There were more than a hundred stairs between me and the ancient temple.
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.
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.
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.
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 really appreciate this perspective because we often think we need to see the whole path before we can take the first step. I love the reminder that taking action also gives us new information, new opportunities, and sometimes even a completely different view of what we want =)