There are two ways to do anything.

You can do it as a way to get to know yourself at a deeper level.

Or you can do it as a way to escape from that, even as you tell yourself that you are doing the opposite.

When I was starting my coaching business, I starting having coaching conversations before I got my official certification. I found I learned more from those conversations than I did from the training (even though the training was incredibly helpful).

Yet I had many classmates who, years later, were still not coaching, thinking they needed more training. Just one more area of expertise, just one more certification, and then they would be ready.

I have seen people go on spiritual retreats to AVOID looking more deeply at themselves, to create themselves as victims of their circumstances, their trauma, rather than actors in continuing to accept their lives or choosing to create themselves differently. They go on another retreat rather than integrate the most recent one into their lives.

I have business owner clients who hide at work so they don’t have to look at dysfunctional relationships at home. Saying “I have to work,” which is in fact the exact opposite of what is happening for them.

I find a helpful question for me is “What am I choosing to avoid right now?”

In writing this post, I was avoiding working on my taxes. I was avoiding reaching out to potential clients.

I might also do work to avoid exercise, or exercise to avoid work.

Am I running toward challenges or away from them? Am I increasing my capacity for discomfort or decreasing it?

There are no easy answers to these questions, but even to ask them is to move toward doing the necessary work.

What are you running toward, and what are you running away from?

And when do you simply need a break?

There is a magical point in the development of any business called Scaling.

When you are scaling, you are taking all the hard work that you have put into the business so far and ramping it up. Increasing the rate of growth. Doubling down because you know, after months or years of testing, that you have a profitable concept that people want. Now the task is to create the capacity to sell and deliver as much as you can.

Most founders get even more overwhelmed at this stage. Because they think that for the business to speed up, they need to speed up.

The opposite is true. Yet it feels so wrong that most founders actively resist it.

One of my clients likes to say “The only thing getting in the way of moving from being a small business to being a big business is me.”

What he is still working on is hiring the right people and get out of the way.

Do it as SLOWLY as you can, to make SURE you hire the right people. People who know finance, sales, product, BETTER than you. People who you trust to GROW your vision.

When you do hire them, onboard them slowly, too. Make sure they understand the business as well as you do. Or as close to that as possible.

At a certain point, you can’t drive a car faster by increasing the RPMs.

You drive a car faster by shifting gears.

The car goes faster while the engine runs slower.

Your business is the same. When you are scaling, you should be running slower, not faster.

Making sure the next gear engages. Making sure that everything falls into place.

When have you sped up by slowing down?

“Uber of…”

Superhero movies.

Sequels.

Market testing.

It’s easy to create something that is kind of popular. Sort of good.

Just look at the hits and follow them. That’s why so many new singers sound like the latest sensation. Because the producers who were afraid to take a risk are the very same ones who are now jumping on the bandwagon.

But no one ever hit it big by being “just like Adele, only better.”

Is there a thing in you that you know is amazing and have dared share with no one?

What if that is the next big thing?

And what if the world never gets to experience it, simply because you were too afraid to fail?

In the movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” (EEAAO), the main characters discover that they can tap into alternate universes where they have different capabilities, and bring those capabilities to this universe.

If you are a kung fu master in another universe, for example, you could use that here as well.

I watched the movie and didn’t think, “What if that were true?”

I thought, “Finally, someone is talking about this.”

Because I have always created by becoming the person capable of doing it first. By stepping into another identity (one from a parallel universe, perhaps?) and creating from that.

Even when I didn’t realize I was doing it.

The simplest model of the universe that fits with our current understanding of quantum physics is that there are innumerable parallel universes, a multiverse, if you will, in which everything has happened that on can conceive of happening. See “Something Deeply Hidden” by Sean Carroll for a layperson’s explanation of this.

Yet most physicists dismiss this because it does not match up with our everyday experience. In effect, they want to make the world more complicated to keep themselves small.

But what if the simplest explanation is that yes, you are capable of anything?

I choose to believe in the multiverse, and my ability to influence the parts that I experience. Not because I know it is true, but because believing it, believing that I have already accomplished everything, enables me to create a version of myself that has the courage to take on my biggest dreams. Like supporting founders at every stage of creating their dreams, and creating a company to do that at a larger scale.

What do you choose to believe, not because it is true, but because it is useful?