This episode explores the difference between being highly skilled at your work and being skilled at building a business around that work. It is for women whose professional expertise is well developed but who may still be learning how to create sustainable offers, marketing, sales, pricing, and business structures. The central question is whether the next stage of growth requires deeper practitioner training or an apprenticeship in business. Sara considers how spiritual orientation can guide that discernment and how business skills can become part of the stewardship of meaningful work.
In this episode, we explore:
- The distinction between practitioner mastery and business mastery, and why each requires its own learning curve.
- How years of training and professional expertise can coexist with beginner-level business skills.
- How to discern whether another certification is genuinely needed or whether the next area of development is business.
- Why marketing, sales, pricing, finance, and business development can be part of the craft of bringing meaningful work into the world.
- How to consider the direction of your soul when deciding whether to deepen your existing craft or build a larger form around it.
Key takeaways
- Being excellent at your work does not automatically mean you have developed the skills required to build and sustain a business around it.
- Practitioner mastery and business mastery are related but distinct disciplines, each requiring study, practice, feedback, and repetition.
- More training is not always the next step. Sometimes the more relevant gap is in positioning, marketing, sales, pricing, financial management, or business models.
- A business does not need to become larger simply because growth is possible. The appropriate form depends on what kind of work and life a person is actually being called to create.
- Marketing and selling can be understood as part of the stewardship of work when the intention is for that work to reach and support more people.
- The question to consider is: What is the apprenticeship your soul is asking you to enter now, and are you treating it with the devotion required to become masterful at it?
Resources mentioned
- Join the free training here.
Episode FAQs
1. How are practitioner mastery and business mastery different?
Practitioner mastery concerns the quality and effectiveness of the work itself: developing expertise, practicing with integrity, and creating meaningful outcomes for clients. Business mastery involves different skills, including offers, messaging, marketing, sales, pricing, finances, and sustainable business structures.
2. Does having years of professional experience mean someone is also experienced in business?
Not necessarily. The episode distinguishes between years of practitioner experience and years spent developing business skills. Someone can have considerable expertise in their field while still being relatively new to business disciplines.
3. How can someone tell whether they need more training in their professional field?
The episode suggests looking honestly at whether there is an actual gap in practitioner competence. If additional training is genuinely needed to become more skilled at the work, further education may be appropriate. If the practitioner skills are already sufficiently developed, the next apprenticeship may instead involve business.
4. Is building a larger business always the next step?
No. The episode explicitly recognizes that a one-on-one practice, private client work, or a smaller business may be the appropriate form for some women. The relevant question is what form of work aligns with the direction they are actually being called toward.
5. How does spiritual orientation relate to business development in this episode?
The episode frames business development as potentially part of a person’s spiritual path rather than something separate from it. For women who feel called to build a business around their expertise, studying business, practicing its skills, and developing sustainable structures can become part of the work itself.
Read the Full Transcript
The other week I was on a call with one of my spiritual mentors, and we got into a conversation about kind of the different forms that one’s life work can take. And I’ve been an entrepreneur for 25 years now. I’ve built my work through a lot of different forms over that time: teaching, leading retreats, writing books, doing private work, leading online programs, business mentorship.
And one of the things I’ve become increasingly clear about in this chapter of my life is that I don’t simply wanna do my life’s work. I want to continue becoming masterful at building a business around my life’s work. And at one point in our conversation, my mentor reflected something back to me that helped me to see this distinction even more clearly.
And she said, “You don’t have to run a business. Like, you could almost do what you’re doing and not run a business, right? Like, you could just call it coaching or private practice.” And she was right. There are other forms my work could take. For instance, there are parts of me that wanna buy a house in the French countryside with a barn that I convert into a teaching space and offer women’s yoga classes there on Saturday mornings, and I just see a handful of one-on-one clients, and I tend a garden, and I journal by the pool, and I live a very private life online.
And I can imagine that life, and I can feel how beautiful it would be, and maybe that will be my life at some point in the future. But I know that what’s true for me now is that a huge part of my life’s work is around entrepreneurship itself, or rather spiritual entrepreneurship itself, and I want to keep learning it.
I want to keep teaching it and mentoring in it. I wanna keep becoming more skillful at it. I want to continually understand business and finances more deeply and how these intersect with my spiritual life and create structures around my life’s work that allow it to reach more people and generate meaningful wealth and have a larger impact.
