We have already had more than 50 people sign up for the January relaunch of the Creating the Impossible: Transform Your World in 30 Days program featuring some new and updated recordings and the same phenomenal community support that made the original so successful!

- Chris H, London UK

1. Members of the Solutions Cafe get to participate in the program for free. If you join the cafe in the next few weeks, your annual subscription will automatically be extended to run through December 31st, 2010. This will also allow you to complete the Success Made Fun one year program, a $129 value also free to Cafe members!

2. Tuition for Creating the Impossible is $99. However, if you sign up TODAY, November 30th, you’ll get an early-bird discounted price of only $79!

About 8 years ago, I was presented with an opportunity to do some business in Eastern Europe. While everything in me knew that it was not something I really wanted to do, the amount of money being offered was more than I had ever made before and came at a time when we could have really used it.

Somewhat tongue in cheek, I asked one of my mentors at the time whether or not I could just ignore my wisdom this one time, take the money, and regret it later. He shook his head wistfully and said “No – not anymore. You’re past that point.” And while a small part of me balked at the idea that I didn’t have any choice, the majority of me knew exactly what he meant.

I was reminded of this last week during a discussion I was having with Sandy Krot, one of the brilliant consultants at Pransky and Associates. She was sharing with me a model she uses in both business and personal sessions to explain the role of wisdom in decision making.

Imagine a continuum that goes from left to right:

On the left hand side of the continuum we see ourselves as victims of circumstance, and consequently when a decision point comes up in our lives we believe that we have no choice about what to do – we must stay married or get divorced, keep working at the same dead-end job or leave immediately, allow ourselves to be bullied or “defend our honor” by fighting back at every imagined slight.

As we become more conscious of our role in creating our experience of life, we realize that we are not really helpless victims and we begin to see that even in the most dire of circumstances we do have some choices, although we may not particularly like any of the ones we are currently able to see.

The further we go toward the right of the continuum, the more empowered we feel and the more choices we become aware of until we realize that in any situation, we have a nearly infinite range of choices. There are not only innumerable actions we could take (though some of them may take great courage), but we also have choices about our attitude (angle of approach) and what meaning we ascribe to whatever it is that is happening.

But at some point, as the voice of fear diminishes and we begin to see things more clearly, we realize that there isn’t much of a choice after all – we are pretty much always going to do what our wisdom and common sense guide us to do, not because we “have to” but because anything else would be self-defeating and a little bit silly.

At this point, our continuum now looks like this:

The guidance of our wisdom is always available to us, but at times can be a bit hard to hear amidst the noisy chatter of our fearful thoughts. But once we do begin to hear it and understand its significance, there’s no going back.

By way of an example, think about the simple task of crossing the street. As a child, chances are you were shouted at by the big people the first time you began to run into a busy street without looking. Their intention was to frighten you just enough to prevent you from ever doing something so life threatening ever again. And if you’re reading this, chances are it worked – you learned not to run out into the street without a grownup holding your hand, or as you got older, without looking both ways for traffic.

But at some point, you realized that the voice in your head saying “NO!” was just a voice in your head, and that you could run out into the street (or try drugs or sex or swimming less than an hour after eating) without getting into trouble from your parents or teachers. And in an odd sort of way that was quite empowering. At last, you’re your own person, and nobody can ever tell you what you have to do or not do ever again.

Except that at some point, you no longer run into the street (or take drugs or have unprotected sex with strangers) not because you are frightened, but because you actually understand the consequences of each one of those acts. It’s no longer about asserting your freedom or individuality – it’s just about following your common sense, understanding and wisdom.

Of course, you can still ignore all that and go play in traffic anyways – but why would you? It would make no more sense than deliberately hitting yourself in the face with a shovel, or teaching a pig to sing (which as most people realize doesn’t work and annoys the pig).

The paradox of no choice is that in order to live a truly guided life, you have to be willing to give up things that sound awfully good to the personally developing mind – things like “empowerment” and “courage” and “choice”. Not because you couldn’t hang on to them – but why would you?

Have fun, learn heaps, and may the still, small voice within be as loud as a helicopter and as clear as a bell!

One of the questions that people in the coaching profession seem to dread is when someone comes up to them out of the blue and asks them what they do for a living.

