More often than you’d think, people leave apparently very successful businesses behind. Even 7+ figure ones.
I’s not because they can spend the rest of their lives rolling around in crisp new bills, like a chinchilla in a dust bath. More often, they’re walking away with disproportionately little for all the work they put in.
Sometimes it happens because they built from trauma drive. They and their business grew from pushing. From forcing themselves into the strange, unfamiliar shapes other people told them success looked like, even when it meant cutting parts of themselves off, or sticking new fake bits on.
- They used tactics that felt wrong in their body;
- They partnered with people who made them feel small and who did things they didn’t want to put their name to; and
- They wore themselves out, until they couldn’t feel joy anymore and peace eluded them so successfully they began to think it was mythological.
Sometimes it happens because grief, pain or illness flow into their lives, and they don’t know how to sustain themselves and their business at the same time anymore. They believe their business can only function when they’re 100% on it and so they walk away.
Sometimes it happens when they grow through a ready-to-roll strategy that doesn’t support their mindset. The business is actually great, but they’re self-sabotaging because they’ve not grown on the inside to match the new reality on the outside. This happens to lottery winners too, FYI. The majority wind up defaulting back to where they were before because it’s what their being knows and trusts. Even though it’s not what they wanted.
Defining Success in Business
The truth is, success comes from within, not without.
Success is how you view yourself; that’s why another 5 or 6 or 7+ figures doesn’t magically transform you all by itself.
It can’t. It’s only as available as you are able to receive it, and you can only receive what you’ve expanded yourself to receive.
The whole question of expansion is nowhere near as woo-woo or wishy-washy as it sounds. Your mind-body literally can’t avoid bringing fear to new things. For success you can feel (and trust) you have to learn to hold new things and be with them, and to navigate the fear through to the other side where abundance actually lives. You have to grow, not just your revenue.
Lack of understanding and integration of this is exactly why many business owners have a 6 or 7+ figure business on the outside and still aren’t paying themselves properly every month. They still aren’t taking real time off and living a lifestyle of freedom. They’re often still renting a house and worrying about making their car payments. Their business is always on the brink of having to let people go, and they’re still frightened there won’t be another big client. They still aren’t feeling like they can keep anything in the bank for more than five minutes. They still haven’t found real joy they can feel deep down in their bones.
How to embody success in your business
The good news is that you don’t have to build all the way to 7+ figures and leave your business behind to learn all of this and grow in a new way.
You can build from alignment in a way that creates freedom, joy, love and peace on autopilot starting right now, wherever you are, beginning by working on the fundamentals of:
- Deconstruction: dismantling toxic cultural patterns that have shaped your belief and experience of your embodied being in ways that limit your sense of capacity, and drive you to “need” things that you don’t need (e.g. the next goal and the next) and to overlook things that you do need (e.g. rest, emotional support, deeper self-worth);
- Safety: learning to feel safe with yourself, in your whole being. Even as you navigate change and new things. Many entrepreneurs believe they “love change” but are actually desensitised to the sensations of their body and are bypassing feelings of lack of safety by continually racing for more;
- Belonging: learning to embody belonging begins within, and living in the truth that there is no greater belonging you can create than belonging with yourself (for all the parts of you, and not for the parts that are not you);
- Significance: learning to see that your significance lies with who you are, not the strategy you choose, or the people in the room with you, or the number in the bank, or any other external thing and then owning that; and
- Actualising: those lessons into your business so that it reflects you in beautifully aligned ways and amplifies your experience of safety, belonging and significance even when you feel like it’s not working perfectly. Even when you feel like you don’t have your full energy available. Even when it’s going so great it’s stretching you. Even when…
Those are the real foundations of freedom, joy, love, abundance, and peace. Not a strategy. An embodiment.
Recently, one of my clients who was going through this process with me had worked for months through grief and made incredible milestones in her business. But when she really stopped and looked at it, she realised she didn’t love it anymore.
She’d given up too much of herself and put too much emphasis on hitting the next goal, then the next and not enough on how she wanted to feel in her business.
The result was that she felt lonely and disconnected, and sales became a struggle. The effects weren’t just in her business either. Everywhere in her life, she felt like she’d lost sight of her whole self.
After a few months of working together, she was delighted to share that she was embodying real capacity for change and growth, making major decisions and taking action from a deeper place inside herself that felt much more joyful and aligned. Right after that, she hit a £70k week. Better than that, she felt like she was back in alignment in a big way.
Radical action leads each of us to different places.
Another client, for example, who was calling in amazing collaborations that fulfil her deep desire for real connection and position her as a leader amongst leaders wound up manifesting a whole entire publishing house!
I’ve studied human behaviour for my entire adult life (hence all the letters after my name) and studied and practised various healing modalities even longer than that. I’ve worked alongside people in diverse contexts from asylum seekers, to local victims of violent crime, to children and the elderly in various capacities. And over and over seen the same basic principles that govern being in the world.
Four key authorities impact all of us in how we co-create with the world:
– Material (how we interact with the material world, including the materiality of the mind-body);
– Emotional (how we experience subjective feeling states in interaction with the world around us);
– Social (how we interact collectively and how our personal perception of self and other is shaped by the collective social environment); and
– Spiritual (how we interact with some construct of spiritual connectedness, and co-create meaning and purpose which transcend the self and limitations of the mundane construct).
Or in other words, body, heart, mind and soul.
Only when we attend to these authorities in our lives through embracing the understanding that our deepest archetypal needs (safety, belonging, significance) are fulfilled within us, not from outside, can we become fully available for our desires for freedom, love, abundance and peace.
And as we actualise those in our lives two magical things happen:
- Money flows easily to us.
- We see it completely differently, no longer as something we’re dependent on and never have enough of, but as an energy that’s always around us, which we can interact with through each of the four authorities.
How long does it take to see success in your business?
It doesn’t have to take a long time either!
In fact, for many people real changes in how they feel about themselves, their lives and their abundance are incredibly rapid because abundance has always been there around them – they just have to lean in to perceiving it and letting it in. If you want to learn more about how my clients have changed their lives (and their businesses) at different paces, at different stages, and with different goals in mind, go check out their transformational stories.
xoxo,
Dr. Morgana
