I understand why they’re asking. I also understand exactly how much I don’t want to say yes.

So I’ve developed a rather delightful pricing strategy. When someone approaches me about work I know I can do beautifully but would prefer to leave in my professional rearview mirror, I quote 3x my usual fee.

Three times.

I call it the vibe upcharge.

The mathematics are exquisite. If they decline, I get to carry on with my life, doing work I actually enjoy. If they accept, the compensation is sufficiently generous that the project becomes considerably more appealing. Either way, I’ve created an outcome I can live with. There’s something wonderfully liberating about sending a proposal and being genuinely pleased with either answer.

I suspect you already know what in your business deserves its own special pricing category. You probably thought of it before I finished explaining mine.

And before anyone clutches their pearls over the audacity of charging more for work I enjoy less, I’d like to point out that nobody is being held hostage by my proposal. They are perfectly free to decline, and I am perfectly free to enjoy the rest of my afternoon.

Consent. What a concept.

Should they accept, they get every ounce of expertise and professionalism they’ve paid for. I will do the work beautifully, honor our agreements, and bring the same commitment to excellence I bring to every engagement. The premium makes me genuinely happy to take on work I would otherwise decline.

The funny thing about the vibe upcharge is that it requires me to be exceptionally clear about what I actually want to do.

So when someone comes along wanting to resurrect one of those skills, I get to decide whether I’m interested in dusting it off. And if I am, what would make that exchange feel absolutely delicious?

Sometimes the answer is three times my usual fee. Sometimes the answer is a gracious decline. And sometimes the answer is, “Who gave you my number?”

Because the real luxury of running your own business is getting to decide what kind of business you want to run.

Your professional history is full of capabilities you’ve developed, and some of them may belong to an earlier version of the business you’re building. You can appreciate what those skills have made possible while becoming increasingly selective about when and how you use them.

Some work makes us come alive. Other work makes us stare at our calendars and wonder what series of questionable decisions led us to this particular Tuesday. And somewhere in the middle, there’s work we’d be perfectly delighted to do for three times the usual fee.

But let’s establish one very important distinction before anyone gets carried away with their calculator.

There are people who don’t get a proposal at all.

No amount of money will convince me to work with someone whose values fundamentally conflict with mine. Racists, bigots, and assholes need not apply. There is no platinum-tier package that includes permission to be a terrible human being.

My vibe upcharge is for work I’d rather avoid, offered by people I’m perfectly happy to work with. My values are not available for purchase, regardless of how many zeros someone is prepared to put on the check.

Now, I can already hear someone saying, “That’s lovely for you, but I have bills to pay. I can’t afford to turn down work.”

Fair. And I want to honor that reality.

Having a financially stable business makes it considerably easier to decline opportunities that don’t fit. When your rent, payroll, and other obligations are covered, you have more room to make decisions based on preference and alignment. Financial reserves create breathing room, and I will never pretend that breathing room is equally available to everyone.

If you’re wondering how you’re going to cover next month’s expenses, I understand why an imperfect opportunity might look considerably more attractive than an empty calendar. Sometimes accepting that work is a sound financial decision. Sometimes it’s the decision that keeps the lights on while you build something better.

But there’s another calculation I want you to consider, especially if you’ve been telling yourself you can’t afford to say no.

Every time you say yes to something, you’re also saying no to something else.

And some of those noes are spectacularly expensive.

Every project occupies space on your calendar, in your attention, and in your capacity to serve. Every client who requires three times the energy you’re being compensated for is consuming resources that could be directed elsewhere.

What happens when the opportunity you’ve been hoping for finally arrives, and your calendar is already full of work you wish you’d never accepted?

Or perhaps the right opportunity hasn’t arrived because you’ve been too busy fulfilling those commitments to create it.

You’ve postponed following up with someone who expressed interest in working with you. The offer you’ve been excited to launch remains a collection of notes. You haven’t reached out to the potential collaborator, nurtured the referral relationship, or made the ask because you’ve spent the entire week putting out fires for a client whose monthly fee barely covers the cost of the matches.

And there you are, fully booked, exhausted, and wondering why your business isn’t growing.

That is an expensive yes.

I want you to consider a question that might rearrange a few things: What are you unavailable for because of everything you’ve already agreed to?

Your calendar, your capacity, and your cash flow are telling a story about the business you’re building. Do you like where that story is going?

If that question stirred something in you, let’s talk. On a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call, we’ll look at what your commitments are costing you and what becomes possible when you reclaim that capacity.

Maybe it’s the client who would be thrilled to pay your full rate. Maybe it’s the new offer you’ve been talking about for six months. Maybe it’s an afternoon with your family, a proper vacation, or simply the ability to finish your workday without wanting to launch your laptop into the nearest body of water.

You may discover that the work you’re afraid to release is occupying the very capacity you need to create a more profitable, enjoyable business.

You can begin creating room deliberately. Review your existing commitments and what they’re actually costing you. Raise your rates where the exchange no longer makes sense. Protect a few hours each week for the relationships, offers, and opportunities that could change your business. Build reserves so that the next time something feels wrong, your bank account can participate in the conversation without having a complete nervous breakdown.

And if you need to keep an imperfect engagement for now, you can make that a conscious, temporary choice with a plan for what comes next. There’s no shame in honoring your financial obligations while you build the capacity for greater freedom.

The point is to become increasingly intentional about what receives your yes.

I want you to have a business where profitability creates possibilities, where your expertise is compensated appropriately, and where the people you work with are people you’re genuinely pleased to see on your calendar. I want you to have enough financial breathing room to recognize a wonderful opportunity and enough available capacity to accept it.

And I want you to remember that being exceptionally good at something doesn’t obligate you to spend the rest of your life doing it.

You get to evolve. Your business gets to evolve. Your pricing gets to reflect the person you’ve become and the life you’re consciously creating.

So the next time someone approaches you with a project you’re spectacularly qualified to deliver and completely disinterested in doing, consider what would make the exchange genuinely worthwhile.

Maybe the answer is three times your usual fee. Maybe the answer is a gracious decline. And maybe, just maybe, the most profitable thing you can do is leave a little room on your calendar for something you haven’t even imagined yet.

As for me, I’ll continue quoting my outrageous premium when the occasion calls for it. If they say yes, I’ll do the work beautifully, collect my fee, and enjoy every delicious dollar of the exchange. If they say no, I’ll be equally delighted.

There’s a certain freedom in being genuinely pleased with either answer.

And darling, that’s a vibe worth cultivating.

The business you actually want doesn’t build itself while you’re finishing projects you wish you’d declined six months ago.

If you’re ready to look at your pricing, your clients, and your capacity with fresh eyes, let’s talk. Book a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call and we’ll explore how to build a more profitable business that supports the life you actually want.

P.S. Profit is Protest, and every dollar of genuine surplus expands your freedom to decide what deserves your time, talent, and energy.

P.P.S. Before anyone goes firing clients and waiting for the universe to deliver a replacement by express shipping, please remember that I love a good plan, followed by the ever important “or better” and then reverse engineering the cash flow to get there..

I’m feral, not financially reckless.

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From the generosity of nature to the exchanges we make in business and relationships, this essay explores reciprocity, the many currencies of prosperity, and what happens when we allow ourselves to receive as generously as we give.

Because receiving is part of the exchange, too.

Ready to explore what’s possible for your own prosperity? Book a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call. We’ll look at where you are, what you want to create, and what might be ready to shift.

I'd rather read the article, thanks!

I nearly choked on my dinner.

My coach and I were spending our final evening at a retreat center in Puerto Rico, sitting beneath a canopy of stars on land lovingly restored from near ruin into a sanctuary. Our host, a scholar of many esoteric traditions whose devotion to the place was evident everywhere we looked, had joined us for dinner. The conversation had wandered, as conversations with me tend to do, toward prosperity.

And then he said those three little words.

“Nature is free.”

I had purchased a plane ticket to Puerto Rico, rented a car to drive across the island, and paid to stay on the very land he had invested years of his life and considerable resources restoring.

Free?

Even the mosquitoes were collecting payment.

I kept my thoughts to myself. We were enjoying a lovely dinner, and he hadn’t given me consent to coach him and challenge his philosophy. But the conversation followed me home, and I’ve been turning it over ever since.

Because I understand what he meant. I can walk outside my door and stand beneath the trees without anyone presenting me with an invoice. I can watch the light move across the water, listen to the birds, breathe the air, and experience a kind of wealth that no financial statement can ever adequately capture. I have stood in places so beautiful that I could scarcely believe I was allowed to be there, much less call one of them home.

And every bit of that experience exists within an extraordinary network of exchange.

The trees participate in the cycles that make the air breathable. Pollinators move between flowers, gathering nourishment while making future generations of plants possible. Fallen leaves decompose and feed the soil that nourishes new growth. Fungi, insects, animals, microorganisms, water, and sunlight sustain the world outside my window through relationships of astonishing complexity.

Some of those relationships are mutually beneficial. Others involve competition, consumption, or one organism thriving at another’s expense. Nature has never promised fairness, and its abundance has never depended on everything receiving an equal share. Life continues to create, adapt, regenerate, and participate in an astonishing circulation of resources.

When I catch myself questioning abundance, I look to nature.

Does abundance really exist? Is there enough? Am I asking for too much? Have I somehow reached the limits of what is available to me?

The questions feel almost comical when I’m standing on my property, surrounded by trees, birds, insects, and the unrelenting determination of everything growing around me. The forest has been creating life long before I arrived, and it will continue long after I’m gone. I can spend an entire afternoon trying to understand the relationships unfolding in a single patch of ground and barely scratch the surface.

There is something profoundly reassuring about remembering that I belong to a world capable of such extraordinary creation.

I experience a similar sense of abundance looking out of a hotel window at the New York skyline.

The first time I noticed the connection, I was struck by how different the landscapes appeared and how familiar the feeling was. Outside my home, I see the accumulated creativity of the natural world. In New York, I see the accumulated creativity of human beings. Buildings imagined, financed, designed, constructed, maintained, inhabited, and continually reinvented by people whose lives intersect in ways they may never fully comprehend.

Every illuminated window represents another life unfolding. Somewhere inside those buildings, someone is making dinner, starting a business, planning a family, falling in love, worrying about money, sobbing in pain, celebrating a victory, or writing the next Tony winning broadway show.

The skyline exists independently of my attention, of course. Yet the particular experience of it, the wonder I feel, the possibilities I imagine, the memories it awakens, the way it changes my understanding of what human beings can create together, exists because I am there to participate.

The same is true when I look across my land.

I am a necessary, cooperating component of the reality I experience. My attention, my choices, my creativity, and my willingness to engage all influence what becomes possible within it. Remembering that I am an active participant in all this abundance changes the way I experience money.

I feel it before I can explain it. The contraction in my body eases. The urgency to force an outcome begins to dissolve. I become more curious, more receptive, and more willing to act on the opportunities in front of me. I find myself making requests I might otherwise hesitate to make, recognizing possibilities I might otherwise dismiss, and trusting my ability to contribute something valuable to the world.

Money becomes easier for me to create when I am connected to that visceral knowing. I stand in the flow of abundance, receiving what is mine to receive and sending out that which is mine to send out.

That understanding also shapes how I care for the land I call home.

Stewarding this land is both a responsibility and an extraordinary privilege. I maintain safe spaces for the animals who share it with us. I encourage native species and the pollinators who depend on them. I maintain firebreaks, watch the health of the trees, and invest time and money in protecting the conditions that let this little corner of the world flourish.

Nature has never asked me to do any of those things. I have never asked nature to compensate me for my efforts, either.

Still, the exchange is unmistakable.

I receive beauty, peace, belonging, wonder, and the satisfaction of participating in the flourishing of something I love. I contribute my attention, labor, resources, and care. Some days my return is the simple pleasure of watching a butterfly settle on a flower. Other days it’s the knowledge that something I did may help protect this place for years to come.

And sometimes the return is awe, the almost overwhelming privilege of helping something thrive.

There is always an exchange, even when nothing has been asked for, and no obligation has been created.

Much of our confusion about money begins with how narrowly we’ve learned to recognize exchange. Business owners understand the value of money because we can count it, deposit it, spend it, and record it. We have a much harder time recognizing the value of attention, presence, wisdom, care, satisfaction, and the countless contributions that make thriving possible.

Somewhere along the way, the word free became shorthand for anything that doesn’t require a financial payment, and we began overlooking everything else being contributed.

And nowhere is this more apparent than in how we offer our wisdom.

People tell me they’re offering free consultations, free workshops, free resources, and free access to their expertise. I understand the intention behind those offers. They want to be generous, build relationships, introduce people to their work, and make something valuable accessible without requiring a financial commitment.

I share that desire, and generosity is essential to how I operate.

