Building a business requires more than knowing what strategy to use or what action to take next. This episode explores five qualities of self-leadership from an Internal Family Systems perspective. It looks at how spiritually oriented women entrepreneurs can recognize when these qualities are genuinely arising from Self and when protective parts may be expressing something that looks similar. The episode also considers how embodied awareness, discernment, and practical business skills work together when making decisions.
In this episode, we explore:
- The five Ps of Self-leadership
- How to distinguish qualities arising from Self from protective or “self-like” parts.
- Why embodied awareness is important for business decision-making and discernment.
- The difference between patience and avoidance, persistence and attachment, and playfulness and performed lightness.
- How practical business data and metrics can coexist with intuition, spiritual guidance, and inner awareness.
Key takeaways
- Self-leadership does not mean becoming free from triggers. It means creating enough space between activation and action to choose how to respond.
- Presence begins with noticing what is happening in the body before interpreting a sensation or making a decision.
- Patience can involve active tending and continued engagement rather than passively waiting for something to happen.
- Perspective allows individual business events, whether difficult or successful, to remain information rather than becoming the entire story.
- Persistence can mean staying with a deeper vision while remaining willing to change the strategy, offer, or path used to reach it.
- Playfulness creates room for experimentation and allows business outcomes to provide information without making them statements about personal worth or identity.
Resources mentioned
- Learn about her Self CEO here.
- Join the free training here.
- Listen to episode #267: What Are You Compounding?
Episode FAQs
What are the five Ps of self-leadership?
The five Ps are presence, patience, perspective, persistence, and playfulness. In the episode, these are described as qualities associated with Self in Internal Family Systems.
What does it mean to be self-led in business?
Being self-led means having enough inner space to notice different parts, emotions, and reactions without allowing any one of them to automatically determine what happens next. It includes the ability to listen to internal experiences while discerning what is actually needed.
Why is the body important in business decision-making?
The episode describes the body as an important source of information because discernment does not always arrive as a fully articulated thought. Sensations such as contraction, opening, settling, excitement, or relief can provide information, while still needing to be observed rather than automatically obeyed.
How can someone tell the difference between patience and avoidance?
The distinction is not always visible from the outside because the same behavior can arise from different internal states. The episode suggests looking at the felt sense underneath the behavior and asking whether there is grounded engagement with what matters or whether a protective part is avoiding a risk or difficult choice.
Does self-leadership mean that business strategy becomes less important?
No. The episode argues that practical strategy remains important, particularly as meaningful work becomes more complex. Self-leadership and business skills are presented as complementary rather than competing approaches.
Read the Full Transcript
A few months ago, I made some shifts to my business model, which I may do a deeper debrief about in a future episode, because there’s quite a lot I could say about what I’ve been learning through this process. But really, these changes are a continuation of a direction that I have been steadfastly moving in for the past four or five years, particularly around Herself CEO as my signature offer, with an ascension path that grows out of that and into Sacred Power.
Now, Herself CEO is a group mentoring immersion where I support spiritually mature women to bring together the inner and outer work of building a profitable business around their life’s work. And it’s about becoming more self-led while also getting very practical about the business itself, clarifying your positioning and messaging, creating an offer or refining an offer that you believe in, becoming more visible with marketing that attracts your ideal clients, and really putting all the foundations in place, or for women who are more experienced in business, refining and fortifying those foundations to generate consistent clients and income, and to really create a space for yourself in the marketplace.
And then Sacred Power is the next level of that journey. It is a six-month mastermind for women who already have meaningful business experience and are ready for a more intimate container and a deeper level of self-leadership, strategy, inner and outer support as they grow. And yeah, we’re still working with those inner and spiritual dimensions of entrepreneurship because I don’t believe those ever stop mattering.
I think that the further we go along the path they actually start mattering more. But we’re also working at a more sophisticated level within the business itself, within your offers, your marketing, your launches, your systems, your hiring, your money, the AI integration, and the decisions that come with leading something that has become more complex and more nuanced.
So what I’ve been building is really a pathway that can support a woman as she moves from bringing her life’s work into form and learning how to build a successful business around it into becoming the leader who can really steward that business through its next stages of growth and whatever those might look like for her.
And one of the things this new business model is asking of me is to work at a much more iterative way than I ever have before at other points in my career. So pretty much every week, and I do this on Monday mornings before I start anything else, I’m looking closely at the data and the metrics from the previous week, and there’s specific metrics that I’m tracking both on my own and with my coach.
