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Why wanting more money doesn’t make you less ethical

Why wanting more money doesn’t make you less ethical

by | Jul 21, 2026 | Business Growth, Conscious business, Mindset

Why wanting more money doesn't make you less ethical

Have you ever noticed yourself wanting to say something in a newsletter or a piece of content and stopping yourself because you think that some members of your audience might not like it?

I have. Multiple times.

Over the years, I’ve noticed myself censoring different parts of my message because I was afraid they would be off-putting for some people in my audience.

Years ago, this happened around planning and goals. I stopped talking about them as much because I got pushback from people for whom planning felt too rigid or too structured, and rather than root into the fact that planning, strategy and goal-setting have been a huge part of my own success, I softened that part of my message to make myself more palatable.

It took me years to realise I was doing it.

And once I saw it, it was immediately obvious that I had been suppressing a huge part of who I am, how I run my business and what I know actually helps my ideal clients move forward.

More recently, I’ve realised I’ve been doing the same thing with something else.

Money.

Wanting money. Setting financial goals. Naming income desires. Talking honestly about ambition. Talking about the connection between impact and income. Talking about the financial results I’ve created in my own business and the results I’ve supported my clients to create in theirs. Talking about the money stories that keep so many conscious business owners undercharging, overgiving and struggling financially.

And I think I’ve avoided talking about it as directly as I want to because I know that some people in my audience will be uncomfortable with it. But here’s my truth:

I’ve always been ambitious about money. I want to have enough money to live in a beautiful home, put my kids through college, help out loved ones, give generously to causes I care about, take care of my health and invest in my personal and professional development.

I want choice, agency and spaciousness. I want to be well-resourced. I want to be able to make decisions from a place of ease and stability rather than fear and scarcity.

And I want the same for my clients.

But for some reason, I’ve rarely talked about that part of myself explicitly.

I can talk about putting people before profit and service over sales all day long, because those are deeply held values for me and they always will be. I can talk about ethical marketing, relationship-building, integrity, trust and being of service without hesitation.

But what I’ve neglected to talk about explicitly is that those principles do not mean you have to struggle financially.

They do not mean you have to undercharge, overgive, stay exhausted, avoid growth or quietly hope that your needs will somehow get met if you just keep being a good and generous person.

Because here’s what I know to be true.

You can be ethical in how you run your business and make a really good income. You can care deeply about your clients and still be well paid. You can reject manipulative sales tactics and still sell out your offers. You can put service at the centre of your work and still want your business to generate more money than you personally need, so that you have more power, choice and capacity to do good with it.

And I think avoiding that conversation keeps us stuck.

I think too many conscious business owners have absorbed the idea that wanting more money is somehow wrong. As if ambition is automatically greedy. As if having wealth is automatically unethical. As if the only way to prove that we care is to keep ourselves under-resourced.

And I just don’t believe that.

In fact, I think it’s ideas like these that keep brilliant, caring, talented people exhausted, underpaid and constantly questioning whether they can ever do enough to earn enough without compromising who they are.

Now I know that there will be members of my audience who will say, “I don’t do what I do for the money,” or “money isn’t what motivates me,” and that is absolutely fine.

I’m not suggesting that money needs to be your primary motivation or that your work should become all about income. For many of us, myself included, the deeper motivation is impact, service, contribution, liberation, healing, justice, freedom and love.

But personally, I am done pretending that money does not matter.

Because it matters when you want to take care of your family. It matters when you need dental or health care. It matters when you get an unexpected bill. It matters when you want or need to rest without financial worry. It matters when you want to get support, give support, invest in your own growth or contribute to the growth of others.

I also think it matters when you want to do this work for a long time and for a lot of people, because making sure you are financially sustained allows you to have a greater impact for longer.

And for me, this is where the next evolution of my work is going.

Not away from integrity or ethical marketing. Not away from service, care or relationship based business.

But towards a fuller conversation about what becomes possible when we stop treating ambition like a dirty word and allow our desire for more income to sit alongside integrity and ethics.

Because I want to work with people who care deeply about doing business differently and who are also ready to own their ambitions and desires.

I want to work with people who want their work to have impact and for their business to be successful. People who are ready for more income, more stability, more spaciousness and more agency because they understand that being properly sustained is what makes the work possible.

And if that puts some people off, I’m learning to be okay with that. Because the more honest I am about what I believe, the more clearly the right people can recognise themselves in my work and the more clearly the people who aren’t aligned can opt out. Which, of course, is how it should be.