But I don’t offer free sessions. I offer complimentary sessions.

When someone spends time with me, I bring decades of experience, knowledge, pattern recognition, attention, and the perspective I’ve developed through working with business owners navigating some of the most consequential decisions of their lives. I bring the mistakes I’ve made, the lessons I’ve learned, and the ability to recognize possibilities that may be difficult to see from inside a particular situation.

The person sitting across from me brings their own experience, questions, curiosity, attention, and presence. They bring a willingness to engage with what we’re exploring and, often, the courage to consider something they haven’t considered before.

Together, we create an experience that neither of us could create alone.

Most of the time, I leave a complimentary session feeling as though I’ve received as much as I contributed. Witnessing someone recognize their own brilliance, discover a possibility, or find clarity around something that has been weighing on them can be deeply satisfying. I love the moment when someone’s entire expression changes because they suddenly see what has been available to them all along.

That satisfaction is part of what I receive in exchange for my time and wisdom. I don’t need that person to buy anything for the exchange to be worthwhile.

The same philosophy informs how I offer complimentary masterclasses and webinars.

When someone joins me live, they contribute their time, attention, curiosity, and energy to a shared experience. Their presence matters. The questions people ask, the insights that emerge, and the connections created in the room all shape what becomes possible during our time together.

If someone can’t attend live and would like access to the recording, I charge for it.

Watching a recording still requires someone’s time and attention, but their presence can no longer contribute to the experience we’re creating together. The knowledge, preparation, and care remain available, and I’ve chosen money as the currency for that exchange.

I’m entirely comfortable with that arrangement. I get to choose how I offer my work, and the people who want to experience it get to choose whether the exchange works for them. Those terms can evolve as our circumstances, priorities, and capacity change. An exchange that once served everyone beautifully may eventually deserve a fresh conversation.

That freedom to choose is part of financial agency, and it belongs to everyone participating in the exchange.

The word free has been costing you more than you realize. You’ve become exceptionally good at giving. Now it’s time to become equally skilled at receiving. That’s the work we begin in a Prosperity Breakthrough Call.

One session. What you give, what you charge, and what’s standing between you and receiving abundantly.

Book Your Prosperity Breakthrough Call

I wonder how much would change in our businesses if we became more conscious of what we’re already giving and receiving. We routinely overlook the preparation behind a generous offer, the years of experience behind a seemingly effortless answer, and the emotional and intellectual resources required to be fully present with another human being. How often do we hesitate to charge for work we genuinely love because we’ve somehow absorbed the idea that our enjoyment reduces its monetary value?

I have seen extraordinarily capable people give so much of themselves that they eventually lose the capacity to continue doing the work they love. Their generosity was genuine. So is their burnout.

I want us all to serve from the saucer. To fill our own cups to overflowing so that we can generously give of our time, energy, and money from a state of blissful abundance.

When we give from overflow, we can release the need to control where our generosity goes next.

Exchange doesn’t require an immediate or equal return, and its effects can extend across relationships, communities, and generations. Someone may receive kindness from a stranger and carry that kindness into an entirely different relationship years later. A teacher may never know the full impact of something they shared. A person who receives help during a difficult season may eventually become the person who makes someone else’s survival or success possible.

The exchange is larger than any individual transaction, and money allows us to participate in that larger circulation in remarkable ways.

It allows us to exchange value across time and distance, often with people we will never meet. It allows us to support the labor, creativity, expertise, and care of others while receiving what we need to build and sustain our own lives. It makes possible forms of cooperation that would be extraordinarily difficult if every exchange required two people to have something the other wanted at precisely the same moment.

Money is woven throughout the life I have created, including the parts that feel most sacred to me.

Financial resources support my ability to steward the land I love. Native plants cost money. Fire mitigation costs money. The tools, materials, and expertise involved in maintaining this place all participate in the financial economy.

The beauty I receive inspires me to care for the land, and the money I create helps make that care possible. The satisfaction of that stewardship enriches my life in ways that extend far beyond the financial investment, and those experiences influence how I show up in my work and relationships.

The exchanges are interconnected, each contributing to the conditions that make the others possible.

When I talk about creating financial abundance, I want people to have enough money to make choices that honor their values, care for the people and places they love, and contribute to the changes they want to see. I want business owners to understand the financial realities of their work so they can make conscious decisions about what they give, what they charge, what they receive, and what they need to sustain the lives they’re creating.

I want the rebels, healers, coaches, and creatives doing extraordinary work in the world to have the resources to continue doing it, expand its reach, and enjoy the lives their businesses are meant to support.

And I want them to experience the pleasure of receiving.

For all the conversations we have about generosity, receiving deserves considerably more of our attention.

It’s the number one skill all business owners need to master.

We can become so accomplished at contributing that we barely notice how uncomfortable we are when something valuable begins moving in our direction. We minimize compliments, wave away offers of help, discount our expertise, and sometimes make receiving money far more complicated than it needs to be. What might change if receiving felt as natural and welcome as giving? If you could enjoy someone’s appreciation, accept support, name your price, and allow another person to decide whether they want to participate in that exchange?

The same person who can spend an afternoon joyfully helping someone solve a problem finds themselves tongue-tied when it’s time to make a paid offer. Suddenly, they worry about being pushy, asking too much, or making someone uncomfortable.

Yet an offer is simply an invitation to participate in an exchange. You bring something valuable. The other person has the agency to decide whether they want that value and whether the terms work for them.

You get to make the ask. They get to make the choice.

And if they say yes, you get to receive.

If receiving is a skill you want to master, let’s work on it together. Not in theory. In practice, with your actual numbers, your actual offers, and the patterns that have been keeping the money at arm’s length.

That’s what the Prosperity Breakthrough Call is for.

Ready to receive? Book Here.

Economic conditions, access to resources, societal inequities, and the practical realities of our lives and businesses all influence our financial circumstances, and I won’t minimize any of it. Appreciating a beautiful view won’t guarantee that the mortgage gets paid. I also know that our relationship with possibility influences what we notice, what we pursue, what we negotiate, and what we allow ourselves to receive.

When I lose touch with that knowing, I return to the evidence around me.

I can stand outside my door and watch the life unfolding across my land, or I can look across the New York skyline and marvel at the accumulated creativity of millions of human beings. Both remind me that I am participating in something larger than myself, something that has been creating and exchanging value long before I arrived.

And wherever you are reading this, you are participating, too.

Perhaps you have a view that takes your breath away. Perhaps you’re sitting in a crowded apartment, a hospital waiting room, a coffee shop, or an office where the only glimpse of nature comes through a window across the hall. The exchanges that sustain your life are still happening. Someone grew the food you ate, built the chair you’re sitting on, created the technology that brought these words to you, or offered a kindness that made your day a little easier.

You are the pebble in the pond, sending ripples farther than you will ever see. Your presence and your work have influenced conversations, decisions, relationships, and possibilities that would have unfolded differently without you.

What becomes visible when you begin recognizing yourself as a necessary participant in the enormous circulation of life?

I think back to the gentleman in Puerto Rico, sitting beneath the stars on land he had helped restore. He had poured years of attention, resources, and care into creating a place where people could experience something extraordinary. We had traveled across the world to be there, bringing our own hopes, questions, resources, and willingness to participate.

The exchange was everywhere, even as he invited us to appreciate what he believed was free.

And I hope he receives abundantly from the sanctuary he helped create.

Because when I look at the world through that lens, I see an extraordinary invitation to participate more consciously in the exchanges already unfolding around us. To recognize the value of what we contribute, honor what we receive, and choose how we want our resources to circulate.

The world is filled with abundance we did nothing to earn and opportunities to contribute that are uniquely ours. We can appreciate what has been generously offered, take responsibility for what is ours to steward, and create new possibilities through the exchanges we choose.

There is always an exchange.

And you belong in it, with everything you have to give and everything you are here to receive.

You’ve spent years becoming exceptional at giving. Imagine what becomes possible when you become just as skilled at receiving abundantly.

The Prosperity Breakthrough Call is where we begin making that real in your business, your pricing, and your life.

Book Your Prosperity Breakthrough Call

P.S. Profit is Protest. And so is allowing yourself to receive abundantly from the world you help make infinitely richer.

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In this audio drop, we’re exploring why so many business owners struggle to sell, how consent and financial sovereignty belong on both sides of a transaction, and what becomes possible when you stop deciding for someone else whether they can afford your work.

Make the ask. Let them choose. And give yourself permission to receive.

Ready to make the ask with confidence? Book a Prosperity Breakthrough Call.

I want to read the article instead!

Ironic, don’t you think? Every business owner I know wants to make money.

We want our work to be valued, our bills to be paid, our businesses to grow, and enough left over to enjoy the lives we’re working so hard to create. We want to make a difference, support our communities, and have the resources to do something about the things in this world that piss us off or break our hearts.

We love the work. We believe in the transformation it creates. We can talk for hours about the people we’ve helped, the problems we’ve solved, and the possibilities we see for the people we haven’t met yet. Give us an opportunity to share our expertise, and we’ll happily pour everything we know into a conversation.

Ask us to name our price, and suddenly we’re very interested in whether the dishwasher needs unloading.

We’ve all encountered the sales tactics that make our skin crawl. The unsolicited direct message that begins with a compliment and ends with a pitch. These days you don’t even get the compliment first. Or how about the stranger who pretends to be interested in your life long enough to steer the conversation toward their offer. The countdown clock that resets tomorrow. The salesperson who treats every objection as an invitation to keep pushing.

We’ve seen people manufacture inadequacy, exploit insecurity, and turn someone’s vulnerability into an opportunity to close a sale. We’ve watched perfectly reasonable questions get reframed as limiting beliefs, and financial hesitation treated as evidence that someone isn’t sufficiently committed to their own transformation.

Of course we want to distance ourselves from that behavior. Especially those of us whose work is rooted in healing, service, advocacy, creativity, and meaningful change. We care about the people on the other side of the transaction. We want them to feel safe with us.

Somewhere along the way, though, many of us began confusing the discomfort of being unethically sold to with the act of selling itself.

And that confusion is costing us.

Let me tell you a story about Emma. She’s a composite of women I’ve worked with over the years. Strong, independent women who’ve spent years “doing the work” to “get their heads straight,” as actual clients have described it. They’ve examined their beliefs, challenged old conditioning, learned to set boundaries, and grown into capacities they once couldn’t imagine. And they’re still growing. Aren’t we all?

Emma believes deeply in the value of her work. She’s witnessed what becomes possible when people receive the support she offers, and she wants to reach more of them. Yet when the conversation turns to pricing, she finds another layer of herself asking for attention.

She worries that raising her rates will make her greedy. She worries that people will leave. She worries that the people she most wants to serve can’t afford what she needs to charge to support herself. So she softens her prices, imagines objections before anyone voices them, and sometimes withholds the invitation altogether.

Her concern for other people is genuine. So is her discomfort with naming the true value of her work and making the ask. The two have become so entangled that she can no longer tell where her compassion ends and her assumptions begin.

The question I ask in conversations like these is simple: Who gets to decide what another person can afford?

Because Emma has been making that decision herself.

She doesn’t know what resources a prospective client has available, what they value most, what they might willingly rearrange to pursue something important, or what other opportunities they’re choosing between. She knows what she imagines their financial circumstances might be, and she lets that imagination determine whether they’ll ever hear the offer.

That’s playing God with their sovereignty.

It’s a provocative thing to say to someone who is trying to be kind. But kindness can become complicated when we begin making decisions that belong to other grown-ass adults.

We cannot know someone’s entire financial reality from the outside. A person with an impressive income may be carrying obligations we know nothing about. Someone with modest means may have savings earmarked for precisely the kind of transformation we provide. Someone might decide our work is worth saving for. Someone else might have the money readily available and prefer to spend it elsewhere.

Each of those decisions belongs to them.

When we assume someone can’t afford our services and withhold an otherwise appropriate invitation, we substitute our judgment for theirs. We quietly appoint ourselves the authority over their priorities, their resources, and the possibilities they’re allowed to consider.

Isn’t that curious? A business owner who wants and, let’s be honest, needs money, choosing not to make the ask because that feels more dangerous than the deprivation they’ve become used to.

Perhaps we grew up believing that people with money were selfish, or that asking for money made us demanding. Perhaps we learned that being helpful meant being available regardless of the cost to ourselves, and that sacrifice and suffering make us good. Perhaps we have become so practiced at earning approval through generosity that receiving full compensation feels disingenuous.

Those stories are remarkably convincing when they borrow the language of compassion. We tell ourselves we’re being accessible. We’re being considerate. We’re protecting someone from discomfort. Meanwhile, we’re reducing prices nobody has questioned, offering discounts nobody requested, and deciding that the people we most want to help probably can’t afford us anyway.

