There is a side of entrepreneurship we don't talk about enough. It's three o'clock in the morning and you're awake. Something is happening in the business. A decision has to be made. The tax authorities are knocking on your door. An investment isn't working out as expected. Someone you trusted is disappointing you. Cash flow is worrying you. You're considering expansion, restructuring, selling the company, or wondering whether you still want the life you worked so hard to create.
You know worrying won't solve anything. You know you should sleep. And yet you're wide awake.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if, just for a moment, someone could make all those worries disappear? The way your mother once could when you were a child and the world suddenly felt safe again.
Well... welcome to the club.
I know that feeling.
Who can you really talk to?
Your spouse?
They may know you better than anyone. But do they fully understand the business, the responsibility and what is at stake? And do you really want to bring every worry home?
Your advisers?
They know their field. But they also look at your situation through their own expertise and their commercial relationship with you. And how personal are you really prepared to become with your accountant, lawyer, banker or consultant?
Your management team?
They are part of the business. You lead them. There are doubts and fears you may not want to place on their shoulders.
Another entrepreneur?
They may understand the pressure better than most. But they will inevitably see your situation through the lens of their own experience.
Over the years, I have met many entrepreneurs who were surrounded by people and still remarkably alone when an important decision had to be made.
And I have experienced that myself.
“Everyone turns to you for answers. But where do you go when you don't have one?”
— Ronald Heister
I learned to look somewhere else
For much of my professional life, I was trained to look outward. As a journalist, I learned to ask questions and listen beyond the first answer. Later, as an executive director working with companies, leaders and complex organizations, I learned to analyse situations, understand different interests and bring in specialists when necessary.
All of that still matters. But at some point I discovered something that fundamentally changed the way I work.
I was asking everyone except myself.
There is a difference between the voice in your head that keeps analysing a problem at three in the morning and the deeper knowing that can emerge when the noise becomes quiet.
I wanted to understand that difference.
So I took action. I travelled to the United States for specialist training that took me much deeper into what people describe as the Higher Self, a level of consciousness beyond our everyday analytical thinking. It took me much further inward than I had expected. And it changed the way I work with people.
I would even call it life-changing. Many of the people I have guided since have used similar words to describe their own experience.
What if the answer doesn't have to come from someone else?
When an entrepreneur comes to us with an important question, we don't begin by telling them what to do.
We begin with them.
For several uninterrupted hours, the outside world becomes quieter. No telephone. No management meeting. No performance. No need to convince anyone. And no need to be the entrepreneur who is supposed to have all the answers. We create the space for the person underneath the role to emerge.
In the deeply relaxed state we work with, people sometimes reach beyond the constant analysis of the conscious mind. Memories, emotions, connections and insights can surface that they had not previously been able to access. Again and again, I see something interesting happen.
The question they arrived with changes.
A business problem turns out to be connected to something personal. A decision that seemed impossibly complicated becomes clearer. Something they had been trying to solve by thinking harder suddenly looks different. Nobody has handed them the answer.
It has come from them.
Coming home to yourself
That is the first part of our 3-Day Discovery.
And we deliberately don't stop there. An inner insight can be powerful, but feeling that something is right does not automatically make it so. We therefore look at the reality around you: your business, relationships, people, circumstances and systems.
Then we look outward and ahead, using external intelligence and Early Warning AI to examine assumptions, developments, risks and signals outside your current field of view.
Inward. Around you. Ahead.
The purpose isn't to make your decisions for you. It is to help you see more of the reality from which you make them. But for me, something even more fundamental can happen.
You come home to yourself.
The noise becomes quieter. You stop constantly searching outside yourself for confirmation. You begin to recognize what is fear, what is expectation and what you actually know. And from that place, you return to your company differently.
There will still be uncertainty. Difficult conversations won't disappear. Entrepreneurship won't suddenly become easy. But you know where to return when the noise becomes loud again.
Everyone turns to you.
Now you know where you can turn.
To yourself.