The Three Laws of Enlightened Business

How to create purpose and profit, bring wisdom to work and sell without selling your soul

• Do we have to choose between purpose and profit, between what makes our souls sing and what pays the bills?
• Does wisdom belong only in temples, or can wisdom belong at work?
• Do we have to sell our souls to make a sale?

Conscious leaders often struggle with the inner conflict of purpose vs profits, wisdom vs work and sales vs soul. When we look for guidance to grow a healthy business, we’re met by cheesy infomercial-style, skin-crawling methods – no wonder many conscious leaders struggled to step up and step into their roles. So how exactly do we do this and is it even possible to create an enlightened business?

My life has guided me to understand the Three Laws of Enlightened Business, which makes this all possible.

How I learned the three laws of enlightened business
If you told the child Colleen that one day I would lead several businesses, be a custodian for assets, close multi-million deals, manage teams, create digital marketing funnels, sign licence agreements and talk tax strategies with auditors – I would never have believed you.

I grew up in a humble home where ‘just get a job to pay the bills’ was the mantra. Plus, I was a highly sensitive, shy, intuitive child wrestling with the aftershock of nearly losing my eyesight and life to an egg-sized monster-making tumour above my right eye. A near-death experience during brain surgery at four showed me the deeper truth of our existence. This home of 360 degrees of peace, love, and okayness was so powerful that fear, shame and anger couldn’t stand.

Returning to life in a body felt like falling out of paradise into a small dark box filled with terror, shame and rage. So you can understand why work and money were the least important things in my life – all I wanted was to find my way back home.

By 14, the weight of this homesickness was so painful that I contemplated suicide. In bed weeping into my pillow, a peaceful presence with a stream of thoughts guided me to: ‘Choose a reason to stay that’s bigger than the pain.’

I chose to stay alive for one thing that mattered more than anything: I chose to live to find ‘wisdom.‘
Finding wisdom was hard because, for decades, I looked in the wrong places. I became an accidental psychic at 16, soon with clients flying from around the country for consultations; at 17, women twice my age asked me to teach them; I argued, but they insisted, so I ran my first intuition course during high school holidays. A few years later, realising that being psychic did not mean being wise, I quit my psychic career path.

One by one, I moved through modalities like tarot, astrology, past life, life between life regressions and metaphysics, each providing clues but not the ultimate wisdom I sought.

My second daughter, born with a life-threatening medical condition, endured her first surgery at 14 hours old and over a dozen other surgeries before the age of two. This, combined with the collapse of my then-husband’s business, the shame of having friends bring us groceries and the fear of losing our home, was unbearable. To cope, I went to my inner Wisdom Well daily.

By drinking in wisdom often, I learned its nature was not knowledge but enlightened, clear seeing and being – and this seeing had the power to free me from suffering.

Imagine my surprise when wisdom not only freed me of crippling shyness and gave me the strength to be there for my baby daughters but showed me step-by-step how to build an enlightened business.

Wisdom didn’t only belong underneath the bodhi tree; it belonged everywhere. Darkness is not an equal opposing force; it’s a lack of light that naturally floods any dark space. Wisdom enlightens all the dark contracted spaces in our minds, hearts and lives.

Wisdom also showed me my spiritual arrogance, the arrogance that judged the accountant who lived down the road for putting a billboard for his services in his front yard when my business struggled because I thought marketing was beneath me. After all, I was trying to be spiritual. Wisdom steadily dismantled the concept of being spiritual.

Wisdom taught me to be equal-to both lack and abundance, spiritual and material. This enlightening clear seeing freed the inspiration to study business building and marketing in the world. And it revealed how to bring enlightened seeing and being to everyday work.

Over the decades, these three laws of enlightened business have crystallised. May they serve you as a conscious leader because the world needs more enlightened businesses.

The three enlightened laws of business are:

• #1 “The law of purpose + profit” purpose naturally produces profit
• #2 “The law of wisdom + work” wisdom naturally opens the flow of work
• #3 “The law of serving + selling” serving naturally attracts sales

#1 “The law of purpose + profit” – purpose naturally produces profit

We’ve built a world where people feel burdened by jobs they hate, where profit evicts purpose.

Sixty per cent of workers feel emotionally detached at work, and 19 per cent feel miserable (Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2022).

How often have you thought: “If only I didn’t need to pay my bills, then I could pursue my purpose?”

