design Collective Substack

Here you find my musings on what it takes to design the life you want and deserve to live. We ALL have it in us to design our lives and I'm confident this space will support you in that pursuit

By Gary Allen

Things I’d Like to Share

Most conversations with doctors stay clinical. isn't most doctors. This episode of In Full-Light stayed clinical for about six minutes and then went somewhere I rarely hear physicians willing to go.

Here’s what had to say about it:

Most marketing conversations chase the sexy stuff. isn't most marketers. He spends his days on the unsexy infrastructure that decides whether any of the sexy stuff actually reaches a human.

Here’s what had to say about it:

Here’s what had to say about it:

Memorable Quote

Vadim Zeland — “Pendulums are not malevolent in themselves. They simply need energy. They do not care if they devour you in the process.”

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.

Almost without exception, that’s the work that hasn’t taken shape yet. They know what they want to be doing in the world. They’ve known for years. The work is alive in them. What hasn’t settled is the form. The offer keeps changing shape. The pricing won’t sit right. The messaging won’t quite hold. They’ve launched versions and pulled them back. They’ve started and restarted.

If you’re reading this, some version of this is probably you too. You’ve been working on the same thing for two, three, five years. You can feel exactly who it’s for and what it would do for them. And the form keeps moving on you.

This used to look like substantive work to me. People refining their offer. Reconsidering their pricing. Rewriting their messaging. The kind of thing that should obviously make it better.

Over time, I started seeing it differently.

The endless refining of the offer is part of the pattern. The pricing reconsideration is part of the pattern. The messaging that won’t quite land is part of the pattern. They look like substantive work, which is what makes them so hard to see. You think you’re making progress. You’re actually running a loop.

The work that means the most to you has the highest stakes. Higher stakes means more protection. The protection comes from a layer underneath your conscious mind. The part of you that’s spent decades figuring out how to keep you safe. And that part has decided in some way that fully stepping into this work is dangerous.

Your wiring doesn’t have a reference point for being seen doing the work. That’s what registers as the threat.

So you protect yourself from the very thing you most want. Not by avoiding it directly. By staying in the version of the work that never quite gets solidified. The offer that needs one more pass. The pricing that needs one more think. The messaging that needs one more iteration.

You’re not lazy. You don’t lack commitment. You’re not undisciplined. The push-harder advice that’s everywhere in this space made you tired in the first place. Whatever’s keeping this work from landing has a different shape than character flaws.

The thing you’re calling stuckness has a structure. It’s a pattern. And patterns have reasons for existing.

The reason your particular pattern exists has nothing to do with your character. It has to do with what your body learned was safe a long time before you got here.

One of the women in our community said it like this: “It’s so hardwired in my head. How do I undo that wiring?”

That’s the right question.

Most of the work you’ve done so far, the therapy, the retreats, the courses, the years of inner work, has been good for naming the wiring. It’s been less good at undoing it. Naming and undoing are different jobs that use different parts of the brain.

I had to learn this the hard way watching people try strategy after strategy that didn’t take them where they wanted to go. The strategies were in many cases good. What was in the way was something else.

I’m going to be writing about this for the next several weeks. About the five specific patterns I see most often in people who’ve done years of inner work and still struggle to put their body of work out there. About what those patterns cost. About what actually shifts them, which isn’t what most of us were taught.

If you’ve been in this loop for a while, you’ll probably recognize yourself somewhere in the next few essays. That recognition is useful. It’s also the starting point for a different way of thinking about growing your business. Recognition by itself wont fully take you where you want to go. But something else will.

I’ll get to that.

For now, the thing worth sitting with is this. What you have to offer isn’t stalled out because you haven’t refined it enough, or you lack required experience. It’s held up because what’s in the way of it is wired in so strongly that its hard to see anything beyond that way of being.

Years pass quickly when you’re stuck.

That’s what I want to write about.

If this moves something in you, the next few essays will probably keep doing that. I’m not suggesting that you take any new actions yet. Just notice what gets stirred up. The recognition is the start.

Phil

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Who We are Celebrating This Week:

Josh Woll has been part of our community for a long time, and we’re celebrating him big right now. He’s about to head to Machu Picchu for a retreat, then jetting straight from Peru to Rio de Janeiro for a VIP In-Person experience with us. What a run. Honestly Josh, that’s the kind of trip most people put on a vision board for ten years and never take. You’re just doing it man!

He’s the first of our community members to come for a VIP experience here in Brazil, and we’re excited to host him. He’s also a brilliant cinematographer and photographer, and he’ll be capturing some of the time on camera with us, and helping us out with some photos. We are overdue for a refresh!

Josh runs The Sober Creative. For 22 years, drinking was just part of who he was. Five years ago he committed publicly to a year without alcohol and told people. He removed the exit. The work he’d been trying to do his whole career started happening. Not despite sobriety. Because of it.

That’s what we’re really celebrating. Josh built a life he doesn’t want to escape from, and now he’s out living it. Peru one week, Rio the next, the camera on his shoulder, the work he loves in his hands. That’s the whole point.

If you’ve been quietly wondering about your own relationship with alcohol and could use some support, take a look at what he’s built.

Visit The Sober Creative →

The Sober Creative

The Sober Creative shows how removing alcohol restores the energy, clarity, and capacity that gets buried under incomplete recovery—with practical strategies and real stories from people who've made the shift.

By Josh Woll

Things I’d Like to Share

Most marketing conversations stay in tactics. isn’t most marketers. This one started in tactics for about six minutes and then went somewhere I rarely hear marketers willing to go.

Here’s what had to say about it:

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

Here’s what had to say about it:

Here’s what and had to say about it:

Here’s what had to say about it:

Memorable Quote

Anaïs Nin — "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

New Here?

How do I get more subscribers on Substack?

You’ve been publishing consistently. Growth was promising at first. It’s flattened in a way that doesn’t match the effort. You’re starting to wonder if the standard advice is missing something.

All three of them framed it as a discovery problem. As though some specific tactic or notes strategy would surface the people who haven’t yet found them.

That’s the wrong frame.

Your readers aren’t undiscovered. They’re already gathered. They’re gathered around someone whose work looks very similar to yours in many ways. Maybe someone who has spent five years writing about almost-the-same-thing. Someone who runs a publication your ideal subscriber already opens every week consistently.

Growth on Substack comes down to two questions.

Whose audience already overlaps yours?

Does that creator believe your work is worth pointing to?

Most writers approach growth a little bit like extraction.

How do I get attention from someone who has more of it than I do?

How do I shortcut my way into someone else’s audience?

The premise is wrong.

Substack is built on trust and introduction. Every meaningful growth lever on the platform is some version of one writer pointing another writer’s audience toward someone they trust.

Recommendations. Restacks. Cross-posts. Notes attribution. Live conversations.

Earning an introduction is harder than extracting attention. The standard is higher and the timeline can be longer, although it doesn’t have to be. But once you’ve cleared that bar, the leverage is enormous, because every introduction arrives with the host’s accumulated trust riding on top.

Here’s what I see actually working with the people I work with on this.

How to ask for a recommendation

Most writers treat the recommendations system as a favor to extract. A small ask, easily granted, low cost.

The math says this is still one of the highest-leverage growth levers on Substack right now. It is. There’s nothing wrong with asking directly for one.

When we were first building our Substack, I wanted our first 50 recommendations and I went after them agressively. I made it a game. I sent a lot of asks. For each writer, I named specifically what I loved about their work and mentioned I’d noticed them engaging with my notes. The asks were direct.

What makes an ask like that land is specificity. Generic asks get ignored. Specific ones get accepted because they signal that you’ve actually read the writer’s work, that you’re paying attention, that the recommendation isn’t just a transaction.

The people I work with who get recommended without much friction tend to do three things alongside the ask. They comment thoughtfully on the writer’s work for a stretch without an angle. They publish essays that are unmistakably theirs and unmistakably good. And when they reference that writer’s work in their own, they do so with the kind of specificity that makes it obvious they actually read it.

All of that makes the ask easier. By the time you bring it up, the writer already has familiarity with your work, so it doesn’t feel like a request from a stranger.

How to get noticed by writers you admire

Substack Notes has a feature most growth-focused creators underuse. When a writer shapes a thought you’re having, you can credit them by tagging them in a Note, in real time, in front of their audience.

It’s very simple to do. Write a note that opens with a real observation. Attribute the seed of it to someone you admire, and a specific thing they shared that sparked a thought in you. The mention surfaces in their notifications. Some will like it or reply. A smaller number will restack the note to their own audience, which puts your name in front of their readers.

