In this episode, Sara reflects on how living in France has shifted her relationship with work, rest, and daily life. Drawing from personal experience and Internal Family Systems (IFS), she explores what happens when entrepreneurs become emotionally fused with their businesses and how this can impact identity, nervous system regulation, and wellbeing. The conversation offers a framework for developing a more sovereign and sustainable relationship with work while remaining deeply devoted to one’s calling.
In this episode, we explore:
- How French culture approaches work, rest, and joie de vivre
- The difference between devotion to work and emotional fusion with a business
- Three signs of a codependent relationship with entrepreneurship
- How productivity can become tied to nervous system regulation and self-worth
- A reframing of business as its own sovereign entity rather than an extension of identity
Resources:
- her Self CEO — doors open now
- Subscribe to elle-même, Sara’s Substack
Key takeaways
- When business performance determines emotional wellbeing, identity and work can become overly fused.
- Rest often feels unsafe when productivity has become a primary source of regulation and worth.
- Entrepreneurship can become destabilizing when self-worth depends entirely on what is produced or achieved.
- Relating to a business as a separate entity can create more clarity, boundaries, and self-leadership.
- Sovereignty in business does not require caring less; it requires greater distinction between self and work.
- A sustainable relationship with work allows more space for joy, presence, and life outside productivity.
Episode FAQs
What does it mean to be “blended” with your business?
In Internal Family Systems (IFS), blending refers to a state where a part takes over so fully that access to inner authority and perspective becomes limited. In this episode, Sara applies this concept to entrepreneurship, describing how identity can become fused with business performance, roles, or productivity.
Why can rest feel difficult for entrepreneurs?
The episode explores how productivity can become connected to emotional regulation and feelings of safety or worth. When this happens, slowing down may create anxiety or discomfort, even when rest is needed.
How can someone relate to their business differently?
Sara introduces the idea of relating to a business as its own sovereign entity rather than as an extension of self. This framework allows for more discernment, boundaries, and collaboration rather than emotional fusion.
Is this perspective about caring less about work?
No. The conversation distinguishes between devotion and codependency. The focus is not on becoming detached from meaningful work, but on developing a healthier and more sustainable relationship with it.
Who is this episode most relevant for?
This episode may resonate with entrepreneurs, coaches, healers, therapists, and other self-employed women whose work is deeply connected to identity, purpose, or calling.
Read the Full Transcript
Hello, beautiful women. Here we are in mid-May, and I am learning that France takes May very seriously. There are four national holidays this month, what the French call the Pont de Mai, the Bridges of May, and the idea is beautifully simple. If a holiday falls on a Thursday, you take Friday off too, bridging your way to a long weekend, and that’s what’s happening here this week.
It’s practical, it’s elegant, and it’s deeply, wonderfully French. And living here in Bordeaux now for almost nine months, which is kind of hard to believe, but also not hard to believe at a certain level, one of the things that I feel most inspired by, and honestly most relieved by, is that work is simply one piece of life.
It’s not the center around which everything else orbits. It’s just one piece. And what I experienced for most of my adult life living in the United States was almost the inverse, that work was central, and life found its way into whatever space was left over.
I didn’t realize just how deeply that had shaped me until I started living here, living in a place that truly operates so differently. There is a phrase that you hear often when people talk about French culture, and that is joie de vivre, the joy of living. And I want to tell you, this is not a cliché.
It is something that you feel here. It is something you feel on a Sunday morning when the city is quiet, when businesses are closed, when people are simply being rather than producing.
We live right near the Jardin Public, and I walk Sadie there pretty much every day. Sometimes it’s in the middle of the workday, and I’ll walk through the gardens and people are just sitting on benches reading or doing nothing, or laying on the grass having a picnic in the middle of a workday.
Last Sunday, my husband Chris and I walked to the marché that happens every Sunday along the river here in Bordeaux with our dog, Sadie, trotting happily alongside us. We didn’t need much. We knew we would do bigger shopping for the week on Monday, and this was mostly for the pleasure of it.
We picked up some extraordinary strawberries. If you haven’t had a French strawberry in season, I really don’t know how to describe it to you. It is like candy in the best possible way.
On our walk home along the river, we wandered over to a wide patch of grass instead of going straight home. We took off our shoes and socks and put our feet on the ground. We felt the sun on our faces and the fresh breeze coming off the water, and we both looked at each other and smiled and said, “I love living here so much.”
There is a real relaxation happening inside of me, and I want to be honest that I know this is a longer-term unraveling. It’s the undoing of very old patterns, a very old relationship with work, with productivity, with always being on, with underlying stress that I always felt living in the US that went beyond just the personal.
That kind of unraveling doesn’t just happen in eight or nine months. But I am already feeling it beginning, and I am deeply grateful for that.
Part of what’s supporting this right now is that I am in the active process of shifting my business model. I’ve come to see that the model that I’ve been working with for many years is not congruent with the life that I am building here, with this life centered around joie de vivre.
I hired support to help me with this, and this month I began working with a new business coach, someone I’ve been wanting to work with for a couple of years. It’s already been profoundly supportive to have another pair of eyes on my work, to be seen by someone who can challenge me, help me identify where I’m playing small, and point out where there is room for me to grow in ways that feel true to the direction that I’m heading in.
I’m turning 50 in a year and a half, so I’m thinking carefully and joyfully about how I want to move into my new decade, how I want to spend it, what I want to create, and what I want my daily life to look and feel like.
One of the things that I’ve shifted this year in terms of my business model is that I moved over to Substack and am making that my primary platform. This is bringing me a lot of joy. Yes, there is a learning curve, and yes, I have been learning a lot, but I’ve been connecting with many wonderful people, some of whom I’ve known for many years and many whom I’m just meeting for the first time.
