Sacred Business Stories

About Sacred Business Stories

Join us for honest conversations with entrepreneurs who are building Sacred Businesses that align with their deepest truth. If you've ever wondered how to build a business that supports your lifestyle while staying connected to your purpose, these conversations are for you. love.sacredbusinessflow.com (https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/s/sacred-business-stories?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Align With Your Deepest Truth

Category

business · religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

14 Feb 2025

Latest episode

27 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

55 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   27 Aug 2026

   Your Work Gets Clearer When It Meets the World

   Yesterday, Carolina and I sat down with Ryan Levesque (https://substack.com/profile/120576113-ryan-levesque) to talk about his new book, Return to Real: The Last Human Advantage in an Age of Artificial Everything. Ryan’s work has influenced several of the businesses I’ve built over the last decade. His Ask Method was ahead of the curve then. And I have a strong feeling Return to Real is ahead of the curve now. Because while AI was part of our conversation, this wasn’t really a conversation about technology. It was about what people are beginning to crave because of it: Real-world experience. Real connection. Real trust. And for anyone trying to turn meaningful work into a viable business, one distinction stood out. Ryan talked about the tension between listening to the market and listening to what he calls “the contrarian voice of your heart.” Listen only to the market and you can build something successful that slowly separates you from yourself. Listen only to yourself and your work may remain meaningful, but private, untested, and disconnected from the people it could serve. The opportunity is where those two voices meet: What is true for you. And what genuinely matters to someone else. That intersection is where meaningful work becomes a business. Ryan’s new book is a great example. He didn’t disappear for two years, emerge with a perfectly completed idea, and hope the market understood it. He wrote about ideas while they were still forming. He shared what he called his “half-baked ideas.” He watched what created a response. And he allowed those real responses to sharpen the thinking, the language, and eventually the book itself. That is an important lesson for anyone carrying work they want to bring into the world: You do not discover the final form of your work before sharing it. You discover it by sharing it. You make an invitation. You have the conversation. You notice what resonates. You listen for what people actually need. Then you refine the work and make another invitation. This is why we believe clarity comes through movement. You can think deeply about your work. You can plan, prepare, and refine it. But eventually, it has to meet another person. Your first invitation may not contain the perfect words. Your first offer may evolve once it meets a real client. Your first conversation may reveal something you could never have discovered through another month of thinking alone. That doesn’t mean abandoning what is true for you to chase whatever the market appears to want. It means allowing your deeper work to enter into a living relationship with the people it is meant to serve. That relationship is where clarity comes from. And your first yes is more than a sale. It is the moment something true in you meets something genuinely needed by another person. That is exactly the work we are doing inside Your First Yes. We help you take the work that has been calling you and turn it into one clear offer, real invitations, meaningful conversations, and the feedback you need to keep making it stronger. Not through more private preparation. Through supported movement in the real world. If you feel ready to stop working on your business entirely from the inside and begin discovering what it can become in relationship with real people, comment FIRST YES, or shoot me an email to learn more (mailto://phil@sacredbusinessflow.com) Phil P.S. I highly recommend watching our complete conversation with Ryan. We explored trust, human-created work, the role of AI, finding the intersection between your heart and the market, and why there may be more opportunity ahead for genuinely skilled practitioners than many people realize. Ryan’s book, Return to Real, launches September 29. You can explore the book and current preorder opportunities here: Explore (https://returntorealbook.com/)Return to Real (https://returntorealbook.com/) → (https://returntorealbook.com/) You can also follow Ryan’s ongoing writing at The Digital Contrarian → (https://thedigitalcontrarian.substack.com/). Thank you Monique Renée (https://substack.com/profile/230268181-monique-renee), Andrew David Shiller, MD (https://substack.com/profile/102696001-andrew-david-shiller-md), Anne Rottie (https://substack.com/profile/470908794-anne-rottie), Ruth Urman (https://substack.com/profile/158214276-ruth-urman), and many others for tuning into this special author spotlight with Ryan Levesque (https://substack.com/profile/120576113-ryan-levesque). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe (https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   29 Jul 2026

