A quick note from Michael:

Today’s tip is adapted from my new book Supercoach: 10 Secrets to Transform Anyone’s Life. You can pre-order the book and receive a 34% discount by clicking here.

Jeremy had joined a network marketing company and hired me to help him boost his self-esteem. He had heard a motivational speaker talking about the importance of self-image and self-worth in creating success, and decided that what was holding him back was his low opinion of himself.

In our first session together, I asked him how he knew that low self-esteem was what was holding him back. He looked shocked.

‘Don’t you need high self-esteem to succeed?’

Having worked with some of the most successful people in Hollywood, most of whom had the self-esteem of a gnat, I knew that most of what people called ’self’ esteem was actually based on how things appeared to be going in their lives, and went up and down on a daily basis.

I then told him the story of when my son Oliver, aged six, was first learning to play baseball. A few weeks into the season, he came to me and said ‘Daddy, I want to quit - I don’t want to play anymore.’ When I asked him why he wanted to quit, he shocked me by saying ‘Because I’m crap at baseball.’

Now, if I really thought that self-image and self-esteem were the keys to success, I would have given him the ‘go get-em tiger’ speech. I would have talked to him about how he needed to ‘believe to achieve’ and ‘whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right’.

But when he said to me ‘I’m crap at this’, I said to him ‘Yes you are. But here’s the question - do you want to get good at it?’

Well, his little eyes lit up. It had never occurred to him that being good at baseball was something you could learn, not something you were born able to do. And I said to him ‘Well here’s how we do it. Every day you’re gonna throw me fifty throws and I’m going to throw you fifty and we’re going to take fifty swings and I guarantee within a month you’re going to be pretty good at this.’

And we did, and he was, and funnily enough he started liking it a whole lot more as well.

The reason self-image is so important, or so the experts tell us, is that we will inevitably live into our self-image - that is, we become more and more like the person we think (or are afraid) we really are. So if someone believes or “sees themselves” as shy, they will tend to behave shyly; if they see themselves confident, they will tend to behave in a more confident manner.

This leads to a host of level one and level two interventions. At level one, we use our physiology to create a greater sense of confident by standing up straight, shoulders back, and looking people straight in the eye. We might back this up with both affirmations (”I am confident, I AM confident, I am CONFIDENT!”) and affirmative actions of the “feel the fear and do it anyway” variety.

At level two, we go to work on the self-image directly. We use hypnosis, relaxation and guided visualization to change the pictures we have of ourselves in our mind. We run movies of our past successes and condition ourselves over 21 days or 30 days or however long it takes for us to begin to see ourselves in a new light.

Now, it’s important to point out that this will have a powerful effect on you and the way you are in the world. But even if I had done all that with Oliver, he still would have been crap at baseball - he just would have thought he was good at it.

This is echoed by a 2003 global study into the relationship between self-esteem and math ability in middle school students. Of the 10 countries with the highest level of student confidence, only Israel and the United States scored higher than average on the international test, and their scores were far below those of the much less confident students in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

What I suggested to Jeremy was that rather than work on his confidence, self-image or even self-esteem, he work on his business and the creative art of selling, he seemed a bit disappointed. But I then talked with him about the true source of self-esteem - his own innate wellbeing.

I pointed out that when we take our focus off creating a more beautiful mask and put it towards uncovering our highest, deepest self, we discover that underneath the mask and underneath all the thoughts about what’s wrong with us is something really rather wonderful.

In the end, Jeremy decided that he would rather spend his time being happy and going for what he wanted than going for what he wanted in hopes it would make him happy. In less than a year of connecting with the ‘diamond’ of his essence, he had become a ‘diamond’ in his network as well.
——————–
Today’s Experiment:
——————–
1. Take the week off from working on yourself in any way. Don’t try to change, improve, or fix yourself - just enjoy hanging out with your work, your hobbies and your loved ones.

2. If you can’t bring yourself to take the whole week off, take a few days off. If you can’t get yourself to take a few days off, just take one. If you can’t even take one day off, repeat step one.

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On my wedding day, a man I had never seen before came up to me and said “You owe me, you know. If it wasn’t for me, your wife would never have been born”. Slightly worried I was stumbling across a dark family secret just moments after joining the family, he went on to tell me his story. He had been travelling in rural England in the 1950’s, and because his watch was running a bit slow he missed his train. While waiting for the next train to arrive, he bumped into a young woman on the platform. They shared a carriage on that train and a little over a year later decided to share their lives with one another.

Still not making the connection, I asked him what that had to do with Nina being born. He seemed surprised that I didn’t get it. “Well, if I hadn’t missed my train I would never have met my wife, and your wife’s parents would never have met each other at our wedding!”

While I was tempted to point out that it was his watchmaker to whom I actually owed the debt of gratitude, it did make me think about all the people and events that conspire and contribute to the creation of everything we have in our lives. For example, if I were to acknowledge everyone that contributed to my writing these tips, I might begin with the coaches and teachers I have had and the authors of the many thousands of books I have read. Going a bit deeper, I would acknowledge each one of their coaches and teachers and friends and parents (and friends of their parents who introduced them) all the way back up each family tree to the very beginning of time.

Widening my quest for a truly complete acknowledgement, I would begin with my laptop and track back not only to the manufacturers but to the inventors of the computer and the miners of the silicon that was used to create the tiny chip that runs the whole machine. And then no matter how far and wide I chose to go, I would need to once again follow each tributary back upstream to the people who created the people who created the people who… well, you get the idea.

And although I am of the generation who take a sort of perverse pride in beginning all conversations about God with the phrase “I’m spiritual, but not religious”, at some point I would need to acknowledge a creator or source for all these people and watches and silicon chips, or at the very least acknowledge the planet as a whole for sustaining all those lives who contributed to all the things I have and get to share with my own life.

