The second biggest problem when it comes to money and business is not knowing how to create anything you want

In this blog I will share with you how to build your business without sacrificing your relationships, your family, your life, anything else that is important to you while growing your business. The second biggest problem when it comes to money and business is not knowing how to create anything you want. Last week we were sharing about not knowing what you want and now we're going to share about not knowing how to create what it is that you want.

We're going to dive deeper into this subject. Most times when I speak on stage in front of an audience I will ask people what is it that you really want of course. We did that last week right? But now suppose you know absolutely certain what it is that you really want. Then what is the second problem? And that is what is the immediate problem that comes up then? If I would ask you to answer me and I could hear your answers many of you would come up with things like, "Yeah, I know what I want, now I need money," or, "Now I need time," or, "Now I need my kids to go to school first," or, "Now I need to have a different husband, to have different people around me, to live in a different place, for the economy to change." Or you would say, "I would need to know how."

And most of these things all relate to, "Yeah, I know what I want, I just don't know how to get it. I know what I want, I just don't know how because," and then there are all these other issues coming up and all of these other issues are stuff that you are not able to control because they're all outside of you. This is mostly what happens. Now I'm going to ask you a really really really strange question to most people's ears and that is how many of you have learned how to walk? And if I could see you now I guess your hand is probably up because most people don't sit in a wheelchair. Some do. Most of you on the other hand do not live from a wheelchair. And most of you have learned how to walk.

If you're in a wheelchair, then how many of you have learned how to listen? How many of you have learned a language? But how many of you have learned how to walk or how to listen to the English language? Which ever makes more sense for you. And I guess all hands are up right now right? Because 100% of you has learned either one of these.

And then my next question would be, "But how many of you have learned how the exact process of walking goes," or of speech. And that's a whole different question. How many of you would be able to teach a six months old baby what it has to do to walk? How many of you would be able to really do that? To say, "Well, first you use this muscle and then you put that bone right there on the floor and then you shift your weight just a little bit this way and then you pull on this." I mean, it doesn't even happen in the same way for everyone all the time. Nobody would really be able to teach a child how to do that from scratch. Even physiotherapists often tell me, "I would not know how to teach somebody that."

Obviously, and the same goes for language, how do you learn a language? Now there's a lot of research on it but kids actually already do the [inaudible] sounds in their mother tongue. They don't just randomly babble and make funny sounds. These sounds are already related to whatever language it is that their parents are speaking or their caretakers. The way we learn is very differently than from what we think we need to do. We are taught in school and by all of our systems that we need to know how and then we can do it. We need to develop the skills and then we can do whatever we want with the skills. We need to do this first and then that. And if we learn this, then that's the result. That's how we're taught in school.

The problem with it is that it's not how we learn at all as a species. If you look at a baby there is only one way we learn how to walk and that is we are put in between a group of grownups walking on two legs and somewhere between zero and 24 months the vast majority of us know how to walk. Same with speech. You put a baby in between grownups who speak more or less the same language and somewhere between zero and 24 months most of us know enough language to make ourselves heard and that develops of course.

How do we learn?

How do we learn? We learn by watching, looking, listening, mirroring and just by being in a context where it is so normal to do that specific thing that we start doing it without even being conscious of it. A baby doesn't think, "Oh, I want to do the same as mommy." It just knows deep down inside that that is what it has to be doing. A baby wants to be heard and it sees all these grownups talking and all this thing and it just starts copying that because it wants to be one of them. We don't have to learn the grammar in order to be able to speak English like we do in school. We don't have to dissect the whole language, we just have to be between people who speak it.

Creating what you want

Now that is a whole different way of creating what you want. But because in school and because our caretakers all so much install that message upon us that we need to develop our skills, we need to know how, we need to know the recipe because if we don't have a recipe we'll sure not be able to follow the instructions, that makes us waiting for the instructions before we think we think can do anything. Even though you might now know what it is you want, you still think, "Yeah, but how can I start creating what I want if I don't know how?" We've been programmed from that early age to learn recipes, to follow instructions, to learn skills, instead of how we as a species really learn and really create. We create our life by knowing what it is we want and then creating a context in which that is the most normal and most obvious thing to want.

