This episode explores the power of compounding and how repeated actions can become increasingly valuable over time. It looks at compounding not only in money, but also in health, relationships, skills, knowledge, marketing, systems, and business assets. For women building businesses from years of accumulated expertise, the episode offers a different way to think about growth: not everything needs to produce an immediate result. The central question is what you are building today that will continue to support your business and life years from now.
In this episode, we explore:
- How small personal rituals can become a baseline of care through decades of repetition.
- Why consistent financial contributions illustrate the power of compounding.
- How trust, knowledge, client relationships, systems, and business processes accumulate over time.
- The difference between something that genuinely needs to end and something that simply has not had enough time to work.
- How inner patterns such as fear, impatience, boredom, and discomfort can affect a business owner’s ability to stay with a process.
Key takeaways
- A single action may appear insignificant, while repeated actions can become consequential over many years.
- Business growth does not always come through dramatic breakthroughs. Mature businesses are often supported by things that became valuable because they were repeatedly developed and refined.
- Unnecessarily reinventing something can interrupt the value that might have accumulated if you had stayed with it.
- Women with years of study, healing, practice, training, and professional experience are not starting a business from nothing. They are bringing accumulated depth that needs appropriate structures to reach others.
- Compounding is neutral. The habits, skills, relationships, and patterns we repeatedly practice can accumulate in helpful or unhelpful directions.
- Patience in business is active: continuing to make offers, communicate, examine numbers, improve processes, learn from clients, and make adjustments over time.
Episode FAQs
What does compounding mean in business?
Compounding refers to the way repeated actions, learning, relationships, systems, and investments can accumulate value over time. In business, the benefit may not be visible immediately, but each repetition can build on what came before.
Why can repeatedly changing direction be a problem?
Changing direction can sometimes be necessary, but unnecessary reinvention can interrupt what might have accumulated if you had stayed with an existing offer, process, relationship, or body of work. The challenge is developing the discernment to distinguish something that needs to end from something that needs more time.
How does inner work relate to compounding in business?
The episode connects business practices with internal patterns such as fear, impatience, boredom, and discomfort. Becoming more skillful as a business owner involves noticing these parts without automatically allowing them to determine the direction of the business.
What does active patience look like in business?
Active patience means continuing to engage with the work while learning and adjusting. It can involve making offers, communicating consistently, reviewing numbers, improving processes, talking with clients, asking better questions, and repeating the process over time.
How can women with years of experience think differently about starting a business?
The episode emphasizes that decades of study, healing, practice, training, professional experience, intuition, and discernment are not erased when someone begins taking business leadership more seriously. The business task is partly about creating structures that allow that accumulated depth to reach more people.
Read the Full Transcript
Before I go to sleep each night, I stand at my bathroom sink and pour a little bit of oil onto a cotton pad or a cotton ball, and then I wipe my face with it. Now, I’ve done some version of this literally every night of my life for close to 30 years now, and this comes from years ago. I heard Sophia Loren say that she washed her face with olive oil when someone asked how she maintained a youthful appearance.
And I thought, “Well, if it’s good enough for Sophia, it’s good enough for me.” So at night, even when I’m tired and would rather just fall into bed, I take off the day from my skin. I take off the dirt and the makeup with olive oil and sometimes sesame oil, and then I do another round with a gentle cleanser and some warm water.
And similarly, in the morning, I always drink a big glass of warm water with lemon, even when I’m traveling, before I do anything else. And I go to the length of even traveling with one of those small electric kettles so that I can always make that in the morning. And if I don’t have a lemon, I can also use apple cider vinegar. But something that helps to alkalize the body.
And after that, I practice yoga and meditation, even if it’s a super full day. I only have 15 to 30 minutes. And for instance, my family was just visiting me here in France in August, and we had full days of touring and doing various things, but I still just took 15 minutes in the morning to do some prayer and some yoga and some meditation.
And at the end of every day, most days, I take a long walk. And these are things, again, that I’ve done for years and years and years.
Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that these little rituals are the reason why I feel healthy or why I feel the way that I do when I’m approaching 50. I genuinely really can’t prove that. I don’t want to pretend that I can.
But what I can tell you is that I experience these things as part of, you could say, a baseline of care that I have been building one very ordinary day at a time since I was a young woman in my early 20s living in northern Thailand, really learning for the first time how to take care of myself, how to tend to this body.
I didn’t know then that, or if I was building anything. It didn’t feel like building. It just felt like a small ritual, a small kindness I was offering myself in the morning, in the evening, then again the next day.
And here’s the thing that I realize now, truly, and you’re likely realizing this too: none of these things are dramatic. They don’t cost anything, right?