While it can be a bit exhausting if you try too hard to actually acknowledge everything that contributes to who you are and what you have in your life, a little bit of effort can go a very long way in making who you are and what you have feel just a little bit more sacred. There’s something almost magical that happens to the taste of my peanut butter sandwich when I take a few moments to acknowledge the farmers who harvested the wheat and peanuts in order for it to one day get stuck to the roof of my mouth.

And therein lies the key to today’s tip:

We live in an interconnected universe, where everything contributes to everything. When we pretend that we exist in our own self-sustaining bubble, we begin to feel isolated and alone. Other people’s problems seem to have nothing to do with us, and we either fight for our piece of the pie or retreat to the corner and wait for the fighting to stop.

But the moment we take the time to acknowledge those people and things that enable us to do what we do and have what we have, we re-connect to the wider world. We see the impossibility of any one of us surviving without the help of each one of us and act accordingly. And when you live your life with full acknowledgement of your place as a citizen of this world, you will always feel connected, supported, and whole.

——————–

Today’s Experiment

——————–

For many years now, my family and I have begun each family dinner with a ritual my 6 year old calls “gratefuls”. It has enriched our lives beyond measure, and I share it with you in hopes it will at the very least bring a smile to your face and some extra flavor to your next meal…

1. Before eating, ask each person to acknowledge aloud some things that they are grateful for. These things don’t have to have anything to do with the meal - in my own household they often range from the mundane (”I’m grateful for this lovely dinner, I’m grateful I got to have a sleep-over at Grant’s house”) to the strange (”I’m grateful that yesterday was Kwanzaa, I’m grateful for toast”) to the truly wonderful (”I’m grateful that you guys are my parents, I’m grateful that we’re a family, I’m grateful that seeds know how to magic flowers from their tummies”).

2. Enjoy your meal!

Have fun, learn heaps, and thank you for being a part of my life in 2008 - without you there to read, I would never sit down to write!

With love,
michael

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A quick note from Michael:

Today’s tip is adapted from my new book Supercoach: 10 Secrets to Transform Anyone’s Life. You can pre-order the book and receive a 34% discount by clicking here.

When we take the pressure off ourselves to be exceptional - that is, the exception to the rule - we recognize that “good enough” is nearly always good enough, and that no matter how hard we try, we will never really be able to do more than one thing at any given time.

This does not mean we have to always go slowly - just that when we are willing to slow down, we are often able to make much quicker progress on what matters most in our lives.

Several years ago, I had child psychologist and author Alfie Kohn as a guest on my radio show. At one point, I asked him if he had any tips for how to be a more caring and effective parent when you were in a hurry. His answer, tongue only slightly in cheek, was ‘don’t be in a hurry.’

While I laughed at the time, the more I thought about it the more I realized what excellent advice that is, not only for parenting but for pretty much any area of our lives.

When we are in a hurry, we tend to get sloppy and things go undone or worse still, half-done. Our best intentions often go out the window and our values shift, expediency and ‘getting stuff done’ leapfrogging their way up the list above such old-fashioned priorities as treating people with respect, doing things right the first time and even enjoying the process.

Stress is a hurrier’s constant companion, as there’s never enough time and there’s always too much to do with it. As time gets short, tempers get shorter, and a frayed nerve often snaps in the face of a loved one.

While there are any number of ‘outside-in’ approaches to getting more done with less stress, effective time management evolves naturally out of our understanding of the 6th secret:

No matter what seems to be going on in our lives,
we don’t have to do anything.

“That’s insane”, one client told me when I first introduced this idea. “I don’t know about you, but I have to go to work in the morning.”

“Do you?” I responded. “What would happen if you didn’t?”

“If I didn’t go to work, then I’d lose my job!”

Ignoring the likely fallacy of that statement, I continued.

“So you choose to go to work because you want to keep your job?”

“Fair enough,” he said, though he didn’t look happy about it. “But I have to eat! If I don’t eat, I’ll die!”

“OK,” I replied. “So you choose to eat because you want to live?”

The reality is, every single thing you do or don’t do is a choice. And while personally I’m a big fan of making choices that lead to things like money and food, nowadays in most cultures you don’t even have to do that to survive. If you never got up from where you’re sitting right now, someone would eventually come to check on you, if only to find out what that extraordinary smell was.

And at that point, if you continued to choose not to move or speak or feed yourself, some other people, (usually dressed in white with friendly smiles and a lot of upper body strength) would come by and scoop you up, give you new clothes to wear and a lovely padded room to live in. They would even feed you more than enough to stay alive, though admittedly the quality of that life would be somewhat less than what you are probably accustomed to.

So the corollary to our secret (”you don’t have to do anything”) is this:

Everything that you do (or don’t do) is a choice.
Given that, why would anyone ever choose to do anything they didn’t want to do?

Two reasons:

1. Because they think it’s necessary to do that thing in order to get or maintain something that they want

2. In order to live up to an idea or ideal of how they think they’re supposed to be in the world

In other words, we do what we do (and don’t do what we don’t do) either because we want to, because we think it is a pre-requisite towards getting something else that we want (i.e. because we “have” to), or because we think it will make us into the kind of person we want to be (i.e. because we “should”).

The question ‘why?’ gets a bad name in some coaching circles because when it’s asked about anything which happened in the past, the answer is invariably a story filled with confabulations that could usefully be edited down to the phrase “because it seemed like a good idea at the time”.

But when we ask the question in the present about what we are planning for the future, we quickly get an insight into our motivation.

If we hear a lot of ‘need to’, ‘have to’ and ‘musts’, we may have fallen into the trap of thinking there’s something we have to do to survive. If there are lots of justifications and rationalizations, chances are we’re doing something because we think it will help us to reinforce our self-image or live into the kind of person we ’should’ be. But when the answer is some variation on ‘because I want to’, chances are that we are following our inner wisdom.

