What's Actually in Retrograde

Mercury Retrograde Didn't Break Your Business. You Might Have.

Every few months, Mercury goes retrograde and the internet collectively loses its mind. Don't sign contracts. Don't launch anything. Don't text your ex. Expect technology to fail, emails to vanish into the void, and your carefully laid plans to combust on the runway.

If you're a business owner, you may have noticed people using Mercury Retrograde as a catch-all explanation for why things are falling apart. Here's what I think is actually happening.

Mercury Retrograde Reveals. It Doesn't Create.

Newsflash: The miscommunication that surfaces during Mercury Retrograde was already there. The project that stalls out? It had cracks in the foundation before the planet did anything. The relationship that suddenly feels impossible to navigate? That tension has been building for a while.

Mercury Retrograde doesn't manufacture problems, it makes the existing ones harder to ignore.

Think of it like a business audit you didn't schedule. Uncomfortable, inconvenient, and almost always illuminating.

The Panic Is the Point

The collective dread around Mercury Retrograde is worth paying attention to, not because astrology is running your operations, but because of what the dread reveals about us.

We don't want to slow down. We don't want to revisit old decisions. We don't want things surfacing that we thought we'd dealt with. And we especially don't want to sit with the possibility that something we built, something we're proud of, might need a harder look.

So when things feel chaotic and unclear during a retrograde, we reach for the planetary excuse instead of the harder question that is, ‘what has been true for a while that I haven't been willing to see?’

What This Has to Do with Your Business

I work with business owners who are highly capable, smart, and frequently exhausted by their own operations. One of the most common patterns I see is the tendency to keep moving as a strategy. Busy is safe. Busy is productive. Busy doesn't require you to stop and look at what's actually working or what is not.

Mercury Retrograde, as a concept, is an invitation to stop and look.

Not because some planet is in the wrong position, but because most of us need a reason to pause that feels bigger than ourselves. A permission slip from the universe, basically.

Use it. Review the thing you've been meaning to review. Have the conversation you've been quietly avoiding. Look at the process everyone complains about, but nobody has addressed. Ask whether the plan you're executing still makes sense, or whether you've gotten momentum confused with direction.

The Part Worth Keeping

I'm not here to sell you on astrology. But I am here to tell you that the instinct to slow down, reflect, and clear the backlog of unaddressed things is genuinely good business practice.

The businesses that stay stuck aren't usually stuck because of what's happening to them. They're stuck because of what they've been managing around. The uncomfortable conversation. The system that sort of works. The role that doesn't quite fit. The strategy that made sense two years ago.

Mercury Retrograde didn't put those things there. But if it gives you permission to finally deal with them? Use the excuse. No judgment.

One Question Worth Sitting With

If the chaos you're feeling right now had nothing to do with external circumstances, what would you have to look at?