49. The Ancestral Business Manifesto - Ten Declarations

In this episode, I'm sharing the Ancestral Business Manifesto — 10 declarations that Dr. Joey Liu and I have created together about building business from ancestral wisdom rather than colonial frameworks.

In this episode, you'll learn about:

• The surprising place your real authority comes from 
• Why "owning" money might be the exact wrong relationship to have with wealth
• The one question that reveals whether your marketing is manipulation or genuine service
• Why staying small and anonymous might actually be a form of hoarding

If you've been looking for permission to build your business differently than mainstream models, this episode is that permission. 

Want to go deeper? Our upcoming course, Ancestral Wealth, is an eight-week intensive where you'll work with these principles in depth, in community, with deep structure and practical application.

Learn more and apply here: https://play.simonegraceseol.com/ancestral-wealth

Transcript

Welcome to another episode of Liberatory Business. I'm your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for listening.

Today I want to share something really powerful — what I'm calling the Ancestral Business Manifesto, that my collaborator, Dr. Joey Liu, and I have created together. It's 10 declarations about what it means to build a business in alignment with your ancestors and their plans for you.

I'm going to read each of those out loud and then talk about why each of them matters and what it means for you right now. So, you ready? Let's go.

Declaration number one. We get the authority to do the work we're meant for not from degrees or certifications or institutions, but from what our ancestors said we are. No external body can grant or revoke what was given to you and assigned to you before you were born. Your ancestors named you, claimed you, and assigned you long before any institution noticed that you even existed. And that authority runs deeper than any credential because here's what I see happening all the time, and I feel so strongly about this one—someone knows that they're meant to be doing creative work, healing work, teaching work, leadership work, something that comes naturally to them. It feels like it doesn't feel like a choice to opt out. And when they decide to build a business around it or a platform around it, the imposter syndrome pops up and it's like the first thing they do is go looking for permission, for validation outside of themselves. They go take a training, they go seek another certification, another credential, another degree—not because they are feeling a genuine gap in their skills, but because they feel like they need someone with letters after their name to tell them that they're allowed to do this work.

And look, I'm a huge fan of education, but there's a difference between "I'm learning this so I can be more effective" and "I need this piece of paper because that's what gives me the authority to do this work." When you confuse the tool for the authority, you give your power away to institutions, often colonial institutions that may or may not even understand what you're actually here to do. So the question is, if every credential you have was stripped away tomorrow, would you still know what you're here to do? If the answer's no, we gotta think about where you've been looking for permission that you already have outside of yourself. That's declaration number one, because I feel like it's the most important.

Declaration number two. Business is personal. If it isn't personal, it's not worth doing. Business built on formulas and best practices that could belong to anyone becomes an interchangeable, forgettable, and ultimately unsustainable thing. When your business is personal, that means it's rooted in specific relationships to your lineage, to your community, your ancestors, your particular gifts and limitations. All of that specificity is what makes it irreplaceable. And it's also what keeps you accountable to something beyond just profit. So lean in to the personalness of your art, your medicine, the exchanges and relationships that you cultivate on your way to building your business.

Declaration number three. Money is never owned, only stewarded. You didn't create wealth. You are moving it through your hands for a time. Your job is to tend to it well, grow it wisely, and pass it on for the betterment of the world. Because if you believe that you own money, the natural conclusion is that accumulation is what becomes the goal. You want more and more of it because it's yours, and having more means being safer, right? But if you understand that there's no such thing as owning money, only stewarding it, and you understand that it's passing through your hands on its way to somewhere else, the question isn't "how do I get as much as possible and keep it for myself," but "how do I tend to this flow well?" When you carry the responsibility for answering those questions well through your choices and your actions, then you become a true steward of money, not just an owner.

Declaration number four. There's no marketing or sales outside of service. Marketing and sales become manipulation and extraction the moment they're severed from genuine service. When you're clear on how your work serves, marketing is simply making that service visible to those who need it. Sales is the structured invitation for people to receive what serves them. Without the underlying genuine service, you are just using psychological levers to move people towards what benefits you. So many people have a problem with marketing and sales because the only way they've seen it done is divorced from genuine care and is just manipulation. But sales and marketing are not inherently a problem. It's only a problem when there's no genuine service.

And here's the test, right? How do I know if I'm genuinely serving or I say I'm serving, but I'm just really pushing psychological levers to get people to do what I want them to do? So here's the question you wanna ask: Would I still say this thing I'm about to say in my marketing, if I knew for certain that this person would never buy from me? If the answer is yes, if I'm sharing something true and useful regardless of whether it leads to a transaction, then I'm in service. If the answer is no, if I'm only saying it because I think it's gonna get them to buy, then that's when you know you've slipped into manipulation.

