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

What do you want?

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

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

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

1. Outside-in vs. Inside-out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

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

Here’s the problem…

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

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

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

What would you love to create?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example:

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

Examples:

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

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

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

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

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

Have fun, learn heaps, and happy creating!

With love,

Michael

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

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

Level I – Change in a Specific Situation

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

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

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

Level II – Change in a Specific Life Area

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

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

Level III – Global Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• How else could you see this situation?

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

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

Have fun, learn heaps, and happy exploring!

With love,

Michael

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

The key to understanding expectations is this:

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

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

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

Expectations vs. Standards

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

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

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

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

Expectations vs. Agreements

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

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

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

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

“I expect you to clean your room!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expectations vs. Hope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

————

TODAY”S EXPERIMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the unmet expectations behind this conflict?

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

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

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

With love,

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A potential client approached me once to ask me to support them in “manifesting a wonderfully fit and healthy body”. They knew that one of the cornerstones of my work is an eschewing of the “no pain, no gain” philosophy in favor of “no pain, no pain”. While I don’t believe you have to avoid pain at all costs, I also don’t believe that “suffering for your art” gets you there any quicker (or makes “there” any more attractive a place to be).

Yet as I pointed out to my would-be client, sometimes being willing to do things in what seems like “the hard way” can be a more direct path to success.

Here are a few of my favorite examples:

Jackie Chan is primarily known in the US as a comedy actor who does some Kung Fu, in China he has directed and/or starred in over 50 martial arts films. One day when I was on the road training, I was flicking channels on the TV when I came across a documentary about his work. As I had always wondered how martial artists do all those extraordinary stunts without getting hurt, I watched with fascination in hopes the secret would be revealed.

Here’s the secret - they do get hurt! In the course of the documentary I watched people break bones, get knocked unconscious, and at one point saw Chan himself pass out from fear 4 times before successfully completing a stunt for one of the Rush Hour movies. But despite this, he continues to develop new, outrageous stunts and creates movie magic on a regular basis.

Kobe Bryant is considered by many to be the greatest basketball player currently playing the game. In 2002, he tied a league record by shooting 12 three point baskets in one game, a feat made all the more remarkable by the fact that before 2002, Bryant was considered a mediocre outside shooter.

How did he do it? By taking at least 1000 long-range shots every single day in practice during the 2001-2002 offseason.

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin is considered to be one of the greatest painters of the 19th century. Yet even as he was developing his own unique style, he would spend weeks at a time recreating the paintings of some of his contemporaries. When a friend asked him why he would spend his time copying someone else’s art instead of creating his own, he said “When I look at these paintings, they appear to have been created by magic. But I know that if I can re-create them, they were created by a human being. And that gives me hope, and the energy to carry on with my own work.

What does this all have to do with you?

Well, in the midst of your pursuit of effortless success and application of the law of attraction, it’s useful from time to time to ask yourself this question:

If metaphysics, positive thinking and the law of attraction were all a load of crap,
am I doing the things that are likely to create the results I want to see in my life?

Please note, I’m not saying that the way you think and the energy you put out into the universe doesn’t matter - as far as I can tell, it clearly does. I’m just saying that when people begin to believe that the only way to unlock the door to success is to visualize and affirm it as open, they sometimes forget to check the door to see if it was ever really locked in the first place.

And as I said to my client (they did hire me, even after all that!), “manifesting a wonderfully fit and healthy body” might actually be harder than simply eating better and exercising more.

———————-
Today’s Experiment:
———————-

Make a note of any project you are currently working on where you feel stuck or frustrated with the speed of your progress.

For each project, ask yourself these questions:

* Am I putting in the hours?
* Am I doing what someone who didn’t believe in any of this “power of thought” stuff would believe was necessary to get where I want to go?
* If I was accountable to a manager or boss for the successful completion of this project, would I be able to give a good accounting of what I’m doing to make things happen?

If your answer to any of these questions is “no”, either reconcile yourself to not completing the project in the time frame you’ve established for yourself or create an “ordinary person” action plan - i.e. the plan you would expect an “ordinary” person to follow to create that result in their life.

Of course, if your answer to all these questions is “yes” and you’re still stuck, chances are you’ve fallen for the opposite lie - the idea that it’s all about action and nothing else matters.

