However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

Sir Winston Churchill
Former UK Prime Minister, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1953

‘What's the number one result that you believe would have the biggest positive impact in your life?’

Over the years, I've asked variations on this ‘number one result’ question to many thousands of people during talks, workshops and one-to-one coaching sessions. And while their backgrounds are incredibly diverse, their initial response is remarkably similar. Invariably, people…

Stop… Go quiet… Get reflective…

Your biggest return on investment

As the responses begin to emerge, they reveal something very powerful. Your answer to this question shows what you currently believe would give you your biggest ‘return on investment’ (ROI) for the time, energy, effort and other resources it would take to achieve it. When I was first asked the question by my coach (a successful entrepreneur) in 2006, I didn't know the answer, and I felt foolish. After all, I should know, shouldn't I? I was working 14-hour days growing my business, but if I didn't know the answer to this, what was I spending all my time, energy and money on? This powerful, unsettling question issued a challenge:

Are you willing to raise your head from the daily routine of tasks, habits and distractions, and focus your energy on what matters most to you, no matter how daunting that may seem? Are you willing to shift your attention from the soothing familiarity of ‘routine’ to the sometimes uncomfortable adventure of ‘results’?

Results…

We all want them, yet many of us struggle to achieve them. Or we get spectacular results in one area of life, while failing to attain even modest success in other important areas. There are plenty of examples…

• The successful businessman who knows he needs to lose weight and get fit, but never seems to find the time.
• The manager who's passionate about becoming a consultant or executive coach, but fears stepping away from the security of a full-time job.
• The graduate who wants to find work with meaning and purpose, but doesn't know where to start.
• The holistic therapist who has a big impact on her clients, but struggles to make ends meet.
• The CEO who wants to leapfrog the competition, but can't find the right strategy.

You probably know someone who dreams of writing the book/starting the business/clearing the debts/finding the soulmate creating the lifestyle/getting the six-pack/making that first million, but never quite seems to get there. You may even be that person.

Five essential questions

Motivational speakers claim we can achieve whatever we want if we believe in ourselves, set clear goals and work hard. But history is littered with examples where enormous self-belief combined with clear goals and massive action yielded little or no satisfying results. Why? As you're going to discover, there are powerful but little-known factors that have a profound impact on your ability to create results. In fact, this book sets out to answer five essentialons:

1. What are the key factors that influence your ability to create the results you desire, and how can you develop those factors?
2. What are the obstacles that may have been holding you or your organization back from getting the results you want, and how can you avoid, eliminate or overcome those obstacles?
3. How can you increase your impact on other people, engaging them in your enterprises and/or empowering them to create the results they desire?
4. How can you leverage your true nature as a results-creator and a leader to get greater control of your livelihood, whether as a solopreneur, as an entrepreneur or by playing a bigger role in your organization?
5. How can you do all of this in a way that's healthy, natural, authentic and enjoyable?

I've spent the past 15 years helping my clients to create results that are often beyond anything they'd previously thought possible. I've worked with…

• business leaders and their teams to create inspiring visions that they've proceeded to bring into existence.
• coaches, therapists and other transformation professionals to increase their impact, grow their practices and create lifestyles they love.
• entrepreneurs to get clarity, transform their personal and professional lives and achieve breakthrough results.
• private individuals ranging from maximum-security prison inmates to chart-topping DJs; from alcoholics and drug addicts to surgeons and opera singers.

The fact that they've done it means that you can do it too. The fact that you're even reading this means you have an innate capacity to live a life you love and create meaningful results in the process. And I don't want you to take my word for it. Instead, as you read this book, I'll be inviting you to test my claims in your own life and against your personal experience so you can discover the truth of this for yourself. It doesn't even matter if you don't yet know what results you want to create. As you deepen your understanding of the principles we'll be exploring together, you're going to start seeing your world with new eyes, getting clarity about what you want to bring into being, and having it happen in ways you may never have anticipated until now.

Your results may be closer than you think

The first time I was asked the number one result question, I eventually managed to identify the thing I believed would give me the most leverage. I wanted to generate income by putting my educational products online so I could stop selling my time, and put my energy into growing my business. ‘How long do you think it will take to do that?’ my coach asked. I told her I thought it would take between 18 months and 3 years. This was the same answer I'd come up with when I'd first had the idea, 18 months previously. In fact, that ‘18 months to 3 years’ timeline always seemed to be floating ahead of me, keeping my goal the same elusive distance away, like a juicy carrot dangling from a pole attached to a donkey's head. But it turned out that my estimate was wrong by several orders of magnitude; in the end, it only took six weeks. As is so often the case, it turned out that I had a lot of the pieces in place, but hadn't realized it (it's very likely that this is the case for you too). In the process, I discovered one of the most important things you can realize about creating results:

There's a shortest possible time required for you to create a result, but nobody knows how long that shortest possible time is. The only way to discover it is experimentally, by taking action.

Your results may be closer than you think. Of course, we live in a material world, and there are certain universal laws or ‘principles’ that cannot be violated (e.g. the principle of gravity). But all too often it is not material laws, but rather our beliefs, concepts and misunderstandings which place artificial limits on the results we produce, on the impact we have and on our enjoyment of life in general.

The process of transformation

By early 2008, my business was running on autopilot and I was ready to celebrate with my first ‘mini-retirement’, a three-month holiday at a Canadian ski resort. I was delighted with what my team and I had accomplished, and I believed this trip would yield another satisfying result; a big jump in my skiing ability combined with a sense of peace, completeness and success. But I was wrong. After a brief period of euphoria, I found myself distracted and dissatisfied, with a busy mind and feeling like there was something missing. I felt stuck, so I cut my trip short and flew home without realizing I was at the very beginning of a massive transformation; a transformation that would see me…

• sell the business I'd spent so much time and energy developing,
• walk away from the field I'd become a leader in, and
• start over and move in an entirely new direction.

