Why Your Vision Dies in the Middle (And How to Keep It Alive)

Big things. Everybody wants to do big things. You're gonna have a very different experience doing the big thing than you will studying the big thing, thinking about the big things. So we love to talk about vision as entrepreneurs and, but there's something different that happens in the human psyche when you go from vision setting to vision implement.

What if you could build a business in the modern world as big or as small as you want without having to compromise the things that were the most important to you in the very beginning? This is the Wealthy Consultant Talks podcast with Taylor Welch and Mike Walker as they share with you today, their learning lessons from stories in their experiences over the past 10 to 15 years.

And share with you right here, right now. Let's get into it.  Let's get started on today. Let's talk about, um, we're gonna hit a lit, we're gonna kind of go wide  today. I think it'd be really fun and, uh, we had a great event on Friday last week. It was one of my faves. We had Eli Wild in Town and Will Hinkley in town.

And we, uh, Gabrielle spoke. I spoke a little bit on  crafting, uh, messages that sell from stage. So if you are interested, if you're in chamber, you should catch the replay. It should be up here.  And go through that. That'll be a lot of fun.  Communication is the, the oldest and most  time tested form of value transfer in history.

Before books, we had oral communication. That's how history transition. I tend to think really deeply about things. Sometimes I can get lost in, um,  in concepts that actually I get so deep that they don't make any sense.  And communication is one of those things because if you learn how to communicate, you learn not only how to communicate to other people, but you learn how to communicate with who  the number one audience.

Yourself. Yourself. Yeah. In fact, NLP kind of became, uh, neurolinguistic programming is, is one of the,  the like sales methodologies that a lot of people use. But NLP actually was kind of created to help people talk to themselves. And if you can influence yourself to do something. You can influence everyone else  to do it as well.

We won't get too deep into NLP today, but what we're gonna talk about if you're taking notes is how to not break in the middle. How to not break in the middle. My God, does everyone hate the middle? I'm starting to see it everywhere. People are like the messy middle, the middle this, the middle that it's like, look, the middle is just a place.

It's not really, we're actually creating problems for ourself by hyper fixating on the middle. You know, a, uh, you know, a way to guarantee that you don't die in the middle.  Just ignore it. Stop worrying about it. Stop thinking about it. Stop wondering about it. Am I in the middle? Am I not? Well, technically everyone's in the middle of something all the time.

Yeah. Put these like weird  brackets around this elusive zone called the middle, and uh, anything can be the middle.  So it don't really matter that much, but because we're already obsessed with the middle, let's just go ahead and talk about how to not break into the middle. I have this quote that I was studying over the weekends, and uh, it's by a mercenary in the fifth century bc and this is what we need to understand when we talk about living big lives, big things, everybody wants to do, big things.

Here's, here's this guy, his name, uh, Tellman is his name. It is one thing to study war.  Another thing entirely to live the Warrior's life.  This is, this matters a lot because if you want to do big things, I notice I didn't say who wants to study people who do big things. I say, who wants to do big things?

You're gonna have a very different experience doing the big thing than you will studying the big things, thinking about the big things. So we love to talk about vision as entrepreneurs and goal setting as entrepreneur. Like we love it and we're addicted to it. But there's something different that happens in the human psyche.

When you go from vision setting to vision implementation, you cross a, a realm, so to speak. You kind of go into this, this territory where everything that you thought you knew is challenged and you get to decide what to do with it. And the moment that most entrepreneurs break is when they are going from planning to advancing, and they begin to feel the pressure of forward progress.

There's no progress without pressure  doesn't exist. We get to define how we view pressure, but let's just define like pressure that, that, you know, we can, we can take pressure and we can sort of, uh, mechanize it so that we understand what's actually happening to the psyche when you're under pressure.

Pressure is simply an energetic structure. Pressure is an energetic structure that feeds off of attention.  Pressure is an energetic structure that feeds off of attention.  You can be under pressure  in the middle of a basketball game  and there's a whole lot of attention on you,  but it's not affecting you. 

Because all, all pressure is just an energetic structure that feeds off of attention.  So there can be attention fed into something.  So Fred can be watching me do something. He is paying a lot of attention and he is like, man, you okay? Worried about you bro. You okay? I'm like, I'm good. I, I don't really care.

