Naturally enough I’d coached plenty of clients who had, and I’m reasonably sure I’d helped them through their various emotional crises, nearly always managing to find a way to reconnect them with their innate wellbeing. I know because they told me so. As for myself, if I thought about it at all I guess I assumed it couldn’t happen to me. So when the pain in my chest showed up, out of the blue and most definitely uninvited, I immediately came to the conclusion, as I presume most people do, that my heart was about to give up the ghost.

I was driving at the time, so had to pull over. Too late to ‘take back’ the thought that I might be suffering a heart attack, my physiology duly obeyed my psychology by manifesting a pain in my left arm. That of course confirmed the diagnosis, leading to the firm belief that I had only moments to live. I called my wife on the pretext that I needed a lift to get to the hospital, but really to tell her that I loved her and to kiss the kids for me. She came at once and we raced to A and E. I sat in the passenger seat sweating profusely as the pain increased, wondering if I was going to make it to the hospital alive.

You already know how the story ends. The doctor who checked me over told me I had the heart of an ox. There was no trauma there, and if my blood pressure was a little raised that was only the result of my imagination running away with me like a galloping horse. What I had suffered was simply a panic attack, scary and unpleasant but ultimately harmless. It was a sobering moment. I realised that all those years I had spent helping people in the aftermath of their own attacks (many times described in great detail) had somehow not prepared me for having the exact same experience.

I could tell you about some of the things that had been weighing heavily on my mind that morning, outward circumstances that could arguably have triggered the attack, but it wouldn’t mean a thing. Life is a contact sport and reading this you will have your own set of personal trials that it has thrown your way. Take your pick. It happened, and as with all experience, I am a little wiser.

In the course of my work as a transformational coach I talk a lot about being present, about the value of living our lives in the moment, unencumbered by a past that never existed and a future that never arrives. Embracing this eternal ‘now’ is the most productive as well as the most spiritually nourishing way to live. And, a little paradoxically, nothing makes you feel more in touch with the present moment than thinking you’re about to die, (which incidentally explains why many people embark on a spiritual journey after a brush with their own mortality).

So how am I wiser? Like the majority of us, I struggle to maintain this sense of the ‘here and now’, even as I teach the understanding to others. It’s called being human. But I know that Mind has a foolproof way of pointing us in the right direction, whatever the circumstances of our lives, and I have no doubt that this little episode in my life was one of those signposts. A worry is an unattached thought after all, with no foundation, like a bubble or a helium balloon we are hanging onto. We can let go the string anytime and watch it float away.

Coming away from the hospital I realised that I don’t want to be searching anymore. In the past I was always on a mission to improve myself, to ‘find myself’ so that I could help others. And I think that for a few brief moments leading up to my panic attack I had slipped back there. I was striving for something out of reach, when in fact it was right there with me all along, and always had been. On that morning I was ‘holding onto the string’.

Here’s a final metaphor that I have used in my teaching. Did you know that if you make a cut with a knife or razor blade in a chrysalis just as a butterfly is beginning to emerge it will never fly? A misguided attempt to help the process along actually ends it, because the insect’s struggle for freedom is not an inconvenience but a requirement, building the strength necessary for flight.

Now I see that the ‘struggle’ of my anxiety attack was actually a requirement of my need to stay present.

I stood out in the garden looking up at the stars. Something was bugging me but it was a beautiful night and I felt momentarily grateful to be alive. There is something very calming to me about the vastness of the universe. The late Stephen Hawking knew something about this when he commented: “Look up at the stars, not down at your feet.” Maybe that’s how he reached the age of seventy-six despite his doctors having given him two years to live at the age of twenty-one.

The fact is I needed calming. I’d been working hard as ever, trying to balance my family life with my professional responsibilities, trying to stay ahead of the game. Not for the first time I was feeling quite exhausted with the effort. But the stars did their magic and my mind gradually quietened down.

Then the insight came, a sudden, powerful and intense glimpse of the truth.

