Michael Neill's Weekly Coaching Tip #876 - Progress from the Inside-Out

MNCT 876
Progress from the Inside-Out

July 1, 2013

"The only trick in life is to be grateful for your highs and grateful for your lows."

- George Pransky

Michael Neill is an internationally renowned success coach and the best-selling author of The Inside-Out Revolution, You Can Have What You Want, Feel Happy Now!, the Effortless Success audio program and Supercoach: 10 Secrets to Transform Anyone's Life. He has spent the past 23 years as a coach, adviser, friend, mentor and creative spark plug to celebrities, CEO's, royalty, and people who want to get more out of their lives. His books have been translated into 13 languages, and his public talks and seminars have been well received at the United Nations and around the world. Read More...

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November 8th-10th
Learning How to Thrive
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November 15th
In Search of the Source of Human Genius
London, England

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From Modeling Excellence to Being Excellent - NLP Revisited
5 years on...

Since 2007, I have been exploring and working from a new understanding of the source of the human experience and the genius we are able to tap into from that space. I am extremely grateful to the hosts of this year's NLP conference in London for inviting me to spend a full day keynoting the conference and sharing the best of what I've learned about unleashing the human potential.

Here's just some of what you'll learn:

The unchangeable principles behind the human experience
Becoming financially fearless – how to make sure money isn’t what gets you out of bed in the morning or keeps you awake at night
How to live and work in the zone
The secrets of perpetual confidence – feeling comfortable in your own skin and not minding when you don’t
How to go beyond empowerment to a whole new way of being in the world

Whether you are an NLP'er interested in a deeper understanding of the 3 Principles, a Principles-based practitioner interested in a deeper understanding of NLP, or simply want to have fun, learn heaps and enjoy a richer experience of being alive, I'll look forward to spending the day with you this November!

To join the conference and learn more, click here.

This Week on SUPERCOACH Radio

Thursday, July 4th at Noon Pacific/3pm Eastern/8pm UK

Effortless Success

Let world renowned success coach Michael Neill break down your walls and help you to create a life that makes you go “wow”!

You can listen to the show this and every Thursday - simply go to hayhouseradio.com at Noon pacific/8pm UK and click on the button marked 'Listen Now'.

Did you miss our most recent live show on THE UNHEALTHY NORMAL? For a limited time you can listen to it here. You can also download and listen to any of my shows at any time as part of your subscription to the new and improved Genius Catalyst Café - click here for details!

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Progress from the Inside-Out

With a slight sigh of regret and an equally slight sigh of relief, today marks the end of my "European tour". Over the past couple of weeks, I've spoken about the Three Principles in front of 400+ people in London, spent five days coaching personal clients face to face, co-taught 80 people in Glasgow how to "wake up" to a deeper reality, done a number of press interviews about the inside-out understanding, and spent three days leading a beautiful "Learning How to Thrive" retreat in the Umbrian hills.

One of the questions which came up a number of times in a number of different ways from students, clients, and practitioners was "If I'm living in the experience of my thinking, not the experience of the outside world, how do I know if I'm making progress?"

While on the one hand, I'm not aware of any official benchmarks for "progress" on the pathless path, it did occur to me that there are a few markers and touchstones that I've found to be reliably helpful with my clients and on my own journey through the world of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought:

1. Is it more fun being you?

I was speaking about this with Cheryl Bond, a Principles-based practitioner with years of experience in the corporate world, and she mentioned that one of the questions she had learned to ask people who were wondering if they were really getting anything of value from what they were learning was "Is it more fun being you?"

If it is, chances are you're letting go of old thinking and spending more time in the flow of your well-being; if not, chances are the Principles have become one more set of things to think about and one more set of rules to be followed.

For myself, I notice that my honest answer to the question "how are you?" has become fairly consistently "Wonderful!" Not "Wonderful, because..." or even "Wonderful, in spite of...", but simply wonderful.