Here’s a simple chart to make the difference clearer:

The more quickly you can recognize the difference, the easier it will be to recognize it as a choice and if you want to, choose something different.

——————–

TODAY’S EXPERIMENT

——————–

1. What are the three things which you most urgently need to get done?

2. For each of those things, ask yourself the following questions:

• What would happen if I did (get it done)?
• What would happen if I didn’t?
• What wouldn’t happen if I did?
• What wouldn’t happen if I didn’t?

3. Experiment with putting each of the following sentence starters before each task on your to-do list this week. Notice how each one makes you feel and whether it inspires you to take positive action:

• I have to…
• I should…
• I want to…
• In this moment, I choose…

Example:

In this moment, I choose to leave the Christmas shopping until tomorrow, at which point I’ll be able to get it done with a minimum of bother. (Ah, peace…

Have fun, learn heaps, happy holidays, and happy exploring!

With love,
michael

PS - Two of my apprentices, Rich Litvin and Elese Coit, have chosen to give back this holiday season by giving the gift of free coaching sessions!

If you’d like to unleash your natural confidence and begin bringing your true potential to life (but money is in short supply at the moment), this is a great way to finish 2008 and begin 2009 in style and with a smile.

To learn more about Rich Litvin and sign up for a free session, click here

To learn more about Elese Coit and sign up for a free session, click here

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Since the markets began their decline in mid-October and the economies of the world began to follow suit, I have at various times seen myself and others reacting like a number of different species of animal…

1. The Vole

I have always thought it must suck to be a vole. Perhaps the most “victimy” of all of God’s creatures, voles (and their more famous cousins, the lemmings) are doomed to be perpetual prey to a host of other animals. Consequently, voles have to be constantly on alert against attack, a state of adrenaline filled alert that many of us humans have learned to live with as well.

You know you’re living life as a vole if you are continually looking around you for economic predators, spending your time and mental energy on imaginary, fear-inducing scenarios like “what would happen if the government collapses?” or “what if this goes on for another ten years like the great depression?”

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with doing some downside planning - in fact, quite the contrary. It’s that when you keep asking the same old questions without coming up with any new answers, you know you’re just spinning your wheels. (This is actually a behavior most commonly associated with another of the vole’s famous relatives - the hamster!)

2. The Ostrich

Contrary to popular belief, Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand in the face of danger. The mother ostrich create her nest by digging a hole into the ground and laying her eggs into them. She then sits on her “nest eggs” and keeps them safe until they hatch. When danger arises, rather than abandon the eggs to the environment, she lies her neck flat to the ground, which coupled with the bulk of her body being below ground level tends to make her (and her “nest eggs”) virtually invisible to would be predators.

That’s not to say that we humans don’t perpetuate the myth of the ostrich with our own behavior. While some people may certainly be doing their best to pretend nothing is happening, the act itself reveals the fear behind it - you don’t bury your head in the sand unless you’re already afraid!

3. The Bluebottle Fly

The bluebottle fly (affectionately known in parts of the UK as a “blue-arsed fly”) feeds on carrion, pestilence, and dung. For the most part, these flies are just a nuisance as they buzz about the house or garden in search of new piles of feces to feed on and lay eggs in, but the danger of the bluebottle fly is that it can also carry and spread disease.

While not everybody in the media is acting like a bluebottle fly, running from one pile of crap to the next making sure that every single thing which goes wrong is being reported for our edification, enough of us get our primary understanding of what’s going on in the economy from news sound-bites to feel like we know “the buzz”.

Many of us have even caught a low-level “thought-virus” which manifests as continual worry about things which are outside of our control and a curious reluctance to act on those things which are within our control.

Interestingly, the best way to protect against the bluebottle fly isn’t to ignore it or even try to kill it, as each fly is capable of spawning many hundreds more and you will never get rid of the swarm by taking out one of its number. The best ways to protect yourself and your home against the bluebottle fly are to:

a. Not let it into your house in the first place, and

b. Keep your home (and in our analogy, mind) as clean and hygienic as possible

4. The Fox

Foxes are opportunistic scavengers, looking for opportunities to benefit from the misfortune of other animals. This is not their fault; it is simply their nature. (As the comedian Chris Rock famously said after the mauling of a Las Vegas entertainer by his “pet” tiger, “the tiger didn’t go crazy; the tiger went tiger!”)

Of course, the difference between humans and foxes is we do have a choice about where we go to get our sustenance and how we go about getting it. Sowing fear, shorting the markets, and then buying up underappreciated homes and assets at a fraction of their true value may seem like common sense to some, but it’s generally fuelled by the same fear that haunts every scavenger - that just because I have a full stomach today does not mean I will have a full stomach tomorrow.

As business guru Tom Peters recently wrote:

“At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, ‘Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.’”

5. The Lion

Lions are hunters, but they are noteworthy in that:

a. They rarely hunt alone, preferring instead a form of cooperative hunting that allows the maximum return with the least effort, and

b. The one feeds the many - rather than hoarding each kill for itself, the lion (or more often the lioness) will share it’s food first with its own pride but then leave the rest of its bounty for scavengers and other animals to feed upon.

I first heard the following story many years ago as a child - the following version is excerpted from my upcoming book Supercoach…

A man was walking through the woods outside his home one day when he came across a hungry fox who seemed to be at death’s door. Because he was a kind man, he thought to bring it some food, but before he could go back to his home he heard a fearsome roar and hid behind a tree. In seconds, a mountain lion appeared dragging the carcass of its freshly caught prey. The lion ate his fill and then wandered off, leaving the remains for the grateful fox.

The man was overwhelmed with this example of an abundant and benevolent universe and decided that he would not return to his home or his job. Instead of working so hard to provide for himself, he would follow the example of the fox and allow the universe to provide for him.