   David Allen says letting go is the point of life

   In 1968 David Allen (https://substack.com/profile/2458209-david-allen) was in graduate school at Berkeley studying American intellectual history. He was reading about people who were enlightened, and he decided he wanted that for himself, so he dropped out. He had no career, no plan, and rent coming due every month. What he wanted was simple. He wanted to keep exploring himself without giving up the life he liked living. The hard part was that none of that exploring was paying his bills. He was diving deep with spiritual teachers, meditation, and martial arts, and he came out of it with a black belt in karate and no source of income. He had always assumed he would end up teaching intellectual history in a university, and he imagined himself with a pipe, a dog at his feet, and a grand fireplace. He also had no interest in the version of the path where you give everything away and go sit in a cave. In his words, he likes good Chardonnay and good-looking women. So I said, okay, how do I maintain a life and still keep this personal exploration game going? That question is the whole origin story. He didn’t start out with the intention of creating a methodology. He was funding deeper inquiry. So he asked around, found a friend who needed help organizing his office, and was able to make a huge difference for him. Then he got bored with that project and moved on to finding another similar job. Soon after, he learned that people who do that for a living are called “consultants”, and that they actually can get paid quite well. What came next is David sharing the most people know in some form, if they’ve heard an interview or read his story before. A senior manager sat in one of his small workshops and asked him to build a training for his whole company, which became a pilot program for a thousand executives and managers at Lockheed in 1983 and 1984. He spent the next two or three decades training and coaching within organizations, thousands of hours in it, sitting desk-side with some of the busiest people on the planet. Eventually his advisors told him to write a book about it, so his first action was to order three books about how to write a book. He committed in 1997 and it took four years to get it done. He wrote it while working inside Goldman Sachs, where the method spread among the employees, and that was his proof it would hold up anywhere. The first weekend the book was out, a woman in Philadelphia picked it up in a Barnes & Noble, implemented the system over a weekend, and shared with David that it changed her life. That was when he understood that his system was scalable and could support people without him needing to be in the room sharing it. By his count Getting Things Done has now sold three million copies in over thirty languages. So we had him on Sacred Business Stories (https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/s/sacred-business-stories) to trace the arc, and there was a part of the story I was initially surprised by, but really expanded my heart. David is an ordained minister in the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (https://www.msia.org/). Years ago he met his spiritual coach, a man named John-Roger, and stayed close to him trying to learn everything he knew, which he says he never got to the end of. What he learned there was how to send the light. I’m sending the light to you guys. I’m doing that right now. So I’m meditating essentially all the time. He said that in the middle of the interview, casually, the way you would mention the weather. He described spending afternoons in Amsterdam watching people get on and off the tram and sending light to all of them. He reads the New York Times and The Guardian every morning and sends light to every headline as he goes. He has no idea how much effect that has out in the world. But he is clear about the effect it has on him. That’s a better thing to think about than to fret about it, worry about it, cry about it, complain about it. None of this is in the book. I told him I had never heard him speak about any of it anywhere, and when I thanked him for going there, he answered with gratitude for having built a career that improves conditions for anyone who uses any part of it. The living it earned him is what gives him room to focus on the subtler stuff. Two moments stood out. The first came from a question in the chat. Someone asked whether letting go is the ultimate purpose of Getting Things Done. Letting go is the ultimate purpose of life. Control is the biggest human addiction. Coming from the man who built the world’s best known system for staying on top of everything, that is worth reflecting on. He shared that you cannot let go of something you haven’t look at directly first, and with honesty. Write