Did you know that “worry” is a verb? That is, “to worry something” is to shake it about – it is an activity, not a thing.

The kind of worrying that most of us do is with our thoughts. We take a particular thought and “worry it about” in our minds, shaking it back and forth and flipping it around until we become absolute experts on everything that could possibly go wrong.

I myself am an expert “worrier” – I seem to have been granted the ability to pick out the worst-case scenario at a puppy farm, or to imagine all the things that could go wrong at an OSHA convention.

Which is why I’ve always found it a bit curious that when I’m actually IN a difficult situation, I tend to handle it with remarkable ease and grace. Being stuck in traffic doesn’t upset me, even if I’m running late. If the recording equipment stops working at an event where I’m teaching, as it did recently, I can generally incorporate it into the proceedings without batting an eyelash, even if I had previously been worrying about the possibility.

The difference, or so it seems to me, is this:

Once something has actually happened,
whether or not it happens
is clearly no longer within my control.

And if I know that something is not within my control, I see no point in worrying about it, or more accurately, in worrying it about.

Which is why when I woke up a couple of days ago without control over the left side of my face, I was oddly calm. In fact, the only real thought my worrying mind gave me to play with was how it might affect the television pilot we’re working on, and whether or not they will be able to film me exclusively from the right side until whatever it was cleared up.

When others kindly pointed out to me all the other things I could be worrying about that might be a wee bit more important than how I looked on TV, like a brain tumor or a stroke, it did occur to me to go to the hospital, and they quickly diagnosed it as a mild case of Bell’s Palsy, a strange form of facial paralysis the explanation for which sounded completely made up, even to the doctor who diagnosed me with it.

The good thing about Bell’s Palsy is that a. Most people recover within 2 – 3 weeks and b. With the exception of a cocktail of drugs that may or may not speed recovery and that I am faithfully taking each day, there’s nothing much which can be done.

And I find that sort of behavioral helplessness incredibly comforting. Oh sure, I get that if I maintain a relatively positive mind and a relatively relaxed body, that will create an internal environment which promotes healing. And even after only a few days, I’ve discovered that ordering soup for lunch is just a bad idea. But when there’s nothing to be done about something, there’s nothing to be done about it – and that leaves our energy free to enjoy whatever it is we can do.

Twenty years ago, I remember seeing the quadriplegic motivational speaker W. Mitchell give a talk from his wheelchair. The line which burned into my memory was this:

“Before I was paralyzed there were 10,000 things I could do. Now there are 9,000. I can either dwell on the 1,000 I’ve lost or focus on the 9,000 I have left.”

What we control, in my experience, is not what happens to us and not even which thoughts, positive or negative, come into our head. What we control is what we do and which thoughts we dwell on. And funnily enough, that’s more than enough control to create a magical life, regardless of whatever circumstances you happen to find yourself in.

Recently, I was watching a video of the spiritual philosopher Syd Banks and he shared an old Irish philosophy:

There are only two things to worry about – are you sick or are you well? If you’re well, there’s nothing to worry about. And if you’re sick, there are only two things to worry about – will you live or will you die? If you live, there’s nothing to worry about. And if you die, there are only two things to worry about – will you go to heaven or will you go to hell? If you go to heaven, there’s nothing to worry about. And if you go to hell, you’ll be so busy shaking hands with all your friends that there’s nothing to worry about.

Have fun, learn heaps, and if you wake up with the left side of your face paralyzed, make sure they film you from the right!

Please check out the amazing work being done here and consider making a contribution: http://www.theatrewithoutborders.com

February 4th at Noon Pacific/3pm Eastern/8pm UK

THE POWER OF COMPASSION

It is often in the face of the worst circumstances that we discover the best of what lives inside us. Join Michael for an hour of compelling conversation and explore ways to access the power of compassion for yourself and others.

To get coaching and speak with me live on air, phone:

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

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

Did you miss our most recent live show on When the Going Gets Tough, Give Up!? For a limited time you can listen to it here. You can also download and listen to any of my shows at any time as part of your subscription to the new and improved Solutions Café - click here for details!

You can now listen to the show from your iPhone!
Simply go to the Apps Store to download your free Hay House Radio App and within minutes you’ll be able to listen to great shows from Wayne Dyer, Cheryl Richardson, and of course, me!

On the week of March 16th, we will be launching my newest book Supercoach: 10 Ways to Transform Anyone’s Life in the US. There are three ways you can help support the launch and assist us in getting the ideas in this book out into the world:

1. Send an email to your mailing list recommending Supercoach during the week of March 16th. (If you would like to do this, please email Terri Carey and she will make sure you get all the info and have the chance to participate in a special thank-you teleseminar I’ll be offering!)

