1. Happiness is your nature.  It is not the fruit of something you do; it is the essence of who you are.

2. Discovering your innate happiness and well-being is the key to creating what you really want in the world around you.

Here’s how I wrote about it in You Can Have What You Want:

Does this mean you need to put your life on hold while you go looking for happiness?

Absolutely not.  In fact, it’s in the midst of the noise of your life that you’re most likely to discover your own inner quiet.  And isn’t it nice to know that no matter how crazy things seem right now, you’re only ever one thought away from peace?

Have fun, learn heaps, and remember:

Happiness leads to success a heck of a lot more often
than success leads to happiness!
With love,

PS – I’ll be coming to London at the end of September…

…and would love to see you at one of our live events!

September 25th – Creating the Impossible One Day Event

September 26th – Financially Fearless One Day Event

September 27th-28th – Coaching Magic Training

• At level one, we are primarily concerned with performance, and our focus is on eliciting peak performance states and triggering them at the appropriate times.
• At level two, we are working with the horizontal dimension of life, sharing strategies for success in disparate areas ranging from career and money through to relationships, social action, and health.
• At level three, we are dancing directly in the vertical dimension, opening up the space for a new way of seeing the world and in so doing, transforming people’s experience in every area of their lives.

One of the issues that comes up most frequently with my coaching clients and indeed human beings in general is fear – and again, there are three levels at which fear and fearlessness can be usefully explored:

Level One:
What specifically are you afraid of?

One of the things I’ve learned is that people can learn to fear pretty much anything, and over the years I have spoken and/or worked with people suffering through everything from a fear of raccoons to a phobia of wobbly Jello.

Since we are born with only two “natural” fears – falling and loud noises – all other fears can be handled quite quickly on an individual basis through psycho-physiological interventions ranging from NLP to TFT to EMDR to the “baby bird technique” (see this short video for more thoughts on being thrown into the deep end of life and learning that you can swim!)

The problem with this approach is that the learning rarely generalizes – we overcome our fear of raccoons but Jello still terrifies us; we move past our fear of asking someone cute out on a date but cold calling sales prospects still seems completely beyond our grasp.

Level Two:

How are you using your fear?

When we look a bit deeper into the phenomenon of fear, we see that there are only three reasons why anyone would ever actually want to be afraid – to protect themselves, to motivate themselves, or some combination of the two.

Since protection and motivation are powerful drivers, often people hang on to unnecessary and even unpleasant fears because of what they are afraid would happen if they didn’t.

For example, someone who is afraid of asking for what they want might be attempting to keep themselves safe from a feeling of “rejection”; someone who is afraid of being poor is often attempting to motivate themselves to engage in more wealth-producing activities.

Here’s the problem:

• “Protective fear” often creates side-effects that are more debilitating than whatever it is you are attempting to protect yourself from.
• “Motivational fear” often backfires, creating so much discomfort that you drop out of the game rather than continuing to push yourself forward.

And even though we can see that our fear based “strategies for success” aren’t working, we’re reluctant to give them up for fear of what might happen if we did. So to intervene at this level, we question our beliefs about the necessity of fear and find alternative ways to protect and motivate ourselves.  Once these new ways take root, the “purposeful fears” we had been clinging to become easier and easier to let go.

When we understand fear in this way, it becomes considerably less scary. But there is an even deeper level of understanding which makes fearless living an even more immediate possibility…

Level Three:

What is Fear, Really?

Have you ever wondered where fear goes when it’s not there anymore?  Or where it comes from in the first place?

One of the most interesting things about fear is that it always seems to either come from something outside of us (like a raccoon or cold calling or Jello) or from something inside but separate from us (what my mentor George Pransky calls “psychological bogeymen”).

Yet when you look closely, you’ll find that every fear you experience (outside of a clear and present danger) is actually a reaction to a thought. It’s not “false evidence appearing real”, as the acronym suggests – it’s thought appearing real, in the sense that we react to the thought of a raccoon biting or dentist drilling or person shouting as if it was actually happening to us right here, right now.

Steve Chandler uses the analogy of a young child drawing a picture of a monster on a piece of paper and then running out of the room in terror. We create a scary thought in our mind, and because we do not recognize ourselves as its creator, we are run ragged by that thought, doing all sorts of things to avoid an imaginary consequence that we ourselves have constructed.

The exact moment the child sees that the monster is just a drawing and can’t hurt it, the fear is gone.  And the moment the child sees him or herself as the creator of the drawing, the very same thing that was so frightening becomes fascinating.

