The Leo Babauta conversation we almost didn't publish

The detour was the training

In 2007, Elizabeth Purvis [https://substack.com/profile/20439034-elizabeth-purvis] sat on her bed in Brooklyn with her husband, two black cats, and a deck of Carolyn Myss archetype cards, hunting for something to call her new business. The card that came out said goddess. She had just quit her last job, a six-figure systems engineering role, and was making about $1,000 a month helping her tarot friends price and package their services. She was also ten years into hiding her witchcraft practice from her staunchly conservative family. What she wanted was to teach magic. The reality creation work she’d spent years learning in her Wiccan circles and her Western magic training. And she wanted to stop hiding while she did it. Which is why the card was a problem. Coming out of a decade in the closet, with a Catholic father and hardcore conservative parents, goddess was about the last word she wanted on her front door. I can’t call myself that. Are you freaking kidding me? That’s what she said to her husband, who was sitting next to her reading his book. He kept reading. “Yeah, that’s the only thing you can call yourself.” And in that moment she made the decision that shaped everything after. She wasn’t going to hide the magic practitioner anymore, and she wasn’t going to make a big deal of it either. The business became Marketing Goddess. Her email signature read “bright blessings and massive success.” What came next is the part people in the online mentoring world already know in some form. Elizabeth became one of the first mentors of the high-ticket model back in 2008 and 2009, spent nearly two decades mentoring conscious entrepreneurs through the growth phase, up to six figures and beyond, and wrote the book Seven Figure Goddess. So we had her on Sacred Business Stories this week to trace the arc. The part most people don’t hear is how long the real work waited. At the very beginning, Elizabeth got a clear directive. She’s Wiccan, she took oaths, and as she tells it, the goddess tapped her on the shoulder: “You’re going to be a part of this movement to bring magic to the mainstream.” She figured business coaching was the on-ramp. But when she put the manifesting work front and center, two things surprised her. She was bored. And she got a second directive that she wasn’t done with the business coaching, because pieces of the reality creation work were still being learned through it. So she went back to it for another eight years. Only last year did the instruction change. Now’s the time to release the business coaching. It served its purpose. You’re the magic teacher from here on out. Applied to business. Nearly two decades between the directive and the green light. She used to tell her husband she felt like she was moving through mud. He told her she was like a tank. “No woman wants to be called a tank,” she said. Then he drew her a picture of one, because she does not stop. “I’m really grateful to myself for having that skill, and I’ll just put that on the altar for someone who wants to pick that one up.” Two things stood out from the conversation. The first was her answer when we asked about her essay on 100% responsibility, which she names as her top value. It means accepting 100% ownership of everything in your life, period. No exceptions, ever. She’s careful with it. It’s an edgy concept and she says so up front. Taking ownership is different from taking the blame for what other people do, and she’s not asking anyone to pretend systemic conditions don’t exist. The point is choice. As she put it, you go from being at effect to being at cause. Responsibility, the ability to respond. The second was a line she got from one of her NLP teachers. Information is just a rumor until it’s in the body. If you’ve spent years learning and your business still doesn’t reflect what you know, that line is for you. Her method for getting knowledge into the body is unglamorous. Regulate before the hard thing, regulate after, celebrate. Then make the action small. “Do the next small thing, because that starts to train your brain and your body that you can do the next thing and the next thing.” In her model, only the action that actually moves the outcome brings a creation from the non-physical to the physical. One piece of advice came up more than once, and she applies it to herself first. She does offers and messaging for a living and still hired help on her own message two months ago. There comes a point where you need to get the outside eyes. You really do. The reframe worth naming from her story is about time. Most of us would read eighteen years of business coaching as a long delay on the way to the real work. Elizabeth reads it as the training. “It’s okay to not have it look exactly like you think it’s going to look. It’s okay to take your time and develop the body of work that really matters while you are serving fully.” If you have a version of this, a body of work waiting while you do the work that pays, her story says the two aren’t in conflict. The waiting is where the work gets built. You can find Elizabeth’s book, Seven Figure Goddess, as a free download at 7figuregoddessbook.com [http://7figuregoddessbook.com/], and she’s now writing on Substack. She speaks mostly to people who feel like they’re at an income ceiling, whether they’re just starting out or sitting at $500K or a million. Catch the full replay. The responsibility section alone is worth the hour. Thank you Josh Woll [https://substack.com/profile/121213711-josh-woll], Jessica [https://substack.com/profile/227197080-jessica], and many others for tuning into Sacred Business Stories with Elizabeth Purvis [https://substack.com/profile/20439034-elizabeth-purvis] and Carolina Wilke [https://substack.com/profile/262727079-carolina-wilke]! Join me for my next live video in the app. Helping you get clear, get seen, and get paid by aligning who you are with how you show up, all while building a business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com [https://sacredbusiness.com/your-slug] on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version [https://www.sacredbusiness.com/sacred-business-stories/elizabeth-purvis-100-percent-responsibility], along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there [https://sacredbusiness.com]. Get full access to Sacred Business Flow at love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Sam Illingworth promised Slow AI would be free. Then his truth changed.

