Building a business that truly aligns with your heart takes courage and finesse of your heart. We have been told so many times: “don’t take it personal” in business and I am inviting to reframe that and to find strength and gift in your vulnerability & beauty in your deep care.
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In this episode I share the delicate nuances about heart-based entrepreneurship journey and sabotaging reasons or vulnerabilities to share your soulful work due to fear of rejection and treating your heart sensitivity as the weakness.
I share my own heart based entrepreneurial journey insights and observations from my clients who have faced the similar unique challenges of this path. I talk about what it takes to build heart resilience and the balance between staying open and connected with your heart while building the muscle against rejection and setbacks. I explore what it takes to be deeply invested in your business without letting the fear of rejection stifle your soulful work.
In the second segment, I explore the compassionate and empathetic approach necessary for heart-centered business growth. I talk about the art of listening to your fears and vulnerabilities while fostering the gentle self-leadership that integrates all parts of yourself, including the ambitious, sensitive, and afraid.
There is always a wisdom within frustration, resistance and the power of moving at the pace of your slowest parts.
This is my heartfelt guide to creating a thriving, purpose-driven business that embodies your soul’s mission and contributes positively to humanity without hiding, shrinking or neglecting your sensitivity and deep care.
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How entrepreneurial journey is different for heart-based businesses
I want to share something deeply personal—both from my own journey and from my work with clients who aspire to build heart-based businesses. This work involves a significant amount of “heart work,” which is about staying open and connected with oneself and one’s ecosystem, rather than guarding, closing up, or building a business from a place of defense.
Through my observations and experiences in building heart-based businesses—those with a deep purpose—I’ve discovered that the entrepreneurial journey is somewhat different. While you can apply regular business resilience principles to heart-based businesses, there are nuances to consider. Let me elaborate.
In typical entrepreneurship journeys, we often hear advice like “claim your voice,” “share your point of view,” “don’t take things personally,” and “be resilient in the face of rejection and fear.” While these statements are fundamentally true, there are layers to how sensitive, extrasensory, heart-based entrepreneurs embody them.
What it means when you feel vulnerable to share your work
First and foremost, if you feel scared or vulnerable about sharing your work with the world, there’s nothing wrong with that. It likely means you’ve found something you deeply care about—something precious to your heart. It could be a solution, a perspective, or something you passionately want to see in the world. Perhaps you see things differently from the rest of the world, or your idea goes against the norm. Whatever it is, it’s close to your core—your heart, your soul. It’s soulful for you.
It’s normal to feel vulnerable. It’s natural to want to protect that precious seed in your heart from rejection. This vulnerability is a signpost that you’re onto something real, something big—it’s part of your inner map, your medicine, your gift to the world. It’s sacred to you, and that’s absolutely amazing. I want to celebrate you for discovering this, as many people never even reach this point.
Shadow side and heart paradox when you become too vulnerable
However, there’s a shadow side to this. It happens when your work becomes so sacred that you overprotect it from the world. You might decide to hide it because it’s so precious, feeling it doesn’t have the capacity or right to face rejection. But by doing this, you don’t do justice to yourself, the soul of your work, or the voice that wants to be expressed. It remains closed off in your tower, your bubble, unseen by anyone.
This is the paradox of the heart. When you build guards around it, you not only protect against perceived threats and rejection, but you also close off the pathways for love, appreciation, and connection. You shut out the people who are craving your soul work, who need to hear your message, who are searching for the very solution you offer.
“Building a heart-based business requires embracing the challenge to walk, build, create, and share with an open heart“
It means staying connected and open through environmental adversity, situational circumstances, and the seasonal weather that buffets the branches of trees. To untangle this and gain a new perspective, it’s crucial to understand the duality and paradox of how you are and are not your business simultaneously. I want to dismantle the notion that you shouldn’t be sensitive or take things personally about your business. When you build a heart-based business, you’re forming an intimate relationship with it—a very close bond.
Creating soulful work often demands sleepless nights, facing deep fears, struggles, and what feels like birthing contractions. It requires a deep commitment to your work, message, and offers. You birth this work through your own experience, embodiment, and deep care—or even anger—about what’s acceptable or unacceptable to you regarding the world, humanity, society, or the solution or diagnosis you have. Building soulful, heartful, purposeful businesses often involves developing a profound intimacy and deep relationship with your body of work, your movement, your message, and the medicine you’re here to bring. It’s absolutely healthy to be sensitive about it and protective of it. If someone were to insult your life partner, wouldn’t you be offended? Wouldn’t you stand up for them and say, “No, that’s not okay”? The same applies to sacred, conscious work. You’re here to be its guardian—to protect and nourish it. There’s nothing wrong—quite the opposite—with deeply caring about your work.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you must approach rejection of your work in a desensitized, numbing way as if you don’t care.
