Stop Watching. Start Directing.

You probably think you’re directing your life.

But a lot of the time, you’re not.

You’re watching what’s happening and reacting to it.

Maybe with popcorn.

Although probably not, because most of the time you’re too busy waiting for something to go wrong.

Waiting for the client to say no.

Waiting for the business to slow down.

Waiting for someone to question the price.

Waiting for the money to disappear.

Waiting for whatever the next thing is.

And actually, you’re not even really in the audience.

You’re an extra in your own film.

Things happen. You react. Something else happens. You react to that.

And before you know it, a whole year has gone by and you’re still making decisions from the same things you believed at the beginning of it.

That’s the part I find interesting.

Because you have a script.

Not literally, obviously.

But there are things you’ve decided are true about money, business, success, time, yourself.

“Q4 is always slow.”

“People get into Christmas mode from November and nobody is buying services”

“Good people are impossible to find.”

“Clients won’t pay that.”

“I can’t give up the salary.”

“Nobody else can do this properly.”

“You can’t build something big without working all hours.”

And the problem isn’t just that you think these things.

It’s that you make decisions from them.

That’s what I coined the phrase False Logic®.

Something you’ve accepted as true because it sounds reasonable.

Maybe your old boss said it.

Maybe everyone in your industry says it.

Maybe your parents believed it.

Maybe something happened once and you’ve been using it as evidence ever since.

Maybe you heard it on a podcast while you were doing six other things and somehow it stuck.

Maybe it came from Uncle Ken in Christmas 2007.

Who knows.

But once you accept it, it starts running things.

You don’t charge the price. You stay another year.

You keep doing everything yourself. You don’t take on teh team you know you need. 

You pull back when the market feels uncertain.

You tell yourself you want more money, but not if it means giving up even more of your life.

And then, of course, the result comes back and seems to prove you were right.

But have you comforted that maybe the assumption changed the decision, and the decision helped create the result.

One of the things I’ve never really accepted is the idea that making serious money means you have to give up your life.

I saw pretty much everyone doing that in corporate.

People worked ridiculous hours and everyone seemed to think that was just what success looked like.

I didn’t. I mean – why would you want to believe that? 

I have built a seven-figure company while, for a lot of that time, working around school hours. 

This is not ‘Yey for me” and it’s not because I found some magical extra hours in the day.

I didn’t start from the assumption that I had to choose.

Read that again. 

Because it matters more than it sounds.

If you assume more money means less time, you make one set of decisions.

If you assume you can have more money and more time, you start looking for completely different answers.

That’s really what directing is.

Not controlling everything that happens.

Because obviously we can’t.

It’s noticing the assumptions you’re making your decisions from, instead of just reacting to whatever happens next.

So this weekend, notice one of yours.

The sentence you keep saying about your business, your money, your time or yourself.

The one that sounds so obvious you’ve stopped questioning it.

Write it down.

Then ask:

Is this actually true?

Where did I get it from?

And what am I doing because I believe it?

You don’t need to turn it into some positive affirmation and chant it in the mirror. To be honest, unless you’ve really understood the neuroscience behind affirmations, they don’t work anyway. 

Just question it.

You may be surprised how much of your “reality” is actually a conclusion you reached a long time ago.

Next week, we’re going much further into this.

From Tuesday 20 to Thursday 22 October I’m running Directing Reality, a free three-day live experience for founders, business owners and leaders.

We’re going to look at the results you’re creating, what’s driving them and the part your own thinking is playing in all of it.

Bring one of those sentences with you.

We’ll start there.

Save your seat: Https://directingreality.guinevereellisinternational.com

Beyond Realistic. Expect Extraordinary.

Guinevere
The Mind Director™

P.S. If you’ve been saying the same thing for two years, that’s probably a good one to start with.