“Please help me,” one recent conversation with a man named Richard began. “I see people all around me who are happy and it seems so unfair. I’m not a bad person. I always try to do my best. Don’t I deserve a bit of happiness in my life too?”

When I smiled he briefly took offense, until as gently as I could I pointed out the essential humor in his request.

It would be as though someone came to me saying “Please help me -I see people around me with noses and it seems so unfair. I’m not a bad person. Don’t I deserve to have a nose on my face too?”

Happiness is our nature. That doesn’t mean we always feel good – any one of us can get caught up in thought at any time, and in so doing we become instantly subject to every emotional color in the spectrum. But to say that means that happiness comes and goes would be like saying that because there are clouds, the sun is not always present. Even in the darkest hour, the sun is still there, right where it’s always been – it’s just that in that moment, there is something between us and our clear seeing.

As we spoke further, Richard and I explored some of the other things that he had thought he needed to “practice” in order to have.

“I’d like to open my heart more,” he said. “Is there some practice I could do to get better at opening my heart?”

Just then, my daughter Maisy ran into my office, asking whether she could go outside to catch some fairies.

I said yes (after all, I’m not an ogre), and then returned to my conversation with Richard.

“Do you think Maisy needs to practice keeping her heart open?” I asked him.

“Well, no, but she’s just a child. She hasn’t learned to close her heart yet.”

We left those words sitting in the silence for some moments, which I finally broke with this quote from Arnold Patent in his book Money:

“We don’t create abundance. Abundance is always present. We create limitation.”

You don’t need to create abundance because abundance is already there. You don’t need to create love, or well-being, or happiness, because love, well-being, and happiness are part of our essential nature. You don’t need to learn to open your heart or connect with others because that’s just what happens when you don’t stop it from happening.

Do you need to practice not stepping on the accelerator of your car if you’d like to slow down?

Not really – because all you’re really doing is just noticing. And as soon as you notice that you’re the one stepping on the accelerator, you can just stop.

The moment you actually see yourself closing down your heart or cutting off from your good feelings for another person (because after all, they left their socks on the floor or didn’t say ‘thank you’ or ran into your office when you were with a client), you probably will just stop, because you have an innate common sense that tells you that if you keep shooting yourself in the foot, you might want to put down the gun before you go in for toe surgery.

For me, the beautiful unfolding of life is in this seeing:

There is nothing you need to do, be, have, get, change, practice, or learn in order to be happy, loving, and whole.

As we come to the end of another year and begin looking forward to the new one, I would like to thank you for reading these tips and the many kind emails and acknowledgements I have received throughout the year. I love what I do, and I am grateful to you for providing me with the forum in which I do it.

Have fun, learn heaps, and happy new year!

This week, I’ll be sharing the rest of the best of what I heard while facilitating the Six Keys to Becoming a Supercoach teleclass series featuring the core faculty of Supercoach Academy…

• If you missed part one, you can read it here.
• You can now download all 6 hours of this audio program for free here.

Key Four: Observing the observer

How do you do you?

I began working with Jen Louden in 2006, shortly before the publication of my first book.  I didn’t really understand how she did what she did at the time – I just knew that I found our conversations endlessly fascinating and curiously reassuring.

Having gone on to study some of the ontological basis for her work, I particularly enjoyed hearing her both demonstrate and explain the idea that since the observer always effects the observed, the most powerful place to intervene with our clients is at the level of self as observer.  In other words, if who you are being as an observer changes, what you are observing (your finances, your relationships, your health, your life) changes right along with it.

There are essentially three elements to this:

Your body – what you are seeing, hearing, and doing in your body

Your mood and emotions – the emotions you are experiencing and the background mood in which you are experiencing them

Your language- The kinds of things you are saying to yourself right and the background story into which they are being spoken

To make this a bit more tangible, let’s say you have the goal of losing 30 pounds in the new year…

When you think about that goal, your breathing may shift into your chest and your shoulders may tighten.  You might notice your gaze narrow as your whole body sighs.  While you might not know exactly what to call your emotional state, “heavy” feels like a pretty accurate description, and in the background you sense equal doses of hope and despair.

“Here we go again,” one voice inside your head begins to mutter. “I’m not sure why I bother.”

A question I have found useful for myself in this kind of work is as follows:

If you were hiring someone to help you reach your goals,
is the you you are being in this moment the person you would hire?

As our understanding and awareness of who we are being in any given moment grows, our capacity for re-inventing a more powerful observer and re-creating our lives grows along with it.

Key Five – Understanding the source of subjective experience

A philosophy I have always subscribed to in my work with others is to “do what works”. This may seem obvious, but from the very beginning I have come across people who refuse to alter their approach from client to client, preferring to hammer each nail, screw, or wing nut that comes their way and wonder why some of them are just “too stubborn to change”.

