“I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.”

-George Bernard Shaw

My two dogs, Mishka and Abby, have very different personalites. Mishka is bored unless engaged in her favorite game, which as you might imagine for a dog, is fetch. You take her bone and throw it as
far as you can, and she chases it as fast as she can. Then she brings it back to you and asks (well, begs) you to throw it again. She wants to play fetch continuously, and I have occasionally
speculated that if I let her, she would keep chasing that bone right up until the point where she collapsed of physical exhaustion.

I call Mishka a “Goal Dog”, because her behavior is similar to what I see in compulsive goal-setters. They continually set goals in every area of their lives, driving themselves forward relentlessly towards
the ever receding goal of “making it”. They rarely stop to consider what they would do if they did make it, and those that do succeed (at least by societies standard) often find themselves bored and lonely until they throw themselves back into the fray.

Essentially, compulsive goal-setting is like playing a game of fetch with yourself - you throw the bones as far as you can (set the biggest goals you can imagine) and then chase them with hyper-focused
attention and continual action. The problem comes when your happiness and self-worth are the bones.

For most compulsive goal-setters, their sense of well-being comes from how well they think they are doing. And since they are constantly raising the bar on what “success” and “making it” mean, they are never doing well enough to feel happy and worthwhile.

There is always more action to be taken and more targets to be reached, so there is never a sense of being content right where you are sitting now. And, I occasionally speculate, if they let themselves they will keep chasing those goals right up until the point where they collapse of physical exhaustion.

My other dog, Abby, is more of what I call a “River Dog”. I call her this based on the writing of Earl Nightingale (founder of Nightingale-Conant), who described “river people” as being those “who
are happiest and most alive when they’re in the river - in whatever business or career or profession it happens to be. And success comes to such people as inevitably as a sunrise. In fact, they are
successes the moment they find their great field of interest; the worldly trappings of success will always come in time.”

Abby loves the park, and she loves the house. She loves going for a run with my son, but she seems equally happy and content to hang out on the sofa with our cat. In fact, wherever Abby is, she throws herself into the mix without ever seeming to need things to be a certain way.

Bizarrely, the one game Abby will almost never play is fetch. You can throw her bone as often as you like, but unless you go and get it yourself it will never be seen again.

When it comes to us human beings, I think of these two approaches to life as being less about personality types than behavioral choices. In any moment, we can decide that what we have is not enough and look around for something to fill in the gaps, or we can decide that what we have is exactly what we want. We can turn our “bone of happiness” into a bone of contention and throw it off into some imaginary future, or we can enjoy gnawing on it right here, right now.

As Henry David Thoreau wrote so many years ago:

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to suck the marrow from the bones of life; to put to rout all that was not life, and not to come to the end of life, and discover that I had not
lived.”

———————
Today’s Experiment:
———————

Step one: Take the week off from trying to accomplish anything with your life. Enjoy yourself, enjoy your loved ones, enjoy your work, enjoy your life. If you can’t bring yourself to take the whole week
off, take a few days off from the game of achievement. If you can’t get yourself to take a few days off, just take one. If you can’t even take one day off from the “more, better, faster” game, repeat
step one.

Have fun, learn heaps, and may you live all the days of your life!

With love,
Michael

PS - In case you think I missed out on step two, I didn’t. There is
no step two. When it comes to living fully in the moment, nothing
happens next!

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“If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you aren’t afraid of dying, there is nothing you can’t achieve.”

-Lao Tzu

Last weekend, I was chatting with the extraordinary therapist/philosopher George Pransky (www.pandacc.com) when he shared a distinction that gave me a whole new understanding of the dynamic underlying not only my frustration with certain world events but also the effectiveness of my own “Effortless Success” programs.

In order to share the distinction with you, I’d like you to imagine there are two separate elements involved in creating anything we want.

The first is an emotional investment - the extent to which we put our happiness, self-worth and well-being on the line in our pursuit of an outcome.

The second is mental and physical involvement - the extent to which we put our creative and physical energies into the creation of that outcome.

There are essentially four ways in which these elements can combine in relation to any goal, problem or circumstance you can imagine in the world.

1. Low Investment/Low Involvement

Low investment/Low involvement is when you don’t particularly care (or even know) about what happens and you are doing pretty much nothing to influence the outcome in any way.

