Ascent with Tom Foxley

You've hired the mentors, read the right books and you're still working incredibly hard. The business is good, but it isn't growing, and you aren't building a life you love.

This episode is for the business owner who wants to finish the year strongly but has lost the drive they had in the early days.

I explain what's happening in your brain when you plateau: why you can't grow despite wanting to, why you underperform relative to what you know you can do, and what's happening in the brain that is creating this block on your growth.

Then I explain what gets you moving again, and how to apply it to your life

You're with your kids, but your head's at work. You're at work, but you're thinking about home. Then something tips you over, you snap at the people you love, and the guilt sits with you all evening.

This is a real coaching session with a driven business owner and dad of a young family who wanted to separate his work brain from his family brain. What we found underneath wasn't a focus problem at all.

In this episode:

• Why telling yourself to "switch off" works for a day, then fails
• How to find what your stress and anger are trying to protect you from
• Treating the parts of your mind like a team you manage, not enemies you fight
• The four stages of building a new relationship with difficult emotion
• Two five-minute practices you can start today

This is how to handle the next stage of growth in your business. The greatest challenge you'll face comes from within and this is a story about how to handle that.

If you keep doing what you're doing you're only going to get more of what you've already got. This is how to change your mental state so you can perform at a higher level

This is how I teach my clients to master their mental weaknesses, and how you can do the same

If you're a business owner who knows they've got more in the tank, this is what you need to be a part of

Today I share 5 quotes that will radically improve the quality of your life if you implement them (plus 2 bonus quotes that came into my head whilst recording)

For twenty years I picked the hardest thing in the room and made sure people could see me do it. I called it ambition. It was an eight year old who didn't feel like he mattered, running every decision I made, and I never once heard it.

There's a line usually put on Jung. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will determine your life, and you'll call it fate.

This one is about the thing driving you that you can't see. Where it comes from, why self-awareness doesn't catch it, and what it quietly does to a business once it's built one.

Then the part that made me want to record it. Every amplifier a business owner has ever held reflects his inner world back at him. Headcount used to. Now AI does, faster, with no sanity check left in the loop. If your thinking is unclear, AI won't fix it. It multiplies it.

Inside: the three ways something ends up in your blind spot, how a financial planner worked out he was creating chaos just so he could solve it, and the one thing I'd train before handing your thinking to a machine.

Take the assessment I run with every client at tomfoxley.me.

A client of mine works sixteen hour days. Up at four, in the office by seven, laptop still open at eleven at night.

I asked him to rate the quality of that work out of a hundred. He said fifty. Maybe sixty.

So we did the arithmetic together. Fifty percent of sixteen hours is eight hours. He's producing one working day and paying for two.

Every endurance athlete already understands this pattern. You run every session at the same middling pace, too slow to build the aerobic base and too fast to build speed, and after eight weeks you're tired and no quicker. Coaches call it junk volume.

Business owners do junk volume at the desk, and fatigue makes it feel like something happened.

In this episode I break down why sixteen hours at full quality was never available to you, what the research on deliberate practice says about the real ceiling, and what changed for Dean McMahon when he stopped working more and started working on far less of the right stuff.

Two sets and reps at the end. Find your three hours, and write your not-to-do list.

If you recognised your own week in this, book a Mental Performance Blueprint Call at tomfoxley.me. Thirty minutes, no pitch, and if it isn't a fit I'll be the first to say so.