Creating the exact right people around you

Creating what it is you want involves creating your context first. Creating the exact right people around you for who it is perfectly normal to have what it is you want to create. It's the people, it's the place where you live, it is the every aspect of it. It's the thoughts people think around you. Now, how profoundly that influences your results I will tell you in a small episode of my own life. A small story. I started my first business when I was 25. It was in 2001. And there was a huge crisis in this country. And it was the internet crises and all these internet companies were collapsing and a lot of people were out of business. Companies went out of business but a lot of people were sent home.

A lot of my friends didn't actually have a job. And I had a very good job. I studied to be a ship building engineering so I was in a big research institution and I had a very good paying job. But I hated my job and I liked what I did for the customers, I hated working in that company for that boss and I didn't hate the person himself, I just hated the way the company worked together. And I wanted to get out. I quit my job and I started my company in the middle of that crisis and all of the people around me said, "You're crazy. Why would you quit your job where everybody is made redundant, I mean that's stupid. That's the most insane thing we've ever heard of." I said, "Well, I think it's the most insane thing to keep on doing something that I really feel like I'm dying there."

I just stopped listening to these people. I started my company. And in the first three months I made my first year of revenue. And in the five years after that I quadrupled my revenue and I thought, "I don't even understand what they're talking about. It's easy." That's what I thought. Now in that time I was living in a Delft, in a small city in a very urban area in the Netherlands where I still live and I was a semi professional rower so I trained nine times a week. Every morning at 6:00 a.m. I would be in the rowing boat with my coach and he would say, "Come on. This is how we're going to fuel your day. Prepare yourself. If it's not for the rowing match then it's for the day. You're an entrepreneur, you need this discipline." And he prepared me. And he said, "And this is the energy and the preparation you need in life."

That's how I started every day. And then for five out of the seven days of the week I would work between highly ambitious, very successful entrepreneurs. And that would be my context. That was very normal for me. I just thrived there and my business thrived and everything was easy. And I was four or five months of the year I was out at sea not working. I was like, "Why is this a problem? It's easy." Until I got pregnant. And that was very unexpected because I thought I was infertile so all of a sudden I was pregnant and the biological father of my kid left when I was eight weeks pregnant and all of a sudden I was an entrepreneur and a single mom. And that changed everything of course. Because all of a sudden, I wanted to be the kind of mom that didn't give her kid more to other caretakers than three days a week but the projects that I earned so much money with required my presence seven days a week, 16 hours a day for two or three months in a row.

And then I would have two or three months off but that just doesn't go well with a baby does it? I mean all the moms and dads here understand what I'm talking about. And I did not want my mom to move in with me and I sure as hell didn't want to move back in with my parents so I had a really big problem and I was forced to compromise and everybody around me said, "Oh well, you know just do normal for once in your life. Find a job. This is only a short period." And I thought, "Well, this is not just a short period. This is 18 years. I'm not going to make this compromise for 18 years. That's not the way the world should be working."

I was aware of that but I also didn't have an answer. I started to do what most people do, compromise and think that that probably would work out and start creating a whole lot of money, et cetera, et cetera and I was like, come on, come on, come on. And in that process I also met my current husband and we made another baby so we created a bigger family and we moved to the east side of the country. All of a sudden I was breadwinner because my husband left his job to go with us, I was mom of two, I had a company and all of a sudden life changed. Now I had to work kind of normal hours and I wanted to be the best mom I could be. I wanted to be there with my family et cetera, et cetera, so I was breadwinner, I had a lot of projects, I worked my ass off but somehow my bank account dropped and dropped and dropped and dropped. In two and a half years time it went from plus 40 thousand to minus 50 thousand.

And now is the interesting thing because I just told you, I moved from Delft, from the urban area where I had this amazing context to a very small place in the east part of the country and I had a family. Now what happened there is the following. Every morning I would wake up and I would have breakfast with the kids and make sure that they had everything they needed and that my husband was kind of okay with me leaving to my work and I would bring the kids to school. That was a Waldorf School. I don't know if you know about it. Look it up if you want. It's Rudolf Steiner. Waldorf School, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful way of raising your kids. But what happened at that school playground is that a group of nine or ten moms would always go out for coffee after bringing the kids to school.

