We’ve just passed the summer solstice, and if you work with the medicine wheel or walk any kind of earth-based path, you’ll feel it – one of the most powerful thresholds in the whole year. Six months of building and stretching towards the light, and here we are at the peak of it. The sun at its fullest. The year cracked wide open.
In the teachings I’ve spent years working with, the solstice is a celebration, a threshold and a moment of reckoning all at once. The light at midsummer doesn’t flatter or find your best angle – it lands on everything, fully, and whatever is actually there gets seen.
I’ve been sitting with what that means for those of us who build businesses from the inside out.
Most of the people I work with are extraordinarily good at what they do, and most of them are showing the world somewhere between seventy and eighty percent of it. The rest gets managed and rationed carefully, held at a distance from the professional version – in case it’s too much, or too far outside what a “professional” is supposed to look like. The gap between who they actually are and who they’re allowing themselves to be in their business is where an enormous amount of their energy goes – energy that could be going into their work, their clients, their growth.
I know this territory because I lived in it for years. Warm, capable, consistent – but not quite all of me, not quite all the time, and the cumulative cost of that was bigger than I ever let myself acknowledge while I was paying it.
The shift came from a decision – made slowly, remade repeatedly, still being made on the days when pulling back feels easier – to lead with the real stuff. My actual opinions. The harder parts of my story. The things I used to save for people who’d already earned my trust, somewhere deep into a working relationship, rather than putting them where they could do the most good.
The coaches, healers, therapists and business owners I see doing genuinely well right now share one thing more than anything else: a coherence between who they are and how they show up that people can feel before they’ve even read a single word. That coherence can’t be manufactured or faked, and no amount of content strategy gets you there faster than simply deciding to be more of yourself in public.
Something to sit with this week.
Is there a gap between the version of yourself you present professionally and the version that exists the rest of the time? If there is, what would it mean for your business – and for the people you’re trying to reach – if you started to close it?
The solstice light lands on all of it whether you’re ready or not. The only question worth asking is whether you’re going to work with that this year, or wait until next time round.
#UnleashYourAwesome