Everything Is Connected · Part I of VII
By 35, my consulting business was bringing in more than $100,000 a month in revenue. I was driving a fancy car and had just bought a beautiful house in the suburbs of Boston. I’d built more than I’d ever imagined for myself.
Then my doctor told me there was a fifty-fifty chance the golf ball-sized tumor in my neck was cancer.
I remember how suddenly I could see my life from a distance. For years, I’d been working too much, ignoring the warning signs, and playing the lone wolf who could handle everything himself. I was dealing with several autoimmune conditions. And even when things went well in the business, I had a hard time feeling much joy about it.
I was proud of what I’d built. I could also see how much of my life I’d arranged around keeping it going.
Carolina and I hadn’t met yet. She was living in Montreal, years into a fast-paced corporate career and dealing with migraines so severe that light could make her vomit. She’d been in and out of hospitals. After trying a number of conventional treatments, she started looking elsewhere for help.
One practitioner worked on her jaw so forcefully that Carolina remembers thinking, Oh no, is this woman going to break my face?
She kept looking. One day, she was sitting in the dark in Montreal, crying. A question came to her.
“I wasn’t born like this. How did I get here?”
She didn’t know what it would take to find an answer. She felt sure she would find one.
I’m Phil Powis. Carolina Wilke and I now run Sacred Business Flow together. We hadn’t met when these things happened, but we’d both gotten used to making decisions around what work asked of us. It took us a while to pay attention to what our lives were asking of us, too.
That’s part of why, when someone comes to us to talk about growing a business, we ask what they want that business to make possible in their life.
You can see how closely the two are tied in an ordinary business decision. Say yes to another project and you’ve also said yes to the calls, the work between them, and the hours that need to come from somewhere. Those hours are part of your life.
So here’s a question you can sit with as we begin.
If you could earn a good living doing the work you most want to do, what would you want an ordinary week to look like?
Once you can picture that week, you have a perspective to make decisions from. Of all the things you know how to do, what would you actually offer? And how would you invite someone to work with you and ask to be paid?
We’ll get into those questions as the series goes on. In Part II, I’ll go back a little further. Carolina and I had both gotten good at work the world rewarded us for. I’ll show you how we each followed that path, what we learned to set aside along the way, and why it took us so long to notice.
Next in the series · Part II: The allure of the fragmented path (releases Thursday) →