And every morning they would say, "Oh, why are you never joining us? Please, it's no fun with you. You should be joining us. We're having coffee." That's one thing. The other thing is that Benjamin's teacher would ask me once a week at least or she wouldn't ask me, she would come up to me once a week and tell me, "It breaks my heart for Benjamin that his mom is hardly ever there." Now, look at that context next to the context of Delft where my rowing coach at 6:00 a.m. would tell me, "Come on, this is how we prepare for the day." And then put that next to this where I felt guilty, I felt no fun at all and I felt like a complete failure as a mom.

And then look at my bank account and look at what was actually going on here. In the first set, I had really positive beliefs about who I am, about what I can accomplish, about what I have to offer the world, about what it is that people can get from me and about how I contribute. And in the second set of context I felt bad, I felt like a failure. Every morning remembered me of where I was not good enough. And to top it all off, I had this big belief pattern that I was totally unaware of and that is that my mom always tells me, "Why don't you just get a husband who provides? Why do you always have to be the smart one, the one doing all the hard work? Get a husband to do that for you. Send Jakko back to work." And there is a lot of love in that actually because she really really struggles seeing me fighting that hard. And she was right, because it wasn't easy at that point.

She saw something and she reacted to that. But my mom and I don't have all of that understanding for each other's life and the only field where I thought she might recognize me and we might bond strongly was by being a mom. And what I always valued very deeply is the fact that she was always home. I wanted to be a mom like she was. I wanted to be home all the time. I wanted to be present in my kids' lives so I tried to be everything to everyone. I wanted to be a better wife for my husband, I wanted to be a better mom for my kids, I wanted to be a better entrepreneur and I wanted to contribute, et cetera, et cetera, so I tried to be home for dinner, I tried to be the cleaning lady, the cook, the wife, the mom who is home with a cup of tea, everything just to feel good enough as a mom. Just to get a compliment from my mom in one area where we both understand. Being a mom.

What I didn't realize is that the day ... I always thought, "Well, that whole idea of men having to provide for the family is just your idea. I don't believe it. I don't believe that men should be the providers. I believe I can be that too." Well, you know, I wasn't even pregnant for more than day and my bank account started dropping. And my beliefs about myself started changing. And I started not to look at, "Hey, am I solving problems out there in the world," but I started looking at, "Am I solving problems for my family?" My whole focus shifted from out there to the world, to how I contributed, to back into my own thing about my problems and my company started to be about me instead of about the contribution that we wanted to make. And I never noticed this until I started to look at my bank account.

Now that is a thing that we're going to share about in the second series so we'll take this example again. We'll probably come back to it when we share about relationships, when we share about health, because this is really key for you to understand. But what I really want you to understand in this article is that if you want to create what you want, you need to build the context that will nourish that. Because if you have the people around you, the life around you that supports what you want, it will come easy. Because if you have the context of people believing in you, of people supporting you, of people being able to support you, because my mom was actually supporting me but she wasn't able to support what I wanted. If you create the context of beliefs of people, of everything that you would need to feel confident and to feel certain about what it is that you want, then the how will show up.

Because if it's very very very normal for the people around you to be energetic, to have a good business, et cetera, et cetera, then it will also be very normal for you. Just like a kid who needs to learn how to walk. It's not the how, it's more the context, your belief system, what you feel you deserve about feeling good enough, about creating a context where it is not a question if you feel good enough but it's the most logical thing to do to feel good enough because the context makes you feel good enough.

Now, during this whole year we will share a lot about context and the example I just described is of course an outward example. You can create that context inside you as well. And we'll share a lot more about that when we come to next week where we will be sharing about ... I'm sorry, next week we'll share about your contribution to the world. The week after we'll share about blueprint navigation and that is so week five of this sequence we will share more about how do you navigate that blueprint and how do you create your context inside you. That's week five so stayed tuned.