Do Business Like St. Joseph; Practice Interior Silence

How to Imitate St. Joseph's Ability to Hear God's Voice: Applied to Business

Today we are exploring how to access God’s guidance in your business, and in particular, how you can develop the ability to hear when God is giving that guidance.

We cover,

• Why you should care

• How to Develop the Practice of Interior Silence

  • Prayer (the Rosary in particular)

  • Visiting the Blessed Sacrament

• A Challenge to You

• Emotional Intelligence

• Ask For the Grace

• As Business Owners

• Your Turn (a call for feedback)

As an FYI, we are putting the paywall up after Ask For Grace. If you’re not already a paid subscriber and can afford it, what are you waiting for?

If you can’t afford it, reach out and we can see about getting you a complimentary sub.

Truth is, most of y’all can afford to support it. If you’re not, then why? Is there something missing about what we are doing that holds you back from putting in your credit card info?

Okay, enough selling—let’s get into it.

---

Why You Should Care

The world is your oyster. I remember my dad saying this phrase pretty frequently to me growing up. After graduating, this didn’t mean that much to me because I didn’t have a lot of ambition or imagination about what I could achieve in life. But a little later on, after having some success in sales, it opened a whole new meaning to me.

I found it so hard to decide what to do. There were unlimited options.

Should I become a lawyer? Should I become a missionary? Should I try to start a business? Should I take my uncle’s advice and just travel across Europe?

All of us can relate to this to some extent. Sure, we have varying levels of ambition, but early on in life and along the journey, we are faced with many consequential decisions. The gravity also increases as we go along. Spouse, children, business, house, etc. It just gets harder.

However, having more anchors doesn’t mean we cannot have drastic changes. Just read stories of the saints. In particular, think about how St. Joseph left for Egypt in the middle of the night after the angel appeared to him. He didn’t hesitate for a moment. Surely he didn’t have know how he would provide. He didn’t know where they would stay. He just went because he knew.

We can’t presume that he simply just understood. That understanding, that deep trust to know this was God speaking to him, stemmed from his constant seeking of the will of God. Through developing silence in his heart, he could hear when God spoke to him or tugged on his heart.

How many of us would be able to react the same way?

Do we eliminate distractions and noise so that we can hear what God is saying to us in our hearts? If not, how will we know when God is asking us to do something big?

If we are not developing the skill of listening to what God is saying to us, we are very likely to miss His calls to action.

So, what do you say? Are you in on this mission?

Great, let’s get into it.

How to Develop the Practice of Interior Silence

I’ll preface this with, I write this as much for you as I do for myself. Silence is not my strong suit. My ADHD makes it hard for me to do this, and makes the likelihood of an excuse, high. These tips are things that I’ve learned from others over the years and some quite recently.

Overwelmingly, the advice has centered on Prayer and Adoration. Specifically recitaiton of the rosary and adoration.

Prayer

Prayer is fundamentally us having a conversation with God. It takes many forms. We can pray in community like we do during Holy Mass. We can pray privately. We can ask for favors, we can offer thanksgiving. We can even simply offer our work as a prayer.

The rosary is particularly powerful because of the promises of the rosary. The first of these 15 promises is “Those who faithfully serve me by the recitation of the Rosary shall receive signal graces.” It is what it sounds like, a sign or signal that is meant to guide you. Kind of like that feeling you get when you feel something isn’t right and you go a different path or choose not to do a certain thing.

Daily recitation of the rosary is a must. We know that our Lady is the human who has the closest proximity and connection with God because she literally bore Jesus. They were connected in pregnancy. How could she not be able to interceed for us, and give us helpful hints along our journey?

Tactical Tip: If you do not already pray the rosary daily, get started by having a rosary accountability buddy. If it’s really hard for you to get into it, start with at least one decade.

Visiting the Blessed Sacrament

Why is adoration so important? It is us going to visit our Lord. Visting and spending time with someone is the definition of friendship. How far out of our way do we go to visit our friends, but how minimal is the effort we put in to stop by a church and visit Jesus. By spending time with Him, we are getting to know him.

Sure, the relationship doesn’t feel the same as hanging out with your friends at 6 Flags, but there is a connection happening. We can pray. We can read. We can just meditate. A lot of folks like to read scripture and meditate on how it’s speaking with them. The way you do it isn’t what’s important, the fact we do it is important. To put it in perspective, even if you were to fall asleep during adoration, the important thing is that you’re still there with Christ.

Now, it’s critical to point out, you do not have to only visit the Blessed Sacrament in the act of exposition / adoration. You can just visit a church where the Blessed Sacrament is. God is still there.

One of my mentors recently challenged me on this. He said, if you’re already in a church every day for mass, why not go early or stay late for just 10 min. It doesn’t create an entirely new habit, it just adds a step to the existing habit.

Start small but most importantly, start. We need to make this part of our routine.

Going back to St. Joseph, he literally spent time with Jesus daily. He was there, most likely not even speaking most of the time but just being with him. Working in his shop, possibly teaching him the trade. He was there.

These two simple things can massively improve your ability to hear God’s instructions for us.

A Challenge

I challenge you to replace one of your existing habits with prayer (the rosary) and adoration.

Think through your pastimes. The things you often do to ‘wind down’ after a long day. Take time from that, and give it back to God.

I believe for many, it will be cutting out television or some form of media/news. Take that time to pray the rosary with your family. To get to adoration, if you don’t have a church nearby, consider doing this during your work day at lunch or in-place of a coffee break.

Find a way to connect it with something you’re already doing. If you’re familiar with the popular book Atomic Habits, just stack the habit so it feels too easy to accomplish.

Have the willingness to challenge yourself in this way. We do not improve by doing what is easy and comfortable.

---

If you find value in this content, isn’t it just to become a paid supporter? If you feel called to support this work, please “Upgrade to Paid” today. — We are soon rolling out additional benefits for paid subscribers.

---

Emotional Intelligence

In addition to prayer and adoration, God gave us skills to help us become more in tune with our inner thoughts and feelings. Some might call this a well formed conscience. Some might just call it your gut. Either way, part of mastering self is learning to recognize when there is dissonance in our very being.

If we get irritated at something, it’s likely a sign of some unresolved issue inside us. Now, I’m no psychologist, but having gone to therapy, I know the power of understanding oneself. These tools are there for us to better ourselves. They are often helpful in developing the practice of charity and patience.

The way I define this is, when we start to develop strong emotional intelligence, we are developing the ability to recognize the dissonance in our hearts.

By praying the rosary, or sitting silently during adoration, we are enabling ourselves to hear these inner voices. These voices, when properly developed, can tell us things like ‘hey, you’re not being a charitable husband’ — ‘the way you’re spending too much time at work is unhealthy’ — etc.

I believe these inner voices are also God tugging at our heart.

There would be, I’m convinced, far more conversions should the number of distractions be reduced because people would come face to face with the thoughts that bounce around in their heart. More people would realize the feeling of emptiness and lack of purpose they have. We saw a version of this during the pandemic.

While for us it may not be as serious, we must constantly seek to understand ourselves more. Listening to those voices allows us to understand when God is asking more of us. When he wants us to let something go. And possibly when He wants us to make a big change in life.

Ask For the Grace

As founders, we are prone to ‘making it happen’ — ‘grinding it out’ — ‘getting the job done.’ That’s great, but with all of this, we need God’s grace. The best way to start is by asking for it.

There are unlimited graces available, we just need to ask.

Start right now by asking “God, please give the me the grace to understand Your will for me. Help me to develop interior peace so I can hear when you’re speaking to me.”

As Business Owners