Ask yourself this:

If taking massive action was a load of crap and it’s all about the thoughts and energy I’m putting out into the world, am I holding the kinds of thoughts and putting out the kind of energy that is likely to create the results I want to see in my life?

Have fun, learn heaps, and happy exploring!

With love,

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In the current economic climate, the phrase I find myself using more than any other with clients and friends is this:

Financial security does not come from the amount of money you currently have -
it comes from your ability to get more of it whenever you want.

There are two key “art forms” underlying the skill of being able to get more money whenever you want it:

The art of serving others, or what I like to call “difference making”
The art of exchanging value, more commonly known as “sales” and “negotiation”

In order to better understand how mastering the art of serving others can guarantee your financial future, here is a simple economic formula I share in our “Happy Millionaire” trainings that demonstrates exactly why people earn however much or little money they are currently earning:

1. Scope of Difference
In one sense, money is just a measure of the difference you’re making in the world. If you’re not making any difference, it will be difficult to make any money; if you make a huge difference to people’s lives, it will be easier. This is not to say that you can measure difference making in pure monetary terms - after all, not everyone chooses to exchange the value they create for money. But if you do want to make more money, mastering the art of serving others will help you secure your financial future.

2. Scale of Difference
How many people currently benefit from what you do? Making a tremendous difference in the lives of just one human being may be the most important thing you do in your time on this planet, but in terms of financial value, it’s extremely limited. (Unless that one human being is Bill Gates!) In simple terms, the more people whose lives you positively impact, the higher your earning potential will be.

3. Scarcity/Uniqueness of Difference
Scarcity and economics go together like a horse and carriage, with the basic rule of thumb that scarce resources are always valued higher than easily accessible ones. This is the law of supply and demand in action - when demand exceeds supply, prices go up; when supply exceeds demand, prices go down. When it comes to our personal economy, you can substitute the word “uniqueness” for scarcity. The more unique the contribution you make, the more you will be able to charge for it.

Ever wonder how much what you do is actually worth to the world in monetary terms? Or why movie stars get paid so much more than school teachers or even doctors?

Let’s run a few examples through the formula to see what we can learn. As we do, please note that I’m only using these examples as examples - if I stumble across something you actually do for a living and you feel I’ve undervalued it, simply run the numbers again substituting what you think the real difference you make in the world is and see if and how that changes things.

Here is a simple scale I will be using so that we can plug in some numbers Note that the scale is reversed for scarcity:

a. A line worker at a factory

Bob works on an assembly line in an automobile factory. His job is physically difficult but most people can learn to do it in just a few days.

b. A teacher

Sam is an elementary school teacher. His 30 students a year love him, and the parents do as well. However, from the city’s point of view, he’s just another member of the union and doesn’t have a lot of seniority.

c. A doctor
Cynthia is an emergency room surgeon. She saves lives almost every single day, and will treat over a thousand people in the course of a year. While she is highly skilled at what she does, she doesn’t have a specialty in one particular area.

d. A movie star

Julia is one of the few actresses who can “open” a film - that is, her name above the title guarantees that millions of people will go to see it and/or rent it when it comes out on DVD.

So what can we actually learn from this?

Well, the first thing to realize is that if you want to increase your income, there are essentially three ways to do it - make more of a difference with people, make that difference with more people, and increase the uniqueness of what it is you have to offer.

The second thing is to notice whether your actual earnings seem small compared to what the value formula would predict them to be. If this happens, chances are that you have not yet mastered the skill of exchanging value for earnings - as the saying goes, “you don’t get what you deserve in life - you get what you negotiate.” While you can find a number of tips on this in the Solutions Cafe, I’ve included a few of my favorite books on the topic in the “Want to Learn More?” section at the end of the tip.

———————-
Today’s Experiment:
———————-

Run whatever it is you do through the value formula. Give yourself marks out of 10 (or out of 100 if you prefer) for the scope of the difference you make to your employer, customer or clients, the number of people you actually serve with your work, and how unique your work is - i.e. how easily could someone else get what you have to offer if you were no longer available to offer it?

2. What are at least ten things you could you do to make more of a difference to your existing employer, customer or clients?

3. Who else could you serve with what you do? Make a list of at least 20 people or categories of people (i.e. plumbers, working moms, recently laid off people, etc.) who would benefit from what you have to offer.

