it needs to be cyclical

sustainable businesses are built in seasons

Helloo, I’m Jessica, soulful coach, copywriter & content strategist for highly sensitives & introverts. This is Whispers of Inner Power, where you’ll find tools to help you build a slow and sustainable business, one that feels like home.

Hello love,

The idea certainly isn’t new yet it hit me as if I’d had an epiphany.

Last Saturday, I woke up in a dramatic manner. One minute I was deep into a dream, the next, I was sitting up eyes wide open, head clear, blurting out loud words that didn’t seem to make any sense to my half-asleep husband.

“IT NEEDS TO BE CYCLICAL!!!

“Like a spiral, but that moves a little bit more upward every year. We’d review 12 foundational aspects of business in a year, and then we’d do it again the next year, but better, so that there is time and space for improvement but without burning out and without constantly feeling like we’re behind on everything, or just never quite good enough”.

My poor husband only mumbled something like “mmpffr”, but that didn’t matter.

After an entire season of dilly-dallying, of feeling that something was off but not quite knowing what, it finally clicked. Not only did I have to transform the way I operate in my business, I also had to teach others how to do it in a way that’s pragmatic, structured and soulful.

I jumped out of bed, ignoring my son’s repeated requests for chocolate, opened a new Notion page before even having coffee, and wrote very confidently: cyclical business 2026.

Since September, I’d felt the pull towards something different.

I had suddenly reached full capacity with client work, the very goal I’d set for the year, and although I was deeply grateful and proud, there was simultaneously another part of me that remained unsatisfied.

I recognized it as my ambition, gently knocking, rapping, at my chamber door. That same door I’d double-locked after my burnout, thinking: nevermore.

Yet here it was: showing me the limits of what I’d been building, opening doors to dreams of sustainability that had never been reachable before, and forcing my eyes to see that this transition was not only desirable, it was necessary.

Not that I buy into the economic system of always bigger, always higher, but I recognized that the sustainability that we’re looking to create demands us to step out of survival and into longer-term, bigger crowd vision.

This was highly disorienting to say the least.

Not because I didn’t know what to do but because I had no idea how…

How to make more ambitious choices in my business in a way that:

• would still meet my needs as an introverted highly-sensitive person,

• would still allow me to be the present homeschooling mom I want to be,

• would still let me honour my personal and creative life,

• and most importantly, that would still feel safe for my nervous system.

I did a lot of thinking.

And in the early weeks of autumn, I knew. What was working now, what would no longer be working, where I had to stop playing small, what I had to tweak, improve, reinforce and, just as importantly, let go of.

All of this, I decided, would be my focus of Quarter 4.

Now, let’s address the elephant in the room: Quarter 4 vanishes as soon as it arrives.

We keep hearing those messages of traditional marketing — fortunately less so on Substack where slow life seems to be more often embraced, but still it’s buzzing — the call to “push through and finish the year strong”.

As if this was the moment to tie up loose ends, finish pending projects and prepare for next year, all of that in a quarter that is by definition shorter than any other quarter. And, one must not forget, the period of the year where on my side of the hemisphere days are shorter, nights are colder, germs are everywhere and we’re damn exhausted of all the hard work we’ve already being doing all year long!

Yes, I am upset.

Not because of what other people might say and do in their business, mind you, we’re still free to lead our lives and businesses as we each intend. But because I know this stuff and still the hard-worker in me over-planned and then felt frustrated due to low energy, stiff muscles and recurring migraines.

Winter is coming, and this is not the time to power through.

It’s the time to listen to the natural urge to slow down, to listen within, to introspect and reflect, so we can, in full alignment with what we authentically want and desire, select the seeds we’ll be lovingly planting in Spring.

Winter is coming, and winter does not end on December 31st.

Do you garden?

I don’t, but there’s a version of me somewhere — in an alternative universe or in a few decades — that does. And she knows, that her gardening doesn’t look the same year round. That her gardening doesn’t look the same one year from the next. Sometimes it’s better, sometimes it’s worse, but always she learns.

There’s no point trying to fight this: this is what our seasonal, cyclical nature demands of us.

We constantly evolve and improve. We gradually deepen our skills and knowledge, and naturally we integrate our transformations and we bring them to the playground of our businesses, embodying the wisdom we’ve earned.

So it’s an illusion to believe that we’ll set something up and be done with it. For instance, create your website and it’s done once and for all. Or decide on a visibility strategy and keep doing that forever. Or create a course, set it up and forget about it.

You get the idea, and I’m sure you’ve felt this inner tension before when you’ve just worked so hard to get one project finished only to realise a few months later that you can actually do better than that.

The problem is you can’t keep tweaking the same thing on repeat, or else you just won’t be moving forward in the other areas of your business, and, at the risk of stating the obvious: there are many.

The invitation here is to take a big step back, a big breath in, and to look at your business as a whole, big beautiful greenhouse. Instead of trying to tend to all plants at once year round, you create a system that lets you focus on one section of the greenhouse every season, and within that section, dividing your attention month per month to more specific tasks.

In this way, we embrace a cyclical operational system, knowing that everything will get the attention it needs and deserves at a specific time. We plan for it instead of endlessly postponing things, and we ditch the pressure of always feeling like we should be doing more.

What it means in my business, and for you as part of my world

Both listening to my ambition to support more people, be more financially sustainable and lead my life and business in a way that feels soulful and cosy, I need adapt and build my business in a way that it can grow without demanding all of me, or without requiring me to hire a team full-time. Here’s some of the changes I’m putting in place right away:

Concrete changes

• My year is structured like a flow, helping me revisit the same foundations (messaging, offers, visibility, systems, website, etc. ) so that each year I can go deeper, gain clarity, and improve further. I’ll be working on one main business theme at a time, and during that time, everything else becomes background maintenance.

• Everything I’ll work on, write about and promote will belong to a season, a theme, and a larger ecosystem, so nothing exists in isolation, and nothing needs to be rushed.

• My membership, the Soulful Biz Club, is also evolving, being built around the same seasonal rhythms, with quarterly trainings and monthly themes that invite the members to build, review, improve their own business in a cyclical sustainable way. A new price will apply from 2026, but you can still join now and lock in the current one.

• So far, my business has depended heavily on me being well: I work on my backstage only a couple of quiet hours a day. But what if I’m menstruating and have lower energy? What if my nervous system has a flare up and I need more sleep? What if my kids are sick? The house of cards collapses. By adjusting my days for client work and coaching sessions (4 days a week instead of 5) and allowing for one week per month focused on input rather than output (learning instead of teaching), I’m hoping to build more flexibility, and, ultimately, more resilience.

These are the broad lines of the changes I’m implementing.

There’s more to it, and I will definitely share more about what I’m doing and and the results of this experiment in my quarterly behind-the-scenes articles. I’m thinking about making them video-based, not sure yet :) If you’re a paid subscriber or a member of the soulful biz club you’ll get those automatically, along with the private podcast episodes. If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, you can become one right here for 8€/month.

I don’t have all the answers yet, and that’s kind of the point.

What I do know is this: I no longer want to build a business that demands constant reinvention, constant urgency, constant proving. I want one that can grow with me, year after year, season after season. One that allows room for learning, rest, ambition, mistakes, and evolution.

Cyclical business is about choosing a rhythm that’s actually sustainable over the long term. One where nothing is wasted, nothing is rushed, and everything has its time.

This is the direction I’m walking towards now. I hope you’ll walk with me.