And I’m really paying attention to that and seeing the trends and then seeing what is one relatively small adjustment based on what I see that is going to have the biggest impact on the numbers that I’m gonna see this time next week.
And there’s something I find refreshing about this. It’s super scientific, it’s systematic in a way that I don’t natively operate that way. But I really appreciate it because it also leaves room for intuition and discernment.
And rather than making enormous changes or doing it based upon emotion every time something is not quite looking the way that I want it to or I want it to be doing better, I’m being asked to really stay close to the facts, stay close to what’s happening, make one thoughtful adjustment, and then be patient and remain with that long enough to see what that adjustment reveals.
And as I’ve been moving through this process, I’ve really found myself thinking about how some of the most important qualities we need to lead a business well aren’t really business skills at all. Rather, they are qualities of self-leadership.
And I was just saying to my husband the other day with the shift in the business model and the things that I’ve been learning, is I said, “I have become a much better business owner because of this.”
It’s like it is requiring of me a deeper level of mastery, both in terms of the outer work of running a business and also the inner work of self-leadership.
So, for instance, in your world, in the world of your business, you might know how to write the sales page or create the offer or run the webinar, read the data, or understand the strategy.
And then, say, a launch underperforms, or someone that you respect starts doing the exact thing that you were about to do, or filling the retreat you care deeply about requires you to become more visible than you’ve ever allowed yourself to be, or you wanna take on twice as many clients as you have right now and you’re not sure how to do that.
So suddenly the question is no longer simply whether you know what to do to create the outcome that you want, but there’s another question underneath it, which is: who inside of you is doing the thing that will get you the outcome that you want?
And in IFS, we describe Self, with a capital S, through a number of different qualities.
And today I want to explore five of those qualities, which are known as the five Ps. And these are presence, patience, perspective, persistence, and playfulness.
And Self refers to the deepest center of who we are. It’s not another part of us. It isn’t some perfected version of ourselves that we’re trying to become.
Rather, Self is already right here. It is the place within us that has the capacity to be present with all of our different parts without becoming completely identified with or overtaken by any one of them.
And when we’re leading from Self, fear can be present without fear having to make the call. An ambitious part can want more without being allowed to drive us into the ground.
A part can be disappointed, angry, uncertain, or afraid, and we can listen to what it has to say without handing it the keys to the business.
So Self is that dimension of us, or more accurately, the deeper presence within us that can hold all of our parts, all of our experiences with curiosity, with compassion, and then discern what is actually needed.
And I think this is important in business because being self-led, it doesn’t mean that you stop getting triggered. That’s never gonna happen, right?
We might get triggered less. We might have more tools to turn to when we are triggered. We might stay triggered for a short amount of time.
So it means that when something activates you, there is enough space between what you’re feeling and what you do next, so you can choose how you actually wanna respond.
So back to those five Ps of self-energy, and I’m not interested in presenting these as five virtues that we need to develop so we can become better entrepreneurs.
Rather, what interests me much more is how difficult it can sometimes be to discern whether one of these qualities is coming from Self or whether another part of us, which we could call a self-like part, has stepped in and is expressing something that looks remarkably similar to Self.
So a driven part can look like persistence, or a part that is frozen or afraid to act can disguise itself as being patient.
And from the outside, two women can be taking exactly the same actions in their businesses, while inside something entirely different is happening inside each of them.
So then the question that I want us to hold as we move through these five qualities is less of the question, do I have enough presence or patience or persistence?
And yeah, we can ask ourselves that, but that’s more of the surface level question that I’m inviting you into.
And the deeper question that I’m inviting you into simultaneously is, who is expressing this quality in me right now?
And the most reliable place that I know to discern that is in our bodies.
Yes, our minds can create very compelling explanations for almost anything we do, yet the body tells a much more immediate, much more honest story, which is why, in my work, I believe the body needs to come fully into the boardroom with us.
We do not make our best business decisions from our intellect alone. The mind, the body, our intuition, our experience, our spiritual guidance, and the actual numbers, they all deserve a seat at the table, especially as spiritual women entrepreneurs.
We have to start in the body.
So let’s dive into the first P, which is presence, and this is a great next step after talking about the body, because presence to me begins with embodied awareness.
It is our capacity to actually be here in our bodies, inhabiting the moment we’re in, rather than living inside our heads, thoughts around what has happened or what might happen next.
And business gives us endless opportunities to leave the present moment.
We can replay something that didn’t go the way that we hoped, or the money we spent that we wish we hadn’t, or the money that we don’t have but we wish that we had, or the decision we now believe we should have made differently.