And the same is true for each one of us. The moment we see that our own deepest, darkest fears are just a thought, we open up a space in our minds for our innate health and wisdom and well-being to come through.

There may well still be things to do in the world – but we will do them based on what is actually wanted and needed in each situation, not as a knee-jerk fight or flight response to our own unrecognized thinking.

And the moment we recognize that we ourselves are the creators of our own experience, this very same world that was once so frightening becomes an endlessly, wonderfully fascinating place to be.

With love,

PS – Experience the three levels of coaching and more…

Get a taste of transformative “supercoaching” in action in Hertfordshire, UK this September – for more information and to register, click here.

“Do you mean in real money?” he asked.  ”Is that even possible?”

When I assured him that I did indeed mean in “real money”, he asked how they’d done it, and I outlined the three ways to make money that I am about to share with you.  But I also pointed out that making money had not been the real point of the exercise.

What was important was bringing people’s fearful thoughts to the surface in a fun and friendly atmosphere so they could look at them in the bright light of consciousness and see if they had any substance to them.  (A small hint – they don’t!)

And when there is no fear (i.e. “fearlessness”), creativity, joy, and fun are the inevitable result.

While he thought that was very “coachy” of me, he still seemed more curious about the three ways to make money, so I shared a bit about what had happened with the group:

1. Planting seeds

Many people seem to think of the game of sales like putting coins into a slot machine – you make your offerings (put in your coins) and if you get lucky, sometimes the machine pays out.  If it doesn’t, you either keep putting in more coins in hopes of “hitting the jackpot”, or you move on to another machine.

But when you approach sales from a place of joyful service, you realize that making offers is more like planting a garden than gambling.  It’s not impersonal. Instead of dropping coins into a machine, you are working with a living system.  And instead of focusing on what you might get back if you’re lucky, you have to take some time to think about what you would like to grow.  Plant a tomato seed and if it takes root, you’ll wind up with a tomato.  If you don’t like tomatoes… well, that might not be your best plan!

Ask yourself questions like:

• Who would I love to serve?  How would I love to serve them?
• What would be the most powerful, fun, and useful thing I could do for this client or customer?
• If I dedicated my life to making this person/company’s life better, what is the biggest difference I could make for them in the smallest amount of time?

When service-oriented questions are asked from a place of joyful inquiry, the answers are inevitably creative, fun, and bring the seeds of opportunity with them.

2. Picking fruit

Some of the largest financial gains people made in the hour were by going to existing clients and customers and creating wonderful offers designed especially for them.  Since they already had a preexisting service-based relationship with these people, they didn’t have to “water the soil” by establishing their credibility and ability to add value – they just had to find the differences they would love to make  and the way they would most like to make them.

When the “fruit was ripe” – i.e. there was a real fit between the offer and the person and the timing was right – the deals could be done on the spot.

How did they know the fruit was ripe?  By reaching out, asking questions, and sharing from a place of well-being that would be unaffected by either a “yes” or a “no”.

3. Exchanging chickens

Money was originally created as a means of exchange that would simplify the barter process.  Instead of my having to carry chickens around with me that I could trade for baked goods or clothing or shelter, the invention of money means I get to sell my chickens for money and use the money to get the cupcake, sweater, or house.

So once I identify “my chickens” – i.e. those goods or services I would love to offer that will make a positive difference in the lives of others – I can now exchange them directly for cash.

How do you identify your “chickens”?

Because they meet at least one of two criteria:

a. You enjoy doing or creating them and do/create them really well
b. Other people value receiving/using them

Your “chicken” might be:

• Making cars run better or making homes immaculately clean
• Facilitating the exchange of goods and services (i.e. “sales”) or facilitating the appreciation of beauty and wonder (i.e. “art”)
• The ability to design a rocket ship or the ability to kick a ball into a net

After sharing these ideas with my son and giving him examples of what people had actually done, he asked me to explain the “coachy” bit to him again.  What is it that freed people up to access the kind of energy, creativity and fearlessness that led to all that money being made?

While there are many ways to answer the question, perhaps the simplest is this:

When you can clearly see the difference between what money is good for (i.e. facilitating the exchange of goods and services) and what money is terrible at but often used in an attempt to create (i.e. security, peace of mind, and happiness), you stop trying to make money to make yourself feel better and realize that the better you feel, the easier it is to make money.

And when you begin to see that good feeling is part of your essential nature and not something that can ever be truly impacted by how much or how little you have, the game of money becomes considerably easier to play.

