How to Be Strategic Without Losing Your Soul
There's a fear that lives in the bones of wild-hearted entrepreneurs, healers, and creative practitioners that says: If I get too strategic, I'll lose the magic. If I plan too much, I'll kill the spirit. If I focus on structure, I'll betray the soul of my work.
And so many of us oscillate. We swing from one extreme to the other—spending months in pure intuition and imagination, waiting for the right signs, trusting the universe to bring the clients—only to crash into panic when nothing materializes. Then we overcorrect, diving headfirst into strategy, following frameworks, optimizing funnels, doing all the "right" marketing things, only to feel hollow, disconnected, like we've become just another person hawking transformation on the internet.
Neither extreme works. And the tension between them—the feeling that you have to choose between being spiritual or being strategic—is what's causing the friction, the burnout, the sense that you're always doing it wrong.
But here's the truth: You don't have to choose.
Strategy doesn't kill soul. Strategy without soul kills soul. And soul without strategy remains un-manifested, unshared, invisible to the people who need it most.
What if the answer isn't to pick a side, but to integrate? To bring all of yourself—your clarity, your intuition, your embodied wisdom, your visionary capacity—into the work of building your business?
Mythopoetic Entrepreneurship: You Are Writing a Story
Let me offer you a different lens for understanding what you're actually doing when you build a business.
You're not just creating offers or marketing campaigns. You're engaged in mythopoetic entrepreneurship—you're writing a story with your life, your work, your vision. A story that matters. A story that's nested inside your personal mythology, your life's work, the reason your soul came here at this time.
I believe that lot of what we experience as “purpose” or “calling” is a combination of the desire that the earth has for herself (desires that we feel and experience at the level of the soul) and the prayers we catch as ideas from the collective consciousness.
Your business isn't separate from this. Your offerings, your brand, the world you're building—these are all expressions of the story you're here to building / shape / craft. The narrative of your business is woven into the larger narrative of your soul's work, which is woven into the cultural and collective story unfolding at this time.
And like any good story, yours needs more than just beautiful language and compelling characters. It needs plot structure. It needs worldbuilding. It needs the architecture that allows the story to land in the hearts and eyes of the people who are meant to receive it.
This is where strategy comes in—not as a betrayal of the soul, but as a necessary element of storytelling.
The Mature Mythopoetic Identity
Part of your work as an entrepreneur is to mature your mythopoetic identity—the version of yourself who can hold both the vision and the vehicle, both the dream and the structure, and both the soul and the strategy.
This maturation doesn't happen by staying only in one realm (i.e. — choosing “logic” over “intuition”). It happens through integration. Through learning to balance the elements that allow your vision to become real, sustainable, and impactful.
I call this process the Journey of Sacred Self-Initiation, and it involves four essential elements:
Imagination
Instinct
Intuition
Intention
Each of these is a layer of initiation—a way of bringing a certain part of yourself online in the building of your vision. And when you learn to work with all four, you stop oscillating between extremes and start building something meaningful and whole.
The Four Elements of Sacred Self-Initiation
Imagination: The Visionary Capacity
Imagination is your ability to see the bigger picture. To invoke an idea that feels alive and living in your body. To dream beyond what currently exists and sense into what's possible.
This is the mythopoetic capacity—the part of you that can hold the vision, feel the future, and bring something new into form. Without imagination, your work becomes transactional. You're just doing what's already been done. You're copying templates and frameworks without any aliveness and the animate quality of essence.
Imagination is what makes your work intriguing and interesting. It's what allows you to build a world people want to hang out in, not just a business people tolerate engaging with.
Instinct: The Embodied Wisdom
Instinct is different from intuition. Intuition is psychic, energetic, subtle. Instinct is somatic—it lives in your body, in your nervous system, in the ancient survival intelligence that has kept humans alive for millennia.
Instinct is what tells you when something is unsafe. When you need to rest. When you're pushing too hard. When a situation or person is depleting you or when your bias may be clouding your judgement. Instinct is the part of your system that keeps you viscerally alive, and it plays a vital role in helping you become a well-rounded, strategic, embodied, and intuitive person.
