Homeostasis in Your Small Business:

If you’re a small business owner who feels like you’re constantly juggling too many things, always busy but rarely progressing, there’s a hidden force at play you need to understand: homeostasis. While it’s a healthy and necessary mechanism in biology, in your business homeostasis can silently sabotage your growth.

Homeostasis Held Me Back Too

Homeostasis is your brain’s way of keeping things stable—avoiding change, maintaining the known, sticking to comfort. And when applied to your business operations, mindset, and leadership habits, it can become a trap that keeps you in a loop of overwork, under-reward and the death knell of the dreaded status quo.

Unfortunately I have several stories about ineffective homeostasis in my professional career (all before I knew anything about my Saboteurs). The latest one ended just about the time I discovered Positive Intelligence. I had started a new line of business a couple of years before and while it struggled, it finally started to move into the black….then it tanked. Deep into the red, but I kept saying hey it used to work, maybe if I tweak this or tweak that, I can get this back on track…..No go, the red ink just kept on flowing. It was affecting my main business as this new business was taking resources (time and money) from it.

Even knowing all this, I struggled mightily to cut my ties to this business and the people I had worked with building it. All the Saboteurs you will read about next came into play. I finally defeated them and closed that line of business, but there was too much emotion attached to it. After the initial trauma, I felt lightened and refreshed having dissolved that business and moved on.

This resistance to change can be driven by fear or doubts fueled by your Saboteurs: the nagging mental habits that hold you back. Homeostasis is often protected by these Saboteurs:

• The Controller Saboteur tells you no one can do it as well as you.
• The Avoider encourages you to procrastinate on hard but necessary conversations or decisions. I remember the time I did not want to contact a client because of a past due invoice, by the time I did the client had moved on and I was out the past due amount.
• The Hyper-Achiever keeps you so focused on doing more that you never pause to redesign your business for sustainability. I did this for many years where I kept myself busy and worked long hours. However, I was not at all efficient. I then reexamined how I spent my day, reorganized it and ended up getting much more done in less time and with more satisfaction.

Each time you try to make a meaningful change—raise your prices, hire help, block time for strategic thinking—these Saboteurs trigger discomfort, and your brain rushes back to the familiar, even if it’s not effective.

The Cost of Staying Comfortable

When businesses maintain homeostasis for too long, several issues arise:

1. Stagnation: Without embracing change, your business risks becoming irrelevant as markets and customer needs evolve.
2. Missed Opportunities: Your Judge Saboteur may convince you that you’re not ready, preventing you from acting on scalable innovations.
3. Burnout: The energy required to continually maintain the status quo, especially if it's inefficient, drains resources that could be better spent elsewhere.

The lies of your Saboteurs reinforce this cycle. Statements like, “Why fix what isn’t broken?” or “You don’t have the time to try something unproven” might sound reasonable. In reality, they’re rooted in fear or scarcity, which keeps you stuck.

In short, homeostasis is a survival mechanism—not a success strategy. By identifying your Saboteurs and practicing PQ, you can move beyond comfort-based decision-making and become the kind of leader your business truly needs.

The growth you want is on the other side of that discomfort. Your Sage knows the way.

I’ll do a deep dive into activating your Sage to vanquish the status quo in Part 2.0 of this series.

If this resonates and you don’t want to wait, get started here.