Before I share it with you I have to explain about an aspect of my childhood that revolved around the dinner table. In our house mealtimes seemed to be less about physical sustenance than the mental kind. My dad always insisted on discussing the political and social issues of the day. Not only that he fully expected me, his only child, to have an opinion about them and was fully prepared to take me to task if he considered that opinion to be suspect or just plain wrong. Why he did this remains a mystery. I never asked him and it’s too late now. He died eight years ago. I’m sure that in his way he felt he was preparing me for the world I was entering.

It seems almost cruel to me now and I feel a certain amount of sympathy for my younger self. As much as I want my own daughters to be able to think clearly and care about the society they’re growing up in, I can’t imagine subjecting them to an intellectual assault course over the evening meal, much less picking holes in their arguments as though they were panellists on Question Time.

It was a very long time ago and my dad was an alcoholic, a troubled man who was very embittered about his own life. I forgive him of course but what I see now is that those early experiences, compounded by my rather patchy and fragmented formal education, left me with a deep insecurity about my poor general knowledge, which only grew as I entered the world of work.

I was afraid of the unknown, so I built my whole life around knowing. In short I needed to know everything about everything!

It worked well at first. That need spurred me on and I found I was a pretty good learner. But as I now realise an insecure thought that’s subconsciously planted, with deep enough roots, will tend to persist throughout our lives. Sure enough at each stage of my career I found that however much I knew about my subject it was dwarfed by how much I felt I still had to learn. This generated a feeling of inadequacy that never quite left me.

Enter the Three Principles.

As with so many of my present clients when I was introduced to the Principles, as revealed to us through the teachings of Sydney Banks, I was blown away. The simplicity of this new understanding of human psychology astounded me, and it still does, every day. But here’s the problem, the one that I was struggling with on that starry night three years ago: I found it hard to come to terms with an understanding that relied upon innate wisdom rather than conventional knowledge. I was inspired on an intellectual level. I felt I had been waiting my whole life to be given this understanding, but…

I didn’t ‘get it’. Being so used to searching, on hearing about the principles I had simply continued the search. When my various mentors talked about insights I searched for insights. When they described a beautiful feeling I went in search of the feeling. I knew that I already had everything I needed within me – because that was the essence of the understanding – but I still searched.

Luckily for me once we truly ‘hear’ the principles they begin to work on our subconscious minds every bit as much as they do on our conscious ones, so in a relatively short time my understanding grew with no apparent help from me. But the revelation that I had that night was the beginning of the end of the search. I saw that I’d been carrying around a misconception about myself since childhood, and it felt as if a massive weight had suddenly been lifted from my shoulders. My insight? The only thing I truly need to know is that Mind has my back. In fact it always has, I just didn’t know it.

Dinnertime. I thanked the stars and went inside.

It sounds like something out of a Bond film, or maybe the catch phrase of the latest Doctor Who villain. In our fiction the heroes are always putting up a valiant fight against the forces of evil. The odds are overwhelming but the good guys have right on their side, along with courage and an unshakeable determination to succeed in their cause.

All very well. There are many instances in life where these qualities are not only necessary but vital for survival, and fiction mirrors our need to be strong and protect our loved ones from danger. But what if the threat is not ‘out there’ in the big bad world but much, much closer to home?

What if the threat comes from our own thoughts?

Many times in the course of my work, as I’m trying to pass on my understanding of the principles to a client who is suffering, I’m faced with the following response, or a variation of it, usually said with a fair degree of frustration and even anger:

“The bad thoughts keep coming in. I try to resist them but I just can’t! What am I supposed to do?”

My response is always the same: we can’t and we shouldn’t resist our thoughts, no matter how negative they seem. Resistance, in this case, is worse than futile – it has inherent dangers. The ‘threat’ posed by our thinking is an illusion (it is itself nothing more than a thought) and to try to resist it simply compounds the problem, trapping us in a viscous circle of negativity. As our old friend the philosopher Carl Jung said: “What you resist persists.”

