Don’t Sacrifice the Future You Want to Protect the Life You Have
The fear of losing what you've built is holding you back
I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching lately…
Because on the outside, it looks like I'm living the dream entrepreneurial life:
A business generating 6-figures per year
Freedom to travel whenever and wherever I want
A loving family
But I’m still not content.
I still feel like everything can be wiped away and as though I’m not doing enough (even though everyone around me complains I’m always glued to my laptop).
So I thought back to a time when I felt unwavering drive and assessed the difference in mindsets from then and now.
And here’s what I concluded:
Most entrepreneurs don’t get what they truly want because they’re too scared of losing what they currently have.
This has definitely been my case.
And it stems from something psychologists call approach-avoidance orientation.
It’s a psychological concept that describes the underlying reasons people pursue goals and how they evaluate success.
The way you’re oriented can have a major impact on what you can achieve in the long term.
So, in this episode, I’m going to unpack everything I’ve learned about approach-avoidance orientation to help you live a more fulfilling life
The two orientations
People generally tend to operate from one of two motivational orientations:
Avoid orientation
Approach orientation
Those motivated by avoidance are running away from an undesired outcome.
For example, they want to avoid:
Rejection
Financial insecurity
Letting people down
As a result, they seek certainty before they act.
Their decisions are driven more by preserving what they have than by pursuing what they truly want.
So they end up compromising what they truly want to ensure they don’t realize the undesired outcomes they are desperately trying to avoid.
This is where I’ve been in the past few months (and I’ll show you how I got here).
In contrast, those motivated by approach are running towards a desired outcome.
They have a clear vision they are pursuing.
For example, they may want to:
Build a $1M business
Write a bestselling book
Become financially independent
As a result, they live life on offense.
They’re willing to risk their current position for the opportunity of a better future.
They do what they must do to achieve what they want.
So the difference between avoid-oriented and approach-oriented people is where they direct their attention:
Avoid-oriented people are conditioned to focus on what they don't want.
Approach-oriented people have trained themselves to focus on what they do.
And as Tony Robbins said, “You get more of what you focus on.”
The origins of avoid orientation
Last year, I made my first $100,000+ in business.
I thought when I got here I’d push on towards $1M with no qualms because the legendary investor, former Berkshire Hathaway vice-chairman, and Warren Buffett’s best friend, Charlie Munger, once said, "The first $100,000 is a bitch, but you gotta do it."
The first $100,000 was definitely a bitch for me (it took 5 years to do it), but things have been stale since then.
Now it’s easy for me to say, “It’s because I got comfortable,” but I wanted to understand why so I could avoid it happening again.
And here’s what I’ve found…
One of the brain’s primary jobs is to conserve energy.
Rather than consciously evaluating every situation from scratch, it creates shortcuts based on what you’ve repeatedly experienced and what it believes is important.
Over time, these shortcuts influence what you pay attention to.
In other words, when you haven’t trained your brain to focus on what you want, your environment and experience tell you what’s important.
So if you’ve had difficult experiences in your environment before (as we all have), you’re more likely to focus on what could go wrong and divert your energy towards ensuring it doesn’t, to avoid going through the pain of it going wrong.
This is one of the ways comfort can quietly become dangerous.
You avoid taking risks because you feel like you’ve reached a point where you’re no longer in survival mode.
This is what earning over $100,000 did to me… it took me out of survival mode.
The problem with avoid-orientation
The minute I exited my survival mode, I got comfortable.
Everything became about maintaining what I’d built.
The majority of my energy went towards making existing clients happy, to the point where I stopped making an effort to get new clients and grow my business.
And this is the problem with avoid-orientation…
You end up building your life around avoiding pain instead of embracing growth and learning.
You become uptight, and your mind becomes dominated by questions like, “What if it fails?”
This is where I’ve been for the past few months.
Scared my long-term clients will randomly terminate one day
Scared I’ll run out of money
Scared everything will come crashing down
So I’ve been overcompensating…
Even though it makes me feel like an unfulfilled piece of shit.
Loss aversion also plays a major role here.
Once you've attained something valuable, your brain treats losing it as far more painful than the excitement of attaining something even bigger.
So preservation becomes your primary objective.
And this is a dangerous place for an entrepreneur to live.
Businesses don’t grow through preservation.
They grow through creation.
You have to keep taking risks.
Keep experimenting.
Keep building.
So the moment your primary goal becomes protecting what you’ve already built, you stop building what you’re capable of.
Become approach-oriented
Basically, I’ve been feeling miserable for the past few months because I never gave my attention a direction.
I allowed it to be conditioned by my environment and experiences.
And now I’ve ended up here.
But this soul search has shown me this problem can be solved by simply diverting my attention to what I want rather than staying focused on what I want to avoid.
And there’s an Albert Einstein quote that’s inspiring this transformation:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
So here are 5 steps I’m taking to shift my attention and reorient myself toward an approach-based mindset.
#1 Setting a big, scary, measurable goal
Your brain needs a target.
If the target isn’t clear, it’ll default to preserving your current position.
So set a goal that’s specific enough to measure and ambitious enough to make you uncomfortable.
For example:
Sign 10 new clients.
Reach $500,000 in annual revenue.
Hire your first employee.
Launch your first product.
The goal should be big enough that your current habits are incapable of achieving it.
This is how you force yourself to grow.
#2 Daily affirmations & journaling
Your environment is constantly telling you what to think about.
Journaling gives you the opportunity to take that control back.
Every evening, I write down:
What I want.
Why I want it.
Who I need to become to achieve it.
Then spend a few minutes visualizing myself already living that reality.
The more often you do this, the more your attention shifts towards creating that future.
#3 Defining my ideal day
It’s not enough to define the destination.
You also need to define the life that gets you there.
So I also make an effort to detail:
What time I wake up
Where I work
Who I’m surrounded by
What problems I’m solving
How I spend my evenings
The clearer the picture becomes, the easier it is to identify what belongs in your life and what doesn’t.
#4 Acting as my future self
Stephen Covey famously said, "Begin with the end in mind."
I’ve taken that one step further…
Rather than asking, “What should I do?”
I ask myself, “What would the person I’m trying to become do?”
#5 Review my progress every week
Our lives are rarely determined by one big decision.
It’s usually down to hundreds of small choices we make.
So small course corrections every week are far more powerful than dramatic changes once a year.
Every Sunday, I ask myself, “Did my actions move me closer to what I want?”
If the answer is the latter...
I adjust.
Final thoughts
For the past few months, I’ve been feeling like shit.
Because without realizing it, I compromised the future I wanted to protect the life I already had.
In doing so, I robbed myself of the ability to imagine what was possible.
Instead, I became driven by fear.
And it severely limited me.
So if there’s one thing I want you to take away from this article, it’s this:
Train your brain to focus on what you want.
Not what you’re scared of losing.
Because entrepreneurs don’t build remarkable businesses by playing defense.
They build them by relentlessly pursuing a vision that’s bigger than their current reality.
That’s where your focus belongs.
Because where your attention goes...
Your actions follow.
And eventually...
Your life does too.
Thanks for reading!