Use caution here: It only works if the feeling is real. If it reads as performance, and on a platform built around taste, this isn’t going to work in your favor. When the credit is honest and specific, it becomes one of the lowest-friction ways to enter the awareness of someone you’d otherwise have to chase for months, likely with minimal results.

Substack Live works even if no one watches live

A client of mine has built a regular Substack Live practice over the last few months. Two conversations a month, mostly with other writers in adjacent fields. She started doing them as a way to make her work visible without the weight of constantly producing essays.

Her subscriber count is up about 25% over that stretch. One Live attendee commissioned her for paid creative work directly out of one of the conversations.

The format is simple. You invite a guest whose work you admire. You go live. The session surfaces in both audiences’ feeds. Your guest’s followers see your name next to someone they already trust. Some of them subscribe.

The live audience itself almost doesn’t matter. The byproducts matter. The recording views that you benefit from months later. The cross-pollination. The relationship you’ve now formalized with a writer whose audience overlaps with yours.

The only real cost is the hour and the willingness to be on camera. That second part is doing more strategic work than most people on Substack realize right now. Love it or hate it, AI lets anyone produce a polished essay a day if they are motivated to. What it can’t replicate is a real person on camera, in real conversation, in front of another writer’s audience. The discomfort of being visible is exactly what keeps most people out, and exactly what makes the move pay off for the ones who go through that resistance.

Write something with another writer’s audience in mind.

This one is probably the hardest. Most will skip it.

Pick one writer whose audience overlaps yours. Then write something with their readers in mind from the first sentence.

It might answer a question their readers keep asking, if you have been observing their comments. Or take one of their ideas and carry it one step further than they have. The form doesn’t matter so much. What matters is the fit. When the writer reads it, sharing should feel natural and like an obvious next step. A favor to their readers, not to you.

Most writers send their work to other writers and hope it gets shared. It rarely does. When a writer shares something with their readers, they’re putting their own taste on the line. Generic work makes their taste look weak. They only share work that they would feel can stand up next to their own in service of their audience.

The principle underneath

Substack growth at the level most thoughtful writers care about isn’t actually a tactical problem, as much as we would all love to just have a simple step by step blueprint to follow.

Honestly, the tactics are easy. You can find them listed for free in a hundred different posts. The bottleneck is whether you’ve done the deeper work that makes the tactics work in your favor.

A writer with a clear voice, a real point of view, and a body of work that rewards careful reading doesn’t need a growth hack. They need to be one degree closer to the writer who has already gathered the readers who would love their work.

And that is work worth doing. Becoming someone worth pointing to for a fresh perspective, or unique viewpoint.

This will get you one degree closer, and the rest will start to take care of itself quite organically.

Most of the people I work with on this came in through someone else's recommendation, or through one of our Sacred Business Stories episodes. The ones who end up getting the best results build their own audience the same way. With a lot of attention on being worth pointing to, rather than looking for shortcuts.

Being worth pointing to is mostly perspective. Publishing consistently is the first step, but the work many writers skip is developing a point of view you can truly own. That perspective gets built through the doing, with a mindset of paying attention and being thoughtful as you go.

Phil

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Who We are Celebrating This Week:

Veronica is an author, an Ironman finisher, and a past guest on Sacred Business Stories.

In March 2025 she published The Anti-Procrastinator with Penguin Random House. Today she’s launching the digital course. The premise overlaps with our work: humans procrastinate by nature and become anti-procrastinators by choice, and the choice runs through knowing your default pattern (one of six types) and rewiring it. The course covers the brain science, the diagnostic, and six mental workouts at what she calls the Anti-Procrastinator Gym.

Get The Course

If you’ve been holding a creative project in the journal stage or postponing the thing you’ve been talking about for years, take a look.

See the course →

Transparency Alert: We do receive financial compensation if you purchase the course from Veronica, but we only recommend affiliates whose work we believe in.

Things I’d Like to Share

Mia Kiraki writes Robots Ate My Homework, one of the sharpest AI voices on Substack. Twenty minutes in, she turned a question back on me that pulled at a habit he'd been quietly questioning.

Memorable Quote

"When you are surrounded with darkness, do not shake your fist and raise your voice and curse the darkness. Rather be a Light unto the darkness, and don't be mad about it." - Neal Donald Walsch

New Here?

There are no wrong emotions.

But there are emotions we’ve quietly put on a “not allowed” list.

And the moment we decide an emotion shouldn’t be felt, we don’t eliminate it… what we do instead is, we reorganize our lives around avoiding it.

The brain doesn’t store events, it stores emotion predictions. And because its job is to keep us safe and help us survive, the feelings that were registered as unsafe begin to shape what we allow ourselves to do, say, want, and pursue.

Without realizing it, our lives become organized around avoiding certain internal experiences.

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And when we live this way, our choices are no longer oriented toward expansion, but toward protection.

This is why we hesitate in moments that matter — not because we don’t know what to do, but because we are unwilling to feel what might come with doing it.

Like pretty much everything in life, emotions are not black and white. Within one emotion there is a whole spectrum of experiences one can have.

Envy is born in the same place desire is born. Before it becomes a thought, it’s a pull, a movement toward something. It’s a physical recognition — something in me responds to that. I see it in the outer world and it calls my attention.

Grounded desire is the cue for expansion.

When desire is born and it meets our stories of not enough, not feeling capable, the idea that we are separated from the whole — it becomes that unhealthy feeling of: why do they have that and I don’t? I shouldn’t want that for myself.

They were able to get that because… but this is not for me. As the energy of desire tries to rise in your body, it hits your relationship with yourself, and the story that what I really want is unavailable for me, or I am not capable of creating this…

Envy, if explored in a healthy way, is not about the situation or the thing or the other people at all… it’s not even telling you what you lack. It’s revealing what you are in relationship with, but not yet in expression of.

What you have been calling envy — maybe trying to avoid feeling it altogether — is just your desire meeting the version of you who doesn’t fully believe you can have it. Or that you are not capable of it. Or even the version of you that doesn’t believe you deserve it.

Next time you feel that, instead of projecting it outward and making it wrong — open yourself to receive its message. It has a gift for you. But the one who will open the gift is not the same one who avoided it for so long.

The version of you that doesn’t feel enough, not capable, not deserving — that one won’t build the sacred business you keep looking at and quietly wishing was yours. But the one who explores not-enoughness, who sits with incapacity and dances when facing the belief they don’t deserve it — that one will.

With love,

Carolina

Who We are Celebrating This Week:

with The Joy Club

Are you looking for a great Substack to follow? I am Celebrating Michele and her joyful Substack publication.

is a psychologist, educator, and the creator of The Joy Club Way — a space she built to help women live more fully alive through play, connection, and self-discovery.

Her main question is so necessary: Why do we need a “Joy Club” anyway?

This is my answer to that: I believe we lost touch with the essence of what we came here for.

In the chasing of money, meaning, and getting it right, we forgot the why. We need a Joy Club to remind ourselves that being is enough, that following your joy is the path.

We did not come here to survive or struggle — we came to have fun, serve, and love. And for me, The Joy Club is a beautiful reminder of exactly that.

Thanks Michele for bringing this work into the world!

Things I’d Like to Share

Sacred Business Stories with

We had such a rich conversation this past week. Brian brought us back to some marketing fundamentals that honestly never get old. Some of the principles that built businesses in the early days of the internet are still the ones that work today.

Sometimes the most powerful move is returning to the basics. I think you'll love this one

Consciously by

Another great essay:

Consciously

Maybe You Don’t Need to Regulate Yourself

There’s a reason we talk so much about nervous system regulation…

Read more

3 months ago · 51 likes · 8 comments · Patricia W.

The foundation of my work is helping people come back to the body, that’s also my own journey (that never ends btw…) the very vehicle that gives us the chance to experience the gift of being alive, and the one so many of us have forgotten.

When we disconnect from our emotions, we don’t become stronger or more stable. We become empty. We start believing that feeling deeply is wrong, that being moved by life means something is broken in us. A regulated nervous system isn’t a system that feels nothing — it’s a system where the emotional cycle can complete itself. Patricia wrote something this week that speaks directly to this, and I couldn’t agree more.

Thank you, Patricia, for another beautiful essay.

Memorable Quote

She has the topic. She has real expertise, plenty of energy around it, and months of material from a workshop she’s been building.

So why wasn’t she writing?

Because every time she imagined “writing,” she pictured herself sitting at a blank computer screen trying to squeeze something out of nothing. She hated that picture. So she avoided it. And then she concluded that she couldn’t write.

Halfway through the call, I shared a few things I do. I don’t actually write at a blank screen. I walk. I talk to myself as I walk, and I record the talking in an app that turns it into a searchable note. Then I let an AI ask me questions about what I said until the idea sharpens into something I can use. When I do sit down, the “writing” part is mostly arranging what’s already there.