So I’m curious to know if you see yourself in this. If maybe you too have been quietly denying your ambition, or minimising your desire for more income because you’re afraid that wanting more makes you greedy, unethical, materialistic or somehow less devoted to your work.

If so, I want you to know that I see you. And I think your desire for more might be asking you to expand your perspective of what’s possible.

I think it might be asking you to stop building a business around survival and start building one that is capable of supporting you, your life and your ability to have huge impact. 

I’d love to know if this resonates. Let me know in the comments.

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

 

The power of momentum

The power of momentum

by | May 19, 2026 | Conscious business, Content creation

The power of momentum

Lately, life has been full on with the type of projects that can become all consuming when you get into them. 

Because of that writing this kept getting pushed back and my usual publish date came and went. In other times, I would probably just have given up on the idea and promised myself that I’ll get back to it next week.

But for some reason, this time I couldn’t let it go. And so here I am on a Friday lunchtime writing it. Not from discipline. Not from summoning the effort to push through. But because somewhere in the middle of all of it, writing this was just there in the background. Ever present. Sort of inevitable. Much like a scratch I had to itch. 

And I’ve realised that’s the power of momentum.

I’ve been consistently writing these past few months, and what I’ve noticed is that getting to this level of consistency has changed my actual experience of writing.

Rather than feeling like something I have to gear myself up for or even remember to do. It now lives in my week. It’s almost as if the task is a blinking light calling for my attention.

I often find myself writing in my mind. So much so that the writing, when I sit down to do it, tends to come more easily because in some sense it has already happened in my head.

When I contrast that with periods where I’ve let several weeks pass without writing content, it often disappears from my mind entirely. And when I eventually return to it, the whole thing feels like a huge effort. I’ve realised that the resistance isn’t about the task, it’s actually more to do with starting over again. 

And here’s the thing I find interesting.

The effort involved isn’t spread evenly across the task of writing a piece of content. The bulk of it lives in the starting. Getting back to something after a gap, picking up a practice that’s fallen by the wayside, sitting down to write when you’ve got out of the habit of writing. That’s where almost all of the friction is. Once you’re in motion, continuing is actually the easy part. 

I think a lot about momentum in this context, because it’s something that has derailed me more times than I care to admit. 

We tend to think of momentum as something that requires the discipline to keep following through. Something we create and maintain through effort. But what I’ve observed, both in my own work and with my clients, is that momentum in business is less about discipline and more about rhythm.

The activities that create clients, showing up with content, reaching out, staying in relationship with your audience, work in exactly this way. When you have a rhythm with them, they become self-sustaining to a surprising degree. You don’t have to rebuild the motivation each time. The motion itself carries you forward. The practice pulls rather than pushes.

But when there’s a gap, a week becomes two, two becomes a month, something shifts. And it’s not just the lost visibility, though that matters too. It’s that you’ve put the brakes on. And now you have to begin again, which is where almost all of the effort lives.

This is why I’m so interested in the idea of rhythm rather than consistency as a goal.

Consistency, as a concept, tends to put the emphasis on the output. Did you do it or not? Rhythm puts the emphasis on the relationship between you and the work. And it’s that relationship that determines whether the task pulls you towards it or it requires your pushing to begin.

Building a rhythm with your marketing, with your newsletter, your content, your outreach, isn’t just a strategy for staying visible. It’s the thing that makes staying visible feel sustainable. Because once you have it, the momentum is partly doing the work for you.

And once you lose it, no amount of pushing will feel the same as simply staying in motion. Which is why when I considered skipping this and restarting my momentum next week, I thought better of it. 

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

 

The two things that create steady client flow

The two things that create steady client flow

by | Apr 28, 2026 | Client Creation, Connection, Conscious business, Relationship

The two things that create steady client flow

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’ll know that the two main levers I talk about when it comes to getting clients are content and outreach.

I’ve written about and taught both extensively, and over the last few years I’ve run in-depth programs on each of these topics.

But something I realised recently is that I haven’t really spoken about the interplay between them.

And when I look at the advice out there more broadly, it often feels like it’s split into one camp or the other. On one side, content is everything. The advice is to show up consistently, build an audience, and clients will come. On the other, I hear that content is largely a waste of time and that what really matters is networking, outreach and conversations.

And I myself have been exposed to both sides of this.

Over a decade ago when I worked with my first business coach, he actively told me to stop writing content altogether and focus purely on outreach. And to be fair, to a large extent, it worked. I got clients.

But what I also noticed was that everything depended on me being actively in conversation all the time. The moment I stopped, things would slow down.

