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Insights Magazine brings you leading experts in coaching and empowerment,

sharing their wisdom, vision, secrets of success and personal defining moments of inspiration.

We hope you will enjoy our new Insights each month.

In This Issue:

Marcia Wieder, CEO and Founder of Dream University:

Focus more on your desire - the dream will take care of itself. Page 4

Dr Richard Johnson, Nationally Recognized Expert on Retirement: Find new meaning midlife— ReCareer Coaching. Page 14

Kathy Esper, Creator of Spirit of the Horse Program: Mix information and inspiration—breakthrough energy can explode. Page 20

Susan Rae Baker, Award Winning Author:

The Last Box – A Women’s Guide to Surviving Corporate America. Page 28

Helen Kerrison, International Conscious Communication Specialist: Build powerful, successful relationships through effective communication. Page 34

Dr. MA Greenstein, Chief Brainiac, George Greenstein Institute, and

Dr. Conrad Milne, former sports advisor to the Minister of Sports, Bahrain. Brain—Mind—Body Connection Series, Part 2, Tapping into our greatness. Page 40

Joshua Zuchter, International Synchronicity & Business Coach: Bring spirituality into business with five significant elements. Page 52

Insights Expert Directory, Events and Resources Pages 57—59

Special Invitation to You From Insights Magazine :

Viki Winterton, Publisher and Kendall SummerHawk, Million Dollar Marketing Coach Page 60

A special thank you to Coach & Media Personality, Stacy Chadwell, Las Vegas, NV, USA

Marcia

Wieder

CEO and Foun-der of Dream

University, a leading dream

movement, with over 20 years

coaching, train-

ing, and speaking experience. Her

inspiring mes-sage, style, and

wit have touched audiences from

50 to 5000 at companies such

as AT&T, Gap, and American Ex-

press.

Marcia is a per-sonal dream

coach to Jack

Canfield, and has appeared several

times on Oprah, The Today Show,

and her own PBS TV special.

She has written

four books that have been trans-

lated into numer-ous languages.

Her newest is called Dreams Are

Whispers From

the Soul.

Her Dream Uni-versity events in-

clude the Dream Coach Certifica-

tion program where she has

certified close to 1000 dream

I: What is the difference between dream, goal, and fantasy?

MW: It's one of my favorite questions. A dream is simply something that you want, and where dreams come from is you make them up. Some of them are based on need,

some of them are based on desire, but the dreams that are the expression of your pur-pose and your mission are usually the most profound; so we could say standing in your

purpose the quality of your dreams and the quality of your life will change.

Now, there's an interesting paradox related to this question that you're asking because the difference between a dream and a fantasy, like winning the lottery, is that in a

dream you can actually design a strategy for getting there, where in the lottery there is nothing that you can do to ensure it's going to happen. Here's the paradox: If you

never go to strategy on your dream, it remains a fantasy or a nice idea; however, if you

go to strategy and that kind of strategic thinking too early in the process, often that will cause you to compromise your dream down to what you realistically believe is possible.

It's like we have to hang out long enough in the dreaming phase before we get into strategy and action, and if we never get into strategy and action, the dream just re-

mains a fantasy.

I would just say that for me, a goal is once you're clear about what the dream is, at a certain point you have to assign due dates and get very specific but not right out of the

gate. The idea behind dreaming is to get you to swing outside of just being realistic, to ask yourself questions like if time and money weren't issues and you had the support of

the people around you, or even if you knew you could not fail, what would you do? That's what opens up the dreaming conversation.

I: So reach beyond your boundaries, allow yourself to be outside of those?

MW: Yes. We have a realistic part of ourselves, and I think that reality is an important part of the mix. You have to know where you are in order to design the strategy for

where you want to go, but the question is, what has being realistic cost you? If you're

overly realistic, not only can that cost you your passion and your dreams, but Dr. Mehmet Oz personally taught me that people with passion and dreams actually live

seven to ten years longer, so being overly realistic can cost you years off your life.

I: I had not heard that. That's excellent information. Thank you.

MW: There's a funny word for it called ―apoptosis.‖ Apoptosis, just like it sounds, is

when your brain believes you've outgrown your usefulness, which can happen at any age, and we see it most often when people retire, get laid off, experience an empty

nest, or when we stop dreaming. The brain sends a message to the body that it's no longer needed and people start to mentally or physically self-destruct.