4. What is your unique contribution to the work that you do? Why would I choose you over someone else who does something similar? This time, write down at least 50 things which make what you do and/or the way that you do it uniquely valuable in the marketplace.

Have fun, learn heaps, and remember - your well-being is not dependent on your bank balance!

With love,

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I’ve just come back from an amazing two days with a group of powerful coaches led by my friend and mentor Steve Chandler. One of the games we played towards the end of the second day was called “the dream and the fear”.

Each person in the room was asked to come up with a dream - i.e. something that they really wanted to have, be or do in their lives - and a fear - i.e. something they were afraid might prevent them from having, being or doing it.

As we went round the room and people shared their fondest dreams and darkest fears, I noticed how dramatically different they appeared when they were talking about their dreams then when they were focused on their fears. Each person would come alive when describing their dreams, as though suddenly possessed by an animating spirit.

But as soon as they began talking about their fears, their bodies would deflate and their life force would leave them like air hissing out of a punctured tire. It was in witnessing this phenomenon repeated time and time again, person after person that I was struck with an ‘obvious’ but previously hidden insight:

*Our dreams carry with them the energy for their achievement; our fears carry with them the energy of our defeat

By way of analogy, imagine you are an athlete about to head out into the arena for the big game. Your trainer offers you one of two energy drinks to prepare yourself. The first one, the trainer tells you, has a secret ingredient which will energize your body and your mind and inspire you to do things you don’t even know are possible for you. The second will give you stomach aches, nausea, and make you want to stay in bed with the covers pulled up over your head.

Which one would you take?

Ridiculous as that analogy might seem, every time we choose to focus on our fears instead of our dreams, we are actually pouring toxic waste into our bodies; every time we choose to re-focus our attention on what we truly want, we are refueling our bodies, renewing our minds and recharging our spirits.

And the secret ingredient in the “energy drink” of our dreams is simply hope.

Here’s my definition of “hope”:

Hope is the magic elixir that energizes dreams and fuels possibilities. It is not a promise that something you want will happen - it is an invitation to enjoy the possibility of what you want while you and life negotiate the eventual outcome.

And here’s what is perhaps the key to the whole game:

There is never a good reason not to hope.
Hope is always just a choice.

—————–
Today’s Experiment:
—————–

1. What’s your dream?

• If you could have absolutely anything happen for you over the next year, five years, or whatever time frame you’d like to explore, what would you want to have happen?
• If you really could create anything you wanted in your life, what would you choose to create?
• What would you want if you knew you didn’t have to be unhappy about not getting it?
• What would you do if you knew you could not fail?

2. What are you afraid might stop you?

• If you take on your dream and fail, why will you have failed?
• If you could eliminate one obstacle to living your dream, which obstacle would you eliminate and why?
• What’s going to be the hardest part of waking up your dream and bringing it to life?

3. Take a few moments to review your dream. Notice how you feel. If you’re not feeling energized, take the extra step of deliberately adding “hope” to your imaginings - in other words, just for now, imagine how wonderful it would be if you actually did succeed in making your dreams come true.

4. Now take a few moments to review your fears. Again, notice how you feel.

5. Make a choice - do you want to focus on your dreams or your fears? Which focus will make living your dreams more likely?

If you’re concerned that not focusing on your fears will leave you open to danger, realize that the opposite is true. Since your fears exist only in your head, the more you focus on them the less you are able to focus on what is actually going on in the world around you. The more you step outside of the “dark imaginings” of your mind and drop down into your body and the world around you, the easier it will be to handle any real challenges that may come your way.

Have fun, learn heaps, and happy exploring!

With love,
michael

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(Today’s tip is loosely adapted from our e-book “Money Made Fun”. To get your copy, click here!)

In 2006/2007, I had the privilege of assisting my friend Paul McKenna in putting together a system for creating wealth he published in his fantastic book, “I Can Make You Rich”. Along the way, he conducted interviews with some of the wealthiest people on the planet, and we had the opportunity to meet with numerous millionaires and even billionaires to find out what it was they had in common when it came to the creation of wealth.

One of the more curious patterns we noticed was that the people with the largest bank balances did not always wear the nicest clothes. This echoed the findings of Thomas Stanley, who in the book “The Millionaire Next Door” recounts the story of a group of advertising executives who were paying extremely wealthy people to come in and participate in a market research study for a new high-end product.