Someone who doesn’t care about sport will be unaffected by the outcome of a sporting match. Someone who has no interest in a relationship, job or world situation will not only not care how those things are going, they will do little or nothing to attempt to influence how things go in the future.

On the plus side, low investment/low involvement is an extremely low stress and relatively easy way to be; the down side is you both miss out on both the fun of creation and the potential impact you could be having in your life and in the world.

2. High Investment/Low Involvement

One of the few fist fights I have ever found myself in came when I misguidedly suggested to a football fan that his team’s loss that day to their cross-city rivals did not really merit the amount of moral outrage he was expressing in the pub that night. This is, in fact, every fan’s dilemma - their moods rise and fall with their team’s fortunes yet outside of cheering loudly and the occasional fervent prayer, there’s nothing they can do to affect the outcome.

This is the high investment/low involvement dilemma - you care too much and do too little. While in some situations this is necessitated by circumstance (i.e. it’s unlikely your favorite team will ever let you out onto the field to make the game winning play), the lack of action is more often due to learned helplessness and emotional paralysis - it seems as though there is so much to be done that you wind up feeling overwhelmed and doing nothing.

3. High Investment/High Involvement

Graduates of motivational seminars, social and political activists, and high-flying entrepreneurs and careerists tend to pursue their goals from a high investment/high involvement point of view. They work long hours, take massive action, do whatever it takes, and then ride the emotional rollercoaster up through the thrill of victory and down into the agony of defeat.

One minute they’re on top of the world; the next their down in the pits of despair. In fact, how well they’re doing often comes down not so much with whether you happen to catch them in an up or a down than with how long they’ve been riding the coaster.

For while this can be an effective approach in the short-term, it often leads to the burn-out/drop-out mentality that stops so many people from actually reaching their goals, and in many people an actual fear of setting goals.

“Oh, no - I’m not putting myself through *that* again” the former eco-warrior or bankrupted businessman will say. Yet lowering your involvement (i.e. doing less, dropping out, not playing anymore, etc.) will not ultimately resolve your desire for change. It will simply give you a bit of time to lick your wounds and recover your spirit before throwing yourself back into the arena in the only way you know how.

4. Low Investment/High Involvement

The two best ways I know to lower your level of emotional investment in an outcome are:

a. Get as clear as you can about what is within your control and what is not.

b. Really see that you will be OK regardless of what happens and how things turn out - that your ultimate happiness and well-being is not at stake.

Years ago, I decided to see what would happen if I engaged in an act of “happy activism” - that is, I would do anything I could think of to get our local council to put a crosswalk in at the intersection near our house, but I would completely let myself off the hook for how things turned out, which I recognized lay well outside of the sphere of my control. While the process wound up taking over a year, to my surprise the entire project was low-stress, extremely enjoyable, and as it happened resulted in a crosswalk.

This is the real pay-off of a low investment/high involvement/”effortless success” approach - you get all the fun of being creatively engaged without any of the stress of being emotionally invested. It’s completely sustainable because it’s not dependant on continual emotional refueling to keep you going. And by letting go of trying to control the uncontrollable (i.e. what other people will do and how things ultimately turn out), you ironically increase your influence and the probability of getting what you want.

——————–
Today’s Experiment:
——————–

1. Make a list of the significant projects, goals or problems you are facing in your life right now.

2. On a scale from 1 - 10, rank yourself for investment (how miserable will you be if this doesn’t work out?) and involvement (how much creativity, engagement and action are you bringing to creating things the way you want them to be?).

3. Choose one project or goal to deliberately take a low-investment/high-involvement approach to and notice what you notice.

Have fun, learn heaps, and happy experimenting!

With love,
Michael

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“The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

-Marcel Proust

I was speaking with a friend yesterday who told me about a simple conversation which changed her life.

She was in the midst of complaining to one of her teachers about her life when she said “I guess what I really want is to be happy.”

He smiled at her and asked, “Do you ever get a happy feeling?”

“Occasionally,” she replied.

“Do more of that,” he said.

Nonplussed by the simplicity of the reply, she went on to discuss her failing marriage.

“Was there a time when your marriage was happy?” her teacher asked.

“Well of course, in the beginning.”

“What was different?”

She thought about it for a few moments.

“I guess when we were first together I wasn’t so critical of him all the time. Nowadays I’m obsessed with every stupid thing he’s ever done, and when we’re together it feels like I’m just waiting to see how he’ll mess things up this time.

