I just got back from two-and-a-half days with one of my founder clients. Since he bought out his co-founders three years ago, he has grown the company by over five times, and is comfortably in eight figures of revenue.

Even so, he could see that he was holding himself back, but he couldn’t yet see HOW he was holding himself back.

But in our time together, he saw that, and more.

How Does A Retreat Help?

When someone gets out of their day to day environment, several really helpful things happen—

They stop being in reactive, firefighter mode. When you’re in a pattern, it’s really hard to see outside of that pattern.

Their thoughts begin to slow. Their breathing moves into their bellies. Their shoulders drop. Their speaking calms and deepens.

Now, the real work can actually begin.

The Difference Between a Platitude and an Insight

A platitude and an insight can look very similar. But they FEEL very different.

I often run into people who talk about how they are too hard on themselves, or how they are perfectionists, or workaholics.

On some level, they know, at least intellectually, that there is a cost to these strategies. And they are willing to say the “right” things. They know they shouldn’t be doing these things.

But at the same time, they are afraid to let them go.

Why? Because it looks like these strategies have more upside than downside. And they don’t know what else to do.

Until the actual insight comes, the outer behavior will not change.

“I Don’t Want to Lose My Edge”

Most successful people push themselves to achieve. Either by being really hard on themselves, or using others’ perceived slights.

For example, my client says one of the things that motivates him most is to be told he can’t do something. He immediately wants to prove that person wrong.

There are two problems with this kind of motivation—

First, it works! Look at all the sports stars who have used perceived slights as a way to motivate themselves—

Michael Jordon, Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, Tom Brady.

All historic greats who used their own anger at others’ insults (sometimes real, sometimes, frankly, made up) as fuel.

Why is that a problem? Because it’s exhausting and unsustainable. It requires you to feel bad to get to a good result. And when you get to that good result, you instinctively find another thing to be dissatisfied with or angry about.

That’s right. You become unable to enjoy your accomplishments.

Enjoyment means complacency means losing your edge means failure.

It’s a cycle that’s very hard to extricate yourself from.

The Two (Contradictory) Insights My Client Had

In a retreat context, we spend a lot of time in silence or near silence. Not because we are meditation, per se, but just because that’s what naturally happens when we give ourselves space.

(Who you are on retreat with matters. I have almost thirty years of mediation experience and am very comfortable with silence. In this context, tools and concepts are not particularly helpful. Your cup is already full. Stop pouring.)

In this space, habitual thoughts become much more apparent.

You begin to get the game you have been playing. And you see it for what it is.

And that’s what happened for my client—

He saw how much of his own internal monologue was self-critical.

And he saw that monologue for what it was. Thoughts that come and go, that have no innate solidity or truth.

Thoughts that, in his case, were not actually not helpful.

He saw another kind of thought as well. Thoughts about having reasonable goals rather than thinking big.

“I’m seeing two things that seem to contradict,” he said to me.

“Tell me.”

“I’m too hard on myself. AND I’m thinking way too small.”

The Power of Both/And

I didn’t TELL my client these things. If I had it would have bounced off him like any other advice. Instead, he saw it on his own.

He FELT it.

By seeing that being hard on himself, which he thought would help him reach his goals, was actually leading him to create smaller goals, he was able to unlock the creative energy that was always there.

And he will take that energy back to the office with him.

I can’t wait to help him create that next version of himself and his company.

What Could You Unlock if I Gave You the Key?

Two days away with your own thoughts and a clear guide is the best way that I know to jumpstart what is possible for you.

There are two ways to do that with me—

First, you can do it one-on-one (with follow up coaching to make sure you integrate it into your return to work).

Second, you can apply for my group event for founders and business owners in Denver on October 20-21.

DM me for details on either or both.

A client of mine recently texted this to me.

It was something he had gotten, intellectually, for years.

But it had never really hit him.

Not only did he not HAVE to know everything.

He can’t. No one can.

But only when he actually REALIZED this could he take action on it.

Only then could he see how free he already was.

Letting Go of Control

Whether they are founders making their next move or successful executives thinking about a job or career change, I see one thing that gets in the way of successful people over and over and over.

It’s the idea that they can figure out how things are going to work out before they actually do anything.

The idea that if they do the right things in the right order it can create a predictable result.

And the idea that they CAN’T act until I have all of that figured out.

Anything involving action in the world is inherently unpredictable.

