113: When Turning What You Love Into Work Stops Feeling Good

Why the problem isn’t your passion... it’s the structure around it.

“Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby…”

You’ve probably read this quote before.

In one of our community calls, someone who is building a business around something she truly loves shared a hesitation. She said:

“I’m not sure that turning something I love into a business is a good idea.”

And honestly, this is such a beautiful inquiry.

Before we turn something we love into a business, we usually feel excitement, joy, and the thought of doing this all day long.

But when something becomes a business, a different form of commitment is born.

We move from I do this whenever I want
to I’m committed to this even when I don’t want to.

Your passion is no longer only about you.
Other people are involved.
And that changes everything.

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I often say yoga chose me. I never dreamed of becoming a yoga teacher, even though yoga has been my passion for more than two decades.

One day I received an email about a teacher training and my solar plexus reacted so strongly … it burned, it pulsed … I couldn’t ignore it.

So I signed up.

Less than two years later, I was teaching around twelve classes a week.

Some days I taught four classes back to back. And there were moments, right before a class, when I would feel that little dread:

“Here I go again.”

The joy was fading. It was becoming another thing on my calendar.

That made me pause, just like our client:

Does this way of doing things still make sense?

But at the time, that was the only model I knew … charging per class, group or private.

I simply repeated what everyone else did.

We often do that.

We follow the structure that’s handed to us. Or we keep doing things that served us in the past but no longer do.

We don’t question it until something inside says, this doesn’t feel good anymore.

And this “not feeling good” is important.

It’s the signal that something needs to change. It’s the reminder that you have the power to create in your own way.

We forget that we are creators.
We forget that we can build a business on our terms.
We forget to question the structures we inherited.

So I want to bring you back to something simple:

How would your days look if every day could feel good to you?

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For me, even though I love yoga, doing yoga for three or four hours a day was not the way.

The form of monetization was killing my devotion.

And the structure I had was inherited, not chosen.

Realizing that was everything.

Your passion isn’t the problem. The structure is.

And personally, I’d rather build a life where I make a living doing something I love than spend my life doing what I love only in the time left after work.

You can love something and monetize it… but not necessarily in the way the world taught you. You need to find YOUR way of doing things.

You don’t have to:

• charge per hour

• follow what your teacher did

• repeat the model of your industry

• do everything by yourself

• trade time for money

• or lose joy to make income

This is the moment your Sacred Business invites you to be really creative.

Your business is meant to support your life… not drain it.

If you serve people or sell a product, there are many ways to innovate, redesign, and simplify.

Doing something you love matters… but how you structure it matters even more.

There is more of you available when you do what you love.
But even inside what you love, there is room to choose a different path.

The answers come through pause, honesty, reflection, and creativity.

What I want to leave you with is this:

Your life and your business should be created on your terms.
Find something you love and are good at, and then be creative in designing a structure that supports your life… not one that slowly pulls the joy away.

And then… allow yourself to believe that abundance and joy can go together.
That you can build a wealthy life doing something that actually feels good, fun and light.

Because the problem was never that you monetized your passion.
The problem was the structure around it.

And you can change that.

With Love,

Carolina

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Here is what I want to share this week …

Creating Images with AI

Lately I’ve been having way too much fun creating images with AI.
Sometimes I make pictures of myself holding a sign with quotes, and we also use our little doodles to illustrate the newsletter. It adds beauty to the page, but more importantly, it adds fun to my creative process — researching quotes, imagining backgrounds, playing with ideas.

And if you want to create consistent illustrations for your own work,
Jenny Ouyang wrote an amazing step-by-step guide on how to do it.

It’s worth checking out:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-179885877

Thank you, Jenny, for your generosity.

Just for fun, I will share some of my fun (at least for me) AI pictures :)

ok…ok… enough for now!! lol :) hope you had a good laugh!

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

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1. Take the Harmony Map Assessment (Free): Find out which pattern is blocking your clarity, visibility, or ability to get the right clients. 8 minutes. You’ll see exactly what’s been in the way, and why strategy alone hasn’t fixed it.

2. Read the Sacred Business Manifesto (Free): The full philosophy behind how we work, why inner patterns create outer business challenges, and what it means to build from both sides.