In 2012, three years after having successfully launched an international training school for coaches called Supercoach Academy, I put the school on hold for a year because I noticed something was “off” in the way people were hearing the principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought that we were sharing. Although our student’s clients were on the whole happy and experiencing positive life shifts, the most common thing they would say when something in their life wasn’t changing for the better was this:
“I know it’s just my thinking, but…”
That “but” could be followed by almost anything, but some of the most common ones I would hear were variations on:
- “… I really am having money problems.”
- “… there really are children starving in Africa.”
- “… this is a really core belief.”
- “… given the reality of my childhood/upbringing/past experience, I don’t think this one’s ever going to change.”
- “…. he/she is really driving me crazy!”
Over the following 18 months, I had numerous insights both in myself and with my clients and students into why sometimes seeing the thought created nature of our experience felt liberating and led to both subtle and dramatic changes, and sometimes it just didn’t. When I brought the Academy back in 2014, we were able to fold these insights into our teaching and the results our coaches have been able to create with their clients are faster and more reliable than ever before. This week, I’d like to share two of these insights with you. Think of them like “places to see” in a guidebook – the words are just an attempt to describe what you’ll discover when you travel inside and see these ancient truths for yourself…
1. No strings attached
I used to joke that the only two things in the world not made entirely of thought are money and my wife. The reason that joke wasn’t always funny to me was because my thinking about money and my thinking about Nina often seemed to carry extra weight – as though my experience in those two areas of life wasn’t free to change on a dime and I was a lot more than one thought away from a new experience of them. In other words, we think that some kind of visible “reality” is mixing in with the invisible power of Thought and that together, those two elements are creating our experience of life.
But as soon as we attach strings between thought and some kind of external agency, be it money, the past, or other people, we are saying we don’t know “it’s just our thinking” – that we in fact think it’s much more of a serious problem than that. Or we make a distinction that some kinds of thoughts are more powerful than others – core beliefs, or convictions, or ideals – and then we suffer from the thought that a belief, conviction, or ideal can’t just change in a heartbeat. And whenever our thoughts grow roots that seem to take hold in the soil of some external form, they really do seem to be based in “reality” and difficult to change.
What the principles point to is that it’s ALL thought – the human design is such that we can only ever experience a thought-created reality. So it’s not that it’s “just your thinking” – it’s just that your experience is 100% made of thought. That invisible power of thought brought to our senses by consciousness is all we know and all we can know. It is the thread out of which the fabric of our reality is woven. And when we really see that all that is ever going on is the energy of thought taking and changing form (literally trans-forming), we become less enamored of the details of our thinking and more enchanted by the power of that which creates it.
2. Waking up to your true nature is where it’s at
The man who first articulated what we now call “the three principles”, Syd Banks, said that “if you want to help people, you can help them a little bit with what’s going on in their lives, but if you really want to help people, show them a whole new world and they’ll help themselves.” That whole new world is the world of our true identity – who and what we really are before, during, and after the play of thought takes place on the stage of our personal mind. When we see that our personal mind is just a reflection of a universal mind, things begin to change. The universal mind is the invisible energy of all things, whether in form or formless, including but not limited to our selves – it is the unfolding of life of which we are all a part.
I am, surprisingly to no one, prone to superhero metaphors, so here’s one that points to how waking up to our true nature changes everything:
Imagine Clark Kent is hypnotized by an evil super-villain and forgets that he’s really Superman. From that moment forward, each time danger comes to Metropolis, Clark does everything he knows to do to stay alive, protect Lois, and keep his job safe by getting a great story about it for the Daily Planet. If he decides he wants to keep himself, Lois, and his job even safer, he might read books and do courses in self-defense and creative journalism. But if he can just wake up from his thought-induced hypnotic state and remember who he really is, he’ll realize that he’s already safe. And that he has the power within him not only to survive, but to thrive – to make a difference to the world around him by being who he really is inside.
So now as coaches, instead of trying to convince people that they don’t have to worry about things because “it’s just your thinking”, we focus instead on waking ourselves and then our clients up to who and what we really are in essence. And the moment you open yourself back up to that power within, your life begins to change from the inside-out. You don’t have to change your thinking – ever. You simply start to see thought creating your moment by moment reality and stop trying to justify it as anything more or less than what it is. Your experience of life becomes more fluid, and the amount of time you spend in the timeless flow of the present increases. Life becomes simpler, richer, and more beautiful, and you become more playful, focused, and effective in the world.
This is not a fairy tale – it’s become the new reality for me and more and more people around the world. And if you’d like to take your life to the next level in 2016, I encourage you to give yourself the gift of looking in this direction for yourself and seeing whatever it is that you will see…
Have fun, learn heaps, happy exploring, and happy new year!
With all my love,
