“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” — Anne Lamott

“You can’t get what you want…till you know what you want.” — Joe Jackson

It can be REALLY hard to unplug. Especially at this time of year.

But hear me out.

Most of us, whether we’re in a corporate job, or starting something, or running our own companies, are caught up in our habitual thinking. The thinking that makes productivity and efficiency and to-do lists the holy grail.

It can seem beneficial to do more things faster.

But what if you’re doing the wrong things?

What if, to paraphrase Steven Covey from so many years ago, your ladder is leaning against the wrong wall?

If money and growth are just exhausting you rather than fulfilling you?

This is why you unplug.

What Do I Mean By Unplug?

By unplug, I’m talking about slowing down. Getting clear. Seeing what emerges, what wants to emerge, from you in the silence.

This is more than turning your phone and your laptop and your TV off. Though, don’t get me wrong, that’s an excellent start.

Unplugging is about settling into another part of your brain. Another part of your being.

Unplugging can include the following—

Going for a run.

Taking a shower.

Making love.

Going for a hike (or even just a walk).

Having dinner with a friend.

Eating slowly enough that you can actually taste your food.

Some of these activities are solo, and some involve a partner. But they all involve slowing down, or at least, slowing that habitual “doer” part of your brain down.

Why Is Unplugging Essential?

There is a long list of leaders who create open space on their calendars just to step back. Just to see bigger. Warren Buffett. Jeff Bezos. Bill Gates. What is that they see that the rest of us are missing?

When I unplug, I begin to notice how amped up I’ve been.

I notice all the things I’ve been doing just because I feel obligated to doing them. Even if that obligation is only to myself.

I notice how often I get stuck in doing things that I really don’t want to do but feel I should do.

How often I do things that others would be better at doing (assuming of course that they need to be done at all).

How often I feel depleted rather than alive.

How often I feel I am enduring rather than living.

How often I feel like my life is happening TO ME rather than FOR ME. That I am reacting rather than creating.

But when I unplug this all begins to fall away.

It can for you, too. Even if at first you only do it for a minute or two.

If you just sit and breathe, if you let go of your to do list for just a moment, what do you notice?

What Can Be Revealed By Unplugging?

Unplugging is the only way that I am aware of to get in touch with that larger part of myself that already knows what I really want.

Almost every breakthrough I’ve had with someone has come when, just for a moment, our thinking stopped. And in that gap something amazing happened.

A business owner discovered that what he most wanted was a close relationship with his wife.

A founder saw a whole different way of leading.

An executive saw how she was reacting to what she thought was expected in her new role, rather than seeing the opportunity to create it.

I saw how I was holding myself back by writing about what I thought people wanted to read rather than what I KNEW they NEEDED.

What could you see new and fresh, if only you stopped to take a look?

What if you made a practice of unplugging regularly?

The Only Way To See THIS Is If You Unplug

We are so used to being “productive” that it can be hard to stop.

I have several regular times on my calendar each week where I take a look at what I am doing and why. I do this with my clients, too.

Most people need some kind of formality to this exercise. It can feel like an intervention. It can take a calendar entry and the tenacity to protect it (or an assistant with the tenacity to do so for us).

It can take an accountability partner, or a mentor, or a coach.

But when it starts to happen, and when it starts to happen regularly, something amazing happens.

We begin to see the structure, the rules, that we have been living in.

How we view work and success and obligation and relationship.

And we begin to see that none of it is solid.

We can question it.

ALL of it.

We can question how we define success, or how we define our own limitations.

We can sense better what we really want.

We can sense the bigger things that want to come through us.

I had an experience one evening in July of 2021 where I closed my eyes and suddenly the world disappeared. I disappeared. There was just space, just possibility, just aliveness.

That sensation has never fully gone away. I can touch that place of possibility almost at will.

It would not have happened, I am convinced, if I didn’t have a habit of unplugging regularly.

What could you create if you knew you could create anything?

What Is Wanting To Emerge?

I am convinced that we spend way too much of our time and mental effort trying to keep ourselves small.

Or, sometimes, trying to make ourselves feel bigger on top of the smallness that we are convinced lurks underneath.

But the ideal life to me feels less like a construction project and more like a demolition project.

We have to let go of the things that have been holding us back before we move forward.