In the early days, I couldn’t stop thinking about what a great guy he was and running through all the fun times we had together in my mind. All I wanted to do was just enjoy hanging out with him.”

Her teacher smiled again, said “Do more of that”, and walked away.

She said that her first response to the conversation was shock and a bit of anger at her difficult, difficult problems being dismissed like that. “After all,” she thought to herself, “that’s the kind of simplistic advice I would expect from my grandmother!” But then something shifted.

She could see her future out in front of her like a line, and she saw how her constant obsession with her husband’s faults would lead to an unpleasant separation and divorce. Then she imagined making his good qualities more important than his bad ones and simply enjoying his company and could see a long and increasingly happy life together stretching on out into the future.

When she imagined herself continuing to obsess about her unhappiness, her image of the future became cloudy and grey; as soon as she imagined herself “doing more happy feelings”, it brightened up and just thinking about it made her smile.

Since I knew her to be someone who was generally very happy and whose marriage, while no doubt not perfect, seemed perfectly wonderful, I asked her how she had made the change.

“It was actually quite easy”, she replied. “Once I really saw the impact of my obsessing with what’s wrong and compared it to the possibility of focusing on what’s right, I just naturally started to do less of what wasn’t working and more of what was.”

“But what about when you were caught up in a negative spin?” I asked.

“I either waited it out, knowing it was just a low mood and would pass,” she said, “or sometimes, I just changed my mind.”

Now it was my turn to be nonplussed.

“You just changed your mind?”

“Sure. Haven’t you ever had a negative reaction to something but then, as you learned more about it, you decided that it was actually a good thing?”

“Of course. When Nina first told me she was pregnant, I thought it was a disaster and that I was going to have to give up my work and become a plumber. As soon as my son was born, I realized how gloriously wrong I had been and now having kids is one of the most wonderful things in my life.”

My friend smiled at me mischievously.

“Do more of that.”

——————–
Today’s Experiment:
——————–

1. Think about a situation in your life you would like to change for the better.

2. Divide a piece of paper into two columns. In the left hand column, jot down everything that’s wrong with that situation and how you behave in relation to it.

3. Next, use the right hand column to note anything that *is* working and how you behave in relation to it when you are at your best.

4. Look at the left hand column. Imagine how this situation will wind up if you keep thinking about it and responding to it like this.

5. Now, do the same with the right hand column. What would it be like if it kept getting better and you kept responding to it in this way?

6. Whatever you discover that works in the right hand column, do more of that!

Have fun, learn heaps, and when you’re convinced there’s no hope, realize that it might be time to change your mind…

With love,
Michael

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“Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.”

-Richard Bach

My friend and mentor Bill Cumming has lived what I consider to be an extraordinary life. After over fifteen years campaigning in the civil rights movement and creating a number of programs for individual and team empowerment (including the pilot for the program now known as ‘Upward Bound’), his life changed forever when his nine year old daughter Joy was raped just a few hundred yards from his Ohio home.

In that moment, Bill realized he was fully capable of the kind of violence he had spent so many years campaigning against, and his work turned in a new direction - what are the true causes of violence in our society and how can they be changed?

During the course of his research, he visited a prison in Somers, Connecticut and spent time with a group of murderers, rapists and other violent offenders who had been working with a man named Dr. Nick Groth for over a year. To Bill’s surprise, rather than blaming what they had done on their often horrific upbringings filled with abuse, violence and criminal neglect, each of these men took full responsibility for their lives.

Towards the end of their time together, one man who had committed three rape/murders and held no possibility of parole took Bill to one side and expressed his heartfelt compassion and sorrow for what had happened to Joy.

In that moment, Bill realized that if he was capable of murder and a murderer was capable of that degree of compassion, the capacity for all things must live inside all of us. As he wrote in the course manual for ‘What One Person Can Do’ (see the ‘Want to Learn More?’ section at the end of the tip to learn
more):

“What I learned in this unusual laboratory is that it is possible, given two critical factors, for even the most violent people to develop meaningful, productive, contributory lives, even within the confines of a maximum security prison. The fact that this is so speaks volumes in terms of what we can do…

The critical factor…was getting these individuals to know that they are loved (i.e. cared about, valued) and that they are able to make choices…IF IT IS POSSIBLE IN THIS ENVIRONMENT, WITH THESE MEN, IT IS POSSIBLE AT EVERY MOMENT IN EVERY ENVIRONMENT WITH ANYONE.”

