How to Grow Your Business: A Step-by-Step Guide to Identify and Cleanse Your Inner Blocking Story | 4-Step Process to Remove Inner Obstacles | How I Overcame my Mental Blocks & Started my Own Business

The Unseen Foundation: How Your Inner Story Shapes Every Aspect of Your Business Story

I still remember sitting in my expensive office, looking at the beautiful website and marketing materials I had created, and feeling like a complete fraud. My business was doing okay, but nothing like what I saw other entrepreneurs achieving. I worked 60-hour weeks, said yes to every client, and constantly tweaked my offers. Yet, the breakthrough success I wanted always stayed just out of reach.

The turning point came during a simple meeting with a potential client. As they asked about my business, I heard myself saying all the right words, but inside, a familiar voice whispered: "They're going to find out you don't really know what you're doing." My confidence crumbled during the presentation. I undercharged for my services yet again and left feeling exhausted and defeated.

That night, I experienced my first panic attack. Lying awake at 3 AM, I realized I couldn't continue this way. The problem wasn't my business strategy, my website, or my offers. The problem was the story I kept telling myself—that I wasn't good enough, didn't know enough, and would eventually be exposed as a fraud. This inner story was silently strangling my business growth.

Perhaps you've felt this too—that sneaking suspicion that despite your hard work, something invisible holds you back. You try new marketing strategies, create new offers, and work longer hours, but results remain stubbornly limited. What if I told you that the most significant growth block isn't out there in the market? It's the inner story running in the background of your mind.

The good news? You can change this story. This article will guide you through understanding your inner story, cleansing it, and aligning it with the successful business you want to create. The journey from blockage to flow begins not with another business tactic, but with looking inward. This is where true business storytelling begins—not with what you tell the market, but with what you've been telling yourself.

Understanding Your Inner Story and How It Limits Your Business Story

Your outer business story—the one you tell clients, your market, and on your website—is only as powerful as the inner narrative that fuels it. Many entrepreneurs focus exclusively on crafting the perfect external storytelling for their brand while neglecting the foundational inner story that ultimately dictates their results.

What Exactly Is This "Inner Story"?

Your inner story is the collection of beliefs, thoughts, and assumptions you carry about yourself, your capabilities, and how the world works. These aren't just passing thoughts—they're deeply held narratives that form the lens through which you view everything in your business and life. This internal storytelling operates 24/7, often below your conscious awareness, writing the script for your daily decisions, reactions, and ultimately, your business outcomes.

Most of these stories formed early in life, often in childhood, and solidified over years of repetition. Like my client who realized he kept repeating his childhood story of "I do all the hard work, but no one gives me what I deserve" in every job and business venture. His belief began when he watched his younger brother receive more attention from their father, despite his own better academic performance. Decades later, this same story was playing out in his business, where he would over-deliver for clients yet hesitate to invoice fairly or ask for referrals.

How Your Inner Storytelling Shapes Your Business Reality

Your inner story acts as an invisible filter on your business decisions, actions, and especially your results. Neuroscience reveals that negative self-talk activates the same threat responses designed to protect us from predators—it's a primal, instinctive experience that literally rewires your brain over time. Each time you repeat a limiting story to yourself, you strengthen neural pathways that make that story feel increasingly true, regardless of external evidence.

Consider these common inner stories and their business consequences:

• "I'm not a real expert" → You undercharge, avoid visibility, and struggle with imposter syndrome, crippling your storytelling for business pitch.

• "Money is hard to get" → You unconsciously sabotage pricing, collections, or profitable opportunities, undermining your financial business story.

• "I have to do everything myself" → You resist delegation, become the bottleneck, and limit growth, stifling the story of your team's potential.

• "I don't deserve success" → You hesitate to launch, avoid risks, and settle for mediocre results, preventing your triumphant business story from being told.

These stories become self-fulfilling prophecies. As much as you may want the opposite to be true, you'll find evidence to back up what you think, feel, and believe. Your inner story doesn't just live in your mind—it manifests in your business results, your client relationships, and your revenue. Your external brand storytelling becomes a hollow echo if it contradicts the powerful, silent narrative running within.

