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

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

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

And it made me wonder…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is the care? Where is the attention?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Love,

Carolina

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

Who we’re celebrating:

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

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

Now, he is asking a different question:

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

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

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

“The contrarian voice of your heart.”

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

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

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

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

Explore Return to Real

Happenings

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

It worked.

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

So we released the spreadsheet version publicly.

Then we listened.

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

So we custom vibe-coded a massive upgrade.

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

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

Because this is how we believe useful things become real:

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

Explore the upgraded Clarity Compass.

The Weekly Highlights

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

Memorable Quote by

Scary and exciting.

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

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

It’s like planning a trip.

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

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

The date is set.

You know where you’re going.

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

Building a business should feel more like that.

More often than not, it doesn’t.

Maybe your Monday doesn’t feel like a runway.

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

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

Because the destination is clear.

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

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

You chose it because you want that experience.

Then you bought the ticket.

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

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

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

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

You know what to search for.

You know what to book.

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

That energy is clarity.

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

The doing starts going somewhere.

That is the whole thing.

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

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

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

They have real skill. Real gifts. Meaningful work.

But they have never committed to one destination.

So Monday becomes more of the same.

Another idea. Another offer. Another possibility kept alive.

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

Every drawer holds another possibility he could pursue.

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

Keeping them all open feels like hope.

It also feels like exhaustion.

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

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

I know that feeling.

That was me too.

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

Eventually, one drawer has to become a clear yes.

I am going to Atacama.

Of course, that is easier said than done.

The moment you choose, the mind goes nuts.

What if it’s the wrong destination?

What if I don’t like it?

But Argentina is amazing too.

What about Paris?

And I’ve always wanted to see Australia.

The business version sounds like this:

What if this isn’t the right offer?

What if I can’t pull it off?

What if my clients don’t understand the shift?

What if choosing this means losing all the other possibilities?

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

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

Deciding on one direction is scary.

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

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

You can let them be there and keep walking.

The Atacama is the destination.

I’m heading there.

Every clear action tells me I’m getting closer.

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

But then I will choose from experience.

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

That kind of clarity cannot be born from thought alone.

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

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

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

At some point, movement has to replace speculation.

The fear may not leave.

It simply stops driving.

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

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

You need one place that is yours.

And a ticket.

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

That part was always yours.

With love,

Carolina Wilke

Who We Are Celebrating This Week

Coming Wednesday: returns

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

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

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

His conclusion is striking:

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

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

Happenings

Sitting on a bench Series

You can spend months working harder on the wrong problem.

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

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

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

Things I want to Share

Your problem may not be a lack of ideas.

It may be that you have too many legitimate ones.

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

Give us $17 and 30 minutes.

One sale can feel insignificant.

Until you learn to read the math behind it.

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

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

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

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

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

Memorable Quote

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

He spread coca leaves across a table.

I realize this is not how most business newsletters begin.

But the last week has not been especially ordinary.

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

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

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

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

Show me the next clear step in my work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Maestro Raúl, the leaves showed something encouraging.

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

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

Then came my real question.

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

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

Mama Coca’s answer was clear.

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

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

Even the shaman told me to market.

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

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

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

This was the moment.

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

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

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

And then, last night, came the spiritual surgery.

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

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

The second doctor pushed her hand down my throat.

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

“This was the problem,” she said.

The sensation was so physical that I woke up choking.

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

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

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

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

Any one of those things could have been coincidence.

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

No single spiritual sign handed me an airtight business plan.

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

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

The inner work matters. It has to lead somewhere.

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

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

Then your job is to just do it.

So that is what we have been doing.

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

I will not give you a grand reveal yet.

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

You will hear more when it is ready.

For now, perhaps the question is simpler:

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

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

You can start with eight minutes.

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

Because the friction is rarely where you think it is.

Free. Eight minutes. Immediate results.

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

Take the Harmony Map

Who we’re celebrating:

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

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

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

This week, he interviewed Hunter Biden.

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

Hunter’s response?

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

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

We are so freaking proud of you, Josh.

Listen to the conversation.

Happenings

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

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

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

• a real problem and an emotional interpretation

• early traction and failure

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

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

Add the Live to your calendar →

The Weekly Highlights

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

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

Subscribe now

Memorable Quote

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

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

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

Would anyone pay?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the sweet spot.

