I was once speaking with the personal assistant of one of my most influential clients. A large part of her job is to be the “gatekeeper” – the ultimate guardian of her boss’ time and schedule.

But when I asked her how often she actually had to “keep the gate”, she said that it was surprising to her how seldom people really tried to get past her and speak directly with her boss. At first, I thought that was odd, because I know a lot of people want things from this client.

And then I realized that wasn’t so odd at all.  Because normally the gatekeeper inside us stops us way before we get to the gatekeeper outside us.

How many times do you stop yourself from asking?

How often do you talk yourself out of even looking into something or checking out a possibility because of that voice inside your head saying things like “Gee, they must get bombarded with things like this all the time”, or ”that’s never going to work” or “there’s no point in even trying – they’re just going to say no”? We all have that voice – and yet some people aren’t stopped by it. What is it that allows them to move forward while the rest of us hold back?

Years ago, James Carville and Paul Begala were managing the presidential campaign of a then relatively unknown Governor from Arkansas named William Jefferson Clinton. They recognized that the only chance they had to make headway coming from the back of a very competitive field was if they changed the normal way of doing things.

In traditional political campaigns, the default response to any newly proposed initiative is “no”.

In a bizarre twist on “first, do no harm”, the only ideas that get through the screening process are the very small percentage that are either completely generic or on rare occasions, undeniably brilliant.   While this does indeed result in a kind of damage limitation, it also results in ideas that don’t make that much difference to a campaign or in the world.

Since Clinton was never going to win with a traditional campaign, his team decided to do something kind of unique up until that point in politics.  They decided to change the default response to “yes”.  Instead of new ideas having to make it through layers of hierarchical bureaucracy before being approved, the new policy was essentially that any idea that had not been completely shot down by 9am was OK to run with.

This wasn’t an “anything goes” policy, and a number of eccentric, dodgy, and downright idiotic ideas didn’t make it through.  But whereas most campaigns might try 2 or 3 different things in a month, the Clinton campaign was trying that many new things each day.  And in the space of less than a year, he went from being a complete outsider that nobody believed had a chance to becoming the President of the United States of America.

While you may not want to become the next President, you can still benefit from making this simple shift in your own life.  So as an experiment this week, flip your inner default switch from “no” to “yes” – from “what’s the point?” to “what the heck?”

Even if that voice inside your head turns out to be mostly right and things don’t work out and people do say “no” to your requests, you only have to be wrong two or three times to make tremendous progress on your seemingly impossible dreams.  And if you do’t start moving past your inner gatekeeper, you’re probably not going toget very far in the outside world.

Have fun, learn heaps, and “just say ‘yes’!”

With love,

PS – Come see Genpo Roshi in Los Angeles!

It has been my privilege to spend time with Genpo Roshi over the past few years and he is a treasure – a modern day Zen master who blends Eastern wisdom with Western practicality to assist people in experiencing deeper, more profound states of consciousness than ever before.

He will be doing a two day workshop in LA called Straight to the Heart of Happiness on the 23rd and 24th of October, and if you haven’t seen him live I highly recommend experiencing his work first hand!

(Genpo will also be leading a virtual masterclass on our next Supercoach Academy – to sign up and learn more, click here.)

For many years I believed that some people had more potential than others – that somehow external circumstances dictated the limits of what’s possible.  But what I have come to see is that all human beings have the same access to universal principles that serve as both a grounding and a compass – a place to come from and a source of wisdom and guidance in our lives.

My own wisdom seems to reveal itself to me most often through images and metaphors, so in today’s tip I thought I’d share a couple of my favorites in hopes they spark a deeper seeing into the source of your own wisdom and how that wisdom can guide you in your life…

1. The Swimming Pool of Revelation

A month or so ago I was listening to a recording on Calm by the counselor Leslie Miller where she compared a calm mind to a swimming pool.  Even if there’s a swimmer (like a thought) in the pool, splashing about and leaving ripples in their wake, the deeper part of the pool is still calm – and the second the swimmer leaves the pool, the rest of the pool returns to its natural state of calm as well.

While I was reflecting on that metaphor, another image came to my mind – a deeper wisdom communicating with us by writing the answers to any question we could want answered in big bold letters at the bottom of the pool.  In order for us to “read” the answer from outside the pool, the water needs to be relatively still and quiet.  If there were people (thoughts) swimming around in the pool, we would have to wait for those swimmers to move on before we could clearly see.

Ironically, any effort we would make to dive into the pool ourselves to move those swimmers along would simply increase the turbulence in the pool and make it even harder to see what was written across the bottom.  It would only be after we got out of the pool that the water (mind) would have a chance to return to calm and we would be able to clearly see the message written by our own guidance and wisdom.