She went quiet for a beat. Then she said:

“This is a whole workshop you should be teaching. How we think we’re supposed to write versus how we actually write. I would pay lots of money to go to that workshop.”

She’d inherited a definition of writing as sitting-at-a-blank-screen. Nothing about that picture matched how she actually generates ideas, and she’d never questioned the mismatch. So the problem had to be her. But inside the span of a single hour on that call, her confidence in her plan moved from a 6 to an 8/10. All from reframing what writing actually is.

The pattern isn’t limited to writing.

“I can’t do visibility” usually translates to “I can’t do visibility the way I’ve decided visibility has to look.” Same goes for pricing, for selling, for charging properly. The block almost always sits one level beneath the action, in the picture we hold of what doing the thing is supposed to look like.

What shifted her was approach. The walking became her main mode of generating ideas. AI moved into the role of interviewer instead of ghostwriter. Her workshops started feeding her essays, her essays feeding her offers, her offers feeding her visibility. None of those tools are new on their own. Assembled in the right order, they change the whole experience of the work.

Next month, I’m running the first Architect Session inside Radiant Flow. This is the exact territory we’ll be in. How to use AI as a thinking partner without handing over your voice. How to turn work you’re already doing into the content you’ve been failing to publish. The goal is a writing practice built around how you actually generate ideas, not around the version of writing you’ve been told you’re supposed to do.

It’s the first of a monthly Architect Session series inside RF. Carolina holds the embodiment anchor. I’ll be bringing the structure.

If you want to know what Radiant Flow is and whether it’s somewhere you’d want to be, you can read about it here.

Learn about Radiant Flow →

Phil

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Who We are Celebrating This Week:

Ancient Wisdom Made Practical for Flow ✨ Monique guides women leaders & entrepreneurs into clarity, peace, and aligned success using Astrology, Feng Shui, Tarot, and intuitive strategy. Join her at the Flow Frwuenc for weekly guidance, resources, and rituals.

The Flow Frequency Collective™

The Flow Frequency Collective™ — a living community and podcast where women entrepreneurs, leaders, and creators align business, energy, and soul through Astrology, Feng Shui, and Spiritual Strategy.

By Monique Renée

Things I’d Like to Share

Carolina wrote this one. It’s about the not-enoughness most people try to correct with better thoughts, and why that approach never holds. The pattern isn’t a belief. It’s a survival strategy with years of loyalty behind it, and the way through runs through the body before it reaches the mind.

Last week a fever sent me to the emergency room and forced me to reschedule a presentation for Leo Babauta’s audience. But watching my mind through the recovery, I noticed I’d also been quietly postponing the prep, telling myself the calendar block was enough. This one is about the kind of avoidance that looks like planning.

Memorable Quote

"Every time you honor yourself, you receive all the support from the universe in ways your mind cannot even imagine." - Carolina Wilke

New Here?

There is a no that is there to protect the status quo.

It comes quietly. It doesn’t announce itself. It’s just the way things are, the job you keep, the dynamic you’ve adjusted to, the version of yourself you keep showing up as. You don’t experience it as a decision. You don’t experience it as a no at all.

But it is.

And it is slowly emptying you.

This no lives in the well-meaning people. Actually it lives in all of us.

The careful ones. The responsible ones. The ones who care deeply about not making a mess, not being reckless, not hurting anyone. Somewhere along the way, safety became their highest value. And a life organized around safety will say no to everything that can’t be predicted, everything that requires exposure, everything that asks you to become someone you don’t yet know how to be.

The problem is that this no doesn’t feel like a choice. It feels like common sense.

It comes with a full story already attached. Why this isn’t the right time. Why that idea is too risky. Why what you have is good enough. The reasoning is solid. The logic holds up.

And something inside you gets a little smaller.

Not dramatically. Just quietly. Like a light being dimmed so slowly you don’t notice until the room is dark.

Your brain is a prediction machine.

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This is not a metaphor. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spent decades showing that the body signals truth before the mind constructs its story. The brain is constantly running a loop of what it already knows. Anything outside that loop gets filtered fast.

So when something in you says this no longer fits, the brain doesn’t pause and sit with it. It reaches for the familiar. It fires the no before you’ve even consciously processed the feeling. Then your mind arrives a second later with all the reasons why that no makes sense.

You think you’re being thoughtful.

You’re catching up to a reflex.

This no shows up everywhere. But it’s hardest to see where you’ve already built something.

For those who are, by every visible measure, successful… this pattern is most dangerous for them. Because from the outside everything looks fine. More than fine.

You built something real. People respect what you do. It works.

And you keep saying no to the thing that’s trying to come through you. The part of you that has more to say. The belief you’ve never said out loud in your work. The way of seeing the world that feels too personal, too strange, too much.

You keep it private.

You’re not sure people would accept that version of you, so you keep offering the more acceptable one.

The business starts to feel like a costume.

It fits. It looks good. But you know it’s not fully you.

Every day you say no to what wants to come through, the work feels a little more like performance and a little less like truth.

Then there is the other no.

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This one is different.

It doesn’t come fast. It doesn’t come with a prepared argument. It comes from somewhere deeper, and when it arrives, it doesn’t feel like defense.

It feels like freedom.

This is the no that says: this no longer fits who I am. Not because the thing was bad — sometimes it was genuinely good, genuinely meaningful. But you’ve outgrown the shape of it. Staying inside it now costs you something you can feel but can’t always name.

This no carries grief. I want to be honest about that.

Even when what you’re leaving is no longer right for you, there is still loss. Because it gave you an identity. An answer to the question who am I.

The grounded no asks you to release that answer and sit with not knowing for a while.

That is genuinely hard.

And it is also where your life is waiting.

The truth of what you want doesn’t live in your mind.

It lives in your body.

Pay attention to the contraction. The flatness behind your eyes when you talk about certain things. The low-grade worry you’ve learned to call normal. That’s not neutral. That’s your body holding information your mind keeps overriding.

And pay attention to the opposite. The moments when something lights up in you. When you feel more awake, more real, more like yourself. Those moments are not accidents. They are directions.

You don’t have to jump off a cliff.

Start here: look at the things you are most accustomed to.

The relationships, the work, the ways of being that you keep choosing without questioning. Not because they are wrong… but because they are familiar.

Sit with them honestly.

Ask yourself: does this still serve who I am becoming? Does it still feel alive? Or has it become something I simply tolerate because I know how to?

If the answer is that it no longer serves you or you just tolerate… that is when the grounded no should come alive.

You don’t need to have the full picture of what comes next. You don’t need to know exactly where you’re going before you take a step. The grounded no is enough to start with. It clears space. It tells the truth. And on the other side of it, there is something worth exploring.

The path forward rarely asks you to be reckless.

It asks you to be honest.

Honest about what the first type of no has been costing you. Honest about what you’ve been protecting yourself from feeling. Honest about the parts of you that have been waiting for permission to come through.

Those parts are not too much.

They are exactly what’s been missing.

With Love,

Carolina

If you're ready to stop tolerating what no longer fits and say yes to what actually matters, Phil and I are here for that conversation.

Let’s talk.

Happenings

Sacred Business Wonder Questions Call For Network Members

Wed Apr 15th at 2:30 EST

If you are a Sacred Business Network member, don’t miss our monthly call this Wednesday.

This is one of my favorite moments of the month. A real conversation with people who believe that business and personal evolution are not separate — they walk side by side. We go deep on topics that expand how you see yourself and how you serve the world.

Don’t miss it. See you there.

If you are not yet a member, click here.

Things I’d Like to Share

Still Rehearsing?

Great guided for you who have been avoiding to shine your light, it’s our gift for you. Click here.

Great conversation with

I want to share with you this conversation we had with Jane Riccobono.

Jane is a Certified Nurse Midwife and Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner who refused to choose between real medical expertise and the deeper wisdom our bodies carry. She helps women heal by honoring both — what science knows and what lives within us.

As a woman, I deeply appreciate what she is building. Watch our conversation here and follow her work at The Wise Body.

Memorable Quote

Why Identity Evolution Demands Business Change

Something happens to people who do serious inner work. They change. Not incrementally. Not just on the surface. Fundamentally. The illness that strips everything back to what matters. The divorce that dismantles the life that was never quite right. The awakening that makes the old ambitions feel hollow. The years of therapy, retreats, and embodiment work that produce a person who is substantially different from the one who started.

And then they sit down to work on their business. And the business feels wrong. Not broken. Not failed. Wrong. Like wearing an outfit that fit perfectly five years ago and now pulls across the shoulders and sits too short in the sleeves. The business was built for someone you used to be. You’ve become someone else entirely.

