I failed my accounts exam at school.
Not through lack of ability. I had been top of the year in it. Then my teacher retired, the new one was terrible in the opinion of my fifteen year old self, and I stopped working at it entirely in order to demonstrate how terrible she was.
I failed. That showed her.
I went and got a job in an accountancy office instead, determined to come at it another way. The job was microfiching invoices, orders and delivery notes. If you do not know what microfiching is, look it up and you will understand why that did not last.
The dream did not go away though.
Twenty five found me married for the second time, with a four year old, a college qualification in accounts, and a job as a purchase ledger clerk. This time I committed properly. Three months later I was promoted and offered the chance to train as an accountant, sponsored by the company.
Four and a half years of study while working full time. The mature student route to CIMA, a regional award in my third year, and steady promotions along the way.
Not bad for someone who failed it first time round.
Over the years, with experience and with people who mentored me, I became genuinely good at that job. Confident that I could walk into an organisation and make a difference to it.
I took that confidence into working for myself and I assumed it would carry.
It did not.
Here is what I had not understood. When you work for yourself you do not only have to be good at the thing you do. You also have to be good at running a business, and good at growing one. Three separate skills. I had mastered one of them.
Meat Loaf sang that two out of three is not bad. In business, two out of three is a slow leak.
Growing was my weak one. It still is, if I am honest with you, though it is less weak than it was. Which began the next long chapter, which was learning how to serve my clients well and run a business and grow one, all at the same time, while actually doing the work.
I tell you this because I meet a lot of practitioners who are superb at holding a room and genuinely baffled that this is not enough.
It is not a character flaw. You trained to hold a room. The other two tend to get far less attention in practitioner training, and some of us did not work out they existed until the diary was empty.
The pattern I would offer you is the one I eventually took. Efficiency, if you want to call it that, is mostly benefiting from somebody else’s learning curve. Find the person who has already made the mistake and ask them what it cost. I have followed the wrong people as well as the right ones, so build in some room to be wrong.
And be patient with the timescale, because mastery is not a thing you finish.
John Wooden coached basketball for a very long time and made a line famous that puts it better than I can. Talent is God given, be humble. Fame is man given, be thankful. Conceit is self given, be careful. It was doing the rounds before he used it, and nobody knows who said it first. I have carried it around ever since.
Am I a master? No. Not of the growing part, and probably not of the rest either.
But I learn something most days, and the wheel turns. Sometimes a little. Sometimes a lot. Some weeks it feels like winning and some weeks it feels like failing.
It is always turning though, and I hope it never stops.
Where do you need help? Not with the breathwork. With the other two.
