Most of the high achievers I work with have spent a long time overcoming things.

Several had almost no money in childhood, and their strategy for life success was to get really good at creating money.

A few have been children of immigrants, and they have lived with the story that they had to make their parents’ sacrifice worthwhile.

Many have had some sort of parental abuse, or have seen their fathers abuse their mothers, or vice versa.

Some kind of substance abuse often shows up as well.

Many people have dealt with these situations and not adapted in the same way. They have adopted the stories that they were victims of their incredibly difficult circumstances and that there was no way out.

But the thing to note here is that each person created a story of who they were and came from that story. Each person was able to create or not create based on their origin story, which they created, often unconsciously.

You and I are doing the same thing. And unless we see it, we continue to create it, over and over again. Your story becomes an invisible habit. And like any habit, once you are aware of it, you can change it.

Who do you want to be? How will you create it as a new, conscious habit?

Not sure of what the story is you have created about yourself? Take a look at what you have created in your life, how far you have come from where you started, and you will quickly get a very clear sense of what you believe about yourself and the world.

What is it you have created? And what is it you see you can create instead?

No.

What people want is a butterfly. But the caterpillar has to be willing to die first.

When the caterpillar goes into the cocoon, it is digested by its own juices and then is reborn as something entirely different.

The infinite intelligence and power of life is operating to create you as a butterfly.

How are you using that intelligence? Are you using all that energy to resist changing? To stay small? To stay a caterpillar, only 10 percent bigger?

Or are you willing to go into your cocoon to emerge as something entirely different?

I went into my cocoon in 2016 as a lawyer and consultant. I emerged as a coach, and as I went with that energy I found myself helping more and more founders. Today I focus on founders exclusively and help them die to one version of themselves and be reborn as another, again and again, in service to their vision and their business.

I was willing to die to what I had done for almost 30 years and be reborn as something else. Something I had, without fully realizing, been preparing for all along.

You are a lovely caterpillar, I’m sure.

But no one needs a bigger caterpillar.

They need your butterfly.

Are you willing to die to get there?

We are so creative that we miss how creative we are. How powerful we are.

Quantum physicists tell is that the world “out there” is a just an indeterminate haze of possibilities until a conscious being observes it.

At that moment, in a process called “quantum collapse,” one of the myriad possibilities emerges, driven in large part by what the conscious being expects to see.

(This is how Schroedinger’s Cat can be both dead and alive at the same time.)

Your brain takes information from your sense organs and combines it with your own history and beliefs and creates a model of reality and you live in that model. Scientists tell us, for example, that only about 20 percent of what we see is new information. The rest is reconstructed in our brains based on past experience.

Every person does that for themselves. Every person is living in their own reality.

There is no separately existing objective reality—only the quantum collapse that each observer creates.

You are creating your model just as I am creating mine. Your entire life you are creating a model and then living in that model as if it is solid and real.

And yes, creating yourself as someone who is not creative is one of the possibilities. But given you can create anything, can choose any of myriad possibilities, why on earth would you create that one?

It takes a certain amount of confidence to be a founder. Some would even call it arrogance.

The audacity to believe that you have a better idea. To believe that starting your own thing, on your own or even as a bigger company, is the best way to bring that better idea into the world.

I had that idea for me. I called it Creating Extraordinary Futures™.

But the Creating Extraordinary Futures that I created in 2017 and what exists today are incredibly different.

Because I also needed humility. The humility to change, to pivot, to adjust.

To see who my ideas resonated with and who they clearly did not. To see how I could make my ideas easier to understand for those who were interested. To continue to adapt the Creating Extraordinary Futures Process™ as my thinking changed and as more clarity emerged.

I see this with my clients, too.

They might start with arrogance, but if they think they have it all figured out, they will likely fail.

People want a road map. So much so that they will blindly follow those who claim to have one.

There is no map. There is no predefined path. What worked for entrepreneur extraordinaire will not work for you. Because you are a different person. You need to find your own way, as I found mine.

You say you want clarity, but the only clarity I know of is the clarity of knowing what to do next. Of taking the very next step.

If you are looking for that kind of clarity, let’s talk.