When you find yourself deciding someone can’t afford you, what information are you working with? Have they told you what their budget is? Have they asked about alternatives? Have they even had the opportunity to decide whether they want what you’re offering?

Whose discomfort are you trying to relieve?

And let’s not forget, you, the business owner, have financial sovereignty, too.

You have the right to decide what your work costs. You have the right to build a business that supports your life, compensates you well, pays its obligations, creates reserves, and generates profit. You have the right to establish boundaries around your time, your expertise, and the conditions under which you do your best work.

Your desire to serve does not obligate you to subsidize everyone who wants access to you.

You know the value of your work. But when it’s time to name your price, can you hold the number without flinching?

That is exactly what we work through in the Prosperity Breakthrough Call. One conversation. Your pricing, your patterns, and a clear path forward.

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We’ve inherited a peculiar expectation that people doing meaningful work should demonstrate the purity of their intentions through financial sacrifice.

The more important the cause, the more suspicious we become of the person who expects to be well compensated for advancing it.

That suspicion has a cost. Have you been paying it?

Healers are supposed to heal. Advocates are supposed to advocate. Artists are supposed to create. People who care deeply about others are expected to keep giving, even when their own businesses are struggling to survive.

And when they finally acknowledge that their work needs to pay for the lives they’re living, they’re encouraged to keep their prices reasonable, whatever reasonable happens to mean to the person making the suggestion. And whoever is making that suggestion brings their own money stories to the conversation, healthy and disempowered alike.

I’ve seen what that bargain costs.

I’ve seen brilliant business owners work far more hours than they intended, delivering extraordinary value while quietly wondering how they’ll pay themselves. I’ve seen people whose generosity has become so deeply embedded in their business model that they can barely distinguish service from self-abandonment.

Eventually, the numbers have something to say about it, and they don’t care how generous you’ve been.

Your business has expenses. Your work requires time, skill, attention, and energy. Your future requires resources. Your life deserves to be funded while you’re living it, including the parts that have nothing to do with serving another person.

The price of your work needs to account for those realities.

This is why I spend so much time with business owners looking at the actual math. We examine what they want to earn, how much they want to work, what it costs to deliver their services, and what their business needs to retain in order to remain healthy. We explore the assumptions they’ve been using to set their prices and whether those assumptions can support the lives they say they want.

Sometimes the numbers reveal that an offer is dramatically underpriced. Sometimes they reveal that the delivery model needs to change. Sometimes they show that a lower-cost offering is entirely sustainable when it’s intentionally designed and supported by other revenue streams.

Financial sovereignty includes the freedom to be generous.

You can choose to offer scholarships, sliding-scale pricing, community programs, or pro bono work. You can decide that serving a particular population is important enough to build an entire business model around making that service accessible, with the financial foundation to sustain that choice.

Prospective clients have the same right to decide what they do with their money.

A person who wants your services does not suddenly acquire the authority to determine what you should charge. Their financial circumstances shape what they can or want to buy, and you may decide together whether an alternative arrangement makes sense. You are each free to propose possibilities, establish boundaries, and decline an arrangement that doesn’t serve you.

Neither person needs to surrender their agency for a transaction to be ethical.

This is the part of selling I wish we talked about more often instead of endlessly bitching about bro marketers and treating money like a spiritual contaminant.

Consent belongs in commerce.

I believe in consent in all things, including making the ask. It’s why dropping uninvited into someone’s direct messages with a sales pitch feels so gross to me. Someone accepting a connection request, commenting on a post, or sharing something vulnerable does not automatically mean they’ve invited us to sell to them.

An invitation has a context. A relationship has boundaries. And a person’s attention belongs to them.

We can make our work visible, communicate what we offer, and create opportunities for people to express interest. When a conversation naturally opens the door to discussing our services, we can ask whether they’d like to hear more. We can make an offer clearly enough that someone understands what they’re being invited into, what it costs, and what they can reasonably expect.

We can answer their questions, explore whether we’re a good fit, and give them the information they need to make a decision they feel good about.

Then we give them room to decide.

We don’t need to turn their uncertainty into an objection to overcome. We don’t need to manufacture false urgency or imply that declining means they don’t believe in themselves. We don’t need to keep following up after someone has clearly told us they’re uninterested.

And we certainly don’t get to decide that our belief in the transformative power of our work gives us special dispensation to override another person’s boundaries.

Believing in the value of your work creates a responsibility to make it available. It never creates an entitlement to someone else’s attention, money, or yes.

That responsibility does ask something of us, though.

It asks us to participate.

The creation of all that you desire requires active, willful participation, and that includes making the ask.

You can have an extraordinary offer, a beautiful website, glowing testimonials, and a library of generous content. You can spend years refining your expertise and building relationships with people who genuinely appreciate what you contribute.

You can become so good at giving people a taste of your work that they begin to expect they’ll always get it for free.

And you can tell yourself that anyone who wants to work with you will know how to find you.

Sometimes they will.

Sometimes they’ll read everything you publish, appreciate every insight, and never realize there’s an opportunity to receive more direct support. Sometimes they’ll assume you’re too busy, too expensive, or unavailable. Sometimes they’ll simply need someone to make the possibility explicit.

The invitation creates an opening that may never have existed otherwise.

Making the ask requires us to step beyond the relative safety of being appreciated and into the vulnerability of being considered.

Because someone might say no.

They might love your work and decline your offer. They might choose another provider. They might decide the timing is wrong, the investment doesn’t fit their priorities, or the particular service you’re offering isn’t what they need.

And if you’ve attached your worth to the answer, that no can feel devastating.

Suddenly the conversation becomes about whether you’re good enough, whether your prices are justified, whether you’ve overestimated your abilities, or whether you should have kept your mouth shut in the first place.

For some business owners, even a yes can bring its own discomfort. Now someone has agreed to pay the full price. Now the money is coming. Now there’s a commitment to fulfill, a relationship to honor, and an expectation that the work will deliver the value you’ve described.

Receiving can feel just as vulnerable as asking.

This is why I believe the inner work and the outer work belong together.

We can build thoughtful offers, examine our costs, establish sustainable prices, and learn to communicate the value of our work. We can also become curious about what happens inside us when it’s time to speak those prices out loud.

Does your breathing change? Do you rush to fill the silence after naming the number? Do you begin explaining all the reasons your work costs what it does before anyone has asked? Do you immediately offer to take something off the price because the other person paused to think?

What might become possible if you could name your price, remain present, and trust another adult to respond?

With practice, you can develop enough trust in yourself to hear the answer as information, without turning it into a verdict on your value.

A no might tell you something useful about the offer, the timing, the audience, or how clearly you’ve communicated the transformation you provide. It might reveal a genuine gap between what people need and what you’ve created. Or it might simply be one person’s decision about how they want to use their resources.

You can examine that information without turning it into an indictment of yourself.

You can celebrate someone making a decision that is right for them, even when that decision doesn’t produce revenue for you.

That is the kind of selling I want more of in the world.

If you recognized yourself somewhere in this article -- the Emma in you, the one softening prices and swallowing the ask -- that is not a character flaw. It is a pattern. And patterns can be worked through.

The Prosperity Breakthrough Call is one conversation where we look at exactly what is keeping you from charging what your work is worth and making the ask without apology.

Ready to stop negotiating with yourself?

Book Your Breakthrough Call Today!

Imagine what changes when business owners stop treating the ask as something vaguely shameful. Imagine the work that becomes possible when people who are deeply committed to their clients also become deeply committed to the financial health of their businesses.

That means sustainable practices, well-compensated expertise, and resources available for innovation, generosity, community investment, and the causes that deserve our attention.

Selling as a service means believing deeply enough in the value of your work to make the invitation, and respecting the other person’s sovereignty enough to let the decision be theirs.

What might change if you trusted your work enough to offer it, yourself enough to receive compensation for it, and the person across from you enough to honor their answer?

There are people who will genuinely benefit from what you have created. Some will be ready. Some will be interested later. Some will decide that what you’re offering belongs in someone else’s life.

You won’t know which is which if you keep the invitation to yourself.

Make the ask.

Let them choose.

And keep participating in the creation of the life you desire.

Your job is to make the ask. Naming your price confidently is part of that ask. Your business survives and thrives when you keep asking.

If you’re ready to stop avoiding the ask and start building the financial foundation your work deserves, let’s talk.

Book Your Prosperity Breakthrough Call

P.S. Profit is Protest, and so is selling from a place of sovereignty. A sovereign transaction leaves both people free to say yes, free to say no, and whole regardless of the outcome.

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You’ve invested the time, money, and energy. You’ve built an identity around getting there. Along the way, you’ve learned things you couldn’t possibly have known when you started.

In this episode, we’re exploring how aligned action changes our perspective, why commitment deserves room to evolve, and how self-trust helps us recognize when it’s time to choose again.

Knowing what you know now, is that still where you want to go?

If you’re questioning a goal you’ve worked hard to pursue, consider booking a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call. We’ll explore what you’ve learned, what you want now, and the possibilities opening up before you.

You get to decide where you go from here.

I prefer to read the article!

We are asked to name the number. Choose the goal. Define the vision. Decide where the business is going. Know our why. Pick our one thing. Picture the life we’re building with so much specificity that we can taste the champagne we’re going to toast our eventual success.

I believe in all of that. I want you to have a destination. I want you to be able to say, with your whole chest, this is what I want.

I also want you to remember something that can make wanting it feel a whole lot safer:

You are making that decision with the information you have today.

You don’t know what you’ll learn when you make the offer. You don’t know who you’ll meet because you finally walk into the room. You don’t know how it will feel when the number in your bank account changes, when the team grows, when the book is published, when the debt is gone, when the thing you’ve spent years imagining becomes part of your ordinary Tuesday.

You don’t know what the first ten steps will reveal because you haven’t taken them yet.

And you shouldn’t have to.

You are allowed to begin before you have all the answers. And you deserve support as you discover them.

Here at Profit is Protest, we explore what becomes possible when you bring your ambition, your money, and your evolving desires into right relationship with the life you’re creating. Consider subscribing or upgrading. There’s room for you here.

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There’s no reasonable way to demand that the person standing at the beginning of any journey possess information that can only be gathered along the way. Yet we do it to ourselves all the time. We choose a destination with today’s information and then expect ourselves to stay loyal to that choice, no matter what tomorrow teaches us.

We call that commitment, but I think commitment deserves a more generous definition. One with enough room for what we learn along the way.

The destination matters because it gives us direction. Without one, we can waste an extraordinary amount of energy moving without actually going anywhere. We can research and refine and prepare and wait for certainty to arrive before we take the first step.

Certainty has terrible delivery times.

Movement is faster.

Movement puts the idea into contact with reality. It gives the Universe something to respond to. You make the offer and someone tells you what they actually need. You raise the price and discover what changes. You hire someone and learn what kind of leader you want to become. You reach the revenue goal and finally have enough lived experience to decide whether you want the business required to sustain it.

Every step gives you information the person who chose the destination didn’t have.

Which means there may come a point when the most aligned thing you can do is look at the destination you chose with complete sincerity and ask:

Knowing what I know now, is that still where I want to go?

Maybe the answer is yes.

That yes has real power because you’re not simply continuing toward a goal you chose months or years ago. You are choosing it again with more information.

Maybe the destination still feels right but the route doesn’t. You want the revenue, but you no longer want to earn it through an offer that exhausts you. You want the impact, but you don’t want the enormous team you once assumed was required to create it. You want the freedom, but your experience has taught you that your original definition of freedom came with a price you are no longer willing to pay.

And sometimes the answer is no.

That can be harder.

Because now you have to decide what all those miles mean.

What happens to the time you invested? The money? The promises you made? The identity you built around becoming the person who gets there?

What happens when you told everyone where you were going?

Sometimes the hardest part of changing direction is figuring out whether you’ve outgrown the destination or you’re afraid of what it will take to reach it. That’s a conversation worth having.

If you’re questioning a goal you’ve worked hard to pursue, consider booking a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call. We’ll explore what you’ve learned, what you want now, and the possibilities you may not have been able to see when you first chose your destination.

This is where self-trust becomes essential.

You have to trust yourself enough to let new information matter without using every uncomfortable moment as an excuse to run. You have to know yourself well enough to recognize when fear is asking for support, when resistance is asking for investigation, and when something deep inside you is saying, I don’t want this anymore.

Nobody outside of you can make that distinction for you.

The people who support you can help you hear it. They can ask better questions, point out your blind spots, help you see patterns, reflect back the best of you when fear distorts the mirror. Good support should make your own voice easier to hear.

Because eventually, you are the one who has to choose again. And choosing again doesn’t make the first choice wrong.

