Choosing the Delightful Path: How Pleasure Fuels Sustainable Success
There's a quiet revolution happening among the women I work with.
They're letting go of the struggle narrative.
Rejecting hustle culture.
And discovering that their most powerful business strategy isn't found in over-optimising, pushing through resistance or jumping on the latest trend.
It's pleasure.
Yes, pleasure.
I forgive you if you just rolled your eyes a little. I used to too.
In our achievement-focused culture, pleasure often feels indulgent, frivolous, perhaps even selfish.
Something you enjoy only after the serious, hard work is done.
We've all been conditioned to believe that valuable work must involve hardship and struggle – that if something feels too enjoyable, it can't possibly be productive or even very valuable.
And this belief keeps so many of us stuck.
Practical Steps Aren't Enough
Over the years of working with brilliant, ambitious women, I've seen the same pattern arise again and again: no matter how simple and do-able the practical business steps are, if there is emotional or spiritual disconnection beneath the surface, those steps simply do not happen.
We all know what we need to do, and yet…
The strategic plans gather digital dust.
The carefully crafted content would remains unsent.
The programme that could transform lives (including our own) stays locked in our imagination.
If you find yourself procrastinating, overthinking, or feeling strangely resistant to actions that would move you into your next level of business - there’s likely something deeper at play.
Here's what I've come to understand: your nervous system wins every time.
No amount of willpower can override a nervous system that's signalling "danger" or "depletion."
And when your work consistently feels like a struggle, your body begins to associate your business with threat rather than nourishment.
The result? A downward spiral of avoidance, inconsistency, stress, and diminishing enjoyment that further feeds the cycle.
Pleasure, enjoyment, delight are what begin to turn this spiral around.
Feminine Fire in a World That's Burning
Before we go further, I want to acknowledge the times we are living in.
The world feels like it's burning – literally and metaphorically.
In times like these, it might seem frivolous to talk about pleasure or joy. Surely, serious challenges demand equally serious, even somber approaches?
I believe this is a false choice.
A depleted, burnt-out woman cannot effectively respond to a world in crisis. A joyless enterprise cannot sustain the energy needed for long-term change. And a culture fixated on struggle cannot imagine the new possibilities our world so desperately needs.
There's a reason why systems of control thrive when people are afraid, exhausted, and disconnected from their joy. Fear makes us easier to manipulate. Exhaustion diminishes our capacity to question or resist. And disconnection from pleasure keeps us separate from our own inner wisdom – the very wisdom that might guide us toward more sustainable, life-affirming ways of being.
Reclaiming your relationship with pleasure isn't just personal indulgence. It's a radical act of resistance against systems that benefit from your depletion.
Relocating Authority: From Outside to Inside
Psychologist Carol Gilligan explores in her book "The Birth of Pleasure" how our culture systematically disconnects us as women - from pleasure and authentic desire, teaching us to suppress what we truly want in favour of performing roles that maintain existing power structures.
This disconnection shows up as a profound mistrust of our own inner guidance. We look externally for formulas, frameworks, and validation, unconsciously seeking permission rather than trusting our own knowing.
The journey to reclaiming your feminine fire is fundamentally about relocating authority – moving it from outside yourself back to where it belongs: within.
This shift from external validation to internal guidance builds self-trust.
And self-trust is the foundation of sustainable success.
Choose the More Delightful Path
I often tell my mentees something that sounds deceptively simple: "Choose the more delightful path."
When faced with two possible approaches to a business challenge, most of us default to the one that feels more serious, more difficult, more like "real work." We've been conditioned to believe that if it feels like a struggle, it must be more valuable.
But that just keeps us stuck and depleted.
Let me tell you about a woman I worked with last year. She came to me frustrated with her inconsistent content creation.
Before building her coaching practice, she had been an avid dancer – nothing professional, just moving her body to music that brought her immense joy. But she'd let this practice slip as she focused more and more on her business.
"What would happen if you started dancing again?" I asked her. "What would it look like to choose the more delightful path here?"
Three months later: not only was she dancing regularly again, but she'd begun incorporating more movement into her client sessions. Her social media engagement had taken off as she was showing up more fully embodied and relaxed.
Her joy was seeping into her work.
She even started to imagine her business through this lens. “I feel like I’m expressing myself more fully and inviting others to join me in the dance."
Her business thrived not because she pushed harder, but because she reconnected with what brought her alive. The rhythm and flow she rediscovered in dancing began to inform how she structured her programmes, how she moved through her day, and how she engaged with her community.
I think you know if something is your medicine, if there is pleasure in it.
Joy as Resistance, Pleasure as Strategy
This isn't just feel-good philosophy. It's neuroscience.
When you approach business from a place of struggle and stress, you activate your sympathetic nervous system – the fight-or-flight response. This narrows your focus, reduces creativity, and limits access to your prefrontal cortex, where your most innovative thinking happens.
By contrast, when you engage in work that feels pleasurable, you shift into a state where curiosity, exploration, and connection become possible. Your perspective broadens. You see opportunities you'd miss in a stressed state. And paradoxically, you become more generative – not despite the enjoyment, but because of it.
In a world that profits from your exhaustion and fear, choosing joy becomes an act of resistance or reclamation.
When you choose pleasure and presence over striving and struggle, you step outside that system. You declare that your worth isn't determined by productivity metrics. You reclaim your humanity in a culture that often reduces us to economic units.
Which is why we started our businesses in the first place. Right?
Let Your Work Nourish You First
Here's what I now tell every woman I work with (including myself!!): your work must nourish you first, before it nourishes anyone else.
If your business consistently depletes you, it's not sustainable – no matter how impressive your strategic plan or how perfect your offer. The most brilliant marketing funnel in the world won't save a business that its owner resents running.
When you reconnect with what brings you alive – what I call your "feminine fire" – everything changes. This reconnection is about more than just enjoying your work. It's about returning to a way of being that honours your natural rhythms, your body's wisdom, and your deepest desires, and creates the systems, structures and strategy from there.
I've watched what happens when women feed this fire:
The coach who incorporated her love of poetry into client sessions, creating gorgeous transformative experiences.
The therapist who trusted her intuition to develop a nature-based approach when everyone else was going online.
The course creator who redesigned her programme around what felt energising to teach, doubling completion rates and testimonials.
These women didn't succeed by pushing through resistance. They succeeded by following their aliveness – by making their businesses expressions of their most authentic enjoyment.
Your Invitation
My own life began to feel very different when I realised that nurturing my creativity and my aliveness wasn't an indulgence but essential infrastructure for my business. I’m in the process of reorganising my life and work around what brings me most alive, and I’m finding that the more aligned I get the better results I achieve with less ‘effort’.
In a world where so many forces seek to disconnect us from our joy – to keep us afraid, depleted, and controlled – reconnecting with your feminine fire becomes not just a personal act of liberation, but a contribution to a different kind of world.
As you go about your day today, I invite you to ask yourself:
Where am I still believing that struggle equals value?
What would it look like to follow my pleasure in my business?
When faced with multiple options, how might you choose the more delightful path?
Where can you relocate authority from external validation to your own inner wisdom?
The path to sustainable success isn't paved with sacrifice and struggle. It's illuminated by the light of your own aliveness – your feminine fire.
This June, I'll be exploring these themes deeply in my new course, Feminine Fire: Fuel Your Brilliance. It's all about reconnecting with your natural source of creativity, confidence, and power so you can create sustainable success without burning out.
Your brilliance doesn't need to be forced or extracted. It simply needs to be liberated.
With love and fervent belief in your feminine fire,
Erika x
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