Needless to say, the fox wandered off and as days turned to weeks, the man himself was hungry and at death’s door. Despite his best efforts to retain his faith, the man was becoming desperate. In a rare moment of inner quiet, he heard the still, small voice of his own wisdom:

“Why have you sought to emulate the fox, instead of the lion?”

With that, the man returned home and ate his fill.

————————
TODAY’S EXPERIMENT
————————

1. What’s going on in your personal economy? Financially speaking, are things going better, worse, or about the same as usual for you?

2. What are your 3 biggest fears about the future? Once you’ve got them out of your head and onto paper, ask yourself Byron Katie’s “story-destroying” questions:

• Is it true?
• Can you really know that it’s true?
• How do you react when you tell yourself that story?
• Who would you be without that story?

3. Which of the animals in today’s tip are you behaving most like -the frightened vole, “invisible” ostrich, buzzing bluebottle, opportunistic fox, or pride-leading lion?

4. If it was not only your job but your nature to provide for your pride, who could you team up or partner with to make for more “happy hunting”? Who else would you like to benefit from your success?

Have fun, learn heaps, and create your own economy!

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In Malcolm Gladwell’s fascinating new book Outliers, he quotes research by Dr. Daniel Levitin into the amount of practice it takes to achieve world-class expert status in whatever field you happen to be involved in.

In Levitin’s own words:

… ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert — in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is the equivalent to roughly three hours per day, or twenty hours per week, of practice over ten years. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people don’t seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

In researching this further online, I came across this fantastic blog entry by David Seah:

What to Do? Just Do!

Starting first with that 10,000 hours of practice: I’d had a similar thought about leveling-up abilities based on a magnitude-of-10 hour scale:

While breaking down the 10,000 hours to mastery in this way can certainly make it seem less daunting, another distinction I have found useful in this arena comes from motivator Anthony Robbins, who recounts his experience of booking himself out as a speaker 3 times a day to anyone who would listen. As Robbins says in the book Awaken the Giant Within.

While others in my organization had 48 speaking engagements a year, I would have a similar number within two weeks. Within a month, I’d have two years of experience. And within a year, I’d have a decade’s worth of growth. My associates talked about how “lucky” I was to have been born with such an “innate” talent. I tried to tell them what I’m telling you now: mastery takes as long as you want it to take.

When someone tells me “I can’t draw well”, or “I’m no good at sports”, or “I’m not a natural writer”, I invariably ask them “how many hours have you spent practicing?” It is very rare indeed that the answer is anywhere near 100 hours, let alone 10,000. The implication is that their apparent lack of skill is usually less a function of a lack of anything on the inside than it is a reflection of a lack of time and effort spent on the outside.

For me, the point of all this is not to give up on something you’d love to do because you’re apparently not very good at it. Almost any worthy goal will succumb to an investment of time – and time is the one commodity that we all have in equal abundance!

—————–

Today’s Experiment

—————–

1. Think of a complex skill you have mastered in the course of your lifetime.

Example: Playing skills (chess, a musical instrument, or a sport); Work related skills (coaching, teaching, brain surgery, etc.); Language skills (learning French, Russian, HTML, etc.)

2. Make a “best guess” as to how many hours you put in between your initial interest in the skill and your relative mastery of it. Over what period of time did you put in those hours?

Example: 250 hours over 1 year, 100 hours over 8 years, 1000 hours in 3 months, etc.

3. Now, choose a skill or project that you are currently working on, and make a “best guess” as to how many hours you have put in to it so far, and how many more hours you will need to put in to get where you want to go.

Example: I’ve put in 60 hours so far; I probably need to spend at least that much time again to get to the level I want to reach.

4. By when would you like to have completed your project or mastered your skill?

A simple calculation will tell you how many hours you need to put in each day, week, month, or year to get where you want to go in the time frame you want to get there.

Have fun, learn heaps, and remember – when you love what you are doing, putting in the hours is a privilege, not a punishment!

With Love,

Michael

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A few months ago, I was sitting in a seminar when a sales trainer drew a circle on a flipchart.

“What is the most important activity in sales?” the trainer asked.

Someone called out “Building your network”, and the sales trainer put an ‘x’ outside the circle.

Another person said “Putting together strong support materials”, and another ‘x’ appeared outside the circle.

More answers came from around the room.

“Building a ‘sticky’ website.”

“Persistence.”

“Research.”

Finally, someone called out “Making sales calls?”

The trainer paused, but then he placed another ‘x’ outside the circle.

The room went quiet as we tried to figure out what it might be. Then the person who had called out “making sales calls” tried again. “Having selling conversations!”

The trainer put a great big ‘check’ inside the circle, and then explained.

“While any of the things outside the circle may be useful, in most sales environments, no sales get made without a one on one conversation between the salesperson and the buyer, even if that conversation is just to conclude the transaction after a decision has been made. Therefore, the most important thing for you to track if you want to be successful in sales is the number of sales conversations you are having.”

On reflection, I realized that the principle behind this sales trainer’s “circle of success” for selling held true in almost any area of business, creativity or life, and could always be found in the answer to this question:

In this area, what is the key activity which MUST happen
in order for a successful result to be achieved?

A little bit later I was talking to a brilliant man who was struggling with the idea of writing a book. I drew a circle up on the board and asked him “what is the one thing which HAS to happen in order for your book to be completed?”

He began listing a number of things like “doing the research”, “creating an outline”, and “developing the premise”. I put three ‘x’s outside the circle and asked him the question a little bit differently:

“What is the one activity without which it is impossible for you to complete this book?”

He looked puzzled for a moment and then the light dawned.

“I need to actually write it.”

That gave us our “magic formula” for successful writing – to spend as much time as possible “inside the circle” – in this case, actually writing pages of his book.

