Understanding Your Nervous System Is a Competitive Advantage

Over the past 11 years, Greg and I have spent significant time and money working on ourselves. 

We both experienced trauma as children and spent a lot of our 20s drowning it out with alcohol. Something hit us when we turned 30, though. 

Let me set the stage:  we were both working at full-time jobs that weren’t fulfilling us. We had recently adopted a high needs dog who had experienced significant trauma and had major behavioral issues. We were also living in the first home we owned together, and we were homesteading in our backyard. 

And I was finishing my bachelor’s degree in the middle of all of this (which meant that Greg was carrying about 95% of the weight at home).

Overwhelm was the norm at our home, and we often drowned it out with alcohol. But one day, we got sick of that approach. 

We decided to make some changes. Most of the changes weren’t drastic. For example, we started going to a yoga therapy class 2x/week to slow down and get back into our bodies. 

But some changes were drastic–like quitting our full-time jobs to figure out entrepreneurship. We had no real plan except that we had saved up enough money to feel comfortable making the leap. 🫣🤷🏽‍♀️

Along the way, life tested us a thousand times over. We lost family members. Greg had a major health crisis that kept him from working for a year. We both had a 4+ year health crisis from a long-term mold exposure, and I missed at least 1 day of work per week during that time due to severe migraines. Our dog eventually passed away. 

Every time we thought we were making progress, something else popped up.

Some of these situations resulted in one or both of us needing to get a job. This tested us even more because our hearts were in entrepreneurship, but we didn't always make enough money in the early days.   

However, throughout it all, we kept working on ourselves. We worked with sooooo many practitioners–from trauma therapists to chiropractors to functional medicine practitioners–while also doing everything we could do to empower ourselves. 

We read books, listened to podcasts, journaled, attended spiritual ceremonies, used saunas, walked barefoot in the garden, tapped (Emotional Freedom Technique), practiced yoga, got attuned to do Reiki on each other, meditated, did breathwork, took a zillion different supplements, and took alllll of the psychometric assessments (including our now beloved Habit Story assessment). 

Eventually, we realized that the common thread running through just about everything we were working on was the nervous system. This was before the nervous system was being mentioned all over social media, and it was a real a-ha moment for us. 

By this point, I had launched For the Love of Systems (FTLOS), and Greg had joined me. As we continued to work on ourselves with this new awareness about the nervous system while also running FTLOS, we realized that dysregulated nervous systems can lead to chaotic business operations. 

So we started teaching clients about the change curve. Then we got certified to use the Habit Story assessment in our work. Then we started applying these principles to our own operations, including how we onboarded and continue to manage our Marketing + Operations Coordinator, Hannah. 

We now consider this understanding part of our competitive advantage–both in how we run our company, and in how we engage with clients. And you can too. 

What it comes down to is that people are looking for predictability and certainty in their work because it helps them preserve capacity for their personal lives. 

And your ability to provide that predictability and certainty is directly related to your ability to regulate your nervous system while riding the waves of business ownership and life. 

If you want to learn more, I’d recommend starting with the work of Stephen Porges and his son, Seth. Their insights on poly-vagal theory are the foundation of this understanding. From there, a quick Google search for “nervous system tools” will send you down a rabbit hole of options you can learn about until you find one that feels aligned.

Learning how to regulate your nervous system is the “secret” we’re all looking for to finding success in business (and life), and I hope this understanding will change your life as much as it has changed ours. 🧡