In private conversation, Bill has told me on numerous occasions that in nearly every instance he has seen where a person has turned their life around, there was the presence of at least one individual who loved (cared for, valued) them unconditionally and believed in them and in their capacity to choose - to make different choices and fundamentally change the direction, quality and character of their lives.

At first, I felt that Bill’s work was very important but not terribly relevant to my own life. After all, nothing that horrific has ever happened to me or the people I care about most. But I soon came to realize that the same critical factors were present any time I overcame a crisis in my own life.

My parents believed in my mental strength and capacity at a time where I was so messed up I thought they were the ones who were nuts for believing in me. Charlie Helfert and Dale Moffit, professors at Southern Methodist University believed in me enough to not only bring me in to their professional actor training program but to refuse to let me be pushed out even when some of their perhaps more ’sensible’ colleagues were lobbying for my expulsion.

Their belief in me forced me to question my own sense of worthlessness. If they thought there was something inside me worth spending time on and salvaging, maybe there really was. In short, they believed in me long enough and consistently enough that I began to search inside myself for the strength they seemed to see so effortlessly inside me.

And since I found that strength and began to use it to create my own wonderful life, I have felt equally committed to believing in others - to making the choice to treat the people I come into contact with as though they too have the power within them to choose and to change. And miraculously, consistently, they prove me right - again and again and again.

So I’d like to conclude today’s tip not with an experiment, but with an invitation - the invitation to become ‘a believer’. A believer is someone who chooses to believe in the capacity inside each one of us to be more than we thought we were capable of - to fly higher and travel harder and arrive triumphantly, creating lives that make us (and often everyone around us) go ‘Wow!’.

There’s no movement to join, no manifesto to sign - just a gentle reminder and open invitation to be the difference maker in someone else’s life and to be open to having that difference made in your own. Tell someone you believe in them. Mean it. Demonstrate it in the way you treat them. Then stand back and watch their life begin to blossom and bloom.

I began today’s tip with a quote from Richard Bach’s wonderful book ‘Illusions’ - “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.”

I’ll put it somewhat less poetically, but hopefully with equal
strength:

“Argue for your possibilities, and sure enough, you will find so much more capacity and ability inside you than you have ever dreamed is possible.”

With love,
Michael

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“Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future; practice these acts. As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least to do no harm.”

-Hippocrates

When I was in my mid-20’s, I was understudying two of the male leads in a production in the West End of London. The show was a hit, and it was to my great surprise that one evening about two months into the run, one of the actors whose part I had to be prepared to take over on any given night was struck by a bout of nerves.

“Why are you nervous?” I asked, less from a helpful stance than because I was genuinely curious. After all, he had now done the play well over 50 times to great acclaim from audiences and critics alike.

“Because now they *expect* me to be good,” he said, bitingly. “Now I have something to live up to!”

While at the time I muttered some generic encouragement and shook my head at this ‘victim of success’, I must admit to now having a greater understanding of what he was putting himself through.

I used to walk out in front of a group to deliver a talk or a workshop with the simple intention of sharing the best of what I know from my heart. If people liked it and acted on what I suggested, wonderful; if they didn’t, well, that was a shame but “no harm, no foul”.

But as the years go by and more and more people have heard me speak and my books and tips and radio shows have brought me some measure of reputation and authority, I notice people are now willing to act on my suggestions simply because they’re my suggestions.

They’re more likely to bypass their own inner wisdom in favor of my clever catechisms, using my ideas not as catalysts for their inspiration but as a temporary replacement. “After all”, one recent seminar attendee said to me, “you’re *you* and I’m only me!”

This came to a head for me this weekend when I was speaking at the United Nations to a relatively small group of delegates, spouses, interns and friends. The talk was an exploration of cultural mythology and how it impacts our pursuit of success and happiness.

Afterwards, as often happens, people came up to me seeking guidance about situations in their personal lives, ranging from diplomatic issues to weight loss to child rearing. But when one young person came up to me wanting to know whether I thought they should “break free of cultural mythology” and give up their virginity before marriage, I understood my actor friend’s conundrum:

*It’s easier to express yourself freely when nobody cares about what you have to say.*

That leaves those of us who want to help with an interesting dilemma of our own. The more successful we become in our desire to make a positive difference in the world, the more capable we become of doing harm. Do we press on with a willingness to “kill one, save many”? Or do we mute ourselves, following the Hippocratic dictum to “first, do no harm”?

