Your Business Won't Grow Beyond What You Can Hold Inside

Welcome to the After-Launch Party 🎉The book is out, Being Is the New Doing is in the world. I wanted to celebrate that the way that feels most true to me with real conversations with people whose work I genuinely admire, and whose lives are — each in their own way — a living proof of what this book is about.So this is the After-Launch Party. Five lives. Five conversations. This is the last one — and it’s the most personal.Being Is the New Doing is structured around the acronym FLUIDE — six dimensions of an aligned life and business: Foundations, Liberation, Unicity, Intuition, Deployment, and Evolution. This conversation lives in the “E” — Evolution — as a lived experience of allowing what wants to emerge, rather than forcing what you think should happen.I invited Renee Spears Abundology because she was there from the beginning. She heard me say “I think I’m going to write a book” before I’d written a word. She was there during the editing, the proofreading, the translation into English. She was the first person to have me on her podcast to talk about it and she knows the backstage in a way almost nobody else does. (I also visited her in Montana last summer for one of her amazing 1-1 spiritual business retreat, and that alone tells you everything about the quality of this friendship.)Renee is a spirit guide channeler, spiritual mentor, and the host of the Abundology podcast — 450 episodes, six years, two missed Sundays. She channels messages from people’s guides. She describes herself as a translator from the spirit world to English. And in this conversation, she channeled her own guides live, on air, in front of an audience. Which is not something I planned. It just happened. (As things tend to do when the energy is right.)The Awakened Entrepreneur is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free subscriber or paid subscriber and access to my Monthly Circle[00:05:47 — 00:07:16]The name Abundology came to Renee during an acupuncture session. The needle went into her third eye, and she received a complete download: the name of her company, the work she’d be doing, the direction of her life. She’d just sold the mortgage company she’d built over 20 years — started in her living room, grown into something real — and she had no idea what came next. Six months of puzzles, chocolate, pedicures, and waiting.The word wasn’t one she’d heard before. She went home and Googled it. It existed, vaguely, in some other context. She followed the guidance anyway. And the name, she says, really does fit — because abundance for her was never primarily about money. It was about joy, presence, beauty, the richness of a life fully inhabited.That’s why I invited her for the last conversation of this series. She doesn’t just talk about this. She lives inside it.The year income doubled by shifting to joy[00:11:32 — 00:12:18]About ten years into running her mortgage company, Renee was deeply unhappy. She had been focused on the numbers, the bottom line, the revenue targets. And she made a decision that, by conventional business logic, sounds almost irresponsible: she stopped looking at the numbers and shifted her entire focus to joy, to appreciation, to the quality of her relationships with her employees and clients, to the journey itself. The first year she did that, income doubled.She said this without drama, almost as a footnote, as if it confirms something so obvious it barely needs stating. Which, if you’ve read the book, it does. But I want to sit with it for a moment because it’s the kind of thing that sounds like a motivational poster until you actually live it and then it sounds like physics.The live channeling: what the guides said about AI[00:24:33 — 00:30:07]Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, I asked Renee to channel her guides live. She doesn’t usually do this for herself she normally works with other people’s guides. So she was curious too.The question I gave them: What do they have to say about AI, and how do we use this time well as entrepreneurs?What came through: “AI is an integral part of this collective consciousness shift. It’s going to free up energy and attention from the things that don’t need us as much — so we can redirect toward connection, authenticity, and knowing ourselves. Because that’s the work of this era, not the eight-hour business plan. Getting to know who we actually are, right now, in this new version of ourselves.”And then the part I want you to read twice: “We are not who we were six months ago, let alone five years ago. And so even if you did know who you were, this is a new version of you.”So the question isn’t just “who am I.” It’s: who am I becoming? And am I awake enough to meet that person?Pfiou! OMG!AI sucking our authenticity[00:29:52 — 00:30:13]Renee also said something she and I had talked about before (see the video below), and I want it here because it’s precise: AI risks sucking our authenticity. Not because it’s malicious, but because if you don’t know yourself well enough to evaluate what it gives you, you’ll use it to define you rather than serve you.This is the same point Stefanie made about the inner compass. The same point Iva made about design. The same thread running through all five conversations: the external world — AI, algorithms, other people’s opinions, financial forecasters telling you a company that doesn’t grow will die — can only disorient you if you don’t have a strong enough signal on the inside. The work isn’t resisting AI. The work is knowing yourself well enough to use it as a tool rather than let it become your voice.Peace starts within (not out there).