140: Not missing, just mixed up
The more she gathered, the more confused she got.
The other day I was helping someone find clarity on her business. She wanted to transition out of a very successful business that was draining her, even though she had loved it for years, into a new way of sharing her gifts.
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
Who We Are Celebrating
I want to celebrate the wonderful work AI Meets Girlboss 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 Steve Kamb
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.
A hundred contacts, zero sent
Someone on our community call last week made a list of about a hundred warm contacts. Past clients, old colleagues, people who would be glad to hear from him and probably glad to help. Then he told us how many of them he’d actually messaged.
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.