And just as easily, we can project ourselves into a future that does not yet exist.
We can worry about next month’s revenue or where those clients are coming from, whether the offer we’re selling will sell, whether the business we’re building will ever become what we hope it can become.
And while all that is happening, the body is still here, in this chair, in this room, living this particular day.
So presence asks us to come out of the constant activity of the mind and put our minds back in our bodies, noticing what is actually happening before we rush to interpret it or solve it or make a decision about it.
So even as you’re listening right now, what does it feel like? What does it mean for you to bring your mind into your body?
You can wiggle your toes. You can shift your hips a little bit. Maybe shimmy your shoulders. Waggle your jaw back and forth.
That brought a yawn forward in me. I don’t know if there’s a yawn that wants to come forward in you.
That matters enormously for those of us who approach our businesses spiritually because the body is part of how we discern.
And guidance doesn’t always arrive as, and we all know this, right, as a fully articulated thought.
Sometimes we just know through sensation, through a subtle contraction or an opening, through a sense of something settling into place before we can really explain why that is.
So at the same time, embodied awareness doesn’t mean that we automatically obey every sensation that we experience, right?
We need to be these more neutral observers as well.
Because a tightening in the chest could be a frightened part of you responding to being more visible.
Or a rush of excitement can belong to an ambitious part that is wanting to prove something.
And even relief can be complicated, because sometimes the relief I feel when I decide not to do something is genuine knowing.
And sometimes it might be an avoidant part that’s just really relieved that I’ve just removed the thing that it was afraid of or that it was resistant to.
And this is why presence has to come before interpretation.
First, I become present enough to notice what’s happening in my body.
And the question I invite you to sit with around presence, around this first P, is: can I be here in my body with what is actually true right now before I decide what it means?
Okay, so let’s go to the second P.
Patience is one of those qualities that I think we can easily misunderstand, especially in a dominant world culture that prizes speed and tends to interpret movement as just evidence that something is working or that you’re valuable.
And the patience I’m talking about, it’s not passive.
Rather, it’s an active patience. It’s like the patience of a gardener.
You plant the seed, you continue to tend it, you water it, you pay attention to the soil, to the positioning of the sun and the shade, you notice what it needs, and you respond accordingly.
And then there’s a point at which you have to accept that you cannot stand over the seed forcing it to germinate by this Friday.
And so much of business unfolds this way.
And if you listened to my episode last week on the power of compounding, you will remember a reputation compounds, skill compounds, relationships compound, and audience compounds.
Our ability to hold greater visibility, responsibility, leadership, money compounds.
Often a tremendous amount is developing underneath the surface before there is much visible evidence that anything is happening at all, right?
Much like in a garden when you’re tending to seeds that are beneath the soil.
And self-led patience allows us to remain engaged during that space between doing the work and seeing the result without turning that interval between those two stages into evidence that something has gone wrong.
It’s just that waiting in that stage between the seed and the germination.
And this is another place where I think spiritual language can sometimes make discernment a little bit harder than it needs to be.
So, for instance, when you say, “I’m trusting divine timing,” we can say, am I genuinely tending something while allowing its timing to unfold, or am I just afraid to take the next step?
And when you say, “I’m waiting for clarity,” are you giving something the space it genuinely needs, or is there a part of you that doesn’t want to risk making the wrong choice and just choosing the path and accepting the consequences?
When you say, “I’m surrendering,” have you actually surrendered what is outside your control, or have you also stopped doing the things that are within your control that are actually yours to do?
And there isn’t a formula that can answer these questions for us, which is why the body, again, is so important.
There’s often a very different felt sense between patience and paralysis, patience and avoidance, even when the external behavior looks identical.
And for me, internally, patience has a groundedness to it.
There can still be uncertainty. There can still be that flutter of uncertainty. There can still be desire, like the heat of desire.
But underneath those things, there is some capacity to remain in relationship with the process.
So then perhaps the question here is not as simple as am I being patient, but rather maybe the question is am I actively tending what matters to me while allowing it to unfold in a timing that I cannot completely control?
So this brings us to the third P, which is perspective.
And perspective is our ability to remember that whatever is happening right now, however important it may feel, is not the whole story. It is just one piece of the story.
So one launch is information, one difficult client is information, one month of lower revenue is information, and equally, one enormously successful month or one post that reaches thousands of people is also information.
And our parts have a tendency to take one experience and to turn it into an entire narrative.