Human beings have thoughts. It’s what separates us from the animal kingdom. Those thoughts tend to go in one of two directions: to the past, where a whole set of personal beliefs – useful or otherwise – lie in wait to challenge us, or to an imagined future full of fanciful scenarios. And again, if we’re in a low mood those scenarios will look increasingly bleak and desperate. Jung’s insight was to see that as we turn away from the bad stuff, shutting it out in the mistaken belief that we are ‘wrong’ to be thinking it, we create the very conditions for the thought to grow even stronger within us.

I can give you an example from my own life, one that might be familiar to you if you’ve been reading these blogs. The seed of a thought was planted in me very many years ago. It was that I was lazy. Not true – it was actually a product of someone else’s well meaning but mistaken thought – but nevertheless it took root. I didn’t want this negative thing to define me so I fought against the thought, to try to disprove it. And of course my way of disproving it was to work very, very hard through decades of my early life and career. That hard work paid off in many ways but did it banish the negative thought? Did it make it go away for good?

No, of course not. Instead of seeing that thought for what it was: just a thought (and not even mine to begin with), I resisted it, as though it was real!

I have to admit it has taken me a while to emerge from under that particular thought cloud. Even as recently as a couple of years ago I had difficulty ‘allowing myself’ the luxury of a holiday free from thoughts about work. My new understanding of how the human mind works informs me that ‘down time’ is just as valuable – perhaps more valuable – for my life and my business than the daily routine of meetings and schedules, no matter how enjoyable.

What Carl Jung was pointing to was the value of a quiet mind, and that can only be achieved when we recognise thoughts for what they are: transient and above all harmless, without form. The illustration that accompanies this blog represents how many of us see the predicament we are in. Our fragile minds are caught in a ‘vice’ of thoughts that there is seemingly no escape from. ‘Resistance is futile’ because there is no stopping the relentless pressure, until we literally ‘crack’.

But suppose we look at the picture in a completely different way, one that is informed by the Three Principles understanding? The egg is Mind, which is shared by every living thing and cannot be broken. Mind can be said to be the only thing in the universe that actually persists. And the vice? The vice is made up of thought, as inconsequential as smoke. The threat it posed was always an illusion, ultimately as powerless as the bad guys in Doctor Who.

And where there is no threat, there is no need for resistance.

I’m sure they are very similar, if not identical, to yours. Is it fair to assume that like me you were wrapped in cosy blankets, cradled and fussed over, beamed at by adoring adults, mum, dad, uncles and aunts, carers, older siblings or any combination of the above? And most – though not all – of us are lucky enough to be wanted, cared for, kept from danger. It’s not hard to love a tiny, helpless baby after all. We humans are programmed that way.

It’s later on that the trouble starts.

They’re called our ‘formative years’ for good reason. The child’s developing brain, as greedy for information in infancy as it was for mother’s milk in babyhood, will take every experience on board. Unable to differentiate between good and bad, the child naturally absorbs each new experience as if it was written in stone. This may be why so many of us suffer as adults as a result of thoughts, beliefs and behaviours unconsciously learned ‘at our mother’s knee’. It seems those early lessons are the hardest some of us have to deal with, being so deeply buried in our subconscious minds.

I recently visited the States as a guest of George and Linda Pransky. They were hosting a Three Principles retreat at which I was alternately coaching and participating in discussions on many different topics. One subject that came up was childhood, and at some point George made a comment that struck me with some force. In fact it pulled me out of the warm feeling that I’d had up until that point and made me feel suddenly separate from everyone else in the room. I was alone, or so it felt in that moment, and I realised that my face was wet with tears. It was the next day before I could properly share my feelings with the group.

