Transformation Starts with Action
What if the world isn’t the way you think it is?
What if the world isn’t the way you think it is?
One of the first things I notice when I begin working with someone is not their behaviour.
It’s their beliefs.
Because long before we change what we do, we need to understand the invisible map we’re using to navigate life.
Most of us assume that we see the world as it really is. We assume our thoughts, reactions and interpretations are simply “the truth.” Yet modern neuroscience, psychology and evolutionary theory all suggest something rather different. We don’t experience reality directly. We experience our model of reality.
As children, this makes perfect sense. During our early years our brains spend much more time in slower theta brainwave states, allowing us to absorb information rapidly. We learn from our parents, teachers, culture and experiences without questioning very much. Those early patterns become the foundations of our subconscious mind.
The problem is that many of those maps were created by a child trying to make sense of the world. Years later we’re still navigating life with them.
Carl Friston’s Free Energy Principle proposes that living systems continually make predictions about the world, updating those predictions through experience in order to minimise surprise and maintain stability. In other words, your brain isn’t passively observing reality—it’s constantly predicting it.
Donald Hoffman’s work reaches a similarly fascinating conclusion from a different direction. Using mathematical models from evolutionary theory, he argues that natural selection favours perceptions that help us survive, not perceptions that reveal objective reality. From that perspective, seeing the world exactly as it is would offer no evolutionary advantage.
Even without the science, it’s obvious that our experience is limited. We see only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. We hear only a narrow band of sound frequencies. Our senses are wonderfully adapted for survival, but they don’t capture the whole picture.
Take the mantis shrimp. While humans typically have three types of colour receptors, mantis shrimp possess around 12 to 16 different photoreceptor types, allowing them to detect aspects of light we cannot even imagine.
Our experience of reality is only one version of what’s available. This matters because it gives us something incredibly valuable.
Choice.
If our experience is constructed through prediction, perception and interpretation, then many of the stories we tell ourselves are not fixed truths. They’re simply the current model our mind has built.
When someone tells me, “I’m not confident,” “I’m not good enough,” “People always reject me,” or “This is just who I am,” I’m less interested in whether it’s true than in asking: According to which map?
Sometimes all it takes is a single thought experiment or a different perspective for an old belief to loosen its grip. The facts haven’t changed. The person has. And from that point, their behaviour often changes naturally. This is where identity becomes so important.
Many people unknowingly confuse identity with habit.
“I am anxious.”
“I am an entrepreneur.”
“I am the responsible one.”
“I am the people pleaser.”
But these are often roles we’ve repeated for so long that they begin to feel permanent. They aren’t.
Identity is far more flexible than most people realise. Once we understand that our internal maps can change, we also discover that who we believe ourselves to be can evolve. We don’t have to remain the person our childhood, our culture or our past experiences taught us to become. We can consciously choose who we want to be in this season of our lives. For me, this also changes how we think about purpose.
I don’t believe purpose is something we have to spend a lifetime searching for. I believe our purpose is wonderfully simple. It is to experience life. The joy. The uncertainty. The relationships. The challenges. The successes. The grief. The wonder.
When we stop mistaking our subconscious maps for reality itself, life opens up. We become more curious than certain. More flexible than rigid. More intentional than automatic. And perhaps that’s where real freedom begins—not by changing the world around us, but by recognising that we have far more choice in how we experience it than we ever imagined.
Learn more about the layers of mind over at my YouTube channel.
∞ Buy my book TURBULENCE
∞ Follow me on YouTube for lots of enlightening conversations.
∞ If you want help in with changing the patterns of your subconscious mind you can explore MindScript. A personalised self hypnosis app developed by me from my clinical framwork.
The Identity Gap After Success
Most founders prepare extensively for the sale. Valuations, structure, legal frameworks, timelines. Very few prepare for what happens psychologically once the deal is done, and how that internal shift begins to ripple outward into every area of life.
That gap in preparation has a name. I call it an identity gap. And it is one of the most significant and least discussed transitions a high-performing person can face.
What Do I Want?
It sounds like the simplest question in the world.
Founders are exceptionally good at knowing what they want. They have spent years proving it. The drive, the build, the exit. These are not the actions of people who lack direction. And yet. When the deal closes, this question arrives in a form that is genuinely unfamiliar. The reason is that it is not one question. It is three. And each one lives at a different level of mind.
