Two compasses

You carry two compasses.

The inner compass reads what happens in you: your body and your emotions. The tight chest before a call. The energy after a good conversation. The flat feeling when you say yes to the wrong thing. The restlessness on a Sunday evening.

The outer compass reads how the world responds to what you do: feedback, numbers, replies, silence, the look on someone’s face.

Successful people tend to read the outer compass very well. That skill built their careers. The inner compass often got quieter along the way, so decisions get made on half the information.

Your head is the narrator

Neither compass speaks in words. Signals have no words, so your head supplies them. It tells a story about every signal, and the story decides your next move.

The head tends to tell the stories that built your success: what’s expected and what others would approve of. That’s why thinking harder rarely gets you unstuck. The work is learning to hear those stories, and to choose stories that move you toward where you want to go.

The loop

The way up: five steps on a mountain trail A trail zigzags up a mountain towards a summit with a flag. Step 1 is the summit: knowing where you're going. On the first stretch of trail, step 2 is taking a small step, step 3 is noticing what happened and step 4 is checking the story in your head. At the first bend, step 5 is the next step. The same markers repeat on every higher stretch, closer to the summit each time. YOU ARE HERE 1 Know whereyou're going AND AGAIN,A LITTLE HIGHEREACH TIME 2 Take a step 3 Notice 4 Check the story 5 Next step
  1. Summit. Where you’re heading, in both compasses. How an ordinary day should feel from the inside, and what a camera would see from the outside.
  2. Move. A real step in the world, with a date on it. Small enough that it happens.
  3. Read both compasses. Pause first. What happened in your body and emotions before, during and after? How did the world respond?
  4. Choose the story. Your head tells a story about every signal. Pick the reading that stays closest to the facts and serves your summit, then test it with the next step.
  5. Next move. The next step comes out of that reading. The loop runs again, and the summit gets sharper each time.

Nobody is pushed through this loop. The work is creating the conditions in which the next step becomes possible: seeing the story that’s stopping you, feeling what’s underneath it, and choosing a reading you can act from. Then the step happens, and each step makes the next one easier.

Catch it. Check it. Choose it.

This is the core skill, and it can be trained.

  • Catch the sentence your head is saying, word for word.
  • Check whether it’s fact or story. Who said it, and when? What else could be true?
  • Choose the reading closest to the facts that moves you forward.

At the Agile Slovenia conference I asked 30 people to hold a squat for two minutes, right after lunch. Within seconds the voices started. “It’s enough now.” “I can’t be the first to quit.” Those are the same sentences that stop the hard conversation and the decision you keep postponing.

Four ways a story passes for a fact

  • Mind reading: you know what someone else thinks.
  • Fortune telling: you know how it will end.
  • Always and never: one event becomes a rule.
  • A verdict about you: a signal becomes a label.

Where it comes from: ontological coaching

My training is in ontological coaching, an approach developed from the work of Fernando Flores, Rafael Echeverría and Julio Olalla, and taught to coaches by Alan Sieler. It looks at a person’s way of being through three connected domains.

Language. The stories we tell, and how we tell them. Ontological coaching separates assertions, which can be checked against facts (“I’ve had no reply for three days”), from assessments, which are judgements that sound like facts (“Nobody wants this”). Most stuck stories are assessments dressed up as assertions. Catch it, Check it, Choose it is built on that distinction.

Emotions and moods. Emotions answer events. Moods are the weather underneath, running for weeks or years: resignation (“it is what it is”), resentment, anxiety, or the pull of something ahead. A mood decides which moves even look possible, before any thinking starts. We name the mood you’re climbing in, because changing a plan without touching the mood rarely holds.

The body. How you breathe, hold yourself and move. The body often knows before the head does, and a new story only holds once the body can live it. So we work with breath, posture and movement as well as words, and much of it happens walking.

The three domains move together. Change the story, and the mood and body move with it. Change the body, by walking up a mountain or taking a slow breath before a hard call, and different stories become available.

Why outdoors

Nature turns the inner signal up. Walking loosens thinking, and climbing above the place you live gives you a literal view of your life from higher up. You don’t need to go to Tibet to meditate. A trail an hour from home is enough. Read the research on walking and nature.

Why “Misogi”

Misogi is an old Japanese purification practice. Its first written trace is an eighth-century myth in which the god Izanagi purifies himself in water after returning from the underworld. Over the centuries, mountain ascetics turned it into a physical practice: standing under a waterfall or in cold water to clear away what you carry, so you can meet what’s in front of you.

In recent years, the sports scientist Marcus Elliott gave the word a modern meaning: one genuinely hard challenge a year, hard enough that you might not succeed, and safe enough that you come back. The idea spread through Michael Easter’s book The Comfort Crisis. A misogi is chosen by you, done outside your comfort zone, and remembered for years, because what you learn about yourself in it lasts.

I named the business after both meanings. The old one: a clearing, where what isn’t yours falls away and what is becomes easier to see. The new one: real, hard, chosen experience as the fastest teacher. The “Works” is what comes after: building, at home and at work, from what you found up there.

Where the method is used

  • The Reading (free, 1 minute) and the Expedition Diagnostic (free, about 7 minutes) show where you are on each part of the loop.
  • The 14-Day Compasses Challenge runs the loop daily for two weeks, for people who know where they’re heading and haven’t started.
  • 6-Month 1:1 Coaching runs it for six months, starting with a full day that sets your summit.
  • Forge48 and Forge Team run it intensively over two days in the Slovenian mountains.

Glossary

  • Summit: where you’re heading, described in both compasses. Usually 6 to 12 months out. It gets revised as you move.
  • Inner compass: what happens in your body and emotions.
  • Outer compass: how the world responds to what you do.
  • Narrator: the voice in your head that turns signals into stories.
  • Move: a small, real step in the world with a date on it.
  • Reading: the moment after a move when you check both compasses. Also the name of the 1-minute questionnaire on this site.
  • Assertion and assessment: a statement you can check against facts, and a judgement that only sounds like one.
  • Mood: the emotional weather underneath the days, which decides which moves look possible.
  • Base camp: where you’re honestly starting from.
  • Fuel: how much energy you have for change right now.
  • Altitude Conversation: the free 30-minute first conversation with Borut.
  • Misogi: a Japanese purification practice, and in its modern sense one hard, chosen challenge that changes how you see yourself. See “Why Misogi” above.

The research

Each part of the loop rests on published research: goal setting, small planned steps, body awareness, naming emotions, checking thoughts, ontological coaching and time in nature. See the research and its limits.