A couple of days ago Nina and I received this book  in the mail from Nancy Kline, an amazing teacher, author, and burgeoning friend.  The book includes essays and deep thoughts from a variety of thinkers including Nelson Mandela, Yoko Ono, and Desmond Tutu.  It also includes this lovely reflection from her husband, Christopher Spence, the founder director of London Lighthouse and former chief executive of Volunteering England:

Stay True to the Voice Within

Stay true to the voice within.  this voice beckons us at birth and bids us be unafraid of death.  It knows what is right and never bends to fear.  It informs our finest thinking and boldest decisions.  It is in tune with nature and the things of the spirit.  It speaks the truth when lies assail us.  It strengthens and softens our loving.  It encourages creation, play, laughter.  It whispers reminders of our humanity.  It confirms our place in the scheme of things.  It celebrates our right choices.  It knows us well.  It is the guide we can trust.

99 words seems a happy medium for our modern age.  To the novelist, 99 words is an insult; to the twitterati, 99 words is a lifetime.

I know that if I only had 99 words left in my life, I would spend them all saying “Thank you”, I’m sorry”, and “I love you”.  So for context, I’ve chosen not my deathbed but my legacy.  If I could leave behind only 99 words for posterity. what would they be?

Here’s what came out…

We live in a world made of love, consciousness, and thought.

Love is the energy and intelligence behind life.
Thought is the creative force that connects the world of infinite possibility to the world of the known.
Consciousness is what allows us to experience both the constancy of love and the variability of thought.

Without consciousness, there is no experience.
Without thought, there is no form. 
Without love, there is no point.

The good news?

Like waves in an ocean, we are made of love.  We arise out of love, and to love we will always return.

Your turn.  You have breath for no more than 99 words.  What would they be?

With all my love,
Michael

Last weekend, I led a 3 day retreat called Learning How to Thrive in the beautiful Ojai Valley.  Throughout our time together, we spoke at length about the inside out nature of the human experience and the seemingly infinite possibilities that understanding opened up for us as individuals and as a society.

One of the features of the retreat is that I spend as much one on one time with each participant as I can.  During one of these one on one “sessions”, a participant was exploring a variety of options for their work and life.

Questions on the table included:

• Do I take a job that will bring more money and prestige but mean I have to spend more time away from my family?
• When things aren’t working, is that a sign to work at them harder or a sign to let it go and start again?
• Can I risk limiting my income and level of success to do things more in alignment with the way I now see them?

When I was asked for my point of view, a different question emerged for me:

Do you want to live a guided life?

It seems to me there are really only two choices for how we navigate our lives.  We can attempt to steer from the outside-in, following the maps and strategies for success passed down to us by our parents and peers.  This “scripted” life has the advantage of being somewhat predictable, but the disadvantage that we are unlikely to surprise ourselves (or anyone else) by what we achieve.  We will tend to live up (or down) to whatever level of success our character has in the life script we choose to follow.  And the more outdated our scripting, the more out of sync our outer world becomes with our inner life.

The other way to navigate is from the inside-out, following our wisdom, common sense, and guidance wherever they may lead.  The inside out life unfolds in front of us through instinct and insight, with the disadvantage that we often can’t say exactly where we’re headed or when we’re liable to get there.  The upside is that it is a life of continual discovery, one that leaves us present in every moment to the living scripture of our own deepest wisdom.  I sometimes call it our “Soul Path”, because the more closely we follow the promptings of our inner knowing the more things unfold better than we could have imagined, as if by design.

And while these descriptions (not to mention the title of this blog) clearly reveal my bias for the inside out path through life, I do recognize the dilemma.  When we’re not used to spending time in the unknown, the prospect of not knowing what’s going to happen next is a scary one and the temptation to attempt to control what happens to us can seem overpowering.

What makes it easier for me to choose in each moment is the recognition that I’d rather experience the reality of freedom than the illusion of control.  And each time I make that choice, it is reinforced by the excitement of living in possibility and the mystery of synchronicity and serendipity that are the consistent milestones of a guided life.

Here is, it seems to me, the fundamental question underpinning our choice between scripting and scripture – between the path of the ego and the path of the soul:

Do you want to navigate by fear or by wisdom?

I look forward to reading your thoughts and reflections in the Comments section below…

With all my love,
Michael

In the book Supercoach, I share one of my favorite teaching stories from the Buddhist tradition:

The Bodhisattva’s Vow

One day, a seeker who had devoted many lifetimes to attaining enlightenment broke through the conditioned thinking of his ordinary mind and saw the world around him as no more than samsara, a projection of his own largely fearful thoughts. His entire being was filled with joy and he felt as though every cell in his body was dissolving into the bliss of nirvana. It was as though the gates of heaven had opened up to him and he glided effortlessly towards them.