This is the conversation nobody in the business world is having. Not because it isn’t happening. It’s happening everywhere, to some of the most talented and serious people I know. But because the business world doesn’t have language for who you’ve become. It has language for pivots. For rebrands. For niching down. None of which touches what’s actually happening.

Why Who You’ve Become Demands a Different Business

Your business is a reflection of who’s running it. Which means when you change in a genuine and substantial way, then the business must change with it. The old model wasn’t wrong. It was built for someone you no longer are. As a therapist who's deepened her understanding through inner work, or an executive who can no longer align with past ambitions, your business needs to reflect not just what you do, but who you are now.

Here’s how this shows up in practice: The message that used to feel true now feels hollow. You can say the words. You’ve said them hundreds of times. But they no longer feel like yours. They feel like something you constructed before you knew what you actually wanted to say. The real thing you want to say feels too specific, too personal, too much like the new version of you that hasn’t yet been authorized to show up publicly.

Steps to Realign Your Business With Your True Self

Step 1: Diagnose which floor your problem is on.

Think of your business as a three-story building. The top floor is Strategy: your offer, messaging, content, sales process.

The middle floor is Identity: who you believe yourself to be, what you believe you deserve, how you see yourself in relation to your work.

The ground floor is Nervous System: the physiological patterns running underneath everything, the protection programs your body activates the moment you try to show up as who you’ve become. Every floor is only as stable as the floor beneath it.

Step 2: Rebuild from the ground floor up.

Start at the ground floor. Your body is running protection programs written for your old life. These activate the moment you try to show up as who you’ve become. The tightening before you hit publish, the speeding up before you say the price, the going blank before you make the offer. This is your nervous system protecting you from a threat that no longer exists. The intervention is somatic work. Specific, embodied practice that builds the physiological capacity your next chapter requires and aligns with the values and truths that now guide your life and work.

With that underway, move to the middle floor. Map the transition: who you were professionally, who you’ve become personally, and the precise gap between your current self-concept and the one your next-level business requires. This is where the permission you give yourself actually shifts by building the inner authorization to show up as who you are now rather than who you were trained to be.

Step 3: Let the new identity lead.

The final step is the simplest and the hardest: stop editing yourself down to something more palatable and start saying the true thing to the right people. This means writing the post you’ve been afraid to write. Making the offer at the price that reflects the depth of what you do. Introducing yourself as who you’ve become rather than who you were. Showing up with the full complexity of your perspective rather than the managed version that feels safer.

Avoiding the Trap of Old Strategies

The most common mistake when you sense you’ve outgrown your business: fixing the top floor while leaving the bottom two intact. New niche. Same identity. New offer. Same nervous system response. New messaging. Same self-concept. The result is a business that looks different on the outside and feels identical on the inside.

What Transformation Actually Looks Like

One client had been helping people with creativity for years. Genuine work, real impact, but messaging that belonged to a previous version of her. After mapping the identity gap and rebuilding from the ground floor up, she found the specific perspective she’d been softening for years and stopped qualifying it. The result: 25 people signing up for her challenge from four continents, strangers reaching out after finding her writing, a business that finally reflected the depth of what she’d always been capable of.

Your Next Step

We’ve created a free guide:

Aligning Your Business With Your Evolved Identity

It walks you through a brand new diagnostic process we are starting to use with our clients. It includes the three questions that reveal which floor your problem is on, the ground-floor-up rebuilding sequence, and the first three actions to take this week.

Download the Free Guide →

The business you’re capable of building isn’t waiting for a better strategy. It’s waiting for you to stop building from who you were. This guide is not just a tool, it's a pathway to ensuring your business success.

Happenings

Sacred Business Stories w/

Kevin built one of the most respected communities in his industry over 11 years. Then walked away. This conversation is about what happens after.

When you know exactly what you should do next and still can't make yourself do it. If that gap feels familiar, start here.

Sacred Business Wonder Questions Call For Network Members

(Wednesday April 15th @ 2:30pm eastern)

Join us for a new type of gathering where we explore the deeper questions of creating sacred business. During this call we’ll share a passage we’ve been reflecting on and pose a Wonder Question - not to get answers, but to open into living inquiry together.

A Wonder Question (as taught by one of our mentors, Jayem) invites you into the mystery of Presence through openness and curiosity, like dropping a pebble into still water and watching the ripples move through your experience.

Come as you are.

Bring your questions, your heart, and your willingness to explore how everything connects in your sacred work. No agenda, no pressure - just space for authentic conversation and deeper connection with yourself and our community.

Network Members RSVP Here

Not a member? Upgrade to paid to access our monthly community calls + many other perks.

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Who We Are Celebrating This Week:

Proponent of social capital, human connection, the power of community—Sharing our gifts with others, living with purpose, generosity of spirit—Inspired by nature—Avid reader moved by words—Living with MECFS—Grateful—UX product designer by profession

We’ve been enjoying getting to know Autumn, and we encourage you to connect with her here!

Connect with Autumn

Things I’d Like to Share

The Love-Led Leap

At some point the clarity work stops being useful and the only thing left is the actual move. This essay is about what that looks like when it isn’t dramatic — and why the leap you’ve been avoiding is probably smaller than the one fear has been describing.

Read More

Stop Performing, Start Being

Carolina wrote this one. It’s about the mask, the version of you that your business has been built around, and what it costs to keep wearing it. If the idea of building from who you’ve become landed for you, this is where to go next.

Read More

Memorable Quote

Your Next Step

We’ve created a free guide: Aligning Your Business With Your Evolved Identity. This guide is not just a tool, it's a pathway to ensuring your business success. Download the Guide Here →

Ready for Deeper Transformation?

For those ready to take immediate action and truly integrate these principles into their business and life, consider booking a call with us. In this session, we'll dive deep into your unique challenges and opportunities, crafting a personalized strategy that aligns with who you've become.

Schedule Your Transformation Call Now →

P.S. You can read all previous editions of the newsletter here, and you can upgrade your subscription here.

You might even notice the obstacles get bigger each time.

It could be a big project that takes up all your time, a move, a new relationship, the end of a long one. It has infinite ways to show up, but only one outcome.

You delay, once again, something that matters to you.

And for a while it starts to make sense to let it go.

Why bother?

It seems a little crazy anyway. What would people think if you actually shared it?

So you let it go.

But it doesn’t let you go.

It fades for a season, while you recover, while you grieve, while you integrate the new thing or finish the move. And then it comes back. Quiet but strong.

You almost feel upset that it won’t leave you alone. What was quiet starts getting louder. After a few months you decide you’ll try again, and then something important, tragic, unexpected, new happens again.

You let it go again.

Every time you do, it feels like the right thing. Responsible. Mature. Necessary. That’s what makes it so hard to see.

You question why the desire keeps coming back. You make it wrong. You wish you could forget about it. You question that quiet voice so many times that you never once stop to question the nature of the obstacle itself.

The obstacle isn’t wrong. It happened. And yet you never pause to ask what your participation was in creating it.

And this is what most people miss: some people use an obstacle as a reason to stop. Others use it as a reason to keep going.

That single interior choice determines whether you will ever actually experience the joy you’ve been postponing, or whether you’ll spend your life coasting, never really meeting your own light.

Choosing to stop doesn’t make you more compassionate.

It doesn’t make you more available to the people you love. You can hold everything life is asking of you and still not put yourself down. Those two things were never in competition. The belief that they are is the story that keeps the lukewarm life intact.

Lukewarm is a temperature we choose.

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Not because we’re weak, but because we’ve learned it’s the only way to never really fail. If life kept interrupting, the dream is still pure. Still possible. Still out there. And so is the version of you who would have done it.

But you’re reading this because you’re done with that story.

You’re not confused about what you want. You’ve known for years.

You’re tired of it feeling noble to leave yourself behind.

You’re tired of the delay feeling like the responsible choice.

So this is where the delaying ends.

Every obstacle that shows up from here is not evidence that you should stop. It is life helping you become the person who can hold what you’ve been carrying in your heart.

Start now. Or keep going if you already did.

That’s enough.

With love,

Carolina

Take the free Harmony Map assessment and discover your breakthrough frequency — the hidden opportunity that’s been waiting for you all along.

Happenings

Radiant Flow

This week we had our very first week of Radiant Flow, and I am celebrating every single person who said yes to themselves.

Who decided they were done postponing what matters. Who chose to work at the level of the body — to break old patterns, unlock their power, and expand their capacity to move toward a life that feels alive. Toward service. Toward love.

So many people love knowing. Studying. Accumulating knowledge. Giving beautiful speeches about profound things. And when it comes to actually bringing any of it to life, nothing moves. It stays an idea they entertain in their heads.

That is not what this is. And it is not who these people are.