On July 1st of last year, Dr Sam Illingworth [https://substack.com/profile/253722705-dr-sam-illingworth] published the first post of Slow AI from his desk in Edinburgh and put a line in it that said he would never charge for the work. He was a tenured full professor with a PhD in atmospheric physics, a decade of public engagement behind him, a science & poetry blog that had peaked at a quarter-million views a year, and a past life as an award-winning playwright. He didn’t need this to pay for anything. What he wanted was simple. He wanted to give people honest, accessible information about AI at the exact moment the digital divide was about to widen. The problem with that opening promise was that he was about to spend twelve months learning everything he didn’t know about marketing, pricing, and what a paywall actually does for a creator’s ecosystem. His friend Mia Kiraki 🎭 [https://substack.com/profile/362428399-mia-kiraki] of Robot Stole My Homework, who he’d met through Substack, kept teasing him about it. He didn’t know what B2B meant until about six months before we recorded this episode . And the more he sat with that line in his first post, the less right it felt. “I think having the confidence to be able to realize that your truth can change with you as you evolve, that’s quite difficult to square.” Those were Sam’s words on the show. He said them about the day he decided to start charging for Slow AI. The irony is that the moment he changed his mind was the moment Slow AI started becoming what it is now. The part most people already know is the growth. Sixteen thousand subscribers in under a year. Just under three hundred of them paid at £100 a year. Paid members get access to a monthly webinar curriculum that ends in an accredited continuing professional development certificate, the kind you can write off as a tax expense or stack as actual credits. He runs a Slow AI Live every Monday with his friend from Exploring ChatGPT [https://substack.com/profile/119184925-exploring-chatgpt]. He just crossed a thousand followers on TikTok [https://www.tiktok.com/@theslowai], where he does investigative AI journalism. He’s also the author of Gen AI in Higher Education. So we had him on Sacred Business Stories this week to walk back through how he built it. The part most people don’t hear is what he had to change his mind about along the way. The arc starts long before Slow AI. PhD in atmospheric physics. Then years on the intersection of science and theater. Then a decade of using poetry to platform the voices of marginalized people in science. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, he saw the next problem coming. AI was going to widen the divide between those who had access and those who didn’t, and there weren’t many academic voices speaking about it in a way regular people could use. That was the gap Slow AI was built into. The decision to charge came after a hard internal conversation. What would a paid product even look like? Should it exist at all? He kept circling back to something he’d learned years earlier as a working poet. He used to do school workshops and talks for free until another poet told him that doing free work was taking paid work away from the people who needed it to be their living. Free, done by the people who didn’t need to charge, dilutes the field for everyone else. “There is more than enough room for everybody to succeed in everything.” That’s the line he kept coming back to. Once he stopped treating charging as the opposite of generosity, he found the structure that worked. £100 for the year. £25 for the month. He set the annual rate to filter for subscribers who’d stay locked in for the full curriculum, not subscribers cycling out at month two. Two things stood out from the conversation. The first was the line he said about evolving. “Your truth can change with you as you evolve.” That’s a pricing story on the surface. There’s a wider permission slip underneath. Most people who start a publication put something in writing on day one and feel locked in by it. They build a brand around the version of themselves who wrote that first sentence. Sam’s experience says you’re allowed to write a line in July, learn for nine months, and rewrite it. The product gets more clear and refined. The audience gets established. The first promise was a messy first draft in a sense. The second was a daily practice he described for staying connected at sixteen thousand subscribers. Two habits, every day. One restack of someone outside his usual bubble, because the Substack feed mostly shows you the people you already engage with and the algorithm needs to be pushed back against. One thank-you note to a creator whose work he wants to platform. He’s honest that this got harder past five thousand subscribers and harder again past ten. The practice is still there, deliberate, against the grain of what the algorithm wants to feed him. The shift Sam made between the first post and the sixteen-thousandth subscriber is worth bringing attention to. He stopped treating service and money as opposites. He realized that charging was a way of not diluting service for everyone else who had to make a living from this. The audience that locked in for a year at £100 was the most invested audience he’d ever built. Which reframes one of the most stubborn beliefs in the creator economy. That authenticity and strategy pull in opposite directions. Sam’s