That was over eight years ago, and they've been some of the most exciting, fulfilling, challenging and joyful years of my life. It's been (and continues to be) a process of transformation, and that, in essence, is the purpose of this book: to guide you in the process of more and more fully embracing your true nature as a results-creator. For reasons of clarity and simplicity, the process is organized around three distinct transformations:

Part One – GROUNDING
Your Personal Transformation

Imagine you're building a skyscraper; the higher you want the building to go, the deeper the foundation has to be. The purpose of Part One is to help you develop your foundations: the key qualities and internal resources of a powerful results-creator. While grounding is the foundation piece, it's often the last place people look when it comes to creating outstanding results. Your grounding is what governs your ability to move forward in the face of uncertainty, and make a real difference in the world. Grounding also determines the impact you're able to have on others, whether as a business leader, a coach, a parent, a partner or a friend. This is the deep understanding of yourself and the human condition that is the basis for all powerful transformation. As you move through your personal transformation, you're going to find yourself experiencing certain automatic and inevitable results. You may notice that you're developing greater confidence, clarity and peace of mind. You're also likely to find yourself experiencing a reduction in stress, worry and anxiety. As you approach the end of Part One, you may start becoming aware of a greater sense of purpose, direction and leadership as you start taking action and moving forward.

Part Two – IMPACT
Your Interpersonal Transformation

As human beings, we have a more highly evolved capacity for connection and relationship than any other species on the planet. It's not only a highly effective survival strategy (it's made us the world's most deadly predators); it's also an extraordinary leverage point when it comes to creating results. The purpose of Part Two is to support you in creating connection and impact in all your relationships. Your interpersonal transformation will give you the confidence and ability to have a greater impact on others, secure in the knowledge that you have something of genuine value and relevance to contribute. Whether as a business leader, a transformation professional, a parent or a colleague, impact means the difference between making a difference and wasting your breath. You're going to be introduced to the Clarity Impact Model, the tried and tested tool used by some of the world's most impactful coaches, consultants and other transformation professionals. In this section you should start to notice certain results emerging easily as the result of your being exposed to the principles in this book. You're going to be discovering the kind of effortless relationship skills that are the essence of powerful communication, whether you're giving a presentation, selling a prospect, coaching a colleague or connecting with your loved ones. You're also going to discover the secrets to dealing with difficult people, and the unexpected keys for motivating others to make changes and take action.

Part Three – LEVERAGE
Your Commercial Transformation

Your commercial transformation is about amplifying your impact, taking control of your livelihood, and moving into a world of abundance through connection, innovation and service. Whether you're an employee in an organization, running your own business or are looking to transition from one to the other, a service-orientation combined with new-economy savvy are essential for taking control of your commercial transformation and creating the livelihood you desire. You're going to be transforming your relationship to prosperity, and taking control of your income as you awaken your inner entrepreneur (whether as a solopreneur, business owner or a star player in a larger organization). You'll be learning how to move with the disruptive forces transforming the business world, and learning how to thrive in the increasing complexity of the commercial landscape.

Subtractive psychology: Less is more

While this book is divided into three sections for practical purposes, they actually describe three different aspects of one transformation: the process of becoming the person who can create the results you're here to create, and more fully live the life you're here to live. Most approaches for creating results are additive, giving you theories, techniques and concepts to remember, practise and apply. While additive approaches are often compelling, they rarely yield the desired results (for reasons we'll explore later). Fortunately, the understanding you're going to be developing as you read this book is subtractive. Instead of giving you more to remember, the principles you're going to be learning will take things off your mind, giving you less to think about. As a result, you're going to have a clear mind, more of the time, and more space for the endeavours and experiences that matter.

We are living in a VUCA world

We are in a time of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). Silicon Valley startups are disrupting entire industries. Airbnb was recently valued at $25 billion (November 2015), making it more valuable than the Hyatt Hotels Corporation or the InterContinental Hotels Group (owner of Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza). This despite the fact that Airbnb has a fraction of the number of employees and owns no hotels. Uber continues to dominate the taxi trade in many of the world's largest cities, and book-lovers are using bookshops as unofficial ‘Amazon showrooms’, browsing the books on display then ordering the ones they want on their smartphones or downloading them to their Kindles. While no-one knows what the future will bring to these companies and these industries, one thing is clear; the world is changing fast and it's unlikely to slow down anytime soon. These turbulent times bring both risk and opportunity. The purpose of this book is to help you mitigate the risks and make the most of the opportunities while enjoying your life to the full.

At the end of each chapter you'll find…

• Bottom line results, a concise summary highlighting how this chapter applies in the business/commercial context.
• A Practicality check to connect your discoveries from the chapter to the results you want to create.
• An Experiment that will only take you a few minutes and will help you further embed what you're learning and generate new insights.
• A web link you can use to share your insights, connect with others and access videos and other additional learning materials.

The ultimate leverage point

This introduction started with the number one result question. As you've read, my first answer to this question initiated a chain of events that resulted in me sitting on the side of a ski slope, with sore feet and a troubled mind. But the subsequent transformation revealed a far more powerful answer to the question: a new leverage point that proved to be the key to creating the results that really matter to you and for you, and enjoying your relationships and your life more and more fully. In Part One of this book, you're going to be introduced to what I consider to be the ultimate leverage point…