Being surrounded by people who are truly ready to transform, to act, to live fully — that is one of the greatest gifts life has given me. I could not be more grateful.

Things I’d Like to Share

Still Rehearsing?!

Stop rehearsing and begin living.

wrote a beautiful guide to invite you into action… toward the very thing that’s been in your heart.

No more practicing.

No more refining.

The stage is ready for you. Go have fun on it.

See you there.

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This came from someone I truly admire. Someone who has been beautifully following her heart, showing up for her calling, and creating real impact in the world.

Is she doing the work? Absolutely.

But that’s not the question I found myself sitting with.

The question is: Who are you being asked to become — that you keep refusing to be?

A few weeks later, I heard something very different from another woman.

“I’m stuck. I’m working a job that means nothing to me. I’m busy, I have little time, but I carry meaningful work in my heart that is ready to be shared. I just don’t know how to start.”

Two women. Two completely different situations on the outside.

On the inside? The same problem.

They are both trying to enter a new cycle of life carrying old energy. They want a new life, but they’re resisting the transformation required to sustain it.

Life moves in cycles — just like nature. And every new cycle asks something different of you. Not just a new strategy or a new schedule. A new way of being.

For the first woman, the answer became clear as we talked: doing more is not it. She built her whole career in doer mode — pushing hard, staying busy, making things happen through sheer effort.

That energy created everything she has — her successful career and her sense of who she is.

The next cycle is asking her to be different. To slow down. To create more space. To restructure her foundation from a place of rest rather than force.

And here’s what’s fascinating — slowing down doesn’t feel safe to her nervous system. Her identity is built around busyness. She has every tool available to bring herself back to regulation, but her real work right now is rarely the work she practices.

It’s learning to tolerate space. To let herself receive what she’s already built.

For the second woman, the busyness lives in her mind. The doubt around whether what she carries in her heart will actually work — that doubt is eating her time, her energy, and her ability to act. Her next cycle is calling her to step into the creator she already is. It’s asking her to get out of her head.

Life is asking her a simple question: What are you going to do with this?

There is more doing involved, but she needs to make a decision first. She needs to decide that what is in her heart truly matters and deserves more space in her life.

Then let the universe meet you there.

Both of these women are on the edge of something new. And what’s standing between them and that new thing isn’t a lack of ideas, time, or talent.

It’s the nervous system’s relationship with expansion.

They are both avoiding expansion — one by overdoing: staying busy, pushing harder, filling every moment with activity. The other by overthinking: circling in doubt, confusion, and hesitation until nothing moves.

Both look different from the outside. Both serve the same purpose: keeping you from becoming someone you’ve never been before.

Because that’s what expansion is. It’s not adding more to your plate. It’s priming your whole system to hold more — more energy, more clarity, more aliveness. And when that happens, action follows naturally. Not scattered, reactive action. Focused, meaningful movement toward what actually matters.

The nervous system, though? It reads “becoming someone new” as a threat. So instead of letting go of the layers of protection built over years, it clings to what it knows — even when what it knows no longer serves.

The first woman already has the business of her dreams. She just hasn’t let herself enjoy it yet — because somewhere deep inside, she still believes that earning is tied to effort. That if she slows down, it will all fall apart.

The second woman already has clarity about what she’s here to create. She just hasn’t let herself trust it — because somewhere inside, she doesn’t fully believe she can make a life from something she loves.

Both are being protected from moving forward by the very system that was built to keep them safe. Regulating this system into calm is not the answer.

The discomfort is not the enemy. It’s information. It’s life telling you something needs to change — not just what you’re building, but how you’re living.

You have two choices. You can work with life as a partner, training your system to welcome what’s coming. Or you can fight the discomfort, trying to stay the same person inside a life that no longer fits you.

One of those will exhaust you. The other will transform you.

This is why you can leave a corporate job, build a heart-centered business, pour yourself into it for years — and still recreate the same cage you left behind. Not because the business is wrong. But because the internal energy running it never changed.

Expansion isn’t just a mindset shift. It’s a practice of allowing.

With Love,

Carolina

Happenings

Radiant Flow

Our twice-a-week movement practice, begins this week. If you missed enrollment, I want to extend a personal invitation. If you feel it in your heart, just reply to this email and we will talk.

This is for you if you have a lot of tools in your belt, if you have a desire to create greater impact in the world or help people with your gifts, but you feel blocked or stuck.

This work is not personal coaching. It is not focused on strategy. It is focused on helping you build the capacity to trust your own wisdom again. I did not start creating my life from my heart because I had a clear plan. I did it once I felt so connected to my inner wisdom that I knew I could follow my heart.

This is not about accumulating more knowledge. This is about moving differently on the mat so you can move differently in life. This is about reconnecting with the aliveness of being in your body, so that translates into a life you actually feel. The energy you cultivate on your mat can be carried into your life, and through action, experimentation, and curiosity, you start moving.

This is about unlocking the courage so you don’t find yourself five years from now sitting with the same unrealized dreams you are holding today.

If you are ready to own your life, have fun, and take action, this is for you.

As within, so without.

Who We Are Celebrating This Week:

Morena Cardoso

Of course I am celebrating Morena Cardoso.

After our conversation on Substack, I felt even more the urge to call people to wake up and move. And she is a big part of why.

I am celebrating how brave she is to honor her body the way she did. To pause for more than a year, to truly listen, and to come back even more powerful than before. That takes courage most people underestimate.

I am celebrating the energy of authenticity and contribution. Of thinking beyond yourself and actively building a world you believe in, one choice at a time.

She is not very active on Substack yet... but she does have an account. Go follow her.

Thank you, Morena, for being you. For not shrinking. For showing others that honoring yourself is not selfish, it is the most generous thing you can do for the world around you.

You inspire people to be more and more themselves.

And that is everything.

Things I’d Like to Share

She had 100,000 Followers. Then She disappeared for 18 months. Here's What She Came Back With.

I want to share this powerful conversation with this powerful woman, Morena Cardoso. If you love being inspired by authentic people, this conversation is for you. She has been running a successful business for over 10 years, building from her heart, honoring her values, and being guided by her body.

If you are looking for ways to be more authentic, be present to the energy in this conversation and let it affect you. The world is waiting for your most authentic version yet.

Robots ate my Homework by

I want to recommend Mia Kiraki’s Substack for anyone curious about AI.

I am not an AI expert, not even an AI lover, but I do use it. And I am finding incredible ways to let this tool contribute to the way I think without letting it replace it.

If you don’t have a clear sense of your own thoughts and opinions, if you often feel lost in your own mind, you might not be ready to prompt AI yet.

And Mia says this beautifully.

For me, she is not just teaching AI. She is teaching people how to think. And that is the only place where AI can actually amplify the good in you, instead of amplifying the mess.

Follow her work.

One morning I went out alone. I walked all the way to the end of the beach where the rocks are, where the serious surfers go. It was around 6:00am.

I just stood there, this quiet sense of awe filling my chest … these humans choosing to get in that water before most of the city had even opened their eyes, paddling hard toward those big waves right there by the rocks, over and over again, with so much courage and so much joy.

If you’ve ever been on a board, you know that feeling of floating. For me that’s the body sensation of surrender, the water carries you up and down, lightly, gently, you have zero control and somehow that feels like peace.

But floating doesn’t catch waves.

To catch a wave you have to move. Paddle as hard and fast as you can, match the force of the ocean with everything you have in that moment. And what I kept noticing was… they don’t wait to fully see the wave before they go (actually they can’t) .

They feel it first. Something in their body reads what their eyes can’t yet confirm, and they commit completely to that feeling.

Sometimes the wave carries them. Sometimes it doesn’t. But when it does… when a human being and the ocean become one for those few seconds… it’s pure beauty. They flow!

The surfer I kept coming back to caught 2 big waves in those 15-20 minutes I was there. But before each one, there were false starts … he would feel something, paddle with everything he had, give it all... and the wave just didn’t carry him.

Every single time, without any frustration I could see, he quietly paddled back to his spot, turned to face the ocean, and waited.

His body language said one thing: another one is coming.

Not as a hope. As a certainty that lived somewhere deeper than thought.

A phrase from one of my teachers came to me standing there … when life knocks on your door, don’t be wearing pajamas.

That’s exactly what I was watching.

Someone who was ready. Not tense, not forcing, ready.

Relaxed and completely engaged at the same time. The posture of someone who has no doubt the ocean is not withholding from them. It’s just moving. And their job is to stay present enough to feel it.

He had also paddled hard probably 10 to 15 times that morning without catching anything. That’s not failure. That’s training. That’s how the body learns to read the water. Every false start is the body getting more fluent in the language of the ocean.