The Mirror of Your Business: When Inner and Outer Stories Collide

Think of your business as a mirror. It shows the world what is inside you. If you have fears, doubts, or old pains inside, your business will reflect these energies back to you. This happens even if you have a beautiful website and perfect prices. The market intuitively senses the dissonance between your polished external storytelling marketing and your internal uncertainty.

Many business owners focus entirely on external fixes—new marketing tactics, website redesigns, different pricing models. While these can help, they're like rearranging furniture in a house with a weak foundation. Without addressing the inner story, the external changes rarely create lasting transformation. This is why how business storytelling works on an internal level must be understood before it can work effectively externally. Business storytelling where to start is always within.

How to Identify Your Limiting Inner Business Story

Recognizing the Patterns in Your Professional Storytelling

The first step in transforming your inner story is recognizing it exists. Often, these narratives feel so familiar they seem like universal truths rather than subjective interpretations. They become the invisible ink with which you write your daily professional story.

Start by looking for patterns in your business struggles. Do you notice the same type of problem appearing repeatedly? Perhaps you consistently attract clients who don't value your work, or you regularly sabotage yourself when nearing a big goal. These patterns are the plotlines of your limiting inner story.

One business owner I worked with noticed she consistently struggled with pricing. Every time she raised her rates, she'd experience intense anxiety and often backtracked or offered excessive discounts. During our work together, she uncovered her inner story: "Asking for money is greedy and will make people reject me." This belief formed when her parents shamed her for wanting expensive toys as a child. This ancient story was directly sabotaging her modern business story of value and abundance.

Practical Exercise: Your Business Story Inventory

Set aside 30 minutes of quiet time with a journal. Answer these questions honestly to uncover the scripts governing your business storytelling:

1. What do I believe about money? (Complete sentences like "Money is...", "Rich people are...", "Having money makes me...")

2. What did my family teach me about success? (Recall specific statements, behaviors, or attitudes that shaped your earliest understanding of achievement).

3. What am I truly capable of achieving? (Notice where you limit your vision. Does your inner story allow for boundless success or impose a quiet ceiling?).

4. What scares me most about greater success? (Beyond surface answers—dig deeper. Is it visibility, responsibility, change, or perhaps proving an old family story wrong?).

5. Where do I feel stuck in my business? Then ask: "What would have to be true for this stuckness to exist?" (This reveals the underlying belief supporting the stagnation).

Be gentle with yourself during this process. The goal isn't to judge yourself for having these stories, but to bring them into the light where you can work with them. This is the raw material from which conscious business storytelling is born.

The Mirror Moment Practice: A Storyteller Tactic for Self-Rewriting

A powerful tool I developed during my recovery is called the Mirror Moment. Here's how it works as a fundamental storyteller tactic for inner change:

When that critical inner voice starts up, stop and imagine holding up a mirror. Ask yourself: What's the empowering opposite of that story? For example, 'I'm a failure' could become 'I'm successful' or 'I'm constantly learning.'

Then take one more step. What's a real story from your life where you know without doubt you were successful? How did you learn from your mistakes? It's simple, and enormously powerful. Step-by-step you start rewiring your brain to instinctively recall more of your wins rather than your failures. You become the author of a new, evidence-based story of competence. This practice is the cornerstone of authentic storytelling in business communication—it ensures you communicate from a place of inner truth.

The Cleansing Process: Transforming Your Story with Ho'oponopono

Introduction to an Ancient Hawaiian Practice for Modern Business Storytelling

Once you've identified your limiting inner stories, the next step is to cleanse them. One of the most powerful methods I've found is Ho'oponopono (pronounced ho-oh-pono-pono), an ancient Hawaiian practice of reconciliation and forgiveness. At its core, it is a profound method of story cleansing.

In traditional Hawaiian culture, families would gather with an elder to solve problems. They believed that illness and trouble came from broken relationships, mistakes, and bad feelings that were not cleaned up. Through talking, confession, forgiveness, and release, they would "make right" their relationships with each other and with their gods. They would rewrite the collective story.

The modern version was adapted by Morrnah Simeona, a Hawaiian healing priest, and made famous by Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len, who used it to heal an entire ward of mentally ill criminals without seeing them individually. He cleaned the stories within himself that he believed mirrored the patients' illnesses, and as he changed, they changed. This principle applies directly to your business: clean the inner story, and the outer business story transforms.