Here’s how I wrote about it in Supercoach:

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

With love,

PS – I will be offering a one-day version of Financially Fearless in London in September…

For more information and to register, click here.

The Real Purpose of Intimate Relationships

Many people believe that the purpose of our intimate relationships is to make us happy. Others teach that we are in relationship to learn, grow, and evolve as human beings. But what if the real purpose was simpler than that, and even more fun? Michael explodes some of the myths of intimate relationships and offers coaching on having what you want in every area of your life!

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 our most recent live show on MAKING THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE? 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!

As I was wallowing in my own insecure thinking, I suddenly had a brand new thought – one I could not recall ever having crossed my mind before.

“What if,” my thought went, channeling my inner Jack Nicholson, “this is as good as it gets?  What if I never get any smarter, any wiser, any more evolved mentally, emotionally, physically, or spiritually?”

I began to enumerate my many remaining faults, from shoddy listening to sloppy administration to an overwhelming fondness for high-carb foods and occasional lapses in my dental hygiene regimen.

And I realized something interesting. If I never got any better as a human being than I am right now, I could live with that. In point of fact, I’ve been living with it for years, but I’ve been battling against it, sure that I was only one short burst of willpower away from becoming the man I’ve always dreamed about being.

In You Can Have What You Want, I wrote about my early struggles with living up to an image of perfection:

To my surprise, what I realized is that the battle for a better me had continued raging quietly in the background throughout my life. Only the battlefield had shifted over the years, from trying to make myself more like I thought I should be to trying to make myself more loving and accepting of my failure and unwillingness to do so.

So here’s the conundrum:

How do we reconcile these two seemingly opposing forces?  Is acceptance a desirable gateway to happiness that brings us deeper and deeper into peace and the present moment, or a seductive siren luring us into our own comfort zone where over time we will silently drown in a morass of boredom, lethargy, fear, and sameness?

What I’ve come to realize in my more reflective moments is that I really don’t need to know the answer to this or any other dilemma. I don’t need to resolve the unresolvable, work on myself or not work on myself, practice acceptance or cultivate “divine discontent”.

There is a power beyond us that seems to work through us in the direction of health and well-being – a sort of psycho-spiritual immune system that will bring a return to peace the moment we step out of the way.  I wouldn’t even think of trying to heal my own cut finger; I needn’t try so hard to heal my wounded psyche.

Because perhaps it isn’t wounded at all. Perhaps, just perhaps, I only think it is.

Have fun, learn heaps, and enjoy your week!

With love,

PS – We will be accepting registrations for two more days on…


Our most popular online program is underway for July, and you have until the 7th of July to join in!

A daily ‘conversation’ with Michael is grounding, inspirational and maintains that focus on happy, effortless creativity. These emails are his encouragement, and a reminder of the strong source and resource that is cheering me on. Whether I am in need of a little calm, an energetic boost or a practical tip there are always some wise words to hear! I love the forums as it is a chance to connect with others – who share a similar ethos, whatever their goal. It also provides the opportunity to meet, share skills and ideas – and maybe even the possibility of all sorts of joint ventures. - Anne

For more information and to register, click here.

Members of the Solutions Cafe can register at no cost here.!
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So many examples of the incredible life changes I’ve witnessed (including my own) came to mind that I had to slow myself down to choose just one to share.  In the end I went with the most recent, which while far from being the most dramatic, points to what’s possible when someone gets a deeper insight into how our experience of life is created on a moment by moment basis…

Frank (not his real name) is a businessman from Europe who just began coaching with me towards the end of May.  During our first session, we talked about the illusory nature of thought and how easy it was to become hypnotized into believing that the seemingly constant noise in our heads is important to pay attention to and act upon.

Because I went away on holiday the day after our session, I didn’t speak with Frank again for nearly three weeks.  When I came back, he asked me how I’d managed to get him to stop biting his fingernails after nearly 30 years of trying.

Somewhat confused, I reviewed my notes from the session and found that not only hadn’t we spoken about his nail biting, I didn’t even know it had been an issue for him.  Yet I did have an understanding of exactly how a life-long habit could completely disappear without any effort whatsoever – in other words, a complete transformation (aka “a miracle”) could take place.

Here’s how I explained it to him:

Frank went on to say that not only is he no longer biting his nails, he is now truly enjoying both his work and his life (which only a month ago he did not).

Does that count as a miracle?  Would it count if it happened for you in your life?

