What if your current reality has absolutely nothing to do with what happens next?
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the word realistic.
What’s a realistic revenue goal?
How quickly could you realistically grow?
What could you realistically charge?
How long would it realistically take?
They sound like sensible questions. Responsible questions, even.
But how exactly are we deciding what’s realistic?
Usually, we look at the evidence.
We look at what we earn now. What we’ve achieved before. How quickly we’ve grown in the past. What other people in our industry are doing. What we’ve tried that didn’t work. How old we are. How much money we have. How big our audience is.
And then we use all of that information to decide what can happen next.
Which makes perfect sense.
Except…
What if you want to create something for which there is no evidence at all yet?
I have conversations with exceptionally ambitious people all the time and I find this fascinating.
Ask someone what they really want, without asking them to explain how they’re going to achieve it, and you often get a very different answer.
They want to build the £20m business.
Sell the company for £100m.
Become globally known.
Make £1m a month.
Completely change their life.
And for a few moments, they let themselves say it.
Then something happens.
Obviously that would take a few years.
I’d need to get to £5m first.
We don’t have the team for that yet.
Our industry doesn’t really work like that.
Realistically…
There’s that word again.
And this is the bit that interests me.
Nothing has actually changed.
The goal hasn’t changed.
Their intelligence hasn’t changed.
Their capability hasn’t changed.
The market hasn’t changed in the last thirty seconds.
Their current reality has simply entered the conversation.
And we give it an extraordinary amount of authority.
If your business has made £100k per annum over the last two years, that’s a fact.
If it’s making £1m today, that’s a fact.
If you’ve never built a £10m business before, that’s also a fact.
If you don’t currently know exactly how you would get from one to the other, that may be a fact too.
But “therefore it will take me five years” isn’t a fact.
“There aren’t enough buyers” isn’t necessarily a fact.
“I need to achieve X before I can achieve Y” may not be a fact.
And yet our minds are incredibly good at putting all of those things into the same box marked REALITY.
This is what I call False Logic®.
It’s one of the things I’m most interested in because False Logic rarely sounds ridiculous.
If it did, we’d spot it immediately.
It normally sounds very intelligent.
There’s a fact. Then another fact. Then an assumption gets slipped in somewhere along the way and, because everything around it makes sense, we accept the assumption as fact too.
And suddenly we’re not making decisions based on what we actually want to create.
We’re making them based on what our past tells us we should expect.
I know there will be people reading this thinking, well, surely you have to pay attention to reality.
Of course you do.
I spent years in finance. I’m certainly not suggesting we stop looking at numbers because they’re inconvenient.
If your bank account says £10,000, it says £10,000.
You don’t get to add three zeros because you’ve bought a nice journal and done a visualisation.
That isn’t what I mean by Directing Reality.
Your current reality is information.
It tells you where you are.
It tells you what’s working and what isn’t.
It tells you what your previous decisions and actions have created.
What I question is whether it should also be allowed to tell you what happens next.
Because we do that without even realising it.
We allow current reality to inform us, which is useful.
Then we allow it to direct us, which is something very different.
And I think this is where so many extraordinary goals quietly become ordinary ones.
Not because someone consciously decides they don’t want the bigger thing anymore.
They simply keep adjusting it until it fits the evidence.
The £20m becomes £5m.
This year becomes three years.
The extraordinary house becomes the slightly nicer house.
The global ambition becomes something more sensible.
And eventually the future looks remarkably similar to the past, just improved around the edges.
I’m not particularly interested in that.
I’m interested in what happens when we reverse the process.
When instead of asking:
What does my current reality suggest I can achieve?
we ask:
What do I actually want to create?
And only then do we deal with reality.
Where am I now?
What’s the gap?
What would have to change?
What am I assuming?
What don’t I know yet?
Who do I need to speak to?
What do I need to stop doing?
What decision am I avoiding because I’ve already decided what will happen if I make it?
Who do I need to become to create something I have never created before?
That last question matters.
Because if you want a result that is completely different from the results you’ve created before, it seems rather unlikely that you can keep thinking, deciding and acting in exactly the same way and somehow arrive somewhere completely different.
This is why Directing Reality has become such an important idea in my work.
It isn’t about pretending reality isn’t there.
It isn’t about waiting for the universe to deliver something.
And it isn’t about convincing yourself that something has already happened when your very intelligent brain knows perfectly well that it hasn’t.
It’s about becoming conscious of what is currently directing you.
Your assumptions.
Your expectations.
Your rules.
Your identity.
The conclusions you’ve made about what is possible, how difficult it will be and how long it should take.
And then asking whether you want those things directing the next chapter of your life.
Because perhaps the most interesting thing about evidence is this:
Your current reality is evidence of what you have created so far.
That’s all.
It is not evidence of the limit of what you can create next.
And if there is something you want that feels far beyond your current reality, this is exactly what we’re going to explore together at The Directing Reality Summit.
Over three days, we’re going to look at the result you actually want, the mind you’re taking there, and the identity required to stop allowing your current reality to dictate your future one.
Not a slightly better version of what already exists.
The thing you really want.
Even if, right now, there isn’t much evidence for it.
Perhaps especially then.
Guinevere
The Mind Director™
Directing Reality. Expecting Extraordinary.