Standing there I thought about an earlier season of my life when I was so hungry to make things happen that I spent most of my energy paddling into nothing. Not because I wasn’t capable. Because I hadn’t really found my lineup yet.

I was in the water, working, trying, caring deeply, but I was in the wrong place, chasing waves that weren’t mine, exhausted before the right one arrived.

And then there were times I was barely in the water at all. Standing close enough to feel the pull of it but not close enough to actually be in the dance. Waiting to feel more ready. Waiting for a clearer sign. Waiting for something outside of me to confirm what I already knew inside.

The sign was always the longing itself. The thing that kept coming back no matter how many times I set it aside. That quiet persistent pull, that was the wave announcing itself. I just hadn’t learned yet to call it by its name.

I want to ask you something, and I’d love for you to feel into it rather than think about it.

Where are you in relation to your wave?

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Some of you are on the shore.

You can see the water from where you stand. You’ve felt called to something, a project, a business, a creative dream you’ve carried for years. It lives in your chest and it refuses to leave, no matter how many times life has pulled your attention elsewhere. You’re waiting for the right moment, the perfect conditions, the day you finally feel ready enough.

I want to be very gentle here, but the ocean will not come to you on the shore.

And that desire that keeps returning, the one that won’t leave you alone, that is already the sign. You’ve been waiting for something that has been calling your name all along.

Some of you are already deep in the water but you’ve drifted too far out.

You got in. You tried. More than once. And somewhere in the trying it got complicated, too many directions, too many pivots, too much searching for the wave that feels guaranteed before you commit. You’re working hard but something feels scattered.

The energy is going out but it’s not landing anywhere that builds.

You're not doing it wrong. You're just still negotiating with yourself about whether this is really yours.

Surfers have a name for where that man was sitting so calmly, so ready.

It’s called the lineup.

A specific place in the water, past where the waves break, but close enough to feel them coming and reach them when they do.

Not too far in. Not too far out.

You don’t think your way to the lineup. You feel your way there.

And I want to offer you this… the lineup is not a strategy.

It’s not a better plan or a clearer offer or one more course before you begin.

The lineup is an internal yes.

It’s the moment you stop negotiating with yourself about whether this thing is really yours, whether the timing is right, whether you’re enough for it.

It’s you planting yourself in front of the one thing you know you’re here for and saying: I am here. This is mine. I am not leaving.

That’s it. That’s the whole first step.

Not paddling hard yet. Not catching the wave yet.

Just… naming it. Owning it.

Showing up in front of it consistently with your whole self, relaxed and ready, the way that surfer sat in front of the ocean at 6:00 in the morning knowing with everything in his body that the wave was coming.

Because once that yes is real, once it lives in your body and not just in your thoughts, everything starts to orient around it. The false starts stop feeling like failure. The waiting stops feeling like stagnation. You know where you are and you know why you’re there.

You give the step. The universe gives the ground. Not the other way around.

The ocean will always be there. The waves will always come and go. They don’t stop for anyone and they don’t withhold from anyone.

So what is the thing you’ve been feeling for a long time but haven’t fully said yes to yet?

That is your lineup. And now is always a good time to find it.

With love,

Carolina

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Happenings

Quarterly Workshop: Leverage Substack’s 5 Best Growth Features To Build a Thriving Publication In 2026

If you are a paid member of our community, this Monday March 2nd at noon EST we have something special for you. , Co-Founder of Write. Build. Scale., is joining us live to share his Substack expertise, specifically the 5 best growth features to build a thriving publication in 2026.

You will walk away with real clarity on what to focus on right now to actually move the needle forward.

Substack has been a huge part of our own growth and we chose it intentionally as a tool to build a strong foundation for our business. Many of our clients use it as part of their audience building strategy too. If you want to make the most of your publication and use it to support your business, you don’t want to miss this one.

Who We Are Celebrating This Week:

from Healers Unite

I want to take a moment to celebrate Brooke and the work she is bringing to the world.

Brooke is building something called Healers Unite, and if you are a healer, or if your work supports healers in any way, I want you to pay attention.

She saw a gap: healers are not burning out because they lack dedication or gift. They are burning out because they have been left without the infrastructure that every other care-based profession takes for granted.

Healers have largely been left to navigate everything on their own.

Brooke decided to build what was missing instead of accepting that.

Healers Unite is a professional cooperative, shared administrative support, collective purchasing power, and real tools that make healing practices sustainable over time. Not inspiration without structure. Actual infrastructure for people doing sacred work in the world.

I deeply believe we are not meant to build alone. Brooke lives that truth in everything she is creating.

If you are a healer or you support healers, go find her on Substack. Together we go further is not just a nice idea in her work. It is the entire foundation.

Celebrating you, Brooke. Your courage, your clarity, and your willingness to let this come through you.

Things I’d Like to Share

Joy is Strategy

Joy is Strategy is a great essay I had the pleasure of reading this week and I want to share it with you because I believe it relates to flow. It felt so connected to the class I was teaching this week on the same topic. The participants and I came to a conclusion together that felt really true in our bodies, flow only happens when you are yourself, when you accept your uniqueness with all your heart. I think this essay is about exactly that. wrote beautifully, using lessons from Olympic champions to illustrate her point

If it doesn't make you glow, grow or flow, choose yourself and go

I also want to share this essay by — The Glorious Fail. And yes, this is the second essay I am sharing about Alysa Liu, because clearly she is teaching something to the world that the world needs to hear right now. Eleni uses her story to say something I believe more people need to sit with.

The real burnout epidemic is not about working too hard, it is about doing work that doesn't make you glow, grow, or flow.

Work that has no aliveness in it. Work that asks you to perform a version of yourself that was never really yours. Eleni says it so clearly: flow is not ease, it is alignment, what happens when skill meets genuine ownership, when the performance and the person are the same thing.

This is the wake up call. Finding your joy, your bliss, becoming fully yourself, this is not a luxury or a spiritual extra. It is the foundation of a healthy, alive, sustainable life.

P.S. If you are feeling called to work together, a great place to start is the Harmony Map assessment. It will reveal your breakthrough frequency — the one pattern your business idea or your next chapter is already asking you to look at. Think of it as finding out exactly where you are in the water, and what it will take to find your lineup. Take the Harmony Map →

Some relief. Some resistance. Perhaps a low hum of “I already know this” fighting with “but why can’t I do anything about it?”

All of it makes sense.

This essay is about something most people sense but rarely name: the gap between who you are as a person and how you show up in your work. That quiet disconnect. The way your work can feel like it's happening to someone else, or for someone else, even when you're the one who shows up every day.

This separation protected something worth protecting. Your sensitivity, your depth, the parts of you that don’t survive well in transactional environments. At some point, you learned to keep those parts out of the room where work happens.

That made sense then. It might be costing you now.

If that gap doesn’t exist for you, this probably isn’t your reading for the week. Close this tab. Come back another time. Or skip on to the other parts of the newsletter.

But if you’ve ever felt successful on paper while something inside felt hollow, or found yourself dreading the very work you once couldn’t wait to do, stay here for a bit.

This isn’t about fixing anything. It’s about noticing something that’s been running in the background for a while now.

A pattern shows up in nearly every client Carolina and I work with.

Someone builds a business. Or climbs the corporate ladder. Or lands the role they spent a decade positioning for. It works, at least by external measures. Clients come, or promotions come, or the comp package finally hits the number they’d been chasing. From the outside, things look like they’re moving.

But inside, a different story is playing out.

The work feels like a performance. Showing up feels like acting. Asking for what you need feels like asking for something you don't deserve.

The pattern isn’t laziness. It isn’t lack of strategy.

It’s separation.

Your professional self lives in one room of your life. Your actual self lives in another. And you commute between them, putting on a different face each time you cross the threshold.

This separation makes sense. At some point, you learned that business required a certain version of you. The professional one. The polished one. The one who has answers and doesn’t flinch.

So you built a wall. Not because you’re broken, but because it felt necessary. The wall protected the softer parts of you from the demands of performing. Selling, managing, presenting, leading. Whatever the role required.

The problem is, walls don’t just keep things out. They keep things in. Including your energy, your clarity, and your ability to show up without that quiet pull on your reserves.

I see this pattern in executives who've spent twenty years climbing. I see it in founders who built something from nothing. The context is different. The separation is the same.

Back in 2019, I was running a consulting business in the hearing industry.

By every measure that mattered to the world, it was working. Six-figure months. A client roster that kept growing. The kind of revenue trajectory people put on slides at conferences.

And I remember standing in my kitchen one morning, coffee in hand, staring out the window at nothing in particular, feeling absolutely nothing about any of it.

Not grateful, not excited, not even stressed in a way that felt useful. Flat.