I have since introduced this idea to a number of clients in a variety of professions, and the result is remarkably consistent – when you identify the core activity that will lead to a successful outcome and then work consistently “inside the circle” on that activity, a successful outcome is sure to follow.

————————-

Today’s Experiment

————————-

1. Choose an area of your work or life to explore.

Examples:

financial management, relationships, widget production, etc.

2. Ask yourself this question:

“What is the one activity without which a successful result in this area is virtually impossible?”

Examples:

• In order to successfully manage your finances (at any level of success or business complexity), the three things you MUST track are what you currently have, what is coming in, and what is going out. While there are many other things you can usefully pay attention to, without those three you simply cannot get a clear financial picture.

• In order to create and maintain a wonderful relationship, you MUST connect with that person in some way. No connection, no relationship.

If you are struggling with this, you may like to go through it with a colleague or group of colleagues, as sometimes the obvious answer is the most elusive one. You can also ask for help from our wonderful community of coaches and friends at the Genius Catalyst Forums.

3. Begin to focus on working and tracking that one core activity until you have successfully reached your target or outcome.

Have fun, learn heaps, and work inside the circle of success!

with love,
Michael

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I have always felt a bit uncomfortable about having my picture on the front cover of my books. While I understand that in theory this increases brand recognition and sales, and in so doing the number of people who are able to benefit from the ideas in the books, it also increases the risk of the messenger becoming more important than the message.

The fact that I haven’t completely made my peace with this dilemma was brought to a head a couple of weeks ago when I walked into a hotel in Gothenburg, Sweden, to find myself face to face with a 7 foot high poster of, well, my face. The poster was promoting our “Happy Millionaire” training, and as I followed a series of smaller posters of my face up the stairs I found a table laid out with course workbooks – each one of which had Michael Neill’s face happily staring up at me.

The thing that took the whole thing from slightly uncomfortable to purely comical was when I noticed that each of the 100 or so participants name badges had – you guessed it – my face smiling next to participant’s name.

What it all reminded me of was a conversation I had with a friend where he shared his favorite question with me, one he had first heard from a famous British psychotherapist many years earlier:

If you were invisible, how would you live your life differently?

When he first asked me the question, I couldn’t really understand the point – other than finally fulfilling a childhood ambition of seeing what really goes on inside the girl’s locker room, I didn’t imagine that very much would change. But the more I thought about it, the more I saw the point. If I was really invisible, I wouldn’t spend any more time worrying about how I looked or what people would think of me. I wouldn’t try to do the things a “good person” would do (after all, who would notice?), but I wouldn’t suddenly become a “bad person” either. I would just allow my natural curiosity about other people and the world to begin to guide me.

Think about it for yourself – if you were invisible and no one could see you no matter what you did, what would you choose to do? Would you become a spy? Would you spend more of your time “people watching”, knowing that no one would ever think you were a creep or accuse you of staring? Would you be an invisible helper or an invisible hindrance?

Now, take it a step further – imagine that as well as being invisible, you have no name and no identity. How would you live your life differently if nothing that you did could ever be traced back to “you”? Would you still want to write that book if you couldn’t put your name on the cover? How much of your work is about being of service to others and how much is about advancing the cause of your own career?

If you allow yourself to get into this “thought experiment” without getting too caught up in judging yourself for your answers, you may become fascinated by how much of how you currently live your life is for show and how much is about authentic service and creative contribution.

For me, the image that kept coming up was of the invisible angels in the German fantasy film Der Himmel Uber Berlin, released in English as Wings of Desire. In the movie, there are angels all around us whose unseen touch puts a happy memory, hopeful thought or simple good feeling into our hearts at the moment we need them most. What I realized is that if I were invisible, I would like to be like one of those angels, using my presence to spread possibility, understanding and hope around the world, one person at a time. What I then realized is that I didn’t have to wait until I became invisible to begin.

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Today’s Experiment:
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1. Take some time to really explore how you would live your life differently if you were invisible – no name, no identity, just an unseen presence. Again, be kind to yourself. Allow yourself to explore some of the “naughty” things you’d like to try as well as the more “worthy” sounding ones.

2. Make a list of some of the things you would no longer do if you were invisible. Notice how many of them you could let go of now, and how much more freedom that would give you.

3. Now, make a list of some of the things you would begin to do. If you really want to (and it is safe and appropriate to do so), begin doing them today!

Have fun, learn heaps, and enjoy exploring the freedom of an invisible, impersonal life!

With love,

Michael

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For many of the 18 years or so I have been involved in coaching and training, I have begun my sessions with variations on a simple question:

What do you want?

I would then sift through the various answers, listening for energy, aliveness, congruence, and a sense of “wow!”. This is because of a simple rule of thumb I discovered early on in my work and which I have written about extensively in You Can Have What You Want – that it is easier to have what you actually want than what you think you can get.

Unfortunately, that “wow!” is rarely there on the first iteration. In seeking to understand why this is, I’ve come to notice that the problem is two-fold. First, you’re looking for what’s outside you to satisfy what’s inside you; second, you’re ordering off the menu instead of creating what you really, really want.

Let’s take a closer look at both of these notions in turn:

1. Outside-in vs. Inside-out

Traditional models of success focus on how getting what you want on the outside will get you what you want on the inside – all you need to do to be happy and fulfilled is to do fulfilling work, achieve worthy goals, have loving relationships with people who share your values, and leave a legacy by making a positive difference in the world.

While any one of these things can be wonderful in their own right, the minute you begin relying on them to be the source of your good feelings, you become subject to the stresses and worries that most of us think of as a “normal” part of life. After all, if the source of your well-being could leave you, fire you, change, or not work out as planned, you need to be on constant guard as change is almost certainly an enemy no matter how friendly its disguise.

