Small Business Blues
Dear Books,
My business had been growing and thriving from 2020 through 2023. Then it felt like it fell off a cliff in the beginning of 2024. Dead silence. The things I did before to bring in business stopped working. Things are starting to trickle in again now but I’m scared. How do I shift into a mindset of abundance, confident that I’ll figure things out and start growing again?
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Dear Trickling In,
I can relate deeply to your struggle. For many years, my husband ran a small business that had a feast-or-famine cycle, which was brutal. We’d often look around, blinking in bewilderment, wondering why it wasn’t working better, why it wasn’t easier.
Our path isn’t your path, but I think it might help you to know an essential truth that we discovered in the implosion of a thing we had tried to build for more than a decade: there is a part of all of us, deep down, that is so wise and true that it will stop us, at any cost, from moving away from the north star of our hearts.
The “north star of our hearts” is clunky, I know, but I’m trying to talk about the deepest, truest part of you that wants you to show up as your most honest, most real self.
Your letter says that what you want is for your business to be successful. But there’s a chance that the north star of your heart might want something else. It might yearn for something else.
In fact, it’s important to make the distinction between wanting and yearning. With wanting, our culture tells us to fill the well of our desire with more and more – a bigger home, more clients, that next promotion, another faberge egg, you name it. It’s endless, bottomless. But the north star of your heart will always push you toward your yearning, which shows up as a deep desire for things like peace. Freedom. Stillness. Joy.
What do you yearn for, Trickling?
To help you answer that question, I’m recommending the memoir of a woman who figured out how to listen to the north star of her heart when she became pregnant with a baby with Down Syndrome: Expecting Adam by Martha Beck.
“The way back to where my soul was meant to exist doesn’t lie through any set of codes I will ever find outside myself,” Martha writes. “I have to look inward. I have to jettison every sorrow, every terror, every misconception, every lie that stands between my conscious mind and what I know in my heart to be true.”
The best part about Martha’s book is that it comes with a side helping of incredible miracles, reminding us we are not alone. We have help. The universe – or angels or guides or God or whatever you want to call it – is with us, always.
Martha’s book touched me deeply, and I hope it will be a lighthouse for you, too. May it remind you that the answers lie not in another training or improving SEO or better headshots, but in connecting to what is trying to come through for you in this moment.
Something is whispering to you, Trickling. Let Martha help you listen.
Much love,
Lara
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