As much as you try to control things, I can assure you that success comes when you are willing to try stuff knowing that you don’t know what’s going to happen.

Taking action and letting go of your control of the result.

“But how do I do that?” you might ask.

The best way I know of is to see that you never really had any control in the first place.

Creating Through Action

One of my favorite pieces of advice is from coach and teacher Michael Neill.

“Try [stuff]. And if it works, do more of it.”

That’s really all you can ever do.

You can’t learn anything about the outside world when you remain inside your head. You have to take action and see what happens.

What may make perfect sense in your head likely has nothing to do with how things will actually play out.

Ever try to plan a difficult conversation? How long before the other person said something totally unexpected?

And yet, in that moment, you figured out what to do next. Even though it was completely different than what you planned for.

Your Greatest Talent

Your greatest talent is the greatest talent that any human being has—

The innate capacity to figure out things in the moment.

Now I’m not saying that your perspective, your experience, even your planning are not relevant. They are relevant and perhaps even critical. No two people will respond to the same situation in exactly the same way.

But that capacity to respond, in your unique way, is what has brought you this far.

Revel in it. Embrace it. Look for opportunities to use it.

Scary? A bit.

But trying to plan your life without living it doesn’t sound like much of a life at all.

Most leaders, most of the time, are in some kind of activated mode. Some kind of crisis. We operate in a world of efficiency and productivity and caffeination and leaders can feel a lot of pressure to get as much done as fast as possible.

The brain can be very efficient when stimulated, whether through chemicals or stress.

But fight or flight brain can also bounce from one thing to another like a ball in a pachinko machine. Progress, if any, is random and lucky.

You Can’t Solve a Problem You Don’t Understand

A former client of mine owns an F350, and when we started working together he simply wanted to do the same things that he had been doing, only faster and more powerfully.

I used to tell him he wanted to F350 things. To use his power to run problems over. Easy, right?

Now that he is in a C-Suite job he sees that he needs to operate differently.

Not just power. You need traction before you can move. You need understanding before action.

The First Thing You Need

The first task that I have with a founder client is to get them to slow down. Not just because the speed of the founder life is unsustainable (and unhealthy). But because slowing down is more effective for what the founder actually needs.

The problems that get to the founder’s desk by definition have no easy solution.

They require a different part of the brain. The part that sees relationships. That sees unexpected connections. That has unexpected insights.

The part, unfortunately, that goes off line when someone is in crisis mode.

When you understand how your brain works, you can see that you need more holistic reasoning. The problems you face are not likely to be solved with a spreadsheet.

To get access to this more holistic reasoning you need to do the one thing you have been resisting doing.

You need to relax.

I’ve developed a quick way to do this that I share with my clients. And I call it, ironically, the 4×4.

Relax in One Minute: How to do the 4×4

Most people take shallow, fast breaths most of the time.

You know them. Those people who insist things are “Great!” in a rushed, high pitched voice, almost gasping as they say it.

Maybe you’ve done this. I know I have.

Even if you do this most of the time, I promise that if you learn and do the 4×4, you can become relaxed in less than a minute. And you’ll get better and better as you do it more.

Before we start, take a deep breath while you are watching yourself in the mirror.

Did your shoulders go up? Did you pull your stomach in?

Here’s the good news—you breathed exactly the opposite of how you should breathe if you want to relax. So just do the opposite of what you just did.

To create as much space as possible in your lungs, you need to move your diaphragm down and your belly out. Your shoulders will likely go down a bit as well.

Do this slowly—take about four seconds to fully fill your lungs. Your shoulders might go up just a bit at the end, after your ribs have expanded, when the air has nowhere else to go.

When your lungs are full, LET yourself exhale. Just let the air out. It might sound like a big sigh, or that the air is whooshing out of a balloon. That’s perfect.

As you let the air out, let all the tension out of your body, too. Your arms, your neck, your shoulders. Let them go limp.

Four inhales of four seconds each. Each followed by a sigh where you release more and more tension.

Most people feel significantly different after three or four breaths, but you can keep going if you want to, feeling more and more relaxed with each exhale.

And more and more likely to see things you didn’t see before. For example, the one thing you actually need to do next, rather than the twenty urgent fires you saw before.

Try it now.

How do you feel?

Why Does This Work So Well?

When you breathe in slowly and then exhale, you move your body from activation of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS, where the fight or flight response lives and where most of us spend most of each day) to the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS).