What I love about Ali Campbell’s approach to NLP, coaching, and change is that it all begins with a simple premise – that everything we are experiencing in our lives is a function of the state of mind we are in, which in turn is a function of our subjective experience.  Since everyone’s subjective experience is different (hence, subjective!), there’s no point in trying to generate a one size fits all approach to transformation and change.

Here’s an excerpt from his soon to be released book, Just Get on With It:

So what I’d like you to do, at least for the rest of the day, is to allow yourself to become aware of your thoughts and to treat them as just thoughts, not as a call to action or a statement of fact or anything other than stories that the little storyteller in your head is making up for you.  Sure, they might be true, but they may just be complete nonsense.  You don’t need do decide which yet! They are just stories, just thoughts, and you don’t need to do anything with them except know they’re not real.Here’s a tip and a trick that really helped me.  Every time I noticed that I was caught up in my thoughts, I would use the following little mantra: ‘Ah, that’s just a thought about…’ such as, ‘Ah, that’s just a thought about having too much to do’ or ‘Ah, that’s just a thought about my deadline for this book.’ And you know what? It totally takes the sting out of them. What you are in effect doing is dissociating yourself – and your feelings – from the randomness of your thinking. You are making each thought a nominalization, a ‘thing’, and its much, much easier to disengage with a ‘thing’ than with a thought that is presented as a fact.

Key Six – Fear is irrelevant

Fear is a fascinating subject because it lies at the heart of so many of the challenges we face in our daily lives.  While Steve Chandler might argue that his expertise on the subject comes from having been so frightened of so many things for so much of his life, I know him as one of the most courageous proponents of fearless living working on the planet today.

The simple truth is, if you are going to expand your life beyond its current confines, you are going to encounter fear.  The question is, what will you do with it when it shows up?

When you are frightened… you use fear as a trigger to shut down, play small, take your ball home, and not play anymore.

When you are courageous… you use fear as a cue to move forward, feeling the fear and doing it anyway, recognizing that whatever happens, you’ll handle it.

When you are fearless… you go from “whatever happens, I’ll handle it” to “what could possibly happen?” You see that your wellbeing is not dependent on having what you want, and you proceed confidently in the direction of your dreams, knowing that that the worst thing that could ever happen to you is just a thought – generally speaking a thought about whatever it is you think is the worst thing that could ever happen to you.

For me, the most important question we can ask ourselves is not “how should we respond in the face of fear?”, but rather this:

What would you do if fear was irrelevant?

In other words, if fear wasn’t something that meant “hold back” OR “go forward”, what would you do today to begin (or continue) creating the life of your dreams?

Have fun, learn heaps, happy exploring, and a very merry Christmas to all those who celebrate it!

Tired of New Year’s resolutions and deja-vu goals? Why not create the impossible instead?

In January, I will be guiding a community of “impossiblers” through my 30 day online audio program Creating the Impossible: Transform Your World in 30 Days, featuring some new and updated recordings and the same phenomenal community support that makes this program so fun to do!

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“Like many entrepreneurs, I’m a one-man-band at the moment. To have had Michael’s ‘thought for the day’ in my email and the overwhelming positive support from others in the forum (as well as an action buddy I plucked out from the crowd in the forum to work with more closely), it’s transformed my feeling of ‘going it alone’ to suddenly feeling a group effort contributing to my daily successes. It’s filled my sails with wind! Thank you!”

- Chris H, London UK

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There are two ways to join us:

1. Tuition for Creating the Impossible is $99. You can sign up and learn more by clicking on the link.

2. Members of the Solutions Cafe get to participate in the program for free. If you join the cafe this month, 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, an additional $99 value also free to Cafe members!

This past week, over 1200 people signed up to participate in a series of six teleclasses with the core faculty of Supercoach Academy.  One of the great things about putting this Academy together is that I not only get to share the best of what I know, I get to learn from the best as well.

So over the course of the next two tips, I thought I’d share the best of what I learned from participating in the calls.  (You can register to download all 6 hours of this program for free here.)

Key One: The power of loving presence

In years of studying with Bill Cumming, one thing that always struck me was his assertion that:

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

The critical factor . . . was getting these individuals to know that they were loved (i.e. cared about, valued) and that they were able to make choices. . . . If it is possible in this environment, with these men, it is possible at every moment in every environment with anyone.

While most of us will not be called to be the unconditionally loving presence in the lives of a violent offender in a maximum security prison, being able to be that presence in the lives of your family members and friends will help you to gain access to that capacity in yourself.

