Your Business Is a Teacher [E69]

There's an idea I tried to articulate back in season one and never quite landed. It finally dropped in clearly, so here it is: treat your business as a teacher.

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 putting them down. 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.

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 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, and that's fine. The point is that the experience is the instructor.

I've let everything be a teacher. Every client. Every challenge. Every uncomfortable new skill — learning to live stream, build an email list, onboard a team, fundraise, network with people I'd normally never cross paths with, present in ways that stretched me. I do it so unconsciously now that I barely notice I'm doing it.

Alignment is the non-negotiable

The people in my world all have businesses at different stages, in different industries. The one constant is this: for 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. You can spend your energy trying to be someone you're not, or you can say: okay, this is how I'm built — how do I use it as a learning experience? I'm 5'2". I could wish I were built for basketball, but that won't serve me. I'd rather lean into field hockey and tennis, where being nimble, fast, and sharp on hand-eye coordination is the actual advantage.

The harder road of creating a category

My path has been unusual — I started by live channeling on YouTube with a grainy camera, my laptop literally shaking on my lap, then live streaming out in the snow before I'd even named my account or figured out my iPhone. That origin made things harder, not easier. The human 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 are willing to offer.

It still isn't easy. When you're creating a category 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 or social media, that would be simple. Instead I have to think outside the box about distribution, about who my advisors are, about where the advice even comes from — because the standard playbook won't get me where I'm going. Playing where the puck is right now isn't the same as playing where it's headed.

Reps become a methodology

The visibility I'm building toward came from going inward first. 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, and had to explain it — plus value propositions 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.

You are your best teacher

I've run import-export, launched a first-to-market product in a regulated health industry with all the manufacturing and labeling that entails, run a B2B high-ticket consulting firm for big brands, and done online health coaching through ads and funnels. 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 — negotiating on a product floor in China without a shared language, 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 are your best teacher. 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 thing differently.