Perhaps, you might think, Oh, that’s a great thought I should navigate around that, create a plan B around that, or what’s even more important is a question of OK, well, what I still be doing this, if that could happen? So in a quite literal sense, we’re in the magic-business – the business of creating magic, of creating something new from, ultimately, nothing at all. Yes, that’s how I got started with it, I became a power user of coaches and I really think my life can be, characterized by me before coaching and me, post coaching. Ultimately, the text itself is the only accessible fact, not the purported events – the text that you’re reading, not the content of the text. What are the mechanisms via which you would reject any evidence that contradicts your existing beliefs, so as to protect those beliefs?

The whole point of what we do is that we’re bending reality-as-experienced into new forms – just like magic.You are likely to have made what you would consider to be a ‘rational’ response to that information – including a probable ‘shoot the messenger’ component of that response. Allison: I think outsourcing is a really outstanding example of like, what it’s getting us outside of our zone of genius.

I reckon it would have taken the simultaneous impact of three people on the door to have the effect of opening it so far. The concept of bending reality first entered the mainstream in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs in which he used it three times to describe why Jobs was so successful. It needs to be hard and almost kind of boring and the harder it is, the more justified we feel to make money doing it.We undervalue the things that come naturally to us and if something comes really too easily to us, we feel bad charging anyone for it. With Victoria’s guidance, her clients feel calm, confident and energized as they scale their multi-billion dollar companies and inspire their teams with their vision and leadership – all the while enjoying a personal life they love. In practice, I could have used almost anything for this, and, as long as the purported ‘facts’ were different from your beliefs, the effective result – the response – would have been almost exactly the same. But when something happens in real-time that doesn’t fit those expectations, what that should normally do is throw us briefly over the ‘edge of panic’ into the ‘Not-known’ domain, where we can work on it with the techniques appropriate to that domain (emergency-checklists, for example, and guiding-principles). Her combination of rigorous strategy insights and ability to go deep into the subconscious mind is unique.

Victoria reveals the metaframework behind peak performance, personal development, and real magic that is accessible to all. They look bolder, they’re bigger actions, and we’re willing to take when we’re playing small, when we’re playing not to lose, when we’re afraid of looking silly. It's the only book I brought with me in my recent move, and I wish I had it when I started Product Hunt years ago. Allison: You talk a lot about why the future belongs to the emotional intelligence and then the importance of mastering unpleasant emotions.Yet somehow, of course, we do have to make it work: we do have to bridge across all of those different ‘truths’. Victoria: Yes, so it’s very uncomfortable, but I do encourage readers and my clients to lean into the emotion. Your response represents a decision that you’ve made, based on the nominal information that I gave above. Hence whenever a significant level of emotion is involved in any discussion about supposed ‘facts’, we’re probably in the realm of religion, not ‘science’. Given the probable extent of emotion used to underpin that decision-making, what does that tell you about the extent to which your nominally-‘rational’ decision-making is not actually rational at all?