In order to better handle that inevitable conversation, coaches (and indeed most small business owners) are encouraged to develop an “elevator speech” – a 30 second pitch for business that can be completed in the time it would take for an elevator to go from the ground floor to the top of the building.

When people come to me for assistance in crafting their elevator speech, I usually share the metaphor of the multi-handled coffee mug that I first learned from my friend Al Secunda…

Imagine that you make a spectacular cup of coffee – coffee so delicious it changes people’s lives for the better.  The coffee is your product or service.

You need to put it in something (and being environmentally conscious paper or cardboard just aren’t going to cut it), so you find or create a mug that allows for maximum ease of drinkability.  The mug is the delivery mechanism for your product or service.

And in order to make it easier for people to pick up the mug, you put a number of different handles on it – each one designed to be a natural fit for the desired coffee drinker.  The handles are your marketing messages, elevator speeches, and brand positioning.

So if we’re talking about coaching, the coffee is your ability to make a real and positive difference in the lives of your clients.  This is the most important thing you could be spending your time and money on developing, because if you can’t yet make a great cup of coffee, it doesn’t really matter what kind of a mug you serve it in.

The mug represents your coaching packages – do people hire you for one-off sessions or a month or year at a time?  Do they pay weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually?  Up front or pay as you go?  Face to face or over the phone?

There is no “right” way to create your mug – you are simply looking for a sufficient and satisfactory way to deliver quality coffee (coaching) to your customers that is at least as workable for you as it is for them.

The handles are your elevator speeches (which work best when they’re not speeches at all) – the explanations and examples and analogies you have for coaching that will make it most likely that people will pick up the mug and try the coffee for themselves.

One of the handles is how you think about what you do, but the rest can be hand crafted to suit the grasp of each potential client (or group of clients).  What would be easy to pick up for an entrepreneur or businesswoman might be difficult for a house husband; what would be simple for an Olympic athlete to grab onto might be completely different to the kind of a handle that would fit the well-mittened hand of an Eskimo.

Of course, you could just forgo the handle altogether and begin to coach people the moment you meet them in hopes that they will be so wowed by your prowess that they hire you on the spot.  But as you can imagine, most people just gag when someone tries to force something down their throat – even if that something is the most delicious cup of coffee in the world.

Here are a few of the ways I find myself talking about what I do as a coach – the coffee cup handles on my own personal coaching mug:

1. I help make people’s dreams come true

Most people I work with have a dream for their life or their business – and while sometimes those dreams change when we begin to work on them, much of the time the things people have always dreamed about just begin to show up in their lives.

2. I’m in the wonderful life business

Whether they come with goals for their business or their marriage, their physical health or their spiritual well-being, what everyone I have ever worked with wants is a more wonderful life.  For most people, that will involve developing a more positive relationship with money, other people, their work, their body, and themselves.  What’s nice about being in the wonderful life business is that it only really works if I become “a product of the product” and have a wonderful life myself!

3. I’m a cocoon salesman

Because my specialty is transformation, I sometimes liken the coaching relationship to a cocoon.  What comes out of the cocoon may still look like what went in, but it also may be unrecognizable.

Of course, the problem with being a cocoon salesman is you can’t necessarily tell someone what to expect at the end of your time together.  A Monarch butterfly will never come from a woolly bear caterpillar, not matter how hard you try.  But what we can know from the very beginning is that whatever emerges will be beautiful, will be an authentic expression of what was inside you all along, and best of all, it will be able to fly!

Today’s Experiment:

1. Use the multi-handled coffee mug metaphor to better understand how to talk about your own product or service:

• What is the coffee?  That is, what is the essence of what you do for others?
• What is the mug? In other words, what is the delivery mechanism through which people get to experience your product or service?
• What are some of the different ways for people to get a handle on your product or service?  How do you understand it for yourself?  How would you explain it to a potential investor?  How would you explain it to a six year old child?   How would you explain it to an Eskimo?

2. Practice!  Speak your new coffee cup handles into the world and notice who is able to pick them up most easily.  Don’t worry about getting it “right” in some sort of a generic sense – allow the point of the experiment to be able to generate multiple handles at will, not to only find the one or two you will use most often.

Have fun, learn heaps, and if none of your handles seem to be working, go back and check the coffee!

In July of 2009, over 550 people joined me for an online experience called “Creating the Impossible: Transform Your World in 30 Days”.

