If you think you are enlightened, spend a week with your family. — Ram Dass

This week’s article is an offering for Thanksgiving.

I know a lot of founders, some of them clients, who will use their success in their business as a way to avoid work on themselves and their relationships.

They often tell me that the person they are most afraid of is their spouse. Or one of their parents.

This resonates with me. I still struggle with it. And I have come up with a personal experiment that I want to share with you.

This week, in the US at least, many of us will spend an extended period of time with our family. Often reentering our childhood homes in the process.

It can feel like we revert to being children again. All the things that used to trigger us—a look from Dad, a button-pushing comment from your oldest sister—show up again.

I find myself in the same political fights with my mother that I have been having for the last thirty years.

What’s your version of this?

What if you did an experiment?

See if you can, just this one time, NOT react. Not fall for the bait.

My mom and I have this strange dynamic where she picks fights with me, and sometimes me with her, to feel alive. It’s like we can’t say the stuff we want to say—that we love and care for each other—but we can show our love, how we care, by fighting.

I’ve talked with a lot of people who have something similar going on in their family. It can feel like judgment but when you look underneath, the energy can only be described as love. You miss it when it’s gone. Even, perhaps especially, the difficult stuff.

The Power of a Pause

If you want to change the dynamic, see if you can PAUSE. See if you can say “Hmm, not sure. That’s an interesting point.” Or “Yes, you might be right.”

When I do this, my mom quickly stops trying to engage. Most of the time, anyway. And we move on to other things. Things that matter more. We have begun to relax a bit more, to enjoy our time together more. Which is important to me because my mom is 87. And I want to feel like I am there for her in her final years, even though there were times I did not feel she was there for me.

It can be strange now. Boring even. There is a vacuum that needs to be filled. People will try to find all kinds of ways to fill it. Sometimes my mom still tries to pick a fight with me. Sometimes she still tries to make me feel small.

But the equilibrium has shifted. And it can for you.

When that opening comes, what will you fill it with?

Happy Thanksgiving.

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.

I was just at a four-day event in Santa Monica with a group of 25 people who are focused on creating in the world.

The event featured two coaches that I have worked with in the past and I would say about half of those in attendance were newer coaches building their businesses.

I was smack in the middle between the coaches who were “new” and those who had, at least in my mind, mature businesses.

But I put myself unconsciously in the “new” category. Until I caught myself.

How I Hold Myself Back

I do not have a business that I am satisfied with. While I love my clients and what I am able to create with them, I want more.

Not necessarily more individual clients, but more impact. With larger organizations.

I want to have a team of coaches who can support me as I expand my work from founders to their leadership teams.

I want to share in the growth of the organizations that I help.

I want to create freedom and abundance both personally and for my family.

In my mind, I have just started that. Hence my mindset that I am still a beginner.

What My First Coach Told Me At Dinner

The first coach that I worked with when I was getting started in 2016 was Rich Litvin. I did a small group with him for several months, and paid something like $15,000, which was an extraordinary amount for someone who had no paying clients when we started.

We had not really connected since then. Until dinner last Friday night with him and another coach that I have worked with, John Patrick Morgan.

They coached me and one other entrepreneur for four hours (Rich started as soon as we got in the Uber), and I came away seeing all the ways that I had been limiting myself. All of the things that I had not fully owned about my journey. I came away feeling like all the things that I want to create are not only possible, but inevitable.

Rich told me at one point, “So let me get this straight. You have built a business where you work by referral, with founders who pay you handsomely, and they renew for more work with you? That makes you in the top 0.1% of coaches on the planet.”

Now, I don’t know if that is true. But in that moment, I owned it as if it was. And I fully saw and owned what I had been able to accomplish.

What I Saw The Next Morning

I had trouble sleeping, both from the coaching (and the possibilities it unlocked) and the large Wagyu steaks we ate. I woke up early and journaled excitedly.

And then it all collapsed.

Saturday was the last full day of the event, the day where we were going to let go of our limiting beliefs, and I was enveloped in fear. All the stories that had held me back came crashing in—

That I was not good enough.

That it was dangerous to be myself fully.

That it was bragging to talk about true things from my experience and expertise.

That it was safer to stay small.

But one thing shifted as I worked through my discomfort that day.

I finally saw those stories as just that.

Stories.

I didn’t have to believe them. I could choose to believe my vision for the future over the limiting beliefs of my past.

And you can, too.

Where Have You Been Holding Yourself Back?

What does my story bring up in you?

What is the possibility that you see for yourself where you haven’t taken action?

Because you think it’s not practical or realistic?

Because you’re having trouble finding the right people?

Because you’re not sure you can get an investor?

Want to know the best way to get a result? Commit to it. Keep trying, even if you fail the first five, ten, twenty times. Keep going. Iterate. Allow your vision, your mission, to emerge from you and JUST KEEP GOING.

This isn’t about hustle culture or working 100 hours a week. It’s just about putting yourself out there, doing the thing you love, and continuing to try until you accomplish it.

It’s about what you do as the fullest and most authentic (spiritual even) expression of yourself.

This is my path, and this is who I support.

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.

If I get another email from someone telling me I need to “crush your goals in 2024” I think I’m going to puke.

I spent at least two decades of my adult life crushing my goals. And having nothing but exhaustion to show for it.

I felt like I had been had. Like I had done everything I was supposed to do to be happy—go to a great school, get great grades, to to a great law school, law firm, consulting firm, partnership, IPO…

And on the other side of all of that?

Just a bigger goal.

My clients don’t come to me to crush their goals. Like me, they are already pretty good at that.

They come to be because they want to know what is actually going to make them happy. And what I point them to helps to unravel the “crush it” mindset that has gotten them so far but now threatens to crush THEM.

Crushing It Looks Outward Rather Than Inward

When someone is trying to crush it, you can be pretty sure there is something internal going on. Rules like the following—

1. I’ve always believed there is some way in which I am fundamentally flawed or inadequate.
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.

Until you become aware of this, you will continue to write that you are not enough no matter what you actually achieve. Because it will always look like there is something that you need that you don’t already have.

What Stories Do You Believe About Yourself and Your World?

You may have a story that you need to “crush it” to be happy.

But the people who I see who have learned to be happy actually work less and achieve more. They create impact (and money) with ease.

They have time to spend on the things that are important outside of work. Like family.

If you have believed different ideas you’re 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 or yes, “crushing goals,” you are not going to let yourself be happy or fulfilled without them. You paradoxically will 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 “crushing it” 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.

“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.