This is very different work—you’re not selling cars. It’s not like walking into a showroom and choosing between an Audi and a Mercedes. It’s more like a mother giving birth to a child. The process involves various growth periods, bodily changes, expansion, and the death and rebirth of identity. When someone says, “Oh, your baby isn’t cute,” it hurts, but a mother doesn’t stop loving, growing, nurturing, or caring for her baby. Here’s the twist: parents give birth to children, but children don’t belong to them. Children are their own beings. Parents are guardians, not owners. This is where enmeshment with your work can occur—when you believe you are 100% your work.
“When people reject your work, you might feel as if they’re rejecting you”.
However, people have various reasons, cycles, and levels of readiness for your work. They may choose not to engage with you, your service, or your product for countless known and unknown reasons. But that says nothing about you as a person or as a being. It’s not a rejection of your essence. There’s a significant difference between receiving rejection or a negative response to your offer or services and receiving rejection as a person. Often, it’s not the latter. They may not see the value in your offer yet, but that’s not the same as you being invaluable or unworthy. This is where the distinction between you and your business comes in. Your business is its own entity with its own identity. It has its own nervous system and cycles of contraction and expansion. It has its own needs, and yes, at the beginning when it’s just a seed or a baby, it might be hard to see or fully embrace that. But as you nurture and grow your business, you’ll notice it gains its own momentum and develops its own way of growing.
I just had a beautiful conversation with an entrepreneur before this call. She’s closing her company, laying off employees in multiple countries, and talking to investors who backed her company. We discussed exactly what I’m sharing here. She said, “Suddenly, I felt it’s not a relationship I want to be in anymore. My business became this huge organism that I no longer want to be a guardian for. It’s too much, too heavy. We want to go in different directions. We have different needs.” It’s like any relationship, including one with a partner. When you start dating, it seems like you’re exploring yourself, becoming more of yourselves together, discovering new things about who you are and how you create together. But at a certain point, you might realize you’ve grown too far apart. You have different visions of where you want to go and what you want to experience, and you have to part ways.
I’m sharing this perspective because I invite you to view your business as its own being—an ecosystem with its own identity, nature, and needs. It’s a living, breathing organism that has its own growth path and means of expression. If you struggle to recognize this, you may become deeply enmeshed with your business, losing yourself in the process of building and growing it. Your entire life and identity may become your business.
About your fear of rejection
Another aspect I want to address is the vulnerability and fear of sharing your work, and the overwhelming fear of rejection. This may indicate that you don’t fully trust or have the capacity to root and embody your light yet. Perhaps you don’t have your own back for your own sacredness, or you’ve rejected yourself in some way. Maybe you’re afraid or don’t yet have the capacity to fully claim and embody your essence. It’s like a tree or flower—if it doesn’t have strong roots, even the slightest wind will blow it away.
This is part of the work in building heart-based businesses: examining those places where you disown your light, potential, and essence. It’s about recognizing where you give your power away or where you have energy leakages due to weak boundaries or lack of respect for your energy. It’s about developing devotion and commitment to your sacred, soulful work. This is how we build resilience for heart-based businesses—we build heart resilience.
This approach to building resilience differs significantly from what we’ve been taught in the old business paradigm. If you feel scared and vulnerable about sharing your sacred work and then tell yourself you shouldn’t feel this way, you’re essentially gaslighting yourself. You’re rejecting yourself where you are and how you feel. You’re rejecting your heart in the moment, and it makes sense that it would be unbearable to receive additional rejection from the external environment.
“Soft Power movement” is about staying deeply connected & being gentle with yourself
This approach isn’t gentle self-leadership. It’s not the full on soft & fluffy way I advocate in my business. The “soft power movement” is about staying connected, listening, and being compassionate to all parts of yourself—those that are afraid, ambitious, daring, scared, and fearful. I always say there’s wisdom in frustration and resistance, and you can only go as fast as your slowest parts are ready to go. If you don’t listen to these parts with empathy and curiosity, truly hearing what they have to say and why they feel as they do, you bulldoze yourself with rejection and abandonment of your heart.
“Building a heart-based business isn’t the easiest journey, but it’s the most rewarding one”.
It’s your soul’s awakening journey, the access point to your soul’s embodiment, your purpose made manifest, your sacredness, authenticity, uniqueness, and your medicine. It’s the purpose you came to bring to the world—your piece of the puzzle in creating a better humanity, a better society, a better future. From my perspective, it’s the only way for businesses to thrive and succeed. Making money for the sake of money is a dying concept.
Companies focused solely on profit are becoming obsolete. It’s the world of yesterday. This isn’t to say I’m against money—I believe money in the hands of heart-based businesses and big-hearted people can do amazing things, and I deeply care about that. But I’m talking about the purpose behind it—the reason, the why, and how you build your business. So, let your heart be sensitive, let yourself care about your business and your work, and let that be your gift instead of a weakness. Treat it as such.
