How I'm embracing a cyclical business over the hustle and hacks
Embracing cyclicality and a manifesto of sorts
💌 Next week paid subscribers get a peek behind the scenes of my business when I’ll check in with my 2023 business and financial goals, including all the numbers. Paid subscribers also have access to the mini-mastermind next month and the accountability club. I’d love to have you onboard ✨Upgrade your subscription to paid to receive the posts.
I’ve been thinking about a different way of running a small business for years. Yet before the Summer I attended a workshop that suddenly brought all of those threads together and crystallized them and put them into more coherent words for me.
In this post, I’ll be sharing a manifesto of sorts for cyclical business, tying together my favourite themes of slow and gentle, no hustle, working with my energy and more. I’ll share how I run a cyclical business and what I struggle with too.
💌 Enjoying these newsletters? I’d love it if you’d become a paid subscriber for just €5 a month by clicking the button below and you’ll receive behind-the-scenes posts and gentle community in the form of the mini-mastermind and accountability club. And—you’ll enable me to continue changing how we think, feel and talk about small business.
If you’d benefit from the paid resources but are unable to afford them right now, do let me know and I’d be happy to set you up for free.
** Until 28 September you’ll get 15% off your subscription (and existing paid subscribers: I have a gift for you too) **
New to Substack and want to become a paid subscriber? Click the button and you’ll be prompted to enter your email address and then directed to the payment page (more info here).
In June I attended a workshop in the Aligned Community by Lottie Randomly. Lottie spoke about using cycles—menstrual, lunar, seasonal—for societal change. Their talk was a great example of connecting threads between various kinds of perspectives and activism, from menstrual cycle awareness to disability studies to natural rhythms and activism.
My lightbulb moment came when they discussed linear versus cyclical time. Of course I knew both of these concepts, but that day something clicked for me. What if I were to expand on that and apply cyclical thinking to business?
Linear time, as Lottie discussed it, emphasizes progress, growth at all cost, capitalism and business as usual. Cyclical time, on the other hand, emphasizes return, regeneration, reflection, menstrual time and crip time.
Cyclical time is the time of the seasons, of the tides, of natural rhythms. It’s the kind of conception of time I’m drawn too, yet find hard to match with the linear time in which much of my world around me functions.
As excited about Substack as I am? Or are you curious whether it’s right for you and your business? My new mini-course is just the thing!
Substack for small business owners, freelancers and artists is available for €35.
In the words of Amy who bought the course:
“You are providing a very useful service to those of us who are ready to move over and I appreciate that you made your course amazingly informative and affordable.” — Amy A
A cyclical model of business
My first entry point into applying the concept of cyclicality and cyclical thinking to business was a question to myself that I scribbled down during Lottie’s workshop. How would embracing cyclical time shift my feelings towards money and enoughness?
With its emphasis on progress, linear thinking emphasizes continual growth. In linear thinking—as in capitalism—there is continual striving and progress, but no arriving. Hence, there is never enough.
In business, linear thinking emphasizes scarcity, the need to keep going, to keep moving, to keep producing and doing. It means having to build from nothing, having to hustle and there never being enough. It means force and constriction, striving without ever reaching. It means not being able to rest. It means living with the idea that nothing is ever enough and everything can be lost.
As I was writing this post, I came across a quote by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass that encapsulates this kind of linear, capitalist, thinking perfectly: “modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world’s wealthiest peoples”. As Wall Kimmerer explains, “The shortage is due not to how much material wealth there actually is, but to the way in which it is exchanged or circulated”.
Cyclical thinking, on the other hand, emphasizes return. It stresses the reality of and trust in cycles, that things will come back—that we never start from nowhere and with nothing.
Even when it seems like nothing much is going on, roots are growing, bulbs are developing, seeds are getting ready to sprout. It means having seasons of abundance and seasons of less, and that both are okay and normal. It means acknowledging that as humans we have seasons and that our businesses have seasons too. It means trusting that there is enough. It means letting go and going with the cycles. Everything around me and in me, the garden, the tides, my body, is cyclical. When I root into that awareness, I can trust things to happen for and in my business.
A cyclical approach to business does not mean that we just sit back and that things will magically come our way. But it does mean that we can have a business and make the money we want without hustling or working ourselves into the ground. That we can experiment with trusting more. That even when nothing seems to be happening, something is happening: we are resting or working behind the scenes in our business or doing something else that prepares us for seasons of abundance. I know all of this to be true—even though feeling it is sometimes hard.
I’m working on an exciting new offer in my business: a group programme that will run in the spring of 2024 all about marketing without social media. I’m slowly putting it together and will frequently share peeks behind the scenes in this newsletter. Paid subscribers will get more in-depth behind the scenes posts on how I tackle a big project like this, how I decided on pricing, and how I’m crafting a group programme that is both supportive and tailored to the participants and asynchronous at the same time.
This is a page from my notebook in which I sketched out the entire programme. Seeing it like this makes me very excited!
How I’m embracing cyclical over linear business
Thinking of business as cyclical feels more expansive to me. Especially as someone who struggles with the concept of “enough”—enough work, enough money, enough everything—resting in a deep trust of enough feels comforting.