I experience all of these things as part of my soul’s journey. And for me, being a CEO isn’t… Like, that’s not a natural identity that I gravitate towards. Rather, it is an identity that my soul is reaching towards. It’s not simply the machinery required to support the work that I really care about, but rather learning how to build and lead a business is part of the work that I really care about.
Because anytime we say yes to a trajectory our soul wants to take us on, we strengthen our capacity to live from our own power because ultimately, I feel that our souls determine our life’s path. And if we follow that, if we follow our soul’s desires, if we follow the trajectory our souls wanna take us on, then we are on purpose.
And that is going to be reflected back to us in that we’re gonna feel more of our power. And vice versa. If we’re off our soul’s path, we’re gonna feel more disempowered because life wants to give us that feedback.
Right now, part of the divine assignment for me is learning how to continually unite my spiritual life with business acumen, to keep developing mastery in business and finance, and to create structures around my life’s work that allow it to reach more people and allow me to live more of my own dream life, and then increasingly to help other women learn how to do the same, starting from the foundation of the soul.
So we actually begin and end at soul. And both my own personal healing work and my professional offerings have moved through many phases of a woman’s healing. Initially, it started with the body, and then the psyche and the soul. And over my 25 years in business, one of the questions I’ve continually asked is, “Where are we as women splintered in our relationship to our own power?”
And then I’ve sought to bring healing and re-empowerment to those areas. And I say re-empowerment because I believe that empowerment is our natural state, so it’s like we need to remember it. We need to reclaim it.
And as I have evolved, as my work has evolved, as the world has evolved, I can see another place where that healing is really needed right now.
And it’s a divide that so many of us experience around work and business and money, and in the ways our power becomes splintered in these areas, as though our spirituality belongs over here, and business and money belongs somewhere else, and that we aren’t necessarily skilled enough or we don’t know enough to even be in those areas or to achieve real expertise in those areas.
And I’m interested in what happens when that divide begins to heal within us and in the world, when our souls and our spiritual connection are allowed to flow freely through the way that we work, earn, sell, create structures, make decisions, and build our businesses.
And I know that if you’re listening to this right now, there is a very good chance that some version of this is part of your own soul’s calling, your own divine assignment.
And that brings me to a distinction that I think that many of us blur, and that is this: that being an expert at your work and being skilled at building a business around your work, they are two different forms of mastery.
And I think that too often those are being conflated. They are related, yes. They can live in the same woman, yes. And they are two different disciplines, each with its own learning curve and each asking to be learned if this is part of your soul’s journey, too.
So let’s break this down a little bit, okay?
Practitioner mastery asks one kind of question. Things like, can I create a meaningful outcome for the person in front of me? Can I sense what’s happening beneath the surface of this person to help them move forward or to the next step? Can I practice my craft with integrity and skill?
And you may have been asking these questions for years through training, supervision, sessions with hundreds, even thousands of people, reading, studying, taking workshops, probably at 2:00 in the morning in your own journal.
You have put in the reps. You have developed instincts that you likely do not even recognize as expertise anymore because they have just become so natural to you.
And business mastery asks a different set of questions.
Can I describe what I do so clearly that the right person for it understands why they need it and say yes to it? Can I find this person amongst all the noise? Can I make them an offer? Can I say the price without getting weird about it?
Can I create a structure that delivers the work effectively and profitably in a way that I can sustain in my body and my life? Can I understand where my clients are coming from? How to get a continual stream of the right clients? What’s converting them? What isn’t? What needs to change to convert them? And how I can do all those things consistently enough for my business to continue to grow and sustain me in the ways that I need and want over time?
And none of these questions get answered simply because you’re brilliant at the first set.
I think this is an important distinction for us as accomplished women because it’s very easy to underestimate how much skill business actually requires. Because when you have spent such a long time becoming excellent at what you do, you can assume that, well, yeah, if the work is good enough, then the business should somehow follow, or that the marketing and messaging and sales and pricing and lead generation and finance and team building and business development, they’re all relatively simple skills that I’ll just pick up along the way, maybe from a free download, a free webinar, maybe a five-week course that I took 60 years ago.
But think about how you became as good as you are at what you do now, right? You studied, you invested money in learning, you found teachers and mentors, you practiced, you made mistakes, you got feedback, you worked with real people, you accumulated hundreds and eventually thousands of repetitions, and you got better sequentially over time as a result of all that.
So I ask you, why would you expect business mastery to be any different? Why would you expect mastery in that realm to require anything less?
And I know this terrain well. I could just sit here for hours and give you examples of this, but just two of them.