Would Nietzsche have written so boldly about the “Ubermensch” if he knew of the Holocaust it might inspire? Would Jesus have spoken so boldly about love if he knew of the many wars which would follow in his name?

While I neither pretend nor aspire to having that level of impact in the world, the question is the same whether you are raising a family or leading a nation - will you be of greatest service by stepping forth or holding back - by actively helping or by “doing no harm”?

I am a man of my time so I get my inspiration as often from the movies as I do from ancient philosophical treatises. And for me, I have found my own resolve to this dilemma in the Frank Capra film “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Jimmy Stewart’s character wishes he had never been born, and his wish is granted. An angel named Clarence guides him through a vision of a world where his voice had never been heard. And in the darkness of that vision, he becomes re-acquainted with his light and the difference he was born to make.

Here’s the best of what I know, shared from my heart:

You have a wisdom inside you - listen for it.
You have a light inside you - feel it shine.
You have the power to speak and act and make things manifest in the world - let your wisdom and light guide you as you do.

With love,
Michael

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My thanks to those of you who pointed out that I got the dates wrong in this week’s Vegas update e-mail…

 I was trying to point out how much fun it would be to see you in Las Vegas for a talk based on the material in my book “Feel Happy Now!”.  I even remembered to mention that you could see Louise Hay, Robert Holden, Marianne Williamson, Wayne Dyer and many other luminaries in the self-help/spiritual development field at the Hay House conference that weekend. 

Unfortunately, I said it was happening in July, and it’s actually in just under 2 weeks time at the end of June!

To learn more and register, visit:
http://lasvegas2008.icandoit.net/

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(Spoiler alert: In today’s tip, I’ll be giving away key plot points from the animated feature “Kung Fu Panda”. Which in fairness is a bit like trying to give away key plot points from an episode of ‘Lassie’ (Timmy gets into trouble and his dog saves him? Really?) but I thought I ought to mention it up front…

In honor of Father’s day, the kids and I went to see a movie this weekend called “Kung Fu Panda”, about the adventures of a young panda named Po with low self-esteem but big dreams. Despite his father’s promise that one day he will inherit the family’s thriving noodle business and finally be told the secret ingredient of their famous “Secret Ingredient Soup”, our panda protagonist decides to follow his heart and attend a competition to reveal the identity of the legendary “Dragon Warrior”, a long prophesied hero who will bring 1000 years of peace to China through the mastery of the secrets of the mysterious “Dragon Scroll”.

As fate would have it, the panda himself is revealed to be the one, much to the chagrin of the many kung-fu masters who believed themselves to be the only ones worthy of the secrets of infinite power contained in the scroll. But when Po finally proves himself in combat and earns the right to read the ancient scroll, he is crushed to find it blank - there is nothing written on the shiny gold paper no matter how closely he looks.

Now, at this point in the movie, I must confess my mind began to wander, and after a time it settled on a memory of my sitting under a tree in Hyde Park in London, peeling an onion. In my early spiritual explorations, I had read many analogies of the mind being like an onion and meditation being like peeling back the layers of that onion until the true self would be revealed. In the spirit of experimentation and laziness, I decided to shortcut twenty years of meditation and just peel an onion directly to find out for myself what would happen.

As layer after layer was peeled away, I found myself getting quite excited as I approached the heart of the onion. What would be revealed? What would I find at the very center of my “onion mind”?

But when I pulled away the last bit of peel, I realized to my dismay that there was no core at all - I had arrived at my destination only to discover that there was no “there” there.

Disappointed, I looked around the park. To my surprise, in that moment my perspective completely shifted. Suddenly nothing became everything, and I became the park. Unfiltered by the layers of the onion, I was left to hold the whole world in the palm of my hand. I sat there in timeless silence, marveling at the beauty of what had been invisible to me only moments before.

At that point, I was dragged back into real time by my daughter who wanted some more popcorn. I looked back up at the screen to see Po’s father about to reveal the secret ingredient of “Secret Ingredient Soup”. I was not surprised to learn that the secret was that there was no secret ingredient. What made the soup special was the belief that any soup with a “secret ingredient” had to be special.

Po got a curious look on his face, and then once again took out the empty Dragon scroll. Only this time, instead of nothing, he saw the secret of infinite power revealed in his own face reflected on the shiny gold paper…

Have fun, learn heaps, and in the words of the mystical turtle Oogway:

“The past is history,
the future mystery;
Only this moment is a gift.
That’s why they call it ‘the present’.”