When you look at success from the inside-out, stress disappears and worry becomes almost non-existent because the source of your well-being is inside you – your own very human nature. You realize that you were born happy, and the worst thing that can ever happen to you is a thought – generally speaking, a thought about whatever you think is the worst thing that could ever happen to you.

In the world of happy success, things still won’t always work out as you’d hoped or planned, but that just becomes a fact of life instead of a problem to be solved. And since you live in a state of being full (of life, of joy, of love and of peace), going outside yourself to “find fulfillment” loses most of its appeal.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you won’t still do all sorts of weird and wonderful things with your life – just that you will be using what’s inside you to create things on the outside instead of doing them the other way around.

2. Ordering off the menu vs. Creating what you want

When I first ask people what they want, they generally go up into their heads to order off an invisible menu of possibilities that have been programmed and conditioned into their brains throughout their lives.

For most people, that menu is so limited that “nothing seems to inspire me” is a common complaint. This is one of the reasons that a coach can be such a huge help in moving forward - the coach generally has access to a larger menu with more choices available, consequently opening up new possibilities in the minds of their clients.

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

But let’s take a look at where this analogy breaks down in the real world. For starters, we’ll imagine that you’re out to lunch and nothing on the menu particularly appeals. Because you know you’re expected to order something, you choose the tuna fish sandwich – a perfectly acceptable if slightly dull choice. Now the waiter comes along and gives you a list of the specials, and suddenly you’ve got a wider range of things to choose from. This time you go for the Croque Monsieur – a blend of toasted ham and cheese and mustard that has your mouth watering in a way that makes you sure that this will be the thing that will really quench your hunger.

Here’s the problem…

What if you’re not that hungry? And what if the sandwich turns out to not be what you thought it would be, and instead of biting into a little slice of heaven your lips purse as you chew your way through a stale and slightly soggy ham and cheese sandwich?

This is again the way life seems for so many of us – we don’t know what we really want so we go for the best thing we can find, assuming that something will be better than nothing but ultimately feeling uncreative, unsatisfied, and unfulfilled by what we get.

While asking “what do you want” with intention and awareness can certainly get at the real desires lurking underneath the straitjacket of societal acceptability, an even more powerful question is this:

What would you love to create?

When we come to the table as a creator, we are no longer limited by whatever happens to be on the menu, because we know we can always go into the kitchen and cook up something wonderful of our own.

And what if instead of seeing ourselves at a cosmic restaurant we viewed our life as a blank canvas, or a musical score waiting to be written, or even a raw, unformed lump of clay? We would then be free to create absolutely anything - and if we don’t like what we’ve created up until this point, we can always throw it away and start again.

Then the natural artistry you were born with as a child has the space to come out and play, and circumstances stop being “good” or “bad” or “right” or “wrong” but simply the raw materials for your next creation.

The reality is, you are infinitely creative – and when you take the best of what’s inside you and use it to create from, things like success, abundance, loving relationships and a meaningful legacy stop being goals to be pursued but rather become the natural fruits of your creation.

—————————
Today’s Experiment:
—————————

1. Draw a box with 9 squares inside it. Inside each square, write the name of an important area of your life.

Example:

2. For each area, ask yourself what you would love to create over the next year or beyond.

Examples:

Family – With my family, I would love to create an atmosphere of love and laughter, a space of acceptance and learning, and relationships based on clear agreements and enjoying each other’s company

Career – With my career, I would love to create a “results-only work environment” where I’m free to work on a completely flexible schedule that allows me to do the work when I really want to and when I’m at my best.

Spirituality – In the area of spirituality, I would love to create a personal relationship with God based on a deep sense of connection and communion, and to see that relationship reflected in the way I relate to the people in every area of my life

3. If you’re still feeling less than inspired by what you are beginning to create, here are a few additional questions designed to turn up the volume on the voice of creation within, including:

• What would be even better than that?
• If that were an 8, what would be a 9? A 10?
• What would you love to create that brings a big grin to your face when you think about it (and that grin would get even bigger if you actually created it)?
• What would you love to create that would make you go “wow!”

Have fun, learn heaps, and happy creating!

With love,

Michael

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Traditional coaching takes place primarily on a horizontal dimension – coaches assist their clients in getting from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’. Yet lasting, sustainable change nearly always happens in the vertical dimension – a deepening of the ground of being of the client and greater access to inspiration and spiritual wisdom. While this has generally led to an either/or approach to success and personal growth and a sharp division between therapy and coaching, transformative coaching – or, as I like to call it, ‘Supercoaching’ – uses the vertical dimensions to create change on the inside while you continue to move forward towards your goals on the outside.

The kinds of ‘vertical’ changes that transformative coaching leads to can be usefully viewed in three levels…

Level I – Change in a Specific Situation

Often, people will hire a coach (or go to a counselor or therapist or friend) to get help with a specific situation they are struggling with. They may want to deal with a difficult person at work, succeed at an important negotiation or job interview, or stay motivated as they train to beat their personal best at a sporting event.

This kind of ‘performance coaching’ has long been a staple of the industry, and long before ‘life coaching’ and ‘executive coaching’ became common terms, people were using coaches in this capacity to help change their point of view, state of mind or actions. At this level, people go from fear to confidence, from un-ease to comfort, or from inaction to action.

The impact of this kind of coaching is generally project-specific. Once the difficult person is handled, the interview completed and the race run, the person gets on with the rest of their life in much the same way as they did before.

Level II – Change in a Specific Life Area

Sometimes, we’re less concerned with a specific event than we are with a whole category of events. This is why you will find coaches specializing in any number of life areas: relationship coaches, sales coaches, parenting coaches, executive coaches, confidence coaches, presentation coaches – the list goes on and on…

People hire these coaches to help them develop their confidence and increase their skills in whatever area they may be having difficulty. Like a performance coach, these coaches will help with specific situations, but they tend to measure their impact not just by how one situation changes but by their whole category of situation changes.