A few years later I started following a coach who talked a lot about the importance of creating content and I made a commitment to creating content consistently. It wasn’t until I started creating content consistently alongside regular outreach that my business really began to grow in a more stable way.

Because here’s what I’ve realised: both are required to have a consistent flow of new people coming into your world.

And that’s because content does something that outreach alone can’t.

It makes you more visible and allows people outside of your existing network to find you, to spend time with your thinking, to understand your perspective before they ever speak to you. It helps you to demonstrate expertise and builds familiarity and trust at a distance. Articles I wrote as long as 7 years ago are still sending traffic to my website and converting into clients.

And by the same token, outreach does something that content alone can’t.

It turns that awareness into relationship. It creates trust and space for real conversation and for someone to feel seen and supported in a way that simply isn’t possible through content alone.

When I look at my own client base, and the data I’ve tracked over the years, most people don’t come to me directly from a post or a piece of content.

They come through a person.

A colleague who recommends me. A former client who shares my work. Someone who mentions me in a space I’m not even in.

But when those people land in my world, they will typically head to my blog and/or subscribe to my newsletter and then it’s my content that does the heavy lifting. It helps them understand how I think, how I work, and whether what I offer is right for them.

Something that happens often is that I’ll get on a working together call with someone who has completed the application form on my 1:1 coaching page and they say that they heard about me from someone in my network. When we talk, they’ll say something like so-and-so told me about you and then I found your blog and binge read all of your articles or I joined your newsletter and have read every single one of your letters since. It’s not uncommon for people to tell me that they had already decided they wanted to work with me before even speaking to me. 

So you can see, it’s never been one or the other. It’s always been both.

And more than that, it’s how those two things feed each other.

Content gives you something to be known for and something to share your message. It creates touchpoints and entry points into your world. It’s a place to share your approach and point of view. For me it has also become a resource, a body of work. In effect, my intellectual property.

Outreach keeps you close to real people. It shapes what you say, who you say it to, and opens the door to the conversations where clients, collaborations and opportunities are actually created. Not sure what type of conversations you should be having, you can read about the 4 types of conversation I recommend here. 

Don’t know who to reach out to? Look at who’s paying attention to your content. Don’t know what to create content on? Look at what people are saying in your conversations.

When one of those drops away, you’re missing something important.

When both are present, but inconsistent, it can feel like you’re doing a lot and not getting very far.

And when both are working together, in a way you can actually sustain, that’s when things start to feel very different.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, particularly in the context of what creates steadier, more predictable client flow over time. Not more effort, not more noise, but a way of connecting with people that has them trusting you enough to buy from you.

I’m curious which side you’ve found yourself leaning towards.

Have you been focusing more on content or more on connection? And what have you noticed as a result? Let me know in the comments. 

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

 

The change that gave me my time back

The change that gave me my time back

by | Apr 21, 2026 | Big picture, Conscious business, Planning, Productivity, Sustainability

The change that gave me my time back

Last year I was exhausted in my business. For all my talk of ideal schedules and operating a life first business, I had reached a point where I felt seriously stretched.

My days consisted of bouncing from zoom call to zoom call, with very little time to actually work on my business, plan or rest. And even when there was space in my calendar, rather than use it to do strategic work or create content, I simply collapsed on the sofa with an episode of my favourite Netflix show.

Client delivery had spilled across my entire week and my previously protected call free Fridays had become a distant memory. As awful as it is to admit, I had started to feel a sense of dread before opening up my calendar each day.

It’s funny looking back because I didn’t really realise that I’d reached that point until I took on an additional assistant to help me with scheduling and inbox management. We both saw pretty quickly how difficult it was for her to find space in my calendar to schedule anything and how, despite a really great system for managing my inbox, it failed because I still didn’t have the time to deal with emails that had been flagged as a priority.

Before that point, I had assumed it was just me, that I was somehow not working hard enough, but hearing from someone else that yes, your schedule and inbox are packed, was deeply validating and made me realise that it was time for a serious change.

That change was super simple.

I switched from yearlong group programs with weekly live calls to yearlong group programs with twice monthly calls.

That simple shift has changed everything for me.

I’ve been able to recommit to my call-free Content Mondays and my call-free CEO Fridays.

I was able to get back to scheduling all of my client delivery work on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and, with live program calls only twice a month, I now have large chunks of focused work space in my calendar on my group program free weeks.

With my new business model well underway I have to tell you, I can’t believe I didn’t make this change sooner. Now when I look at my calendar, I typically have a slightly heavier program and delivery week followed by a lighter delivery week. On those lighter weeks, I have large chunks of uninterrupted focused work time.