When I moved back to the US in 2008 after living in Thailand for nine years, I had already created a business there, although at that time I wouldn’t have called it a business. I was teaching yoga teacher trainings, retreats, workshops, classes, all in person in Thailand and throughout Southeast Asia, and to some extent in Europe.
And I felt like I knew what I was doing. And then I came back to the US, and I realized that most of the people on my email list lived in other parts of the world, and that the way that I’d been doing my business simply didn’t translate if I didn’t wanna just be flying back to Asia several times a year.
So I hired my first business coach, and he started talking to me about funnels and email sequences and teleseminars, and I remember sitting there feeling like my head was gonna explode. Like he was speaking a language that I just didn’t understand.
And I wanted to go back to the days where I was just driving my motorbike around Chiang Mai, Thailand, hanging up flyers in cafes, and that’s how I was filling my programs.
And years later, when I was first learning to set up my own Facebook ads, I felt completely overwhelmed. I blocked off an entire day just to support me with this level of overwhelm, to create a kind of container for the experience.
And I definitely followed a program that I had bought. It’s a really step-by-step program, just to get the first one running.
And I had written books by then, I had taught thousands of women, and there I was clicking around in Meta Ads Manager about to have a total meltdown and feeling very much like a brand new beginner who just wanted to give up.
But I knew how important learning how to do that was, because I had hired agencies in the past to do that for me. And I knew that there was gonna be a certain kind of empowerment if I understood how to set it up myself. I was gonna be able to better manage these agencies and better know how to understand what they were doing and to determine or to read the numbers that were coming from these ads.
And so I had years of experience behind me in my actual work, but in that particular discipline, there were skills that I just hadn’t learned yet. I just hadn’t put in the reps. I hadn’t spent years studying Facebook ads and funnels and conversions and those other skills that go into building a business that you wanna grow beyond yourself, that you wanna grow beyond just a one-on-one practice.
So of course I wasn’t masterful at them yet.
And, you know, just this morning, the time I’m recording this is a Monday morning, I have a Claude task scheduled for Monday mornings to run a report for me on my Meta ads, tell me, analyze them, how they did the previous week, to scour the ads of my competitors, giving me suggestions for what to shift this week.
And I was going through all that, going through all the data from my Meta ads from the past week, and just really appreciating that foundational work that I did several years ago and how this has become much more of an organic process for me.
And I still consult with experts about it. I still sometimes work with an agency and a strategist, but I understand how to do the basics of it.
And I really appreciated how I’ve really put in the reps and the ways that it has benefited me and my business.
And I think that’s an important shift because sometimes we can make a business problem much more mysterious than it is. We can assume that we need another breakthrough or we need another layer of clarity when sometimes we just need to acknowledge that there’s a skill that we haven’t developed and that we need to learn it.
And, you know, I had this come up recently with two women in Herself CEO who came into the program genuinely believing that their next step was that they needed to get another certification in something that they weren’t trained in yet.
And they had compelling arguments for why that was, that they needed that in order to really bring their body of work into the world.
And with that, each of these women, they were constrained in terms of time and energy and money, or they just needed to use their resources wisely in this season of their life.
And when I looked at what both of these women already had in terms of their years of experience, and these are both women in their 50s, their certifications, their expertise, and the emergent body of work that I could feel just intuitively it was ready and wanting to move through them, I gave them both essentially the same advice.
I said, “I don’t think you need more training right now, and I think you’re actually gonna be holding yourself back. You’re gonna be actually weakening yourself by getting more training right now.”
And I wanna name that there are absolutely times when I work with a woman and I can see that there is a gap in her practitioner skills, and that she does need more training to actually be better at what she does.
And in those cases, I will encourage her to get the training. I’m not interested in telling women that expertise doesn’t matter, because it does. And I’m not saying that we can simply declare that we’re ready just because we feel called to do something, right? It’s… we need that expertise, absolutely.
But that’s actually less often the situation with the women who find their way to my work. And more often, more often than less, I’m sitting across a woman who has spent 10, 15, 20 years becoming very good at what she does, and still assuming that the next threshold is going to be crossed by becoming even better at what she already knows how to do.
And so for these two women in Herself CEO, the gap wasn’t practitioner competence. They already had that sufficiently. The gap was knowing how to take what they knew and create a viable business around it.
Like, how do I shape this body of knowledge into an offer that people will actually buy? How do I communicate it so the right people recognize themselves in it? How do I reach those people consistently and in a way that I enjoy?