The SNS is great at helping you do one thing over and over again, really fast if necessary. Think serial processor in a computer. Most of the left hemisphere of the brain specializes in this kind of work. Think numbers, language, logic, analysis. Sounds useful, yes?

It is. To a point.

But the PNS enables a more powerful, parallel processor to come on line, generally through functions in the right hemisphere of the brain. These brain functions are holistic. They take everything in rather than breaking it into parts. They read body language and the energy in the room. They see connection. They take in way more than language can convey, so when you talk about your gut or a hunch, you’re usually talking about information you got from the right hemisphere of the brain.

This is us at our most powerful, and yet every message in our society tells us to speed up, to rely on logic, and data, and measurement.

If you had access to a supercomputer, would you use your calculator a little bit less?

Try This For Yourself

I don’t want you to believe me. I want you to try this yourself.

Next time you have too much to do, or a problem that feels too big to solve, see if you can get out for a walk, or if you can sleep on it. Giving yourself more time and space is usually better for activating the PNS and the right hemisphere.

But if you can’t, take a minute, and try the 4×4. And let me know how it goes.

This weekend I finally watched “The Brutalist.”

Among other things, the movie is about an architect who sacrifices a great deal for the sake of his vision. And one of the points that the movie seems to make, to even revel in, is that suffering is necessary for excellence.

That suffering should be celebrated.

That brilliance emerges from trauma.

I don’t buy it.

Not that it doesn’t happen. Nearly all my overachieving clients have some form of it. A deep need to achieve in the world, if only to show to themselves that they actually are enough.

I, too, suffered with this idea. For decades.

The Problems with Self-Brutality

Brutalism is a twentieth century school of architecture, but the word and term work on several levels in the movie.

The lead character, architect László Tóth, both experiences and delivers brutality, as does his patron, industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren.

“The Brutalist” can be a tough watch, and it has an often brutal view on the suffering that it proposes is necessary to achieve.

But I want to challenge this view, from several perspectives.

It’s Hard to Turn Off

When achieving in a brutalist way, there is no level of achievement that relieves the hatred, whether of self or other. In fact, I have had founders tell me that they are afraid to let go of it, lest they “lose their edge.”

I’ve seen another founder whose work I admire, Anastasia Koroleva, talk about the “chip on your shoulder” phenomenon, the continued and ongoing desire to prove oneself, even after one has sold multiple companies

Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, and Michael Jordan are great examples of this in the sports world. But the problem with never being satisfied is that you end up never satisfied. If you’re an athlete, even at Brady’s late retirement age of 45, that leaves decades of self-dug holes to fill.

While each Super Bowl can bring a moment of satisfaction, it will never get these athletes what they actually need.

Because it starts from a premise that isn’t true.

It Starts from a Faulty Premise

Every one of these overachievers, including the fictional Tóth, experienced something that taught them that they were not enough.

Every founder that I have worked with has had some version of it.

And it has brought them everything they have gotten in their lives. The desire to prove themselves, to show the world (and more importantly, themselves), that they are enough.

To silence the voices in their heads telling them otherwise.

What they don’t see is that they have always been powerful. So powerful that they created voices in their head that they believed. They created an illusion of insufficiency that they have spent their whole lives trying to overcome, when instead, they could see through it.

It Works (but not as Well as Something Else)

If you are convinced that you are not enough, doing more and more can work for a while.

You will do things that others will give you a lot of attention for, like getting good grades or winning a championship or selling your company.

It can feel really good. At first.

With each goal achieved, there is a temporary satisfaction, but the underlying problem, the not-enoughness, remains. In fact, founders can actively seek out the next slight, the next version of someone else thinking they are not enough, the next thing they need to prove to the world.

There is no end to that path, no matter how much the founder achieves.

Adding a zero to the next exit will not make you any happier until you actually see how you are keeping yourself from that happiness.

What Actually Works (and it’s Easier than you Think)

I can point you to what works in only a line or two. But for you to get it you have to experience it.

The place where you can embrace both how far you’ve come AND how far you have to go.

Would you like a taste, with a group of other founders who are struggling with the same thing?

Would you like to get a sense of how you can create anything you want without your whole sense of self worth riding on the outcome?

Would you like to learn how easy and joyful creation can be?

I’m restarting my founder calls to explore this, and would love to include you.

DM me to be included.

Jeff