2. Blurb about Supercoach on your blog and/or tweet about it on your Twitter page.

3. Buy a copy of the book and if you love it, post a review to Amazon. You can pre-order a copy now or wait until it comes out in March. Either way, save your receipt as we’ll be giving away a small number of very cool gifts, including the chance to win some free coaching from me and some of the other supercoaches mentioned in the book!

Personally, I love teaching stories. They enable people to hear things that are sometimes difficult to hear, and can often create what my friend Steve Chandler calls “mindshifts” at a level well below the surface. Once the mind has shifted, behavior shifts too, seemingly “all by itself” and without the effort or struggle often associated with changing old patterns of thinking and doing.

So when a potential client recently told me that his life was on hold until his lawyers were able to reach a large financial settlement with his former employer, I shared with him an old teaching story I first heard many years ago.

Once upon a time there was a wise old rabbi who traveled the land with his young apprentice. At each village they passed through, the rabbi would seek out the house of a family he had been guided through prayer to be of assistance to, and they would take up lodging with the family for the night. Sometimes the houses were grand and sometimes simple, but wherever they stayed, the families lives would in some way be transformed by his visit. One day, the rabbi and his apprentice arrived at a particularly poor village and to the apprentice’s dismay, the rabbi sought out the poorest home in the village to request lodging. Although the house itself was barely a shack, there was a healthy cow standing by itself, tethered to a post in the middle of the shack’s tiny, dirt filled yard. As was the custom, the rabbi and his apprentice were welcomed into the home of this poor but proud family and shared in what little food there was. After the meal, the somewhat sickly head of the household explained how blessed they were that despite their abject poverty, they were able to maintain their prize milking cow who always provided them with just enough to get by. The lives of the family revolved around the care and feeding of this cow, with all their spare time and any spare money going towards its upkeep. The rabbi nodded and smiled as he listened to their stories, and when the head of the household explained apologetically that he had to get up very early to feed and milk the cow, everyone went off to sleep. But in the middle of the night, the rabbi woke his apprentice and led him out to the small yard where the cow was tethered. To the apprentice’s dismay, the rabbi swiftly killed the cow and they left the house before the sun had climbed up into the sky from its eastern bed. Despite all the apprentice’s entreaties, the rabbi refused to explain his actions, saying only that “things are not always as we think them to be.” Several years passed, and the apprentice had abandoned his apprenticeship and begun traveling on his own. Although he had learned much from the wise old rabbi, he had never forgotten the incident with the cow, and he realized that he himself could never become a rabbi or truly be at peace with himself until he went back to the village and confessed what they had done. As he approached the village, the young man’s mind was filled to overflowing about what sad fate had befallen that poor but proud family after the death of their one and only prize cow. Yet when he arrived at the spot where the old shack had been, in it’s place stood a much nicer house, and what had been a small dirt yard was now a much larger field filled with corn and wheat. Sure that the family had lost their home and it had been taken over by wealthy landowners, he approached a strong looking man walking through the field to find out what had become of the poor family. To his surprise, it was the same head of the household who had seemed so sickly when last they met, and when he explained who he was he was welcomed back with open arms and as was the custom, invited to share a hearty meal with the family and spend the night under their sturdy roof. Awed by the transformation in the family’s health and fortunes, the former apprentice asked, with some trepidation, what had become of their prize cow. “Well,” said the head of the household with a twinkle in his eye, “it was the strangest thing. The very night you left we awoke to find our cow had been murdered, no doubt by some neighbors jealous of our prize possession. At first, of course, we were devastated, and we wondered if were being punished in some way for not being worthy of our good fortune. Then, of necessity, we began to explore a new way of taking care of ourselves. It was my daughter who first suggested that we attempt to grow vegetables in that small patch of dirt which had once been home to our cow, and that was successful beyond our wildest dreams.” “Not only were we able to feed ourselves, but we had enough crop left over to sell at market. We reinvested our profits in the land and soon enough we were able to buy our neighbors plot as well. Creating our own farm reinvigorated my spirit, and soon my health began to return as well. Now, we are truly blessed in that we are able to bless others with our abundance.” The former apprentice was stunned into silence, and after a long night in a warm, comfortable bed, he thanked the family for their kindness and returned to the road. As he contemplated all that had happened, he decided to return to the wise old rabbi to complete his training.

I was all set to offer up the moral of the story but my would-be client declined, having already realized what mortgaging his life to the care and upkeep of his own “prize cow” was costing him.

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Today’s Experiment:

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1. What are the “prize cows” in your life? That is, what are you spending your time and energy on which is preventing you from creating what you really want in your life?