How Ho'oponopono Works for Business Story Evolution

You might wonder what an ancient forgiveness practice has to do with modern business challenges. The core idea is this: You are 100% responsible for everything in your reality—including your business results. This is the ultimate empowerment for a storyteller.

This doesn't mean blaming yourself for business problems. It means recognizing you have the power to change your business by changing what's inside you. Your subconscious mind contains many memories, programs, and patterns that shape how you see the world and what you attract—these are your stored stories. If you have hidden memories of "I'm not good enough" or "Money is hard to get," these memories filter your experience and become the subtext of your brand storytelling.

Ho'oponopono helps you clean these memory-based stories using four simple phrases:

1. I'm sorry: For my part in creating this situation, consciously or unconsciously.

2. Please forgive me: For carrying these limiting memories and patterns.

3. Thank you: For the cleansing and healing.

4. I love you: To fill the space with love after the cleaning.

When you say these phrases with feeling, you're asking the Divine (God, Universe, Higher Power—whatever you believe in) to erase the negative memories causing your business problems. As these memories are cleaned, your inner world changes. Then your outer world—including your business—must change to match your new inner state. This is how business storytelling works at an energetic level.

Practical Application: Using Ho'oponopono in Your Business Storytelling

You can apply Ho'oponopono to any business challenge. It clears the static that distorts your storytelling for business pitch and your business storytelling where to start from a place of clarity.

• When feeling stuck: Clean on the feeling of stagnation. "I'm sorry for the energy of stuckness I am carrying. Please forgive me. Thank you for clearing it. I love you."

• Before client meetings: Clean on any anxiety or need to prove yourself. This purifies your storytelling in business communication.

• When reviewing finances: Clean on any money stories that arise. This directly impacts the financial plot of your business story.

• After mistakes: Clean on the error and your response to it, allowing for a story of learning rather than failure.

The practice can be done silently in meditation, spoken aloud, or even written repeatedly in a journal. The key is to connect with the feeling behind the words, not just repeat them mechanically.

Table: Ho'oponopono Applications for Common Business Story Challenges

Aligning Your Inner Story with Your Entrepreneurial Archetype

Discovering Your Natural Business Storytelling Energy

Once you've begun cleansing your limiting inner stories, the next step is aligning with your authentic business energy. I've found the concept of entrepreneurial archetypes incredibly helpful for this alignment. An archetype is a universal story pattern—a character role—that lives in you. It shapes how you create, how you lead, and how you share your gifts with the world.

When you know your archetype, you move from confusion to clarity. You stop copying others' storytelling marketing and start creating from your core truth. You understand business storytelling where to start for you. Your archetype gives you the authentic voice, plot structure, and themes for your unique brand storytelling.

Through my research and work with creative entrepreneurs, I've identified seven main entrepreneurial archetypes. Each has unique gifts, challenges, and natural ways of doing business and telling their story.

The Seven Entrepreneurial Archetypes: Your Core Business Story

1. The Visionary

   • Core Gift: Big-picture thinking, future-building, innovation.

   • Shadow/Challenge: Can get scattered, resist details, feel overwhelmed.

   • Business Story Style: Creates scalable programs, masterminds, thought leadership. Their storytelling is epic and future-oriented.

   • Example: Elon Musk with his story of interplanetary colonization and sustainable energy.

2. The Healer

   • Core Gift: Deep empathy, transformation, energetic work.

   • Shadow/Challenge: Over-giving, burnout, lack of boundaries.

   • Business Story Style: Offers 1:1 coaching, retreats, healing containers. Their storytelling is intimate, transformative, and safe.

   • Example: A trauma-informed coach whose business story is about healing money wounds.

3. The Artist

   • Core Gift: Beauty, originality, aesthetic expression.

   • Shadow/Challenge: Perfectionism, self-criticism, inconsistency.

   • Business Story Style: Creates limited editions, experiential offers, beautiful brands. Their storytelling is sensory, visual, and evocative.

   • Example: A designer whose brand storytelling is woven through visually stunning client websites.

4. The Sage

   • Core Gift: Wisdom, teaching, structured systems.

   • Shadow/Challenge: Over-intellectualizing, resisting flow, rigidity.

   • Business Story Style: Offers courses, mentorships, clear frameworks. Their storytelling is educational, logical, and authoritative.

   • Example: A business coach whose story is delivered through step-by-step programs and clear teaching.