Like many people I had a difficult childhood, caught in the middle of a very acrimonious divorce. Being an only child made it worse as I inevitably became an emotional football, passed back and forth between my parents, one of whom stayed here in England, while the other began a new life in South Africa. That meant nine different schools for me, five of which I got kicked out of for being, shall we say, less than a model student. I’ve documented some of those early experiences in my book ‘Joyride’ and I don’t want to repeat them here, except to say that well into adulthood I carried a lot of what we all refer to nowadays as ‘baggage’.

Until that moment in La Conner I would have stated confidently that my understanding of the principles behind our human experience had finally swept away any residual negative feelings I may have been harbouring about that time. I knew in my heart, in my bones and even in my head that the past was over, that it could not hurt me. My thoughts were transient and could not dictate my reality. I had forgotten – and therefore forgiven – the bad stuff.

But still, those words of George’s had got to me.

One of those painful memories I’ve referred to had to do with my mother. Our relationship had never been very good, for reasons I won’t go into here. But I realised that I’d built for myself a resentful attitude towards her over the years. I was working from a set of negative presuppositions about her that had got so ingrained in me that I no longer thought it possible to view her in any other way. But the truth that suddenly hit me was this: I have never been a mother!

For some reason this biological impossibility had never really occurred to me before. How could I know the experiences that she had gone through before, during and after my birth that had affected her behaviour towards me? Perhaps after all she had been doing her best in the circumstances. I decided on my return from the States to give her a ring. Her voice on the phone sounded surprised (which tells you pretty much all you need to know).

“What did you want? Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine. I was just calling to see how you were.”

We had a pleasant chat, and I felt warmer towards her than I had for a long time. For years I had unwittingly projected that negative attitude onto her whenever we spoke. All I needed was a loving feeling to change the relationship instantly.

And you’re probably wondering what George had said in that seminar in La Conner that had brought me to tears. It was very simple.

He said: “Everybody loves their mother.”

That’s not intended as a sick joke, and it certainly doesn’t reflect my feelings at the time, which were pretty much what you’d expect as I stood over him in the funeral parlour, preparing to lay the old man to rest. Despite my sadness I couldn’t help noticing that he looked handsome and very much at peace lying there, death having finally freed him from the demons that had haunted him his whole life. He looked like the dad I always wanted him to be, the one that he really was, behind the mask of pain and disappointment he had always seemed to wear.

I was, and still am, grateful that we had been on good terms in the last few years of his life. I felt paradoxically very close to him at that moment, and though it’s not really in my nature to dwell on questions of the afterlife I found myself wondering, like so many before me, whether something of the human spirit survives death. I found myself whispering, just under my breath:

“Dad… if you can hear me … give me a sign.”

In the course of my work as a transformational coach and educator I naturally encounter many grieving people, some whose lives have been so shattered by the loss of a loved one that they live in the firm belief they can never be truly happy again. Whatever else they are struggling with in life this burden of grief is the one seemingly insurmountable difficulty they face, and often they make it clear to me that I can be of no help at all in that one area. It’s hardly surprising then that they are sometimes angered by the suggestion that grief is a choice we make. I can understand why, but all of my personal experience, along with the philosophical teachings that I’ve long been studying, tells me that it’s the truth.

Our psychological and physiological responses to pain are one. They are inextricably linked. You have an accident in which your arm or leg is broken. There is major trauma both physically and mentally. Your limb is in plaster for weeks, and the memory of the accident haunts you, perhaps even gives you nightmares. Then what happens?

It gradually fades.

The pain, in each case, lessens. It’s supposed to. The limb is healed, the nightmares become less frequent until eventually they cease altogether. The accident that was so painful at the time becomes no more than an anecdote, something half-remembered at best. You even find yourself joking about it in time.

The pain of loss of a loved one is terrible, and I would never try to deny or downplay it. But the truth is that it fades, like any other pain, because we human beings are designed that way. What happens with many of us is that as we feel the pain gradually leaving us we work to keep it alive through our thoughts, perhaps from a sense of duty to the person we loved, or from a sense of guilt that we are still here and they are not. And of course the culture we are raised in plays a big part in encouraging us in this respect. Queen Victoria famously mourned the death of Prince Albert in 1861 for the remaining forty years of her life, wearing her widow’s clothes and instructing her servants to keep filling his shaving bowl with hot water every morning as usual. So public was her grief that even her own loyal subjects began to wonder about the state of her mental health.

