Steve Barton built his floral business to two million dollars in revenue. He had the numbers. He had the outcome. On paper, everything added up to a good life.
And still, something was missing.
That gap is where my conversation with Steve begins, and it is a gap I suspect many of you know well. You reach the target, tick the box, hit the number, and instead of the peace of mind you were promised, you find a quiet, nagging sense that this was not quite it.
When Success Doesn't Add Up
I asked Steve what he would say to someone listening right now who finds themselves in that exact position: successful on paper, but feeling that something is missing. His answer was simple. Find someone, a therapist, a coach, a mentor, who has already broken through what he calls "the veneer" that keeps us from awareness.
That word, awareness, became the spine of our whole conversation. Not thinking. Awareness.
We Have Been Conditioned to Think
Here is the phrase that stayed with me long after we stopped recording. Steve believes we have been, in his words, traumatised to think.
Think about how many times you were asked, as a child, "What were you thinking?" or told, "Think, now." We are trained from the earliest age to believe that thinking is how we solve problems, how we earn approval, how we stay safe. Steve calls it rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. You cannot think your way out of a problem that was created by thinking in the first place.
According to a Cleveland Clinic study Steve referenced, the average person has around 60,000 thoughts a day. Eighty per cent of them are from the past. Eighty per cent of them are negative. Sit with that for a moment. If most of what runs through your mind each day is old and unhelpful, no wonder peace feels out of reach.
Awareness, Steve explained, is not another way of thinking better. It is the absence of thought altogether. It is the space you drop into when the noise finally quietens, even for a moment, and something clearer comes through.
The Game of Ten: Six Phrases to Quiet the Mind
Steve shared a simple practice he calls the Game of Ten, built around six short phrases you repeat to yourself:
I'm 10
I'm doing the best that I can with the awareness that I have
I'm always right with the awareness that I have
I am enough
I do enough
I have enough
We tried it together, live, on the call. It took less than fifteen seconds, and even in that short space, something shifted. Steve says these phrases work because they answer the questions the mind never stops asking. Am I enough? Am I doing okay? Am I allowed to stop striving for a moment? When those questions are answered, the mind has nothing left to chatter about.
He is honest that it takes practice. You may only get a nanosecond of true stillness at first. But it took years of repetition to become addicted to thinking, so it makes sense that it takes some repetition to find your way back out.
Letting Go of What You're Carrying
The second practical tool Steve offered was a visualisation for the painful thoughts and memories that surface unexpectedly, the ones we usually suppress rather than sit with.
Instead of pushing them away, he suggests giving them space. Sit with the thought for five or ten minutes. Let it be there without fighting it. Then, in your mind, picture placing it on an altar, along with every thought attached to that person, that disappointment, that situation, and simply say, "I'm willing to let this go."
We hold on to these thoughts, Steve says, because some part of us believes they are protecting us. Protecting us from what, though? Often, from love itself.
A Practice, Not a Performance
What struck me most about this conversation is that none of it asks you to believe anything on faith. Steve is not asking you to accept a philosophy. He is inviting you to try something, in the next transition moment of your day, whether that is picking up your phone, opening a door, or stepping outside, and notice what happens when you pause and repeat those six phrases.
It is, as Steve says, easy to understand intellectually and far more valuable to actually practise.
So here is my invitation to you today. Choose one transition moment. Just one. And see how much noise you can quiet.
Stand out, don't fit in.