One morning of meditation did not change my life. One long walk at the end of the day didn’t create good health. One yoga practice did not create good mobility. Washing my face with a little bit of sesame oil one night did absolutely nothing, right? If I looked in the mirror the next morning kind of expecting some miraculous transformation, I would’ve been quite disappointed.
But again, nearly 30 years of those mornings, of those days, of those practices is something else.
And this is what I find myself thinking about more and more as I get older. So I am going to be 49 this November, which means that 50 is close enough now that, yeah, I can see it very clearly. And I do feel that my relationship with time is changing.
I am becoming much more interested in the things that look like almost nothing on any given day, but that become incredibly, and I would say even increasingly, more powerful when you keep doing them for a very long time.
And these are choices I made when I was 20 or 25 that the woman that I am today is benefiting from. And of course, there are other choices that, oof, I wish I’d made them differently. Like one example is just sunbathing with baby oil and tinfoil. Not a good idea.
But increasingly, I find myself asking, “What am I beginning now that the 60-year-old version of me will be grateful that I started?” Or, “What will the 70-year-old version of me be living inside because of choices I’m making today?”
And this question follows me right into my relationship with money.
Now, the version of the olive oil in the face with money is that twice a month, when I run payroll for my business, one of the first things that I do is move a set amount of money into my retirement investments. In other words, I pay my future self first.
And there’s nothing impressive about any single one of those transfers, right? I don’t make the transfer and think, “Wow, this is a life-changing amount. Look what I’ve done.” It’s actually pretty boring.
But that’s precisely what I am becoming more and more interested in: the boring things that work. The things that don’t necessarily give us that immediate dopamine hit of feeling like we’ve made some enormous change, but that rather become enormously consequential because of the very fact that we keep doing them.
So let me give you a very simple example, and I want to be clear, this is purely hypothetical, right? Nobody can promise you an investment return, as we all know that markets go up and down.
But say you invested $100 every month, and hypothetically, it grew at an average rate of around 7% a year. After 20 years, you’d have somewhere around $52,000. After 40 years, you’d have around $260,000. And after 60 years, that would be more than a million dollars, all from an initial investment of just $100 a month.
And this isn’t because you suddenly got super clever in year 37, right? Rather, it’s because you kept making the contribution and you gave time a chance to do what only time can do.
That is the power of compounding.
And what fascinates me about this is that money is not the only thing that compounds. Money is simply one of the places where we can see it most clearly. But really, almost everything we invest in repeatedly over time also has the capacity to compound.
And that brings me to, yes, you guessed it, your business.
Because I think one of the shifts we need to make as we become more and more skillful business owners is to stop evaluating everything according to what it produced just this week or just today.
So much of what we’re taught about business is organized around the lens of breakthrough: the right offer, the launch that finally works, the new website, the rebrand, the platform that’s going to change everything for you, the strategy that can finally unlock the growth that you’ve been waiting for.
And yes, of course, those things do have their place. Sometimes you do need a new offer. Sometimes you do need to change your positioning. Sometimes a launch really does create that inflection point in your business.
But when I look at the businesses that have lasted, including my own, what I see is something that is a lot less dramatic.
Because a mature business is largely made of things that became valuable because of the fact that you kept returning to them.
So, for example, a woman subscribes to your newsletter today, and maybe she doesn’t buy anything this week or this month, and maybe she doesn’t buy anything next month either. Maybe she reads your work for three years before she decides that it’s time to work with you.
And those three years, they weren’t wasted marketing. That was trust accumulating.
And of course, there are things that you can do in your marketing to shorten that gap, right? To build trust sooner, but that’s a conversation for another time.
But the point is that she does, at a certain point, become a client, and perhaps she loves your work and she refers two other women to you.
So now suddenly the one person who joined your email list three years ago has become something you never could have measured the day that she subscribed.
Or you launch an offer for the first time and it doesn’t go particularly well, and that is not uncommon. So it’s very easy to conclude that your offer didn’t work.
But that’s not the point.
You learned something. You learned maybe where people stopped paying attention. You learned what questions people asked. You learned what people were getting about what you were offering and what they didn’t, and you learned something about how you priced it and about your sales process and something about yourself as you were selling it.
And if you take all of that into the second launch, then the second launch, it’s not starting at zero, right?
And if you keep iterating from that, your fifth launch contains knowledge that your first launch simply never could have contained.
That is compounding.
And the same is true behind the scenes.
You create a process in your business for something that you do repeatedly, an SOP, which is a standard operating procedure, and these are the backbone of any mature, stable business.
And the first time you document that process, yeah, it’s annoying, right? It takes longer than simply doing the thing yourself, although not necessarily now that we have AI, and one of the things that I give my clients is a template to plug into AI to help create those SOPs.