2.  The Bubbling Well of Consciousness

Imagine for a moment that you have been given a magical well to keep in your home and told that whatever you drink from inside it will determine your experience of life.  If your well is filled with good things, you will experience good; fill it with dark things and you will experience darkness.  Chances are, you would do your best to fill the well up with as much good stuff as you could, and whenever you saw bad stuff in there you would do your best to fish it out.  This continual activity and monitoring might become tedious after a while, but you could reconcile yourself to the fact that “the price of peace is eternal vigilance”.

More curious still, imagine that everyone around you has the same magical well inside their homes, yet seemingly has no idea that what they drink from their well is the source of their experience.  You watch with amazement as they fill their wells up with scary thoughts and horrible stories and then argue amongst themselves as to why life itself has become so scary and horrible.

You do your best to help, of course, and to point out that their experience of life is simply a product of what they fill their well with, but even those who claim awareness of the magical well dispute its power, preferring to blame circumstances and the world around them for the experience they are having on the inside.

Eventually, your innocent desire to help others takes your eye off of the contents of your own well, and the crap you surround yourself with begins to seep into your well and becomes your experience as well.  Before you know it, you are as confused as the people you’ve been trying to help, filling your magical well with murky memories and dark imaginings, drinking deep and wondering what’s become of the world.

Fortunately, unbeknown to you, underneath your well sits a bubbling spring of life and joy and hope, and your well is continually being slowly replenished from this natural source. The only reason you haven’t noticed this up until now is either that you’ve been so busy trying to put good things in and take bad things out or that you’ve been distracted by all the things going on outside you.

But the more you allow your well to fill up from the source without putting more and more things into it from the outside, the more beautiful your life becomes.  Over time, even the most awful stories and memories and imaginings are washed away in the bubbling overflow of joy and peace and wisdom from within.  And as you drink each day from the well of your being, you realize that your cup truly does “runneth over”…

Have fun, learn heaps, and drink deeply from the wisdom within!

With love,

PS – Join us in October and Create the Impossible in your life and in the world!

Here are the only prerequisites for your “impossible” goal, dream, or project:

1. You must believe you have a less than 50% chance for success in the 30 days of the program.

2. You must be so passionate about what it is you want to create that you will be glad of any time you spend invested in creating it, regardless of how things turn out!

“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, CA

To join the Creating the Impossible community and learn more, click here.

Some years ago, I came across a version of this story in the book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps:

I loved this story when I first read it and was convinced I understood it – but of course even as I do now, it only made sense at the level of my understanding at the time.

I presumed the story was about positive and negative emotional states.  ”Hell” in the story was clearly a “bad feeling” – depression, anger, fear, sadness, jealousy, etc.; “heaven” was synonymous with a “good” feeling” – happiness, peace, humility, gratitude, love, etc.

Since my life at the time was pretty hellacious, it was easy for me to imagine that the goal of life must be simply to feel as few of the “bad” feelings and as many of the “good” feelings as possible.

So I set out to master my emotional states, and cutting edge mental technologies like Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Thought-Field Therapy (TFT) seemed custom-made to suit my new “designer feelings” lifestyle.  And in some ways, it worked.  My life became less and less of a personal hell, and for a time this was more than enough for me to think I had found the secret of a happy life.

Unfortunately, being happy was still a daily struggle, and while it felt like I was winning more than I was losing, I lived each day on the battlefield of my thoughts, chalking up the fear that I might at any point be overcome by a new wave of depression to “a sensible response to the realities of war”.

Then one day I was sitting in a hotel room thousands of miles from home watching a video-taped talk by the theosopher Syd Banks. He was talking about the power of Thought with a capital “T” and telling the story of how his life changed when someone told him “you’re not insecure, Syd – you only think you are.”

Somehow, that one sentence led him directly into an experience of satori and oneness with the whole universe and with it into a whole new understanding of the role of Thought in creating our experience of life.

As someone who had by that point studied, written, and taught about the power of thought with a little “t” for over 15 years, I was pretty sure I already knew all there was to know about the subject, but there was another thing that Syd said that touched a nerve:

We think, and then we experience our thinking as though it were real.
But it’s not WHAT you think that matters – it’s THAT you think.
In 1986, my six year battle with depression and suicidal thoughts essentially ended when I realized that the scariest thing about my life was my own thinking.  But even when I saw through the mirage of the “suicide thought” and was able to dismiss it from my mind, I missed something even more fundamental:

There is, or so it seems to me, an energy and intelligence behind life.  But that energy is not the creator of our personal experience – it is the raw material of its creation, in the same way as a lump of clay doesn’t express a preference as to whether it is molded into an ashtray or a work of art.

When you begin to see the phenomenal creative power of Thought, you realize that you are the wielder of that power in you as I am the wielder of that power in me.  In fact, each one of us is the creator of our own personal experience of life – no exceptions, no excuses, no fault, no blame, no shame.

And in making the shift from being a “samurai warrior”, doing daily battle with each individual thought, to a “life master”, using the power of Thought to consciously create heaven or hell on earth in any moment, we also make the shift from helpless to hopeful, from control to freedom, and from fear all the way back to love.

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

With love,

PS – Are you ready to become a Supercoach?