The person who chose the original destination wasn’t foolish because they couldn’t predict what you would learn along the way. They did exactly what we ask of ourselves when we talk about creating a life intentionally: they looked at what they knew, listened for what they wanted, chose a direction, and moved.

Thank them for getting you this far.

Then let the person standing here today decide what happens next.

This is the deeper promise inside aligned action. You are moving toward a reality you have consciously chosen while remaining in right relationship with yourself, your values, your money, and the life your business exists to support.

Consciously chosen has a heartbeat. It’s alive and evolving. It leaves room for you to do the same.

It assumes that you are going to grow, learn, encounter things you couldn’t anticipate, gather evidence, change your relationship with money, discover new desires, release old identities, and become someone with a perspective that wasn’t available when you began.

And sometimes honoring your commitment means changing the destination. Because underneath the number, the offer, the title, the size of the company, or whatever marker you originally chose, there was a reason you wanted it. You believed it would make something possible in your life. As you move closer, you learn whether the destination can actually deliver what you asked it to. You may discover another path that gets you closer to the life you want now. And sometimes you discover that the life you were trying to create has changed too.

It may be evidence that you stayed committed to what mattered most.

So choose a destination.

Choose one big enough to get you moving. Choose one that makes something inside you come alive. Commit to it deeply enough to find out what happens when desire meets action.

Then go.

Pay attention.

Gather the information that only movement can give you.

And somewhere along the way, when you can see farther than you could from where you started, trust yourself enough to look up and ask whether that’s still where you’re going.

You are allowed to change the destination.

P.S. Profit is Protest, and so is trusting the person you’re becoming. You were never meant to know at the beginning what only the journey could teach you.

The life you want is allowed to evolve. So is the business you build to support it. So are you.

If you’re ready for deeper conversations about money, aligned action, and becoming unreasonably resourced on your own terms, consider subscribing or upgrading to paid. Join us for live monthly coaching and weekly group tapping as you build the clarity, confidence, and self-trust to create prosperity that supports the life you want to live.

You don’t have to know the entire destination to take your next step.

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But do you believe yourself?

Every promise we make to ourselves leaves a little evidence behind. The ones we keep. The ones we break. And the ones we learn to repair.

In this episode, we’re exploring how those seemingly insignificant moments shape our ability to trust ourselves with bigger decisions, more money, and the power our prosperity creates.

Because self-trust is something we can build, one promise at a time.

Ask yourself : What would change if you trusted yourself to hold the money, make the decisions, and wield the power that comes with the prosperity you desire?

If that question stirs something in you, consider booking a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call. We’ll explore the money stories and fears shaping your decisions, uncover where self-trust needs strengthening, and identify one aligned action you can take now.

I prefer to read the article, thanks!

For decades, we’ve been told to hustle harder, sacrifice more, and prove how much we want our dreams. Then came the promise that if we just believed hard enough, everything would fall into place.

I’ve got a few choice words for both.

In this episode, we’re exploring what happens when desire meets reality, why hustle can become a hiding place, and how to participate fully in creating what you want while trusting yourself with whatever happens next.

Ready to turn desire into aligned action? Consider booking a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call. Bring the dream. We’ll explore your next move.

I prefer to read the article

It is such an ordinary promise that we barely register making it. Dinner ends, we get comfortable, something good is on television, and we decide the trash can wait until morning. Of course it can. Nothing terrible happens. No one is disappointed. There is no consequence waiting for us on the other side of the kitchen door.

Except we heard ourselves say it.

I have been thinking a lot about the promises we make to ourselves that no one else knows we’ve made, and especially how differently we treat them from the promises we make to others. If I tell you I will meet you at seven, send the proposal by Friday, pay you back next week, or show up when you need me, I understand that my word carries weight. If I repeatedly fail to do what I said I would do, eventually you will stop trusting me. I would expect you to.

We don’t apply the same logic to our relationship with ourselves.

The commitments we make privately feel consequence-free. I’ll stop working at five. I’ll look at the numbers tomorrow. I’ll take Friday off. I’ll send the email. I’ll make the offer. I’ll start putting money into savings. I’ll hold this boundary. I’ll take the trash out after dinner. And, my personal kryptonite - I’ll cut back on the sweets.

Then we don’t.

Each broken promise is tiny enough to explain away. Tomorrow is fine. Next week is fine. I got busy. Something came up. It wasn’t that important anyway. And most of the time, taken individually, it truly isn’t that important. The trash will survive another night. The spreadsheet will still be there tomorrow.

The problem is the accumulation.

A single drip of water seems harmless. Give it enough time in the same place, though, and it can compromise the entire foundation. Our scattered promises to ourselves works the same way. One forgotten commitment doesn’t destroy self-trust. Neither does changing your mind, misjudging your capacity, or having a day when life simply has other plans. But hundreds of tiny moments in which we hear ourselves say I will and then don’t leaves a mark.

We are always listening to ourselves.

If this is landing for you, you are probably someone who is done letting yourself down quietly.

Here at Profit is Protest, we explore what it means to trust ourselves with our decisions, our money, and the prosperity we’re creating. Consider subscribing or upgrading. You don’t have to build that trust alone.

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By the time we reach the decisions where self-trust feels consequential, we already have a history.

We want to trust ourselves to leave the job, start the business, make the investment, raise the price, hire the person, walk away from the client, make the ask, or bet a stretchy amount of money on something we believe can work. We stand in front of something we desperately want and declare, I’m going to do this.

And somewhere inside us, a quiet voice asks, Are we? Are we really?

It's easy to call that voice doubt. Fear. Resistance. Another limiting belief to clear so we can finally get out of our own way.

But what if that voice has simply been keeping receipts?

It remembers every promise because it was there for all of them. It remembers when you said you were going to stop working at five and looked up from your laptop three hours later. It remembers when you promised yourself you would look at the numbers, make the ask, hold the boundary, take the day off, or stop accepting work that leaves you depleted.

So when you announce that this time will be different, the question isn’t coming from nowhere.

Do I believe myself?

That’s a much more interesting question than Do I believe in myself?

We spend enormous amounts of time trying to strengthen the second one. We work on confidence, worthiness, mindset, visibility, courage, and our capacity to imagine ourselves having the thing we want. All of that matters.

But believing in yourself and believing yourself are completely different things. Both parts of the same song, yearning for harmony.

You can believe you are capable of building the business and still not believe yourself when you say you’re finally going to make the changes required to build it. You can know you deserve to be paid well and still have years of evidence that you won’t hold the price when someone pushes back. You can believe you are capable of becoming wealthy and still wonder whether you can trust yourself with the kind of power that comes with a fuckton of money.

Becoming unreasonably resourced requires more than believing that more is possible.

At some point, you have to truly believe yourself when you say you are ready and willing to steward the amount of money and resources you say you want.

Money expands your choices. Enough of it can change where you live, how you work, what you tolerate, who gets access to you, what you can walk away from, what you can build, and how much of someone else’s cheerleading you need before taking action that can transform your life.

My people are rebels, healers, coaches, and creatives, so I want you to hear me when I say this: money can give your impact massive reach. It can put resources behind the things you care about and allow you to protect people, fund ideas, create opportunities, and say no when saying yes would cost too much of you.

That’s real power.

And if you have spent any amount of time watching people use money and power in ways that horrify you, it makes sense that some part of you would have questions about what happens when there is more of it in your hands.

Will I become greedy? Will I stop caring? Will I start valuing the money more than the people? Will I become one of those people who can justify almost anything once enough money is attached to it? Will I still recognize myself?

Those questions live underneath more of our money stories than I think we realize. We can consciously want wealth because we understand what it would make possible while carrying insidious fears about who we might become if we actually have it.

What becomes possible when you begin to trust yourself with more money, more choices, and more power?

If you’re ready to explore that question, consider booking a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call. Together, we’ll look at the money stories influencing your decisions, the prosperity you want to create, and an aligned action you can take to begin moving toward it.

Which brings us back to self-trust.

I don’t need to believe that money will make me good. I need to trust the goodness that already exists in me, even knowing I will make mistakes, get things wrong, and sometimes unintentionally hurt people.

I need to know that I can trust myself when money gives me more choices about who I am going to be.

I need to trust that my values still belong in the room when the opportunity is enormous. That I can walk away from money that requires me to abandon myself to receive it. That generosity doesn’t require me to empty myself every time someone else has a need. That I can have more than enough without immediately apologizing for it, giving it away, or inventing a reason it shouldn’t stay with me.

I need to believe myself when I say there is no amount of money worth compromising my values.

And that kind of trust is built long before anyone puts the giant check on the table.

Which is good news, because it means you don’t have to wait for the giant check to start building it.

If self-trust can be eroded through hundreds of tiny moments, it can also be strengthened through hundreds of tiny moments. Every time you keep your word to yourself, you give yourself a new receipt. Every time you say I will and then do, you add another piece of evidence that your own voice is credible.

And when you don’t keep your word, because sometimes you won’t, the damage can be repaired. The drip can be stopped.

Changing your mind can be part of trusting yourself. Sometimes you realize you no longer have the capacity for something you committed to. Sometimes new information changes the choice itself. Self-trust lives in what happens next: whether you stay in relationship with yourself through the change, acknowledge the commitment you made, and consciously choose again.

What erodes self-trust is the quiet accumulation of promises left behind. The commitments we stop acknowledging. The agreements we make with ourselves and casually abandon. Eventually, we can let ourselves down so routinely that we stop expecting ourselves to show up.

Self-trust has room for renegotiation, accountability, forgiveness, and repair because trust is a relationship.

If you tell someone you love that you’ll be there at seven and realize at six that you can’t make it, you don’t protect the relationship by disappearing. You call. You tell the truth. You acknowledge the commitment. You make a new agreement.

What if you offered yourself the same courtesy?

What if, instead of allowing another promise to quietly evaporate, you came back to yourself and said: I know I said I would do this. I’m not going to. Here’s why. Here’s what I know now. Here’s what I’m choosing instead.

Imagine what that does to your foundation.

Now the evidence you’re collecting isn’t that you execute every commitment perfectly. The evidence is that you don’t abandon yourself when something changes. You come back. You tell yourself the truth. You repair. You choose again.

That is a person you can trust with more.

A person who can look at a bank account without avoiding what it says. A person who can make a financial decision and take responsibility for it. A person who can say yes without disappearing inside the yes and no without requiring everyone else to approve. A person who can make a mistake with money, repair what can be repaired, learn what needs to be learned, and continue without turning the mistake into an identity.

A person who can hold power without requiring themselves to wield it perfectly.

Because someday the promise will be much bigger than just taking out the trash.

It may be I will not abandon myself for this money.

I will tell the truth when the numbers scare me.

I will make the ask.

I will keep enough.

I will walk away if having this requires me to become someone I don’t want to be.

I will use what I have to build more of what I want to exist in the world.

And when you make those promises, I want the person who has been listening all along to answer:

I believe you.

P.S. Profit is Protest, and so is trusting yourself with the power your prosperity creates. Build that trust now, one kept promise, one honest renegotiation, one repair at a time.

Join us for deeper conversations, live monthly coaching, and weekly group tapping as you build the confidence to make decisions and follow through on your own terms.

I have definite opinions about that question. Nearly every big-name guru since the 80s has made serious bank convincing us that if we just worked harder, ground it out, and hustled until we dropped, we’d finally deserve and receive what we desire.

If you really want the business, the money, the impact, the life, then surely you should be willing to work longer, sacrifice more, push harder, sleep less, risk everything, and drag yourself across the finish line bloody enough to prove you meant it.

Fuck that!

Then there’s the new generation of coaches telling us that if we want it enough, just believe, stay in the “right” energy, and say enough mantras or affirmations, all that we desire will simply arrive.

Fuck that too!

At some point, the book has to become words on a page. The business has to make an offer. The debt has to meet a payment. The revenue goal has to encounter a sales conversation. The dream that has lived safely inside your imagination has to enter a world where other people can see it, respond to it, buy it, reject it, misunderstand it, or help you build it.

Creation of all that we desire requires our willful participation.

That can be far more confronting than just wanting and more uncomfortable than hustle and grind.

Because hustle can become a hiding place.

We can work extraordinarily hard without ever taking the action that makes us vulnerable to an answer. We can spend twelve hours perfecting the website instead of making the offer. We can research every possible way to publish the book instead of writing the next chapter. We can build the spreadsheet, rewrite the sales page, tweak the branding, take another course, get another certificate, develop another strategy, and fill every available hour with work that feels productive.

We can exhaust ourselves in pursuit of a dream while carefully avoiding the actions that allow the dream to respond.

Willful participation asks more of us than effort. It asks us to step into the places where we don’t control the answer.

