Creating a business — especially one that emerges from your love, soul, devotion and deep desire — is like creating a world, or a child. It is your soul, pouring its love for this world into action. It is your incarnate being learning how to co-create heaven on earth, in partnership with the subtle energy realms and the 3-D world.

Your business grows you, as you grow it.

Too many of us get stuck because some part of us believes a business can be assembled like Ikea furniture, by following a blueprint: Plug in your USP here; your client avatar there. Attach A to B, to your marketing funnel, your sales pitch, your content development strategy, your offers, your whatchamacallit, and et voila! You have yourself a fully fledged, thriving business!

Intellectually and spiritually you know this isn’t true. And yet, some part of you keeps trying to “get it right.” It’s a kind of magical thinking: If I just connect all of these moving parts properly, I will give the work of my heart wings, and it will fly.

Of course, each of these elements is as necessary to building a business as the harmonic scale is essential for composing a symphony. But if that symphony were simply a collection of major and minor scales, it would not transport you into a world you’ve never experienced before. It would not open your heart, expand your mind or make its home in your cells and bones. It would not change you.

Business is a journey your soul, and the soul of your business, take together. It is the hands and feet of the Sacred acting to shape this world closer to its true nature. It brings greater wholeness, reverence, beauty, love, respect, generosity and kindness into our world. You can’t walk this path without being profoundly transformed.

Each step we take, on this path of growing our businesses, is a step into our own becoming. Each step that is chosen, deliberate, makes wholeness out of raw inspiration, out of our soul’s desire.

This means that we often have to act before we know what we’re doing. Because each step we take grows us into the person who is able to take the next step, and the next. And each step opens our hearts and our vision to whom and what we serve, how we serve, and how we express that which has no shape or form — the soul essence of our business — in the concrete, everyday world of our business.

The journey takes time, and space, and the willingness to walk this path even when we can’t see what’s ahead. We have to love this journey enough to be willing to choose our deepest desires, to act on the truth of our souls, even when those choices seemingly make no strategic sense. Our souls, and the Devas of our businesses, have a perspective that is vastly more expansive than that available to our conscious minds, or even to our imagination. Yet that vision cannot come into being without the work of our hands and feet — one step, one action at a time.

So, we act. We make the path by walking it. To dream without doing is to remain forever at the foot of the mountain, the edge of the forest. It’s like dreaming your newborn baby’s life as a woman blooming into her greatness — and forgetting to do the necessary work of bathing her, feeding her, changing her nappies, cradling her wobbly little head while she spits up on your shoulder. You cannot get her there without tending to here.

We’re all, always, dreaming in the dark. What makes a business work isn’t perfect clarity, or impeccable strategy, or angel investors. It’s our willingness to grope our way through, listening always for the unmistakable ring of truth, feeling for the shape of wholeness, staying attuned to harmony. We may wander in circles for a while, take a turn that leads nowhere, encounter dead-ends and change course over and over until we find our feet back on the path that’s ours to walk. In the process, we become intimately familiar with our businesses’ souls, with the very specific ways in which they want to express themselves.

No matter where you are, in the life of your business, give yourself time. More than you think you need. Space. Support. Kindness. Love.

Take one step, and then the next, and the next. The path is love. All the rest is mutable. The particular choices you make, the strategies you employ, the people and stories you play with, will all change and grow and evolve over time.

Try things, in a spirit of curiosity and openness. If a particular strategy or offer doesn’t work, be curious about why. Refine, adjust, try other things. Along the way, you’ll develop a body of knowledge about your particular business, your particular tribe. The path is always love. Walking it brings you skill, knowledge, understanding and wisdom. And a business that is fully itself, sovereign and free. A living miracle.