So much of my own marketing and sales processes, I always come back to the question of how is this gonna serve? How is this gonna serve the people who might be a good fit for what I'm selling, and they might give me money. And how is this also gonna be of service to people who might never buy. But the part that makes me feel really good about my marketing is when I know in my heart that just being exposed to my marketing genuinely helps them in their lives. There's nothing that gratifies me more than when somebody tells me, "I've never bought anything from you, and yet I felt so taken care of. I felt so nourished from your marketing. It felt like a service to me." That's how I know I'm doing it right. And I hope that your marketing has that impact on people too.

Declaration number five. And this is what I feel so strongly about—cultivating excellence in business is a form of stewarding the gifts my ancestors gave me. The gifts that my ancestors passed down, whether it's tangible resources or skills, or the conditions that made my life possible, were given so that they could continue to nourish and serve the world. So letting those gifts atrophy or using them carelessly is a form of waste, abuse, I might even go as far as to say. So developing them, refining them, and expanding what they can do is how you keep them alive and generative for what comes next.

I think there's a certain kind of false humility that can show up in sort of conscious business or spiritual business spaces or progressive business spaces, and that looks like a lot of people staying artificially small, playing down their gifts, refusing to develop their capacity to receive and to steward flow because they instantly associate any kind of bigness with moral corruption. And I think that's a mistake, and I think it leads to waste. When you refuse to develop your gifts, when you let your capacity for excellence atrophy without being used because growth feels uncomfortable or scary, or you feel like expansion is only a capitalist trap and you feel like there's no way to steward a big flow of influence or money because it's inherently immoral or not spiritual... you're not doing something that's gonna make your ancestors happy and you're not actually serving your descendants either.

Excellence is not about ego. It's not about being better than other people. Excellence is about taking what you've been given and making it as powerful, as refined, and most importantly, as useful as it can possibly be to the world.

Declaration number six. As my marketing and sales skills sharpen, so must my commitment to eldership. Power without maturity is dangerous. The better I get at moving people, the more responsibility I carry for where I move them. And growing my influence means also that I have a responsibility to grow my wisdom, my discernment, and my accountability to those who are in my world.

I think you and I probably have both watched people get good at marketing and sales. They get really good. They learn the techniques, they refine their messaging. They figure out what makes people move. They make more money, their audiences get bigger, and some of them stay grounded through that growth. They're committed to developing their wisdom and discernment alongside their business skill. They put themselves in rooms where they're challenged morally and spiritually, not just in terms of growing your business. They grow in their commitment to being accountable to elders, to their peers, to the communities they serve, and often they evolve and pivot their work publicly as a consequence. Their learning is reflected in the actual choices they make.

But also a lot of people don't do any of these things. Some of them just get better and better at influencing people without getting any wiser, without growing their moral discernment. And that's when things get dangerous because now you have someone who can move tens of thousands, maybe millions of people, but doesn't have the moral fiber to consider, "Hey, okay, I'm moving people, but where am I moving them?"

So as your skills grow in business—and I want your skills to grow—I also want you to ask yourself: What structures do I have for growing my wisdom, my morality at the same time? Who in my life do I have that is capable of challenging me?

Declaration seven. There's no wealth without community wealth, and your individual prosperity built at the cost of your community is not prosperity at all. Real wealth lifts others as it rises. Real wealth creates pathways. It opens doors. It redistributes access. If you're winning alone, you are not winning at all.

I got to reflecting on all of this in a very specific way when thinking about the climate crisis, and just thinking about how much can wealthy people just like sequester themselves into the illusion of safety while the planet is actually burning. Like, what good is your money gonna be able to do when the planet is destroyed? Right? I started thinking a lot about that, and even without that, even without considering that, right? To what extent can you pass down whatever generational wealth to your children and their children, if the world you're leaving behind for them is gonna be one in which they're always gonna have to sequester themselves because it's so unsafe, because it's so unequal and the world is dysfunctional and their safety requires that they build these giant walls around their luxurious lives. Is that the kind of wealth that I want for my descendants? And I think for most people, if they were to answer honestly, they would say no.

So real wealth creation, liberatory wealth creation, is always, always, always, always community wealth creation. We rise together or there's no meaningful rising at all.

Declaration number eight. This is another one of my favorites. Achieving greatness is not selfish. It's generous. If you think about it, anonymity always allows you to receive more. When you're just kinda like lurking in the background, you don't have to be noticed. Then you can just receive and receive and receive, and without having to take the risks to give. Greatness is a life of giving. Your whole life becomes a blueprint for others to learn from and pushes the boundaries of what's possible, and you become great knowing that you will outgrow what others can give you in return.

Greatness is generous. Staying small, being anonymous can feel safe, but I want you to consider that it could also be a form of hoarding. Staying small could be a form of hoarding. When you allow yourself to pursue greatness, your whole life becomes a gift. Everything you learn and build, everything that you struggle with and overcome, becomes a blueprint. Other people get to look at your life and think, "Oh, that's possible. Oh, that's how you do that. Oh, I'm not alone in facing this." Your greatness pushes the boundaries of what other people believe is available to them. That's such a generous service.