How do I deliver this work in a way that creates a meaningful result without requiring me to trade every hour for money? How do I price it so the work is profitable? How do I create a business model around it that feels good to me, that aligns with my values, that supports the kind of life I wanna live?
Those were the skills that these women needed to develop next.
And what was interesting was watching what happened when they could see that, and when they took my word for it, is that there was relief in realizing that they didn’t actually need to disappear into another long training before they could begin.
But there was also excitement. As they started to tap into the thread of what was already alive in them, ’cause it’s like this live channel inside of us that’s saying… It’s like the soul’s channel. It’s like trying to call us toward it, saying, “Here, here, come here. Tap into this.”
Then the work that they wanted to create, it stopped feeling like something that they had to become more qualified for, and it started to feel like something that could begin taking form right now.
It was already… It was, like, just this flow that was wanting them to step into it.
And this is something that I can’t even tell you how often I see, is just continuing to invest heavily in becoming better practitioners while investing comparatively little in becoming better business owners.
And another certification makes sense as a serious investment in their work, but spending that same money or time learning the positioning or the marketing or the sales or the money management or business models can somehow just feel more optional.
But if you wanna run a business, if your soul wants you to run a business, those things are not optional. They are a central part of the craft.
And this is where I think we need to be discerning because there is nothing inherently superior about building a larger business.
Like, it can feel very appealing to stay with a one-on-one practice or to work with an agency that sends you the clients so you don’t have to go out there and do it yourself, to continue taking insurance, to have a small roster of private clients and just let that be enough.
And for some women, that is enough. That is completely the right path.
And I know for me, if I did that, that would be a lot easier than what I’m doing right now. I wouldn’t be recording this podcast if that were the case. I could knock that off of, take that off of my weekly schedule.
But that’s not my soul’s path.
So yes, it may be that it may be the work and the life that their soul is asking them to create. And I’m not interested in telling every woman that she needs to scale and build an audience and launch a group program or become the CEO of her life’s work.
But I also work with women who know that form of working is not where their life’s work ends. That’s not the end of the road.
And they genuinely feel called to move from one-to-one to one-to-many. Maybe they want to develop intellectual property around their work, create a certification around it. They wanna lead groups or retreats, create signature programs, write books, teach, speak, to really create a body of work that can travel beyond themselves, like a legacy that moves beyond them and moves to people that they personally don’t know, that moves out to a wider audience, and they wanna step away from having all of their income tied directly to the number of appointments that they can fit in to any given day or week.
And they know somewhere inside that the particular transmission that they carry, the lineage of wisdom that they’ve inherited and developed, their expertise, their life experience, their particular way of seeing things are meant to, genuinely meant to reach a wider circle of people that just a one-on-one practice cannot.
Only a business is a vehicle that can do that. And if that desire is there, then it asks something different of you.
Because when we reach the edge of what we know how to do, it can be tempting to shrink the vision back down to the size of our existing skill set and to just, I don’t know, take shelter in what feels known and familiar.
Like, “Okay, maybe I’ll just keep seeing clients. Maybe I’ll just go back to the agency. Maybe I don’t need to create that program after all. Maybe I should just stick with what I already know or…”
And sometimes one of those decisions, yeah, it’s really wise and I’m, and I have advised women to do that at certain times, to take the easier path when that was necessary.
But the question that lives underneath all of this and the question that I’m much more interested in is what is your soul actually calling you toward right now?
What is your soul actually calling you toward right now?
If your soul is calling you toward deepening your craft, becoming a more skilled practitioner, spending the season doing really rich one-on-one work, I want you to honor that completely.
And if your soul is calling you toward a deeper mastery of business, towards learning how to create the appropriate structures around your spiritual depth and professional expertise so they can reach more people, support you financially in a more significant way, and make the contribution, leave the legacy that you’re here to make and to leave, then I think it’s important to acknowledge that really honestly, to just look at it head-on.
Because perhaps the apprenticeship that your soul is asking for now, it’s not another apprenticeship in your craft, and perhaps it’s actually an apprenticeship in business.
And this brings me to another piece of this that I see, is that you can be a woman with senior practitioner training with beginner business results, and you can have a couple of decades of expertise and several certifications.
You can have your graduate degree, maybe even your PhD, but your business still isn’t supporting you in the way that you want it to.
Maybe you’re subsidizing it with another job or a private practice that you’ve outgrown, or from savings or your partner’s income.
Maybe your clients come in inconsistently, or you still don’t know how to explain what you do in a way that really lands and works.
