Go From Within to Win: Why Inner Work Equals External Results
After 20+ years in HR and Talent Acquisition, listening to the hopes, dreams, and challenges of thousands of people, I’ve realized one profound truth: what’s inside you affects everything outside—career, relationships, lifestyle, and happiness.
In retrospect, my career has really been about looking inside a person; beyond what they say and what they have done to see what’s inside; values, behaviours, emotions, character, even wounds. I’ve done this and led teams who do this, within listed organisations, global organisations and high-performance private businesses.
I’ve done the same with myself too, looking into myself to see what’s there. It started as an experiment out of frustration. A decade ago I got to a point where adding more strategies, techniques, models and effort was exhausting, and as the years ticked over, the life I wanted was not emerging. Out of despair, I tried going inwards- perhaps to the source of the results I was experiencing. I wasn’t sure, I didn’t know. At first I didn’t have anyone to guide me. Often, it felt like nothing was happening. But in short, it ‘worked’. I’ve lived the journey, and thousands of journeys within the journey. I continue to everyday as there are always new levels, new simplicities, new inspirations to access. Along the way I have formalised and fortified my personal experience with study and training in Coaching, Psychology, Counselling paired with holistic modalities such as Mindfulness, Breathwork, Meditation.
How exactly does what’s inside affect what’s outside?
Your Results Reflects What’s Inside: Every result in your life (health, wealth, relationships, lifestyle etc) stems from actions you took or didn’t take. All of those actions were influenced by your inner world.
Feelings Drive Behaviour: What you did or didn’t do was influenced by your inner world. By what your human experience was, aka how you ‘feel’. You felt motivated or you didn’t. You felt interested or not. You felt calm or not. You felt creative, or not. Trying to ignore feelings and force ourselves comes at a cost – your unhappiness, internal conflict, endless effort requirements, and exhaustion.
Feelings Drive Behaviour. Behaviours Drive Results. To be do different things, our feelings need to be different. But, we generally can’t control how we feel (our Human Experience). Our Human Experience is our home, it’s how we experience our own life. It's the sum of a vast ecology of emotions, energy, patterns, even an internal family of ‘parts’– a part which wants more, a part which wants to be acknowledged by others, a part that’s frustrated or angry, and so on.
Your Inner World is The Source of Power: This inner realm of emotions, energy, parts and patterns is where the power is. We’re close to your ultimate source of being. Changes here happen differently than in the cognitive world. Down here, it might appear complicated and unclear, our mind may try to analyse and incorrectly concludes this isn’t real, it doesn’t work, it’s all just too intangible and messy. Here’s a counter point… think about somebody you love, and what lengths you would go to protect them from harm. Can you feel the power, clarity, purpose? Where did that come from… it wasn’t your mind, it was this inner world. That power exists for everything, you can learn to align and connect with it.
How do we make progress in this our Inner World?
This is a huge topic with a huge answer. To boil it down, helpful modalities include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) , Internal Family System Therapy (IFS), and Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT). It's vital to make your Inner World a regular priority until it takes on a life of itself and then you seamlessly receive power and clarity from your inner world. It was always a part of you, we just forgot and become disconnected. Prioritising this world looks like mindfulness practices, working with a coach, reading and exploring more about the topic.
Going forward I’ll be sharing regularly on these topics to help us all move forward. Go in, to go forward.
