Why the Best-Case Scenario Isn't Woo (And How It Doubled My Business)

Business  ·  Mindset  ·  Limitless Woman

By Julie Cyvonne  ·  Plant Medicine Coach & Business Mentor  ·  8 min read

Last year was a hard year. I got burnt out in a way I hadn't experienced since I was practicing law. I had been doing all the things people told me to do: posting four times a day, building funnels, following the exact blueprint of people I had put on a pedestal for years. People whose podcasts I listened to, whose revenue numbers I had envied, & whose path I assumed must be the right one because it had worked for them.

What I didn't see until I was deep in it was that high revenue doesn't mean good margins. It doesn't mean you're keeping that money. And it definitely doesn't mean the person living that life is happy. One of those mentors had given himself a serious medical condition from stress. Others lacked real relationships: no community, basically no life outside the business. Just work, all the time.

I looked at that and thought: that is not the cost I'm willing to pay. So I stopped. And I started over, differently.

I stopped asking what I wanted from my business. I started asking what I wanted from my life.

This sounds simple but it's not. Most of us have been so conditioned to optimize for the business first, and then whatever is left over becomes our life. The hours that remain after the work is done. The remaining capacity you have when the laptop finally closes.

I heard Greg McKeown, the author of Essentialism, talk about how he wrote one of the best-selling books in the self-help category while prioritizing his family, his health, and his life above the work. Not after the work. Above it. And the book still got written. The business still grew. Because when you're clear on what your life needs to look like, you stop wasting energy on everything that doesn't fit it.

That reframe changed everything for me. In the first few months of this year, I've already made more than I did in all of last year. Not because I'm working harder. Because I stopped outsourcing my power to other people's formulas and started trusting my own.

What "doing what works for you" requires

I want to be honest about something because I think this concept gets misused constantly. Doing what works for you is not soft-girl era. It is not an excuse to sit on the couch and call it alignment. I still work. I work hard. I just don't burn myself out doing it.

To build a business around your life instead of the other way around, you need two things that most people skip straight past.

Entertaining the best-case scenario isn't woo. It's neuroscience.

I talk a lot about entertaining the best-case scenario. And I want to ground it in something real because I think when people hear it, they assume it's just positive thinking with better branding.

What it's doing is activating the reticular activating system. This is the part of your brain that decides what information is worth noticing. It's why the moment you decide to buy a green Honda Civic, you suddenly see them everywhere. They were always there. Your brain just wasn't filtering for them.

When you consistently orient toward the best possible outcome, your brain starts filtering your environment for evidence of it. Your behavior shifts. The way you show up in conversations, in client work, in decisions all of it shifts. It's the reticular activating system doing exactly what it was designed to do.

I had a client who was always waiting for the other shoe to drop in dating. Always pre-judging, always braced for the red flag. She asked me if she was creating the situations. The honest answer was: not exactly. But her energy was shifting how she showed up, and that was influencing how the other person responded. The moment she started genuinely entertaining the possibility that it could go well, everything changed. Not because she manifested the perfect guy. Because she finally stopped sabotaging her own shot.

Who I'm working with now and why it matters

My work has shifted a lot in the last year. I started in the plant medicine space talking primarily about microdosing for anxiety, OCD, depression, PTSD, and helping people titrate off medications that weren't serving them. That work mattered enormously.

But now I'm working more and more with business owners. Brick-and-mortar practices, online businesses, women in leadership positions who present as incredibly successful from the outside and are quietly being eaten alive from the inside. 

I've had clients doing yearly performance reviews, navigating contract disputes, figuring out how to have a hard conversation with an employee they need to let go. My legal background keeps showing up in ways I didn't expect, and I love it. This is where the lawyer brain and the plant medicine work live together in the same room.

The next round starts August 10th. If you've been reading this and nodding along, that's information. 🍄

The intersection of woo and science is where the real work lives

I am reading The Body Keeps the Score right now and it is confirming things I have been saying for years. Microdosing and psychedelics down-regulate your nervous system by taking blood flow away from the amygdala. The amygdala is what drives fight-or-flight. When it quiets, you have access to the parts of yourself that can think clearly, make better decisions, and stop reacting from fear.

That is not something I made up, is a scientifically documented physiological process. And it's why the work I do isn't just a vibe. And understanding that mechanism makes it possible to talk about it in a way that lands for people who would otherwise dismiss it as woo.

The principles of manifestation are proven by quantum physics. The best-case scenario mindset is the reticular activating system. The integration work after a psychedelic experience is neuroplasticity in action. When you understand the science underneath the spiritual principle, you don't just believe it more. You can use it more precisely. And that precision is what turns a concept into an actual result.

I built a life I want to live, a business that grew because I stopped forcing it to look like someone else's and let it become mine.

That didn't happen by accident. It happened because I got clear on what I wanted, took radical responsibility for my role in everything that wasn't working, and built from there.  And it's available to you too. 🍄