To grow your business, you must grow yourself. Business growth is anchored in personal growth the way a tree’s roots are anchored to the ground that nourishes it.
Business expansion brings increased creative risk and complexity as well as the potential for outstanding rewards — and it requires an expanded version of you to shape and hold it.
The most successful of my clients are those who understand this. They willingly cultivate a loving relationship with their soul and with the essence of their business. Their business flourishes, serving them and the people and causes they love, while shaping a world that works for everyone.
Much of the work my clients and I do together is about building capacity — the capacity to handle creative risk; to ride the waves of uncertainty without losing focus and commitment to their deepest desires. The capacity to reshape identities, transform beliefs, and evolve into the inner pattern of their being. The capacity to partner effectively with the soul of their business and to manage increasing complexity in their business relationships.
You grow your business by developing a deep relationship with its soul — the essence qualities that you and your business are here to bring into the world. Those qualities of essence are intimately connected to your own soul’s deepest purposes. They also emerge from your gifts, talents, genius and heart — from the purposes of your incarnation.
The soul of your business is a living being whose pattern of perfect unfolding already exists in the subtle energy realms. You co-create your business by anchoring this pattern to your concrete intentions, and partnering with the soul of your business to bring its pattern into the world.
By tethering the pattern of your business — or of a particular project in your business, like creating a product or launching a program — to your clear intention, and then by taking consistent, daily actions towards the fulfillment of your desires, you help to grow your business organically and sustainably.
You do this most successfully when you keep the anchor of your intention steady no matter how choppy the seas around you become.
As you take creative risks in your life and in your business, you run up against the shoals of your own anxieties, fears, doubts and unconscious beliefs about the way the world works.
As you deepen your commitment to your business, you feel — in the queasiness of your belly, in the pounding of your heart — the sway and chop of all your unresolved feelings about desire and commitment.
Those patterns you have developed in response to your history will surface. You’ll want to run away to Bora Bora, or escape to some other Eden of simplicity and avoidance.
You’ll abandon your deepest desires — for creative fulfillment, for experiencing and expressing your truth, your love, your genius. You’ll exchange these sources of true nourishment for the slithery comforts of food or drink or exercise; driven, mindless work, or fiery relationship dramas or other self-generated obstacles to your heart’s desire.
You’ll do this, not because you’re weak-willed, undisciplined, self-destructive or lazy, but because saying Yes to your deepest desires activates tremendous power. Your desire, anchored to a concrete intention, summons the powers of the universe to your side.
And, like most people, you have probably spent a lifetime learning how to create an illusion of safety by fitting in, getting by, getting along — by avoiding your power to actively co-create your world.
In the Pacific Northwest, where I live, the sea shapes everything that grows along its shores. Those trees that inhabit cliffs and bluffs — arbutus, Garry oaks, scrub pines — are twisted into fantastical shapes by the daily pounding of wind and rain, sea spray and salt.
These same trees, when they grow inland, reveal the inner pattern of their being — straight, tall, their majestic trunks smooth and even-grained, their branches a haven for birds and insects, they are the rulers of a benevolent ecology that blesses the air with oxygen, animals and humans with shade, birds with a home for their nests.
But here, in the arms of the sea, these trees grow stunted, arthritic. Their bark stripped by wind, their branches distorted, they lean out over the cliff’s edge, their roots nourished by the thinnest skiff of soil, salt spray riding their backs.
We, too, are profoundly shaped by our environment.
Those of us who are fortunate enough to grow up in homes and families, neighborhoods and schools that support us in being fully ourselves, grow tall and magnificent, according to the inner pattern of our being.
The rest of us grow up doing the best we can to become who we are. We grow around the obstacles that we encounter. We do still grow — and we create, because creativity is the nature of our souls. But our growth is distorted because it is only partially supported by the world around us.
This isn’t because our parents and families do not love us — though some do not. Nor is it because our schools and teachers do not care. Mostly, this spiritual malnourishment happens because the beliefs and habits, patterns and programs that shape us are ubiquitous, and therefore largely invisible. They are so much a part of our common culture, our shared, inherited or acquired world view, that we are collectively blind to their effects.
We believe that this is just the way things are; this is the best we can hope for — the job that leaves your heart empty; the relationship that leaves you parched and yearning for more; the business that doesn’t make enough money to support you; that takes every ounce of you without giving you ground under your feet, or the steady stream of nourishment you need to flourish.
So we grow up longing for something we vaguely remember, but that feels like a dream. We grow up not knowing that we are meant to be great and glorious sources of shelter and belonging in the ecology of our world. We grow up not knowing that we are powerfully creative, sovereign beings.
We don’t know, or honour, our own desires because we have never been shown that desire is the call of our souls. We don’t trust our inner sense of what’s right for us because our own truth has been drowned out by the Voices of Should so many times that we no longer hear Truth’s quiet certainty.
We don’t believe that we have the right to be ourselves.
We don’t know — and aren’t taught — the basic skills we need in order to serve our own beautiful unfolding:
- How to stay in communion with your soul, and partner with it to fulfill its purposes.
- How to form a clear intention and follow through with it.
- How to tether the pattern of your being to your desires and intentions, so you can become your radiant, flourishing self.
- How to co-create your life in partnership with the powers of wholeness, which are invested in your success.
- How to work skillfully with boundaries and limits to shape a life and business that truly serves you and your world.
- How to transform obstacles into sources of success and fulfillment.
- How to work compassionately and skillfully with the fears that inevitably surface when you declare your intention to grow yourself and grow your business in harmony with the pattern of your being.
These fears are what stop you in your tracks, what cause you to waver in your intentions.
Fears that you will lose your place in the hearts of your family and friends. That you’ll lose your existing clients and customers when you raise your prices or change your offers so they serve you and your world more fully. Fear of what will happen when you become more radiantly visible.
They all boil down to the fear of being sovereign — of being the ruler of your inner world; shaping it as a potter shapes raw clay into something both beautiful and useful.
Over the past thirty years, I have taught thousands of women and men how to live a sovereign life. How to grow themselves, so they can grow their lives and businesses with ease, joy and creative power. These energy alchemy skills and tools work — powerfully, effectively.
My mission is to offer everyone who wants them the skills and energy technologies to shape a truly joyful, prosperous, creatively fulfilling life and business.
If this calls to you, please consider my self-study program, Rule Your World from the Inside Out.