Elevating Your Rituals
I felt myself become so cynical. Almost overnight.
Creating and operating my marketing business, Flourish Your Practice, required unnatural levels of optimism.
In the early days, I would lay in bed in the morning
Counting the seconds that I wasn’t prospecting for clients, problem solving, or figuring out a way to translate my skills and knowledge into a sellable service or product.
I know that anything I write on this topic has been well established by thousands of other business owners and entrepreneurs across history.
Running a business is a roller coaster, emotionally and financially.
You’ll take two steps forward then three steps back.
You’ll need to iterate the product over and over.
You’ll need to finely tune your value proposition over and over.
Your early customers are everything.
You have to think about integrity, quality, and scalability simultaneously, even though they are often in direct conflict with each other.
In April 2025, I shifted to a full time job and scaled back on Flourish.
This required a mini grief process.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the characters we play in the professional world.
I’ve forced creation.
Especially in down times, times of conflict, frustration, self incrimination, and paralysis.
The zeitgeist tells us to:
Create create create
Move the energy
Process the process
Meet stagnancy with activity
I have no energy for this.
I feel stuck.
I’m at my desks - both my day job and home office - pulling out hairs from my beard one at a time, compulsively picking up my phone, craving connection, imagining a deeper conversation.
I’m burnt out from LinkedIn.
I’m burnt out from sharing.
I’ve been having this strong reaction now to when others share
And a hyper sensitivity to performance.
Every letter I choose to write or speak now has been a chore, a pit of self criticism crossed with a higher calling for me to uphold my personal privacy and sacredness.
In today’s age, I think we do a poor job of
Honoring the things we choose to not talk about it
The importance of things like:
Privacy
Sacredness
Holding a true inner self
Having conversations with yourself and yourself alone.
Sharing, opening up is now a reinforceable act.
Vulnerability is having a renaissance.
While I have my reactions to this, I stop myself before I say something to the effect of:
It’s gone too far
I honestly don’t think it has.
Vulnerability and honesty will get us There.
To happiness, peace, and the state of contentment all of us crave in our relationships, work, and life.
Opening up has led to some of the most meaningful moments of my life.
There is the feeling of pure relief after I get something of weight off my chest.
Or when the moment calls for me to bring my wisdom to the table, and it is welcomed and received warmly.
Extension, offering parts of yourself can be inherently gratifying.
The type of gratification that is independent from the response of others.
Gratification that is felt from head to toe as soon as your piece is offered.
I grapple with the sacredness of healing. As well as, the professional, capitalist world built around it.
I’ll catch myself in my Holden Caulfield vortex of accusing everything of being phony, and laugh.
The verdict here has been: Maybe it’s time for a new source.
The existing sources we choose to listen to.
The sources we express ourselves through.
Our relationships with news, information, friends, peers, yourself, and the state of the world.
Relentlessly check in with how your sources are serving you.
Patterns are meant to be broken
Habits are meant to be augmented
Rituals are meant to be elevated