Don’t Start With Why, Start With You.

Simon Sinek says ‘start with why’. And who are we to disagree? Aristotle taught the same 2,000 years ago. The best thinking comes road tested over time.

Lana Jelenjev taught us to start with who - great advice and learning from the excellent 2020 Vision Programme.

I’m wondering, though, if we might better start somewhere else.

With you.

’Start with you’. 

Do the same problems have a habit of following you around? They do me.

I am prone to bad sleep. The 3.42am wake up. Pangs of I don’t know what drifting into my consciousness in the dark of the nightime. Anxiety, tension, doubt, fears, insecurities. All that pesky stuff of life.

I sleep better when I feel more secure about money.

This is true now, to en extent, and was true when running the company.

In fact, how well I slept was directly proportional to the size of our stashed away cash reserves. The bigger the reserve, the better I’d sleep.

And sleep is good.

In truth, though, cash wasn’t the issue.

These worries and anxieties are painful. They hurt. And having money in the bank helped keep these pains at a safe, manageable arms length distance.

Which is fine. Until it isn’t.

Nothing wrong with having cash reserves. Quite the opposite.

But cash pile as sticking plaster serves a different purpose. If the goal, in some hidden recesses of my mind, is protection, a defence against worries and doubt, spending money is tricky.

Fail to spend money in a business and you’ll strangle it. Try hiring well. Or investing. Or budgeting. Or day-to-day running and operating. Can’t run a business without constantly investing resources. And if those resources are a protection against something deep inside, you’re in all sorts of trouble.

This isn’t about money. It’s about our minds.

The things I’m scared of, doubt, fear - these are personal and painful and exert their pesky control over our day-to-day any which way they can. Like in money. Or in teams. Or managing. Or whatever. And this is the stuff of our minds.

The businesses we create are like an x-ray.

The companies we build express our fears and hopes and beauty and wonder and insecurities.

The melting pot of our minds.

How big we try to grow. How fast. How aggressively. How motivated we are. How harsh. The problems we encounter (/create).

All a function of the mind.

And left to its own devices, the mind will play this game out regardless of plans you might write, budgets you might set, hopes you might think you have.

Get to know your mind. Shine a light on it. Fear not, it’ll not be pretty. As one teacher put it, the mind is needy and shouty, lazy and crazy. But it’s doing this whether you like it or not. So better to like it. Or know it, at least.

Left hidden it’ll choreograph you back to the same problems over and over, the same problematic team, the same insurmountable obstacles. Yep, all functions of the mind.

Whatever your best laid plans, the business you create will be a function, a picture, an expression of your mind.

Get to work on yours and start wrestling back control of what your future business might look like.

Start with you.