This fall, I am shifting what I’m leading in terms of retreats. I am offering two in-person retreats.
The first one is called The French Art of Slow Living, a joie de vivre retreat. This is a weekend experience from October 30th through November 1st at Kripalu in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. This retreat is designed to support you in exploring how to truly slow down, live intentionally, and center joy in your life and work.
Immediately following that, from November 1st through November 6th, I am leading the Self-Led Woman Retreat, which blends Internal Family Systems and feminine spiritual leadership with sovereignty at its center. How do we lead from our inner authority in our work and our lives?
I would say that the bigger shift around my business model relates to my core program, Her Self CEO, which is a 12-week business accelerator for spiritually mature coaches, therapists, healing professionals, and creatives. We blend Internal Family Systems, women’s spirituality, and timeless business principles to help you create a steady, calm, six-figure business based on the truth of who you are and the kind of life that you want to live.
This program is truly the heart of my work. What is changing is the way that I promote it and the way that I enroll women into it. This business model that I’m shifting into is one that I’ve been curious about for a long time, but I’ve never fully delved into it. It feels much more congruent with the slower, more intentional life that I am building here.
All of this — the long weekends, the strawberries, the barefoot afternoons by the river, the business model in transition, the longer-term unraveling — has been showing me something that I wanted to name with you today.
When work is not the center of your identity, something opens up. There is room for actual living. There is room for joie de vivre.
What I witness so often in the women I work with is how easy it is, especially in entrepreneurship, especially when our business feels like our baby or our calling, for business to stop being something that you do and start feeling like who you are.
This episode is an invitation to untangle that, to choose sovereignty in your relationship with yourself and with your business.
In Internal Family Systems, we have a word for what happens when a part of us takes over so completely that we lose access to our Self, our inner knowing, our inner authority. In IFS, we call this blending.
What I want to offer is that it is possible not only to blend with our inner parts, but also to blend with our business. When we are blended with our business, we could say we are in a more codependent relationship with it. Our identity becomes fused with our work.
There are signs, and I want to name a few of them gently, not as a diagnosis, but as a mirror.
The first sign is that your mood tracks your metrics.
A good week of sales, strong engagement, or a new client signing on can leave you feeling expansive, worthy, and lit up. Then there is a quiet week, a launch that doesn’t land, or a client who doesn’t renew, and something in you deflates.
Your business has become your emotional weather system. You don’t just have a slow week — you are a slow week.
The performance of your business and the state of your inner world have become, for all practical purposes, the same thing. When that is the case, you are not leading your business. Your business is leading you.
The second sign is that rest feels unsafe or like something that must be earned.
You take a day off, but there is a low hum of anxiety underneath it. You feel pulled toward checking email or doing something productive. You tell yourself you’ll rest after the launch, after the program ends, after the year wraps up, but the “after” never quite arrives because there is always something your business needs.
This is your nervous system becoming conditioned to urgency. When productivity becomes a primary way that we regulate ourselves, stopping genuinely feels unsafe.
I say this with tenderness because I have lived this too. It takes time to untangle that, and I go through different seasons of it.
The third sign is perhaps the most important, and that is that you don’t quite know who you are outside of your work.
Take away the title, the offerings, the expertise, the identity of being a coach or healer or entrepreneur, and what remains?
This is not a comfortable question, and the discomfort itself is information.
If our sense of self rests almost entirely on what we produce and who we serve, we have outsourced our worth to something that will always fluctuate, and that is a deeply unstable place to live from.
The only stable place to live from is our own inner authority, our own sovereignty, our own true Self.
If any of this resonates, you’re not doing anything wrong. This pattern is incredibly common, especially among high-capacity, deeply devoted women. In many ways, it’s a natural consequence of caring deeply about your work and being highly skilled at what you do.
But caring deeply is different from fusing with it entirely. That distinction — the gap between devotion and codependency — is exactly where your sovereignty lives.
How do we begin to untangle?
Today, I want to talk about one particular angle that is not commonly discussed. The reframe I want to offer is this: your business is not you. It is its own sovereign entity. It has its own highest Self.
Inside the first pillar of Her Self CEO, called The Sacred World of Your Business, we practice relating to one’s business not as an extension of ourselves, but as a distinct, separate presence with its own intelligence, purpose, direction, and highest expression in the world.
We explore what it truly means to be in relationship with your business rather than fused with it.
When you begin to approach your business this way, something profound shifts. Instead of being your business, you are in relationship with it.
Real relationship requires two sovereign beings. You are not fused or blended together, but there is an interrelationship. You can dialogue with your business. You can ask it what it needs. You can notice when it seems to be moving in a direction you hadn’t planned and become curious rather than reactive.
You can even experience tension with it. Just like any relationship, that tension becomes part of an ongoing living conversation.
In IFS, this is the move from blending to self-led partnership, from merger to genuine relationship and collaboration.
This reframe is not about caring less. It is not asking you to be less devoted to your calling. It is asking you to be more distinct, clearer about your boundaries, and clearer about where you end and where your business begins.
That is sovereignty. It’s not separation or detachment.
What I am experiencing here in France is that work is work and life is life, and the health of one depends on not consuming the other entirely.
What I’m discovering here, laying barefoot on the grass last Sunday afternoon, watching the river and holding a bag of extraordinary strawberries, is that when I am not fused with my business, when I can set it down and simply be a woman with her husband and her dog and an afternoon ahead of her, I return to my work more clearly, more refreshed, more inspired, more joyful, and with more of myself intact.
That is the invitation I’m living into, and it’s the invitation I want to extend to you.
What would change in how you relate to your business if you began to see it as its own sovereign presence, something you are in relationship with rather than something you are?