And that pressure is mounting up 'cause Fred's feeding attention to it, but it's not affecting me.  Pressure becomes hostile to the individual when it's feeding on our attention.  So it doesn't matter  whether it's Fred's attention or Lay's attention or my attention, it just needs attention to feed off of, and it's damaging when it is the user's attention that is self perpetuating the pressure.

So you got Steph Curry shooting the three point shot at the end of the game, a stadium full of people are watching him. How many of you would say that's a lot of pressure on Steph Curry?  You would think, yeah. Yeah.  But because he's not feeding the energetic structure with his attention, it's not affecting his shot.

It doesn't matter. But then we've all seen these pro ball players who they get in their own head. They're tripped up. They're stuck up, and they're the ones now  feeding this energetic structure, and they can't function anymore  as humans. There's no way to escape pressure.  But there is a way  to not let it affect you.

So let's talk about the three worst kinds of pressure that we have. This is how I know when, when an entrepreneur is feeding their own pressure, energy structures three types of pressure that will cause you to get in your head and will cause this thing to self perpetuate. Number one is overreaction.

Overreaction is one of the worst.  You use this as a heuristic, and you can just see in your life if you're overreacting, if you're pendulum swinging. Then that's, that's an indication that you are feeding too much attention into the system. You're paying too much attention to it. Overreaction, number one.

Number two, doubt.  If someone is uncertain, it means that they are now the main fuel source for their own self-sabotage.  It's not coming from the markets, it's not coming from what that person online said about you. When you doubt, you begin to feed your own self-sabotage, overreaction, doubt. And then the third one, which is where we'll spend most of our time on today, is, is something that you could call like a spiral,  cumulative compounding decisions. 

Have you ever been in a situation where you were trying to fix something and in the attempt to fix it, you made it worse?  Oh yeah. Oh,  been there.  Sure. No, let me just play with a little bit more. Yeah,  yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, then you realize it and you've made it worse. And so, um, then you just try to fix that with another decision. 

And then you make it worse.  And then you're like, well, out  here I am deep in the belly of pressure and I need to make another decision so I make it worse. And so you begin to see these entrepreneurs spiral.  They spiral from the top to the bottom  because they can't stop themselves from trying to be corrective, which is past instead of constructive, which is future. 

Oof.  There will be no decisions that you make that are corrective, that you are proud of in the future. 

Every decision you'll be proud of in the future is a constructive decision, not a corrective decision. There are times for the entrepreneur where it's time for you to simply cut off the fuel supply of whatever's causing you to fatigue, and instead focus on how do I make decisions that are in alignment with my best.

My vision, who I'm going to become. These are constructive decisions, and what happens is when you, when you see an entrepreneur spiraling, it's because they can't let go of the past and they keep trying to prove something.  By the way, anytime you're trying to prove something,  it usually is because.  You're focused on the past.

You're focused on some comparative analysis that says you are not as good as that person. How would you know that unless you were focusing on the past 

deep? We're gonna go deeper. 

So to fix a spiral, it's helpful for us to understand a little bit of  spiral dynamics.  And spiral Dynamics is essentially a model of the world that says your reality shifts  as you move up.  The spirals of your like level of consciousness.  Levels of consciousness is basically sort of like levels of energy.

And so you have these plateaus that an an entrepreneur, really any human will hit. So at at 200, you have this level of  courage.  Anything under 200  from a levels of energy standpoint or a maps of consciousness, scientific worldview, anything under 200, you begin to  suck energy out of the worlds, you become a giant vacuum. 

You can tell that someone is under 200 real easily, like get on the phone with them. Do you feel worse after the call or better?  Yeah. Uh, if you feel worse, they're probably somewhere under 200. Because what just happens if, you know, I get on a call with,  with someone and I feel a lot worse after the call.

What just happened is they had a deficit in their life and they used my energy to fix that deficit.  Mm-hmm.  Anything under 200 will just suck out of you to fill themselves up. Anything over 200,  200 to 500 ish is going to be like an enhancement. It's going to, like I get on the phone with, with uh,  Greg, and I feel better. 

It's probably above 200 because he's not taken away from my energy. He's added to my energy reserves. You can tell that you're in the presence of someone who's over like 5 50, 600 because you feel totally different and new. There's something new that unlocks. So 500 and above is like life creation. 200 500 is like, uh, life enhancement under 200 is going to be hostile to to life. 

