PREFACE

SO TELL US, what is it for you? What’s the change that you’re trying to create?

What is it that’s standing in the way of you achieving your goals, from fulfilling your potential, both personally and professionally?

Perhaps it’s a situation that you’ve wrestled with for some time, or maybe it’s something that’s simply gotten the better of you more recently. The truth is, we all have something that we struggle with from time to time.

It was ten years ago, when we first asked ourselves this simple question…

“What if you could create the change that you need, whatever that may be, by this time next week—if that was the case, what else would have to be true?”

At that time, we could never have known how that ‘thought experiment’ would result in us questioning everything we believed about change, and the problems that people wrestle with.

Over the following decade, we explored and researched an incredibly diverse range of disciplines and fields. We spent time with experts from the worlds of philosophy, psychotherapy, systems thinking, behavioural economics, family therapy, design thinking,…even the world of magic.

Using these insights, we analysed our own work with elite athletes, teams and business leaders, exploring how some individuals manage to create meaningful change, whilst others, despite seemingly having more resources at their disposal, find themselves stuck.

As a result of all of these experiences we’ve come to believe that there is one reason, and one reason alone, why individuals struggle to create the change that they need. It’s a reason that is common to all individuals, and to every problem that they wrestle with.

We’d now like to share this with you, along with everything else that we’ve learnt about creating change.

This book represents the first step on that journey.

Pete Lindsay & Mark Bawden

Hathersage, 2017