Level III – Global Change

The ultimate level of change is transformation, or what I sometimes call ‘global change’ – a pervasive shift in our way of being in the world. At this level, it is not enough for us to develop a skill or change a feeling, it is our intangible ‘selves’ we want to change, and in so doing we change our experience of everything.

Let’s take an example. Bob is a customer service rep for a medium-sized manufacturing firm and he’s having a really bad day. When we ask him what his biggest sticking point is, he tells us it’s a phone call he needs to make to a supplier he’s been having difficulties with in Dagenham.

If I were to intervene on level I, I would probably work with his state of mind by getting him into a better, more confident state. We might role play a phone call with his supplier and I would offer him tips and techniques to better handle the call and get the outcome he most wants. We might even choose to script the call, or at least the beginning of it, to help boost his confidence and resolve the situation.

But let’s say I want more for Bob – I don’t just want to assist him in getting through this one situation, I want to help turn him into a more effective employee, one who can handle a wider variety of customer service situations. At that point, I could give him books like How to Talk So People Will Listen and Listen So People Will Talk. I could teach him rapport skills like ‘matching and mirroring’ so he could use body language to effectively allow people to feel more comfortable around him.

In time and with practice, Bob might well be able to turn things around and maybe even become the best customer service guy in our whole company. But in another way, nothing will have fundamentally changed. Because in order for something to change at a fundamental level, that change has to happen from the inside out.

At level III, our coaching interventions are no longer about the supplier from Dagenham or even about customer service. At level three, we’re dealing directly with Bob – the way he sees himself, the way he sees his job and the way he sees other people. And when any one of those things change, Bob will not only become more effective at his job, he’ll become more effective in his life.

Here’s another example, one that might hit closer to home. Imagine you are having difficulties with your resident teenager. You want them to help out around the house and be more respectful of you and your partner, but they seem determined to set a new world record for ‘most dirty clothes piled up in one corner of a bedroom’.

At level I, you could go in guns a-blazing and order them to pick up their dirty clothes ‘or else’. You might even try a subtler approach – a dangling carrot of a trip to the cinema or a shopping trip to the local high street in exchange for a cleaner room.

At level II, you would read parenting books that would tell you how to handle discipline problems with teens, or even one on how to handle difficult people at work in hopes you could map it across to your own children at home. (Of course, if you come across a copy of What to Do When You Work for an Idiot in their bedroom, chances are they’re planning a little level II intervention with you!)

But at level III, you would know that what’s called for is a shift in perspective – a new way of seeing the situation.  Perhaps your child isn’t just being stubborn or argumentative – perhaps they’re lonely, or confused, or frightened, or overwhelmed by their burgeoning lives but too proud or disconnected from you to share what’s behind their misery.

If nothing else, you might remember that every teenager is on drugs – and even though the vast majority of those drugs are dealt by nature (things like testosterone, estrogen, dopamine and serotonin), the impact on their nascent nervous systems can be pretty difficult to deal with.

If you play with this model over time, you will find that each level maps across to a certain kind of intervention.

• When we want to make a change in the moment or in a specific situation, we apply a technique.

• When we want to make a change in a broader context, we work with teaching and installing new strategies.

• When we want to actually change lives, we offer up a whole new paradigm, or perspective – a new way of seeing.

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Today’s Experiment:
————————–

As a general rule, it is simpler and faster to put a band-aid on a bruise than to alter your diet and nutritional intake to help prevent bruising than to alter your lifestyle in such a way as to build the kind of super-immunity and moment-by-moment awareness that makes bruising a near impossibility. So it is with the 3 levels of change. The basic dictum is this - put the band-aid on first!

1. Find an example of 3 changes you want to make - one for each of the 3 levels.

Example:
Level I - I want to perk up before a dinner party tonight
Level II - I want to feel more at ease in job interviews
Level III - I would like to be a more loving person.

2. Think of at least one change you would like to make, and imagine what it would entail at each of the 3 levels.

Example:
Cindy wants to become a better actor. At Level I this might mean that she spends an extra hour working on her scene for class tomorrow, at Level II it could mean that she creates a daily training program to develop her voice, movement, emotional expression and script analysis skills, and at Level III it might be that she works on being more authentic in the way she lives her life on a daily basis.

3. The next time a friend, colleague, or client presents you with a problem, goal, or change they would like to make, notice at what level they are currently thinking about it. If it’s appropriate, make suggestions or guide them into a Level One “Band-Aid” change that will free them up to take on levels two or three if they still want to when whatever is “bugging” them is taken care of.

Of course, if you want to practice doing a bit of “transformative coaching”, you can guide them in an exploration of other ways of seeing the situation they are in.  Here are a few questions to get you started:

• How else could you see this situation?

• How would an alien who had just arrived on earth see it?  What would they make of it?

• What would Jesus (or Buddha, or whoever represents the highest epitome of your spiritual belief system) see?

Have fun, learn heaps, and happy exploring!

With love,

Michael

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A friend of mine once told me the story of the first night he kissed his future wife. Having known her for years and loved her from afar, he confessed his true feelings for her. She asked him if he wanted to sleep with her and he said “To be honest with you, if it’s just sex, we may as well not bother because there’s no way the reality is going to live up to seventeen years of my fantasies!”

The key to understanding expectations is this:

Expectations exceeded bring good feelings;
Expectations unrealized bring bad feelings;
Expectations met bring nothing but more expectation

So how do we manage our expectations of life and of other people in a way that allows us to think creatively about the future without setting ourselves up for future disappointment?