Spiral Dynamics is the, the journey that we go on. Going from one level to the next level, to the next level, to the next level, to the next level. And as we progress up these levels, what happens is that the reality we see around this literally changes based on how we're looking at it.  So we're no longer looking at a situation as like, I need to correct this situation. 

We're looking at a situation and we're seeing something totally different. That might not even need to be corrected. This is how you really become, uh,  like immortal and, and really impossible to kill. I was on the phone with someone, this is about a year and a half ago. It was right around when like the, uh,  the FTC stuff wrapped up and I think it was William Lamb that I was on the phone with who's a master at all things NLP and Quantum.

And he said, how are you doing? And I said, man, I am just really, really difficult to kill.  He was like, wow, I freaking love that. And he went off and built like a playbook around this because when you're challenged and you come out the other side and you have, you didn't die, you got stronger, you, you usually move up in spiral dynamics so that the world around you that you see now is filtered through this lens of like, man, nothing can really kill me.

It's a choice to die. It's a choice to move backwards, and I'm just not gonna make that choice anymore.  So when you get into a spot where you're frustrated, you're confused, you are misaligned. You know what entrepreneurs say, you're in the middle man, you're in the middle, you're in the messy middle. Well, maybe, but you're sort of always in the middle.

It's not indicative that you're in the middle. But when you're confused, that's not necessarily the, the indication When you're confused or or you're frustrated. What it really means is that you are outgrowing an operating system.  So your previous operating system is no longer sufficient as a container to hold whatever you're supposed to do.

You're outgrowing an operating system. I'll be real honest with you guys, right now I'm in the middle. Uh, there's the word of a giant outgrowing of my old operating system.  It don't work anymore. It doesn't work anymore. It doesn't give me the solutions that I need. It doesn't give me the fulfillment that I need.

It doesn't gimme the creativity that I need. I am frustrated because what used to work no longer works. And instead of being corrective about this, I'm instead acknowledging that I am going up through these levels into a new spiral, and I must learn the rules of this new level.  So when you reach for something  and it almost works, but it doesn't quite work, and you're pushed back down to the previous level, it does not mean that you deserve to be at that level.

It means that you are being trained in the rule system that runs and governs the next level. And so what is a good, healthy, empowered entrepreneur? Do they assess and reach again?  And then they're pushed back down again. What do they do? Reassess, reach again. And instead what we have is we have these self-help gurus who are trying to teach people essentially how to be more comfortable at their current level rather than teaching them how to push forward and learn the rules at the next level.

I reject the, the modern self-help gurus of our era. They're not enabling people to grow, they're enabling people to cope. There's big differences between these two things. Is this making sense? You guys good? Or keep going?  Keep going bro. Crushing.  Alright. So we have like, if you study spiral dynamics, you have almost like a Maslow, uh,  pyramid thing that, that shows up where you have these levels that a person will, will, um, grow through. 

And it starts with survival thinking, survival instincts. This is the bottom of the spiral dynamics. Survival. The mindset is to stay alive, you've gotta get your basic needs met. There are, um,  I'm not gonna put percentages on this, but I'll say that in every room I've ever been in for the long, for as long as I've been in business,  I've never been in a room where there's not at least someone who's in this first spiral.

It doesn't mean anything's wrong with you, it just means that you've mastered the rules at that level and you struggle to get past this level to the next one. So don't take shame from this. This is just the first level. The second  is tribal,  and this is where you get into these like tribal routine type things where your, your tradition and your rituals. 

Really run your vision and then run your life. You can go really deep into this if you wanna study it, but I'm just gonna give a cursory overview so we know how to get through them.  Then you get to level three, which is the, the level of power and dominion.  This is where you get into ego. People develop ego. 

I'll say this, in every single room I've ever been in since the beginning of my career, most of the rooms sit in this third level.  Whether they agree with it or not. That's just where they are. Hey man, you think that your life is, is acceptable because you set a revenue record level three.  Nothing wrong with it, it just is what it is.

This is the, these are the people who are like, I get what I want by working harder than everyone else.  Why take weekends off? Did you know that there are two days on the weekend that you could work level three?  It ain't a bad thing. It is just, you gotta be able to observe what level somebody's coming at you from. 

