There’s a version of business most of us are taught to build — focused on growth, efficiency, top-line revenue, jobs created, and results. It values clarity, structure, and scale. Follow the path closely enough, the thinking goes, and you’ll build something great.
At some point, a lot of people hit a moment where something doesn’t feel quite right. For me, that was 2015, when I was in the Goldman Sachs 10K Small Businesses program while pregnant. I was following the steps, taking the advice, grinding. From the outside, things looked successful.
But there was an uneasy undercurrent — and not just because I was growing a whole human. A small feeling of unease. Small, but impossible to ignore.
Where That Disconnect Comes From
Most business advice is designed to optimize outcomes, not support the person building them. You learn how to position your offer, grow your audience, and increase revenue. There’s much less conversation about whether the way you’re building actually works for you — whether it fits your capacity, whether it’s how you want to spend your time, whether it aligns with the life you actually want.
My agency, LimeRed, was already a Certified B Corp at that point. I was doing things “right” by almost every metric. But I’d never stopped to ask the bigger questions. Does what I’m doing here support the kind of life I want to live?
I don’t think I ever asked myself that.
Why Strategy Alone Doesn’t Fix It
When you reach that point, most advice points you back to tactics: refine your niche, clarify your positioning, adjust your pricing. I’ve given this advice myself, more times than I can count. Sometimes it helps. But it doesn’t always address what’s actually wrong.
The problem often isn’t what you’re building. It’s where you’re building from.
A Different Starting Point
What tends to shift things isn’t a better framework. It’s a different question. Instead of: What should I do next to grow this? You start asking: Does this still feel right?
Those questions are easy to dismiss because they don’t sound strategic. But they’re the ones that force you to pay attention to things you’ve been ignoring while hustling: your energy, your limits, and what your body is actually telling you.
And here’s the thing I will never stop saying: You’ve been taught not to trust that. Most of us were conditioned to look outside ourselves for answers — to experts, to systems, to frameworks. Patriarchy and organized religion have been force-feeding us that lesson for a long time, and somewhere along the way, we started eating it voluntarily.
You don’t have to. You can stop right now. You already have the answers.
Does Your Business Benefit You?
There’s a lot of conversation about businesses that “do good.” But there’s a layer that often gets skipped: does your business benefit you? Not just financially — does it support how you want to spend your time? Does it serve who you’re trying to become? If the answer is no, it becomes harder to sustain, no matter how successful it looks from the outside.
If something feels off, you might not need a new process or idea. You might just need to notice where the “off” feeling lives in your body — and get curious about what it’s telling you.
I think you already know.