By seeing that, even though we have believed them for a long time, they never were real.

Only then can the real you, and your real work, emerge.

What Do You Really Want To Create?

At this time of year, it’s easy to think about what goals you missed in 2023. About how you might meet them in 2024.

But what about 2034? 2050? 2100?

What is the cause, the legacy, that will outlive you?

What is the one tiny step you can take today to start to create it?

How To Go Deeper

I am convinced that more and more people are coming out of the spiritual closet and seeing their work as a vital personal journey to both abundance and meaning.

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, at all stages of this journey.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If you want to build a coaching business where you get to be yourself, help amazing people, and replace your corporate income in the process, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.

This is a time of year when I see a lot of fear.

My clients are running businesses and tend to think of things a year at a time.

As a new year approaches, they assess how they are doing this year and what they want to change for next year.

Our culture attributes special meaning to January 1 and we begin to think about the next one around October 1.

“Fourth quarter” is when we think about the goals we’ve not met, and the goals that we want to meet come “first quarter.”

A lot of people come to me because last year did not go as well as they wanted it to and because they want next year to be different. Because I work with people running businesses, and because I tend to work with people a year at a time, I have a lot hinging on this cycle even as I work with them to break it.

I end up feeling the fear, too.

The cycle may be somewhat arbitrary, but the fear behind the cycle is very human.

Three Types of Fear

While fear shows up in a lot of different ways, the three most common ones I see with business leaders are the following—

Fear of Uncertainty

Leading a business, even if that business is just you for the time being, is full of uncertainty.

Full of decisions that have no easy answers, and paths that only reveal themselves a little at a time.

What humans crave is certainty, predictability. We are genetically programmed to seek safety. I think this is why most people work for someone else. They know they don’t know the answers, but hope that someone else does. And (see below) they’re not willing to take the risk of being wrong.

In fact, most people will not start something new until they feel sure of the result. And thus most people find it very hard to change.

Fear of Failure

Related to the fear of uncertainty is the fear of failure.

It seems obvious that we are afraid of trying something new and failing at it. We might feel foolish, people might laugh at us, there might be economic consequences.

Failing at some things might even mean that we or people we employ could lose their jobs.

It’s one thing to feel the fear and do it anyway. But a lot of people want to avoid even feeling fear.

So they avoid taking risks in the first place.

Yes. This means that the fear of failure actually contributes to lack of success. That fear of failure can be a self-fulfilling prophesy.

If I never apply to my dream job, I will never know if I would have gotten it. If I could have succeed at it.

If I never go into business for myself, I will never find out if I could have done it.

The phrase, “it is better to have loved and lost than never loved at all,” was likely written by someone trying to talk themselves out of the fear of failure.

Our fear of failure might keep us physically alive, but it might also keep us spiritually dead.

Because it keeps us from pursuing our dreams.

Fear of Success

So if people are afraid of failing, they must be eager to succeed, right?

Not so fast.

Remember that mostly we fear uncertainty. So it’s really hard to take a risk, even if it appears likely to succeed.

But another thing that gets in the way of success is the stories that people tell themselves about success.

About what it means, to them and to others.

Maybe successful people never see their families.

Maybe successful people are selfish and exploit others.

Maybe successful people become famous and lose their privacy.

You can try this yourself—just journal with the sentence “Successful people are…” and see what are the first few things that come to mind.

If the first few things are bad things, things you would never want, you have a fear of success.

Unless you are willing to consciously let go of what is called an “upper limit,” you will never be successful.

You will never let yourself be.

How Fear Has Served You

Remember that from an evolutionary perspective, small is safe. Safe is alive. Alive is what brought you here.

The fact that your ancestors were afraid is the very reason that your parents survived to give birth to you.

Humans are pack animals. Watch pack animals in the wild. The ones at the edges get killed.

Stand out, in a bad way or a good way, at your own risk.

How Fear Gets In Your Way

If your job or your business is completely fulfilling, congratulations.

But if you are a human being, you are drawn to grow, to test yourself, to create. To learn and try new things.

You will want this your entire life. It is another, essential part of genetic code.

A paradox—when you look at the amazing things a small number of people have been able to do, even while most are afraid of acting.

