138: When You Have a Reason for Everything
The line between a real obstacle and an old story you hide behind.
A few weeks ago I got on a call with someone who had ten years of reasons.
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?
Carolina Wilke 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.
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.
Adam Quiney offered a nice reframe. When you’re moving someone toward something that isn’t already available to them, their defenses go up.
Dr. Kelly Flanagan 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. Steve [Sage-Outlaw-Caregiver] 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. Brian Clark 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. Nikki Kountouriotis, Philip Hofmacher, and Jonas Braadbaart agreed, and Avy Leghziel was straight up about it. Every time he gave a possibly toxic client a chance, hes regretted it in the end.
Carolina Wilke, 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. Rachel Connor and Declan Zimmermann 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
Rebecca Weston 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. Elizabeth Purvis hid her magic from her family for ten years. Then she named her business after it.
You keep changing your mind
You are sitting at a beautiful restaurant. The view is gorgeous, the menu almost feels overwhelming. Pages and pages of options.
You don't need more healing before you start
Some people use inner work the way other people use Netflix.
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.” - Elizabeth Purvis
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.
For me, a real obstacle may explain where I am, but an old story can keep me stuck there. I think a useful distinction is not "Everything is my fault,” but “Yes, this is real, now whatdo I do?” The line between avoidance and responsibility.