How to Spot the Hidden Competitive Advantages in Business (and Life)

How many self-help books have you read?

How many professional development courses have you attended?

How many new techniques have you tried?

If you’re anything like me, you might be embarrassed to admit the answer to these questions. Let’s just say A LOT!

I was living my life wholeheartedly committed to taking on more every day to better myself and better my career. And I truly felt it was an admiral way to live. 

I mean, I wasn’t sitting around doing nothing, I wasn’t expecting life to happen to me. I was out there adding the pieces to myself one by one. I thought I had it sorted……or at least I thought that one day I would have it sorted once I got a few more pieces in place.  

But by the time I hit my early-thirties I had crashed with chronic fatigue and realised the strategy of adding more and more to who I was simply wasn’t helping and certainly wasn’t sustainable. 

And I noticed it wasn’t just me. 

How many businesses do you know who add more and more processes, systems, initiatives and techniques into their already complex environment day in day out? How many leaders are pedalling so fast that they are teetering on the edge of falling off on a regular basis?

But what if it wasn’t how it seemed?

“You have capacities within you that are phenomenal. If only you knew how to release them” David Bohm

What I finally realised was the more I was adding in, the more I had sloshing around my mind. The noisier it became the greater the intensity of the feelings that I operated within - urgency, overwhelm, confusion, exhaustion, fear – which we all know makes for a rockier and more effortful ride whatever we’re doing. 

Just like computers, we humans have an operating system but, in our case, it’s widely misunderstood. We unleash the full potential of the system when we have less on our mind. Less insecurities, less to remember, less techniques, less of everything. 

We all know this intuitively but forget it frequently. When we have less on our mind, we are naturally more creative, more present, more motivated, more resilient, more collaborative, more focused, more peaceful and more successful. More of all the things we are innocently trying to get by adding more in. 

I’m sure we could all benefit from taking things out of our lives for sure, but the great news is that when we understand how the mind works and the natural capabilities that are available to us, we find a lot of the noise naturally falls off and we simply know what makes sense to do or not do next. 

No techniques, no tools, simply seeing what already exists when we’re looking in a different direction. 

When I saw this in my own life it felt like turning the noise down in my mind and seeing a whole world open up which I could leverage without any effort. I found ideas come to me when I needed them, I coped better with the unexpected circumstances, I simply didn’t get impacted by others like I had before, I got more done in less time and I felt so much more peace. 

Fast forward to today and at Wellineux we share these principles of Subtractive Psychology with leaders and teams to help them more effortlessly take the weight off of their minds so that they can leverage the full potential of their mind. We see it as drawing out their natural performance rather than showing them how to create an artificial one and the results speak for themselves and it is a huge competitive advantage. 

So maybe it’s not about adding more in but taking more away so we can reveal the potential we already have available to us. Interested in finding out more? We’d love to hear from you.