With love,
Michael

PS - COACHING MASTERY IN LONDON THIS SEPTEMBER!

The next Coaching Mastery training will be taking place in London this September. Here’s what some past attendees have said about the training:

“I’ve been lucky enough to learn from many outstanding coaches and for me Michael is the best of them all. His Coaching Mastery Workshops are a must for anyone who is looking to develop their coaching skills and ethos, grow their coaching business or simply increase their chances of having a wonderful life.”
- Richard Nugent

“It was a really great experience. I had little coaching experience before, but I successfully applied the techniques I learnt and it significantly boosted my self-confidence in coaching one-to-one.”
- Ausra Jakaitiene

If you’re ready to take your skills (and income) to the next level, visit http://www.coachingmastery.co.uk to learn more and book now.

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“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule but to
schedule your priorities.”

-Stephen R. Covey

The US Army used to have a slogan that read “We get more done
before breakfast than most people do all day.” Over the past
few weeks, I have been experimenting with a practical
application of this slogan to my working day. Instead of
getting started on the overnight e-mails or getting stuck in to
my daily task list, I deliberately choose something which
*doesn’t* need to be done today and make that the first project
of the day.

Here’s what this looked like last week:

Monday: Wrote a few pages of my new book, “Supercoach”

Tuesday: Did some on-line research on potential project partners
for training work

Wednesday: Wrote an e-course for a new web project

Thursday: Worked on “Supercoach”

Friday: Read a few chapters of “Why Work Sucks and How to Fix
It” by Cali Ressler and Jodi Thompson

In each case, I spent between 30 - 90 minutes on the project,
and in each case I then moved on to my daily dose of e-mails,
appointments and to-do’s. In other words, I prioritized what
was important over what was urgent, knowing that anything which
was truly urgent would get done anyways but anything which
wasn’t (longer-term goals, projects and explorations) might
not.

Now, this is by no means an idea which originates with me - time
management experts from Julie Morgenstern (”Don’t Answer E-mail
in the Morning”) to Mark Forster (”Do it Tomorrow”) and Michael
Masterson (”Automatic Wealth”) have been preaching the benefits
of beginning your day on your terms for years. But what has
been a revelation to me is just how much easier it is to get
stuff done *before* I open myself up to the input of the day.

Once I’ve answered my first e-mail or picked up my first phone
message, my brain automatically begins solving other people’s
problems or responding to their heartfelt questions. And
there’s a part of me that loves that - I want to be of service
and I enjoy being able to make a difference in people’s lives.
But by simply delaying that process by an hour or so each
morning, I get to put my first things first.

And because I know I’m taking care of what matters most to me,
I’m much more inclined to then take care of what matters most to
the people around me.

——————–
Today’s Experiment:
——————–

1. Starting tomorrow, begin each day with at least 5 minutes of
work on something which you really want to do but know doesn’t
*have* to be done today. As you get more comfortable with this
idea, extend the time to 15 minutes, then 30 minutes or more.

2. Create a “frontlog”. Everyone knows about backlogs, but a
frontlog is simply a list of all those things which you know
will be on your to-do list later in the week, month or year but
wouldn’t otherwise make the list now. When you find yourself
with free time you want to spend moving things forward, you can
begin clearing your frontlog instead of filling that time with
busy work or idle surfing.

Have fun, learn heaps, and contemplate this quote from Alan
Cohen:

“On the day you die, you will have unanswered e-mail in your
inbox.”

With love,
Michael

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New show this week on ‘YOU CAN HAVE WHAT YOU WANT’
(Live internet radio at http://www.hayhouseradio.com)

Thursday, June 12 at Noon pacific/3pm eastern/8pm UK

Join me and Dr. Robert Holden, Oprah’s favorite happiness guru,
for this fast-paced and humorous exploration of how to enjoy
real, soulful success while living in a manic, busy, and
hyped-up world.

To speak with us live during the show, phone these numbers:

Inside the US (Toll free)
1-866-254-1579

From the UK/Outside the US
001-760-918-4300

You can listen to the show live this and every Thursday - simply
go to hayhouseradio.com at Noon pacific/8pm UK and
click on the button marked ‘Listen Now’.

MISSED AN EPISODE?  FIND IT HERE!

