Remove The Rule

One of the most useful things I do when I’m trying to solve a problem is to separate what I actually want, from the way I’ve decided it will be achieved.

Because we muddle these two things up all the time.

You want another £100,000 in revenue, and somewhere along the way you decide that means finding ten new clients.

You want to grow the business, so you decide you need to build a bigger team.

You want to become much better known in your industry, so you decide you need a huge social media following.

You want to leave corporate and start your own business, so you decide you can’t leave until the business is replacing your salary.

And then you start trying to solve that problem.

How do I find ten clients?

How do I afford more people?

How do I grow my following?

How do I get the business to replace my salary?

But that wasn’t necessarily the original problem.

It was simply the route you chose to solve it.

And I think this is one of the reasons intelligent people can spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to solve something that suddenly becomes much easier when somebody asks them a different question.

What if that rule isn’t true?

I was thinking about this recently because I noticed myself doing exactly the same thing.

I had a result I wanted, and without really noticing it, I had built a whole series of assumptions around what would have to happen first.

A had to happen before B.

I needed this before I could do that.

This particular route was how the result would happen.

And once I’d accepted those assumptions, my mind stopped looking elsewhere.

That’s the interesting part.

The moment you decide how something has to happen, you massively reduce the number of solutions your mind is available to see.

So this is something I now deliberately do with problems, and it’s remarkably simple.

Take whatever result you’re trying to create and write it down without the method attached to it.

Not:

I need ten more clients.

But:

I want to create another £100,000 in revenue.

Those are completely different problems.

Ten new clients is one possible route to £100,000. But perhaps the money comes from three existing clients buying something else. Perhaps it comes from one much larger contract. Perhaps there’s an offer you haven’t created yet. Perhaps your pricing is wrong. Perhaps there’s money sitting in opportunities you’ve already generated but haven’t properly followed up.

You don’t know which one.

And that’s precisely the point.

The same applies outside business.

“I can’t move until I can afford X”

“I can’t do that while the children are this age”

“I need to feel more confident before I put myself forward”

“I need more experience before people will take me seriously”

“I need to know exactly how this is going to work before I decide”

Maybe.

But you may want to establish if any of those things were actually true before you allow them to determine what you do next.

Because there’s a big difference between a genuine constraint – and a rule you’ve created in your own thinking.

And we’re very good at turning the second into the first.

So try this today:

Take the thing you most want to change at the moment.

It could be a revenue problem, a career decision, a business problem, a money problem, something you want to buy, something you want to change in your life.

Write down the result you actually want.

Then underneath it, write:

For this to happen, I believe I need to…

And finish the sentence.

Then keep going.

Before I can do that, I need…

The reason I can’t do it now is…

The only realistic way this can happen is…

This is where it gets interesting, because what you’re looking at now is not the result.

You’re looking at the rules you’ve built around the result.

Take each one and ask:

Is this objectively true, or have I simply decided this is how it has to work?

If it is objectively true, keep it.

If it isn’t, remove it.

And then go back to the original result and ask a much better question:

If I didn’t have to do it that way, how else could I create this?

Don’t look for one answer. Find ten.

Make some of them ridiculous if you have to. The purpose isn’t to immediately find the answer. It’s to get your mind out of the narrow route it has been repeatedly travelling down.

Because sometimes you don’t need to work harder at solving the problem.

It might be that you need to notice that you’ve been solving the wrong problem.

Guinevere

The Mind Director™

Directing Reality, Expecting Extraordinary