There are three distinctions that I have found extremely useful in answering this question for myself:

Expectations vs. Standards

When I first talk with people about lowering their expectations, they often get a bit upset with me. “You want me to expect less from my employees? I can barely make this company work as it is!”

But once I clarify the distinction between an expectation and a standard, they usually relax into the possibilities this shift allows them to make. For example, I have a standard that says I will always either be on time for a meeting or let people know if I’m going to be late. Recently, I completely missed a coaching session with one of my clients.

If “showing up on time” was an expectation I had of myself, I would have responded to that situation with either a lot of guilt and shame over having missed the appointment or blame and fault finding with the people and circumstances that led to my missing it. But because “showing up on time” is for me a standard – something that I want to create as “standard operating procedure” in my life – I responded by changing the appointment scheduling system in my office to make this kind of thing unlikely to happen again in the future.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t apologize to my client – it just means I didn’t exhaust myself with self-flagellation or damage my relationship with my employees by taking out my frustration on them. And when you raise your standards while lowering your expectations, you open up the possibility to create something really beautiful in your life.

Expectations vs. Agreements

One of the most useful distinctions I use around expectations came from my friend and mentor, Steve Chandler. Instead of having high expectations of people (or indeed any expectations at all), he recommends the use of clear agreements.

Here’s how he wrote about it recently in his wonderful blog

Expectations are stories we believe about how others should behave. The more expectations I have the more I set myself up for disappointment in life.

But with no expectations, there can be no disappointment, only loving life as it is.

“I expect you to clean your room!”

Imagine yourself hearing those words. A knot forms in your stomach. Your throat tightens a little. Your chest feels like someone is pushing on it. You begin to explore the consequences of rebellion. Because people rebel against expectation.

That’s why creating agreements is so much more effective. No expectations, just agreements. Two people co-author the agreement in the same way that John Lennon and Paul McCartney would co-author a song.

Parents live in a constant state of anger and anxiety when they expect so much from their children. I know a woman I will call Courtney who walks around all day riddled with expectations for her children. She has even more expectations for her husband. So she is miserable. And if she died tomorrow her tombstone would say, “DISAPPOINTED.” Because that would sum up her life.

Take, though, the example of a different wife and mother I know named Alexandra. Alex has no expectations. All human behavior is an amusing surprise to her. And her son’s room is clean. How is that possible? Because she has an agreement with her son about the room. She and her son respect each other. They also like keeping their word with each other. It’s easier to live with confidence and happiness that way.

Her son’s favorite action heroes keep their word, too. It’s a matter of honor and grace.

As Steve so beautifully illustrates, when we base our relationships on mutual respect and clear agreements (as opposed to expectations and emotional blackmail), we create a greater ease and “workability” in every area of our life.

Expectations vs. Hope

I was teaching a seminar several years back when a woman stood up, dripping with disgust, and pointed an accusatory finger at me. “The problem with you”, she said, “is that you give people hope”. She was right, of course,though in my defense it had never occurred to me that this might be perceived as a bad thing.

Where did hope get such a bad name? Criticism of both religion and new age thinking is filled with accusations of giving people “false hope”. But what makes hope false?

The Oxford English dictionary defines hope as “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen” and as “grounds for believing that something good may happen”. False hope, then, is not to do with my feeling of expectation and desire for my relationships to be successful, my business to make money, and my body to be healthy, but with my grounds for believing that these things are possible.

If I ask you to believe in yourself and your dreams because I have “secret” knowledge of the future which reveals that as long as you do x, y, and z, you will ultimately succeed, that is unfortunately false grounds for hope - I have no such knowledge. However, if I ask you to believe in yourself and your dreams because there are hundreds if not thousands of stories of people who have succeeded in spite of the evidence, that is indeed grounds for legitimate hope, regardless of how things ultimately turn out.

(A quick word on “evidence”. In days gone by, the evidence has clearly “proven” that the sun revolves around the earth, which is in fact flat, that bumblebees cannot fly, and that humankind will not only never reach the moon but cannot run a mile in less than four minutes or find true and lasting happiness in a world filled with suffering….oh, wait, is that one still a fact?

I gave this definition of hope in a tip a few weeks back:

Hope is not a promise that something you want will happen - it is an invitation to enjoy the possibility of what you want while you and life negotiate the eventual outcome.
And since hope costs you nothing and in fact increases the level of energy you have to move forward towards a goal, there is never a reason not to hope. In fact, there is every likelihood that hope itself makes achieving your goal far more likely.

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TODAY”S EXPERIMENT

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1. Think of an impending event that is important to you. It could be a meeting, a phone call, an announcement, a trip, anything that you know is coming up in the next few days.

Imagine the worst - the nightmare scenario. Not only do you fail, but you fail publicly, embarassingly, and on an unprecedented scale!

Now, imagine the best - the Disney movie scenario. Not only do you succeed, but you save a diabetic child from down a mine shaft along the way!

Next, imagine the likeliest - what do you think is a more likely outcome than either the nightmare or the “wet dream”?

As you go through this, notice how your feelings change without anything having changed in the world around you.

2. Identify an area in your life in which you would like to improve the quality of the result you are producing.

What expectations do you have for yourself and/or others in this area?

How might they be getting in the way of creating the results you desire?

What is the standard you would like to establish for how you behave in this area?

What structures, systems, habits or reminders will assist you in creating that standard?

3. Choose a relationship to explore where you are currently experiencing conflict.

What are the unmet expectations behind this conflict?

What are some agreements you could put in place that would make the expectations irrelevant?

4. Find an area of your life in which you have given up hope of ever making a useful difference. Notice what happens to your energy when you give yourself hope that it could actually change. Remember, you’re not setting yourself up here – no promises or resolutions required. Just hang out for awhile in the energy of possibility and see what happens!

Have fun, learn heaps, and have a wonderful, expectation-free week!

With love,

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