Twenty-plus years ago, desperate to find a way to pay my bills with a sick baby and a toddler who needed me, I built my Wisdom Well and tuned in, writing on my notepad the all-important, desperate question: “What must I do?”

Intuitive Wisdom replied: “You’re asking the wrong question. Instead of asking what to do, ask who am I?”

This confused me; how was knowing who I was going to help me pay the bills?

The next clear seeing that formed into a simple thought changed the direction of my life: “If you were an apple tree and didn’t know you were an apple tree, how would you know what to do?”

Our purpose is first to BE our apple tree selves and then to express that through everything we DO.

We have mistakenly placed doing above being and distorted natural truth. Everything in nature does from what it is. When we build businesses divorced from our true natures, we build unnatural distortions of business that take more than they give.

The day I found my apple tree and started a being-purpose-quest instead of a doing-quest changed everything. Every role in my life became an expression of my apple tree and I worked daily to free being and seeing. Within three months, income began to flow. In three years, my business served 60 – 120 students per week, teaching a two-year metaphysics and coaching course, making guest appearances on television and radio and signing my first book deal.

Guided to use the seven chakras as a business-building framework, each energy centre became a chronological focus point to plan and create a business. I called this the Seven Step Dream Builder framework. For 20-plus years, InnerLifeSkills still teaches this as a master coaching method worldwide.

The key is to use these seven steps as a framework to build a business from purpose to profit, not from profit to purpose – from the crown chakra to root, not root to crown.

1. IDENTITY – What is it?
2. VISION – Where does it take people?
3. VOICE – What does it solve?
4. RELATE – Who can grow this?
5. TRUTH – Why can they trust this?
6. POWER – What is it worth?
7. ACTION – What ecosystems can sustain this?

You can use this framework to create a new book, strengthen a brand and even check what might be missing from your existing business.

When businesses are grown from Step 7 to 1, they go against dharma (the natural laws of life that flow with the intelligence of the soul and the universe). They start with Step 7’s root chakra, primal survival consciousness, which places doing above being. This path is rooted in the false belief that we are what we do, that we are separate physical creatures crawling on a blue planet, grasping the means to survive.

The unnatural unconscious Business Building Path

• STEP 7 ACTION – We mistakenly believe our purpose is something we’re supposed to do and this doing is driven by Base Chakra survival fear. Our actions are cut off from expressing the home of the true self.
• STEP 6 POWER – Worth and power are build on this action doership foundation in Step 6 (Sacral Chakra). ‘I do to earn money as power’ is the sole focus, inviting corruption and greed.
• STEP 5 TRUTH – Trust is won by manipulating the truth felt in the Solar Plexus Chakra. ‘Trust me because I have worked out how to make money without being of real service.’
• STEP 4 RELATE – Relationships are sought in Step 4 (Heart Chakra) to reinforce the base of survival-focused credibility and power. ‘You only matter if you bring money or power.’
• STEP 3 VOICE – Marketing and messaging (Throat Chakra) uses survival fear, power, false credibility and relationship to grow.
• STEP 2 VISION – The vision (Brow Chakra) is formed to serve its seed, a doing-based survival purpose that grabs for power, manipulates to win credibility and relationships, selling illusions to grow.
• STEP 1 IDENTITY – Finally, this all informs the creation of the identity of the business (Crown Chakra).

Like cancer cells in the body that revert to their primitive programming, losing the ability to cooperate in service to the whole, cancerous businesses are diseased.

We can build and grow businesses differently!

If we build from Crown Chakra Identity first, we follow the natural laws of life.

An apple tree is first an apple tree before it does anything. Even in seed, it is an apple tree. The seeds of creation and reality lie in the crown chakra, in spirit, inspired ideas that bring us energy because they want to be in the world.

Look at how easily we sacrifice being for doing. When someone asks you what you do for a living, you answer, “I am…” We don’t say “I do coaching”, or “I do managing”; we say “I am a coach,” or “I am a manager.”

We make what we do into who we are. We try to pack an unlimited being into a limited doing box.

Any distortion of truth causes the nervous system to suffer stress. We feel a closed, contracted heaviness in the body’s felt sense. This is how we can use our intuitive somatic experience as a compass to discern the truth.

When we build businesses from the base chakra up, from doing and financial power instead of from purposeful identity and vision, we create stress and suffering.

Growing businesses that express our apple tree true selves brings natural fulfilment and joy.

How happy is an apple tree to make apples?