My body had started sending memos I kept ignoring. Headaches that wouldn’t quit. A jaw so tight my dentist asked if I was grinding my teeth at night. Background anxiety that showed up around 4pm every day like clockwork.

I noticed I’d been holding my breath through entire Zoom calls, exhaling only after I hit “Leave Meeting.”

I kept telling myself the problem was tactical. I needed better systems. To grow the team to take some of the workload off of me. Maybe a different niche.

But the real problem was simpler and harder to solve.

I had built a business that worked. It didn’t feel like mine.

The person who showed up on client calls wasn’t exactly me. He was a competent, confident version of me who said the right things and closed the deals and then collapsed on the couch at 8pm, unable to explain why success felt so heavy.

I didn’t have language for it then. I knew something was off. I kept looking at the numbers, waiting for them to tell me why I wasn’t happy.

They never did.

You already know what it feels like to be whole while you work. You’ve felt it. Maybe not recently, but it’s in there somewhere.

That feeling isn’t something you build from scratch. You remember it. It was there before you learned to compartmentalize. Before someone told you that business is business and feelings are feelings and never the two shall meet.

Think about the last time work didn’t feel like work. Not because it was easy, but because it was yours. When the doing and the being were the same thing.

The last time you helped someone without thinking about what you’d get back. The conversation that went long because you forgot to watch the clock.

That was connection. It didn’t require effort.

The feeling isn’t reserved for artists or monks or people with trust funds. It’s available to anyone willing to stop treating their work like a role they have to perform, and start treating it like an extension of how they move through the world.

This doesn’t mean your work becomes your therapy. It doesn’t mean every client call needs to feel like a spiritual experience.

It means the wall comes down. Or at least, gets a few doors cut into it.

You don’t have to become a different person. You stop pretending to be one.

The Practice

This week, try a simple check-in before you start any work task.

Pause for ten seconds. Put your hand on your chest or your stomach, wherever feels natural. Ask one question: “Am I here?”

You’re not trying to get centered. You’re not trying to breathe your way to enlightenment. You’re noticing whether you’ve shown up, or whether some professional avatar has shown up instead.

Do this before you open your email. Before you get on a call. Before you write that post or send that invoice.

Don’t expect anything to shift immediately. This isn’t a hack. It’s a practice of noticing the gap when it’s there.

Over time, noticing changes things. But not on your timeline.

Some days you’ll check in and realize you’ve been absent for hours. Just notice that.

If You Want to Go Deeper

Choose one of these.

Write for five minutes on this prompt: “The version of me that shows up in my business is different from the real me because...” Don’t edit. Don’t make it make sense. Let it come out.

Or try this: Pick one recurring task this week, something you do regularly that usually feels like a slog. Before you do it, ask yourself what would change if you did this task as yourself, not as your business persona.

Notice what happens. Something might shift.

Where This Shows Up in Your Work

These are signals. They tell you where the separation is showing up.

Visibility becomes exhausting. Not because you're introverted, but because every time you show up, you're performing. In the meeting, on the call, in the presentation. You're putting on the professional version of you, and performances drain energy. The real you stays hidden, which means nobody sees the real you, which means the people who would genuinely resonate with you can't find you.

Compensation feels like a negotiation with your own worthiness. Whether you're setting prices or negotiating salary, when your professional self is separate from your real self, asking for money triggers the question of which self deserves it. The professional one can make a case. The real one isn't so sure.

Consistency becomes a willpower problem. You start things with energy because the business self gets excited about new projects. Then the real self has to show up and do the work. The two don’t always agree on what matters.

Decision-making gets slow and second-guessed. Without a clear sense of who’s running this thing, every choice becomes a debate between personas. Should I do what’s strategic? What feels true? What looks professional? The questions multiply because there’s no unified self to answer them.

This Week’s Questions

At the end of this week, sit with these. No need to write answers. Notice what comes up.

When did I feel most like myself in my work this week?

When did I feel like I was performing?

What task did I dread, and what version of me was dreading it?

Did I notice the gap between who I am and how I showed up? Even once?

What would have been different if I’d shown up as myself?

What surprised me?

The gap between who you are and how you work didn’t form overnight. It won’t close overnight either. And closing it completely isn’t even the goal.

Noticing it is.

You’re not behind. You’re right where you’d expect to be, given what you’ve been carrying.

I’ll be honest: I still catch myself in this as well.

Last Tuesday, I noticed I’d been holding my breath on a call. Not a hard call. A call with someone I like. But somewhere between “hello” and “let’s talk next week,” the professional version showed up and the real one stepped aside.

Seven years later, and the pattern is still there on some level.

I’m starting to think the goal isn’t to stop it. Maybe the goal is to notice faster. To shorten the lag between separation and return.

I’m still in that work. It is an ongoing practice.

If you’re in it too, tell me what you’re noticing.

Phil

P.S. If you want to see what other patterns might be running, the Sacred Business Harmony Map can help. It’s a free assessment that measures nine frequencies, including Connection. Takes about ten minutes. No email required to see your results. Take the Harmony Map →

Happenings

This Week on Sacred Business Stories w/

Kevin Rogers built CopyChief into an 11-year powerhouse. Live events with 300 people flying in from around the world. A coaching program that actually worked. By every external measure, he’d made it.

Then he walked away from all of it.

Kevin talked about the moment his business stopped feeling like his. About needing five approvals to send his own emails. About being “banned from pushing buttons” in his own software. The guy who built his success on spontaneous connection couldn’t wake up with an idea and share it anymore.

Sound familiar?

If this week’s essay resonated, Kevin’s story is the same pattern playing out at scale. He achieved everything he set out to achieve, and somewhere along the way, the professional version took over completely. Now he’s 55, starting fresh, sitting with uncertainty, and being incredibly honest about it.

His line that stopped me:

“There’s no workbook for what comes next. You just have to let go of any expectation for what life might have waiting for you.”

Listen to the full conversation →

Interview w/ on the Notes Playbook

If you are curious about how we approach Substack notes, this is worth a listen.

Journey to Success Club

The Notes Playbook: The Real Power of Engagement, Energy & Sustainable Growth with Phil & Carolina

Listen now

5 months ago · 16 likes · Fabio Posca, Phil Powis ❤️⚡️, and Carolina Wilke

The gap between who you are and how you show up at work doesn’t close on its own. Most people try to think their way out. Read another book. Take another course. Hope that this time the insight sticks.

It rarely does.

The pattern runs deeper than information can reach.

Carolina and I created something called the Serve & Receive Partnership for exactly this.

Over 90 days, we build three things together: the frequency alignment that stops you from sabotaging yourself, clarity on what you’re actually here to do, and a structure that makes follow-through possible.

Whether you’re building something of your own or figuring out what comes next, the work is the same. Get clear on who you are. Then build from there.

You also get a full year of support to make sure it sticks. But the foundation happens in the first 90 days.

Learn more about Serve & Receive →

Who We Are Celebrating This Week: Jeff Kimes

started publishing on Substack recently. And he came out swinging.

His first series, “Creative Agency in an Age of Collapse,” names something most of us feel but can’t quite articulate: the most brilliant, creative minds of our generation are trapped in systems that waste their gifts.

The visionary artist working as a UX designer for Microsoft. The brilliant music producer grinding 60-hour weeks in the bowels of Amazon. The writer locked into copywriting, his own stories shelved to sell other people’s widgets.

Jeff calls it “creative constipation.” We have everything we need to transform our world. The talent exists. The vision exists. The capacity exists. It’s just stuck.

If this week’s essay about the gap between who you are and how you show up hit close to home, Jeff’s writing is the macro view of the same pattern. Individual disconnection scaled up to civilizational crisis.

But here’s what I love about Jeff’s work: he doesn’t stop at the diagnosis. He gets into systems dynamics, strange attractors, and why collapse actually creates the conditions for transformation. His take: this is the age of the artist. Not because we have all the answers, but because we’re the ones who can seed new ideas in the fertile compost of what’s falling apart.

His words:

“In those quiet moments, between projects, late at nights staring at the stars, there’s a low-grade despair I can’t quite shake. This sense that I’m not doing what I’m actually here to do. That I let a side-quest become the whole game.”

Jeff describes himself as a multi-passionate creative and neuroscience nerd exploring the intersection of creativity, natural systems, and songlines of culture. Marketing strategist by day. Musician and girl dad by night.

He’s in motion. And his writing is worth your attention.

Read “Creative Agency in an Age of Collapse” →

Things I’d Like to Share

The forbidden question in client retention

wrote something that made me uncomfortable in the best way. He noticed that when he asks founders about client churn, they react like he just said Voldemort’s name.