But no sooner had he set one foot in heaven than he heard a sound that filled his heart with compassion. He turned back to see a seemingly infinite number of perfect beings acting for all the world like trapped cattle, struggling to make their way in the world and suffering at the hands of phantoms created by their own minds.

In that moment, he made this vow: ‘For as long as space endures, and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I too abide to dispel the misery of the world.’

To this day, it is said, the Bodhisattva works tirelessly for the liberation of all sentient beings, one foot firmly planted in heaven, the other planted firmly here on Earth.

It was only recently that it dawned on me that inspired as I am to ‘work tirelessly for the liberation of all sentient beings’, at times I seem to lack an equal commitment to living with one foot ‘firmly planted in heaven’.  I do enjoy my life.  But sometimes I see that as a character flaw – an unjustified frivolity that someday I’ll be punished for by circumstances far worse than I can imagine.

And then I remember that the worst thing that can happen to me is a thought – generally speaking a thought about the worst thing that can happen to me.

That’s the whole point of the inside out experiment – to see through the illusion that the outside world has any influence over our internal experience.  We are thinking creatures, living in a world of thought and experiencing the feeling of that thinking.  And sometimes the feeling of our thinking really, really hurts, and we suffer.

We know that when a new thought comes along, a new feeling and new possibilities will come along with it.  But in the midst of our suffering, it seems like that new thought will never come, and that the pain and fear and overwhelm we are feeling will go on forever.

It’s at this point that we have a choice.  We can decide that our suffering serves us and the world, making us stronger and more compassionate as we begin to see ourselves as martyrs to a larger cause.  Or we can see that our suffering limits us and serves no one, weakening our resolve and drowning our natural compassion in wave after wave of self-pity.

That’s not to say you can just do without suffering by choice.  The principles behind life work perfectly, and you will live in the feeling of your thinking in the moment, no matter how hopeful or hopeless that thinking may be.

But when we realize the goal isn’t to suffer to elevate ourselves or that others may be freed from suffering, it’s easier to let go of those anguish-filled thoughts that seem so real until the moment we truly see them for what they are.  And here’s the hidden kindness of the design:  the moment we stop suffering, we find ourselves right back in the heaven of our own well-being and the purity of consciousness of our essential selves.

What do you do to keep ‘one foot in heaven’?  What do you do to ‘dispel the misery of the world’?  I look forward to reading your comments below!

With all my love,
michael

The difficult thing about parenting, or so it has always seemed to me, is that the gap between cause (our words and actions as parents) and effect (our children’s behavior) can be so long that it seems impossible to learn directly from the feedback of the system.

For example, if we yell at our young children about something that they stop doing it, did yelling “work”?

What if we continue to “parent by volume” and their behavior gets worse and worse over time until they become the teenager from hell – did our yelling simply stop working, was it in fact counter-productive over time, or is their future behavior completely disconnected from our past actions?

What if our rebellious teenager becomes a responsible adult and even comes back to us twenty years after leaving home and thanks us for setting such clear boundaries for them when they were young, even though they hated it while we were doing it?  Is that evidence that yelling at them was, in fact, useful, even though it seemed to backfire at the time?

Seventeen years and three children into my “career” as a parent, the only two conclusions I’ve come to are these:

1. It’s impossible to gauge the long term effect of our parenting actions from the outside in.  No matter how our children respond to us in the moment, we can’t usefully extrapolate that data and use it to become more effective parents.

2. We don’t need to, because we have a built in “inside out” feedback mechanism that will guide our parenting both in the moment and over time.

That feedback mechanism is our feeling of connection with our children.   When that level of connection is high, whatever we do is likely to be quickly forgotten at worst and positively impactful at best.  When that level of connection is low, even the most positively intended action is likely to backfire or even blow up in our faces.

So if I lose my temper and yell at one of my kids for not doing the dishes but our level of connection is high, they’ll roll their eyes and do the dishes and wait for me to apologize when I calm down again half an hour later.  If I do exactly the same thing when we’re feeling disconnected, it will turn into a drama that can go on for ages, not to mention go viral on facebook in minutes.

(One of the odd drawbacks to parenting as even a minor public figure in the digital age is that your children’s feedback on your parenting skills is readily available for public viewing in real time.  Joan Crawford was a full blown movie star and she got away with it for nearly 40 years…)

So how do we recognize this feeling of connection?

While I’m tempted to say “you’ll know it when you’ve got it”, there are some characteristics that most people I talk with seem to agree on.  Connection is a feeling of closeness.  It’s a feeling of respect, from you to them if not always the other way around.  It’s an affinity.  It’s being kindly disposed towards them.  It’s unconditional.  It’s love.

It’s the feeling behind the sanskrit word ‘Namaste’, first taught to me by my friend and mentor Bill Cumming, which translates literally as “I bow to you” but more poetically as:

I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides.
I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, and of peace.
When you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us. 

