Your weekly dose of Alluviance!
There’s a common piece of advice people give to aspiring startup founders:
If you can not start the company, don’t.
Because once you start, you’re in it.
It will ask more from you than you think.
And if you don’t have real conviction, it will spit you out.
The inner work deserves the same warning.
If you can avoid it, avoid it.
Hit quota. Chase the title. Stay busy. Call the anxiety “ambition.” Keep telling yourself the next milestone is the one that will finally let you exhale.
There are worse ways to live.
But if you start asking real questions, the game changes.
Not inspirational quote questions.
Real ones.
- Why am I so afraid of slowing down?
- Why do I perform confidence when I actually feel terrified?
- Why does one bad sales call send me into a full identity spiral?
- Why do I say I want freedom, then keep building a life that requires me to abandon myself?
That’s when the trouble starts.
Because once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it.
You can still run it.
But now you know.
That’s the annoying part.
The inner work doesn’t magically make you peaceful.
Sometimes it makes you more uncomfortable.
This is why I don’t think inner work is for everyone.
Not because some people are better than others.
Because some people don’t actually want the responsibility of seeing clearly.
And that’s okay.
But for the ones who do…
There is a different kind of life available.
Not easier. Not softer.
Not using spirituality to disappear from ambition. Not using ambition to outrun the pain.
Something else.
More true. More connected.
So consider this a proper warning.
If you can say no to the inner work, say no.
But if some part of you already knows…
If the mask is getting heavy… If the old game is still working on paper but not in your soul…
Then welcome 🤝
You’re probably one of us.
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2. Quote to fuel your Alluviance:
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." — Carl Jung