One of us said something this week that I felt was valuable to share. Describing how he had always operated, he said he was used to running through brick walls and fixing up his broken nose after the fact.
He is pivoting his business at the moment. Normally, in his words, that would mean a five-year plan, nights of research, every i dotted, and a hard run at whatever stood in the way. This time he is doing none of it. He is still doing his due diligence, still turning up to consult for people, but he has stopped forcing the outcome. He described it as sitting back and letting things come to him rather than going out after them, and he was honest that he does not like it.
I told him that his old approach was a perfectly rational attempt to lower his risk. Planning hard is what rational people who are afraid of downside do. What we are asking of him is, in some sense, irrational.
Stress narrows us. When we are under pressure, our attention pulls in tight around survival, and the wider view, the one that would actually show us the way through, quietly disappears. When stress goes up, intelligence goes down. The harder we push at a problem, the less of that problem we can see. Which means the forcing we do in the name of control is often the very thing costing us the answer.
Another Member brought a decision to the group that showed the alternative in practice. He and his wife are living in a place they want out of. Then a bigger property came up, same cost, with a pool. On paper it was straightforward. A friend of his asked one question that changed the shape of it, which was simply which option gave him peace. Staying put was the answer. He asked his wife the same question without steering her, and she landed in the same place.
So they’ve elected to stay. He was candid that both of them are still second-guessing it, still glancing back at the property that rationally seemed like it would have been a great solution and did not feel right. He also noticed that the tension around it has made the two of them more deliberate about how they speak to each other and about what they allow to influence them.
Another Member has come to the same territory from the other end. He asked a friend with an easy voice to listen to, to record him a custom meditation, built from his own answers to her questions about what he wanted to work on. He now practises meditation at least twice a day. He falls asleep more easily now, he has noticeably more energy throughout the day, and he stays with complex problems far longer without the old stress response firing. Where something difficult used to tighten him up, it now reads as manageable.
He also said the gap between where he is now and where he was three or four months ago is huge, and that there is still a long way to go.
Something else surfaced that might be your experience too. The Member who is pivoting has a long-running family joke that he has a parking anointing, that a space always opens up wherever he goes. You might relate. It held right through the stretch when his business went in a direction he did not want, when it felt as though whatever he touched went wrong. Looking back, he could see it for what it was, a pattern feeding itself under pressure. The parking never wavered, because he never questioned it. The business did, and something crept in while he was busy pushing.
A fair question came up about whether any of this means we stop making plans. It does not. What changes is the grip. There is a difference between a plan that comes from lack, the one that whispers I need this or I will not be enough, and a plan we make while already whole, held loosely because we stay willing to be redirected. One of us put it neatly, saying he is happy to make the plan and go along with it, he is just not holding on hard or attached to the outcome.
That distinction reaches further than it first appears. If a proven strategy does not sit well with us, do we change the strategy or change ourselves? The more useful question is whether we are quiet enough to recognise which of the two we are being pointed toward. In years gone by I’ve spent a great deal on marketing with organisations that had genuinely delivered for the people who referred them to me, and not got anywhere near the same result, which I can now see was because of a limited perception when I received the opportunities.
We shared the emptiness of financial success alone and how many people I’ve met in this line of work who testify to the same. Some have made tens of millions, some made hundreds of millions, and a number of them arrived to find their health thin, their relationships frayed, and the fulfilment they had been chasing no closer than the day they set out. I call it chasing rainbows, as nobody has ever caught one.
None of this is an argument for apathy. Every one of us is still doing the work, still doing the due diligence, still turning up. What we are practising is the part that comes afterwards, which is loosening our hold on how it lands. It is uncomfortable, particularly for those of us who built our results by charging at and “controlling” things. But the wall was never really the obstacle. The running was.
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” — Alan Watts