We can sincerely want more clients while avoiding making offers. We can hustle for money while refusing to look at the numbers. We can want the book while endlessly researching how to write one. We can want support while obsessively holding onto every task. We can want visibility while waiting to become impossible to criticize. We can want a different business while repeating the decisions that created the one we say we’ve outgrown.

The desire can be completely real while our behavior tells a different tale.

So let’s ask a better question than: How badly do you want it?

Are you willing to actively participate in creating it?

Because participation changes our relationship with the desire itself. Wanting can remain safe and private for as long as we choose. We can imagine what happens when it works, rehearse the celebration, make plans for the money, and build entire futures around what becomes possible when the thing finally arrives.

Active participation brings that beautiful imagined future into contact with reality.

And reality gets a vote.

The book in your imagination can’t be rejected. The offer you haven’t made can’t fail. The price you haven’t said out loud can’t be challenged. The person you haven’t asked can’t tell you no. The business you haven’t started can’t disappoint you. The money you haven’t invested can’t be lost.

Dreaming gives us access to possibility without requiring us to risk the unknown beyond our comfort zone.

Action gives us information.

The offer that doesn’t sell tells us something, as does the one that sells immediately. The price someone questions gives us information, but their objection doesn’t determine the price. A no tells us something, but it doesn’t decide whether we ask again. An investment that doesn’t produce the result we expected gives us information, but it doesn’t decide what we believe is possible next.

Reality gets a vote, but you get the final say.

The trouble starts when we crowdsource our dreams.

We make the offer, and someone questions the price, so we ask ten other people what they would charge. We share the dream, and someone looks skeptical, so we start asking whether it makes sense. We tell someone what we’re building and suddenly we’re collecting opinions about the business model, the audience, the timing, the positioning, the likelihood of success, and whether anyone would actually buy it.

We tell ourselves we’re gathering information.

Sometimes we are.

Sometimes we’re looking for validation.

And the more important the desire is to us, the more tempting that validation can become. There is comfort in consensus. If enough people agree that the idea is good, the price is reasonable, the investment is smart, or the dream is possible, perhaps we can finally move without having to carry the full weight of choosing it ourselves.

Except every additional vote dilutes the dream.

One person thinks the price is too high. Another thinks the idea is too ambitious. Someone else has seen something similar fail. Someone has a strategy that worked brilliantly for them. Someone knows what “the market” wants. Someone loves the idea but thinks it would be so much better if you changed this one little thing.

Listen long enough and the dream can slowly become more reasonable, more marketable, more recognizable, more easily explained, and less yours.

That’s the danger of crowdsourcing your dreams.

The information may be valuable. The people offering it may be brilliant. They may love you deeply and genuinely want you to succeed. They may even be right about some of it. They are also bringing their own money stories, their beliefs about goodness and suffering, and their fears of being too much or not good enough into the conversation about your dreams.

Self-trust allows us to listen without automatically handing over editorial control.

You get to consider the feedback. Question your assumptions. Look at the numbers. Learn from people who know things you don’t. Change your mind. Change the offer. Change the strategy. Change the price if you decide the price should change.

And you also get to say, Thank you. I hear you. I’m still gonna do it my way.

Sometimes the most valuable conversation is one that helps you articulate your true desires.

If you’re ready to explore what’s possible, consider booking a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call. We’ll look at where you are, what you want, and the possibilities in front of you so you can choose your next aligned action with greater clarity and confidence.

Active participation requires us to expose our dreams to reality. It does not require us to crowdsource what we’re allowed to create.

We can participate fully, but we can’t command the outcome. Things rarely happen when and how you expect. To keep going when nothing feels like it’s landing requires surrender.

Surrender doesn’t remove us from the creation process. It changes the question we ask while we’re inside it.

Instead of How do I make this happen? we can ask:

Given what I know now, what is my next aligned action?

An aligned action moves you toward the reality you have consciously chosen while allowing you to remain in right relationship with yourself, your values, your money, and the life your business exists to support.

Sometimes that action is asking again. Sometimes it’s making another offer, investing more money, changing the strategy, resting long enough to hear yourself think, having the conversation you’ve been avoiding, or allowing new information to change what you do next.

The action can change without requiring the desire to disappear.

And the desire can change without making everything you did in pursuit of it a mistake. We can remain fiercely committed to creating what we want while releasing our need to control exactly how, when, and in what form it arrives. We can take the next aligned action without requiring that action to guarantee the outcome.

Perhaps the deepest commitment we can make to something we desire is to participate fully without requiring ourselves to suffer for it or demanding that we control how it arrives. We take the next aligned action, pay attention to what happens, trust ourselves with what we learn, and keep enough space around the dream for possibilities we couldn’t see when we first imagined it. We stay in relationship with the desire, with reality, and most importantly, with ourselves.

Because there is something profoundly powerful about being able to say, I want this. I am willing to participate in creating it. And I trust myself enough to discover what happens next.

P.S. Profit is Protest, and so is refusing to sacrifice yourself on the altar of your ambition. Your dreams deserve your participation. They were never meant to require your destruction.

If you’re ready to create prosperity that supports the life you want to live, consider subscribing or upgrading to paid. Join us for deeper conversations, live coaching, and weekly tapping as we turn desire into aligned action.

Imagine what’s possible when you give yourself the resources to go after what you want.

Subscribe now

In this episode, I’m sharing how an unexpected $80,000 hurdle on the way to our dream home taught me what it means to want something fiercely, take aligned action, and leave room for the Universe to surprise and delight us.

Your desires deserve your full participation. And a little creative freedom.

Ready to move toward yours? Book a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call. Bring the desire. I’ll bring thirty years of financial strategy and a healthy respect for “Or Better.”

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In February 2024, two days before we were supposed to close on our dream home and three days before the movers were scheduled to load everything we owned onto a truck headed across the country, the amount of cash we needed to close changed.

The banker told us we needed to create another $56,000. My intuition said $80,000.

I couldn’t explain the extra $24,000 yet. I simply knew that $56,000 wasn’t the number I was working toward.

I wanted that house. Very specifically, unapologetically, absolutely wanted that house. We had fallen in love with it and with the life we could see ourselves living there. I could picture mornings in that house, the view from my office, quiet mornings sipping tea on the deck, family and friends gathered around the table.

I’m good, but I’m not 56K in 48 hours good. I knew I needed at least a couple of weeks to create the additional cash being demanded. And with the movers coming in three days but a month left on our lease, we had to decide whether we were still going.

Our life in Florida was already dismantled, most of our furniture sold and belongings in boxes. We could postpone the move until the house was certain, or we could keep moving toward an island in the Pacific Northwest without knowing whether we would actually have a home waiting for us when we arrived.

Throughout the process, I had been saying the same two words:

“Or Better.”

This house, “Or Better.”

Saying it was easy when the house still seemed inevitable. Now I had to mean it.

There is a version of “Or Better” that sounds wonderfully surrendered while secretly containing a very specific request to the Universe: Please surprise and delight me by giving me exactly what I already decided I want.

I had done some of that. I could say the words while still clutching the outcome, leaving the Universe plenty of creative freedom as long as all roads eventually led to the same front door.

Then we decided to go.

I was going to do everything I could to create the money. I would ask, make offers, follow leads, move money, and take every aligned action I could see. And if we arrived in Washington without a home to move into, we would figure out what “Or Better” meant when we got there.

That was utterly terrifying.

“Or Better” had been a guiding principle in my business and teachings for more than a decade, but I think this was the first time I believed it with every fiber of my being.

I started asking everywhere. I made offers. I asked for referrals. I generated a list of thirty-one ideas for making cash, from selling my art to OnlyFans and everything in between. Then I took action on the one I thought was my best shot. I followed conversations and opportunities as they appeared. People came back to me asking for things I hadn’t originally planned to sell, and those conversations created possibilities I couldn’t have anticipated when I first sat down to make my list.

Somewhere in the middle of all that activity, another business owner dropped into my DMs to tell me, “Desperation isn’t a good look on you.”

I laughed because desperation wasn’t what I was experiencing. I wanted the house fiercely, and I was willing to participate fully in creating the possibility of having it. I had also released the belief that I needed this particular outcome in order to be okay. I could make another ask without needing the person on the other side of it to say yes. I could hear no and keep moving. I could follow an unexpected opportunity without demanding that it look like one of my thirty-one ideas.

Desperation grasps. Determination grounds.

Money is repelled by the first and seduced by the second.

If there’s something you want fiercely and you’re ready to stop grasping at the outcome without giving up on the desire, let’s talk. Book a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call. We’ll get clear on what you want, what you know from where you’re standing now, and the next aligned action that puts you back in motion.

I can’t prove that surrender caused the money to flow. I can tell you what changed in me when I stopped grasping at the house as the only acceptable outcome. I became extraordinarily available to ideas, conversations, asks, and possibilities.

Within 23 days, we created the $80,000.

My intuition had been right about the number. By the time the banker was satisfied, the move was paid for, the delays were absorbed, and we bought the necessities we needed after closing, that $80,000 was exactly what the whole experience required.

We got the house.

And I still believe that if the house hadn’t been ours, whatever came next could have been “Or Better.”

You don’t need thirty-one ideas before you begin. You need the next aligned one. If there’s a financial goal you’re ready to move toward, book a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call. Bring the number. Bring the desire underneath it. We’ll figure out what movement looks like from here.

I’ve written about the entire wild journey of buying this house in a five-part series. If you want the receipts, the numbers, the asks, and all the plot twists, you can start there.

Long after closing, I kept thinking about what it means to leave room around a desire.

I believe in being wildly specific about what you want. Name the number. Name the house. Name the amount of debt you want gone, the balance you want sitting in your retirement account, the revenue you want your business to generate, the scholarship fund you want to create, the number of people you want to serve. Give your desire edges. You’ll never reach a destination you haven’t defined.

Specificity gives you somewhere to move. Once you choose a destination, you can make decisions in relationship to it. You can commit resources, recognize opportunities, measure progress, and choose aligned actions that move you towards the reality you have consciously chosen while allowing you to remain in right relationship with yourself, your values, your money, and the life your business exists to support.

Underneath that specificity lives a feeling, and it’s that feeling “Or Better” serves.

You want to pay off the debt because you are craving freedom. You want to build a retirement account because imagining a fully funded future creates warmth and safety in your body. You want to create a scholarship fund that helps Black and Brown children attend the school of their choice because you want your prosperity to participate in healing generational wounds.

“Or Better” leaves room for the Universe to deliver the experience underneath the desire in ways you may not yet know to ask for.

This is what I want. This is why I want it. I am willing to commit to it and take aligned action toward it. And I am willing to be surprised and delighted by possibilities I cannot see from where I am standing.

“Better” doesn’t always mean more. More money may be better. So might the same money with half the hours. A bigger business may be better, and a smaller business with extraordinary margins, work you love, and enough spaciousness to enjoy the life your business is funding may hold something you were actually asking for. The largest contract may satisfy the number, while another opportunity brings relationships, visibility, freedom, or a completely different future you couldn’t have included in the original request because you didn’t know it existed.

If prosperity can only arrive wearing the costume you’ve already chosen for it, you’ve given the Universe a very narrow doorway.

I want you to fling the doors open.

I want you to ask specifically and move decisively, without assuming that the version you can imagine from here represents the outer boundary of what is available to you. I want you to choose a destination knowing that every step toward it gives you information you didn’t have when you chose it.

You make the offer and learn something about what people want. You ask for the introduction and meet someone you didn’t know existed. You spend the money and discover what the investment can actually produce. You hear no and learn what you want to ask next. Someone hears what you’re creating and says, Have you ever considered...? A possibility unavailable from the starting line becomes visible ten steps farther down the road.

Each aligned action changes the landscape from which the next action will be chosen.

That mechanism doesn’t require a metaphysical explanation. Movement creates encounters. Encounters create information. Information expands the possibilities we can perceive and act upon.

And yet sometimes what arrives through those possibilities feels so exquisitely timed, so far beyond anything you could have engineered, and so delightfully outside the limits of what you knew to request that you’re perfectly happy to see the Divine’s hand in its creation. And sometimes you get to be the hand. Your introduction, your money, your yes, your invitation, your generosity may become the possibility someone else never knew to ask for. “Or Better” can move through us as easily as it moves toward us.

We don’t need to know exactly where the line between causality and synchronicity lives. Both are woven through our lives. Sitting still waiting for the Universe to deliver something we have refused to choose gives it very little to work with, while grasping an outcome so tightly that we can’t recognize anything outside it makes our world smaller.

So choose.

Move.

And leave room.

The house taught me that I can want something enough to cross a country for it while leaving enough space around the desire for life to surprise me. I can name what I want without making my safety dependent on receiving it exactly as imagined. I can listen to the banker and listen to the knowing in my own body. I can imagine thirty-one actions toward one destination and allow the thirty-second possibility to come from somewhere I never thought to look.