We tell ourselves we don’t have time to look at the data, or that we need more clients before we can worry about keeping them, or that churn is outside our control anyway. But underneath all of it: the sting of not being enough. The fear that if we look too closely, we’ll confirm something we don’t want to know.

Filip’s take: the founders who are willing to look without flinching are the ones who actually improve. Not because the data is comfortable. Because they stop letting shame run the show.

(Full disclosure: Carolina and I are featured in this piece. Filip looked under the hood of our business and showed us something we couldn’t see ourselves. Worth the discomfort.)

Read “The shame behind the forbidden question in client retention” →

Design Your Creative House: a weekend sprint

is running a free 3-day challenge at the end of February, and the premise stopped me mid-scroll.

When she was a child, she used to draw floor plans of imaginary houses. Not the outside. The inside: secret rooms, back staircases, the attic where she’d hide and write. Years later she realized she wasn’t drawing a house she wanted to live in. She was mapping one she already lived in.

The challenge invites you to do the same for your creative life. Draw the floor plan. Name the rooms. Find the heart. Stand at the threshold of the room you’ve been avoiding.

Her point: before you can change your creative life, you need to see it. Not the life you wish you had. The one you’re actually living.

The challenge runs February 27 to March 1. Free. Twenty minutes a day. Wobbly lines welcome.

We sat down to talk with Rachel about it here this past week

Also worth Checking out:

on building a collective

on turning the page on an old story.

on growing your organism.

Notes I Loved This Week

Memorable Quote

“Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives.”

from A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life

If you read this and felt something stir, but you’re not sure what to do with it, that’s okay.

You don’t need to know exactly what you want. You don’t need to impress us. You don’t need a polished pitch for your business or a clear explanation of why you’re stuck.

You just need to be honest about where you are.

Maybe you’ve been scattered across too many ideas and you’re looking for the one that would organize everything else. Maybe you’ve been sitting in rooms that only speak half your language, strategy without soul or spirit without systems, and you’re tired of choosing. Maybe you just want to be in a conversation where both parts of you are welcome.

This is 30 minutes for us to listen, ask a few questions, and share what we see. We’ll talk about what you’re building, what’s getting in the way, and whether working together makes sense.

Schedule a call →

P.S. You can read all previous editions of the newsletter here, and you can upgrade your subscription here.

It feels like wearing clothes you’ve known for years, clothes that once fit you well. But somehow they don’t sit the same on your body anymore. So you decide to go out and look for something new… and nothing calls your attention.

You feel confused. Lost.

There’s an urge to rush into “what’s next,” even though you don’t know what “next” means. There’s a subtle tendency to blame people or circumstances around you. And when your mind finds someone to blame, or at least something to name, you feel a strange relief.

Relief because now there’s a reason.

But underneath it, you still feel fragile. Slightly unstable. You look for the woman who used to feel certain, and you can’t quite find her.

January started a bit different for me.

I signed up for the Sober Reset Challenge with , with the intention of exploring my relationship with alcohol. I was grateful to be inside such a safe container, surrounded by people genuinely wanting to become more conscious.

At some point, I realized I had never considered alcohol a problem in my life. I could go days or weeks without drinking. I never used it to numb negative emotions. Often one glass was enough, and I genuinely enjoyed a good white wine.

But as the days passed, I started feeling better. Clearer. More present. More energized.

And in removing something I didn’t think was a problem, I gained perspective.

That’s when a question came:

What else in my life do I not consider a problem, but if I removed or shifted it, would change everything?

This essay is not about sobriety.

The reset challenge, for me, wasn’t about alcohol. It was about noticing interferences.

And what I started noticing was the way I communicated with the people closest to me.

There was a tone. A subtle intensity. A way of responding that didn’t match who I want to be, or what my heart knows about love.

With that awareness came shame. Disappointment. And an almost immediate thought: if I can see it now, I should already know how to fix it.

But awareness doesn’t automatically give you the new answer.

The way I communicated felt like old clothes on a body that had already evolved, yet I kept reaching for them out of habit. And if I’m very honest, out of patterns.

I started noticing my inner experience more clearly in situations that were seemingly innocent. I was anticipating an attack. I felt guarded. Defensive. As if I was bracing for something wild… when the moment was simply asking for listening. Or even humor.

Nothing was actually threatening me.

So I had to gently ask myself: what am I protecting?

And then, with more clarity in my body, something deeper revealed itself.

The communication wasn’t the problem. It was the symptom.

What I started noticing were the small moments throughout the day. The tiny things that would close my heart, one by one. Things I wouldn’t even name as significant. A slight irritation here. A small disappointment there. A moment of impatience. Nothing that felt like it mattered.

But they accumulated.

I realized I could (often) hold my heart open through bigger challenges. Through moments that would feel like obvious tests of love. Those, I could meet with more presence.

But the small ones? I was missing them completely.

And by the time I was communicating with the people I love most, my heart had already been closing in small ways all day long. So of course the communication came out less than love. Not because I wanted it to. But because I was already carrying all those tiny closings with me.

That’s what the clarity has been showing me. The small things matter more than I thought.

I don’t have a grand conclusion. I don’t have a new perfected version of myself to present.

What I have is this awareness.

That sometimes the struggle to grow isn’t dramatic. It’s quiet. It’s subtle. It’s noticing the ways we brace when there is nothing to brace against.

It’s admitting that something isn’t wrong, but it’s also not aligned.

And maybe that’s enough for now.

And I can feel this “in-between” state touching everything, even my work.

Not long ago I was writing three essays a week, with ease. And then this one came, and I found myself staring at the page for hours. Draft after draft. Not because I didn’t have something to say, but because something in me was reorganizing.

I think this is part of what business asks of us too.

Not just to create, but to meet ourselves. To notice the places we brace, the places we polish, the places we hide, and to let our work come from a truer place, even when we don’t yet know what that “new way” looks like.

Maybe growth is not about becoming someone new.

Maybe it’s about softening into what my heart already knows, without the old armor.

This is where I am.

And if you recognize yourself somewhere in this, you’re not alone.

With Love,

Carolina

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Happenings

Substack Unconference #001: 581 days to Montreal

Let’s just say… I’m excited and scared about this adventure Phil and I just signed up for.

I love the community energy of it.

The idea of co-creating something in public. Alone we may go faster, but together we go further — and this feels like choosing the longer road on purpose.

If you’re curious about what we’re building, Issue #001 is already out. We are in the very early stages — nothing locked in, everything still a question — and already there’s support gathering around it. If it speaks to you, come subscribe.

Come be part of building it with us

Who We Are Celebrating This Week

Celebrating Jenn Ocken she is a Substack Unconference Founding Builder number #4

Jenn publishes Creative Return… for those done performing certainty and ready to return to discernment. Quiet rebels. Deep feelers. Creators of the in-between. She’s all about exchanging ideas, not just content, and that’s exactly what we’re here to do.

Happy to have you with us, Jenn. Let’s have fun while we build this event.

Things I’d Like to Share

Some great Substack accounts I came across lately:

for great music. It’s just so beautiful

for relationship with self. Her Consciously publication is full of gold, I love the way she writes and the clarity she brings to the most confusing moments.

If you're dealing with what I described here, this one is great: When Your Old Self Has Died But Your New Self Hasn’t Fully Emerged Yet

Smarter Substack for Substack Growth. , and just launched this and they’re on fire.

These three know Substack inside out.

Here’s what they’re doing: Substack is simple. Growing on Substack isn’t. The problem isn’t lack of information, it’s filtering through the noise to find what actually matters. Smarter Substack solves that.

They deliver three carefully selected Substack resources straight to your inbox every weekday. No long essays. No recycled advice. No opinions pretending to be strategy. Just the most valuable resources for creators who actually want to grow.

Go follow them.

for beautiful art and creative work. her publication makes my Substack prettier and happier. full of colors and creative ideas.

Draw Your World

67: Draw Your Adventures is Here

Today, Draw Your Adventures is officially out in the world…

Read more

a year ago · 126 likes · 40 comments

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If you read this and felt something stir, but you’re not sure what to do with it, that’s okay.

You don’t need to know exactly what you want. You don’t need to impress us. You don’t need a polished pitch for your business or a clear explanation of why you’re stuck.

You just need to be honest about where you are.

Maybe you’ve been scattered across too many ideas and you’re looking for the one that would organize everything else. Maybe you’ve been sitting in rooms that only speak half your language, strategy without soul or spirit without systems, and you’re tired of choosing. Maybe you just want to be in a conversation where both parts of you are welcome.

This is 30 minutes for us to listen, ask a few questions, and share what we see. We’ll talk about what you’re building, what’s getting in the way, and whether working together makes sense.

Schedule a call →

P.S. You can read all previous editions of the newsletter here, and you can upgrade your subscription here.