It also feels really hard. Seasons of less in business are hard. But they are hard whether we think linearly or cyclically—the only difference being that if we try to cultivate trust we have a slightly more pleasant experience. As hard as I often find it still to think cyclically, trusting that things will return—whether it is energy, clients and customers, time, money—makes for a more pleasant ride.
Cyclicality, in life and business, is less a model for me than it is something to be aware of. A lens, rather than a blueprint. There is only so much that I can control in life and in business, and cyclicality is helping me be okay with that. I can enjoy seasons of abundance and use them to put away money for seasons of less—without feeling scarcity or stress.
Quite practically, it means having a loose approach towards numbers of all kinds. I notice that when it comes to numbers—subscribers numbers, money—I either feel excited about them, or I feel grasping, clenching, scarce about them, even if the numbers are exactly the same.
It probably largely has to do with my mood on any given day, but I also notice that the more attention I pay to numbers, the sooner I end up feeling scarce about them. When it comes to subscriber numbers, I want to embrace the magic, to focus on connection and community. Those are the things that fill me up, much more so than whether I have ten or twenty or thirty more or less subscribers.
With money this is perhaps a bit trickier. On the one hand, I know that my mood on any given day influences how I approach money. I’ve already made huge steps in feeling less scarcity. And most of the times I feel absolutely fine. But as I’m decreasing my hours in my teaching job and thereby putting more (financial) pressure on my business, making money becomes more important. I don’t believe in manifesting—I don’t believe that just because I want to make X amount of money I will. That only if I try hard enough, work hard enough, manifest hard enough (am deserving enough…), the money will come.
But in thinking cyclically, I want to remind myself to trust in cycles. That some months I will make more money than I need, and other I will make less. And that this is okay. It means that I need and want to practise feeling enough and feeling gratitude. It means reminding myself of another Robin Wall Kimmerer quote that I underlined: “Scarcity and plenty are as much qualities of the mind and spirit as they are of the economy”.
Another practical way of implementing cyclicality is to continue to do what I’m doing: really paying attention to my own fluctuations in energy and mental health. Unplanning and loose consistency both help me with this, as does working ahead whenever it feels right. The reason why I’ve started working on a group programme that won’t launch until the early Spring isn’t so much because it’s a lot of work (although it is), but primarily because I don’t want to put too much pressure in myself during the Winter, when my energy levels are generally more unpredictable. At the same time, I continue to embrace rest as a core business value in practice too—building my days around rest, mental and physical nourishment (reading; naps; yoga and pilates).
Take a moment to think or journal about these questions:
How, where and when are you approaching your business linearly? What does that mean, look and feel like?
Which elements of your business would you like to approach more cyclically? What would that look like for you?
I’d love to know what resonates with you from this post and how you feel about the concept of cyclical business. Is it something you’re doing in your business too, or does it not sit right with you? Leave a comment below to join to conversation.
If you’re new to Substack: you can comment by clicking the button below—you’ll be prompted to set up an account which requires very little personal info and takes only one minute of your time.
a book | I just finished reading In Memoriam and was very impressed—it’s both horrifying and gorgeous. I’m usually not one for books about war, but am so glad I picked this one up (affiliate link).
a show | J and I just finished watching Extraordinary Attorney Woo on Netflix and really enjoyed it: it’s the right combination of feel-good, suspense and quirkiness.
notebooks | I love notebooks and loved reading about how Katherine May uses hers: “It should actively repel the casual viewer, and exude a feral air that unsettles intruders. It should be a disorderly space, defiant of bourgeois convention; a rowdy heath instead of a tidy garden.”
a pep talk | Maggie Smith’s pep talk on putting work out into the world for whenever we need to hear it.
What’s on your lists of favourites this month? What did you read, see, hear, drink, eat, observe that made your day?
Have a really good, calm rest of your week! 💌 Paid subscribers will get a look behind the scenes in my business next week with a check-in post on my financial and business goals for the year and will have their questions answered in our brand-new mini-mastermind.
I’ll be back with a regular newsletter towards the end of the month.
Until next time xx
Let’s work together
If you’re craving a slower, gentler and more profitable business, I’d love to support you. Over the past year, I’ve worked with female small business owners, freelancers and artists to restructure their days and week; create big picture plans; launch their Substack; brainstorm and plan new products and more.
Most of all, I help them feel a sense of clarity and empowerment in choosing to do business differently.
Send me a message or check out my website for ways of working together: from one-off sessions to flexible packages. I’d love to be by your side this year.
This really resonated with me Astrid. I read Braiding Sweetgrass and loved it and have also recently been thinking about the seasons and the seasonality of life. Some thoughts around this is related to aging also.
But I agree with you it also exists in our businesses. And like you I feel it frees me up to think about my work & business like this. I think as self employed or becomes even more important to move towards a cyclical way of thinking about time because it is so much more unpredictable than when you have a paid job. In that situation linear thinking and linear time lends itself easier.
If I was to reflect on where my own business is right now, I would say early Spring. Coming out of a slow & resting / slightly dormant season I am now in the space of planting new seeds & bulbs, clearing and tidying up but yet not is an abundance / harvest season.
I'm a longtime business owner, and I've learned this lesson about cyclicality the hard way, by gnashing my teeth against the slower times for probably the first ten years I was in business. It took a really long time to see that there's a lot of benefit to being slower, and you can consolidate a lot of the improvements you've made during the busy times, so they stay in place for the next rush. This is good stuff.