Big Ideas.

Almost every business owner and entrepreneur is constantly accumulating crisis: whether throughout many years of chaos, struggle and overwhelm or in one batch of massive catastrophe... or however it comes about. This accumulated crisis is what truly limits their freedom.

You think your freedom is going to come from money. You think freedom is going to come from success. Or from having more time, great relationships or purpose... You think your freedom is going to come from all sorts of these things. But my experience taught me that freedom does not happen until you revisit your adversity. Until you take a hard look at the past and present crisis, at the adversity you have gone through, you are always going to be chasing something that doesn't work.

Crisis to Freedom is the ultimate path we all have to navigate but don't always know how. Crisis and Freedom  are not just two words — they are the entire journey beginning to an end. Crisis Freedom™ is the big entrepreneurial problem everyone is trying to solve. And most entrepreneurs are getting it wrong. Why? Read on, and you'll discover two traps that amke this so.

There is a vicious cycle most business owners and entrepreneurs find themselves stuck inside without even realizing it. This is how it works:

When you find yourself in a crisis (big or small), you become anxious. When you are anxious, your compulsions and defaults kick in trying to keep you safe. It happens really fast and quite intensely, so that you can cope with anxiety and not feeling okay. Acting out these coping compulsive mechanisms is a very familiar pattern repeated many times during all kinds of stressful and adverse situations. So your pattern-recognizing brain immediately draws you back into that past adversity (and trauma) that actually created those coping mechanisms in the first place... reinforcing the sense that what is happening today is also adverse and traumatic. This is obviously overwhelming and stressful. It produces unrest in your body, mind and soul sending you into a tailspin of more chaos and crisis... which then ups the anxiety and unlocks a more intense CACTUS cycle.

This is how you get stuck into not being able to escape or get relief from your situation. I call this vicious cycle the CACTUS Effect™. Dealing with the CACTUS Effect on your own is next to impossible. No wonder so many of us repport suffering from endless depression, anxieties and addictions.

In everything that I've seen working with hundreds of business owners and entrepreneurs over the years, it was clear that our struggles and our genius are more than highly correlated. There was just something about countless stories of success and struggles that always seemed to unearth the same memories. It appeared that the root reasons why all of these business owners and entrepreneurs struggled were exactly the same reasons why they were so good at what they did. Both genius and the struggle could be traced to the same set of past core experiences. What was even more fascinating is that their real root problems were often hiding inside their genius zone... in almost plane sight... and they weren't even looking there.

After seeing this over and over again, I realized that I was dealing with yet another vicious cycle I now call the Blindspot Crisis Loop™. Here is how it works and the basic level:

(A) underlying past trauma is (B) hiding inside your genius zone, and (C) accelerating your current crisis, which is then (D) nose-diving your business and your life, causing you to experience (A) even more trauma.

If you really are a person that values excellence, eventually you'd come to realize that you must examine your dysfunctions to improve your functions. You probably already picked all the low hanging fruits in your genius space and there's no obvious things left there for you to unlock. Without looking into the crisis, you were playing in the land of diminishing returns. So in order to get to the next step, you've got to literally turn to crisis and chaos as the final teacher. You have to realize that the freedom that you seek and the real genius you want to unlock, can't be attained unless you examine the crisis, unless you look at the thing that is not working, the thing that is bothering you, the thing you tolerate, the thing that's causing you the suffering.

I have come to believe that our gifts (Genius) are incredibly close to our wounds and our scars (Trauma). And this proximity is what ultimately keeps us from achieving our freedom. More on that next.

Recently, I was writing a series of stories called “Gifts and Scars”, focusing on this very idea that we receive gifts and scars at the same time in the same package.

Imagine a bunch of wrapped Christmas gifts... Now imagine all of these fancy boxes have big scars on them. And when you open them you receive both the greatest gifts and the deepest wounds at the same time. And it's just how things are.

You could look at your gifts and find scars... and you could look at scars and find gifts. And that is how you are able to understand your human experience FULLY. This is by the way, in contrast to victims who collect scars and ignore gifts and high-achievers who chase gifts and ignore scars. Neither is the sensible approach because it limits your human experience.

Gifts and Scars™ is the complete and nuanced understanding of our very own human experience that has the ultimate power to create our true freedom:

Freedom from Pain of recurring crisis and chaos patterns and mental and emotional suffering caused by past trauma and adversity. Freedom from Limitations to know that you have all you need to make your world 100x better because you are NOT blocked or limited by anything (mindset, beliefs, unwanted behaviors and inability to make permanent changes in your life). Freedom of Identity to be your authentic self and live the intentional life you deserve and desire. Freedom of Your Genius to pursue your biggest goals, growth, and profits – all on your terms.