Be careful. If you don't wanna be at this level, be careful who you're following. That is at this level, because humans are programmatic, we're a mimetic. So if you sit and you listen to me all the time, and I'm at level three, it doesn't matter whether you were at level one or level two or level four, you're gonna slowly morph into what level? 

Three, three. Three.  If all you eat.  If all you eat is Oreos and pizza, I'm gonna be able to tell. I can tell. I'm gonna be able to look at you and be like, yeah man, all you eat is Oreos and pizza. Something's wrong with that human body. That is not a specimen, that's just a, that's just junk.  You are what you eat.

So you got the same thing going on with our mind. Our mind feeds on this stuff. So why you can go into this like weird meta metaphysical place. You say the Bible, Jesus is like, I'm the bread of life. You want feed on it, you become whatever you feed on. So we have to be careful what we're feeding on because we're not just listening to words.

We are feeding on the nutrient density  of whatever level that person is speaking from. Level four,  this is the order of control. This is where.  We began to understand that there are rules in how everything works. If you would clock me on spiral dynamics, you would notice that I'm teaching this from level four.

Why? How do we know that? Because I keep talking about rules in order, there are rules that govern everything. So I'm at level four teaching you this and then we can adapt if, if you wanna see a difference, I'll jump up and show you the difference in how all of this feels. When you're in level four, you, you tend to. 

Put a, a, a cause and effect between how you make these decisions  and the life that you have as a, as a consequence. This is the cause and effect realm. Level five. This is rational achievement, science, and independence. These are where you get your business strategists from that, a lot of times business strategists tend to sit at this level because they realize that there is a cause and effect.

Okay. That's not the problem, but the cause and effect is delayed.  Ray Dalio first order, or second order, third order, fourth order consequences. This is the rationale of strategy. This supersedes this mere rule systems to long-term rule systems. Then you get into level six, which is equality and community. 

Level seven, which is integrative thinking, flexibility level eight, which is holistic awareness where you get to these spiritual gurus and they're like, everything is interconnected. These are peak,  like the wizards of, uh,  of consciousness. They're, they're usually teaching at like level eight.  Okay. So how do we, how do we use all of this to, to get the things that we want?

Whenever you are in the middle, it's not a linear binary thing. You're going to constantly be in the middle of going one level to the next. And when you're in the middle of that place, what you realize is that your confusion comes from the previous set of, of operations expiring. It's like a, you got a thing of, um, they drink milk.

My 2-year-old loves, loves to drink  milk and we're trying to just.  Break him of the habit. We're like, how about some water, some juice? You're two years old, you don't need to be drinking milk anymore, but you have to think of milk in your fridge and the expiration date is March 10th and it's April 21st.

Who's gonna be putting that into your mouth?  Nope.  It's gonna smell a little bit weird and it's gonna look a little bit weird. It'll be like something might not be wrong, something might be not be right with this or something may be wrong with this. Like, like you got, you got an expiration date on your previous level, and therefore something feels like it's not right. 

Something just feels off,  something feels like it's just you're not in the right spot.  Making sense? Yeah, it's a good analogy, bro. It's funny. It's a good one.  This is how it is in life, and this is the problem is  I see people a lot of times.  They will bend to try to fit back into an old expiration date rather than replace whatever is expired with something new. 

And this is evolutionary.  It would be so silly to use the previous, the previous analogy. Let's keep using it because it's nasty and sometimes it works. You got this nasty thing of milk, it does not work. It's not, it's expired, bro. And you're like, well, I'll just supplements. I'll just use some supplements so I don't get sick.

Why?  Because evolution and you look in the neurochemistry of a person's brain,  our instinct is to,  to selectively prioritize what is known, even when what is known is no longer safe.  Hmm.  So the, the process we have to go through as performers, as leaders, is we have to go through the process. Of sitting in the discomfort of an exploration  that no longer serves us and observing  how we are supposed to operate in this new season. 

Reality rarely bends under pressure.  It, it just consolidates. It doesn't bend it, it consolidates and it's, it begins to block you up. Reality will bend.  Under alignment when you know for a fact that  who you are and what you're doing is what you were born to be and born to do.  And when you have this level of certainty, you can actually rip tide up through these levels into the next level.