Business is Personal: The Beliefs and Practices That Shape My Work
My personal beliefs have a direct impact on my business. They influence my business model, my approach to marketing and client work, and the way I view personal and professional growth.
In this article, I outline the main beliefs that underpin my work as well as what I’m in practice of to show up from my values more often than my fears.
This article was originally published as a page on my website in April of 2023. It’s due for an update soon.
Our businesses are vehicles for personal and collective evolution. Through them, we get to practice what we want more of in the world.
If you are paying attention, you cannot build a business and escape the call for personal development.
The challenges we face in business hold a mirror to the challenges we face within ourselves.
We cannot design our maps for success and growth without coming up against the ones dominant culture has given us. We live in the tension of capitalism. Our relationship with money and marketing reveals our relationship to—and experience of—power.
By holding this tension we get to shift it. We get to discern how we want to show up, what we want to be in practice of, what we want to shape.
These are my commitments to doing just that.
I look forward to them evolving as I do.
What I believe:
There’s risk in every direction (h/t Rob Bell).
Uncertainty is unavoidable. Better to increase our capacity for it, and right-size our relationship to it, than avoid it altogether. When we turn away from the hard parts we cut ourselves off from the wisdom they have for us.
Dignity is a right.
All humans, regardless of their age, race, size, disability, sexual orientation, gender expression, or spiritual belief, deserve protection and care.
Beauty is not a luxury.
We all deserve to know, live with, and seek beauty.
Rest is not a reward.
Rest is the starting point, the fertile ground that makes all else possible.
Scarcity is structural.
We live in a fundamentally abundant world.
Shame doesn’t create change.
I will not coerce myself through growth. I will not put another human below me and call that progress.
True diversity creates room for all of us to be our full, unburdened selves.
It’s not diversity if we still have to meet patriarchal standards of masculinity (or femininity) to be heard, seen, respected, or paid. As adrienne maree brown says, “We have to create futures in which everyone doesn’t have to be the same kind of person.”
Exploiting ourselves isn’t the answer.
Undercharging and under-resourcing ourselves isn’t how we shift an unjust system. I will not turn the tools of the system I seek to change back on myself.
Turning away from the places we hold privilege and power is an underuse of that power (h/t Dr. Cedar Barstow).
We have a responsibility to own our power, our privilege, and our story. Change happens when we tell the truth about where we’re changing from.
You are the authority on your own life.
You have the last word on you. I care about your agency and will not use tactics to undermine it.
Most of our problems come from our inability to embrace difference, discomfort, and contradiction.
We’re not able to be with the expansiveness of someone else’s gender because it doesn’t fit within the narrow frame we’ve given ourselves. We’re unable to hold the fullness of our humanity because we don’t know how to embrace paradox. We’re unable to honour someone else’s individuality because of the perceived threat on our own.
So many of us are told—in implicit and explicit ways—by the way we look, or who we love, or how our brains work, that we don’t belong. That the world wasn’t built for us.
We live in a world built by the few, for the few. Through my work and life, I want to participate in the construction of a world built by the many, for the many.
I want it to be safe—and desirable—to be our full, bright, messy selves.
What I’m in practice of:
These are the somatic guardrails I have created for myself with language. By choosing language that resonates with me on a visceral level, I’m able to reorient myself more effectively and practice acting from my values rather than my fears.
I am moving toward…
Fullness
Discernment
Dignity
Agency
Paradox
I am moving away from…
Rigidity
Urgency
Domination
Punishment
Exploitation
I am moving away from the brittle, grasping, limiting nature of rigidity. The instability and insecurity of false urgency. The extractive, oppressive nature of domination over self and others. The dis-connected, dis-eased, dis-associative shame that punishing behaviour relies on. And from the lack of care in exploitation.
I am moving toward the longevity and vitality of fullness. The generous, curious, and compassionate nature of discernment. The right relationship of dignity. The resilience and courage of agency. And toward the awe, humility, and alchemy of paradox.
I am moving from a narrow to a wide place. From a static to a dynamic understanding of being.
The language of moving toward is deliberate. This is a daily, unfinished practice. It is not about arriving, it’s about continuously inviting myself into a more spacious way of being. Of finding myself in a narrow place and inviting myself back into a wide one. A continuous noticing and naming and re-orienting. Working with what is, meeting myself with compassion for however and wherever I find myself.
It’s not about getting myself to better, it’s about creating more room for myself.
With gratitude to:
The spiritual teachers, who have given me language: Rob Bell, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Rohr, Tyson Yunkaporta.
The researchers, feminists, and futurists who have given me the frameworks to make possibility possible: Cedar Barstow, adrienne maree brown, Brene Brown, Kelly Diels, bell hooks, Resmaa Menakem, Richard Schwartz.
The poets, who have given me meaning: John O’Donohue, Mary Oliver, David Whyte.
Selected links:
White Supremacy Culture by Tema Okun
Developing a Liberatory Consciousness by Barbara J. Love
Internal Family Systems by Dr. Richard Schwartz
Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein
Living in the Power Zone by Dr. Cedar Barstow
“Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be, stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends on those who go on anyway.”
— Robert Henri