This happened, therefore this is what happens to me. This is what my business is like. This is what my future will be.
And when I lose perspective, my field of vision becomes very narrow.
Like, I can look at one number on a dashboard and temporarily forget everything else I know about my business, my work, and the much longer trajectory I’m on.
And one of the gifts of being in business for over two decades and now being in this new season of my business where I’m poring over a metrics dashboard that AI is helping me to create and review each week, I am not doing that, not letting one number determine everything.
I’m holding it within the larger perspective.
So over time, you begin to understand the difference between a season and a sentence.
Yes, something can be difficult or disappointing or worthy of serious attention without becoming a pronouncement about who you are or where your business is going.
And the opposite is true, right? If there’s some really fabulous numbers on that dashboard, not making that mean that that’s the forever story.
It’s like that is what is happening in that moment or that week, and that can and will also shift and change.
So there’s another side of perspective that I think is also important for us as spiritually oriented women to look at, and that is that sometimes spiritual language itself can become a way of moving too quickly toward the larger meaning of something.
Like we could say, “Oh, everything happens for a reason,” when what is actually required is for us to sit down, look carefully at what happened, acknowledge that something didn’t work, see what caused that.
Self-led perspective is spacious enough to hold both.
So we can trust that there’s a larger unfolding to our lives, to our work, while still opening the spreadsheet and looking very carefully at the numbers.
So when I do that each week, I don’t need to choose between the sacred and the specific. I can really hold space for both.
The next P is persistence, and persistence is perhaps the quality that I’ve been thinking about most in my business lately because it sits so much at the intersection, a very interesting intersection between things like ambition and devotion and burnout and self-trust, and really playing for the long game.
Self-led persistence, as I experience it, comes from the recognition that something matters deeply enough to me that I’m willing to remain in relationship with it.
And that feels very different internally from the belief that I have to make this work because otherwise everything I’ve done has been for nothing.
So the challenge is that both of those states can produce exactly the same visible behavior.
In both cases, the woman keeps going.
Although in some cases, you can hit a hard point. Maybe you get overwhelmed parts or parts that are really doubting that something is possible, and they start making up all these excuses about why you can’t do something, and then you pull yourself out of the game.
And what we really need in those moments is the persistence to keep going even when there might be what I often call with myself and with my clients a parts palooza happening inside.
Just a lot of parts speaking up, a lot of parts are very active.
And I was just using this analogy with a client last week: how can we be the buffalo in the storm?
Buffaloes, they don’t hide from the storm, and they don’t seek shelter from the storm. They just walk directly into it, and that’s what I think of persistence, self-led persistence.
So when a part is white-knuckling something, there can be a kind of rigidity underneath the persistence.
It can feel as though that particular offer or launch or business model has become fused with the larger vision itself, and it’s like, “If this doesn’t work, then none of it’s gonna work,” and we make it mean something about us, that something’s wrong with us, that we don’t have what it takes.
But Self has more room than that, right?
Self can remain deeply devoted to the vision, deeply in tune with your why, while allowing the vehicle to change, while allowing things to go up and down, which they always will, right?
The Buddha taught that there is suffering. There is change. These are the truths of existence in our personal lives and in our business, too.
So yeah, there are times when persistence means staying the course and giving something much more time than an impatient part would like.
And there are times when persistence means being willing to change the strategy or the offer or maybe even the entire way that we imagine getting somewhere while remaining faithful to the deeper thing that we’re trying to create.
You know, it’s just like when you’re going on a road trip and you’re humming along and you’re making good time, and then you come to a detour sign, and it’s like, “Oh, this is gonna add another hour to my drive time and I’m already exhausted.”
And you still wanna get to your destination, so you take the detour.
So when I’m trying to discern whether I’m being persistent or simply attached, the question I find useful is, am I devoted to the vision or am I attached to this particular way of getting there?
And the last P of self-leadership that I invite you to bring into your business, and I think I’m smiling as I say this because I think this is an important one for all of us to practice more, is the P of playfulness.
And I wanted to end with this because I increasingly think of this as something that becomes possible when the other qualities are present.
It’s very difficult to play when everything feels like it carries enormous consequences, when everything has to work.
Every new thing you try has to validate the business. Every post has to perform. Every decision has to be the right one, and there isn’t much room left for curiosity or experimentation.
And playfulness gives us room to experiment, and experimentation is really at the heart of what I try to instill in the women that I work with.
It’s we have to be willing just to get into the game to try something out.
And this is why I really advise against building out a whole online course or a whole thing without actually seeing if it’s gonna work and without just bringing the product to market.