The ad executives all showed up in their Armani suits and leased BMW’s and Mercedes, only to be greeted by a procession of men and women dressed in jeans and showing up in pickup trucks and 5 year old Buicks and Fords. One advertising executive was heard to say “Where are all the millionaires who look like millionaires?”

While Stanley used this story to illustrate his findings that many people reached millionaire status through careful saving and frugal living over a 20 or 30 year pattern, I noticed something different:

Some people dress and shop to keep up appearances; some people dress and shop to please themselves

What is interesting is to note is that this pattern was by no means restricted to people with a lot of money. Here are some of the most common patterns I have noticed generally:

a. Be rich, look poor:
If you believe that people can’t be trusted or that your friends will resent your success, you’ll want to hide your wealth as much as possible.

b. Look rich, be poor:
If you think you’re only attractive or likeable to the extent that you spend money, you’ll spend more than you make, no matter how much or how little that is.

c. Be rich to look rich:
Some people direct their passion for gaining power, acclaim, or love into creating more money. This can lead to a rich bank account but a poor sense of self-worth.

d. Be poor to look poor:
If you subscribe to the ‘blessed are the meek’ theory, you’re liable to sabotage your financial security in order to protect your virtue - or the appearance thereof.

e. Be authentically wealthy:
Whether you earn minimum wage or appear on the pages of Forbes, your wealth is authentic when it’s an expression of your true desires in both how you earn it and how you spend it.

During our study of the wealthy, one multi-millionaire in particular kept attracting my attention in that he was generally well dressed save for some of the ugliest, most beat up looking shoes I had ever seen. At first, I assumed that he must be wearing them for some kind of effect, and I began to make up stories about what that must mean about him.

After all, when we place more importance on others’ impression of us than we do on our own sense of well-being, comfort and style, we betray our self-trust and over time, decrease our self-esteem.

But when I finally built up the nerve to ask him about his shoes, he looked surprised that I had even noticed. As it turned out, the millionaire wore those beat up old shoes for the best of all possible reasons - they were really, really comfortable and he really, really liked them!

—————–
Today’s Experiment:
—————–
1. Which of the above money styles best describes you? Do you have one with one group of people (maybe your employees) and another with a different group (like your neighbors)? How does this affect your relationship with yourself?

2. Today, notice your thoughts and actions around all those things from which other people might get an impression of your financial situation.

Examples:

• When you put on your shoes - scuffed and cheap or high-end and polished
• When you look at your watch - Timex or Rolex?
• When you get into or out of your car - Skoda or Lexus?
• When you go to a restaurant - McDonalds or The Four Seasons?

Remember, the point isn’t what you have but why you have it. Each time you choose something you really want over something you want to be seen wearing, doing or having, your authentic wealth will begin to grow.

Have fun, learn heaps, and happy exploring!

With love,
michael

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(Today’s tip is excerpted from my new book, “Supercoach: Ten Secrets to Transform Anyone’s Life, Including Your Own” coming from Hay House in early 2009…)

There is a (very) old joke about a man who goes to a doctor.

‘Doctor,’ the man says, attempting to lift his arm over his head, ‘it hurts when I do this.’

The doctor looks at him sagely and says ‘Don’t do it!’

This kind of common sense/innate wisdom approach to life is nearly always available to us - but most of us spend so much of our time caught up in the whirlwind of our thought that we don’t notice it. And even when we do notice it, we’ll often ignore it hoping that our intellect can find a different answer more in keeping with what we hope will turn out to be true.

When I was in a meeting with a potential corporate client one day, I was explaining this idea when one of the women in the room asked for an example. I went with the first one which popped into my head - that nearly ever woman I’ve talked with who has come out the other side of a bad marriage has told me that she ‘knew’ not to marry the guy at some point before getting far enough down the aisle to say ‘I do’.

Before I could even finish my example, another of the women in the room burst into tears. It turned out that she was engaged to be married and was doing her best to ignore her wisdom because ’she didn’t want to let anyone down’.

‘Besides’, she asked me, ‘how do I know whether or not that’s some kind of inner wisdom or just fear?’

I was tempted to say “ask your wisdom”, but I offered her the following guidelines…
Wisdom often comes disguised as “common sense”, but in reality is extremely uncommon in usage.

Wisdom is sometimes quiet but always clear

Wisdom feels right, even if it doesn’t always feel good.