When you ignore your instinct—when you override your body's signals because you "should" be showing up, posting, hustling—you burn out. When you don’t know how to discern instinctual responses in your body, you may mistake the experience of a dorsal vagal collapse with the need to go much slower and rest, resulting in paused momentum and jeapordizing your cashflow. In these responses, you can lose access to the very wisdom that could guide you toward sustainability.
Instinct teaches you how to build in a way that honors your capacity, your energy, your nervous system. It's the element that prevents strategy from becoming extractive. It’s the element that makes your work truly magnetic.
Intuition: The Inner Knowing
Intuition is your capacity to sense what's true beyond logical explanation. It's the part of you that knows—even when you can't articulate why—whether something is aligned or off, whether a decision feels right or wrong, whether a person or opportunity is meant for you.
This is the realm most wild-hearted creatives are comfortable in. You trust your intuition. You follow the nudges. You wait for the signs.
But intuition alone isn't enough. Intuition tells you what feels true. It doesn't always give you that felt-sense impulse for moving into action. That's where Instinct is helpful.
Intention: The Clarity of Purpose
Intention is about getting clear. Not just spiritually clear, but practically clear. What exactly are you building? What are you manifesting? What are you creating?
This is where strategy begins—not with tactics or funnels, but with the willingness to define your purpose and commit to it. To say, This is what I'm building. This is who it's for. This is why it matters.
Without intention, you drift. You create in fragments. You second-guess every decision because you're not anchored to a clear purpose.
Intention is the ground. It's the foundation. It's what allows everything else to have direction.
The Integration: Strategy and Soul
Here's what happens when you bring all four elements into your work:
Intention gives you clarity. You know what you're building and why.
Intuition gives you discernment. You can sense what's aligned and what's not, even when the logic isn't clear.
Instinct gives you sustainability. You honor your body, your capacity, your need for rest and integration. You build in a way that keeps you alive, supported, and grounded.
Imagination gives you intrigue. You create something that feels alive, visionary, and compelling and not just functional and service-oriented.
When all four are present, you're not choosing between strategy and soul. You're weaving them together. You're building a business that has structure and spirit. Plot and poetry. Worldbuilding and magic.
What Causes the Struggle
The struggle you're feeling—the sense that you're always doing it wrong—isn't because you're broken or unclear or not spiritual enough. It's because you're stuck in one mode.
Maybe you're all imagination and intuition, but you have no intention or instinct. You dream beautiful visions but never build the structure that makes them real. Or you override your body's signals because you're so focused on the vision that you forget you're a human who needs rest.
Or maybe you're all intention and instinct, but you've lost access to intuition and imagination. You're strategic, organized, efficient—but your work feels lifeless. You're going through the motions, but there's no magic left.
The answer isn't to swing harder to the other side. The answer is to integrate all four.
This Is Mythopoetic Entrepreneurship
When you build from all four elements—when you balance intention, intuition, instinct, and imagination—you're engaged in mythopoetic entrepreneurship. You're writing the story you came here to write. You're building the world your soul is calling you to build.
And you're doing it in a way that's sustainable. Strategic without being soulless. Visionary without being ungrounded. Embodied without being stuck. Clear without being rigid.
This is the maturation process. This is the journey of sacred self-initiation. And it's what allows you to build a business that actually feeds your soul and serves culture—not one or the other, but both.
Worldbuilding Requires All Four
In Worldbuilding School, we work with all four elements. The 6 Phases of Visionary Praxis aren't just about strategy. They're about integrating intention (clarity on your medicine and message), intuition (discerning your right-fit modality and model), instinct (building momentum that honors your capacity), and imagination (creating a world people want to inhabit).
We don't ask you to choose between being spiritual and being strategic. We ask you to bring your whole self—all four elements—into the work of building your vision.
Because the world needs your medicine. And your medicine needs a structure that allows it to reach the people it's meant to serve.