That’s the relationship I want you to experience with “Or Better.” Bring your desires, commitment, discernment, money, a willingness to ask, and the next aligned action you can see. Trust yourself to respond to what happens after you take it. Let the destination become clearer as you approach it, and remain willing to discover that the life you are trying to create may be available through a door you didn’t know existed when you began.

Maybe you’ll get exactly what you asked for. The number. The contract. The house. The life you can already see so clearly that you could walk through it in the dark.

I hope you do.

And I hope you leave enough room around what you want for something you couldn’t have imagined to find you, too.

There are dreams you can name from where you are standing today, and there are possibilities you will only become capable of seeing because you began moving toward them. Your job is to choose, to participate, to trust yourself with what you learn along the way, and to keep the door wide enough for surprise.

Want what you want.

Go toward it with your whole heart.

And when the Universe asks for a little creative freedom, give it some.

“Or Better.”

What do you want? Really want. Name it. And if you’re ready to stop circling it and start moving toward it, book a complimentary Prosperity Breakthrough Call. We’ll get specific about the destination, look at what’s between you and it, and find the next aligned action you can take now. You bring the desire. I’ll bring thirty years of financial strategy and a very healthy respect for “Or Better.”

P.S. Profit is Protest, and so is creating enough prosperity that your wildest dreams become someone else’s unexpected blessing.

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You can know what you want, give the desire edges, do the math, make the plan, and still have absolutely no idea what might become possible along the way.

In this Audio Drop, we’re talking about the next aligned action, why action gives us information we cannot access while standing still, and what happens when one small movement begins gathering momentum.

Because sometimes you have to stop trying to figure out step 87.

Sometimes you have to trust the stair beneath your foot.

And sometimes, when you finally look up, you discover you’ve gone somewhere your original plan couldn’t possibly have imagined.

P.S. Profit is protest, and sometimes protest begins with taking one more fucking stair. You have no idea what might become possible by the time you look up again.

Book My Breaththrough Call

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In this Audio Drop, I’m talking about what becomes possible when you refuse to concede the final hundred days.

We’ll explore why January 1 has far less power than we give it, how to get specific about the reality you want to carry across midnight, and why your next aligned action matters more than having the entire path figured out.

Because manifestation lives at the intersection of Soul and Science, math and miracle, vision and participation.

There is still time for an email to become a conversation, an idea to become an offer, an offer to become revenue, or one decision to change the trajectory of what comes next.

The ball hasn’t dropped.

What are you still willing to create?

P.S. Profit is protest, and so is refusing to surrender possibility simply because the calendar says September. The ending is still unwritten. Put your hand back on the pen.

2026 Still Gets To Be My Year!

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Uneven stairs. Old stairs. Kyoto-in-April stairs.

And I am fat. Like 5’9, nearly 300lbs fat.

I knew there was a temple somewhere at the top and a bamboo forest I wanted to see beyond it. I had already decided I was going, so I started climbing.

At some point, I made the mistake of looking up.

Fuck.

There were so many stairs left.

For a moment, the distance between where I was and where I wanted to be became the only thing I could see. I was hot. I was tired. My body was working hard. And the temptation to turn around and walk back down those stairs was strong.

I remember thinking that I could stop. I had already seen beautiful things in Kyoto. Nobody was waiting at the top with a certificate proving I had completed Japan correctly. I could turn around, go back down, find some air conditioning, and have a perfectly lovely day.

So I stopped looking up.

I looked at the stair in front of me.

That was it. One stair.

I took it. Then I looked at the next one and took that one.

I did not enjoy it every step of the way. Don’t get me wrong. There was no magical moment when the stairs became easy because I had decided they were aligned. My thighs did not receive a spiritual download. The humidity did not part in recognition of my commitment.

The stairs remained stairs.

What changed was where I put my attention.

I stopped asking myself to climb all of them at once. I trusted the internal feeling that there was something for me on the other side, and I gave my attention to the only piece of the journey I could do anything about.

The next step.

I think about those stairs all the time when I’m working with people on manifestation, money, and creating a reality they have never lived before, because so much of the way we approach our desires involves looking up.

We decide we want to pay off $100,000 in debt, build a million-dollar business, leave the job, fund the sabbatical, create six months of reserves, write the book, buy the house, change the way our entire industry operates. We allow ourselves to want the thing, maybe even get brave enough to say it out loud, and then our logical mind immediately starts measuring the distance between here and there.

How?

Where will the money come from? How many clients would I need? What would I have to sell? What if nobody buys? What if I make the wrong decision? What if I get halfway there and discover I can’t do it? What if the plan doesn’t work? What if I’m not capable of becoming the person who can hold what I say I want?

Pretty soon, we’re standing at the bottom of the stairs trying to make decisions about step 87.

Step 87 belongs to a version of us with information we haven’t gathered yet.

We have the information available here. Now.

If you are sitting with a desire right now and the distance between here and there feels impossible to close, you do not need a bigger plan. You need one clear next stair. That is exactly what the Prosperity Breakthrough Call is for. We look at where you are, where you want to be before this year ends, and the one aligned action that changes everything from here.

Find My Next Aligned Action →

There is tremendous value in knowing where you want to go. I’m a CFO. I’ll reverse engineer the hell out of a goal. Give me a revenue target and a spreadsheet, and I am a happy woman. I want to know what the desire costs, what the business needs to generate, what capacity exists, what assumptions we’re making, and what the numbers are trying to tell us.

And after thirty years of doing this work, I also know that every plan we build is created using the information available from where we are standing when we build it.

There are conversations you haven’t had yet, people you haven’t met, numbers you haven’t seen, questions you haven’t thought to ask, capacities you haven’t developed, and desires you haven’t admitted. There are opportunities that don’t exist yet because they will be created by something you do three steps from now. There are versions of you that you have not met yet.

The spreadsheet cannot calculate with information you do not have.

So we do the math with what we know. We give the desire edges. We choose a direction. We ask for this “or better”. And then, at some point, we have to take our eyes off the distant goal and come back to the next stair on our journey.

The next aligned action.

At Prosperity First, an aligned action is one that moves you toward the reality you have consciously chosen while keeping you in right relationship with yourself, your values, your money, and the life your business exists to support.

Alignment does not promise comfort.

Those stairs were aligned. They also sucked.

Sometimes the next aligned action is scary, inconvenient, expensive, vulnerable, or deeply annoying. It can be the conversation you’ve been avoiding, the price you’re afraid to change, the offer you’re afraid to make, the truth you’re afraid to look at in your financial statements, or the help you’re finally willing to ask for.

The value of taking that action reaches beyond whatever immediate result it produces, because action gives us something we could not have had while standing still.

New information.

This is where one of my favorite questions enters the conversation: What has that changed?

You send the proposal and learn something. You raise the price and learn something. You look at the P&L and learn something. You make the ask and learn something. You hold the boundary and learn something. Sometimes the answer is the one you wanted. Sometimes what you learn changes the question entirely.

Maybe the sales conversation reveals that the problem you’ve spent six months trying to solve isn’t actually the problem. Maybe somebody introduces you to a person you could never have included in your original plan because you didn’t know they existed. Maybe the thing you thought would make you feel free begins to feel remarkably unlike freedom once you get close enough to see it clearly.

That new information changes where you are standing, and from that new vantage point you can ask again: What is my next aligned action from here?

This is how a plan becomes a living thing.

We keep bringing Soul and Science back into conversation with each other. The numbers tell us what has changed in the tangible world. Our intuition, desires, values, capacity, and nervous system tell us what has changed within us. We pay attention to both, because both contain information about what belongs to us next.

Over time, those actions begin building on each other.

An email creates a conversation. The conversation creates an introduction. The introduction sparks an idea. The idea changes the offer. The offer changes the revenue. The revenue changes your capacity. That new capacity changes the size of the possibility you are able to hold.

You could not have planned that sequence from the beginning. Each action created information and possibility for the one that followed.

That is the avalanche. And it starts with one move. Not the perfect move. The next one. If you are ready to find out what yours is, book a Prosperity Breakthrough Call. We will look at the numbers, feel into the desire, and find the action that starts the momentum moving.

Start My Avalanche →

I think of it as an avalanche of alignment.

An avalanche begins with something small moving. A little snow shifts, gathers more snow, and gains mass and energy as it travels. What began as a tiny movement becomes powerful because of everything it gathers along the way.

Our desires can move this way too. One aligned action gathers information for the next. Then another gathers possibility, courage, evidence, relationships, money, capacity, and self-trust. Movement begins creating more movement, and somewhere along the way the path becomes larger than anything we could have engineered from the starting point.

Self-trust becomes enormously important here, including understanding how you make embodied decisions when certainty isn’t available.

Certainty is seductive because it promises that we can know in advance whether the entire staircase will be worth climbing. Self-trust gives us something more useful: the ability to take the next step, pay attention to what it reveals, and trust ourselves to choose again.

That choice may be to keep going. It may be to rest. It may be to ask for help, change the route, alter the goal, or turn around completely because the new information has revealed something we could not see before.

I care about that distinction because I have no interest in turning “next aligned action” into prettier language for self-abandonment. We have enough cultural mythology telling us that suffering proves commitment and exhaustion proves how badly we want something.

The allegiance is to the reality you have consciously chosen and your relationship with yourself as you create it.

Sometimes that relationship asks you to rest.

Sometimes it asks you to climb one more fucking stair.

In Kyoto, I kept climbing.

Once I stopped looking at how far I had left to go, something in me settled. I no longer had to answer the question of whether I could climb a hundred stairs. I only had to answer the question presented by the one in front of me.

So I climbed that one.

And eventually, I looked up.

I was there.

I had reached the temple. I made it to the bamboo forest. I had reached the thing I thought I was climbing toward.

Except I know now that I hadn’t yet discovered what I had really come to Kyoto to find.

There is something I haven’t told you about that trip.

Profit is Protest was born in Kyoto.

I can trace the work I’m doing today back to that trip.

The questions I now ask about who accumulates money and who has been taught to fear it. My conviction that good, kind, generous people becoming wildly profitable changes who gets to hold power. The work around financial agency, Sovereign Profits™, becoming unreasonably resourced, and what becomes possible when rebels, healers, artists, caregivers, activists, and changemakers have enough money to fund the world they want to live in.

This Substack.

The book I’m writing.

The work that has reshaped my business and, in many ways, reshaped me.

None of it was the goal at the bottom of those stairs.

I was trying to get to a temple.

I had no fucking idea what was waiting for me when I got there.

There was no way for me to reverse engineer Profit is Protest from the bottom of that staircase because Profit is Protest did not exist in my consciousness yet. No spreadsheet could have contained it. No business plan could have named it. No vision board could have included words I had not yet thought.

All I had was the internal knowing that there was something worth continuing toward and the next place to put my foot.

That was enough.

And this is the beautiful thing about manifesting our desires this way.

We can be specific about what we want without requiring our current imagination to define the outer edge of what is possible. We give the desire edges. We do the math. We make the plan with the information available from where we are standing. Then we ask for this or better and take the next aligned action.

Somewhere along the way, the path begins revealing things we could never have planned for.

Maybe the business becomes larger than the one you imagined. Maybe it becomes smaller and wildly more profitable. Maybe the money arrives through an offer you hadn’t conceived of yet. Maybe you thought you were building a company and discover you are building a movement. Maybe the thing you believed you wanted was simply the first visible landmark on the way to something your current self had no language for.

That possibility is why “or better” matters so much to me. It leaves room for the Universe to surprise and delight us, for our desires to evolve as we do, and for a future that exceeds the imagination of the person standing at the bottom of the stairs.

So want unreasonable things. You weren’t built for a “reasonable” existence.

Want the paid-off debt and the overflowing reserves. Want the house. Want the freedom. Want the business that funds your life beautifully. Want the million dollars. Want the month in Italy. Want to change your industry. Want enough money to become gloriously inconvenient to every system that depends on good people being exhausted and underfunded.

Then come back to the stair beneath your foot.

You don’t have to know what step 87 looks like yet. The person who eventually reaches step 87 will know things you cannot possibly know from here.

Trust them.

And trust yourself enough to become them one aligned action at a time.

I went to Kyoto wanting to see a temple.

I came home carrying the first seeds of Profit is Protest.

Thank God I stopped looking up.

Those are not fantasies. Those are instructions. And the Prosperity Breakthrough Call is where we figure out which one belongs to you right now and what it is actually going to take to get there. Come ready to want unreasonable things. We will find the stair together.

I Want Unreasonable Things →

P.S. Profit is Protest, and sometimes protest begins with taking one more fucking stair. You have no idea what might become possible by the time you look up again.

