What the Yin Yang Symbol Teaches Entrepreneurs About Change
by Kalika Yap
You’ve seen this symbol your whole life. A necklace. A phone case. Somebody’s shoulder at the beach.
Ask anyone what it means and you’ll hear the same word. Balance. Light and dark held equal, like two sides of a scale.
It was never a scale.
In the original Chinese, yin and yang describe two sides of the same hill. Yang is the sunny slope. Yin is the shaded side.
And you can’t balance sunlight on a hill. The light moves. What’s bright at nine is in shadow by four.
That’s why China’s oldest book, the I Ching, is called The Book of Changes. It never asks where your balance is. It asks one question.
How is your life changing right now?
Twenty-Seven Years of Watching the Light Move
I started Citrus Studios in Santa Monica in 1999. Sunny side of the hill. Everyone wanted a website and it felt like the light would never move.
A year later the dot-com bubble burst. Clients who’d been signing checks in March were gone by fall.
Then the sun came back around. Then 2008 the financial crisis that put everything in shadow. Then 2020. Covid.
Every time I stood on the shaded side, I was sure it was permanent. Every time, it wasn’t.
Citrus Studios turns 27 this year. Not because I found the balance. Because I stopped expecting the light to stay put.
The Trap I See With Almost Every Client
When things are good, you cling. You try to freeze the season and build your whole plan around keeping it exactly as it is.
When things are hard, you brace. The slow season becomes a story about you. I’m not good at sales. This never works out for me.
Clinging to the good and bracing against the bad are the same mistake. Both assume the hill holds still.
It doesn’t. The good you’ve reached is already moving. So is the hard thing you’re afraid of.
You Are the Change, Not the Rock
Here’s the reframe I want you to sit with this week.
Now light. Now dark. Change is the only way anything on the hill ever moves. And once you accept that, it changes what you understand yourself to be.
You’ve been thinking of yourself as a person holding steady against change. Feet planted. Bracing.
Try it the other way around. You are not a person holding yourself together against change. You are change, trying to hold itself together as a person.
Read that twice. The founder you were in year one is gone. The one who made it through the hard season is someone new. That’s not a loss. That’s you, working as designed.
Once you see it that way, two fears lose their grip at once.
The fear of losing the good. You can’t lose what was never meant to stay still.
The fear of being trapped in the bad. Nothing on the hill stays dark forever. The shade isn’t a verdict on you. It’s a time of day.
That’s the one thing a hill can teach you that a scale never could. A scale asks you to hold two weights perfectly still. A hill asks you to keep walking while the light moves.
Say it this week when something flares up, good or bad. It’s a hill, not a scale.
Your Step-by-Step Guide: Build a Business That Expects the Sun to Move
Step 1. Run a 15-minute “what’s moving” audit
List your top five sources of revenue. Next to each one, write one word: growing, flat, or shrinking. Then do the same for your top three costs.
Most founders have never put this on one page. It shows you where the light already is, and where the shade is coming from.
You can’t plan for change you haven’t looked at.
Step 2. Start your shade fund
Decide how many months of operating expenses you want in reserve. If the number is zero right now, that’s fine. Pick one month as the first target.
Then set up an automatic transfer this week, even if it’s small. The bright season is when you build for the shade.
Cash is what lets you wait for the light to come back.
Step 3. Open a second door
Look at your audit. If one client, one channel, or one offer decides your whole season, that’s your exposure.
Name one new door you can test in the next 30 days. A second offer. A referral partner. A client type you haven’t pitched. Not a pivot, a test.
No single source should get to decide what season you’re in.
Step 4. Put a light check on the calendar
Schedule a recurring 30-minute review, once a quarter, to redo the audit and ask three questions. What moved? What’s about to? What do I adjust?
Prices, offers, team, and your own time are all fair game. This is how you move with the hill instead of getting surprised by it.
The seasons change on a schedule. Your review should too.
Step 5. Make one move before you feel ready, within 48 hours
Pick the one thing from Steps 1 through 4 you’ve been putting off because it felt like the wrong time. The price change. The proposal. The money conversation.
There is no right time on a hill. There’s only the time you move. Write down the date and the hour.
The people who ride change well aren’t calmer than you. They just move a day earlier.
Want a Second Pair of Eyes on Your Hill?
Sometimes you’ve been standing in the shade so long you’ve forgotten it’s a hill at all. That’s a lot of what I do with my coaching clients. We look at the season together and figure out what to build for the next one.
No pitch. Just a real conversation about what’s moving in your business right now.
Whatever slope you’re standing on today, the light is already on its way. You’re doing just great.
DOWNLOADABLE WORKSHEET
Read Your Own Hill
This worksheet is designed to help you see what’s changing in your business, review your revenue and costs, prepare for slower seasons, test new opportunities, and choose one move to make within the next 48 hours.