twelve months say they pull in the same one. Again, in my opinion, the most strategic thing he did was charge fairly. The most authentic thing he did was change his mind in public. You can find Sam at Slow AI on Substack, on TikTok at @theslowai [https://www.tiktok.com/@theslowai], and at samillingworth.com [https://samillingworth.com]. He speaks to academics, educators, and working professionals who want to make informed decisions about AI without being sold the latest prompt-engineering hack. If that’s you, the curriculum is built for you. Watch the full replay. I think you’ll love getting to know Sam. Thank you Sue Reid [https://substack.com/profile/121378676-sue-reid], Rachel Connor [https://substack.com/profile/43692040-rachel-connor], Des Kennedy [https://substack.com/profile/345899347-des-kennedy], Michele Gill [https://substack.com/profile/3160747-michele-gill], Claire Machado [https://substack.com/profile/168845660-claire-machado], and many others for tuning into Sacred Business Stories Episode 44 [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/s/sacred-business-stories] with Dr Sam Illingworth [https://substack.com/profile/253722705-dr-sam-illingworth] and Carolina Wilke [https://substack.com/profile/262727079-carolina-wilke]! Helping you get clear, get seen, and get paid by aligning who you are with how you show up, all while building a business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com [https://sacredbusiness.com/your-slug] on May 27th, 2026. You can find the canonical version [https://www.sacredbusiness.com/slow-ai-sam-illingworth], along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there [https://sacredbusiness.com]. Get full access to Sacred Business Flow at love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Why Most Creators Don't Know About This Until It's Too Late

This week we talked with Matt Brown [https://substack.com/profile/420828413-matt-brown], and here’s the thing… we allowed ourselves to go a bit off-script. Matt runs a boutique email performance agency. He helps entrepreneurs make sure their emails actually land in inboxes instead of spam. It sounds dry. But oh so important. Most first-time creators don’t think about deliverability until they have a problem. They build an audience, they send emails, and suddenly half their emails are landing in promotions or they’re getting spam complaints they don’t understand. By then, the damage is harder to undo. Matt is the person you call when that happens. I’ve called him. When we were moving our list from ActiveCampaign over to Kit and connecting it with Substack, when we needed to understand what was actually happening with our email health, and that’s when I reached out. What makes Matt different is that he can explain something genuinely technical and boring and make it clear. He doesn’t overcomplicate it. He doesn’t hide behind jargon. He just says: here’s what’s happening, here’s why it matters, here’s what you do about it. What We Talked About We went deep on how email performance actually works. Not the copywriting part. Not the psychology. The mechanics. The infrastructure. The stuff that determines whether your best email ever written lands where people can see it or disappears into the void. We talked about: * Why your sender reputation matters more than most people realize * What happens when you import a list incorrectly (and how to catch it) * How to keep your email health strong as you scale * What to look for if your deliverability starts dropping * Why the platforms you choose (ActiveCampaign, Kit, Substack, whatever) have different capabilities for protecting that health The conversation was technical. But it was also practical. Matt has built his entire business around the reality that most founders and creators don’t know this stuff exists until they need it. Why You Should Listen If you’re building an audience and you send email, this is relevant. Not because you need to become an email infrastructure expert. But because you need to understand the baseline. You need to know when something’s off before it becomes a crisis. Matt also has a gift for making complex things sound simple. That’s rare. And if you ever hit a deliverability wall, you’ll want to know who to call. He’s building at deliverabilitynow.com [https://deliverabilitynow.com]. Subscribe to his newsletter. It’s good. Helping you get clear, get seen, and get paid by aligning who you are with how you show up, all while building a business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. Get full access to Sacred Business Flow at love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Billy Broas: Marketing is an argument, not a fight

So, Billy Broas [https://substack.com/profile/18366571-billy-broas] was on Sacred Business Stories [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/s/sacred-business-stories] with us this week. For context, Billy is the guy who supported the creation our messaging foundation for Sacred Business Flow back when we were too close to it to see it ourselves. Author of Simple Marketing for Smart People. Creator of the Five Lightbulbs framework, which we still apply almost daily. He just launched a new Substack called Fractal Faith, and the conversation we had with him went somewhere I wasn’t expecting. Most marketing conversations stay in tactics. This one started in tactics for about six minutes and then went somewhere I rarely hear marketers willing to go. Billy uses a metaphor early on about fish, water, and what we’ve all been swimming in without realizing. I’d heard him use the metaphor before, but the way he applied it to the entire marketing industry stopped me. Where he takes it from there is the part I want you to hear from him directly. He also names a single question, near the end, that he says will tell you whether your marketing is crossing a line or not. One question. He gives it to you in a simple sentence you can sit with for yourself. Carolina said something in this conversation I had almost forgotten about her. She confessed she rejected marketing entirely for the first three years of her previous business. Why she changed her mind, and what she heard from Billy that supported her own growth, is a pretty nice moment in the episode. And there’s a story Billy tells about leaving his energy industry job at twenty-nine, expecting his side business to take off. What actually happened next, and the phrase he uses to describe that in-between place, is worth pressing play for if you are feeling stalled out right now. Another fun surprise connection was hearing about Brian Clark [https://substack.com/profile/18025426-brian-clark]’s influence on Billy’s journey, after just having him on the show a few weeks ago. The whole thing runs about fifty-five minutes. If you’ve ever caught yourself avoiding marketing because something about it felt off, or you’ve quietly wondered whether there’s a way to do this work without giving up your dignity or theirs, this is the conversation for you. For more from billy, check out his new substack at Fractal Faith and marketingisanargument.com [https://www.marketingisanargument.com/] Phil (& Carolina) Helping you get clear, get seen, and get paid by aligning who you are with how you show up, all while building a business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. Thank you Josh Woll [https://substack.com/profile/121213711-josh-woll], Prof. Barbara Bernier [https://substack.com/profile/2398139-prof-barbara-bernier], Marvin L Mitchell [https://substack.com/profile/293792476-marvin-l-mitchell], and many others for tuning into Sacred Business Stories [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/s/sacred-business-stories] with Billy Broas [https://substack.com/profile/18366571-billy-broas] and Carolina Wilke [https://substack.com/profile/262727079-carolina-wilke]! This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com [https://sacredbusiness.com/billy-bross-marketing-is-an-argument] on May 5, 2026. You can find the canonical version [https://sacredbusiness.com/billy-bross-marketing-is-an-argument], along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work there. Get full access to Sacred Business Flow at love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Leo Babauta conversation we almost didn't publish

So here’s what happened. We sat down with Leo Babauta [https://substack.com/profile/240519-leo-babauta] last week. About twenty-five minutes came through in the replay. The first fifteen didn’t. Substack swallowed the opening. Honestly, I was pretty gutted, and I sat with the recording for a few days wondering whether to share the replay at all. Then I caught myself. This was a conversation about beginning before you’re ready and shipping the imperfect thing. And I was about to scrap it because the recording wasn’t perfect lol. Honestly, Leo’s been someone I’ve considered a friend for years now. So here it is. Imperfect, missing the opening, but still some great food for thought, as Leo is one of the wisest dudes I know. I listen to what this guy has to say, and you should too. A few things from this conversation I think are worth drawing attention to: There’s a moment where Leo names a particular trap AI is setting for ambitious people, and and interesting framing. He calls Claude his “best cheerleader.” Why he frames that as a problem is the part you should check out. Carolina asked him about fear and resistance. He answered with a sewing project he’s been working on for years. (Yes, sewing.) Where he took that, and how he tied it back to his own Substack, was also a great moment worth watching. And toward the end, he answered a question about growth in a way you might not quite expect from someone who’s built the audience he has. The line started with “growth is a loaded topic for a lot of people.” The whole thing runs about twenty-seven minutes. If you’ve ever caught yourself opening twelve tabs because Claude told you all twelve ideas were brilliant, this one’s for you. Phil (& Carolina) Thank you Josh Woll [https://substack.com/profile/121213711-josh-woll], Noelle Richards [https://substack.com/profile/350223153-noelle-richards], Rebecca Weston [https://substack.com/profile/132718831-rebecca-weston], Inge van de Graaf [https://substack.com/profile/324346859-inge-van-de-graaf], Claire Machado [https://substack.com/profile/168845660-claire-machado], and many others for tuning into Sacred Business Stories with Leo Babauta [https://substack.com/profile/240519-leo-babauta] and Carolina Wilke [https://substack.com/profile/262727079-carolina-wilke]! Helping you get clear, get seen, and get paid by aligning who you are with how you show up, all while building a business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. Get full access to Sacred Business Flow at love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]