We will be relaunching “Creating the Impossible” in January with new and updated recordings and the same phenomenal community support that made the first version so successful!

“I love Creating the Impossible! Starting with the Workbook to get clear about what I want and make up my mind about 100 actions to get closer towards this goal. Each morning I impatiently wait to download the audio to listen to it on my way to work.

The audios are wonderful! They keep me on track and motivate me to try the experiments, try a different perspective and thus finding new ideas how to approach the task. I love the daily coaching tips but to listen to Michael to hear the humorous way he presents the tips is even more motivating and a real energy booster!

The forum is great and I thank everyone who posts here. I love the encouragement and inspiration I found! A whole lot of people who support, helped me to find a different perspective on things, trigger insights with fantastic questions to ponder about. And the feeling I have a lot of fellow people to travel with me! I simply love Creating the Impossible! THANK YOU!!!”

-Anja S., Hollan

There are two ways to join us:

1. Members of the Solutions Cafe get to participate in the program for free. If you join the cafe in the next few weeks, your annual subscription will automatically be extended to run through December 31st, 2010. This will also allow you to complete the Success Made Fun one year program, a $129 value also free to Cafe members!

2. Tuition for Creating the Impossible is $99. However, if you sign up before the end of November you’ll get an early-bird discounted price of only $79!

Thursday, November 19th at Noon Pacific/3pm Eastern/8pm UK

THE HUNDRED GRATITUDES

Join me for this exploration into the transformative power of gratitude. Be sure to bring your gratitude to life!

To phone in and speak with me live during the show:

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 this and every Thursday – simply go to hayhouseradio.com at Noon pacific/8pm UK and click on the button marked “Listen Now”.

Did you miss last week’s show on What Would Business Robot Do? 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!

New! – 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!

(Today’s tip is adapted from the Creating the Impossible 30 Day audio program)

One of the things I’ve learned in over 20 years of coaching and teaching is that there are certain things which are predictable about human beings. So even though I probably don’t know you personally, I’m going to make a bet with you that there is at least one thing you are not doing that if you did it, your most wonderfully impossible goal would come 20 miles closer today.

Now, I don’t know what that one thing is. It might be a phone call you’ve been avoiding making, an email you’ve been putting off sending, or a conversation you’ve been reluctant to have. It might be sitting down to type the first words of your novel or a letter of resignation to your boss. It might be sending in a check to book on a course or sending off an application to begin training for a new career. It might even be as simple as going for a walk, doing a push-up, or any of the myriad of things you already know to do to create the life you want.

But I do know that if you did it – if you “did the thing” – you would be so much closer to your goal than you are now it would be as though you were a different person. You might even be all the way there.

But you can’t do the thing, can you?

You can’t because you don’t know how. You can’t because it’s too hard. You can’t because, well, you’re just not the kind of person who does things like that.

In his essay On Compensation, Ralph Waldo Emerson concludes with the now famous line:

“The law of nature is do the thing and you shall have the power; but they who do not the thing, have not the power.”

Now this is exactly the opposite of how most of us go about things. We try to build up the power before doing the thing. We have this idea that we have to able to do something before we can do it. And in nature it is the exact opposite. Do the thing, and you will have the power. When you do it, you will develop the ability to do it.

This is the essence of true learning. We can learn about something, or we can learn to something. We learn about it by talking about it, reading about it, and studying it. We learn to something by doing it before we can do it.

Do the thing, and you will have the power.

We walk before we can walk, and now we are walking. We dance before we can dance, and before long we have learned to dance. We ask for help before we can ask for help. We make money before we can make money. And before we know it, we are walking and dancing and asking for help and even making money.

How? We have done the thing, and in so doing we have unleashed the power within us to make things happen.

So what I want you to do today is I want you to find that one thing. And it might not be one, it might be two. But I want you to find those one or two things that if you did them, you know it would make a tremendous difference to reaching your biggest, most wonderful goal. And this week I want you to do them. And it’s fine if you do them badly. It’s fine if you do them terribly. But do them.

Do the thing, and you will have the power.

What you’ll find is that as you “do the thing”, other things will begin to happen. You’ll find it easier to do things the next time. You’ll notice yourself thinking, “I can’t believe I did it- maybe I am the kind of person who does things like that.” And the shift in who you become in doing the thing will make doing anything else so much easier.

