Sometimes people wonder how I got here. 

Having world-class coaches, mentors and teachers has done me great good: They have been constant invitation to grow and beautiful examples of what's possible when you do.

My formal training with the foremost coaches and teachers in the world included: Michael Neill, George Pransky, Debbie Ford, Steve Chandler, Robert Holden, Byron Katie, Bill Cumming and Barbara Sher. Many of these I've been lucky enough to teach alongside.  I hired Michael Neill as my coach for a total of nearly 3 years. For one of those years I was an apprentice — one of the best decisions I have ever made. There were also countless books and chance encounters that offered me chances to see more deeply, reflect and grow. 

I've made growing a big part of my life.

If you are doing the same you will have noticed by now that all books worth reading and all great teachers point in one direction: You. This can be very annoying when all you want is to feel better now, get over a hump, or make a decision.  Yet I was lucky enough to work with people who refused to dishonor me by giving me their answers and opinions.  Instead they helped me to see me more clearly where my own answers actually come from and to understand what gets in the way of that sometimes. 

Ultimately, as you will find, no book or coach or thing or person can give you anything that will make you happy and solve your problems. I had to find out in the course of working with the best people in the world, that even they did not have my answers. In their wise refusal to substitute their knowledge for my own wisdom, they gave me the greatest gift of all: to see that every human being already has the potential and capacities we need in order to guide ourselves. This may not seem clear to you or even true, but it is.

You are using these capacities now to read this and to understand what I am saying.  You use your innate abilities all the time to know what is right for you and what is not and even to decide what you want for lunch.

I remember very well the time in my life when I did not realize that I had any innate capacities at all.  I did not understand that my own happiness was not contingent on anything.  I thought my emotions and feelings were the result of what had happened to me and the difficulties and problematic people in my life. I thought I had lost myself along the road of life and I was irreparably damaged. Then I learned no one, no thing, and no event had the power to get into me and create my feelings. I also learned that things were always going to happen to me, but that I could be OK regardless of what was going on. 

I began to understand my humanity, my mind and my thinking in a way that completely revolutionized my life and my work. (Read my book "101 New Pairs of Glasses" where I share that journey).  I saw that the quality of my life was created 100% from inside me. I began to truly live, to be myself and for the first time ever, to relax. I began sharing what I knew about this with clients. They began to see powerful changes.

If you want to experience your real potential and strengthen your ability to use it to create, inspire and set your own compass I do recommend you hire a good coach.  It helps a lot.  But you don't have to.  After all, if it's inside you, you must also have the ability to find it.  So there are times I've had coaching and other times, I've done my own work in reading and reflection.  How did I know to do that?  I listened to what I knew was true for me.

Personally I love the coaching relationship because it helps.  If you pick a good coach you have someone whose only interest is that you wake up to the fullness of what life can offer.  They are totally on your side. Almost no one in your life will agree to take the time to do this with you. And sometimes even if they do, they really don't understand what "thriving" means, much less how to help you understand it for yourself. 

A good coach will not waste your time trying to help you change things and people on the outside of you. They will help you leave your past in the past, and they will always, ultimately, redirect the signposts relentlessly inward.  All good facilitators of transformative personal change will offer you a gift you can keep for a lifetime, not just a solution to your current issue.  That is why the work I do and the work I recommend is called "transformative."  A transformative coach will share with you what they shared with me; the priceless reminder of what we all do forget sometimes:

• We've all got the power to see something new, no matter how many times in the past we haven't been able to. 
• We all have the power to act based on that new information. 
• There is no limit to the amount of new insight available.

A good coach will help you to take these principles out of the realm of "good ideas" and theory, and support you in making them practical and useful. They will ask you to reflect, to notice, to test it out. They will remind you of who you are. Over and over and over. Until you get it.

I heartily encourage you to keep open and keep listening until you can see for yourself that the whole world can change for you in any single moment, with one thought, in one conversation with one new insight. Seeing anew is one of your greatest capacities.

This was the gift of coaching for me.

This is true freedom.

I wish it for you too.