In our latest Growth HotSeat, we kept returning to a question that sounds simple until it’s turned on us. Is it the actual circumstance in front of us that causes the disturbance, or just the story we’ve quietly decided to tell about it? A Member’s HotSeat conversation became the clearest possible illustration, and it opened onto two more conversations that carried the same thread right through the session.
The Member had noticed a pattern he wasn’t proud of. He described choosing short-term comfort over longer-term value, losing focus whenever he sat down to read, scrolling for long stretches, and occasionally pushing to close a deal for quick cash flow even when it worked against the bigger picture he was actually trying to build. What made the moment worth sitting with wasn’t that he’d managed to stop the pattern outright. It was that he could now watch it happening while it happened, aware in real time of the pull he used to sleepwalk straight through.
We spent time unpacking why that noticing matters so much. Increased self-awareness doesn’t always feel like progress from the inside; it can feel like proof that the problem is getting worse, because we’re suddenly seeing more of it than we used to. But seeing the edge of a pattern is only possible once we’ve already grown past unconsciously living inside it. The Member wasn’t further from where he wanted to be. He was closer, and finally close enough to notice.
From there, the conversation moved to what to actually do with that noticing, in the moment, without needing to have already solved it. Rather than trying to force a better decision on the spot, the practice offered was to hand the moment over entirely and ask for guidance, using a short, three-word phrase to carry that willingness, decide for me. Not fixing the feeling, not overriding the ego with willpower, just consciously choosing not to decide alone. The Member’s honest answer, when asked whether he was willing, was simple. He was, most days, to the best of his ability, and that is always enough.
The same Member then traced the pattern back further, into a childhood built on a message of scarcity that didn’t match the facts of the life he’d actually lived. He grew up on twenty resourced acres, with a hand-milked cow, a full vegetable garden, homegrown lamb and beef, and yet the language around money in the house was most often that things were tight. Looking back honestly, he realised he had always had exactly what he needed when he needed it, even if not always what he wanted.
Another Member recognised the same story from his own upbringing, having been told directly that his family wasn’t abundant, only to look back now and see just how fortunate that childhood actually was. Both agreed the shift came down to interpretation rather than circumstance; the number in an account was never really the thing creating the feeling of lack, the meaning attached to that number was. I added my own experience to the conversation, of being squeezed right down to the last dollar more times than I could count over the years, until the accuracy of things arriving exactly when needed became impossible to keep dismissing as coincidence.
Another Member brought a quieter version of the same theme. He described a long-standing tendency to want to control outcomes, and the daily practice of catching himself doing it and consciously handing it back over instead, asking himself again and again what our intuition would have him do. He was candid that some days he didn’t feel like he was getting anywhere with it, that he’s not yet anywhere near where he’d like to be, and that awareness itself has had to become the win rather than waiting for a finished transformation that may never arrive in the way the ego wants it to.
That same Member has spent the past few months on a genuinely different kind of project, writing a book about the many years he’s spent building across property and business, prompted by a series of podcast interviews where he was asked, in detail, how he’d actually got to where he is. Working the material with an AI’s help, now on a fourth draft, he’s been shaping years of experience into something a wider readership could appreciate. What caught him off guard wasn’t the writing itself, but reviewing his own story properly for what felt like the first time and realising just how much ground he’d genuinely covered. The practical next step on the table is transcribing his own podcast interviews directly, so the natural, unguarded language of how he tells these stories out loud can carry straight onto the page.
Another Member brought smaller but no less real news. Progress on a long-stalled home loan finally started moving after months of sitting still, and rather than chase it, he described consciously letting it go and trusting it would land when it was meant to. On the health front, he’s waiting on the results of a recent X-ray before he can return to full movement, and described feeling genuinely well in the meantime, grateful for the guidance that’s carried him through similar uncertainty before.
By the end of the session, the throughline was clear. Whether it showed up as a phone in hand, a bank balance that looked thinner than preferred, a habit of wanting to control what was never really ours to control, or years of a life someone hadn’t had the perspective to appreciate fully yet, the disturbance to one’s peace wasn’t really coming from the circumstance itself. It was coming from the story wrapped around it. None of us have to work that story out alone, and none of us have to get it right on the first attempt. All that’s ever actually asked of us is the willingness to keep asking to see it differently.
“Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.” — Epictetus
