If you want to be more pirate in life, then take a moment for reflection here. I’ve run Be More Pirate workshops all over the world with all sorts of teams, from students to senior executives, and there are a couple of challenges we use during the sessions that have been very successful for others. I want to share one of them here.

It’s worth setting this up now as I’m going to include some of the challenges that have had the most profound impact for people in my workshops at the end of some of the coming chapters.

I’ve left a page blank by each challenge for you to make notes, partly because I love the idea of this book becoming yours, and partly because giving yourself a few minutes to reflect when absorbing new information dramatically improves your relationship with, and your ability to benefit from, what you’ve learned.

And because, whilst writing notes on your phone is easier, we both know you’ll get distracted.

The Golden-Age pirates took on the challenges of their time, and the solutions they created for their world then changed the world. The same is true of the more modern pirates we’re going to look at, and the same is true of you. If you really want to take on the task of creating meaningful and lasting change, you need to make sure you know what gets in your way before you begin.

So, the challenge I invite you to consider upon before we embark on the rest of the book is:

What really holds you back in life?

Invest a few minutes and aim to come up with between five and fifteen points.

The things that hold you back could be your own habits, the self-sabotaging acts you semi-subconsciously make every day, the boxes you let others put you in or just the stuff you sometimes say to put yourself down. They could be things you let other people get away with, that bad habit you just don’t ever get around to breaking or something else. All that matters, if you’re going to do this, is that you’re really honest with yourself. Identifying honestly what truly gets in your way is going to make rebelling against it much easier later on.

Then, if you’ve time, in the workshops what we’d do is take one more minute to look up and down the list and choose the one thing you do that holds you back the most, then put a cross through it.

One by one, in order of worst to least bad, put a slow, steady and deliberate cross through each and every other one of those little pains in the arse. X marks the spot so let them all die right there on the page.

Feel no guilt as you cross out the things that drive you mad or hold you back. The point is to identify the barriers you face. By the time you’ve finished this book, bad habits and self-doubt will be a distant memory, leaving you the option of nothing but success.