Whatever our reasons we suffer through each anniversary, reliving precious memories of the loved one, willingly re-opening old wounds even as we sink into despair. All this time we know full well that our grieving does not return this person to us, nevertheless we feel helplessly caught in the negative emotions that their loss has caused.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not judging, condemning or criticising anyone. I’m simply pointing out that it is not in our emotional and psychological make-up to grieve beyond a certain point, so there must be choice involved. If someone wants to make that choice it is of course up to him or her, but perhaps the knowledge that pain is supposed to die away might bring some comfort.

I think about my dad with affection, and I choose to remember the good stuff. Did he hear my whispered question in the funeral parlour? I’m not sure. All I know is that the instant the words ‘give me a sign’ left my lips a pneumatic drill started up outside with a hellish clattering that I swear could wake the dead.

I nearly jumped out of my skin!

This was different.

Something very strange was going on. I suddenly felt like a helium balloon about to drift away. I was at home, in the middle of the living room when I realised this was more than a sensation in my head; this was actually happening. I looked down and sure enough my feet weren’t so much planted on the carpet as brushing lightly against it. The next thing I knew I lost contact completely and began rising through the air, slowly at first but then more rapidly until I had to reach out to stop my head from bumping on the ceiling. There I stayed, halfway between too light fixtures, helplessly stuck like a fly on flypaper. Even so, in my panic and distress the one thing I was grateful for was that this was happening in the house. If it had happened in the garden I might never be seen again. I cursed myself repeatedly because I had no doubt in my mind that this was entirely my fault…

I’d forgotten how to use gravity to stay on the ground!

Sometimes when we exchange insights with each other, examining our understanding of the three principles of universal Mind, universal Consciousness and universal Thought, we innocently make the mistake of seeing them as tools to enrich our lives, concepts that we can take ‘off the shelf’ as it were, to influence and change our experience for the better. But it’s very important to emphasise that the principles are not prescriptive but rather they are descriptive of our human experience. They are just the way it is in this life, in this universe.

I told my little story about floating away – and by the way in case you were worried about me it never happened. I may have lost a few pounds but I’m still casting a shadow – to hopefully illustrate the point. We don’t use gravity! Gravity is a universal force – a universal Truth – that is simply part and parcel of our reality. That doesn’t mean that we are not aware of it in our everyday lives. Think of how you feel when you’re climbing one of those spiral staircases inside a tower or lighthouse and the ground is dropping away alarmingly beneath you.

We don’t use gravity, but we use our understanding of gravity to keep ourselves safe when we’re up high, or to put our glass down carefully so as not to spill red wine on the nice white carpet. It’s the same with the principles. Our understanding is all that counts, because that’s what allows us to steer away from the choppy waters of our negative thinking into that calm blue lagoon where clarity is restored.

That’s where the good feeling is to be found.

I’ve just spent a week in La Conner, coaching the principles with my good friends George and Linda Pransky, and as ever the more I taught the more I found I was learning. I’ve come home with many fresh insights that I’m eager to share. This ‘good feeling’ that we often hear about, ever since Sydney Banks had his extraordinary revelation back in the seventies, is not an absence of anything. It’s not merely the antidote to feeling bad, like my trips to the gym are an antidote to feeling unfit. The feeling is your birthright. It is how you are meant to feel.

I can’t say for sure because I only have my own experience but I think the feeling is probably different for each one of us. What I know is that it’s a loving feeling. Personally I have it watching my two young daughters playing a game together, in quiet moments with my wife, or when I’m sharing insights with a client and I see him or her transform before my eyes.

I know equally that this feeling is always there, like the sun that is always there behind the rain clouds. I don’t need reminding anymore. (And if I did, well, that’s what rainbows are for, right?)

