How Is Business Asking You To Evolve? | Blog

A few years ago, I was sitting on my couch feeling like something might be wrong.

Business wasn’t working in the way I wanted it to. Nothing I was doing seemed to be making much of a difference, and my cash position was more precarious than it had been in many years.

The things I knew how to do, the things that had worked before, were no longer producing the same results.

At some level, I could sense there was something meaningful in the moment. I could feel that I was being asked to listen more deeply for what wanted to come through next.

And that knowing was mixed with plenty of worry, second-guessing, and uncertainty.

I started questioning myself. Had I made a mistake? Was I missing something? Had I somehow lost my way?

Then, sitting there on the couch, two questions came through very clearly:

Can I trust myself? Can I trust life?

As soon as I saw them, something shifted.

I could suddenly recognize what this period might be asking of me. There was an opportunity to develop a deeper trust in my own way, a deeper trust in what wanted to come through me, and a deeper willingness to keep moving toward something that had not fully taken shape yet.

The interesting thing is that if the cash flow had remained comfortable, I probably would have continued doing much of what I had been doing. It was familiar. I knew how to do it. It had worked at some level, and at one point had worked quite well.

The discomfort made staying there harder.

It pushed me into questions I might otherwise have avoided.

Could I go all in on myself?

Could I back what wanted to emerge even without certainty, a proven formula, or a guarantee that it would work?

Could I continue engaging with the unknown long enough for something new to reveal itself?

There wasn’t a perfectly formed vision waiting for me that I simply needed the courage to follow. Much of it was still unclear. The invitation was to keep taking the next step, to pay attention to what felt alive and true, and to trust that clarity could emerge through the movement itself.

It reminds me of one of my favorite Boyd Varty quotes:

“I don’t know where I’m going, but I know how to get there.”

I love what that points to.

There are times in our lives when we cannot see very far ahead. We can still learn how to move. We can listen. We can make contact with what we know now. We can take the next step, see what life shows us, and allow that to inform the one after it.

Learning to trust myself in this way, to trust what wants to come through me and trust that life will meet me as I move, has been a significant part of what has allowed me to continue taking risks in my work and in my life. It has led me toward choices, relationships, creations, and experiences that have felt fulfilling and worthwhile.

And business has been one of the primary places I have learned it.

For years, I’ve thought of business as one of the most consistent teachers in my life and a vehicle for self-realization.

It is a place of creation, livelihood, service, expression, challenge, and growth. It is also one of the places that continually shows me where I am attached, where I am afraid, where I am trying to control an outcome, where I am playing it safe, and where something in me is ready to grow beyond the edges of what I already know.

Seeing business this way has helped me navigate its inevitable ebbs and flows.

There are seasons when things move easily, clients come, ideas are flowing, opportunities appear, and the next step feels clear. There are other seasons when money feels tight, something I thought would work doesn’t, I feel stuck, or a new direction starts to emerge before I know what it will become.

In those moments, I often find myself returning to a different kind of question:

How is my business asking me to evolve here?

That question changes my relationship with what is happening.

It creates space to wonder what the experience might be showing me about myself. Maybe there is an old belief becoming visible, a conditioned pattern that has been running quietly in the background, a place where I am still looking outside myself for certainty, or a capacity I am being asked to inhabit more fully.

Business has offered me many opportunities to discover that I am okay even when the external conditions do not feel secure.

When money has been tight, I have watched how quickly the mind can create a story about what that means about me, my future, or the viability of what I am creating. Each time becomes another opportunity to find a deeper ground beneath the circumstance and to discover how much more of life I’m capable of holding.

It has also continually asked me to trust what I know.

There are moments when the methodologies, formulas, best practices, and opinions around us point in one direction while something nudges me inside and points somewhere else.

Those moments ask whether I am willing to listen, speak what feels true for me, and let that knowing inform what I create and how I move.

I still wrestle with uncertainty. I still get caught in trying to figure things out. I still want reassurance sometimes before taking a risk, and I still bump into old ideas about money, success, timing, visibility, and what I should be doing.

That is part of what makes business such a powerful path.

It keeps presenting us with the gap between what we understand conceptually and what we are actually able to live.

We may know there is no certainty and then face a decision that asks us to move without a guarantee. We may know that rejection does not define us and then have to make an invitation and let another person choose.

We may know our worth is not determined by money and then discover what happens inside us when revenue falls short of what we hoped.

Business creates an almost relentless encounter between realization and reality.

And within that encounter, some very intimate questions emerge.

Do you know who you are?

Do you know what you are made of?

Can you stay connected to that knowing when circumstances become uncomfortable?

Can you hold more of life: more uncertainty, more visibility, more responsibility, more disappointment, more opportunity, more joy?

Can you embody what you know deeply enough that it begins to shape the ordinary decisions of your day?

That embodiment happens in very practical places: the investments you make in yourself, the email you send, the price you name, the person you hire, the idea you follow, the conversation you initiate, the opportunity you decline, the moment you stop searching outside yourself for an answer and allow yourself to act from what you already know.

Our fear enters the business. So does our imagination, our conditioning, our relationship with money. Our capacity to be seen enters it, our need for certainty enters it, and so does our creativity, willingness, and aliveness.

Business growth is not separate from the human we are inside the business.

Anything we care about enough to risk ourselves for will eventually introduce us to the edges of who we think we are, and business brings us to those edges again and again.

If we are willing to stay in the encounter, those edges can become places of realization.

We can see through limiting ideas that once felt like facts. We can loosen identities that no longer fit. We can discover capacities we did not know we had.

We can become more available to our own direct knowing and more willing to let that knowing inform how we actually live.

This is not about mastering business or us.  It’s an ongoing, ever-changing relationship.

The business changes. Life changes. I change. A new edge appears, another layer becomes visible, and the invitation arrives again.

Which is why one of the questions I keep returning to is:

How is your business designed to evolve you so you can realize more of your own potential?

Maybe one of the hidden gifts of building something of our own is that the business we are building is continually inviting more of us to come alive.