The beauty of the transformative coach approach is that it is not so much dependent on the skill of the coach as it is on their level of understanding and the innate health, wisdom, and well-being of the client.

And if you feel like you are spending your life running from dragons, isn’t it nice to know that you’re never more than one thought away from peace?

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

With love,

PS – Supercoach Academy 2011 is coming!
To be one of the first to learn more, enter your information here!

So I hereby make this official declaration:

June 22nd is International “Have an Average Day” Day!

That doesn’t mean don’t go to work if you work – it just means take the day off from trying so hard to be exceptional, brilliant, stunning, and amazing. The truth is, you’ll have better days, and God willing, you’ll have worse ones. And since today is the only day you have any guarantee of, you may as well enjoy it.

Spread the word @ www.haveanaverageday.org

As my mind wandered through the 16 years or so that children have been a part of my life, it also wandered back to last Saturday, part of the final weekend of Supercoach Academy 2010. (And yes, for those of you who’ve been asking, there will be a Supercoach Academy 2011 – details will be coming in the next few weeks!)

Our guest lecturer was the phenomenal Dr. Robert Holden, a man whose work I’m grateful to have come across almost two decades ago and I’m even more grateful to have been able to call my friend for the past six years. And what he delivered over 8 scintillating hours was a meditation on the nature of true success.

We began by sharing our successes from the past week – an easy enough task until you were asked to share a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth example, and your definition of success began to stretch to accommodate the scope and breadth of the exercise. A bit later in the day we shared a “top ten list” of our most meaningful successes, and nearly all of us noticed that when the word “meaningful” entered the equation, our definition of success changed again.

Finally, Robert asked us to write down our own personal definition of success in 25 words or less – an exercise that took people considerably deeper than expected.

To my surprise, there was nothing in there about achievement or accomplishment, although achievement and accomplishment are certainly common side effects of having fun and learning heaps. But what I realized almost immediately was why the high achievement lifestyle has never really grabbed me by the throat. Because it’s readily apparent to me that despite the hype, my life is no more or less of a success because of the number of boxes I’ve ticked along the way.

As I was thinking about all this, the sound of giggling children and happy teenagers interrupted my meditation, and moments later the door to our bedroom swung open. Before you could say “Happy Father’s Day!”, the bed was filled with people and cats and scrambled eggs and yes, even handmade cards with sentiments that brought tears to my eyes and a smile to my lips.

And I knew that my definition of success in that very moment was exactly what was happening in that very moment.

One of the most popular tips I have ever written was entitled “Have an Average Day!“. It was reprinted in the Utne Reader and the Irish Journal and a number of other publications around the world. It forms the basis for the sixth session of my book Supercoach, and I have received more mail around it than anything else I have written, often from teenagers, college students, young adults, and sometimes even their parents.

I think the reason it speaks to so many people is that they recognize the truth in it – that despite all of our cultural mythology to the contrary, happiness leads to success a heck of a lot more often than success (in the achievement-oriented sense of the word) leads to happiness. Striving and struggling to succeed won’t get you more of what you really want out of life anymore than eating cookies will make you feel loved and whole. It’s a cheap imitation – a poor substitute – and it takes you away from the true wonder and joy that is always on offer and never more than one thought away.

So I hereby make this official declaration:

June 22nd is International “Have an Average Day” Day!

That doesn’t mean don’t go to work if you work – it just means take the day off from trying so hard to be exceptional, brilliant, stunning, and amazing. The truth is, you’ll have better days, and God willing, you’ll have worse ones. And since today is the only day you have any guarantee of, you may as well enjoy it.

There’s no banner to wave and no mailing list to join. If you’d like to tell a few friends about it, feel free to share this tip or point them here; or even write about what it means to you in your own blog or talk about it with a friend.

But more important than any of that, just relax and have an average day. Tell someone you love that you love them. Better yet, give them a hug and share a moment. It doesn’t have to be an exceptional moment – in fact, it might be better if it’s just an average one. Because a series of average moments filled with love may just be the most important secret to a successful life I’ve yet discovered.

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

With love,

To begin today’s tip, I would like you to think about something that you would really love to be, do, have, or change in your life but it seems impossible that you ever will.

This is not a “fantasy”, in the sense that it defies the laws of time, space, and matter, but rather something you really do want in your life that really does seem beyond unlikely for you to have it.