This is allowing me to work on Thinkific courses. It’s also allowed me to maintain my weekly newsletter rhythm and enjoy it in the process. And it’s created space to do things like arrange a catch up with a good friend or go for a longer walk in nature on work days, because there is plenty of space in my calendar to do what needs to be done in my business.

And interestingly, with all of this space came a new challenge.

For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t constrained by a packed calendar or back to back calls.

I actually had time to work on the business instead of in it. And what I noticed quite quickly is that having time and using it wisely are two very different things.

There have been days where I’ve sat down to work and felt overwhelmed by the options of what to focus on, and other days where I’ve had the space to go really deep into a piece of work and get more done than I would have previously thought possible.

What having more space has forced me to do is get really intentional about how I work and what I focus on.

Without the structure of a full calendar telling me what to do next, I’ve had to make those decisions much more consciously. And that’s when I started to see something more clearly.

It’s not just about creating space. It’s about knowing how to use that space in a way that actually grows the business.

What’s one small tweak you could make to your weekly schedule that might have a big impact?

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

 

Why your income feels unpredictable

Why your income feels unpredictable

by | Mar 31, 2026 | Business Growth, Business model, Conscious business, Strategy, Sustainability

Why your income feels unpredictable

One of the hardest phases of business I’ve been through is what I call feast and famine. That is where you know your business works, to an extent, but income is completely unpredictable. It often feels like a game of chance. Not knowing when the next client or sale will come and just hoping it comes soon.

It was during that time that I often felt like there was some secret other business owners knew about that I had yet to discover. It’s in this space that I see so many business owners fall prey to manipulative strategies that promise to let you in on the secret that will magically bring about 10K months.

If you’re on my list there’s a good chance you’ve already called bullshit on those promises, or like many of the people I work with, perhaps you’ve spent thousands only to figure it out the hard way.

So here’s the thing. There is no secret or magic bullet, but there is what I call your “X”.

That is the lever you pull or the strategy you implement that does bring about more business.

I remember many years ago realising that I’d figured out that when I do more of my X, I get more clients.

My X might not look the same as your X, but they will have one thing in common: connection.

Because here’s the thing that I think on some level we understand but also often overlook.

Revenue follows connection.

Take a moment to let that sink in and feel into what that might mean for you.

For me, things finally started to fall into place in my business when I got consistent with two things: authentic outreach, keeping in touch with my network and having meaningful conversations, and writing long-form content, sharing my ideas and point of view on a regular basis in my newsletter and on my blog. Connection.

But here’s the part most people don’t talk about: there is a lag between connection and revenue.

As you’ll no doubt know, it’s not like we publish a post on Instagram and immediately get a client. It might take months of posting before we start getting any traction at all.

I remember committing to posting weekly blogs and it took nearly a year before people started applying for my coaching and telling me they had found me on Google.

And this lag creates two really common patterns.

1. People give up on or switch connection activities when they don’t see immediate results.

Or

2. They do it long enough to get results, sign a client or two, and then get so focused on delivery that they stop connecting altogether.

Income isn’t random. It follows behaviour. It follows how consistently we connect, how visible we are, how often we reach out.

Because there’s a lag, it’s very easy to misinterpret what’s happening. We stop connecting and nothing changes immediately, so we assume it’s fine. Or we start connecting and nothing changes immediately, so we assume it’s not working. But both of those interpretations are usually wrong.

Stability isn’t built in the week you feel motivated. It’s built in the months you keep going when nothing obvious seems to be happening yet. That doesn’t mean pushing beyond your capacity. It means choosing a rhythm you can realistically hold.

And that’s the part that’s hard. But it’s also the part that changes everything.

If your income has felt unpredictable lately, it might be worth looking back three months instead of three days. Where did connection slow down? Where did it stop entirely?

Because revenue follows connection. It just doesn’t do it instantly.

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

 

Behind the scenes of my personal business growth journey

Behind the scenes of my personal business growth journey

by | Feb 24, 2026 | Business Growth, Conscious business

Behind the scenes of my personal business growth journey

I recently found myself reflecting on my business journey within the context of my Sustainable Growth Framework, Root, Rise and Bloom, which I can assure you has been far from plain sailing.

Clients are often surprised when I share some of the ups and downs of my path, so I thought it might be helpful to tell a bit of that story here.

I didn’t start out as an entrepreneur. After university I was very career driven and spent well over a decade climbing the ladder in comms and project management in the charity sector.