A “prize cow” may look like a job, a relationship, or an opportunity that’s “too good to pass up”, even though it’s not the job, relationship, or opportunity you’d really like to have in your life. It might also look like an idea before the mind of how things “should” be or about what’s possible for “people like you”.

2. If your “prize cow died” (or was no longer available to you or no longer needed care and feeding for some reason), what would you do with your time and energy instead?

3. Consider doing it anyways and doing it now.

Have fun, learn heaps, and move on!

Check out my apprentice Bevin Lynch speaking at the Well-Being Expo!

You can learn more here – use the discount code “supercoach” to save $15 off your ticket price!

A quick note from Michael:

Today’s tip is excerpted from my first fiction book, It’s Not Too Late: A Story of Hope for Your Marriage. The conversation is taking place between two strangers on a plane – Jack, a relationship therapist whose own marriage is in trouble, and Benjamin, a self-professed “theosophist and facilitator of wonder”.  (This book is not yet available for purchase.)

“One of my mentors was a man named Lyndon Duke,” Benjamin continued.  “Lyndon used to say that the meaning of any event can be measured in the difference that it makes – if it doesn’t make any difference, it doesn’t have any meaning. I would actually take that one step further to say that we are the meaning makers – we create the meaning of our lives by the thoughts we think and the stories we tell ourselves.” “I’m not quite sure what you mean,” I said, grasping the irony of my confusion but having no idea where to go with it. Benjamin looked away for a moment as if he was trying to decide whether or not to continue.  When he looked back at me, his eyes were shining and alive. “I remember when my father died, I was absolutely convinced that it was my fault.  I had been studying theosophy and shamanism and done a very powerful visualization for wealth.  I remember feeling the energy build up inside me as I did it and somehow knowing at a cellular level that I had somehow affected the very fabric of the universe. Less than 24 hours later, I got a phone call that my father had been killed in a car accident, which meant that I would inherit some money.  I was devastated. For several years, I lived with that guilt like a heavy weight inside my stomach.  I stopped exploring anything remotely esoteric, religious or spiritual, and went about my life as if we’re all alone in the universe. On the 5th anniversary of his death, my family and I got together for a special commemorative service.  I had mostly lost touch with them, not wanting to spend too much time with them lest they discover what I had done. After the service, my brother and sister and I went for a walk through the snow-dusted streets of the small town where we had all grown up.  As we walked, my brother, who had always seemed to me to have everything together, began sobbing.  Not just tears – huge racking sobs.  He told us he had a confession to make – he had killed our father.” I was gripped by Benjamin’s story but with this last sentence my mind began to race. Was there more to Benjamin than I had previously noticed?  Did his brother really kill their father?  Was he in prison?  Had he killed again? Before I got very deeply into my thoughts, Benjamin continued. “Now as you can imagine, my sister and I were shocked and we stopped walking and just stared at him.  He told us how just a few days before my father was in the accident, they had sat down together and my father had asked him to take over the family business.  When my brother declined, my father was devastated.  Three days later he was dead.” “But that didn’t mean your brother killed him,” I argued, stuck somewhere between compassion and indignation.  “You said he died in a car crash.” Benjamin smiled wanly and continued with his story. “That’s what my sister said – just before she confessed that for years she’d been dreading having to tell us that she was responsible for Father’s death.  The morning of his car accident, he’d asked her if she would bring the kids out for a visit.  She wanted to get her nails done that day, so told him that she was so busy with work that she couldn’t.  Unfortunately for her manicure, he offered to drive out himself.  He was on his way to see them when his car was struck by a seventeen year old boy speeding along the winding country road. My brother comforted her but I just stared at them both in amazement.  When they asked me what was going on, I told them my story. Well, three more miserable people you could not have found that cold February afternoon.  We were silent for the rest of the walk, having resolved we needed to tell our mother what we had done. I was almost sick with fear and guilt by the time we got back to my mother’s house, and we sat my mother down to confess our sins.  When we had finished speaking, my mother was in floods of tears.  To our amazement, she then told us how she had been carrying the guilt of his death in her heart for all this time because she had declined to join him for a visit to the grandchildren. ‘To this day’, she said, ‘I regret not having gone with him.  I might not have been able to save him, but at least I wouldn’t have had to go on living without him.’ Suddenly, my brother burst out laughing.  We looked at him in shock and asked him what was going on. ‘I just thought,’ he said, choking out his words between waves of laughter, ‘that the boy who crashed into Father’s car may have spent the past five years thinking he was responsible.  We could have saved him all that pain!’ Somehow that struck all of us as hysterical, and we four killers laughed for nearly fifteen minutes until we were spent with emotion. In that moment, I felt an extraordinary sense of calm and well-being fill the room.  When I looked around, I could see light everywhere – as though each member of my family was glowing. It was as though my father himself had come in to lend us a bit of his heavenly peace and presence. By the time I went home that night, my guilt was completely gone, and to my own surprise I stopped by a church and lit a candle for him.  It was the first remotely religious or spiritual act I had engaged in since my father’s death.” We both sat in silence for a little while, reflecting on the story he had just told.  It was the stewardess who broke the mood by asking if we wanted anything else to drink. “A cup of tea for me, please,” said Benjamin in that accent I couldn’t quite place.  “And might I say what a splendid job you’re doing – this can’t be the easiest thing in the world to get done right.” I thought he was being corny, but the stewardess was clearly charmed by him.   When I declined a second whiskey, she went off with a skip in her step. “I think you might be in there, Benjamin,” I said. He smiled at the thought. “Kindness,” he said, “is love made visible.”