But then someone on your team can do it for you, and then you improve the process, you use it again, and then three years from now, you have an infrastructure supporting you, so you never even have to think about that process again because it’s just running behind the scenes without you.
And none of this necessarily shows up in this week’s numbers, but that’s the whole point, right?
So I’m feeling this right now because I am getting ready to open applications this fall for my mastermind, Sacred Power.
And as I’ve been working on this next iteration, I so deeply appreciate that I’m not starting from scratch. I have offered Sacred Power before, and I’ve run it, I’ve learned from running it.
We already have an application, an application process. We have the welcome email, the event reminder emails, a members area, resources. We have systems in the backend, SOPs. I understand so much more about the women who belong in this room, the women, what they need from me when they’re there.
And now that I’m offering it again, some things are changing, as it should, right? I’m iterating. I’ve changed. My work has changed. My understanding of what Sacred Power wants to be has become clearer.
So I’m refining something that already exists. I’m building upon a body of work rather than manufacturing something entirely new this season.
And there’s something so satisfying about realizing that the work I did in the past is supporting the business that I have today, that my past self is supporting my future self.
And this brings me to something that I really, really want to emphasize, and I want you to even just, like, write this down, imprint this in your memory.
Every time you unnecessarily reinvent something in your business, you interrupt the compounding.
And I say unnecessarily on purpose because part of becoming a skillful business owner, part of becoming a self-led CEO, is learning when something does need to end.
Sometimes, yeah, an offer has run its course. Sometimes your positioning genuinely does not reflect who you are. Your branding is out of date. Sometimes a marketing channel just really isn’t a good fit for various reasons. And sometimes, yeah, you do need to make a significant change. I have made plenty of those in my own business.
But I do think that there is another skill that takes longer to develop, and that skill is knowing the difference between something that needs to end and something that simply has not had enough time to fully work yet.
And I have—I’m guilty of making this mistake. That’s why I can speak to it here, right?
I have a lot of interests. I have a lot of ideas. There are many, many things I could create. And for years, the energy of the new thing could be super seductive for me.
And you know, when we’re creative and spiritually oriented, there can be a very convincing story around these things that we want to create. We can tell ourselves that we’re following what feels alive, and sometimes we are.
And sometimes we’re uncomfortable staying with something through the less exciting middle, through the blocks that we feel, through the challenges that we face, through the low points, the stuck points, because there is always a point.
Just like, you know, when you think about a romantic relationship where the initial wow energy wears off, where you have to refine it, you have to repeat yourself, you have to get better at selling it, you have to study the results, you have to tolerate the fact that you’re doing something for the fifth, 10th, 50th time.
And that is likely not nearly as exciting as beginning again.
But every time I changed direction unnecessarily, I was also giving up everything that might have accumulated if I had stayed. I was, in essence, resetting the clock.
And I think this is especially important for women in our community to hear because I know that so many of you have been compounding something for decades.
You have been studying. You have been healing. You have been practicing. You’ve become more skillful at your craft.
Maybe you’re a therapist or a coach or a healer, or you write or you teach or you create things of some sort.
And undoubtedly, you’ve accumulated certifications, trainings, thousands of hours working with people. All of these things have compounded too, right?
So has your discernment. So has your knowledge, your intuition, your lived experience.
So when you decide that you’re ready to become more serious about leading your business, I do want you to understand that you are actually not starting from scratch.
Yeah, there are still aspects in running a business that you are still learning: positioning your work, getting better at marketing, understanding your numbers, creating an offer that translates everything you know into something another person can actually understand and buy.
But you’re not starting from nothing.
You may be bringing 20 or 30 years of accumulated depth.
So then the business question becomes, what are the structures that will allow all of that depth to travel? How do you give it form? How do you create a business that allows the wisdom that you’ve spent decades accumulating to reach far beyond the number of people you could personally sit across from in a week?
That is the power of compounding, too.
So I’m increasingly interested in creating things that keep working after I finish making them.
My Substack does that. My books do that. My podcast does that. An evergreen program does that. Email sequences do that. Systems my team and I create do that.
And in its own, yeah, slightly ridiculous way, apparently the olive oil or the sesame oil on my face does that too, right?
There’s a thread running through all of these things. They allow the effort I make today to continue having value tomorrow.
And I think this matters because there is another way many of us have learned to work, which is to constantly produce something that immediately disappears, and Instagram Stories and Instagram Reels are a perfect example of that, right?
We finish it, and then we need to make another one. We finish that, and we need to make another.
And after years of working this way, we can be incredibly busy and still feel as though we’re beginning from zero every Monday morning, and that is exhausting.