5. The Rebel

   • Core Gift: Disruption, boldness, unconventional expression.

   • Shadow/Challenge: Alienation, pushing too hard, polarizing.

   • Business Story Style: Creates edgy offers, provocative messaging, paradigm shifts. Their storytelling is disruptive, challenging, and unapologetic.

   • Example: A marketing consultant who teaches "anti-methods"—their story breaks industry rules.

6. The Lover

   • Core Gift: Connection, authenticity, emotional resonance.

   • Shadow/Challenge: Codependency, pleasing, boundary blur.

   • Business Story Style: Focuses on community, intimate offers, relational marketing. Their storytelling is connective, vulnerable, and heart-led.

   • Example: A relationship coach whose entire business story is built on the power of deep client bonds.

7. The Alchemist

   • Core Gift: Transformation, blending strategy + soul, spiritual business.

   • Shadow/Challenge: Confusion, scattering, overwhelm in integration.

   • Business Story Style: Creates hybrid offers, transformational programs. Their storytelling is metaphorical, deep, and integrative.

   • Example: A consultant who combines practical business advice with energy work—a true blend story.

How to Discover Your Dominant Storytelling Archetype

Finding your archetype is more about remembering than inventing. Here's a simple way to discover yours:

1. Observe your energy: What tasks energize you? What drains you? Your natural energy reveals your archetypal story.

2. Reflect on patterns: What roles (teacher, healer, disruptor) keep showing up in your life story?

3. Try archetype language: Sit with names like Visionary, Healer, Artist. See which feel like home. Which story feels like yours to tell?

4. Use Ho'oponopono meditation: Before reflecting, do a short Ho'oponopono practice. Then ask: "Which part of me am I resisting?" The answer often points to your dominant archetype.

5. Test in action: Try creating content or an offer from one archetype's voice. See what feels aligned. Which storytelling style flows easily?

Most people have one dominant archetype and one or two supporting ones. Use your dominant archetype as the protagonist of your business story, and let the others add depth and flavor to your narrative.

Table: Archetype-Aligned Business Storytelling Strategies

Practical Steps to Maintain Clear Energy in Your Business Story

 Establishing Daily Story-Cleansing Practices

Clearing your inner story isn't a one-time event—it's an ongoing practice. Just as you clean your physical office space regularly, your inner world needs consistent maintenance to stay clear and aligned. This maintenance ensures your storytelling for business pitch and all external communication comes from a place of clarity and power.

Establishing a daily meditation practice is one of the most powerful ways to maintain energetic clarity. You can start with just a few minutes each day and gradually build from there. Sit erect, focus on your breath and how your body feels. Visualize your energy rising as you sit, and if you sense any blockages—tension or tightness—release them with each exhale. In these moments, you are the silent editor of your inner story.

Using Breath to Clear Negative Story Energy

Your breath is always available to you as a cleansing tool. When you feel negative energy building up—perhaps after a difficult client call or when reviewing stressful financial numbers—use this simple breathing practice to reset the narrative:

1. Imagine breathing in light from the universe.

2. As you exhale, release any negative energy or old story back into the earth.

3. Continue this cycle, breathing in light and creating space for new opportunities and new plotlines.

4. Exhale anything holding you or your business back.

5. Continue until you feel a shift in your energy and your internal storytelling.

This practice can be done in just a few minutes, even during a busy workday. I often use it between client sessions to reset my energy and show up fully present for each person, ensuring my storytelling in business communication is fresh and attuned.

The Power of Gratitude in Business Storytelling

Gratitude is perhaps the most overlooked tool for maintaining clear business energy and writing a positive business story. Keeping gratitude in our hearts for what our business already provides creates a positive energetic foundation that prevents distortion from negative energies. It actively writes a story of abundance.

Maintain a gratitude journal specifically for your business. Before finishing work each day, write down three things you're grateful for about your business. These don't need to be major achievements—appreciation for a supportive client, a lesson learned from a mistake, or simply the freedom your business provides all count. This practice consciously curates the evidence for a successful business story.

This regular gratitude practice accomplishes two important things: it shifts your focus from what's lacking to what's abundant (changing the plot), and it reinforces positive neural pathways about your business success (rewiring the narrator).