I keep hearing some version of it from business owners. Sales have been slower. Appointments have been harder to fill. Clients are taking longer to pay. Plans that looked perfectly reasonable in January met a year that had other ideas.

And now we’re getting close enough to fourth quarter that people are beginning to mentally pack up 2026.

The holidays are coming. December feels close. Only so many selling days are left. Vacations are on the calendar. Family obligations are looming. Before long, we’ll be buying planners, talking about fresh starts, and choosing words for the new year.

One of my clients said it plainly: “As far as I’m concerned, the year’s already over. I’ll just work on making 2027 better.”

No, no, no, no.

I don’t concede the year until the ball drops on 12/31.

For years, the fourth quarter has held some of my biggest expansions. I routinely make more money in the final hundred days of a year than I make in the entire stretch before them. I’ve watched clients who intentionally stayed present in their businesses during the fourth quarter create results that looked wildly different from the trajectory they thought they were on.

We didn’t turn the final months into punishment for everything that hadn’t happened yet. There was no heroic sprint, no grinding ourselves into dust so we could drag a prettier P&L across the finish line.

We decided what we wanted. We got specific about what that reality looked like and how we wanted to feel in its presence. We looked at the numbers. We took one aligned action.

And I want to be clear about what I mean by aligned. Aligned doesn’t always mean comfortable or fun. Sometimes the aligned action is the conversation you’ve been avoiding, the number you’re scared to look at, the ask that makes your stomach flip, or the decision that requires more courage than certainty.

At Prosperity First, an aligned action is one that moves you toward the reality you have consciously chosen while keeping you in right relationship with yourself, your values, your money, and the life your business exists to support.

Then we paid attention to what happened.

One of those clients was Tasha, the owner of a multi-practitioner therapy practice. When we started this work in the final hundred days of 2020, she was carrying more than $80,000 in high-interest credit card debt and another $30,000 in old IRS debt.

I didn’t ask Tasha for the biggest vision she could imagine. I asked her for the most expansive vision she could comfortably hold in that moment.

She wanted to know what it would feel like to wake up without all that debt weighing on her.

That was enough.

She could feel that. She could stay in relationship with that possibility. And we could begin making decisions from there.

Tasha helped her team get approved to provide online therapy in multiple states. She stopped accepting insurance and moved the practice to a cash-pay model. She raised her rates. Each decision changed the economics of her practice and gave us new information about what was possible next.

Within those final hundred days, the high-interest credit card debt, gone. The old IRS debt, gone. There was even money left over to begin 2021 with a small cushion.

And her “or better” was something she hadn’t even thought to ask for.

In the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown, when so many people were watching their livelihoods become less certain, Tasha’s practice gave her entire team, including herself, an unexpected raise.

She had started with the most expansive vision she could comfortably hold: waking up without all that debt weighing on her.

By December 31, she was carrying something entirely different into the new year.

Tasha did not have a perfect plan. She had a feeling she could hold and a willingness to take the next aligned action. If you are ready to find out what yours is before this year ends, book a Prosperity Breakthrough Call. We look at where you are, where you want to be, and the one move that changes everything from here.

I'm Not Conceding This Year

I’ve been thinking lately about how much power we give January 1.

We treat year-end as though there’s some enormous cosmic Etch A Sketch hovering over our businesses, waiting for midnight to shake everything clean and give us a do-over.

Your business doesn’t start over at zero when the clock ticks from 11:59 PM to 12:00 AM.

Your clients still value your work. Your skills still belong to you. Your reputation comes with you. So do the proposals you’ve sent, the conversations you’ve started, the relationships you’ve built, the cash you’ve accumulated, the lessons you’ve learned, the decisions you’ve been avoiding, and every possibility you haven’t discovered yet.

You carry all of it across midnight.

Which makes January 1 a very strange date to hand responsibility for your new reality.

A new reality can begin on a Wednesday in September. And Wednesday, September 23 happens to be 100 days from January 1… just sayin’.

It can begin at 10:43 on a Tuesday morning because you finally decide to send the email. It can begin six weeks before Christmas when you look at your numbers and realize the story you’ve been telling yourself about what’s possible isn’t actually supported by the data. It can begin on December 17 because you woke up that morning and decided you were still in relationship with the year you were living.

The line in the calendar is arbitrary. The decision is real.

This is where the Soul and Science of manifestation become inseparable for me.

I believe in manifestation. Deeply. I believe in intention, energy, and conscious co-creation. I believe there are possibilities available to us that we cannot see from where we’re currently standing. The Universe has surprised me far too many times for me to assume that what I can presently imagine represents the outer boundary of what is available.

I also have thirty years of financial statements singing my song.

Creating a new reality involves both inner and outer work, and I am fascinated by where they meet.

The outer work is tangible. There are numbers to look at, proposals to send, asks to make, prices to examine, people to follow up with, decisions that have been waiting patiently for us to make them.

The inner work begins somewhere quieter.

What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?

Take a beat, get curious, and lean in.

If you knew the thing you wanted was possible, how would you behave differently today? What decision would become obvious? What would you finally ask for? Where would you stop hedging? What would you create? Who would you call? What would you be willing to let yourself want?

And then I want to take the question deeper.

How would you feel in the presence of everything you want to achieve?

Maybe it’s relief. Maybe it’s safety. Maybe it’s power or spaciousness or delight. Maybe you imagine opening your bank account and feeling your shoulders drop because there is enough. Maybe you imagine looking at a full calendar and feeling deeply wanted. Maybe the dream is an empty calendar, because your business is finally profitable enough to give you your time back.

Maybe you want the debt gone because you imagine freedom on the other side of the final payment. Maybe you want a million-dollar business because of what you believe becomes possible when that kind of money moves through your hands. Maybe you want enough reserves that an unexpected expense becomes an inconvenience rather than an emergency.

How does that version of your life feel?

And how much of that feeling can you allow yourself to experience now?

I’m not asking you to look at $417 in your checking account and pretend you feel wildly abundant. Your nervous system knows when you’re lying.

But maybe you can find 5% more safety today. How about 10% more joy or 1% more curiosity?

Maybe you can make one decision from spaciousness instead of urgency? Maybe you can let yourself feel proud before every box has been checked? Maybe you can celebrate the money that is already here? Maybe you can allow support before you’re too exhausted to reach out? Maybe ask for guidance before you feel lost? Maybe you can give yourself an hour of the freedom you keep promising yourself you’ll have when the business reaches the next level?

The feelings we associate with our desires aren’t exclusive to the future. Something changes when we begin practicing them now.

The person sending the proposal from a place of self-trust writes a different proposal. The person looking at their numbers with curiosity sees possibilities that shame obscures. The person who feels supported finally asks for help. The person who has begun making room for spaciousness can recognize that the opportunity requiring them to abandon all of that spaciousness isn’t actually the opportunity they want.

Our inner work changes the person taking the action. Our outer work gives that person real information to respond to.

This is Conscious Co-Creation as I understand it.

Soul and science.

Math and miracle.

I can hold a vision for something I’ve never experienced before and reverse engineer the numbers required to create it. I can ask the Universe for this or better and send the proposal. I can feel into the experience of being unreasonably resourced while building the financial structures capable of holding those resources. I can trust my intuition and look at the P&L. I can celebrate what is coming and what is already here.

I can believe something extraordinary is possible and participate fully in preparing the way for it.

That participation matters.

Because “I want more money” gives us very little to build from.

$75,000 in collected revenue by December 31 gives us something.

January fully booked before you close your laptop for the holidays gives us something. Three months of operating reserves gives us something. Two weeks completely off with January already funded gives us something. Paying yourself consistently gives us something. Fewer clients at higher margins gives us something.

Give the desire edges.

Then let yourself stand in its presence for a moment.

What does December 31 feel like in your body when this is true?

What becomes available because there is enough?

What can you fund?

What can you release?

What gets more of you because depletion isn’t eating everything first?

Who are you becoming as you create it?

Once we know where we’re going, we can begin walking backward from there. December 31 becomes December. December becomes November. November becomes October. October becomes this week.

Eventually, the enormous thing you’re trying to manifest becomes small enough to fit into today.

One follow-up. One invitation. One proposal. One invoice collected. One conversation about price. One look at the numbers you’ve been avoiding. One boundary honored. One hour spent making the thing you keep saying matters.

One ask.

The vision can be enormous.

Today’s participation can be tiny.

That one ask. That one aligned action. That is where every avalanche begins. If you are ready to find yours before this year ends, the Prosperity Breakthrough Call is where we figure it out together. We look at the numbers, feel into what you want, and find the move that gets the momentum moving.

Find My One Aligned Action

And once you take that action, something has changed.

Maybe the email gets a response. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the proposal gets accepted. Maybe the sales conversation exposes a problem you couldn’t see before you were in it. Maybe looking at the numbers reveals that the problem you’ve spent six months trying to solve isn’t actually the problem. Maybe somebody introduces you to someone you couldn’t possibly have included in your original plan because you didn’t know they existed.

So you ask one of my favorite questions:

What has that tiny action changed?

You look at the new information. You listen inward. You look at the numbers again. You notice what feels different now that you are standing somewhere you weren’t standing yesterday.

Then you ask what the next aligned action is from here.

This is how a plan becomes a living thing. Every action gives us a slightly different vantage point. Every response adds information. Every piece of information gives us another opportunity to choose.

And sometimes the thing we eventually create bears very little resemblance to the route we drew when we began.

Good.

I have no interest in limiting the Universe to the ideas I could only imagine at the beginning.

Or better.

There is something else I want you to hear, especially if 2026 has kicked your ass a little. Or a lot.

You are allowed to tell the truth about that.

A difficult year contains real information. Look at it. Let the numbers be numbers. Let disappointments have their honest moment. Let exhaustion tell you where your capacity needs care. Let the lessons become useful.

You don’t owe fourth quarter manufactured optimism.

You don’t have to slap a vision board over a cash flow problem and call it manifestation.

Your fear doesn’t mean you’ve blocked your abundance. A disappointing sales month isn’t evidence that your vibration is wrong. Having a nervous system that responds to uncertainty makes you human, and your humanity is welcome in the future you are creating.

You can know exactly how hard this year has been and remain curious about what these remaining months can hold.

That curiosity leaves a door open.

There is still time for an email to become a conversation, and for that conversation to become an opportunity. There is still time for an idea to become an offer, an offer to become revenue. There is still time to reset a boundary to restore capacity or make a decision to alter the trajectory of the next hundred days.

You still have time to surprise yourself.

So before you begin planning the business you’re going to have starting in January, spend a little time with the business that is still here.

What have you already decided about the rest of this year?

What ending have you unconsciously written because you’re tired, disappointed, scared, distracted, or ready for something new?

And what would you do today if you knew you couldn’t fail?

Let yourself imagine December 31 in the presence of everything you want to have created. Feel what is available there. Find some small piece of that feeling that is available to you now.

Ask for this or better.

Find the smallest aligned action available from exactly where you are standing.

Take it.

See what changes.

Choose again.

The ball hasn’t dropped.

This year still has something to say.

And so should you. If this year has not gone the way you planned and you are still willing to stay in relationship with what is possible before December 31st, the Prosperity Breakthrough Call is for you. Come ready to tell the truth about where you are. Together, we'll figure out what this year still has to offer.

The Ball Hasn't Dropped Yet

P.S. Profit is Protest, and so is keeping the year open long enough to surprise you. The ending is still unwritten. Put your hand back on the pen.

* * *

“I’m done being an unpaid intern in a business I’m starting to hate.”

She was crying when she said it, and she wasn’t describing a failing company. Five years in, profitable, staff who get paid on time, customers who come back. And in those five years she had taken exactly five thousand dollars out of it for herself.

Once, for a week at the beach with her kids.

And when she told me about the vacation, she apologized as though she’d done something frivolous.

Six weeks earlier, we’d had a very different conversation.

Her books were eight months behind. They’d always been done eventually, because taxes have deadlines, but nobody had been keeping them current enough to tell her what was happening while there was still time to do something about it.

She knew the business was profitable.

She just didn’t know by how much.

She wanted me to catch everything up and then, if the business could support it, stay on as her bookkeeper and CFO. She wasn’t sure she could afford me, so she proposed something entirely reasonable: clean up the books first, see what was actually there, and then tell her.

There was one other thing she wanted me to look at while I was in there.

She’d really love to start taking $2,500 a week.

If that was possible.

So we got to work.

Six weeks later, we sat down together with books that finally told the truth.

For the first time in five years, we could see the business as it actually was. What it earned. What it spent. What it could support.

And somewhere in that conversation, we got to her.

That’s when she told me about the five thousand dollars.

The only money she’d taken for herself in five years.

The beach.

The kids.

The apology.