The First Level: The Conscious Mind
The conscious mind has an answer ready. It is fast and confident. A new venture. A portfolio. Time with family. Something to move toward. This is the navigator. The strategic, analytical part of the mind that sets direction and executes plans.
Founders are exceptionally skilled here. It is where they have lived for years. The answer at this level feels like clarity. It is often the beginning of the real question.
The Second Level: The Subconscious
Below the conscious mind sit the patterns. The beliefs formed early in life about what success means. What safety looks like. What you have to achieve in order to be enough. Most successful founders build companies through a combination of vision, creativity, intelligence, and ego-driven striving.
The drive to be recognised. To provide. To prove. To get there before someone else does. The ego is a fire starter. It is one of the most powerful motivators a human being has. It builds companies.
The trap is not the ego itself. The trap is the unawareness of it.
Ego wants are conditional. When I have this, I will be satisfied. When I achieve that, I will feel complete. The exit was supposed to deliver that feeling. For many founders it does. For a while. Then the wanting returns. And it is asking something different.
The Third Level: The Deeper Psyche
This deeper psyche does not communicate through language in the way the conscious mind does. It speaks more symbolically. Through synchronicities. Unexpected opportunities. Recurring themes. Intuition. A persistent sense that something deeper is trying to emerge. And when ignored for long enough, often through suffering itself.
The founders who struggle most are often the ones most skilled at overriding these signals and redirecting themselves toward the next objective.
Carl Jung described life as having two halves. The first half is for carving your place in the world. Building. Achieving. Establishing. Earning recognition. Providing for those you love. Most driven people answer that call with everything they have.
The second half of life asks different questions. Purpose speaks louder. Meaning becomes harder to ignore. The external markers of success are still present, but they satisfy differently. Sometimes they do not satisfy at all.
The founders who get into the most difficulty are the ones who try to outrun this shift. Who close the deal and immediately seek the next object for the ego to pursue. Another company. Another acquisition. Another milestone. An endurance fixation.
There is a principle I return to often in this work: “You can never have enough of what you do not need.”
No exit resolves a wanting that was never actually about the exit.
Asked at this third level, “What do I want?” requires a different kind of honesty. And a different kind of preparation.
Damian’s Story
Damian Tunney sold his company and kept moving. He came to me looking for a co-pilot. Someone to sit alongside the transition and make sure that what he said he wanted and what he was actually doing remained the same thing. The wobbles, the blind spots, the productivity distractions that feel entirely reasonable from the inside, part of my job is to mirror those back in a way that resonates and allow space for insight.
Damian was sharp, commercially experienced, and self-aware. He already had a name for what he wanted to build next. The challenge was the gap between knowing and doing. Stepping into the unfamiliar and uncomfortable spaces, physically and psychologically, that the vision required.
What do I want, asked honestly, was present at all three levels. The conscious mind had a clear answer. The subconscious was running patterns that belonged to the previous chapter. And underneath both, a genuine wanting had been present for years, waiting for the right conditions to surface.
Those layers became visible over the months we worked together. The values and qualities that were genuinely his, deal maker, connector, strategist, playful adventurer, became the foundation the next chapter was built from.
Futures Club, the business he is now creating, reflects what life was asking. Not just what the ego had been answering.
Three to six months of work with me is usually enough. The goal is never dependency. When the internal navigation system has been recalibrated, the founder flies their own course.
Damian is doing exactly that.
‘Working with Jo gave me the space most founders never give themselves: to challenge old beliefs, confront the fears underneath success, and consciously design what came next.’ – Damian Tunney, Founder & Strategic Advisor, Futures Club
What Preparation Actually Looks Like
The founders who navigate this transition well do the internal work. If you don’t do the internal work you may just get to learn “the unteachable lesson of life” and that’s a whole different article.
So alongside all the legal preparation and timelines they examine what has been driving the build. What the success was actually for. Which level of mind has been running the show. What the second half of life is beginning to ask that the first half never had to.
This work begins with understanding the levels of mind then bringing awareness to them. It changes the quality of decisions made during the sale process, the clarity available in the aftermath, and the coherence of whatever comes next.
The question “what do I want” is simple. The layers underneath it are what few people actually prepare for.
Learn more about the layers of mind over at my YouTube channel.
∞ Buy my book TURBULENCE
∞ Follow me on YouTube for lots of enlightening conversations.
∞ If you want help in with changing the patterns of your subconscious mind you can explore MindScript. A personalised self hypnosis app developed by me from my clinical framwork.