I used to think that I was 100% in charge of my own destiny. In fact I prided myself on my ability to seek out new opportunities, capitalise on my hard-won skills and forge a career for myself. The move from I.T. into personal development was a particularly smart one. It was a path I chose because I intuitively knew it would be good for me financially and, more importantly, emotionally and spiritually. My intuition was entirely correct and I have never been happier in my professional life. I made mention of the fact in last week’s blog on ‘needs’ that there is no finer way to make your living than by helping people, because each time you do so you help yourself a little bit too. It’s an understanding I worked hard for many years to reach.

But in fact I wasn’t doing any of it.

I now realise that my ‘self’ is purely a construct, an illusion created in hindsight from nothing but thought. All along that journey to self-discovery it was Mind that was guiding me, every step of the way, so as much as I am in awe of the whole process I can hardly take credit for it. That strong sense of pride I used to feel was only ego, only thought. It has been replaced by gratitude, and when I coach my clients now I am simply trying to wake them up to the fact that their lives are being guided in exactly the same way, whether they realise it consciously or not.

I have two young daughters so for a man in his early fifties I’m quite familiar with fairy tales, genies, princesses living in castles kissing frogs and all the rest. There is naturally a magical element in those stories we’ve all grown up with. The magic is a constant acknowledgement and reminder of the truth of our experience as spiritual beings in human form. But I’ve come to realise that many of these stories have some pretty fundamental limitations built into them.

Take the classic story of the genie released from captivity in his bottle or lamp and granting Aladdin or whoever three wishes. The story has a sting in its tale, usually ending up when the inevitable self-interest of the one doing the wishing is exposed and punished. I’m no expert but I think somewhere along the way a story intended to point us towards the magnificent abundance of life got turned into a moral lesson about the dangers of selfishness and greed. Here’s my re-telling of the genie story: Aladdin is walking along a beach when he finds a strange-looking bottle washed up on the shore. When he rubs it to remove a couple of barnacles the cork springs open and out jumps a magical genie.

“I am a magical genie. I have been trapped inside this bottle for an eternity. You have released me. I must now grant you three wishes.”

Aladdin, being well acquainted with the Three Principles guiding his life is a bit underwhelmed. He scoffs.

“Only three? Surely you can do better than that!? Besides, I know what you’re up to. You’re testing me to see whether I’m going to ask for riches. Well I’m not going to because Mind has my back and I have all the riches I could ever need.”

The genie is impressed and they walk off together down the beach, talking about philosophy and the nature of our experience. The end.

Okay it’s maybe not as exciting as the original, and I don’t think my daughters would approve if I rolled it out for their bedtime story, but at this stage of my life it just seems more relevant to me.

All through my personal ‘journey’ – if I can call it that – all I ever needed was to get out of my own way, to realise that in life there are multiple choices, many doors opening for us all the time, even if we sometimes can’t see them for the fog of our own thinking.

Too many of us are living in a fantasy where there are only two or three choices open to us in the wish department, and no genie on hand to grant them anyway. I felt that way once, but I won’t live in that fantasy anymore.

I’ve changed my mind about choices.

“Nothing darling. Just wallowing in nostalgia and regret”.

You caught sight of that guitar, the one you were so determined to learn how to play. The watercolour set that you never even opened. The beginnings of a novel in that dusty old notebook that you promised yourself you’d finish. And on and on. There’s a story we tell ourselves at moments like this. It’s the one that goes: ‘Ah well, we can’t do everything. We can’t fulfil every need, pursue every dream. There are only so many hours in the day. Not to mention these bills that need paying. Maybe next year…’

All very plausible, but let’s look at it more deeply. What actually are our needs at the end of the day? One of the first life coaches to inspire me when I started on my personal development journey was Tony Robbins. He pretty much nailed it with his ‘Hierarchy of Human Needs’. He said there are four basic ones: Certainty, Variety, Love and Significance. And a clue to our feelings of regret when we think of our unrealised ambitions is in those first two, certainty and variety. They are seemingly at odds with each other. We need certainty, which means money, which means getting a job. But we also need variety, which means having plenty of free time to develop our talents and skills.