Imagine growing businesses inspired to express the truth of our being, aligned to the natural intelligence of life.

Let’s do that.

#2 “The law of wisdom + work” – wisdom naturally opens the flow of work

Business leaders, self-employed solopreneurs and entrepreneurs often struggle with decision fatigue. What’s the priority? Which is the right path?

Wisdom may seem lofty, not relevant to the grind of work. But wisdom can make work flow. It unblocks thinking and feeling, facilitates decision-making and invites intuitive insight.

Spend quality time often, tuning in deeper than the surface mind to find clarity, draw it to the surface and grow a garden in the desert of business.

How to bring wisdom to work

Step away from your screens and take a notebook and pen to sit in nature. Set an intention to build your Wisdom Well, acknowledge and include the very real and raw human experiences of stress and struggle, then send the buckets of your questions, no matter how mundane, inwards to find clear seeing.

Ask for deeper truth. Ask: “How does wisdom see this?”

Open to new ways of seeing and being. Find the thoughts that open your felt sense – those words are translations of clear-seeing truth. Thoughts that cause contraction indicate a lack of clarity.

For example, on a typical Monday many years ago, I was stressed by the plaguing thought: “How do I make more money?”

The thought was causing a heavy felt-sense of contraction, which told me there was a lack of wisdom. So I sat to meditate and coach myself to find a deeper truth.

Because questions are the buckets we send into our Wisdom Well, the quality of the question determines how much wisdom we can find.

Sometimes all we need to do is change the questions we ask.

I examined each word in my question, noting which caused heaviness. “Making money” was causing the closed feeling. So I opened to wisdom, laughing at the a-ha moment, “I can’t make money. It’s illegal.”

My new question was, “How do I create ways to earn money?”

This brought an open flow of inspiration. Suddenly Monday felt free, I was ready to find those ways and to create them, which I did.

Where can wisdom help create flow for you?

Imagine bringing wisdom to work every day.

Let’s do that.

#3 “The law of serving + selling” – serving naturally attracts sales

When an apple tree grows, it naturally gives.

By focusing on serving at the highest, we naturally create sales. But if we place sales above serving, we are back to growing an unnatural, unconscious business.

• How deeply have you listened to what your clients really need?
• Where are they specifically struggling, suffering, stressed or stuck? (In their words, not yours.)
• What could you do to serve them at the highest level?
• Are you happy to walk away from a sale if you know you cannot serve?

What is service?  Service is alleviating suffering, stress and struggle.

This is also the call of the soul. So why not create a business that serves the soul’s highest calling?

If what we create does not truly serve, does it deserve to exist?

Giving first is also a wonderful conscious business practice – use free content, samples, education, demonstrations etc. Being generous with our sharing doesn’t mean undercharging. It means charging a fair and profitable rate and packing more value into what we offer than expected. It means striving to find new ways to serve our clients daily with heart and soul, guided by wisdom.

If you SHARE and SERVE, you’ll never need to SELL.

Final Message

My ego would have loved to sit under a tree, but my soul called my apple tree to the world. My ego wanted to do grand spiritual work, but my soul said: “Serve them at their place of need.”

If someone fell and cut their knee, would you teach them about enlightenment or help them to stand?

Fifteen years ago, when wisdom guided me to drop my spiritual teacher identity, I struggled to let go; I’d become ego-attached to my doing identity!

But I’m so pleased I surrendered. Soon I found myself helping natural coaches to become master coaches and helping visionaries build their Apple Tree Businesses in a natural, purpose-led way.

Wisdom finds a way to enlighten with love, even in boardrooms.

As Kahlil Gibran said: “Work is love made visible.”

In a world where corruption and greed are an aggressive terminal cancer, it’s tempting to feel as though you have only two choices:

1. Opt out, reject business building entirely and struggle financially on the fringes of society;
2. Or compromise, sacrifice your purpose to earn a living.

But there is another way. Bring your soul’s wisdom to work.

Let’s do that. LET’S GUIDE, COACH AND LEAD WITH WISDOM TOGETHER.

Colleen-Joy helps natural coaches become master coaches, guided by Wisdom + Purpose. She is an author, speaker and MCC coach, managing director of Colleen-Joy Pty Ltd and Fields of Gardens Pty Ltd, founder of the InnerLifeSkills and Wisdom Well Way teachings.

Follow her and visit www.colleen-joy.com and, to become a master coach, www.innerlifeskills.com