And you can be excellent when you’re sitting across from your client, but you don’t have a reliable way of getting that person into the room consistently.
Now, I don’t automatically see a contradiction there. I wanna know how much time that you’ve spent developing the second skill set that we’re talking about.
Like, how many offers have you made? How many sales conversations have you had? How long have you practiced writing messaging that’s actually gonna convert? How well do you know your ideal client?
How many launches have you run and then actually debriefed and then rerun? How consistently have you marketed yourself?
How well do you understand the numbers in your business, and how much do you lead your business from those numbers? How much have you studied pricing and profitability and lead generation and positioning and sales and business models with anything close to the seriousness with which you have studied your craft?
Because 20 years of practitioner experience does not equal 20 years of business experience.
Your current income may not be telling you anything about the value or depth of what you do. It may simply be showing you that your business skills have not caught up yet with your practitioner skill set, and that’s useful information, right?
Because it shows you where the work is now. It shows you there are things to learn, there are skills to develop, there are investments to make, there are actual reps to put in.
And there’s also a belief that I’ve carried for a long time, and I see it amongst a lot of spiritually serious women, that business skills are somehow beneath the real work.
Or that business skills are not part of the, quote, “real work.” That the work itself is the sacred thing, and the marketing and selling and pricing are the noisy promotional machinery that has to be tolerated as one can around the edges. Necessary maybe, but not really part of the work.
And I’ve come to see this differently and just in so many different ways, but one really concrete example is around my books.
I love writing. I love the long private months of writing books, and every time one of my books has come out, I’ve had to meet a truth that I didn’t wanna meet, which is that writing the book is only half of writing a book.
Because if I care about what’s in those pages, if I actually care about getting the message out, then I also have to care about how these books reach the women who need them.
And that means doing the interviews, the podcast conversations, the book launch, which is like launching another small business in and of itself, showing up and talking about it again and again and again, posting constantly on social media, when honestly, I would rather be at home in my pajamas reading a book on my couch, right?
I mean, that’s stewardship.
And the same is true for your work. If you believe your work matters, and I suspect that you do, then learning how to talk about it, to market it, to price, position, sell it, find the people who need it, deliver the work in a way that you can sustain, that’s all part of the stewardship of the work itself.
It’s how the work gets carried out of your consulting room, out of your treatment room, out of your journal, or out of your own imagination, out of the big, you know, the big poster board that you have on your wall where you’re mapping out the vision.
Learning these skills does not diminish the expertise you already have.
It allows that expertise to support you financially. It allows the work to reach farther than the handful of people who happen to already know your name.
So as we’re coming to a close today, I want to leave you with a question to sit with.
And that is, what is the apprenticeship that your soul is asking to enter now?
What is the apprenticeship that your soul is asking you to enter now?
Is it asking you to go deeper into your craft, to develop skills or knowledge that you genuinely don’t have yet? Is that actually necessary?
Or have you reached a point where you already have considerable depth and wisdom and expertise, and the apprenticeship in front of you is learning how to give all of that a larger form in the world?
And if business is part of the path your soul is asking you to walk, as it is mine, are you treating it like a discipline that you genuinely intend to master for the sake of your soul’s fulfillment?
Are you studying it, investing in it, investing in becoming better at it, getting feedback, practicing the skills that you’re weakest at, and putting in enough repetitions to reasonably expect yourself to become good at this?
Because you already know how mastery happens. You’ve done it. You’ve done it before.
Think back to when you began your first training, whatever that was for you. The first workshop, the first practicum, the first client you ever sat with.
You did not expect yourself to have 20 years of wisdom on day one. You studied, you practiced, you got feedback, you kept showing up, and you slowly developed the fluency that you now have.
What would happen if you brought that same seriousness and devotion to messaging, selling, marketing, money, and the whole craft of creating a business around your expertise?
And if you do fall into that latter category, if you know that part of your soul’s path is this mastery of translating your depth and expertise into a business that genuinely sustains you, changes other people’s lives, allows your work to reach a wider audience, this is what I am showing you how to do inside my free training, Open Channel.
And there I am breaking down how we become more open channels for the force of wisdom and the life’s work that is emerging in you, that wants to move through you, while healing some of the ways that we’ve become splintered from our power in the realms of business and money.
And we’ll look at how your spiritual guidance, your inner work, and business acumen can come together in the same place at the same time to develop mastery in all of these realms, which is what’s needed to bring our life’s work into the world in a bigger way.