I’m much more interested now in asking, “What am I building that accumulates? What am I creating that I can refine? What relationships am I tending that can deepen? What skills am I practicing often enough that I can actually become excellent at them? What am I putting into place that will make my business more capable five years from now than it is today?”
And there’s another side of compounding that I think is worth talking about because the things that we avoid accumulate too.
So if I don’t wash my face every night, the effects of that are going to accumulate. If I don’t drink enough water, if I don’t walk or move my body.
If you put off learning how to understand your business numbers year after year, that gap in your skill as a CEO, it grows.
If you spend three years tinkering with an offer, but you never get in front of the people who need it and sell it, you’ve also lost three years of information that you could’ve been gathering from the market.
If you keep meaning to build an audience, but you never establish a consistent way of communicating with people, another year passes without that body of people gathering around your work.
And every time you become uncomfortable with visibility and you disappear for six months, the effects of that compound too.
So, yeah, while compounding itself is neutral, it doesn’t particularly care what we feed it. The question is: what are we practicing? What are we compounding?
And I think this is one of those key places where, yes, the inner and outer work of business becomes so intertwined.
And perhaps you know intellectually that you need to keep talking about your offer, but a part of you becomes afraid that people are tired of hearing from you.
Or that you need to look at your numbers, but a part of you is scared to.
Or that the offer needs another launch before you can make an intelligent decision about whether it works, but a part of you is seduced by another idea and just wants to go in another direction.
So these patterns compound too, and this is why becoming a more skillful business owner isn’t simply about learning better tactics.
It’s also about becoming capable of staying with yourself, staying with the process while you practice them.
It’s learning to hear the parts of you that are scared or impatient or bored without automatically letting them determine the direction of your business.
And it’s about learning to make a thoughtful decision and to stay with it long enough to actually be able to gather meaningful information.
Because time, it can’t compound something that you keep abandoning.
And this is really the heart of what I’m trying to say today.
We talk a lot about patience in spiritual circles, and I think there’s a very practical form of patience that is required in business.
It’s not passive. It’s not sitting around waiting for something to happen.
It’s active patience where you keep showing up, you keep making the offer, you keep writing the essays, you keep sending the emails, you keep looking at the numbers, you keep improving the processes, you keep having conversations with your clients, you learn to ask better questions, to make adjustments, and then you do it again.
And over time, something begins to accumulate that simply could not have existed in year one.
And when I look at my own business after 25 years, I can see this everywhere, right?
There are people listening right now to this podcast, hello you, who have been in my world for many years. Very grateful for you.
And there are women who first encountered me through a book and later came into a program.
There are ideas that I started writing about years ago that I understand so much more deeply today because I keep living them and teaching them and embodying them.
There are relationships that have lasted through many iterations of my work.
There are systems in my company that exist because we got tired of reinventing something and finally decided to build it properly.
None of that arrived in one dramatic moment.
None of that is sexy. None of that’s exciting. It’s pretty boring, pretty mundane, but it accumulated.
And that brings me back to my bathroom sink because I think one of the gifts of getting older, you finally have enough years behind you to see what repetition can do.
You can look backwards and see that a life is made in very small increments. So, too, is your business.
The things that become meaningful are so often the things we tended long before we had proof that tending them would lead to anything or would even matter.
So this is what I would love for you to sit with this week.
If you knew with real certainty that you were going to be doing this work for the next 10 years, what would you begin building differently today?
What deserves to be repeated rather than reinvented?
What could become an asset rather than another one-time effort?
What skill would become extraordinarily valuable if you practiced it consistently for the next five years?
What relationship deserves tending?
What system would save you hundreds of hours if you built it once and continued improving it?
What body of work are you willing to keep contributing to even when an individual piece doesn’t receive an immediate response?
And what have you been standing on the edge of quitting that might not need quitting at all?
Maybe it needs to end, but maybe it just needs more time.
So this brings me to one final question that I want to ask you, and that is: what are you compounding?
Because as we’ve seen, you already are compounding something.
You’re doing it in your body, your relationships, your money, your inner life, and yes, you’re doing it in your business too.
So the question is whether what you’re repeatedly doing today is building the life and business you actually want to inhabit five, 10, 20 years from now.
This is so much of what I mean when I talk about translating the depth of your gifts into the outer structures of a real business.
Because you might have spent decades growing your wisdom, your spiritual life, your expertise. That is compounded. That depth is real.
But for that depth to reach the people who need it, it needs structures and a willingness to keep showing up, learning, refining, staying with what matters long enough for time to become one of your greatest allies.
Until next week, perhaps tonight when you wash your face or tomorrow morning when you drink your warm water with lemon or your coffee, you can ask yourself, “What am I doing today that the woman I’ll be 10 years from now will be grateful I kept doing?”