 Energy Clearing for Your Physical Storytelling Space

Your physical workspace holds energy too. Just as we clean our inner world, it's helpful to periodically clear the energy of your office or workspace. A clear space supports a clear story.

Simple methods include:

• Using salt water: Salt is believed to have purifying properties. Lightly spray salt water around your office or at entryways to clear stagnant energy and old, stuck stories.

• Burning bay leaves: Write limiting beliefs on bay leaves and safely burn them to release these patterns—a physical act of story revision.

• Decluttering regularly: A cluttered space is believed to draw negative energy. Clear out unnecessary items to create space for positivity and new opportunities, mirroring the internal process of clearing mental clutter for new storytelling.

From Blockage to Flow: Implementing Your New Business Story

Taking Aligned Action from Your New Story

Inner work becomes meaningful when it translates to outer results. Once you've identified and begun cleansing your limiting inner stories, the next step is taking aligned action from your new perspective. This is where you begin to live the new story and tell it through your actions.

Start small but be consistent. If your old story was "I'm not a real expert," your aligned action might be:

• Raising your prices by 10% for new clients (affirming a story of increased value).

• Speaking up in a mastermind group instead of staying silent (participating in a collective story of expertise).

• Publishing content on a topic you previously avoided for fear of being "exposed" (publicly telling your new story).

Each small action reinforces your new story. The brain learns through repetition and experience, so consistent aligned actions—no matter how small—literally rewire your neural pathways to support your new narrative. This is how to grow your business with storytelling at the deepest level: by embodying the story first.

Measuring What Matters in Your Evolving Story

As you implement these changes, pay attention to different metrics than you might normally track. Beyond revenue and client numbers, notice the qualitative shifts in your business story:

• Energy levels: Do you feel more energized at the end of your workday?

• Synchronicities: Are you noticing more "lucky coincidences" and perfect timing? (Signs of a flowing story).

• Client quality: Are you attracting more aligned, enjoyable clients? (Your story is attracting its perfect audience).

• Ease factor: Is business flowing with less struggle and effort? (The plot is smoothing out).

• Joy quotient: How much pleasure are you deriving from your work? (The emotional tone of your story).

These subtle indicators often shift long before the financial metrics catch up. Celebrating these small wins reinforces the positive cycle of growth and validates your new storytelling.

Creating a Support System for Your New Narrative

Transforming your inner story isn't a solo journey. The entrepreneurs who create lasting change build support systems that reinforce their new narratives. Even the best storyteller needs a trusted editor and audience.

This might include:

• A like-minded mastermind who understands the importance of inner work and can reflect your new story back to you.

• A coach or mentor who's done this work themselves and can guide your storytelling evolution.

• Conscious content consumption—reading books and listening to podcasts that support your new story.

• Regular check-ins with an accountability partner who knows your growth goals and the new business story you're committed to living.

Remember, you're not just building a business—you're rebuilding your relationship with yourself as a business owner. This deserves the same level of investment and support as any other business function. It is the fundamental work of brand storytelling that starts within.

Your Journey from Blockage to Business Flow Through Story

The most significant growth block in your business isn't your strategy, your marketing, or your offers—it's the inner story running beneath the surface of your awareness. This story, formed through years of repetition, shapes everything from your daily decisions to your ultimate results. Understanding how business storytelling works internally is the master key.

The journey from blockage to flow begins with courage—the courage to look inward, to identify the limiting narratives, and to consciously rewrite them. This isn't about positive thinking or manifesting through willpower. It's about fundamental cleansing of the mental and emotional patterns that filter your experience of what's possible. It's the ultimate storyteller tactic: becoming the conscious author of your life.

When you do this deep work, something remarkable happens. Your business begins to transform from the inside out. Clients feel more drawn to you. Money flows more easily. Work feels joyful rather than effortful. This isn't magic—it's the natural result of aligning your inner world with your outer ambitions. Your external storytelling marketing and brand storytelling suddenly ring true because they are.

Your business is your creation, your child, and your manifestation. The more you work on your relationship with your business, the more joy you will derive from it. There is harmony in partnership if we can establish it. Clearing the energy and rewriting the story of your business will help you do just that. This is business storytelling where to start. This is how to grow your business with storytelling that is authentic, powerful, and truly your own. Begin with the story you tell yourself. Everything else is the sequel.