So then are we doomed to a life of compromise and regret?

The only answer I can give is my deep conviction that Mind has our backs, that the only thing stopping us from doing anything at all is that old familiar story. It’s been told by a purely illusory self, created from nothing but thought. He or she has ‘let opportunities slip by’, ‘squandered time’, ‘missed the boat’ etc etc. We are spiritual beings in human form with unlimited potential but as yet we haven’t cracked mortality, and sometimes our limited lifespan can weigh heavily, such as when we’re in a low mood.

Strange but true is the fact that time expands and contracts according to our state of mind. When we are fully engaged in any activity that we love there’s a very real sense of time standing still. As Carl Jung said ‘where our attention goes our energy flows’, and when we’re in this highly desirable state the mastery of seemingly impossible skills can seem effortless and fun. It’s really as simple as that.

Remember that physically and emotionally we are not the same people who first had the thought: ‘I’d really like to …” learn that instrument, learn to draw, learn Spanish, whatever it is. So all you need is a good feeling in the moment, free of made-up negative thoughts about who you are, where you’ve come from, what you’ve achieved or haven’t achieved, in order to launch yourself into whatever activity you choose, and so enrich your life.

Tony Robbins didn’t stop at those four basic needs by the way. He highlighted two others that he termed ‘spiritual needs’. It could be argued that these are in the end more important than the others. They are Growth and Contribution. Here we have the same apparent contradiction. How can we grow as an individual while at the same time satisfying our need to give to others?

But maybe there’s no real contradiction after all. Feeding our souls by making music or art, taking up fishing or golf can expand our consciousness, meaning we have more to give. And by the same token it seems the more love and support we give to others – not just family and friends but in the world at large – the more clarity we achieve, and so more focused on our own needs we become.

Those ambitions you feel you abandoned are right where you left them. Blow the dust off and start again.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

Instead when I finally came to the end of my rant he fixed me with a stern look, told me to get out of his office and not come back until I’d fixed one or more of the problems I’d so enthusiastically identified. Chastised, and more than a little humiliated, I left with my tail between my legs and soon after resigned from the firm, telling myself I wasn’t going to be spoken to like that. But of course he’d been right. Instead of recognising my responsibility and living up to it I had allowed myself to become caught up in a ‘thought storm’ of judgement and blame.

Calling out others for their lack of competence put my own in question. I had felt pretty confident in my abilities up until then but as it turns out real confidence springs from competence, not the other way around.

Cut to a few years later when I had mercifully switched from IT to personal development. Trying to be better at sales had led me to have a ‘light bulb’ moment when I finally saw a way to be not just a better salesman but a better human being – and maybe get more fun out of life into the bargain. As I began to coach clients in the techniques and methodology of NLP I would very often be asked the following question: ‘When I get my certificate will I be fully qualified to practise?’ The answer was yes they were. I was always at pains to give my students a thorough grounding in the subject to the extent that they weren’t just equipped to practise but on a deeper level would be able to change their own lives for the better.

But here’s the point: behind the question was a lot of insecurity about my clients’ need to believe in their ability to do the job, and a piece of paper could never give them that. I could sympathise of course. A certificate is evidence that you’ve been somewhere and heard some useful things, perhaps even passed some kind of test. However it does not mean you are competent in your chosen field. Competence in any activity comes from repeated exposure to the demands of that activity, whether it’s life coaching, juggling or sumo wrestling. (And it’s worth adding that in all my years of coaching literally thousands of clients I have never once been asked to prove my credentials).

If you’ve never thought of it before, here is how competence works:

Step One. You are unconsciously incompetent. You don’t know anything, but you don’t know that you don’t know. (Ignorance is bliss!)