Wisdom comes most often in the midst of inner quiet.

Wisdom is always kind

Your wisdom is right there inside you, just waiting for you to allow it to guide you. You need only to be quiet and listen - when you relax into it, you’ll almost always know what to do.

—————————–

Today’s Experiment:

—————————–

1. Choose an area of your life that you would like to have some additional insight into.

Example: Health and Diet

Putting that topic to one side for a moment, begin to write or speak aloud a list of things “you just know”. Start with the screamingly obvious.

Examples:

• I know that today is _______
• I know my name is _______
• I know that I went to school at _______
• I know I am ______ years old

2. After about a minute, or whenever you feel like you are in the ‘flowing of your knowing’, begin to make pronouncements about whatever area you’ve chosen to explore. Don’t worry if what you’re saying is ‘true’ or ‘right’. Just keep talking for at least another minute and notice what you notice.

Examples:

• I know that eating carrots gives me indigestion.
• I know that having a potato at bedtime helps me sleep better.
• I know that I can take better care of my teeth and gums.
• I know that central heating dehydrates me

3. Make note of any of your ‘knowings’ that have the ring of truth about them. If you are moved to do so, follow up on your insight with appropriate action.

Have fun, learn heaps, and enjoy riding along in the flowing of your knowing!

With love,
michael

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“Leaders are people who can discern the inevitable and act accordingly.”
-Donald Trump

Emma was struggling to keep her home-based business alive after about a year
of very hard work and very limited profits. When she hired me to help her
turn things around (or help her make peace with letting the business go),
the first thing I did was introduce her to a thinking tool I use with many
of my clients:

Imagine a robot who has been programmed with all the best business skills
and business wisdom, but has no emotional circuitry whatsoever. No matter
what is going on in your business, “Business Robot” will always make the
decisions and take the actions that are most likely to lead to success both
short and long-term.

Now imagine that Business Robot has been hired to run your company or take
over your job for awhile - what would Business Robot do?

When I asked Emma, her first response was “he’d quit!” (Not sure why most
people seem to make Business Robot a “boy-bot”, but they do!) After further
questioning, she realized that in fact, the business was mostly on track -
what had been troubling her was the pressure she’d been putting on herself
to “make” it succeed more quickly.

A series of insights followed, including:

*Business Robot would institute a strict ABC priority policy and stick with
it, not letting himself get caught up in other people’s sense of urgency

*Business Robot would work less hours, recognizing the value of focusing on
work when at work and renewing energy and resources outside of working hours

*Business Robot would go through and do an 80/20 evaluation of which clients
were bringing in the most money for the least effort and vice-versa - and
then would use that information as a basis for prioritizing certain clients
and “firing” others

Perhaps the biggest breakthrough she got from the exploration was when she
realized that far from working harder or longer, Business Robot would hire
an assistant to take care of the majority of the tasks she herself found so
tiresome, leaving her free and energized to do the work that she loved and
excelled at.

——————–
Today’s Experiment:
——————–

1. Imagine that Business Robot has been brought in to run your company, take
over your job, or manage your career - what would Business Robot do in the
first week? What goals or targets would he set for the next month? Next
quarter? Next year?

2. What longer-term vision would Business Robot create for you business or
career?

3. Think of the biggest problem or sticking point you are facing in your
work right now - what would Business Robot do in that situation?

The key to making this “thought-experiment” work for you is to realize that
as Aristotle said, “a virtue is the mean between two vices”. Your goal is
not to become more robotic - just to bring the wisdom of a mentally
disciplined approach into balance with the wisdom of your very human heart.

Have fun, learn heaps, and happy exploring!

With love,
michael

PS - WOULD YOU LIKE TO HAVE MORE FUN SUCCEEDING IN EVERY AREA OF YOUR LIFE?

Our next Success Made Fun program begins on the 1st of October. Your
participation in the program is free with your membership to the Solutions
Café, so join the café today and we’ll automatically extend your membership
to run an extra month until the end of October, 2009!

For more information and to join, go to:
http://www.geniuscatalyst.com/cafe.php

PPS - One of my coaching apprentices, Rich Litvin, has created a brand new program for leaders.
Here’s what Rich has to say about it:

“In last week’s Tip, Michael described the delight one of his mentors had in pushing people over their ‘edge’ and into a larger world of fresh experiences and new possibilities. For the past ten months, Michael has done exactly the same to me and changed my life and business in incredible ways.

