You might’ve noticed (actually tbh you probably haven’t lol) that I haven’t sent an issue of this newsletter in a few weeks. In August I was visiting London with Izzy and our baby, and decided to take a break from “content stuff” to be able to hang with family and friends without the “pressure” of production schedules. It felt great. We’re back in Hong Kong now, and so I’m ramping up back into the work stuff, while also enjoying how baby’s growing up and becoming much more interactive and fun compared to when she was a potato-like creature who didn’t do much other than cry and poop and sleep. Now she smiles reliably (super cute), and actually seems to enjoy being taken for walks, but seems to need more and more mental stimulation or she gets restless.
Couple of quick things before we continue:
- Firstly, very exciting news because we’re officially launching our next app Momentum: Energising Habits this week 🥳 The app is focussed on helping you stay consistent with your habits and leverage the power of accountability to make meaningful progress on your goals. We’ll be officially announcing it tomorrow but you can access it early here – check it out and let me know what you think 🙏
- Secondly, we’ll be hosting our usual quarterly reset workshop on Saturday 20th September. This is a great opportunity to review the last 90 days but, more importantly, set yourself up for success for the final 100 days of the year. It’s a free event – you can register by just clicking here.
Anyway, this week I wanted to share a reflection prompt I came across from a business mentor.
I’ll describe the prompt as it relates to business, but you can substitute <business> for anything else in your life.
Think about how you FEEL about your business, on a scale of 0 to 10. Zero is “this is the worst feeling in the world, it’s going terribly”, and 10 is “I feel amazing about my business, it can’t possibly be any better”. Got a number in mind? Okay good. Now imagine that number increases by 1. So if, for example, you were a 5/10, imagine that in a hypothetical future, you feel 6/10 good about it. In that 6/10 world, what does your business look like? Don’t think too hard about this – just based on your gut intuition, what’s happening in the business to make it feel 6/10? Okay great, now add 1 more. So let’s imagine it’s a 7/10 in terms of how you feel about it. Again, just based on your gut intuition, what’s happening in the business to make you feel this way about it?
My mentor guided me through the exercise – in my case, I’d chosen 6/10 as my original feeling. I was surprised to find that I easily, and immediately, knew EXACTLY what would be different if I felt 7/10 good about it, and if I felt 8/10 good about it. Without any “thinking” that went into that, I intuitively knew what it would look like. I said as much.
Okay great, now what you envision when we take your current feeling and +2 to it, that’s going to form the exact vision we’re going to work towards.
This is a… different… way of coming up with business goals than I’ve ever tried before. Sure, I’ve done visualisation type exercises where you project forward 3 years, and think about what would be cool to have accomplished etc. And I’ve done loads of journaling prompts based around: “What would the business look like if I didn’t care about money” or “What would the business look like if I could only get customers through referrals” and stuff like that.
But this was the first time I’ve done something that was so clearly “just” about “intuitive feeling” rather than thinking-based exploring. And I was pleasantly surprised by how clear my responses were.
The details are a little too “inside baseball” to share, but one major theme that came up was how keen I am to have a physical office for me and the Hong Kong-based team to work from. On paper, this doesn’t make much sense – we could easily work from our apartment (which we do sometimes), or from a co-working space (which we also do sometimes), and pretty much everything we do could be done remotely. But… there’s something that feels really good and vibey about having an in-person office setup. We had something similar back in 2021/2022 and it was super fun – expensive, but super fun. And we had something sort-of similar in 2023 when I rented a massive apartment in Marylebone, London, and we turned the living room into a co-working space, and converted one bedroom into a YouTube studio and one into a podcast studio. Each day we’d have a handful of team members around – those were great times too.
But even though it was super fun, it always felt hard to justify the expense. So when we moved to Hong Kong, I was like: “everyone does this remote thing, how hard can it be, it’s way more economical to just use our apartment and have team members over on certain days”. But… now with a baby in the mix, the “hey our house has an open door policy, anyone rock up whenever you want” doesn’t feel right anymore. So I’ve been thinking: “hmm should we get a proper office” but been held back by “ah but it’s so expensive, I can’t justify the ROI”.
At least not on paper. But… after doing the “intuitive feeling” thing, I realised: “screw the ROI. I’d feel much better about running this business if we had a nice vibey office and me and the team worked from there in-person, rather than our current remote work-from-home setup”. And as I’ve been writing about for years, when you feel good about what you’re doing, you become more productive… so even though the ROI isn’t clear right now, I’m sure it’ll become clear over time. Or maybe that’s just a cope, and maybe I just want to hang out with people in person because it’s more fun, which is itself also fine.
So yeah, we’re now actively looking for office spaces in Hong Kong. The prices are… eye-watering, as you’d expect in HK. But I keep coming back to this idea that sometimes the “right” decision isn’t the one that makes sense on a spreadsheet. Sometimes it’s the one that makes you go “yeah, this feels good.”
The various insights prompted by the “+2 feeling” prompt have made me think about how I make decisions more broadly. I love to pretend I’m this rational creature who makes choices based on data and logic. I’ll often create elaborate pros and cons lists, build financial models, ask for advice from 17+ people. But then, often, I just end up doing what I wanted to do anyway – what felt right from the beginning.
I wonder if I’d save myself a lot of time and mental energy if I just… trusted that feeling more? Not in a “yolo blow the money on vibes” way, but in a “my intuition is also a form of data” way. I read somewhere that your gut feeling is essentially your brain processing years of experience and pattern recognition at a speed your conscious mind can’t match… which sounds plausible.
The tricky part is distinguishing between “this feels right because it aligns with my values and vision” versus “this feels right because it’s comfortable and I’m avoiding something scary.” So I’m not sure how seriously to take the “feelings”…
Anyway, I’m curious – if you did this exercise with something in your life (doesn’t have to be business – could be your health, relationships, creative projects, whatever), what would come up? What would take you from wherever you are now to +2 on that feeling scale? And more importantly, what’s stopping you from just… doing that thing?
I’d love if you could hit reply and let me know 🙂
Have a great week!
Ali xx