Step Two. You are consciously incompetent. You don’t know anything, but at least you are aware of your ignorance. (Caution: steep learning curve ahead!)

Step Three. You are consciously competent. You know it all and you’re well aware that you know it all. (Danger! Ego!)

Step Four: You are unconsciously competent. You know it all but you embody it, so you have nothing to prove. (And everything to give).

This is the goal of all learning. This last state, unconscious competence, is one in which the mind is quiet, so that wisdom flows without effort. The understanding that I now coach my clients in – The ‘Three Principles’ – has no models to follow and no techniques to learn, hence no certificates need ever be handed out. The truth of our human experience, the way in which we create our internal reality through the principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought, once fully grasped, is all any practitioner needs. He or she must simply speak from their grounding and trust that the client will hear the truth.

And the rest is exactly what’s implied by that word: ‘practitioner’.

As with anything else – practice!

A professional guy, a life coach I’ve been acquainted with for many years, had pretty much achieved everything he’d dreamed of way back when he started out. From humble beginnings selling his wares metaphorically from door to door, customer by customer, he had slowly but surely expanded his client base, speaking on ever-larger platforms, first locally then ultimately globally. Moving into the digital age further lengthened his reach until he now found himself in the enviable position of being able to sit back and enjoy some much needed leisure time. The business could run itself perfectly well without him.

But there was a problem. He found himself asking this question: what exactly do you do when you’ve done the thing you worked so hard to do? … Play golf?

This man’s business had been his life for as long as he could remember, with each phase of his long career having its own unique rhythm, comprised of meetings, presentations and consultations, all neatly spaced throughout the working week. Yes he had allotted himself time off and he enjoyed regular holidays, but invariably his down time was filled with thoughts about his next objective, his short-term and long-term goals. If it was a ‘hamster wheel’ of an existence it was one of his own making, so he could hardly feel bad about that. Besides it had yielded the much-desired result. But now what?

It would be easy to dismiss my friend’s dilemma. Many of us would be very happy with exactly the situation he found himself in. We should maybe reserve our sympathy for those whose life plans have not worked out so well. But I think there’s a deeper message here that can apply to all of us, whatever square we’ve landed on in the Game of Life.

The great ocean of Mind is shared by each and every one of us on the planet. It has our back every minute of the day, and it exists – so it seems to me – for the sole purpose of making us happy, healthy and fulfilled. Whatever, or whoever, placed Mind inside us also equipped us with five pretty incredible senses (the miracle of consciousness) with which to experience all the billions of sights, sounds, tastes and aromas of the world.

… The least we can do is have some fun.

Mind may be always available to us, but we have to be available to it in turn. That means taking the time, every now and again, to have a different experience, one that doesn’t involve those plans we made for our business or those goals we’re striving for – even when they’re noble ones.

In our house that usually means walking. Just after Christmas we embarked on a short break to the Lake District in the North West of England. We like to do this as a family once a year, not for the sun, the pool or the beach necessarily (though we like them too!) but for the walking, and there’s no better place than the Lakes. I have to admit that my thoughts do occasionally stray to work-related matters, but even when that happens I find the quality of my thinking is raised to a new level by the tranquillity, the wildlife, the scenery and the crunch of my boots under foot.

Mostly I just drift.

Having a full diary is manna from heaven to someone in business. It’s exactly what I want for my clients after all. But like so many things in life it can become an end in itself. Sometimes you have to get off those ‘railway tracks’ you laid, even if they’re leading you to where you always wanted to go, and explore some uncharted territory. That’s what I told my business-oriented friend. “Why not take a look around, see what else is out there?”

Mind is the driving force, the engine of the ship. It can, and will, take us where our heart desires we should go. But let’s not underestimate ourselves, and what we’re capable of. Success in one area should not preclude success in another.

And incidentally, if you’ve been wondering to yourself as you read this whether my professional ‘friend’ might actually be me…?

I couldn’t possible comment!