With love,

Supercoach Academy kicked off in NYC this weekend and I can honestly say I haven’t enjoyed a training experience this much in years.  We will be posting audio and video clips from the training on the website over the next few weeks – you can sign up here to be notified when new clips become available!

In their excellent book, Buck Up, Suck Up, and Come Back When You Foul Up, James Carville and Paul Begalia share the following analogy to illustrate the reason why most people fail to achieve the level of success they would like:

Imagine a lion, searching for food on the African Savannah. If he goes after a field mouse, he will use up more energy in that pursuit than he will get back from eating the mouse. Yet if he goes after an antelope, even if he expends far more energy in the hunt, he will be able to live well off the fruits of his success for many weeks to come.

The point of the metaphor is that given that you will inevitably spend at least a portion of your time pursuing something, you may as well pursue something worthwhile as trivial and large instead of small.

However, in the years since I originally read that analogy, I’ve realized that while some people play too small with their dreams, projects, and goals, some take things to the opposite extreme and think “well, if an antelope is more (ful)filling than a field mouse, why not spend my energy chasing the Loch Ness Monster?  After all, I only have to catch it once and I’ll never have to hunt again!”

These are the people who try to make a million dollars in 30 days when they’ve never earned more than $10,000 in a year, or expect to become a movie star in their first week in Hollywood.  They are the ever-hopeful self-help authors for whom I want to write a book entitled Getting on Oprah is Not a Business Plan and who spend their time and seed money reading online marketing letters headlined “I Caught the Loch Ness Monster in my Spare Time… and You Can Too!”

Now, if you’ve been chasing a Loch Ness Monster of your own, please understand my intention is not to belittle you or your dream.  While I am taking a (hopefully) gently chiding tone, my real purpose in writing this is to encourage you to slow down and start where you are.

• If you want to create more money, how about starting by doubling what you have and then when you’ve done that, doubling it again?
• If you want to make great strides in your career, how about getting into action by simply taking the next step?

In my experience, a diet of either field mice or Loch Ness Monsters may well lead to the premature demise of your business, career, or project.  On the other hand, a steady diet of antelope will lead to all the success and fun stuff you can handle!

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Today’s Experiment:

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1. Take out your “to-do” list for today. Alternatively, make a list of all the projects you are currently working on.

2. Next to each item on the list, put an A if it is related to an Antelope project (i.e. something with substantial rewards), an F if it is related to a Field Mouse project (i.e. something that will take high effort for low rewards), or an LM if it is related to a Loch Ness Monster Project (i.e. an escape fantasy that would mean you “never have to do anything hard ever again”).

3. Spend as much time as possible working on your “A” priorities today!

Have fun, learn heaps, and may all your success be fun!

Two great events are coming up that I wanted to bring to your attention…

1. The WellBeing Expo in Chicago on January 31st benefits PAVE

PAVE: Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment is a national, grassroots nonprofit, using education and action to shatter the silence of sexual and domestic violence. PAVE’s work has been featured on CNN, Today Show, and in TIME. If you’re anywhere near Chicago on the 30th of January, come along to have fun, learn heaps, listen to some great speakers and contribute to a worthy cause.

Learn more at  http://www.TheWellBeingExpo.com

2. Win the chance to participate in your PJ’s on a new virtual retreat this Valentine’s weekend!

“We all have enough info about how to take care of our souls. What we need is the reminders, the sacred space and the permission to use what we know.” - Jennifer Louden

I presented at supercoach Jen Louden’s Big Virtual Retreat last year, and this February she’s come up with another roster of mind-blowing, heart-expanding teachers like Mary Manin Morrissey, Christina Baldwin, Bill Baren, Stephanie McWilliams, Tama J. Kieves and more!

You can win a seat at the retreat for free (or a nano with all the sessions on them!) by writing in and telling Jen why you need a retreat. Click here to learn more.