When you see opportunities, does fear keeps you from acting on them? The fear of failure runs deep. Failure used to mean getting kicked out of the tribe. About being on your own with predators all around you. Taking risks wasn’t about money or reputation. It was about life and death.

But staying small has created some big problems. Politically, economically, environmentally. We can see a day where if we don’t change we might not even survive.

Life is asking us, requiring us, to make BIG changes. Staying small and doing what we have always done no longer feels like it is enough.

At times it can feel like we will not survive UNLESS we take risks.

A different kind of person is called for. A different kind of leader.

Are you one of the people who will answer the call?

How To Go Deeper

If you are reading this, you are different, or at least you want to be.

You are willing to feel the fear and do it anyway.

Most people shake their fists at life when it does not turn out as they want, rather than work with what life is actually giving them.

You accept your role as a co-creator of your life. Yes, you still stop yourself from time to time. It is hard to completely overcome our genetic programming. But you are miles ahead of those who refuse to see it.

There are others like you, and I work with and hope to inspire them, just as others have inspired me.

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, at all stages of their journey.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If you want to build a coaching business where you get to be yourself, help amazing people, and replace your corporate income in the process, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.

I got an email from a coach whose work I mostly really like.

And it was about his top ten favorite high-performance habits.

I had a reaction to this. Not because there is anything wrong with high performance. But because of the cultural narrative, we have built around high performance. The story we have created is that, if you get more done, if you are more productive, if you meet the goal on the other side of them, you will be happy.

I could not disagree more.

How High Performance Gets It Backwards

If you are able to look at the assumptions in the high performance game, they go something like this—

1. There is something fundamentally wrong with me.
2. I can achieve my way out of it.

In other words, there is some big goal that, if I meet it, I will feel better. Or I will “arrive.”

Maybe it’s a degree, or a job title, or a house in the right place, or a second house in the right place.

I tried to achieve my way into feeling okay about myself for decades.

It doesn’t work.

Because there is always more to do. There is always a goal behind the goal, another mountain to climb or race to run, or another digit to add to the exit.

So when the first goal doesn’t get there, certainly it’s because the goal wasn’t big enough, right?

It took me about 30 years to learn the goal wasn’t the issue.

The Only Thing You Have To See To Be Happy

Meeting a goal will never make you happy (for more than a few fleeting moments, anyway).

Your entire experience of the world is happening inside your brain. Based on what your senses tell you, true, but more important than that, based on the stories you tell yourself about what your senses tell you.

You are living in your stories about the world. And most of them are unconscious.

If you are writing the story, why are you writing it to make yourself miserable?

What Stories Do You Believe About Yourself and Your World?

The coach I’m referring to told me that he had never seen anyone build a million dollar business without a lot of hard work.

But I see it all the time. Enough that I make it a goal for people. To make as much income as you can with as little work as possible.

If you have believed different ideas you are not even going to see this as a possibility.

If your rules require struggle to make money, for example, you are going to struggle to make money.

If your rules require productivity or efficiency or exhaustion, you are not going to let yourself be happy or fulfilled without them. You need to be miserable to be happy.

Each of your rules is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And you can let each of them go.

If you see that you must already be enough (that you can’t NOT be enough) because you are the one creating your experience of being enough, or not enough, you are going to set different goals.

What Do You Really Want?

What do you WANT when you see you don’t actually NEED anything?

When creating can be from a sense of play rather than lack?

What will you create just because it is deliriously FUN to do it?

That’s what the high performance culture says is not possible.

But to me, that’s the place where our capacity to create gets most powerful.

How To Go Deeper

You can be happy without being exhausted.

What would that be like? To fully embrace you and THEN create, rather than thinking you have to create to someone FIX yourself?

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, at all stages of their journey.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If you want to build a coaching business where you get to be yourself, help amazing people, and replace your corporate income in the process, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about the intersection between our financial success and our capacity and willingness to be ourselves.

There is a connection that occurs between humans that deepens as each is willing to be more and more vulnerable, real, themselves.

I believe that, especially as we get into longer-term relationships with each other—whether that is as provider and client or as employer and employee, this capacity to know and trust deepens and enhances what we are able to create with each other.

And not so coincidentally, I believe that this is what we most want—that we want to fully express our unique selves and find the people who will accept and appreciate and even love us for those selves.