My life continues to have it's ups and downs as do my feeling states, yet none of that seems to impinge on my essential wonder-filled experience of being alive. And paying attention to that fact seems to matter at a very deep level of experience. As I used to say in my coaching brochures "Wouldn't it be a shame to have a wonderful life and not notice?"

2. Gratitude and grace

During a coaching session this morning, my client commented that she'd been experiencing more "gratitude and grace" in her life. She was feeling extremely grateful for all the good in her life; she was also finding herself more able to handle life's bumps and bruises more gracefully.

This resonated with me as someone who had spent years caught up in the superstitious thought that feeling grateful made me somehow more vulnerable to loss, as if the very act of appreciation would call attention to the gods and that which I loved would be taken away from me.

These days, as best I can tell, the "gods" don't seem to have an opinion about how much I love and appreciate my life and everything in it. And seeing that the only thing I am ever "vulnerable" to are my own insecure or fearful thoughts has allowed me to love more fully and step out into the world with more confidence and grace than ever before.

3. Coming home

Over the past few days, I've been using the metaphor of "coming home" to point towards a space that seems to open up inside us as our minds get quieter and our thoughts begin to flow more freely. In The Inside-Out Revolution, I describe the experience of coming home like this:

We all have within us a deeper essence that’s untouched by conditioning and circumstances. We could call this part of us ‘the light within’ or ‘the inner flame’ and it’s the source of our fundamental sense of inspiration, crackle, and aliveness. Some of my clients have called it their ‘twinkle’ – the spark of life inside them that appears as a twinkle in the eye on the outside.

This inner glow is made of pure Consciousness, but when we get caught up in the dream of thought, we get cut off from it. Most of us don’t notice this disconnection at first, except as a vague sense of something not being quite right. Work just isn’t as fulfilling as it once was, our partner isn’t quite as handsome or beautiful or loving as we thought they were, and don’t even get us started on what might be wrong with us…

Because we’ve been conditioned from birth to believe in the myth of an outside-in world, we assume the path back to well-being and joy and peace of mind must be through getting a better job or a better partner or working on becoming a better person. The irony is that the harder we work on changing ourselves in order to change the way we feel, the more distant we become from our true self, and the more important it seems to work on all those things, and the more lost we become.

So, regardless of what ‘problem’ we think we have, our only real problem is feeling cut off from our innate wisdom and well-being. And the moment we reconnect to that source energy, our problems stop being so problematic and we move into a new reality.

When we "come home" to our innate wisdom and well-being, our experience of life gets easier. Instead of trudging downstream barefoot on a rocky riverbed with a boat balanced precariously on our head, we allow the river of life to flow, hop into the boat, and enjoy the ride. We don't even need to wait to see where that river will take us. Because the moment we get on board, we're already home.

So what does this all mean?

Simply that "progress from the inside-out" can't be measured by achieving some kind of external goal or scoring ourselves higher on each category of the wheel of life. It's about spending more time in our well-being, moving gracefully and gratefully through life, and increasing the depth, purity, and duration of our connection with our essential self.

Have fun, learn heaps, and happy exploring!

With all my love,
Michael

PS - Supercoach Academy welcomes students from 7 countries and counting!

I'm delighted to welcome new students from Singapore and Denmark to Supercoach Academy 2014, bringing the number of countries represented by our students and alumni up to 25!

The training is a combination of live and virtual instruction - here is the most up to date details of the upcoming live sessions:

January 16 – 19, 2014: The Foundation weekend in Los Angeles with special guest faculty Cathy Casey and Dr Mark Howard
March 13 – 16, 2014: The Connection weekend in New York City with special guest faculty Mara Gleason
May 15 – 18, 2014: The Creation weekend in London with special guest faculty Dr Aaron Turner
September 11 – 14, 2014: The Integration and Expansion weekend in Los Angeles with special guest faculty Dr George Pransky and Linda Pransky

If you enroll now, you'll qualify for six full months of mentor coaching from a Supercoach Academy graduate and participation in an exclusive virtual masterclass series so you can begin deepening your understanding straight away. To join us for the learning adventure of a lifetime, visit www.supercoachacademy.com!

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