Like, this is where an example of Silicon Valley, the prototypes, bringing a prototype in or a beta version of something.
So instead of asking, “Is this the right thing?” we can become interested in what happens when we put the thing out there, and we do it relatively quickly, so we’re not spending too much time or energy and money into it.
And instead of needing to know whether a new price will work, you can try and pay attention to see what happens when we price it that way.
And instead of needing an idea to become the next major pillar of your business, you can give yourself a little runway to explore it and to allow the experience to teach you something that you couldn’t have known beforehand because it’s the doing of the thing that will give you the information.
You can’t get the answers without getting in the game and doing it.
And this is also how playfulness changes our relationship with failure because when something is genuinely an experiment, an outcome that we didn’t want can still give us super helpful information.
But when our identity has become attached to the experiment always succeeding, then that outcome will feel devastating.
And because we’re talking about spiritual entrepreneurship, it’s worth acknowledging that playfulness can be imitated, right?
There’s kind of a performed lightness that can try to rise above disappointment or grief or fear or anger before those experiences, before you’ve actually had a chance to feel those experiences, and that’s not the playfulness that I mean.
Rather, the playfulness of Self doesn’t require us to deny the gravity or the truth of what we’re experiencing, and this is where we come back to that embodied awareness.
We feel it. We feel it fully.
Rather, it gives us enough inner spaciousness that the gravity of feeling those harder things doesn’t become the only thing we can feel.
It’s actually the feeling of things fully that allows that lightness to emerge.
And I think that’s part of why playfulness matters so much.
It reminds us that our businesses are alive, that we are engaged in the creative process.
We are creating something from nothing. We are discovering things that we could not have known in advance.
We are explorers, and we are allowed to be interested in what happens next.
So these are the five Ps: presence, patience, perspective, persistence, playfulness.
See which one of these, and maybe just choose one, is standing out for you the most right now that maybe you wanna highlight that in your work this week.
Maybe you wanna write it on a sticky note and put it on your computer or put it on your bathroom mirror to remind you.
And I hope that what you’re hearing isn’t that you just need to become more present or more patient or more persistent or more anything.
That’s part of it, yes.
But self-leadership is much more about learning to recognize the difference between these qualities when they genuinely arise from Self, because just as Self is always within you, these qualities are always within you.
But also to notice the ways that our protective parts can approximate them when they are trying very hard to keep us safe, and how can we become more discerning, more aware when that is happening?
This business gives our parts an extraordinary amount of material to work with, right?
Money can activate them, visibility can activate them, rejection, of course, can activate them, but so can desire and responsibility, uncertainty, failure, and perhaps surprisingly, success can activate them, too.
And again, the goal is not to reach some point at which none of these things activate us anymore.
That’s not possible.
The practice is noticing when the activation happens, becoming curious about the part of us that has stepped forward, and learning what it believes it needs to protect us from, and then creating enough inner space again for Self to lead within us and within our businesses.
And this is one of the reasons why I have come to experience business as a profound spiritual and self-development practice.
It continually brings me into contact with the places where I wanna control what I cannot control, where I wanna rush what I can’t rush, or I want to avoid what scares me, or to cling to what has stopped working or make one moment mean something far more than it actually means.
And every time, there’s an invitation to come back.
Come back into the body. Come back into the present.
Right now, how is your relationship with your embodied presence?
Is your mind in your body?
Breathe into your deep belly. Breathe into the soles of your feet.
Come back in a relationship with your parts, back into the larger perspective, your bigger why, back into the question of what is actually yours to do right now.
And as I’ve said throughout the episode today, learning to lead your business from Self, it doesn’t mean that strategy no longer matters.
In fact, I think the opposite is true, right?
The more deeply you know yourself and the more meaningful your work is to you, the more important it becomes to develop the practical skills that will allow you to bring that work into the world efficiently and elegantly and enjoyably.
And this is something I see so often with women, is you’ve spent years doing inner work and developing expertise and deepening your spiritual connection, becoming very good, very skilled at what you do, and you know that there’s more you want to create and contribute, but you haven’t necessarily learned how to translate all of that depth into a clear, profitable, and self-led business.
So the next time you’re facing a meaningful decision in your business, perhaps before you implement another strategy or ask someone else what she thinks you should do, give yourself a moment, take a pause, become present in your body, and ask, “Who in me is making this choice?”
And then give yourself enough time, enough curiosity, enough presence to hear the answer.
And that is where self-leadership begins.
