I work as both an intuitive and a business strategist, which means that when I sit down with someone to talk about their business, I rarely see only the business. I see patterns. I see where someone is exceptionally capable and still hesitating, where they continue recreating the same circumstances with different clients, different partners, different employees, or different opportunities, and where what looks like a business problem is actually connected to an identity they have been carrying for years.

I believe very literally that how you do one thing is how you do all things. The identities we carry into our businesses are the same identities we carry into our relationships, our finances, our health, our families, and our decision-making. The circumstances may change, but the underlying pattern often does not.

If someone believes they are bad with money, that belief does not disappear when they become an entrepreneur. If someone has spent a lifetime believing technology is overwhelming, complicated, or simply not for them, that identity follows them into a marketplace increasingly dependent on technology. If someone believes asking for money is uncomfortable, they may chronically underprice their work. If they learned that being needed makes them valuable, they may build a business where everything depends on them. If they are afraid of disappointing people, they may struggle to establish boundaries with clients, employees, or collaborators.

This is one of the reasons I became interested in the Mace Energy Method.

I began the path toward becoming a Mace Energy Method practitioner because I could see how valuable it could be for people who were continually repeating patterns they consciously wanted to change. I have since paused the training to focus on my own business, but that has not changed my view of the method. If anything, working more deeply with business owners has reinforced how useful I believe it can be.

Mace Energy Method is not therapy, and it is not coaching. It is not about spending months analyzing why someone became the way they are or teaching them how to think differently about a problem. The work is focused on identifying and clearing the energetic imprints connected to negative identities and the patterns those identities continue to create.

That distinction matters to me because I can often see very clearly what is happening with someone professionally, but seeing the pattern and intellectually understanding the pattern are not always enough to change it. Someone can know exactly why they behave a certain way and still continue doing it. They can have read the books, taken the courses, worked with coaches, and have tremendous self-awareness while still finding themselves back in the same situation.

What interests me about MEM is the possibility of addressing the imprint underneath the pattern rather than continually managing all of its different expressions. A person may have problems with money, visibility, relationships, delegation, technology, confidence, or decision-making that appear to be completely separate issues. They may actually be different manifestations of the same underlying negative identity. In that sense, they do not necessarily require a collection of different solutions. Clearing the underlying energetic imprint can potentially affect many areas of a person’s life at once.

Technology is one of the clearest examples I see in business. I work with a number of Baby Boomers and Gen X business owners who are extraordinarily talented at what they do. They may know how to build things, heal people, manage teams, create beautiful work, understand complicated systems, sell, negotiate, or run businesses that have survived for decades. Then I put a website dashboard or a new piece of software in front of them and suddenly I hear some version of, “I can’t do this,” “I’m terrible with technology,” or “I need someone younger to handle this.”

Sometimes those statements have been repeated for so long that they are no longer descriptions of frustration. They have become identities. The person is no longer saying that a particular platform is confusing. They are saying, in effect, this is who I am: I am someone who cannot understand technology.

Once an identity is established, we tend to keep finding evidence to support it. Every forgotten password, unfamiliar interface, or mistake becomes confirmation. At the same time, the enormous amount of evidence contradicting the identity gets ignored. This same person may have mastered a profession that required years of study, learned complex equipment, managed employees, raised a family, navigated financial transactions, or developed a craft requiring extraordinary precision. Their capacity to learn is obviously there.

The issue is not necessarily the technology. It may be the identity attached to it.

In today’s business environment, that identity can have very real consequences. It can limit independence, increase operating costs, slow communication, complicate marketing, and create dependence on other people for things that have become fundamental to doing business. It can also keep extraordinarily talented people from bringing their work to a larger audience simply because they have accepted a story about themselves that may no longer be serving them.

This is also why I think business strategy has to look beyond the mechanics of a business. Of course I look at positioning, marketing, offers, websites, systems, revenue opportunities, and where someone should be putting their time and energy. Those things matter tremendously. But there is another operating system underneath all of them, and that is the person running the business.

Their beliefs about money affect pricing. Their beliefs about visibility affect marketing. Their relationship with authority affects leadership. Their relationship with being needed affects delegation. Their ideas about struggle, success, worthiness, safety, and responsibility influence decisions every day, whether they are conscious of those beliefs or not.

One of my strongest abilities is pattern recognition, and often I can feel very quickly when the problem someone is describing is not the actual problem. A client may tell me they need more customers when what I see is a resistance to being visible. They may tell me they need a better website when what I see is an identity built around being incapable of understanding technology. They may say their employees refuse to take responsibility when I can see that they have difficulty relinquishing enough control for anyone else to truly take ownership.

The circumstances look different, but the underlying imprint can be the same.

This is why I have recommended the Mace Energy Method to nearly every business strategy client I have worked with when I can see that they are repeatedly encountering the same kind of block. Not because they need therapy and not because they need someone to coach them through it, but because sometimes the most efficient thing may be to clear the energetic identity creating the pattern in the first place.

I still consider myself a business strategist rather than a coach. My role is to help people see what they cannot see from inside their own business, identify opportunities, sharpen their positioning, create better offers, build systems, communicate their value, and make more intelligent decisions about where to place their energy. At the same time, I cannot ignore what becomes visible when I work closely with someone.

A business is constantly reflecting the person who created it. It reflects their expectations, their boundaries, their relationship with money, their willingness to receive, their comfort with being seen, their ability to trust other people, and the identities they carry about what they are and are not capable of doing.

You can redesign the website, restructure the company, change the pricing, hire a new employee, build a funnel, or write a new marketing plan, and sometimes those are exactly the changes that are needed. But when the same circumstances keep reappearing in different forms, there is value in looking underneath the strategy.

Sometimes the most transformative business work has very little to do with business at all. It is clearing the identity that has been quietly shaping the business, the relationships, the decisions, and often much of the person’s life.

For more information about the Mace Energy Method, including how it works and how to find a practitioner, visit carleymontgomery.com/mace-energy-method.

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Originally published on Substack.