Sex, Money, Control, the new book from self-made multimillionaire businesswoman Charlie Puchala

How to create a successful mindset, develop your confidence and become the director of your own life.

No one else is going to build the life you want.

You can visualise it. Manifest it. Tell yourself you're worthy of it. But eventually, says multimillionaire businesswoman Charlie Puchala, you have to do the work yourself.

Charlie should know.

At the age of ten, she was picking potatoes on a family friend's farm during the school holidays to help pay for her textbooks, uniforms and spending money.

Decades later, after building a multimillion-dollar business from the ground up, she's growing her own designer potatoes at ZaDa Farm in the Southern Highlands, New South Wales, with locals now on a waitlist to buy them.

For Charlie, the distance between those two potato fields wasn't luck. It was hard work.

Charlie's philosophy is uncompromising:

Know what you want, understand what it will cost you and set the standard for the life you want to create.

When she bought her first country investment property eleven years ago, Charlie didn't outsource the hard yards. On Saturday nights, she worked as a butler for paying guests, often driving home to Sydney around 1am, before returning the next morning to clean the property and change the linen herself.

While friends planned ski trips to Japan and European holidays, Charlie kept working.

'In the end I owned two incredible lifestyle country estates, worth millions... But I had more than that, a gift far greater than the millions of dollars that was my financial reward. I had freedom.'

Charlie has come a long way from the backwaters of Poland, where as a young child she lived in a cottage with no running water and an outdoor toilet. But she has never attributed the multimillion-dollar life she built to luck.

'There is no such thing as luck. There is no such thing as unlucky. There is only intention, motivation, execution and outcome.'

There's another popular mantra Charlie has little time for: Fake it till you make it. For her, believing you're successful and building success are two very different things.

'I am a successful woman, professionally, emotionally, mentally and physically. I know this not because I voice it or believe it of myself; it's because that success is a measurable and carefully weighted outcome based on KPIs and my ability to deliver on them, time after time.'

In her forties, she decided to apply that same analytical mind to something considerably less predictable.

Men.

After marriage, motherhood and years focused on building her businesses and financial independence, Charlie re-entered the dating world with a question:

Could the same mindset that had helped her build professional success help her navigate modern love?

'I threw myself into the dating game in the same way that I approach life in general: with determination, honesty and ruthlessness.'

She researched the hell out of it.

Over several years, Charlie dated multiple men while researching what would eventually become her book, Sex, Money, Control, openly telling them she was gathering information about their experiences, attitudes to dating and views on commitment.

She treated dating as data.

She observed behaviour. Assessed risk. Set her baseline. Tested assumptions. Analysed outcomes. She even put potential partners through what she describes as a dating 'probationary period', recording her observations and watching whether their words matched their actions.

The data led her to a deceptively simple conclusion:

'We date the potential, not accepting the reality.'

Charlie believes too many women invest in what a man could become, rather than looking honestly at the person standing in front of them.

'You cannot do somebody else's work for them. You cannot make somebody change.'

Her advice is simple:

Stop listening to what someone says they'll do and watch what they actually do.

'A person can give you words and even, to a degree, fake a big picture for up to about three months. But the details, never... They will give it away in the details; the devil lives in the details, ladies.'

Charlie wasn't looking for rescue. She wasn't looking for financial security. She wasn't even looking for someone to complete her.

She had already built a life that gave her options. What she wanted to know was whether a fiercely independent woman could find love without giving herself away in the process.

And what happens when a woman stops waiting to be chosen and starts doing the choosing?

'A woman with options means exactly that: you have options personally and professionally. Becoming a woman with options means that you have created those options yourself.'

But Sex, Money, Control is about far more than dating.

Built around three core pillars, Sex explores dating, self-perception and worth; Money charts Charlie's journey from having little to financial success; and Control examines the discipline, focus and intent behind the way she lives.

For Charlie, control isn't about controlling other people. It's about self-control.

'It is the power to direct your own behaviour and to influence the course of your life.'

Together, they form what Charlie calls the 'golden trifecta' of the independently successful woman.

Sex, Money, Control is not about telling women how to become Charlie!

It's about challenging them, at any stage of life, to decide what they want their own lives to look like and how to do the work required to create it.

Charlie makes no apology for the fact that her philosophy isn't for everyone.

'I am not for everyone. I am not interested in making everyone happy; I am not tequila.'

But for women who want more from their lives, Charlie's message is simple.

Don't wait for somebody else to make it happen.

Do the work.

Sex, Money, Control

by Charlie Puchala

https://charliepuchala.com/

RRP: $32.99

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