The Shadows We Bring to Entrepreneurship
This article accompanies my appearance on Vibing Consciously, a local podcast about authentic expression and thought work. You can watch the episode HERE.
Shadow Work is a new and fascinating idea for me, a spiritual late bloomer.
When I considered writing this article, I did what any late bloomer would do.
I Googled it.
I knew the basics. Carl Jung and his research on the more mysterious parts of our unconscious that we don't particularly want to claim. That’s about it. I assumed there was probably some soul-searching journaling involved.
What I didn't expect was it to hit so close to home.
I’ve been an entrepreneur for nearly two decades. I've opened businesses and closed them, pivoted more than once, spent years working alongside other entrepreneurs as they built their own brands.
Most recently, I co-founded Lantern & Lore, a local platform devoted to expanding discoverability for Central NC’s holistic healing and spiritual
At this point, I've been in this funhouse long enough to know that uncertainty comes with the territory.
And still, a contract or project pitch can sit unanswered for a few days, and suddenly the offer that seemed perfectly reasonable when I created it begins to look a little… ambitious.
A quiet week can be just a quiet week. Or, with very little effort, it can become evidence of impending professional doom.
Clearly, experience does not make us immune to our own nonsense.
The more I read about shadow work, the more I started thinking about how good entrepreneurship is at bringing that noise to the surface.
Running a business asks a lot of us. We go from being comfortable with our skills to putting a number on our work, being more visible, risking rejection, making decisions without a trusty crystal ball, and having faith that another opportunity will come along if we keep showing up.
If you have any unclaimed mental baggage around money, worth, visibility, or security, entrepreneurship will eventually find it.
And underneath many of those worries is the same question:
Is there enough for me?
The Question Underneath the Question
Scarcity is easy to name when money is tight, but it's harder to label when it sounds like good business sense.
Maybe you take a project you don't really want because turning away paid work feels foolish. You keep your rates low because asking for more feels risky. An empty calendar makes you restless. You sit on an idea until it's absolutely, positively ready… which, mysteriously, it never is.
The circumstances vary, but the concern is familiar. Is there enough work coming? Enough money? Enough sign-ups? Enough room? Enough opportunity?
And after sitting with that question for a hot minute, it becomes difficult not to notice the one lingering underneath it:
Am I enough?
Oof. And here we are.
None of us shows up to entrepreneurship carrying only a laptop and a stellar idea. We bring years of accumulated beliefs about work, money, success, failure, being seen, and what it means when someone says no.
Some of these beliefs have been around long enough that they simply feel like facts.
Then a client doesn't respond to your idea.
That's what happened.
But the mind rarely leaves anything that neat and tidy, right?
Maybe she thinks it's too expensive. Or boring. Or just plain bad.
Maybe it is bad?
Give us any time to ruminate, and we've arrived at: Nobody is going to pay for this. Pack it up, sis.
Meanwhile, our client may simply be at the darn grocery store.
A perfectly ordinary event has picked up a whole story about the value of our work.
That distance—the space between what actually happened and what we decided it meant—is where shadow work starts to get interesting.
Sometimes There Really Isn't Enough
There is a version of the scarcity conversation that makes me uncomfy.
Sometimes business really is slow. Sometimes you need to take the project because you need the money. An offer can flop, and a price can actually be wrong.
Real problems exist in business, and they deserve reasonable responses.
You don't have to explain every uncomfortable feeling away as a limiting belief or convince yourself that abundance is waiting for you to have the right “mindset.”
The interesting part is noticing when a real problem picks up a much bigger story.
I need more clients next month might mean it's time to do some marketing.
No one wants what I do anymore is something else entirely.
This project would help financially is useful information.
I can't turn this down because another opportunity may never come has a little more going on.
The facts and the fear can even be true at the same time. The trick is knowing which one's driving the bus.
A Little Shadow Hunting
So after all my Googling, I'm not about to prescribe a proper shadow-work practice.
But I do think there's an experiment here worth trying.
For one week, pay attention to the moments in your business when your reaction seems noticeably bigger than whatever just happened.
The unanswered email. The price you're tempted to lower. The empty afternoon that makes you uneasy. The thing you keep finding reasons not to launch.
When you catch one, don't immediately fix it or talk yourself out of it.
Ask two questions:
What happened?
What did I make it mean?
That's all.
The first answer will usually be wonderfully mundane.
The client hasn't replied.
Only three people signed up.
Nothing is booked Thursday.
The second answer has considerably more personality.
Maybe there's a real business problem that needs solving. Solve it.
But you might also discover that a perfectly average Monday has been carrying around WAY more meaning than it deserves.
I think that's one of the stranger things entrepreneurship offers us. We set out to build something in the world and, along the way, keep bumping into pieces of ourselves. Good, bad, and fugly.
After nearly two decades, I'm still bumping.
At least now I know what to call some of them.
Thanks, Google.
