I wanted to apply my brilliance to me.

I had a brilliance. A good one. I could point it at a company, a room, a person, and change what happened next by distilling what made them brilliant.

The one place I could never aim it at was myself.

Not to be rich, though I do alright now. Not to be admired, though I managed that. I wanted to 180 the thing I did for everyone else and do it for me.

I could be whoever a room needed, and then walk into another and become a reaction to its need. I could find exactly what anyone wanted to feel about themselves, and give it back so cleanly they came looking for me again and again. I was always me. I just wasn’t who I needed me to be.

Away from work, I was out of control. I was drinking. Married to someone I couldn’t trust. No savings, for all the money that came through. Relationships breaking down one by one, and me at the centre of every one of them.

I had a rule in business. If something went wrong twice, it was mine to solve. Here I was brave, I was fearless. But never once on my own life.

I stayed focused outward. The next problem, the next fix, the next person to help. And when the ground moved under me, I had an explanation ready. Something in my past. Something unresolved. True enough to stop me looking. A quasi reason.

Each person’s life is them in the middle of many relationships. The quality of their life is directly correlated to the quality of their relationships. Here’s what mine looked like, before I learned how to study my own mind.

What made me look was loss. I lost the business. It had covered the cracks, and when it went, it was like looking at a healthy face, then watching the mouth open and seeing a set of decaying teeth. The broken marriage and family and dreams. All of it had been there the whole time. I just hadn’t had a process to see.

And I didn’t look at first. I closed my mouth and I blamed. I blamed my business partner, I blamed clients, I blamed my ex. I blamed anyone who breathed in my direction. I got a lawyer, paid a lot of money, and blamed them for the cost. I even went to a fortune teller, probably to find someone else to blame. None of it changed anything.

All of it was distraction from the one thing I needed to do. See.

We all look. Reflection, journalling, every self-help book ever written. Looking takes a million perspectives, and a million perspectives is just a million more stories. You can look at yourself your whole life and never get anywhere. I had.

Seeing is different.

When I worked in business I had a process for it. Discovery, to get to the deepest reason for something, to find the layer that showed cause and effect. What mix of ingredients produced this outcome, and whether my new way of seeing would lead to understanding and to change that would truly hold.

I had that process for companies. I did not have it for me.

So that was the work. Building a way to see myself with the same rigour I used on a company. To trace my own outcomes back to their cause.

It took me seven years to learn how to see. And once I could see, I could understand. Why every cause was having every effect. And from there I knew how to change it.

The process I’d been inventing started doing what I’d always believed was possible. Brilliance began to compound. Incremental was yesterday. I was starting to see leaps.

I had to test it. So I went looking for the biggest, hairiest challenge I could find.

My drinking.

I drank too much and I owned a bar. There was no better place to test whether my new way of seeing and understanding would lead to change that would truly hold.

For years I thought the drinking was compensation for trauma. Something wrong with me, yes, but not my fault. Before that, I thought it was fun, or fitting in, just a stage.

Each of those thoughts was a story. A reason not to look, because I was terrified the truth was simpler: that my own bad character had caused it.

When I applied my new way of seeing, of examining until I understood, it was obvious that drinking was a programmed response, running exactly the way it was built.

Efficient, tireless.

Under the behaviour. Under the rationalisations, the storylines, the hope, the delusion. Under all the places I used to stop looking, I found a blueprint. I got to the level the system was actually drawn on. Not because I was suddenly brave. Because I finally had a process to get there.

And once you are looking at the blueprint, you are not fighting a habit. You’re not using will, luck or environment to change. You’re holding the base plan. From here, you can rub the line out and you can draw a new one.

I learnt how to rewrite the plan through comprehension of the system.

I discovered that the only thing I ever lacked was a way to see how my systems built my life, now I had built one.

Eight years on, that switch remains firmly off.

For me, Happy means no relationship with alcohol. Not a day has it gone back on, even through three more years of bar ownership and an office upstairs.

I went full throttle, running the process on me.

And here's what my life looked like after.

I even made a tool, the Brilliance Gap, to choose the next area. As I ran the programme on me, I learnt how to teach it to others. And when I applied it to others, it compounded into Genius.

I’ve taught it to a lot of people now. Each one turns it on their own life, and the people around them feel the change before they can name it. The conversation that finally happens. The child who feels seen. That’s the ripple.

I wanted to apply my brilliance to me. I did.

And then it stopped being mine, and it started being yours.

Complete The Brilliance Gap