A huge breakthrough moment for me

It was a huge breakthrough moment for me, it’ll sound pretty insignificant to you I’m sure.

I really wish that I could remember more about it or more specifically, who said it.

I was 11 years old

I was bored

it was a summer holiday

I felt like all of the things I wanted to do were inaccessible to me because I had no money.

I wanted to go swimming, eat all the ice cream, buy stationary (why is stationary so exciting?)

And then it happened, someone said THE magic words.

“Why don’t you just...?”

“Why don’t you just wash 🧽 cars for money 💴?”

Ok, so I said it would sound insignificant but I’ve thought a lot about why it is and was such a life changing sentence for me and if it was for me then maybe for many others too.

That sentence was the catalyst to me making £100-£200 a week during summer holiday for maybe 2-3 hours work a day,

Not bad for 11 eh

Not to mention swimming trips, boat loads of ice lollies and packet after packet of space raiders.

It opened the door to many other businesses too, most notably the soccer school I set us at 14 with a couple of mates.

It happened again later in my life too,

I remember this one more clearly.

I was sat with my 8 month pregnant girlfriend in our car 🚘 and we had just learned the business I had built up over 2 years (gym and personal training at the time) no longer had a home.

I was frantically trying to come up with ideas of how to make a rapid turn around and save this situation,

Then my father in-law just said, in the most matter of fact tone,

“Why don’t you just take over the gym?”

Again, it sounds obvious,

Of course it should have been one of my first thoughts.

But the thing is, our brains 🧠 only really let us see the life that we believe is possible for us or “people like us”

And leaves all else hidden from us.

There is a lot of truth in the statement, if you can imagine it you can achieve it. It’s probably even more to say if you don’t imagine it you can’t achieve it.

Yet we rarely slow down enough to open our imagination and focus on what we really want.

The statement

“Why don’t you just...”

From someone that you know, like and trust isn’t about the idea at all.

It’s about both the permission and the belief.

Most of us have had it ingrained in us from a very young age that every single action NEEDS permission that we literally become conditioned to believe that our thoughts and ambitions are wrong to have,

BAD BOY, It’s HELL for this one...

So we limit ourselves, we dismiss or even chastise our imagination, we say to ourselves,

WHO do you think you are?

and eventually we stop dreaming big.

Then when someone comes along and says

“Why don’t you just... “

In such a matter of fact tone, what they are say is

I believe in you

and their permission opens the door for us.

The truth is that we can imagine as big as we choose and we need nobody’s permission nor anyone’s belief but our own.

I remind myself of this daily

But it’s worth knowing I think