Last week, I attended an interesting webinar with a brand consultant, Kris Byers, who, alongside his work as a designer, had trained to become a hypnotherapist. He was discussing thinking about your thoughts, and one of the areas he mentioned was that our reality stems from our thoughts.

Thoughts > Feeling > Action

In the early hours of the following morning, I woke up with this on my mind and began to think more deeply about what it meant for the consultancy founders I work with.

My initial interpretation

Thinking it through, I developed the model that our habitual thoughts are the most influential here.

Regular thoughts shape our beliefs, which in turn influence our behaviours, which become our regular actions, creating our reality. Going deeper, I realised that each step also passes through a perception filter based on a combination of factors.

So if we want to change our reality, we have to start by reprogramming our regular thoughts. A lightbulb moment for me.

Then came the question. What about someone facing circumstances with external forces outside their direct control? How would they take the view that they are in control of their reality?

This led me to the context that we all live in a collective consciousness that shapes a shared external reality. We control our internal reality within the external environment; however, the more powerful the environment, the more challenging it is to create our desired reality.

Why this matters for your business

When we want to change our reality, like achieving ambitious goals, it is easy to get stuck thinking it is all about the action we take. When in fact it starts much earlier in our thoughts, beliefs and feelings.

It's why business planning starts with vision and values, with the goal of influencing our thoughts and beliefs. As this is subtle, it's easy to dismiss. However, this is essential to creating the reality we want.

As we are on the journey, stuck in the day-to-day, it's easy to forget the power of the subtle - which is why encouragement and evidence from a like-minded positive community is essential in helping keep on the right path to achieving our goals.

The power of community

Understanding this model made me realise why community is so crucial to changing our reality. Recently, I asked myself: why had another community I am part of, You Are The Media, become such an essential part of its members' lives? The answer lay at the heart of this realisation.

A positive community provides a shared consciousness that offers both support and evidence to reprogramme our habitual thoughts, beliefs, and behaviours. It also gives us a safe space where we can discuss and develop our ideas, just as I did with this diagram in the Consultancy Growth Club community call on Friday.

With the power of the community's insights and input, we refined the model significantly:

One member showed us Charles Duhigg's Habit Loop - Thought > Feeling > Action > Result - and we realised I had missed feelings from my model.

We also concluded that regular thoughts, beliefs, and feelings form a two-way loop, each influencing the others.

A couple in the group pointed out that we can have an internal reality independent of the commonly perceived external reality, and that our external reality contributes to the collective consciousness, which, in turn, influences the commonly perceived external reality.

We also agreed it would be beneficial to illustrate how part of this is internal, and part is external, which we conveyed using a gradient that transitions across behaviours at the intersection.

The result is the diagram above - a much richer model than I could have created alone.

Planning next year

If, like me, you are using the Christmas break to plan next year, remember how this works. Start with your thoughts, beliefs and feelings - not just your action plan.

If you don’t have the right community around you and you’d like to find out more about Consultancy Growth Club, join us on one of our Breakthrough Days next year.