Of course, if you don’t think you can do it, if you don’t know how to do it, if it’s all too much, if you’re not ready yet… just do the thing. Do the thing, and you will have the power.

Today’s experiment is simple:

Do the one or two things that would make the biggest difference to creating your goal – even if (especially if) you don’t think you can.

Have fun, learn heaps, and enjoy the power!

Bevin Lynch has created a wonderful new interactive audio and web based coaching program called Creating the Life you Love to Live. To sign up before the Saturday deadline, click here.

To learn more about becoming one of my coaching apprentices, click here. There are currently two places left for 2010!

Thursday, November 12th at Noon Pacific/3pm Eastern/8pm UK

WHAT WOULD BUSINESS ROBOT DO?

It has been said that business is a primarily rational endeavor conducted by primarily emotional beings. In this week’s show, I share one of the most powerful techniques I use with business owners, CEO’s, and entrepreneurs around the world.

To phone in and speak with me live during the show:

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 this and every Thursday – simply go to hayhouseradio.com at Noon pacific/8pm UK and click on the button marked “Listen Now”.

Did you miss last week’s show on The Possibility Game? 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!

New! – 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!

Imagine playing a game without any rules…

Would chess be any fun (or even playable) if you could move any piece in any direction at any time?

Or think about a car race where drivers were allowed to take shortcuts across the middle of the track – would there even be a point in participating in that kind of an event?

The point is this:

It’s the rules that create the game.

Change the rules of poker and you’re playing blackjack – change the rules again and you’re playing gin rummy or even old maid.

Now, one game that a lot of us play in life is “the results game”. In fact, many people spend the majority of their time in pursuit of results – career results, financial results, relationship results, and more.

And while we all have made up slightly different rules for how the results game is played, there are a few that most of us share:

• Set goals (i.e. define “winning”)
• Keep score (i.e. track progress)
• Do unto others as you would have them do unto you (i.e.the “golden” rule)

Over the past six months, I have added one additional rule to my version of the results game which has revolutionized the way in which I play. I call it the “no suffering” rule.

Simply stated, the “no suffering” rule dictates that I be at least as committed to not suffering in my pursuit of results as I am to creating them. This means that according to the rules of my game, the results I create only count as a win if I don’t suffer while creating them.

This is no different to a rule stating that if a runner or cyclist takes steroids their results don’t count, even if they “won” the gold medal or Tour de France. With the “no suffering” rule in effect, I have to find a way to win (i.e. create the result I desire) without suffering or my results will be “disqualified”.

Instituting this rule has actually led to a number of changes to the way I pursue results:

• I’m now sleeping an average of 7 hours a night (up from 5 -6 in the past)
• I’m now starting on projects earlier so I don’t bump up so hard against a deadline
• If a path to my result looks unpleasant to me, I will not take it, even if it seems the most direct way to my desired result. Instead, I will find a more enjoyable and creative path.
• If the people I’m working with are contributing to my suffering, I either find different people to work with or, if I can’t or won’t do that, I take the time to transform my relationship with them
• Instead of always seeking perfection, more and more of the time I seek satisfaction

Remember, the “no suffering” rule doesn’t mean you are no longer committed to results. it just means that you may need to become a bit more creative and flexible in how you go about creating them.

Here’s how you can put this rule to the test in your own life over the next month:

1. Choose a practice goal – a result you would like to create in your life in the next 30 days.

Examples:

• Writing the first/next fifty pages of my book
• Losing that last 10 pounds
• Making an additional $100/$1000$10,000 income

2. Commit to achieving your result without suffering. That means that if you’re dreading doing it the way you’re about to do it, DON’T DO IT THAT WAY!

3. Take action and keep moving forward. To paraphrase the military strategist Hannibal, “We will either find a way or make one – without suffering!”

Have fun learn heaps, and remember:

Suffering is optional -
but you have to provide it for yourself!

Thursday, November 5th at Noon Pacific/3pm Eastern/8pm UK

THE POSSIBILITY GAME

Are you a possibility person or a dream killer? Listen in as Michael shares three questions which have changed his life and talks about making the impossible possible!

To phone in and speak with me live during the show:

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 this and every Thursday – simply go to hayhouseradio.com at Noon pacific/8pm UK and click on the button marked “Listen Now”.

Did you miss last week’s show on The Art of Sprinting? 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!

New! – 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!