Your Business Is a Teacher [E68]

We live in a world that says if it's not revenue-generating, you don't need to do it.

Why would you do A when everyone else is doing B, and B is supposedly the promised land?

I'm not telling you to bang your head against a wall or waste years trying on hats and taking them off.

But I am telling you that too many of us have outsourced the role of "teacher" to other people— and forgotten that other people are guides.

Your business itself is the teacher. Your alignment depends on this—especially if you are a non-conventional business owner. 

Learning in the Ring:

A lot of people want to figure everything out beforehand.

They want certainty before they move. 

But you figure yourself out in the ring.

You learn about yourself in the ring.

You learn about business in the ring—and a lot of folks are taking advice from people who have never actually been in one.

For me, this is personal.

I am a majority of unconscious 3 lines in Human Design.

I have to learn by doing—and I don't mean by making mistakes.

I mean I have to decide whether I want to do something by actually doing it.

The doing tells me—am I willing to go deep here? 

That may not be your style, or design... and that's fine. But the point is that the experience is the instructor.

Remember that the 3 line is the money line. 

There is not way to learn in entrepreneurship without testing against reality AND your own energy.

Here is the thing about doing business this way:

Metrics alone are not enough. 

Even before I ever learned of Human Design.

Even before it was even a "thing" in the business world—I've let everything be a teacher.

Every client.

Every challenge.

Every uncomfortable new skill.

Even if you outsource or hire experts you can't escape this reality at some level. 

At the end of the day alignment is the ONE non-negotiable.

Alignment will drive you to figure things out when it's hard.

To stay the path when it's uncertain.

And lack of it will shut down your will try at all.

The people in my world all have businesses at different stages, in different industries.

But the one constant is this—or them—the work isn't just a business.

I won't reach for loaded words like "purpose" or "calling"—people chase those phrases. But this is something they feel they need to do. Something that goes beyond money, because frankly, all of us could go do something else and make plenty of it.

So alignment is the whole game. And part of alignment is understanding who you're not.

The harder road of creating a category

My path has been unusual—I started this journey by live streaming on YouTube with a grainy camera, my laptop literally shaking on my lap, and before that live channeling out in the snow before I'd even named my account, figured out to use Instagram on an iPhone or knew I had that skill.

That origin story made things a lot harder, not easier. This didn't start as a "normal business". with a plan, a goal and methodology.

The human (me) had to catch up to wherever the train was already going, and that took more faith, more trust, and more saying yes than most people would ever be willing to do.

It still isn't easy.

When you're "creating a category"—even partially—and working with tools people don't yet understand, don't respect or have never heard of, you run into challenges others never will.

If I were just selling SEO, generic business coaching or social media, it would be simple.

Instead I have to think outside the box about distribution, about who my advisors are, about where my advice even comes from—because the standard playbook won't get me where I'm going. 

The visibility I'm building toward came from going inward first and letting everything teach me. 

I did a 24-hour global women's live stream where every speaker got five minutes—so I had to compress my entire pitch into five minutes.

Then a 20-minute summit, where I built many of the frameworks I'll be sharing going forward.

I presented to a room of podcasters who'd never heard of Human Design—why that was related to their podcast— and had to explain it— plus unique value proposition and my own twist on them—in twenty minutes, including Q&A—in person. 

Harder than it sounds. But enough reps reveal the patterns, and the patterns become a methodology.

The Business Is Your Best Teacher

I've:

• Run an import-export e-commerce operation through Amazon, inclusive of shipping, customization and inspections.
• Launched (and formulated) a first-to-market e-commerce product in the health industry with all the manufacturing, labeling and regulations that entailed.
• Ran a B2B high-ticket market research firm for big brands (B2B).
• Did online functional health coaching through ads and funnels (B2C).

None of those stack neatly into the next as transferable skills. 

What they share is that every single one forced me to learn on the fly, in chaos, in the moment—like negotiating on a product floor in China without a shared language or chasing subcontractors through WeChat in the middle of the night. 

You come out of that trusting yourself to figure things out.

It's fine to take advice from people ahead of you in what you need. 

But the guru worship—the pedestal, the assumption that some online personality has the answer when you have no idea how they actually run their business or their life—that I don't understand.

You instincts are your highest source of truth.

And your business is the best teacher you've got.

Start approaching it that way, and you'll see your challenges, your obstacles, and the whole journey very differently.