And of course it comes at a cost. And the cost is that you will be giving more than others can give you back. When you develop your excellence past a certain point, you step into territories that no one else around you has already been before, and you outgrow what your peers can offer you. You'll know things that they don't know, you'll carry responsibilities, knowledge that they can't and won't understand. And yeah, knowing that this asymmetry is gonna exist and being okay with it, with giving more than you receive, with teaching more than you're taught—that is the true meaning of greatness.

Declaration number nine. Dreams, signs, felt sense, communion with unseen allies—these are as essential to business decision making as analytical thinking. Both together are my ancestral inheritance. Your ancestors used their rational intelligence, their intuition, their oracular insights to make wise decisions. The dream that wakes you up at three in the morning and the spreadsheet that shows you the numbers are both valid sources of guidance for your business, 'cause you inherited a whole person, whole soul decision making system, not half of one.

And here's what I see happening in two different directions. Some people in sort of conscious spiritual business spaces have completely abandoned analytical thinking. Everything is intuition and everything is signs and everything is energy, and they're making important decisions solely based on whether something feels aligned without ever really looking at reality, the numbers. And I used to be sometimes guilty of this, so I'm not pointing fingers, but it's really important to look at reality and ask yourself, "Okay, is this sustainable? Does this make sense?"

On the other hand, and I think this is where a lot of people who grew up within colonized education systems land, which is that they've been trained to trust only what can be measured. So when they have that, you know, 3:00 AM intuitive clarity, you know, they wake up the next morning and go, "Ah, that was just a—you know, that's not real." And they dismiss those critical sources of wisdom from their bodies, from the part of their mind that is deeper than rationality.

And I just wanna let more people know that these two ways of knowing are not in competition. Your ancestors certainly didn't choose one between these two—they used all of them together, right? I mean, everyone who's gonna be listening to this will have different inheritances, different types of wisdom and practices in their lineage, but I'm sure that you can find evidence of how they were both very spiritually attuned and also were incredibly practical people, because without that practicality, it's kind of hard to let your line survive as long as it did so you could be here today. So let yourself be a whole person, whole soul decision making system. I think that's the only way we can decolonize our ways of knowing and doing.

Declaration ten. The work I'm here to do is bigger than my lifetime. I'm one link in a chain that stretches behind me, beside me, and ahead of me. My job is to carry my part well. I didn't start this work and I'm not gonna finish it. My ancestors began it before I was born. My peers are carrying it alongside me, and my descendants will continue it long after I'm gone. I don't try to do it all. I just rise to my own part with the best of my integrity and excellence.

I think this is very much the colonial capitalist conditioning—like, you have one lifetime to make your mark. You gotta, you have one life to change the world. Clock is ticking, time's running out. You better hurry. And in liberatory spaces this just gets manifested another way, but it's the same thing at the core. You have this one lifetime to dismantle all the harmful systems, you have to fix all the problems, you have to heal all the trauma, build all the things. So, you know, time's running out, better hurry, right? Both are at the core of the same thing and they are fundamentally destructive.

You are not the origin point. And you're not the finish line. You are doing this work with so many allies and peers, many of whom you won't even know that they exist, who will be impacted by your work and your ideas. And you are gonna be impacted by so many people's work and ideas whom you will never meet, right? And your allies also include your ancestors and your descendants who are gonna continue the work once you are no longer on earth.

And so this fundamental shift in understanding of your responsibility as being one link changes everything. And by the way, being one link doesn't mean half-assing. It doesn't mean opting out of anything. It means that being devoted to carrying your part with full integrity while letting go of any kind of pressure to have to do more than that because you literally can't. No need to be the hero, we're just trying to be a good link.

Okay, so those are the 10 declarations. The point isn't that you take all these 10 declarations and implement them all perfectly by next week. The point is that I wanna encourage everyone to start asking different qualities of questions about what it means to build a business. Not "how do I be like so and so," not "what's the formula, what's the template?" But "what is my ancestral assignment to carry? What am I responsible for stewarding? Who am I accountable to?"

I think the temptation is to think that when you are oriented ancestrally and relationally, it like slows down business or like it's an impediment to making actual money. Like it's something that you have to do alongside the actual real work of the business. But I have found in my own experience as well as the experience of so many of the people I work with, that being ancestrally and relationally oriented actually speeds up your business growth. It actually makes things smoother because you are no longer in a situation where one part of you is fighting another part of you, and all of you are on board in alignment pointing to the same place. Your soul feels good, your business brain feels good, your community feels good, and that actually creates so much momentum.

Now, if you wanna work with these principles in depth, in community with deep structure and practical application, that's what our upcoming course, Ancestral Wealth, is for. It's an eight-week intensive and practicum. If you wanna find out more and apply, you can find the link in the show notes.

You inherited something specific from your ancestors. You're carrying something specific. Steward that with as much excellence as you can.

I'll talk to you next time. Bye.