This was the key thing I took from this session – that the question is never one of capacity (i.e. “can we?”) but always one of access (i.e. “how can we?”).  And once you can show up as an unconditionally loving presence in the world, every life you touch will be transformed for the better.

Key Two: Following your happy wanting

In her session, Mandy Evans shared the beauty of a life created by following the path marked desire.

As she pointed out, even the Buddha was not the enemy of desire he is sometimes portrayed to be.  ”Misunderstood desire” (or as I have heard it translated, “Craving”) is the root of all suffering.

Desire is just desire, as natural and unique to each one of us as a fingerprint.  And when we allow our happy wanting to guide our decisions, life takes on a simplicity and joy that has to be experienced to be believed.

I saw a very funny cartoon recently in a book called The Overfed Head by Rob Stevens that speaks to the overcomplication most of us make of our lives. He shows two people trying to decide whether or not to eat, and the inside of the first person’s thought bubble looks like this:

…need to limit my carb intake I shouldn’t eat anything after 8 PM Low fat foods will help me lose weight I just haven’t found the right diet yet I just need to exercise more I don?t have enough willpower That new diet pill might be the answer I need to drink more water I need to limit my carb intake I shouldn’t eat anything after 8 PM Low fat foods will help me lose weight I just haven’t found the right diet yet I just need to exercise more I don?t have enough willpower That new diet pill might be the answer I need to drink more water …need to limit my carb intake I shouldn’t eat anything after 8 PM Low fat foods will help me lose weight I just haven’t found the right diet yet I just need to exercise more I don’t have enough willpower That new diet pill might be the answer I need to drink more water I need to limit my carb intake I shouldn’t eat anything after 8 PM Low fat foods will help me lose weight I just haven’t found the right diet yet I just need to exercise more I don’t have enough willpower That new diet pill might be the answer I need to drink more water…

The inside of the second person’s thought bubble simply says:

Am I hungry?

The equivalent of that for us when we follow our happy wanting is to simply replace all the noise of the shoulds and shouldn’ts with one equally basic question:

Do I want to?

If you do, do; if you don’t, don’t. And that?s about as simple as I know how to make it!

Key Three: Success is Letting Go of Fear

Every time I hear Robert Holden speak, I feel both inspired and challenged – inspired by the loving presence he is in his work and challenged by the intellectual rigor he brings to his speaking.

There were many things in this session I could focus on here, but the one that occurs to me is to share what he calls the FOSI – a quiz style “Fears of Success Indicator” that can give you some idea of how large a role fear is playing in your current level of success.

(This is copyrighted material reprinted from Robert’s book Success Intelligence)

FOSI – FEAR OF SUCCESS INDICATOR How much can you identify with the following statements? 4- Completely  3- Very  2- Quite  1- Not at all 1. I am not always comfortable with the attention success attracts. 2. I worry that any major success I enjoy will attract envy or jealousy. 3. I believer that greater success leaves me more vulnerable to criticism and attack. 4. I think any big success must inevitably require some sacrifice or loss. 5. I am uneasy about the high expectations that come with success. 6. I do not always believe I deserve all the success I experience. 7. When things are going really well for me I often feel uneasy. 8. I believe every major success has a high price or a hidden cost. 9. I wouldn’t like the person I’d have to become to achieve big success. 10. I think that success can ruin people and that it can create unhappiness. 11. I don’t like the idea of success that comes too fast or is too big. 12. I think that success can lead to complacency and a loss of motivation. 13. I worry that success will leave me feeling empty, and with nowhere to go. 14. I am not confident enough to see how successful I could really be. 15. I believe that success always leads to a fall in the end. FEAR GAUGE: 15 – 24 points: This score indicates you have very few unresolved fears of success. This score is typical of people who face their fears and who are less afraid to shine.  When they do feel fear, they call upon extra help and inspiration. 25-39 points: This score indicates an average level of unresolved fears of success. These fears may cause you to shy away from opportunities for greater success and happiness.  You are porbably playing small in your life. 40 – 50 points: This score indicates a high level of unresolved fears of success. These fears may well conspire against your best efforts to succeed and will cause unnecessary struggle, setbacks, and failures. 51-60 points: This score indicates an extreme leel of unresolved fears of success. This score is typical of people who suffer from dysfunctional independence; i.e. they believe they have to “do” success by themselves.

So how do we become more successful?  By letting go of the fears that we have identified and used to hold us back.

(In next week’s tip, I’ll share more about how we actually do this as I discuss the 4th, 5th, and 6th keys to Transformative Coaching that were highlighted on the calls…)

Until then, have fun, learn heaps, and I hope to see you in NYC in the new year!

In January, I will be guiding a community of “impossiblers” through my 30 day online audio program Creating the Impossible: Transform Your World in 30 Days, featuring some new and updated recordings and the same phenomenal community support that made the original so successful!