There are only 22 seats left on this six month training in with some of the best transformative coaches in the world, including (in alphabetical order):

Join participants from seven countries (and counting!) in Los Angeles beginning next January and learn how to make a wonderful living by making a powerful difference in the world.

This training will be sold out, so if you’d like to transform your life by learning to transform the lives of others, visit supercoachacademy.com today to set up a conversation with one of our staff, reserve your place and learn more!

Years ago, I heard this quote about the relative value of alcohol from Al Smith, who was the governor of New York during the Prohibition era:

I must admit to having a similar relationship in my mind with the notion of “commitment”. If by commitment you mean that sense of obligation that shames us into either doing what we don’t really want to do or feeling a wave at guilt at letting down our team, our colleagues, our loved ones, but most of all ourselves;  that tool used by the unscrupulous and well-intentioned alike to legally and morally bind our hands and causes us to stay in a joyless job or a loveless marriage, then of course, I oppose it “with all the resources of my mind and body”.

But if by commitment you mean the glue that holds relationships together, the catalyst for enhanced performance in any goal or purpose-driven activity, the simple act of honoring your word that lets people know they can rely on you and that when you say you will do something, you will do it, and that when you say something will get done it will get done 99.9% of the time, then of course I encourage it.

Here are three things that commitment does that make it a wonderful tool to be used as opposed to a heavy burden to be feared:

1. Commitment helps you banish doubt

Those of you who are regular readers of these tips will recognize the opening line from my favorite quote by W.H. Murray:

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness…”

One of the great things about having committed to a course of action is that when the little nagging thoughts of doubt appear (and in my experience they nearly always do), you don’t need to entertain them, debate them, or take them seriously. Without commitment, those same insecure thoughts sound really important and worthy of discussion.

Think about it this way – if you’re about to jump out of an airplane and that voice inside your head says “What are you doing?  Are you insane?  Is that even a parachute on your back?”, you might seriously engage with it and triple check it for the fourteenth time.  If you’ve already jumped, it’s considerably easier to ignore it and focus on the task at hand. And once the decision is made, your mind is now free to focus on how to make things happen.

2. Commitment helps you enroll others

Imagine two people come to ask you to back their cause…

The first one says “Hey, I’ve got this idea for creating clean drinking water in the 3rd world – if I can get the seed money so I can take the time off from my regular job, I’m going to work on a prototype – can you help?”

The other says “Hey – I’m in the process of creating a source of clean drinking water that will benefit the 3rd world (but also parts of America, Asia, and Europe where there’s a real need).  I quit my job and am now working on this full time along with a team of volunteers I’ve assembled.  What would it take for you to become a part of our support team?”

It’s clear that our first would-be do-gooder means well, but whether or not they move forward is dependent on me (or others like me) saying “yes” to them.  It’s equally clear that our second “water cleaner-upper” is taking on this project with us or without us. We don’t have to decide whether or not the project is worthwhile – only whether or not we want to be a part of it.

This is the power of commitment in conversation – we’ve made our choice (to commit to a certain result or course of action) – the other person is free to make theirs without any neediness on our part for them to say “yes” or “no”.  And as I wrote in Supercoach, you can ask anyone for anything when you make it OK for them to say ‘no’.

3. Commitment helps you to look in a different direction

My 15 year old son is in the process of creating the money to buy his first car. About a month ago, I asked him how it was going and he shared with me how hard it was for someone his age to get a job, and how with his school schedule and football practice and the desire for some semblance of a social life, there really wasn’t any time to go out and make money anyways.

We chatted for a bit and I explained that we tend to see what we’re looking for. When we think we can’t do something, our brains automatically begin to look for facts to back up our hypothesis – and they will inevitably find them.  However, once we commit to a certain course of action or the creation of a certain result, our brains automatically begin to look for ways to succeed.

Within a few minutes, I saw his eyes light up as he saw a way to go about creating the money he wanted within the life he already had.  And I’m pleased to say this past week was his first $250+ week!  (Now I get to worry about him driving in a few months time, but I’m sure I’ve written a tip about dealing with that somewhere… :-)

So does all this mean you have to commit to succeed?

Absolutely not.  I’ve stumbled on to at least as many wonderful results in my life as I’ve deliberately created.  But if there is something that matters to you – that you really want to be, do, or have in your life – your commitment to creating it is a pretty wonderful place to start.

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

With love,

PS – Meet supercoach Greg Baer in Sweden and experience the power of Real Love!

Greg Baer is a truly remarkable teacher, and it’s been an honor and privilege getting to learn from him and to share his work with my students over the past year.  His message is simple and uncompromising – that when you begin to give and receive unconditional love in your life, everything transforms for the better.

Europeans normally need to travel half-way around the world to see Greg speak, but on the 22nd and 23rd of October he will be presenting a two day Real Love workshop in Gothenburg, Sweden.

For more information and to book, please visit:
http://www.reallove.com/events.asp