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

But it’s replicable.

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

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

And he did it again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

With love,

Carolina

What We Are Celebrating This Week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our website is back in alignment too.

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

Things I’d like to share

Work on your energy first - Protocol attached

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

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

Flow isn’t luck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When it does, follow it. :)

Memorable Quote

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

What came out was anger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and Bliss were my two lowest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m here now.

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

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

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

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

Take the Harmony Map

The result is yours. So is what comes next.

Phil (& Carolina)

Who We Are Celebrating This Week:

Slow AI is #1 in Generative AI on Amazon!

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

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

Memorable Quote

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am proud that I decided to try.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

And even if it does, then what?

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

This isn’t about being irresponsible.

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

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

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

Because we build a life from fear-based decisions.

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

But how can that be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Love,

Carolina

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

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

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

Take the Harmony Map

Who We Are Celebrating This Week:

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

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

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

Mac challenges his clients to look one level deeper.

Things I’d like to share

Memorable Quote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But lately, I stopped enjoying it.

I had to pause and ask why.

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

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

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

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

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

I noticed the same pattern on the other side.

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t want to dismiss the what entirely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’d love to hear it in the comments.

With Love,

Carolina

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

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

Take the Harmony Map and see what it reflects back.

Explore the Harmony Map

Who We Are Celebrating

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things I’d like to share

In full Light with

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

The conversation is full of gold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Love,

Carolina

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

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

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

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

so I checked too

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

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

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

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

why it agrees with you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the noise of the crowd

And it isn’t only AI that does this.

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

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

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

where he was really asking from

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

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

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

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

one thing to try

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You probably knew before you asked.

Phil (& Carolina)

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

Take the Harmony Map →

Who We Are Celebrating This Week: Michele Gill

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

Things I’d like to share

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

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

Slow AI

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

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

Read more

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

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

ROBOTS ATE MY HOMEWORK

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

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

Read more

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

Memorable Quote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But they are there.

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

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

So much effort, and not the results she expected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the lady I was helping.

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

They were keeping her where she is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Love,

Carolina

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Who We Are Celebrating

I want to celebrate the wonderful work does on Substack.

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

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

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

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

Things I’d like to share

Sacred Business Stories with

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

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

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

What stayed with me was how he relates to failure.

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

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

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

And it is usually the one we avoid.

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

We block. We get scared.

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

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

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

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

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

Memorable Quote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A rope is only tight when both sides pull.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am selfish too.

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

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

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

Selfish and altruistic at the same time.

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

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

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

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

And that was okay too.

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

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

We do it all day.

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

We try to build businesses out of one half.

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

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

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

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

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

I am.

With Love,

Carolina

Who We Are Celebrating

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

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

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

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

Things I’d like to share

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

Read it

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

Read it

Memorable Quote

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

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

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

✔️ The marketers she hired failed her.

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

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

✔️ She has health challenges.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ability to respond.

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

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

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

There are two types of reactions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phil (& Carolina)

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

Take the Quiz

after i posted about it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who We Are Celebrating

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

Things I’d like to share

Worth Your Attention

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

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

Memorable Quote

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

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

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

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

Thanks, life, for so much.

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

Then I felt like writing this.

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

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

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

It is.

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

Don’t believe that.

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

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

I would say resilience.

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

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

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

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

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

It can just guide.

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

It’s true. And it’s terrifying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So do you.

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

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

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

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

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

It doesn’t matter how long it will take.

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

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

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

With love,

Carolina

Who We are Celebrating This Week:

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

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

Why does this matter?

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

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

Things I’d Like to Share

on Sacred Business Stories

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

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

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

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

Memorable Quote

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

New Here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two ways of seeing visibility

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

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

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

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

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

The problem: these two perspectives rarely meet

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

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

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

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

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

A Sacred Business is where both versions finally meet

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

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

Hiding isn’t the answer either

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

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

Both drain you.

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

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

Your business deserves that version of you.

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

With love,

Carolina

Who We are Celebrating This Week:

and his upcoming book, the Wellbeing Equation

Things I’d Like to Share

Conversation with founder of Second Callings

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

One thing Eva said stayed with me:

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

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

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

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

Sage Marinelli

I Lost Myself Building the Thing I Dreamed Of

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

Read more

3 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

4 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.

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