When I decided to walk away from that career to become a life coach in 2012, I had very little idea how I was actually going to make money. I threw myself into blogging, which I loved, but after two years of not earning any money, it became clear that passion alone wasn’t going to sustain me.

That’s when I hired my first business coach.

I worked with him for around eight months, for the rather eye-watering price of $17k.

Crushing the Root stage

Looking back, that period was very much my Root stage, and a lot of what I teach today grew out of the work I did with that coach.

I was full of ideas and possibilities, but completely naive about what getting clients actually involved. One of the first things my coach had me do was fire a “client” I’d been coaching for free for two years. Imagine.

At the time I wanted to do it all. Write a book. Speak on stage. Host a retreat. Create an online course. Run a group programme. You name it, I wanted to do it.

But again and again, he brought me back to one thing: conversations.

In our weekly sessions, he would ask me to open my calendar and show him how many conversations I had booked. Gift sessions, virtual coffees, work together calls. If there were none, we focused on who I could reach out to and how to invite them into conversation.

During that time I ran a 77 Call Challenge, offering 77 free coaching sessions to people in my audience, which I had built through two years of blogging. That year was intense. I coached all day, every day, Monday to Friday. Some days I had five sessions back to back.

I learned an enormous amount. I honed my skills as a coach, deeply understood what people struggled with, and saw clearly what needed to be in place for real change to happen. I also gained paying clients.

That first year, I made 15k. At the time it felt disappointing, especially given the investment I’d made in support. But when I compared notes with others on my life coach training, I realised just how unusual it was to make anything at all in year one. I was the only trainee on my course with paying clients.

In hindsight, that was my Root stage in a nutshell. Focused. Relational. Built on conversations rather than offers. And crucially, it was where I figured out who I liked to work with and what kind of work I wanted to do.

Starting over

A few years later, after stopping work with that coach, I allowed the noise of the online world to creep back in. I was still making money, but it felt inconsistent and unreliable.

Around the same time, it became clear that life coaching wasn’t where my passion lay. Business coaching was. A realisation I wouldn’t have reached without all the coaching I’d done during Root.

In 2017, just months after my first son was born, I launched a completely new business.

2017 and 2018 were tough. I didn’t even track my income in 2017 because it was so small. 2018 became what I now call my burnout year. Hustling hard while being a stay-at-home mum to a baby took its toll. I even did VA work on the side to cover my share of the bills.

At the time it felt like failing. Looking back, it was pivotal.

This was the stage where things weren’t falling apart, but they weren’t stable either. I had proof that my work mattered, but not the consistency to relax into it.

Transitioning to Rise

By 2019, I knew something had to change.

I made myself one simple promise: I wouldn’t launch anything new. Instead, I would double down on what I knew worked. Reaching out to people, offering gift sessions, and creating meaningful content consistently.

That year ended up being my best financially at that point, around 21k.

From 2020 to 2021, I continued to focus on visibility and connection. I strengthened my marketing by repurposing content, using paid promotion, and building relationships with colleagues whose values aligned with mine.

By the end of 2021, I had more than tripled my income.

This was my Rise stage. Less scrambling. More intention. Strengthening what already worked rather than constantly chasing something new.

Hello Bloom

From 2022 onwards, my income and client load have grown steadily year on year.

During this time, I put systems, processes and support in place so I could deliver my work without being buried in admin, tech, or the endless fiddly bits of running an online business.

Business was good.

And then something else happened that I didn’t expect.

With things working so smoothly, I started to feel a little uninspired. Not ungrateful, just under-stimulated. Some of my drive and creativity dulled.

That changed this year, when I completely overhauled my business model. I feel energised again, curious, and genuinely excited about what this next phase will bring.

Today, Bloom for me is about continuing to grow while giving less of myself away. Creating income that isn’t solely dependent on my live presence. Building something that supports my health, physically, mentally and financially.

My word for 2026 is HEALTH, and my business needs spaciousness for me to live into that. I’m here for it.

How long success really takes

When we look at successful businesses, we often assume it’s always been that way. In reality, it took me from 2012, when I first thought about starting a business, to 2021 to truly reach Bloom. That’s nine years of trying to make it work.

I could beat myself up for not getting there faster. But during that time I changed businesses, moved house three times including a full renovation, and birthed and raised two incredible boys.

So there’s no beating myself up here. Just a quiet knowing that real, lasting success takes time to build, and deep gratitude for the journey.

If any part of this story resonates with where you are now, I want you to know that you’re not behind. You’re in the journey, and from experience, that always feels messy while you’re in it.

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.