it down, decide what you want to do about it, park it somewhere you trust that you can come back to, and your mind will stop chewing on it at three in the morning. The second was the being and doing question, which Carolina and I both kept returning to. It’s a false dichotomy. It really is. In order to really do, you need to be. In order to really be, you also really need to do. He answered it with his own observations instead of speaking from theory. The people he has known across eighty years who most represent being are, in his description, highly productive and highly creative people who never stop making things. Then he went further and said everybody is already as spiritual as they ever need to be, and the only work left is recognizing it. If you’re not sure what to do, clean a drawer. Plenty of people we encounter with our work treat structure as the enemy at first. Lists feel like cages. Creating systems feels like the opposite of creative freedom. David lives life the other way around and is quick to say so. He calls himself a freedom-loving guy who plans as little as he can get away with, and he says people who meet him are surprised he isn’t buttoned down and corporate. There are a whole lot of things I do that are not on any of my lists. But I have the freedom to do that because of my list. So I know what I’m not doing. His list does not dictate his day. It lets him walk away from his day and go have a beer or walk the dog with nothing nagging at him once he shuts down. Which flips the belief a lot of people carry into their work, that getting organized costs you your spontaneity. In his experience it creates the space for it. Then he spoke to the pattern underneath all of it. He said your world comes down to two things, completion and creation, and that he never invented the method, so much as recognized what people were already doing. Then he added the part that stung a little. In our culture, most people have created a lot more than they have completed. I see a version of that constantly with folks we encounter with our work. Five offers, four websites, a course that’s most of the way built, a newsletter that was kept up for two months before falling off. In my opinion, one of it comes from laziness. It comes from people who are genuinely good at what they do and keep starting new things because starting is the part that feels like progress. David’s answer is unglamorous. Go finish something small and watch what it does for you, and frees up in your life. Getting Things Done was one of the first things I read during my tech years that gave me any relief from the chaos of a workday, and it helped me create the conditions to reflect and ask the questions about what I truly wanted. And that is a question I’ve kept asking that helped to set up the last decade of my work. The new close, so you can read it without opening the file: Near the end he described who this work actually reaches. The people most drawn to it are the ones who need it least, already organized and already competent, just hitting a capacity issue. The people in real trouble, he said, don’t think they need it at all. Most people are in their comfort zone with their ambient anxiety, so they think they’re fine with what they’re doing. Ambient anxiety is his term for the low hum of knowing there’s something you should be handling without being able to name what it is. He says people get addicted to it. A lot of the people Carolina and I talk to live in that hum and would never use that word for it. They’re in motion. They’re good at the actual craft. And somewhere along the way they decided that structure is a threat to their essence, that lists and systems are in opposition with creativity and spontaneity that they bring to their work. So the thing that would free them up the most is the one thing they often have the most resistance to looking at. If that’s you, I invite you to take a closer look at this with the Harmony Map, a free assessment that shows you the energy behind what you’re doing and where your resistance actually lives. You can find David writing at davidallen.substack.com (http://davidallen.substack.com) and at gettingthingsdone.com (https://gettingthingsdone.com). Watch the full replay. I promise you, the last fifteen minutes are the part you won’t hear anywhere else. Helping you get clear, get seen, and get paid by aligning who you are with how you show up, all while building a business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com (https://sacredbusiness.com/your-slug) on July 29th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there (https://sacredbusiness.com). Get full access to Sacred Business Flow at love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe (https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   1 Jul 2026

