Have you ever had one of those days when you have that feeling of déjà vu, you feel like you’ve been here before? I think we all feel like that from time to time….

This got me thinking about the 1993 movie Groundhog Day where the main character gets stuck reliving the same day over and over again until he gets a revelation about how to take his life forward. In this case, because it’s a rom-com, it’s about the hero discovering that he needs the heroine and they all live happily ever after…. Sorry to spoil the plot but it is a great movie to watch with your partner on a rainy afternoon.

If you’ve seen the movie, I hope you can connect with the plot lines as I show you how they relate to the life many of us experience today. If you haven’t seen the movie, put it on your weekend watch list, then come back and re-read these messages.

The movie starts with Phil, the hero played by Bill Murray, having a job he doesn’t enjoy and a life he doesn’t love, waking up one morning to the same song on the radio. As he begins his day, he finds himself having the same conversations with the same people as he did yesterday. He repeats the same actions with the same outcomes and, as this continues day after day, he becomes increasingly despondent.

Over time, Phil begins to realise he has feelings for Rita, the heroine played by Andie MacDowell, he tries to learn about her passions and hobbies and get to know her, knowing that he can start again tomorrow if his attempts at befriending her don’t work.

Unsurprisingly, all his attempts fail until his revelation.

He discovers that being himself works when artificially creating situations does not.

So our hero embarks on a journey of learning and self development to better himself and become the person he is proud to be with a life he loves. And guess what… he gets the girl as all good rom-coms do.

What can we learn from this story?

As a mentor and business coach I see too many business people stuck in a life they don’t love because what they wanted at that beginning still eludes them. It’s true they may be ok, they are probably busy and busy means successful right?

Wrong…. why? Because their dreams and ambitions move increasingly further away. Most keep repeating the same old tasks, doing more of the same old work hoping that the harder they work and the more things they try, the closer they will get to their desired outcomes.

If we learned anything from Phil and his revelation, it is that trying more and more, harder and harder to artificially influence your outcome does not work, in reality as much as in fiction.

For you to get what you want, you need to change. Not work hard to change the things around you, what you do and how you do it, but change the way you think as Phil, our hero did.

Scaling a business requires that people change because when people change, those people can change things – not the other way around.


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Remember, there are only three types of people – those who make things happen, those who wait for things to happen, and those who talk about why things don’t happen for them. Which one are you?