Start Here: When Success Nearly Killed Us
A manifesto for entrepreneurs who know something's off
For anyone who’s ever felt disconnected from their work. Whether you’re dreaming of starting, struggling to sustain, or successful but empty.
I’m Phil Powis. My partner Carolina Wilke and I run Sacred Business Flow. You’ll meet her soon. But first, let me tell you about the hardest time of my life.
By 35, I was running a consulting business bringing in over $100K a month.
I share this number not to impress you, but because what happened next became the most important business lesson I’ve ever learned — one that applies whether you’re chasing your first $1,000 or your next million.
On paper, my life looked like a dream. Inside, it was falling apart. The success I thought would bring freedom was destroying me.
Disconnection is feeling like you’re living someone else’s story.
Maybe your dream looks different. Maybe you’re still building toward it, or you’ve already hit the number. Here’s what I’ve learned: your inner patterns create your outer results. I didn’t understand that then. I thought strategy was enough.
Disconnection is feeling like you're living someone else's story.
No matter how much I achieved, nothing filled the emptiness. I kept thinking the next milestone would do it. The car. The house. The six-figure months. Each one just highlighted how disconnected I’d become.
It got worse. Years of ignoring the warning signs, playing the lone wolf, refusing to slow down. It culminated in a complete breakdown of my health. Several autoimmune conditions. And then the final straw:
The discovery of a golf ball-sized tumor growing in my neck.
Me grinding in my business at the expense of everything else.
That's when the doctor dropped the bomb: I had a 50-50 chance that I was walking around with cancer.
Facing a 50-50 chance of cancer, I finally saw it clearly. My strategies were solid. My systems were sound. But I’d completely ignored what was happening inside me. And that inner chaos was sabotaging everything I built.
Halfway across the world, Carolina was hitting her own wall.
While I was chasing external success, she was trapped in corporate stability that was literally giving her chronic migraines.
Years of corporate stress had left her with chronic migraines so severe she could barely function. Like me, she’d mastered the outer game. The strategies. The metrics. The systems. But something deeper was demanding attention.
Carolina tried everything. She exhausted conventional medicine. Eventually she found herself with a small Chinese woman aggressively cracking her jaw to improve the flow of Chi. She remembers thinking, ‘Is this woman going to break my face?’ But she was that desperate.
She was in and out of hospitals, often experiencing intense vomiting because she was too sensitive to be exposed to light.
One day in Montreal, locked in a dark room, she asked herself a simple question: ‘I wasn’t born like this. How did I get here?’ She didn’t know what it would take. But she knew she’d find the answer.
Continue To Part II↑
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What’s next?
Carolina and I are ready to support you in creating a business that aligns with your heart's calling. Here's how we can help:
Click to Find Your Hidden Business Pattern (Free): The Harmony Map Assessment reveals which inner pattern is blocking your next level - and why strategy alone hasn't fixed it. For entrepreneurs ready to address both the inner patterns AND outer strategies for breakthrough results.