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“I found Creating the Impossible to be one of my most successful programs in achieving a desired goal yet. The daily message brought inspiration, grounding and a new perspective on a goal that has been a part of my life for quite a while. I am making new gains with my goal and it is exciting. I hope that many more people have the opportunity to work through creating their impossible goal using this invaluable resource that Michael has so graciously shared with us. Thank you.“- Tamikka R, San Francisco

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There are two ways to join us:1. Tuition for Creating the Impossible is $99. You can sign up and learn more by clicking on the link.

2. Members of the Solutions Cafe get to participate in the program for free. If you join the cafe this month, 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, an additional $99 value also free to Cafe members!

What’s your impossible goal?

In January, I will be guiding a community of “impossiblers” through my 30 day online audio program Creating the Impossible: Transform Your World in 30 Days, featuring some new and updated recordings and the same phenomenal community support that made the original so successful!

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“I found Creating the Impossible to be one of my most successful programs in achieving a desired goal yet. The daily message brought inspiration, grounding and a new perspective on a goal that has been a part of my life for quite a while. I am making new gains with my goal and it is exciting. I hope that many more people have the opportunity to work through creating their impossible goal using this invaluable resource that Michael has so graciously shared with us. Thank you.”

- Tamikka R, San Francisco

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There are two ways to join us:

1. Tuition for Creating the Impossible is $99. You can sign up and learn more by clicking on the link.

2. Members of the Solutions Cafe get to participate in the program for free. If you join the cafe this month, 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, an additional $99 value also free to Cafe members!

Thursday, December 10th at Noon Pacific/3pm Eastern/8pm UK

A MEANINGFUL LIFE

Join me and my very special guest Laura Berman Fortgang, bestselling author of The Little Book on Meaning, for a fun, in depth exploration of what it takes to create a meaningful, purposeful 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 FREE WILL OR FREE WONT? 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!

A couple of weeks ago, a marketing expert was shotgunning me with suggestions about what I needed to do to once people had signed up for Supercoach Academy. After listening to him for awhile, somewhat confused by the array of to-do’s he was putting forward, I asked him why he thought I needed to do all those things.

He looked at me curiously. ”To prevent buyer’s remorse – after all, research has shown…”

What followed was an in-depth explanation of why this was so important, and suddenly I understood why I hadn’t been understanding him.

“The reason this hasn’t been making any sense,” I explained, “is because you’re trying to help me solve a problem I don’t actually have.”

A few days later, a client was explaining to me his concerns about his big break – his first gig in front of over 1000 people.  He wanted tips on how to find the “extra” confidence to make his performance “really, really, really good”.

I told him that I could share tips with him, but what would make the biggest difference was to have fun and not try to make this performance any different to any of the ones he had done that had led to this opportunity.

As I explained it to him, here’s how the problem-solving cycle usually works:

• Something happens.
  (In this case, he got offered a great gig.)
• We imagine all the bad things – “problems” – which might happen as a result of it.
  (In this case, what would happen if he suddenly lost his nerve in front of all those people and “blew his big chance”.)
• We then “problem-solve” by doing things to prevent the bad things we’ve imagined from happening.
  (In this case, try to learn confidence tricks and techniques to “ensure” that nothing will go wrong.)

The problem is, apart from the original event, nothing’s actually happened except our over-reaction in the physical world to the problems in our imagination!

He didn’t quite seem to get what I meant, I told him the following story:

Imagine that it’s the Wild West and you are surrounded by hostile Indians. Your only hope is if the cavalry comes to save you. Just as you are about to abandon all hope, you hear hoofbeats in the distance and see a lone rider coming towards you at a gallop. He pulls up beside you, leans down from his horse, and in a voice dry and crackling from the trail, says “I’ve got some bad news and I’ve got some good news…” “The bad news is that the cavalry’s not coming. The good news is, this isn’t the Wild West and there aren’t any Indians.”

He laughed, and called me a couple of days later to tell me the gig had gone phenomenally well.

What can we learn from all this?

There will never be enough techniques to solve problems that don’t actually exist.

Have fun, learn heaps, and relax… while life will always have its ups and downs, coping with them is inevitably much simpler than you think.

Did you like this tip? You can have them delivered directly to your e-mail every Monday by subscribing at geniuscatalyst.com

If you coach others, personally or professionally at work or at home, this teleseries is for you!

Please join me for this special teleclass series beginning on Monday, December 7th! The series is free to anyone who registers. Each call will last for approximately one hour and will be co-led by me and one of the six supercoaches on the live faculty for Supercoach Academy.

For more information and to register yourself, click here!