It’s 8pm on a Saturday night.

You’re shoving food in your mouth with one hand while trying to type last-minute emails with the other. 

You’re not taking a salary this quarter. 

Again. 

And you keep telling yourself the same thing you’ve been telling yourself for months:

It’s just business.

That sentence is desperately trying to draw a clean dividing line between what’s happening in the business and what’s happening in you.

The line doesn’t hold. It never did.

Because here’s the truth: 

It’s never “just business.”

The founder who’s not taking a salary, and telling herself it’s just business, is actually dealing with a confidence crisis that’s showing up as a relationship strain that’s showing up as a health problem. 

None of that is just business.

It’s all connected. It always was.

The organ problem

Western medicine has its own version version of this same blind spot.

You go to one doctor for your back. Another for your gut. A third for the thing that’s probably stress but nobody wants to say that out loud. Each specialist looks at their organ. 

None of them talk to each other.

And you leave every appointment with a partial answer and the same feeling you walked in with: something’s off, but I still can’t figure out what.

What’s missing is fascia.

Fascia is the connective tissue that links everything — muscle to bone, organ to organ, system to system.

Without it in our bodies, the parts would fail. The system would break down. 

In our businesses and our lives, we expect the parts do their jobs in complete isolation. Nothing integrates. Nothing flows.

The marketing team does its job. Finance does its job. The founder holds the whole thing together in her head because she’s the only one who can see how it connects.

That works — until it doesn’t. 

What chaos teaches us

There’s a version of crisis that arrives so suddenly and so completely that the old systems stop working, and we have no choice but to build new ones from scratch.

Most of us spend years trying to avoid that moment.

But some leaders, when everything falls apart, discover something unexpected: they’re actually good at the blob.

That formless mass of things with no clear entry point. 

The leaders who navigate blobs well aren’t the ones who stay calm because nothing scares them.

They’re the ones who go into action because it’s a crisis. Who start mapping connections because that’s how their brain works. Who build the path one rock at a time, not because they can see the end, but because they can see the next step.

That’s a skill. It’s learnable. And it starts with dropping the fiction that any of it is just business.

The jungle gym you didn’t know you were building

There’s a career metaphor worth retiring: the ladder.

The ladder has one direction. One destination. Everyone on it is competing for the same narrow space at the top. And if you step off — if you go sideways, or back, or somewhere the ladder doesn’t reach — it feels like failure.

The jungle gym is different.

On a jungle gym, every direction is available. You can swing left when the right side stops being interesting. You can add a new section when you discover something worth learning. You can play.

More importantly: everything you learned on one part of the structure comes with you to the next.

The corporate skills don’t disappear when you go to a startup. The startup lessons don’t vanish when you go fractional. The parenting, the advocacy, the navigating of systems that weren’t built for you — all of it compounds.

The jungle gym career doesn’t look coherent from the outside. From the inside, it’s the most connected thing you’ve ever built.

The first question

If you’re the one holding all the connections in your head, the only one who knows how the parts fit together, what happens when you’re not there?

Because the business that only runs when you’re in it isn’t a business yet. And the life that only holds together when you’re managing every thread isn’t sustainable.

You need fascia.

It might be a system. It might be a person. It might be a new way of seeing what’s actually connected and what you’ve just been keeping separate in your own head.

But it starts with letting go of that sentence that seduces you into settling.

Because it was never just business.

And you deserve more. 

Lauren Zaslansky Conner, MBA and I go deep into this territory in the latest episode of the Untamed Leader Podcast — her Disney turning point, how she navigates blobs for founders and families alike, and what two decades of connective-tissue leadership looks like in practice.

🎧 Listen here

With love & connection,
Lauri