If you missed last week’s show on “Clean Pain, Dirty Pain”
including a real-time exploration of coping with a degenerative
illness, you can listen to it now by visiting the archives at
hayhouseradio.com.

Simply download any show to your iPod or stream them live on
your computer!

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“The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves
miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the
same. ”

-Carlos Castaneda

Nina and I were at a friend’s birthday party this weekend when
the conversation turned to ‘the worst thing your children have
ever done’.  While everyone went in to the conversation
convinced their story would win the day, I sensed we all left
the conversation grateful that we had the kids we have and
wondering how on earth those poor other parents coped!

In thinking about it afterwards, it reminded me of a letter I
first read in the sociologist Robert Cialdini’s seminal work
“Influence: Science and Practice”…

“Dear Mom and Dad,

It has now been three months since I left for college. I have
been remiss in writing this and I am very sorry for my
thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you
up to date now, but, before you read on, please sit down. I
repeat, please, YOU ARE NOT TO READ ANY FURTHER UNLESS YOU ARE
SITTING DOWN.

All right now; this is not easy to write about. I am getting
along pretty well now. The skull fracture, and the concussion I
got when I jumped out of the window of my dormitory when it
caught fire shortly after my arrival, is pretty well healed.
Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory and my jump, were
witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm.

Now about this attendant, he was the one who called the fire
department and the ambulance. He also visited me at the
hospital, and since I had nowhere to live because of the burned
out dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his
apartment with him and his three buddies. It’s really a basement
room, but it’s kind of cute.

He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are
planning to be married. We haven’t set the exact date yet, but
it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mom and
Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to
being grandparents. I know you will welcome the baby and give it
the love, devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a
child.

The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend
has some minor infection which prevents us from passing our
pre-marital blood tests, and I carelessly caught it from him.
This will soon clear up with the penicillin injections I am
having daily. I know you will welcome him into our family with
open arms. He is kind and, although not well educated, he is
ambitious.

Although he is of a different race and religion than ours, I
know your often expressed tolerance will not permit you to be
bothered by the fact that his skin color is different than ours.
I am sure you will love him as I do. His family background is
good too, for I am told that his father is an important weapons
dealer in the village from which he came.

After college, and until he finds a decent job, we’ll be using
my old bedroom. We aren’t asking for a large wedding; in fact,
maybe just something for the immediate family in front of a
judge. Maybe just you, dad, grandma and grandpa, and whatever
family he has. Don’t worry about them; they will be happy just
to stay in our basement.

Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that
there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or a
skull fracture. I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant and
I am not engaged. I do not have syphilis and there is no man
(of any color) in my life.

However, I got a ‘D’ in History and an ‘F’ in Science, and I
just wanted you to see those marks in the proper perspective.

Your Loving Daughter”

The point of this letter, as I’m sure you have worked out for
yourself, is that how we feel about something is very much
determined by the context in which we are thinking about it.

Many a parent has blown a gasket at their son or daughter’s poor
grades who would be only too happy to return to a time where
poor grades were the biggest challenge they were facing.

Similarly, it is entirely possible to excel in every area of
your life and still feel a failure if you are continually
comparing your achievements to those of someone who is simply
further along their path than you are on yours.

One of the revelations of my recent life was when I realized
that I am only now the age my father was when I was born.  Truth
is, I have no idea what he was like in the 40 years or so
before I joined him on the planet, yet I still spent much of my
20’s and 30’s comparing my own marriage, business and parenting
skills to his and striving to live up to what I was making up
to be his example.

In NLP, we call this pattern of judging ourselves and others
against an invisible standard a “comparative deletion”.  That
is, whenever we consider something in our life to be “good” or
“bad”, we are leaving out the key distinction - good or bad
compared to what?

Compared to all those happily married Nobel prize winning
academically gifted genius friends of yours, things might not be
going so well for you.  But compared to the millions of people
who are still living in hunger and poverty as we speak, I’m
guessing your life is actually quite amazing.

If you like, you could use that comparison to create a feeling
of guilt; if you prefer, you can use it to tap into the
authentic gratitude that comes with realizing how incredibly
blessed you already are.

With love,
Michael

PS - What happens in Vegas…

…can change your life!

I will be doing my only US talk based on the material in
“Feel Happy Now!” in Las Vegas on the 29th of June, alongside
such personal and spiritual development luminaries as Wayne
Dyer, Marianne Williamson, and Louise Hay.

To join us and learn more, click here

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