Her line in the sand.

“I’m done being an unpaid intern in a business I’m starting to hate.”

I’ve spent thirty years telling people that numbers are information. They don’t carry a moral judgment. They tell us what happened, and if we’re willing to look at them without flinching, they can help us decide what happens next.

But every once in a while, a clean set of books does something else.

It gives someone evidence of their own absence.

Her employees were there.

Their wages and benefits were there.

The vendors were there. The software was there. The rent was there. Every person and every thing the business had agreed was necessary to keep operating had a place in those books.

She didn’t.

For five years, she’d built a business that knew how to pay everyone except the person who built it.

And until we put the books on the table, she hadn’t been able to see how completely she’d written herself out.

She could afford the $2,500 a week.

She’d been able to afford it for a while.

And there was more. Sitting in her operating account, doing nothing, was roughly three months of full operating expenses, including her salary.

Three months of runway.

Accumulated almost by accident, out of the habit of taking nothing, by a woman who had spent five years believing the answer to her question might be no.

That’s what I had to tell her.

The thing she’d been afraid to ask for had already been affordable for years, and the business had quietly been stockpiling the proof.

She wasn’t relieved. Not yet.

First she had to sit with the fact that the money had been there the whole time.

Something other than money had been keeping her from it.

I see this most often in extraordinarily capable people.

Give them a problem and they solve it. Give them a mess and they clean it up. Give them too much work and they find another hour. When something falls through the cracks, they’re already bending down to pick it up.

It’s one of the reasons they’re able to build businesses in the first place.

Starting a company requires an almost unreasonable willingness to figure things out. There is no accounting department down the hall when you need to understand sales tax. No IT department when the website breaks. No HR department when you make your first hire. In the beginning, the answer to almost every question really is you.

So you learn to figure things out, and over time you become remarkably capable. The problem you solved last month becomes evidence that you can solve this one too. You found the money when cash was tight. You stayed late and got client work done, on time and under budget. You handled the client who was furious, fixed the mistake nobody noticed until Friday afternoon, and somehow made payroll during the month when three invoices came in late.

Every gap you cover makes it easier to believe you’ll cover the next one.

And there is always a next one.

As the business grows, almost everything around the founder develops terms. The landlord expects rent on the first. Payroll has a date and employees have salaries. Contractors send invoices with due dates printed at the top. Software subscriptions renew with extraordinary confidence regardless of whether the month was spectacular or terrifying. The business learns to accommodate all of these obligations because they have been made nonnegotiable.

The founder remains flexible.

She is the expense willing to negotiate with herself.

When cash gets tight, her paycheck moves. When the work spills beyond the hours available to do it, her day off disappears. Retirement can wait another year. The vacation gets shorter, then postponed, then eventually becomes the five thousand dollars she feels compelled to explain to her CFO.

None of these decisions feels enormous when she makes it. That’s part of what makes the pattern so durable. One delayed paycheck doesn’t feel like self-abandonment. Working one Saturday doesn’t feel like a business model. Skipping one retirement contribution doesn’t feel like giving away your future. Each decision can be perfectly rational on its own, especially in the early years when building something often requires flexibility from the person building it.

Five years later, those individual decisions have become an operating system.

The business has payroll, policies, due dates, contracts, budgets, and commitments to nearly everyone who depends on it. The founder has taught herself to absorb whatever remains.

No one had to tell her to come last.

She’d become exquisitely good at doing it herself.

By the time we met, she had started to hate it.

Not the work. She was good at the work. She chose it, and on a good day she still loved it.

What curdled was the thing itself. The business. The entity. The obligation.

It became the reason she missed the recital.

The reason there were four years without a vacation.

The reason she was tired in a way that sleep couldn’t fix.

A business that never pays its founder collects the difference somewhere. It collects it in resentment, and resentment compounds faster than interest. It also doesn’t appear on a financial statement. There’s no line for it on a profit and loss. I’ve never seen it listed as a liability on a balance sheet. Yet I’ve watched it close good business after good business.

Profitable businesses, with loyal customers and employees who depend on them.

Businesses that worked and made a real difference to their communities.

Quietly resented by the only people who could keep them alive, until being free of them began to feel more valuable than fixing them.

My client was crying in my office because she loved something that had started to feel like a debt she owed.

She was also six weeks and one honest set of books away from finding out the debt had already been paid.

I looked up the word intern.

Merriam-Webster defines an intern as someone who works, often without pay, in order to gain practical experience.

Experience toward what, exactly?

My client had five years of experience. She had employees. Repeat customers. A profitable company. She had survived the fragile early years when most businesses are still trying to prove they deserve to exist. She had learned her market, built a reputation, made mistakes expensive enough to remember, and become good enough at what she did that other people depended on the company for their own paychecks.

There was no senior position waiting for her.

She already owned the place.

That’s what makes “unpaid intern” such a perfect description of the arrangement. An internship contains an implied future. You accept less today because the experience is supposed to lead somewhere: a credential, a career, a paid position, a seat at a table you haven’t earned access to yet. The imbalance has an expiration date built into the bargain.

Founders make a similar bargain with themselves in the beginning. They bootstrap. They reinvest. They take less because the business needs cash to grow. They work jobs they fully intend to hire someone else to do later. They trade some present comfort for the possibility of building something that will eventually give more back than it requires.

There is wisdom in that bargain, but there also needs to be an expiration date.

Nobody says, “I have decided to exploit myself indefinitely.”

We have much better words for that.

Bootstrapping.

Reinvesting.

Building for the future.

Keeping cash in the business.

Being responsible.

Each can describe a perfectly sound business decision. I’ve recommended every one of them. A founder who empties the bank account every month in the name of paying herself isn’t building financial sovereignty either. Businesses need working capital. They need reserves. Growth sometimes requires investment before it produces a return.

The trouble comes when these decisions stop having numbers and dates attached to them.

“I’m reinvesting for the next twelve months while we build the team” is a strategy.

“I’ll pay myself when the business can afford it” can survive forever.

There will always be somewhere else for the money to go. Another employee who would make things easier. Better software. A larger marketing budget. New equipment. More inventory. A bigger cushion against whatever might happen next.

And every one of those things can sound more responsible than paying yourself.

That’s how another month becomes another quarter, another quarter becomes another year, and a temporary sacrifice becomes the way the business operates.

You keep building for the future while quietly removing yourself from the future you’re building.

We’ve been asking the wrong question.

We spend so much time asking what our businesses need from us.

More hours. More clients. More visibility. More investment. More patience. More courage. More of our attention, our creativity, our money, our lives.

I want to ask what is your business here to give you?

Because you were here first.

Before the LLC, the website, the lease, the employees, the clients, the inventory, the payroll, the followers, the revenue goals and the tax returns, there was a human being who wanted something enough to build a business around it.

Maybe you wanted freedom. Maybe you wanted to make beautiful things and spend your days making more of them. Maybe you wanted to heal people in a way the existing system doesn’t allow. Maybe you wanted to build something your family could carry forward. Maybe you wanted money, agency, time, impact, choice, or the ability to decide what happened to your own Tuesday afternoon.

Somewhere in the building, it’s remarkably easy to forget that original desire.

The business becomes another mouth to feed.

And because you’re capable, you feed it.

Your time. Your ideas. Your evenings. Your weekends. Your money. Your attention. Your nervous system. Year after year, you keep asking what the business needs next and finding a way to provide it.

Eventually, I want the question to travel in the other direction.

What is this business providing for you?

Your business is here to serve you. Not the other way around.

I mean that with every financially feral bone in my body.

It is here to create something in your life that would be harder to create without it. Wealth. Freedom. Expression. Purpose. Generosity. Choice. A home. A retirement. Tuesdays with your children. Art that gets to exist because the artist can afford to keep making it. Healing that remains available because the healer can afford to keep offering it. A family legacy in which every person whose labor built the asset gets to participate in the prosperity it creates.

And yes, your business can serve other people too. I hope it does. I hope it serves them magnificently. I hope your employees build beautiful lives with the wages you pay them. I hope your clients are changed by what you create. I hope your vendors prosper, your community benefits, and eventually you have so much surplus that you can fund things you may never personally benefit from.

You belong inside that circle of prosperity.

Every time. From day one.

In fact, you are its epicenter - everything you desire for the world ripples out from you when you thrive.

Share

The four broken models we’ve been examining share the same disappearing act.

The artist disappears behind the art.

The healer disappears behind the healing.

The child disappears behind the family.

The founder disappears behind the business.

And every one of them deserves to come back into the picture, and it requires more than deciding you deserve to be there.

Eventually, it has to show up in the numbers.

I want to see your life well represented inside the financial plan for your business.

I want to know what it costs to live well now, what you’re building for later, and what kind of support makes it possible for you to keep doing this work without consuming yourself to do it.

I want your salary sitting beside payroll and rent as something the business is expected to produce. I want retirement contributions planned before another year slips past. I want time off that has been funded instead of stolen from whatever week finally looks quiet enough to disappear.

Yes, I want a number.

A real one.

One of the most dangerous promises a founder can make herself is “when there’s enough”, because enough can move forever. Give it a dollar amount. Give it a date. Decide what the business needs to hold in reserve, what it needs to reinvest, what it needs to meet its obligations, and what it needs to send home to the person whose life and labor make all of this possible.

Then build for that.

This may mean the business needs to make more money.

Good.

That is useful information.

Maybe prices need to rise. Maybe an offer isn’t profitable enough to keep. Maybe labor is too high, margins are too thin, or growth has been eating every dollar it creates. Maybe the business model that works beautifully at $500,000 stops working at $800,000.

Those are problems we can solve.

A founder disappearing from her own financial model is much harder to fix.

Revenue grows.

Payroll clears.

Taxes get filed.

The business looks successful.

Meanwhile, the person who owns the thing is still waiting for her turn.

Your turn belongs in the budget.

Your life belongs in the forecast.

Your future belongs in the plan.

Put yourself in the math.

My client did.

The day after our meeting, she started taking the $2,500 a week she’d been afraid to ask for six weeks earlier.

She also hired herself a fantastic CFO, if I do say so myself.

And then something wonderfully ordinary happened.

The business kept going.

Customers still came back. Employees still had jobs. Bills got paid. There was money to reinvest and money to hold in reserve. The business did all the things she’d spent five years protecting its ability to do.

Only now, it supported her too.

And it flourished.

So did she.

These days, she takes a week off every quarter.

I think about that whenever I remember the woman who once apologized to me for taking her children to the beach.

One vacation in five years had felt frivolous enough to require an explanation. Now four weeks a year belong in the plan.

That’s what changes when the creator of a business finally becomes one of the people the business is designed to support.

The time and the money move differently. The future feels more exciting. And perhaps most importantly, she no longer has to hate the thing she built in order to imagine being free.

She gets to be free inside it.

Over the last four essays, we’ve met the Starving Artist, the Healer bound by an old bargain, the Dutiful Child, and now the Unpaid Intern.

Different work. Different histories. Different ways of disappearing.

And underneath all four is the same quiet assumption: the more meaningful the work, the easier it becomes to justify leaving the person doing it out of the prosperity it creates.

I want to challenge that assumption all the way down.

The world needs artists who can afford decades of making art. It needs healers whose own care is fully funded, family businesses that create wealth for every generation whose labor built them, and founders whose companies make their lives bigger instead of slowly consuming them.

Because when good people are well resourced, the benefits don’t stop with them.

They keep creating.

They keep healing.

They employ people well. They invest in their communities. They fund ideas that might otherwise never get funded. They have the time, money, energy, and capacity to take on problems bigger than their own survival.

Resources are power.

And I want more of that power in the hands of people who give a damn what happens to the rest of us.

That is the larger argument I’m making in Profit Is Protest, the book I’m writing now.

The book goes beyond these four models into the stories we’ve inherited about money, profit, generosity, worth, and what good people are allowed to have. We’ll follow those stories into the numbers, because beliefs eventually become business models, and business models eventually become bank balances. Then we’ll build something better: businesses capable of creating real wealth for the people who own them, the people who work inside them, and the communities they can reach.

If you’ve recognized yourself anywhere in this series, I hope you’ll join the waitlist.

I’m writing this book for the people who have spent years making sure everyone else was taken care of and are finally ready to include themselves in the prosperity they’re creating.

The world needs what you’re here to build.

Let’s make sure you can afford to keep building it.

ProfitIsProtest.com

Join the waitlist

What do you pay yourself? What would feel more expansive than that?

You don’t have to tell me in the comments, but ask yourself and write that number down.

And now, if you’re feeling feisty, add a zero.

P.S. Profit is Protest, and so is building a business that gives back to the person who built it. Your work can fund your most expansive-feeling life and change the world at the same time. Make both nonnegotiable.

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