   AI offered to write his book. He said no.

   Shannon Algeo (https://substack.com/profile/49935530-shannon-algeo) had already done the hard part. He’d published his research, written his thesis, and turned years of study into a direction for his book our relationship with technology. Then a friend told him he had to try Claude as a writing partner, so he opened it and fed it his question and his plan. It handed back chapter titles. Mini chapter descriptions. Catchy ones. And reading through them, he experienced a hollow feeling. Are these my ideas? Is it mirroring back what I fed it, or is it writing the book for me? He’d spent years putting the pieces in place to be in a position to write this book, and now a machine was offering to do the one part he most wanted to do himself. No F-ing way. The buck stops here. He drew his line in the sand and wrote the book by hand. In the opening pages he tells the reader plainly that it was written by him, without AI. He used it to track down citations he already knew existed, and that was it. Some of Shannon’s story you may already know. More than fifteen years teaching yoga and meditation, a long-running podcast called SoulFeed, co-founding We Human, an earlier book called Trust Your Truth. And his latest, The Power in Your Hands: Liberate Yourself from Attachment to Technology, came out June 2nd. He’s a psychotherapist and a poet, based in Ojai, and he narrated the audiobook himself. So we had him on Sacred Business Stories (https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/s/sacred-business-stories) this week, and the conversation kept coming back to focusing on the machine most of us now keep in our pocket. Shannon’s explanation about what a large language model (LLM) actually is was very articulate. He calls what it produces “high-quality appearing slop” in many cases. It could say anything, and it always says it in a convincing way. He points to Zachary Stein, the psychologist behind the AI Psychological Harms Research Coalition, who describes a shift from the attention economy to the attachment economy. Social media went after our attention. AI, in that framing, goes after our attachment, the part of us that reaches outside itself to feel seen and safe. Which is the whole thesis of his book. He leans on a definition of addiction from Nikki Myers, the founder of the yoga of 12-step recovery. “Anytime I reach outside of myself for something that can only be sourced from the inside, I risk forming an addictive relationship with whatever that thing is.” Read that again if you have a chat window open. Two moments from the interview stood out. The first was related to something I wrote about earlier this week (https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/p/141-my-client-asked-ai-if-he-could). A couple of mornings before we recorded, one of our clients sat at the end of a long day and asked Claude whether he could make a real living doing his work. It told him no. Not much money in it, quite a difficult field to make money in. By morning he was talking about a different plan. We opened a fresh chat window in a different tool, asked asked a different variation of the question, and received an opposite answer. Same individual at the center of the conversation in the same week getting two very different answers. Shannon’s read on it was extremely sharp: “We are looking outside of ourselves to a higher power-like figure to see us, to soothe us, to make us feel safe.” The machine gets things wrong, sure. The deeper problem is the authority we often hand it almost without question, to decide who we are and what we’re allowed to want or create. The answer was never meant to be found in a chat window. It lives within the client’s own intuitive knowing, who has already been shown by his own results quite a bit of evidence that he is great at the work he has chosen to take on. The second was about what lets a person take feedback or constructive criticism and keeping their own center: “Having ego strength allows me to receive feedback and test it against my own inner knowing.” Shannon isn’t anti-feedback, and he isn’t anti-technology. He was on a video call the whole hour, and I felt we had a nice connection. His argument is that you should ask what a given tool amplifies in you, and whether you’re using it or being used by it. His own answer for himself is to create intentional friction. He keeps his iPhone off, in a box, all day, and carries a Light Phone with no apps and no internet. Not because everyone should, but because the apps were built by behavioral psychologists to be frictionless, and the only counterweight is friction you build back in on purpose. The advice underneath all of it: We should do whatever we’re doing with a reason and with intention. Shannon’s story reframes a belief that shows up all over creative work. The idea that the answer about whether your work is worth doing lives somewhere outside you, in an expert or a machine that speaks with 100% conviction. His creative process around writing his latest book is a perfect example of this. The satisfaction of having made the thing himself was extremely meaningful to his own sense of self, and he wasn’t willing to hand that over to a machine. If you’ve been using ai to make important decisions about your work and your calling, this interview is a good place to start putting the pen back in your own hand. You can find Shannon at shannonalgeo.com (https://shannonalgeo.com) and writing at The Sacred Ebb on Substack. If this stirred something within you, the private work Carolina and I do is for the person who wants guides, not another voice to outsource their inner knowing. We support the development of your business structure and the nervous system side, but in the end the important decisions stay yours. Start a conversation here. (https://savvycal.com/links/integrate/sales-serve-receive-partnership/settings) This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com (https://www.sacredbusiness.com/shannon-algeo-power-in-your-hands) on June 28, 2026. You can find the canonical version (https://www.sacredbusiness.com/shannon-algeo-power-in-your-hands), along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there (https://sacredbusiness.com/). Helping you get clear, get seen, and get paid by aligning who you are with how you show up, all while building a business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. Get full access to Sacred Business Flow at love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe (https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

Who has been a guest on Sacred Business Stories

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Elizabeth Purvis
• Sam Illingworth
• Matt Brown
• Billy Broas
• Carolina Wilke

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings