Get Intimate With Your Business

One of the greatest love affairs of your lifetime will be with your business.

Think about the loves that have shaped you most. A marriage that has weathered seasons and emerged deeper for it. The slow, faithful work of becoming who you are meant to be. The devotion and deep work required to reveal who you are and fall in love with yourself. These loves share something in common. They are not always easy. They are not always joyful. They require presence, patience, forgiveness and an unwavering decision to stay. Your relationship with your business is no different. It belongs among these great loves and if you treat it that way, it will be a journey of a lifetime.

A long time ago, I made a decision that changed everything. I decided to treat my business like a great love affair. Not a transaction. Not a chase. Not a means to an end. A relationship. A living, breathing, feeling entity that I was choosing consciously, completely and for the long haul. 

I took on the mindset of building something lasting. A lifelong relationship that would undoubtedly have its highs and lows, its seasons of abundance and its seasons of rebuilding. I embodied the woman who would commit to seeing it through, so that it could become a tale that would outlive me and provide a stunning example that inspired many.

What I did not expect was how much it would teach me about love itself.

The Parallels No One Talks About

Here is what I know to be true: how we show up in our most intimate relationships is almost always how we show up in business. The same wounds. The same patterns. The same self-sabotage dressed in different clothing.

Think about what it feels like to be with someone whose eyes are always somewhere else.

You are sitting across from them at dinner and they are scrolling through someone else’s highlight reel. You are sharing something vulnerable and they are already comparing your story to another. You give them everything you have and it never feels like enough, because their attention is split. Always half here, always half somewhere more exciting, more successful, more appealing.

How does that feel? Unseen. Undervalued. Like no matter what you do, you will never measure up to the version of love they have constructed in their minds.

Your business feels exactly the same way.

When you lust over another woman’s business model, her audience, her revenue, her aesthetic, while yours is right here, showing up for you every single day, your business feels it. It feels like it is never enough. Like all you do is compare it to others. Like you do not have eyes only for it. A business that does not trust its owner will contract. It stagnates. It stops surprising you with its potential because you have made it feel like it has none.

The business does not trust you. It feels like you are one foot out the door at all times and you wonder why it is not growing the way you imagined.

The Behaviors We Do Not Examine

We lust over others.

We compare obsessively.

We fixate on what is not working versus what is.

We get lazy and take it for granted.

We stop trying the way we did at the beginning.

We get resentful that it is not what we imagined.

We blame it for not doing enough.

There is also this one. The one we rarely admit to.

We disappear.

We leave for days, sometimes weeks. We neglect it, ignore it, avoid it. We come rushing back expecting it to greet us at the door like a dog who has been waiting loyally, tail wagging, completely forgiving, ready to give us everything again.

Sometimes it does. A business, like love, can be remarkably resilient.

Resilience is not the same as thriving. Showing up only when it is convenient is not the same as commitment.

A dog who only ever sees you when you decide to show up will love you, but it will also carry the anxiety of not knowing when you are coming back. It will never fully settle. Never fully trust. Never fully open.

Your business is no different.

I go deep on this conversation inside House of Her a membership for women who are ready to lead their businesses with fresh perspective, full presence and a standard that makes the whole thing feel as good as it looks. The patterns we bring to our businesses are exactly what we excavate there.

What It Looks Like to Love It Right

The greatest love stories, the ones that move us to tears in darkened theatres, the ones we carry with us for years, are not great because they were easy.

They are great because the people chose each other through the hardship. They remembered why they fell in love in the first place. They deepened their devotion precisely because of what they overcame, not in spite of it.

What if you decided to love your business that way?

To be as devoted to it in the slow season as you are in the season of overflow. To nurture it and flirt with its potential. To pour belief over it so completely that success and growth became inevitable, not because the market shifted or you went viral, but because you never stopped believing in what you were building.

What if you made it all right? Every chapter. Every pivot. Every moment it did not perform the way you projected.

What if instead of making your business wrong, you chose to love it forward?

The Invitation

I recorded an entire podcast episode on this because I believe it is one of the most important conversations a female founder can have and almost no one is having it. We talk about strategy, systems, scaling. We rarely talk about the relationship with your business. Listen to the episode of Iconic Podcast here. 

I also shared a version of this on Instagram that sparked one of the most vulnerable conversations I have ever witnessed in a comments section. Women admitting they had been abandoning their businesses for years without realizing it. That they were treating their business through the eyes of lust, comparison, not good enough or resentment. Not through love, compassion, devotion and respect. 

Here is what I want you to sit with:

The business you keep waiting to fall in love with? It has been waiting for you to come home.

It holds your fingerprints. Your original vision. Your most audacious dreams. It has survived every season you have put it through and it is still here, still breathing, still full of potential, asking only one thing of you.

Choose it. With your whole heart. With your full presence. With the same tenderness and fire you would offer the greatest love of your life.

A Few Questions Worth Taking Seriously

How would you soften in your approach if you looked at your business through the eyes of love?

How would you forgive it for the seasons it did not perform?

How would you lead it differently if you trusted that it trusted you back?

What would it mean for your business and your life if you decided that this was, in fact, the love story you came here to tell?

Build your intimacy with your business by writing the next chapter of your blockbuster. Expect hardship. Expect seasons. Expect to be changed by what you are building. Know that the deepest rewards of entrepreneurship are reserved for the women who refuse to walk away.

It really does get to be this wonderful. If you allow it to be.

Jen | CEO + Founder, Becoming Iconic® | Editor-in-Chief, ICONIC Magazine®*

To go deeper on the relationship between how you love and how you lead, send me a message. I would love to hear how this shifted something in you.