[00:30:46 — 00:32:35]I pushed the guides on the practical question 🤷‍♀️ the one my entrepreneur mind needed to ask: How do you keep inner peace when you have a company to run, invoices to pay, salaries, taxes? If I spend time on myself, who’s paying the bills?The answer through Renee was clean: “That’s scarcity thinking dressed up as pragmatism. The shift isn’t about spending three hours a day in meditation instead of running your business. It’s about the quality of presence you bring to the marketing plan, to the client session, to the proposal. Are you doing it from “I got to get this done” or from peace and joy and abundance? Because those are two completely different energies. And they produce different results.”And then: “If you aren’t open to this shift, you’re going to get smacked upside the head with something not working to get you to shift.” She said it with a smile, the guides said it with precision.We’ve all seen this:* The sore knee that forced Renee to sit still and receive ideas she wouldn’t have had otherwise. * The meeting I’ve missed that turned into an afternoon in the sun. Everything happening for you, not to you, if you’re awake enough to read it that way.A company that doesn’t grow will die. But what is growth?💥 Spoiler alert: that's not how it works in the new paradigm.[00:52:41 — 00:55:51]One of my clients sent me a voice note earlier that day. She’d been in a meeting with her financial forecaster, who told her: a company that doesn’t grow will die.I asked Renee — and the guides — what they thought.The answer: “That’s our old-fashioned idea of growth. Revenue up, headcount up, complexity up, overhead up. And when revenue went up in that model, for most of Renée’s friends who ran companies, happiness went down. Because more revenue often meant more everything — more work, more people to manage, more costs, more pressure. The number grew. What was left didn’t.”She asked the question I want to ask every entrepreneur I work with: What does success actually mean to you? Is it a company that doubles revenue every four years? Or is it: I make great income. I work with people I genuinely like. I have time for my life and my family. I leave work feeling like myself.If it’s the first one : how can you have a healthy business if the people inside it aren’t healthy? If the owner isn’t healthy? That’s not a company that’s thriving. That’s a number that’s growing while everything underneath it deteriorates.For the first time in history, we get to choose how we evolve[00:51:15 — 00:52:08]Renee quoted Barbara Marx Hubbard — something she’d heard in a talk years ago that has stayed with her. The idea: this is the first time in human history that we get to consciously choose how we evolve. Before, evolution was driven by necessity. We needed lungs. We needed to walk upright. We needed whatever the environment demanded.Now, it’s consciousness. We get to choose how we want our businesses to evolve. Our souls. Our societies. That’s a completely different position to be in.And the invitation, from the guides and from this conversation, is to approach what’s happening with wonder rather than fear. Not “what is this going to destroy” but “what wonderful thing is going to come from this.” Not reactive in the sense of scrambling. Reactive in the sense of open, receiving, present.So here’s what I’m leaving you with:If your business stopped growing tomorrow — in revenue, in headcount, in scope — but everything inside it became healthier, lighter, more joyful: would that be a failure? And if the answer makes you uncomfortable, what does that tell you about what you’re actually optimizing for?You can find Renée Spears and the Abundology podcast on all major platforms, and her work at abundology.com. AAnd please do me a favour: start next week with Renee's Energy of the Week here on Substack or on Youtube (or your favorite podcast platform).Being Is the New Doing is available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/08gxk9ctValThe Awakened Entrepreneur is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free subscriber or paid subscriber and access to my Monthly CircleMy most recent conversation with Renee:And the podcast she mentioned with the astrologer Deborah Norton (which, btw, is the best astrologer I’ve ever met!) Get full access to The Awakened Entrepreneur at demontvalerie.substack.com/subscribe