Even the parts of us that we regard as flaws and try to hide.

But I got a question recently that stopped me in my tracks—

This sounds simple. But what does it mean to “just be yourself”? And why does it feel so difficult?

A Simple Answer to a Hard Question

The simple answer to this doesn’t sound very satisfying. You are yourself when you are honest about who you are and what you believe. When you speak as and from your truth.

I confess that there are an awful lot of times when I do not feel fully myself. This feels like a goal, an aspiration, but it can feel like true authenticity is a long way off. I do better when I am writing—there is something about the psychological distance between me and my readers—than I do with one-on-one in real-life interactions.

It can feel really hard to “be myself,” to “own my truth.”

Why?

For me, I notice a few things.

First, I really want people to like me and when I say something that they might not agree with, I risk that.

Of course, when I hide something with the goal of them liking me, they are not really liking “me,” they are liking me with some kind of veneer or mask.

Second, I have a lot of history around feeling like my interests are weird, and I learned to hide them. I’ve told the story of how, walking out of the original “Star Wars” with my parents when I was 12, feeling like I had had a life-changing experience, my mom looked at me and said, “Jeff, if you liked that, you’re weird.”

That was the story of my life—if I liked it, it was weird.

For decades I hid that rather than embraced it. And I and my friendships suffered for it.

Third, I was afraid that if I said what I really thought, I might hurt people.

A More Satisfying Direction to Look

I was talking with a coach friend about this—he was really interested in how I might answer the question and I confess I hadn’t given it much thought. But it occurred to me that I might be useful to try to define this.

The first thing that occurred to me is that if I don’t say something because I am afraid of what you might think of me if I do, that is not being myself.

There are some things that I am afraid to say because I am afraid that if I say them you might judge me in some way.

Disclosing some “weird” interest or hobby, for example.

I remember when I started going on retreats I would actively avoid talking about them. When I was on retreat, a lot of the people there were therapists or healers. I didn’t run into many lawyers and consultants and business people.

So I would avoid talking about my work when I was on retreat, and I would avoid talking about my retreats when I was back at work.

But what I discovered when I did begin to talk about those things is that there was a small number of people who appreciated the combination. That the fact that I was interested in both of those things made me more interesting to those people. That I had deeper relationships with these people, and that I would not have without that uncomfortable disclosure.

Years later, embracing those interests made me a more powerful coach, and helped my ideal clients find me.

On the other hand, there are times when I don’t say something just because I don’t want to hurt them. It might or might not be helpful for them to hear it in some way, but the relationship is not such where it can withstand my saying it.

The vast majority of the time, that simply means that it is none of my business. We do not have a relationship where my disclosure is helpful or appropriate and I will not disclose it.

But in other cases, some level of disclosure is helpful and even necessary.

For example, am I protecting a boundary? If so, I need to disclose. I need to declare, for example, if I think the other person did something that violated a boundary for me. Of course I need to do this in an appropriate way and that is a deep and detailed inquiry in and of itself. But “being myself” and “protecting myself” overlap and it’s important to honor that.

In another case, I might be invested in a long-term relationship with this person. Are they my partner, or a key employee? If so, there are things I need to say for the sake of the relationship, or in the case of an employee, for their development and performance, and it would be neglectful for me NOT to say something.

How Being Yourself Creates Psychological Safety

When we disclose something that feels a bit vulnerable, we begin to create some sense of psychological safety. It becomes easier for the person in front of us to disclose something unusual about them. We become closer because of these. We trust each other more. And we are more likely to enter a long term relationship, either person or business.

Being ourselves FEELS dangerous. But it benefits everyone.

Sometimes the first step is to create that safely within ourselves. To admit to ourselves things that we have not admitted. About what we really want, for example, or what we are really good at.

Try it. See if the other person opens up to you. And see what you both can create from that.

Having a Deeper Conversation

I am dedicated to the idea that all you ever need or want to be is YOU.

You with all your gifts. And all the things you instinctively hide, too.

What would that be like? To fully embrace you and THEN create, rather than thinking you have to create to someone FIX yourself?

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, at all stages of their journey.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If you want to build a coaching business where you get to be yourself, help amazing people, and replace your corporate income in the process, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.