For a long time, I thought I understood what Jon Young was teaching. I had practiced his nature awareness exercises—learning to extend my senses in the forest, sitting quietly with birds, listening beyond the obvious. I thought I was applying those lessons.

I was.

Just not where I needed them most.

I was approaching my business very differently.

That word — trying — should have been my first signal.

When Effort Is the Problem, Not the Solution

I was trying to build it. Trying to grow it. Trying to find the right strategy, the right message, the right way to be seen. There was a lot of effort in all of it, and underneath the effort, a kind of persistent friction — as if I were pushing against something that wasn’t quite pushing back but wasn’t quite yielding either.

If you run an intuitive practice, you probably know that feeling. You’re doing everything right on paper. You’re showing up, putting out content, refining your offer. And yet something isn’t landing. The energy feels forced. The right clients aren’t finding you, or they’re finding you and not quite staying. The work you do in a session is alive and resonant, but the business around it feels like it belongs to someone else.

I didn’t know how to name what was wrong. I just knew the word that kept showing up was trying.

And then my back gave out.

What the Pain Was Actually Saying

The pain arrived suddenly and stayed. Three hundred steps a day on a bad stretch, my watch counting what I could barely manage. I couldn’t push through it, couldn’t strategize around it, couldn’t optimize my way out of it.

So I did what Jon had taught me to do in the forest when I didn’t know what I was looking for: I stopped analyzing and started listening. Not to find an answer. Not to fix anything. Just to stay present with what was actually there.

What came back wasn’t a diagnosis. It was a question.

 
What if I could co-create with my business instead of trying to build it?

That question landed in my body like something true. Within a week, the pain was gone. I don’t offer that as proof of anything. I offer it as the moment I understood something I’d been circling for years without quite seeing: sustained relationship changes perception.

Some forms of knowing don’t come from standing outside a system and analyzing it. They only become available after you’ve participated long enough for the relationship itself to begin teaching you.

When you stop imposing and start listening — really listening, the way you’d listen to a forest you wanted to understand — forms of intelligence become visible that were there all along, just filtered out by urgency and effort.

Jon teaches this with birds. I had just never thought to apply it to the room I was sitting in every single day.

The Business as a Living System

I began approaching my business the way I had learned to approach the forest—slowing down, noticing what was actually present rather than what I thought should be there, paying attention to what felt alive and what felt forced.

It wasn’t a different strategy, framework, or marketing plan. It was a different quality of attention. And if you’ve spent any time doing intuitive work, you already know how to do this. You’ve been doing it with your clients from the beginning.

The harder invitation is to turn that same attention toward your own business and marketing.

When you’re in your body — in curiosity rather than pressure — you can feel the difference between a message that’s in resonance with what you’re actually offering and one that’s been constructed to sound right. You can feel the difference between a client relationship that’s aligned and one you’re efforting to hold together. Between a direction that wants to move and one you’re forcing to move.

Patterns that were invisible begin to reveal themselves. Not all at once, but clearly enough to take the next step.

What This Looks Like in Practice

One client had been struggling for a long time to find the right words for his work. He had clarity about what he offered. He had the skills to deliver it. But something in his message wasn’t landing with the people he most wanted to reach.

Most business consultants would have adjusted the copy — sharpened the positioning, tested different hooks. Instead we tried something different: we brought his attention inside.

As I read phrases from his marketing back to him, he slowed down and listened the way you listen in the forest — not evaluating, not performing, just noticing. The shifts in sensation. The moments of coherence or friction. The felt difference between something alive and something hollow. We went back and forth many times — him reworking a phrase, checking it against that deeper attention, reworking again.

Partway through, something shifted. He stopped trying to sound impressive. Stopped second-guessing himself. The message became clear and grounded — not because he had learned a new technique, but because he had stopped pushing and started listening.

Within three months he had enrolled new clients. More importantly, the right ones — the ones his work was actually here to serve. Not because the words were better. Because the message was finally in resonance with what he was actually doing.

The Part Nobody Tells You About Marketing Your Practice

That’s when I began to understand what I was really offering.

What I bring isn’t certainty. It’s the capacity to stay present with uncertainty without immediately trying to solve it. To notice what a living system is revealing before deciding what it ought to become.

And because it’s alive, it turns out to be more useful than most frameworks. It can meet you where you actually are, not where a template assumes you should be.

Most of the people I work with don’t lack insight. They know what they’re here to do. What’s usually missing is an environment that can hold that knowing without freezing it — without rushing it into urgency and strategy before it’s ready to move.

The same thing Jon found in the forest. The same thing the birds knew before the hawk arrived. You cannot act well from inside urgency. You can only act well from inside sustained attention.

What Changes When You Stop Trying

I used to think success was something to strive for. Now I think of it as relational alignment — noticing what’s ready to move and moving with it rather than against it.

The forest didn’t change when I learned to read it.

I changed.

And that change made a whole new order of perception available to me — not because I had gathered more information or found a better strategy, but because I had become a different kind of participant in my own work.

That is available to you too. Not as a destination to arrive at, but as a practice to begin — or deepen, if it’s already underway.

Your business is a living system. It’s already sending signals. The question is whether you can slow down long enough to hear them.

Jan Anderson
Your Healing Business
Jan@YourHealingBusiness.com

P.S. If your business has been sending signals you haven’t quite known how to read, I’d be glad to explore them with you. Sometimes another attentive presence is all it takes to begin noticing what’s already there. Book a conversation here.

Or leave a comment below: Where in your business right now are you trying too hard — and what might it feel like to listen instead?