Breaking the Chains of my Business
How I'm Becoming Intentional about my Creation
This week, I wanted to celebrate the milestone transition that I’m moving through in the structure of my business. I’m in the process of moving from being a Sole Trader to the Director my own registered Company. Wow.
After seven years built on survival mode, I feel ready to set intentional new foundations for my work in the world.
When I started Writing & Thriving, in 2019 - and especially when I went full-time and fully online in 2020 - my primary question was, ‘how can I get paid?’ My approach to running my own business was, like many of the working-class women I know, based on the only relationship to work I’d ever had. Money came from outside. Someone else determined my worth. And my value was based on the amount of service I could perform for others.
I’ve pushed a lot of edges in my life. Doing things that most people who grew up in the culture and conditions I was born into never do. I left school early and starting working, then went back to college and University to become one of a handful of people from my year group in my all-girls school to get a degree.
That shifted me up into the middle classes, and spent the first decade of my working career as a teacher, teaching English in UK secondary schools. The burnout and trauma from that role was real - but I felt duty-bound to stick with it, I thought the problem was me. If only I could figure out how to do everything better, I’d be the person I thought I should be.
It took getting married, briefly, to realise that I really wasn’t made for that conventional life - and so, at my first Saturn Return, I left it all behind.
I tried teaching yoga (I was terrible), and ended up drifting back into teaching jobs to pay the bills. It wasn’t until the pandemic - just as I was completing my PhD, after returning to University in my late thirties - that I truly had no other choice. With no job and no furlough to support me, I had to support myself.
I’d already started teaching journaling workshops to a small group of women in my coastal community, but I had no idea how to make that pay the bills. I started copywriting for spiritual and creative entrepreneurs, online, and - somehow - month by month, I made it by.
That’s also when I began working with Nicola, my first book coaching client, and I realised that I loved supporting other creative visionaries with bringing their books into being.
I’ve always worked with words as vibration, frequency, the intentionally woven threads that create the fabric of our lives. Helping people to bring their revolutionary ideas and visionary voices into the world to share with others - in ways that inspire and uplift people, and can even motivate a movement - is a gift and a privilege that I don’t take lightly.
Me, with just some of the books I’ve helped Visionary Authors to create!
By the end of last year, I counted over 50 authors whose words I’ve helped bring into the world.
As my coaching business has grown - mostly through referrals and word of mouth, with very little social media or marketing on my part, for which I’m truly grateful - I have also grown and evolved. Not always easily. Starting and running my own business has been one of the toughest challenges of my wholly unconventional life. Right up there with the PhD… I had no roadmap, no role models, and no f*cking idea what I was doing. Most of the time. I also, always, hired good coaches to mentor me, and that has been one of the secret sauces of my success. There’s nothing like investing everything you have in yourself to find out what you’re made of!
So, approaching the end of the tax year in Britain, I’m preparing to create a solid foundation and intentional structure for my business as a registered company.
And I thought I’d be ready to celebrate.
But when my certificate of incorporation arrived this week, I took one look at it and was mortified.
Because, right there at the top of the page was that god-awful symbol - the one with the Lion and the Unicorn. Where the unicorn is - I kid you not, if you haven’t seen it - chained up and subdued by the roaring lion. I could not bear to have that symbol of submission associated with my work in the world. And I wondered, what kind of institution have I stepped into? What encoded beliefs and behaviours am I perpetuating by aligning myself with THIS?
The answers to which are patently obvious to anyone with a conscience who is concerned about equity, sovereignty, and decolonisation. Everything about the british institution is inexorably bound up with capitalism, colonialism and patriarchal worldviews. The violence of this silencing and oppression has wrought untold damage on people, cultures, and communities across the world - including here at home. The suppression of the working classes, the burning of the witches, and capture of land by the wealthy go back centuries and shape the national psyche.
It’s sick.
And I don’t want to be a part of that.
But I am. I cannot escape the situatedness of my specific existence, and both the privileges and traumas that come with that.
I could do something though.
When I mentioned my dilemma to a friend and writing client who is an intuitive channel - her book is coming soon, folks - she invited me into a reframe. She asked, what if I create a new visual design, where the unicorn is NOT chained up, and I set the new standard for my business.
So, I spent a little while chatting with Google Gemini, and created this!
New Company Registration Logo for Writing & Thriving. Witchy edition.
Let’s be clear. Creating a wacky new graphic does not change the reality of the world in which we live, nor does it alter the fact that my company is now registered as part of the system.
What it did was this: It changed my relationship with my business, and the way I show up in my business within the system. It set a new intentional frequency for what I am creating, where I get to lead with my values, passions, and principles.
And it set this out visually, so that I can be reminded of my vision every day.
With this image, I’m reminded of my responsibility to lead with ethics and integrity, question the assumptions that I may otherwise take for granted, and work co-creatively towards collective liberation and equity.
I’m building this new version of Writing & Thriving, and myself, on the following foundation:
Collective Liberation based on the principles of Sufficiency, Sovereignty & Co-Creativity
What the symbol also gives me is a reminder to bring the fun and playfulness back into my life and business. So I’m intentionally embodying these qualities:
Freedom, Fun, Creativity, Playfulness, Ritual, Ceremony, Ancient Wisdom, Future-Facing, Visibility, Joy.
And I’m committed to replacing my old, habitual beliefs and behaviours with these instead:
Connection, Collaboration, Community, Co-Creation, Passion, Pleasure, Power, Purpose, Play, Expansion, Liberation, Visibility, Abundance, Flow, Gratitude, Joy, Love, Generosity.
I’ve also noticed how often I talk myself out of my own creativity, believing I have to prioritise other things. This feels like an inheritance of suffering I am no longer willing to bear.
Breaking that habit feels hard, though. And it’s laced with grief. So I’m being tender with myself - while also committing to come out writing every day…
And if you’d like to design your own business incorporation symbol, feel free to adapt the prompt I used:
“It is the british crest - the one with the chained unicorn. But the unicorn is unchained. The lion is a lioness. The aesthetic is English Magic / Pagan / Celtic. The writing on the shield says ‘Liberation for All’. They are dancing, like the Strength card in the Tarot. There’s an infinity symbol and a flower garland instead of a crown. It’s feminine, and femme. Inclusive and ritualistic. Ancient and contemporary. thanks.”
I’d love to hear how this lands for you! Please leave a comment below.
With 3I Atlas making its final pass of the Earth, in conjunction with Jupiter and Sirius in Cancer this week - it’s a powerful time to call in the collaboration of Ancient Wisdom and Future Facing Vision.
And with Saturn and Neptune’s recent conjunction at 0 Aries being reactivated by the Sun on the Equinox, NOW is a potent time for creating the new foundations for your revolutionary work in the world.
