If you find life burdensome and boring, here is ‘Supercoach’ with ten secrets from Michael Neill to make a difference to yourself (www.hayhouse.com). This is a book about succeeding from the inside out, he writes in the intro. “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.”
The first of the ten ‘secrets’ is that we each live in our own separate reality. Our brains filter information through the five senses, make representations of that information inside our minds, and we experience these representations, first as thoughts and then as emotions, the author explains.
“But as we represent the information in our minds, certain bits of the data are inevitably deleted, distorted, and generalised. And since we all delete, distort, and generalise that information slightly differently, we all have slightly (or sometimes completely) different perceptions of what is going on around us.”
As a result, there is what happens, and there is what we think about what happens. But why is an understanding of this divergence important? Because the lion’s share of our decisions, feelings, and actions in life are based on our thoughts, not the objective facts, observes Neill.
But thoughts by themselves have no power, he clarifies. “It is only when you invest your own energy and consciousness into them that they begin to become real.” A thought without your personal investment is no more powerful than a tea bag without boiling water, reads a handy comparison. “It’s only after you add the water that the tea begins to infuse and create the flavour, and it’s only after you add your agreement and energy to a thought that it begins to impact your life.”
Another ‘secret’ in the book is about the problem posed by goals. Take, for instance, the compulsive goal setters who continually set goals in every area of their lives, driving themselves forward relentlessly toward the ever-receding goal of ‘making it.’ They rarely stop to consider what they would do if they did make it, and those who do succeed (at least by society’s standards) often find themselves bored and empty until they throw themselves back into the fray, the author rues.
He likens compulsive goal setting to playing a game of fetch with oneself – ‘you throw the bones as far as you can (set the biggest goals you can imagine), and then chase after them with hyper-focused attention and continual action. The problem comes when your happiness and self-worth are the bones.’
The trick to goal setting, says Neill, is to fully involve yourself in making things happen without investing your self-worth or emotional well-being into their achievement. “When people ‘give up’ on getting anywhere and focus instead on living their passion, doing more of what they love and want to do, they wind up working more consistently and more passionately than they ever did when pursuing their so-called career.”
He assures that such ‘a low investment/ high involvement/ effortless success approach’ can get you all the fun of being creatively engaged without any of the stress of being emotionally invested; and that it can be completely sustainable because it is not dependent on continual emotional refuelling to keep you going. “By letting go of trying to control the uncontrollable (that is, what other people will do and how things will ultimately turn out), you ironically increase your influence and the probability of getting what you want.”
Imperative read.