(My favorite “defying the laws of physics” fantasy would be to have the power of teleportation. I would love that, especially on days like today where I’m awaiting an afternoon flight back to LA. If I could teleport, I wouldn’t have to take an hour’s cab ride to the airport and then spend another hour in line going through security; I’d be able to just make one of those humming noises like on Star Trek and then there I’d be, sitting in the living room with Nina and the kids.  The coolest bit is that the dogs would begin to bark moments before I appeared, turning their heads sideways as the energy began to swirl, invisible to everyone but them.)

So for this exercise, choose something that you really do want in your life and is theoretically possible, but it really does seem impossible for you to have it - because you’re too old or too young, too smart or not smart enough. Maybe it would be possible if you had this upbringing instead of that upbringing, or this much money instead of that much money, or if the world were designed this way instead of that way. But for whatever reason, it just doesn’t seem possible for you.

Now, once you’ve chosen your impossible goal for this exercise, I want you to do something a little bit unusual. I’d like you to speak it out loud at least a dozen times and notice if you have more energy around it or less. Keep speaking it out loud until you can really feel the energy shift in one direction or another.

For most people, their energy goes up.  If yours went down, you can try it again with a different “impossible” goal or simply keep speaking it until it shifts.

Once you’re energy has gone up around it, you’re ready for the next step:

Go and speak your “impossible” goal to someone else.

It can be someone you know, someone you trust, or even a complete stranger. But I’d like you to speak it to someone and notice what happens to your energy after you have spoken it.

Don’t confuse this with what happens in your body when you think about speaking it, or even as you’re speaking it. In fact, until you’ve spoken it out loud to someone else, just assume that whatever you think about what it’s going to be like is just wrong!

Because once you’ve actually done it, once you’ve spoken your “impossible” goal aloud, it becomes more possible.  It seems more real. In fact, speaking your desire aloud is the first step in the process of its creation.

A friend once told me about how candles were originally made.  What the candle makers would do is to take a wick, dip it in hot wax, and then take it out.  And a little bit of the wax sticks.  And they let it dry and then they stick the wick back in the wax and take it out again.  And of course, now more wax sticks because there’s more substance to it.  It’s more solid – it’s got more surface area.  And then they let it cool and they put it in again. And each time they dip the wick, the candle gets more and more solid. It gets more and more tangible.  It gets more and more real.

In the same way, each time we speak what we want, even if we think it’s “impossible”, we speak what we want into being.  Because each time you speak about what you want, it becomes just a little bit more real to you.  It adds wax to your candle.  It makes it seem more solid.  Eventually, it becomes so real that other people can start to see it too.  Sometimes they can even see it before you can.  And the clearer and more solid the vision appears, the easier and easier it becomes to create it in the world.

So if you want to create the impossible in your own life, your business, your relationships, and in the world, it begins by simply being willing to speak it.

Have fun, learn heaps, and make the impossible happen!

With love,

PS -If you’d like to learn more about being Financially Fearless in your life…

Listen in or download this wonderful interview that Bevin Lynch did with me on seeing through fear and creating more wealth in your life!.

One of my favorite bits of research into what it takes to master any skill comes from Dr. Daniel Levitin, and I have quoted this excerpt from his work in past tips:

… 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 response to this notion, a reader wrote me last week as follows:

This is undoubtedly true, and excellent books like The Talent Code and Talent is Overrated make this point as well.  But the reader then went on to say:

I appreciated the email, as it made me look a bit more closely into my own experience for insights.  The truth is, I began writing these tips just over ten years ago, having never written more than a couple of dozen school essays and a series of comic sketches for a Welsh radio show called 30 Something Else.

Had I been overly concerned about having “mastered the craft” back then, I never would have kept it up to the point where I have mastered (well, gotten pretty reliably good at) the craft.  And chances are that the first 100 hours of anything from golf swings to piano playing won’t involve very much (well, any) mastery at all.

The reason I like the notion of the 10,000 hours is that while it is daunting, it actually lowers the barrier to entry for most people, allowing them to know that the playful joy of the boys playing soccer in the streets of Brazil and the pleasure my 8 year old daughter (and her 43 year old father) get from pounding on the keys of a piano is more important as an entry point to learning than the perception of any “innate” talent.

At some point, it will indeed matter what specifically is being practiced, and I have no doubt that if one or more of us decide to go from tinkering to mastery our practice sessions will become more frequent and more precise.  But for these first 100 critical hours, the doing and the joy is enough.

With love,

PS – Would you like a day off from striving to succeed and pushing yourself to excellence?

Mark your calendars – June 22nd is “Have an Average Day” Day – details to follow!