With this feeling of connection, you can weather any storm.  Without it, any single communication throughout the day can become a nightmare.

But the best thing of all about this feeling is that you don’t need to do anything to get it – it’s the factory default, baked into the firmware at birth and designed to survive any future software upgrades or thought viruses.  And the less rules you try to give yourself for how best to parent, the easier it is to feel the natural connection we all have with our children.

I was teaching a class for the Genius Catalyst Cafe when someone asked me about parenting, and an image came to mind of a parenting handbook that was given to each of us the moment our children were born but had become so filled with scribbles and notations and margin notes that it was virtually impossible to read the original text.  We try to refer to the handbook, but even though we try our best, it’s difficult to make sense of all the conflicting advice that’s written inside.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this next bit, but if I were to guess at the original text, I think it would only say four things:

• Love them
• Enjoy them
• Connect deeply
• Trust the unfolding

I look forward to reading your thoughts and your own parenting wisdom in the comments section below…

With all my love,
michael

When we first moved to America and got our first home, a lovely piece of Californicana with a basement that was just dying to be converted into an office, I used to grab a cup of tea, kiss my wife goodbye and head out the door with the parting line “I’m off to the salt mines!”  I would then step outside, walk the thirty steps or so across the deck and down the stairs we had custom-built for the purpose, and walk into the office to begin my day.

After several years of relative productivity, a friend pointed out that while salt mines were all the rage in 13th century Poland, I might want to update my metaphor to something with friendlier and more modern connotations.  And so, after much thought, my office was re-dubbed “The Creativity Factory”.  And over the next six years, my clients and I gave birth to books, radio shows, marriage proposals, rock albums, television series, and a couple of major motion pictures within the confines of those walls.

In 2009, my friend Paul McKenna and I said a fond farewell to the original Creativity Factory and formally opened the doors on a new basement office in a new house – admittedly one with more light, more rooms, more space, and a putting green outside my window.  In just a couple of years, this one has carried on the proud traditions of its  predecessor, producing four books (including it’s first novel), plans to renovate and modernize one of the world’s oldest cities, a breakthrough in chemistry, and a stream of people learning to live happier, more harmonious lives within its confines.

And now, in the past few months, the Creativity Factory has taken on a new form and new meaning.  In order to make sense of this new form, I have to first ask you the question I’ve been asking myself for many years – where does creativity actually come from?  That is, where have your best ideas come from thus far in your life and work?  And where do you think your next great idea will come from?

(At this point, I can’t resist sharing one of my favorite anecdotes.  A colleague of mine was giving a corporate talk on the links between a quiet mind and creativity, and he shared the results of a study that showed most people have their best ideas in the shower, on vacation, and walking in nature.  After the talk, which was very well received, a manager came up to him, clip board in hand, and asked him “How long should I have my people shower?”)

Back to our question – where does creativity actually come from?

When I ask this question of my clients and on workshops, the most common answer is “out of the blue” – that is, we are just sitting at home, or in traffic, or in the bath or shower, with nothing much on our mind, when suddenly “bam!” – an idea hits us and it has a wonderful feeling of both freshness and familiarity about it, like rediscovering something we already knew and loved but had somehow managed to forget.

Another way of saying it is that our best ideas come from the unknown – that vast expanse that lives just beyond the fiefdom of the known and is the favorite holiday destination of all creative minds.  It is the space where miracles happen – not limited to any one feeling but characterized most often by curiosity, wonder, and awe.  It is our spiritual home, that place where we feel most connected to the majesty of nature and the mystery of life.  And but for all the time we spend up in our heads, recycling the same thoughts again and again in a vainglorious attempt to think the same things but experience something different, we would live 24/7 in the flow of new, creative, inspired, and insightful thinking.

So in December, when I recognized that every great idea I’ve ever had has come out of that space, I decided to make more space for that space in my life.  If you were to look at my calendar, you would see that every morning from 7am – 10am is marked “Creativity Factory”.  And the only rules for that time are that there are no scheduled appointments and no regular routines.  It’s simply space, put into the schedule by design, to hang out in the flow of creative thought.

In less than three months, this new “Creativity Factory” space has spawned this blog, an online program, two new book proposals, and the formation of a mastermind that just might change the world.  And the beauty of it is that it no longer lives in my basement, no matter how nice a basement it is.  It comes with me for coffee, takes my dogs for walks, and is always happy to see me no matter how long I keep it waiting.

And the true beauty of it is its “open door policy” – it’s a factory to which every single human being on the planet has a key.

I look forward to reading about your own creative explorations and the fruits of your own time spent hanging out in the unknown.  And who knows – maybe one day we’ll bump into each other in the factory!

With all my love,
michael