Now you too can create great success and have fun at the same time (who knew that was even possible?!)

Join us on our “Leadership Mastery Accelerator Program” which will run alongside “Success Made Fun” from October 2008.

My name is Rich Litvin and I’d like to invite you to check out a unique program normally available only to high-paying private clients…”

To read more, visit: http://trulyrich.org/whatsNew.html

BONUS: Check out his program and get a free 30 minute “Instant Confidence” session

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“Come to the cliff,” he said.
They said, “We are afraid.”
“Come to the cliff”, he said.
They came. He pushed them. And they flew.

-Guillaume Appolinaire

A quick note from Michael:

I’m coming up on deadline for my new book, “Supercoach: 10 Secrets to
Transform Anyone’s Life”, due out from Hay House early in the new year. I
was going to write a new tip this week, but then I re-read the chapter on
“An End to Overwhelm” and changed my mind! Please enjoy this MNCT “Classic”
from the Tip Vault of the Solutions Café…

It was once said of Lawrence of Arabia that the loyalty his men felt for him was such that they would have “followed him over the edge of the world.”

Which raises an interesting question:
Where are the edges of your world – and what’s waiting for you on the other side?

One of my first mentors was Stuart Wilde. As well as being an author, Stuart took great delight in taking people out to the edges of their world and on occasion, pushing them over the edge and out into a larger world of fresh experiences and new possibilities.

In fact, one of the reasons you are now reading this tip is that Stuart pushed me - out in front of a group of people to lead a trust fall as a part of his ‘Warrior’s Wisdom’ course.

For those of you who haven’t done one before, a trust fall is where a group of people who don’t know each other very well have to catch one another as they fall backwards and blindfolded off a table, ladder, or in our case an 8 foot high tree stump. If the group learns to work together quickly, no-one gets hurt and everybody learns about the power of trust. If people don’t learn to work together quickly, people do get hurt and everybody learns something else.

For the very first time, I was placed in the role of both ‘teacher’ and ‘coach’, and I was terrified. When I asked him what I was supposed to do, he said “It’s a trust fall – trust!”

I trusted, they fell, and eighteen years later I’m still working with individuals and groups, a testament to the catalyzing power of being willing to follow a trusted guide out over the edge of your world.

Here are a few of the many experiments I learned from Stuart and others that will take you up to the edges of your world and invite you to step out over that edge – into new, uncharted waters filled with at least one mermaid for every dragon and at least one new rise for every fall.

They range from the gentle to the extreme – choose the one to try first which most appeals to you (or is most frightening to you, if you prefer…

——————–
Today’s Experiment:
——————–

1. If you are someone who is habitually argumentative, seek out someone you fundamentally disagree with and have a conversation with them where you completely agree with everything they say. If you are generally more of a ‘go along to get along’ type person, find someone you like and get into an
argument with them!

2. Go into work tomorrow dressed completely different to the way you normally dress. (Stuart used to recommend a chicken costume… If anyone comments, just smile and go about your business.

3. Make a list of ‘forbidden’ words – those words you would never even think of using in polite company. Choose a different word for each of the next 7 days and work it into your conversations as often as you can.

4. Go into a place of business and deliberately ask them for a product or service you know they don’t provide. Order a pizza in an Indian restaurant. Walk into a travel agent and ask them to place a bet for you on the next big match. No matter how they react, stick with your request until you’re ready to leave.

5. Choose a shop you have never been into before. Pick an item off the shelf, walk up to the checkout counter, and offer them 10% of the asking price in cash – $1 for a $10 book; $50 for a $500 television set.

(Please note, this is NOT about stealing or breaking the law – there is nothing illegal about offering less than the asking price, even in a “real” store like Borders, Dixon’s or Circuit City.)

Have fun, learn heaps, and enjoy the fall – you just might remember that you already know how to fly!

With love,
michael

PS - SUCCESS MADE FUN IS BACK!

We will be beginning a brand new Success Made Fun program beginning on the 1st of October. Your participation in the program is free with your membership to the Solutions Café, so if you join the café today, we’ll automatically extend your membership to run an extra month until the end of October, 2009!

For more information and to join, go to:
http://www.geniuscatalyst.com/cafe.php

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