I: Interesting. Why is it essential to have dreams, especially in business?

MW: Without dreams, all we have is reality, and although reality is not a bad thing, it

can actually squelch our passion and have us really play small. In business, dreaming is the driving force for transformation; without vision, companies fail. It's pretty much as

simple as that, and also without our personal dreams, vision, goals, hopes, and desires, life can become … I guess I could say at best boring, stagnant, and mundane, way be-

fore its time. We sometimes meet people who have died before they've died. They've lost their passion, they've lost their joy, they've lost their energy for life.

-5- (Continued next page.)

Marcia Wieder continued... MW: I think the secret to living a joyful, fulfilling life is to do more of what you love every day. For many of us, the first step needs to be we need to quit some stuff. We

need to say ―no more‖ and ―no thank you‖ to what‘s no longer true, and then schedule

more things into our life personally and professionally that really do light us up, give us our passion, get us excited, and give us a reason to live.

I: You're absolutely right. I mean, I've seen plenty of the walking dead – they‘re just going through the motions of their lives.

MW: Yes, the zombified.

I: What is the Dream University? I mentioned that in the bio, so I'd like to hear more

about that, please.

MW: Dream University is my company. We've been around for over 20 years. We are considered one of the leaders in teaching people how to make dreams come true, and

our mission is literally to teach the world to dream and help millions of people achieve their personal or professional dreams. We have live workshops and events. I've certi-

fied, as you said, over 1000 Dream Coaches, and people come to Dream University pro-grams to learn how to be a more effective, inspiring speaker, or learn how to create their

future.

All of that's on the Dream University website, but what's exciting is the direction we're heading is we're really becoming much more of an online university. We realize that we

can't fulfill our big dream of helping millions of people over the world if we are a bricks and mortar school and people have to come to San Francisco to learn from us, so we're

really moving more and more in to being kind of a University of Phoenix model, but with some very cool and cutting edge technologies so that we make learning affordable and

really fun and accessible to everyone in the world.

I: I really see that we're all headed in that direction anyway. I think that's so smart of you to go ahead and do that.

MW: There are 40,000 online universities right now, but we'll probably be the only one

where you can actually get a Dream University degree.

I: You talk a lot about purpose and mission. Why?

MW: It's the foundation, it‘s that old adage, if you climb to the top of the mountain

without knowing your purpose or your mission – only to find out sometimes it's the wrong mountain, and we see that and hear that a lot. As I said earlier, standing in your

purpose, the quality of your dreams and the quality of your life will change, so for me

purpose answers the question, ―Who am I?‖ Then my dreams are, ―How do I want my life to be?‖

In the Dream Coach methodology, we're going for alignment so that your purpose and dreams are aligned, because ultimately a big part of our work is designed to help you

turn your life right-side-up. What that means is that someday soon when you open your

calendar what you would see scheduled are activities that are moving you forward on the dreams that are all the expression of your purpose.

-6-

MW: I think to live on purpose requires three things:

1) A spiritual practice so that you can get quiet and still

and hear the deeper wisdom underneath the ego.

2) To know what's unique and special about you.

3) Find a way to be of service with that.

The people that are living on purpose are usually the people that

are the most fulfilled I would say, and people who don't know their

purpose – we spend a great deal of time on this at the Dream Coach Certification

program and even at the one-day Create Your Future Now program, helping people

identify what their purpose is, because it's a game changer,

As coaches we know that knowing our own purpose and helping others find theirs is

incredibly satisfying. It really can change everything once people really know who

they are. I think we're in the small percentage of people in the world who actually

have the luxury to ask the question ―What is my purpose?‖ We're not mostly in sur-

vival, we're not necessarily trying to go kill a wild animal to have dinner tonight, so

we're perhaps more along the path, and I think the people who can answer the

question have a responsibility to ask the question.

Once you ask the questions, ―Who am I and how do I want my life to be?‖ If you're

somebody who practices living with integrity, the next question must be, ―What am

I willing to do about it?‖ Having the courage to say, ―No more‖ or ―No thank you‖

to what's no longer true, scheduling more things into your life that truly are the ex-

pression of your purpose or your mission or your heart and soul, that's what living a

dream-come-true life is actually all about.

I: Could you take us through your Dream Coach process?

MW: I'll give you the short version first. Instead of the ABC‘s, at a very basic, sim-

ple level there‘s the CDA‘s:

C - Get clear about what you want. For most people that's the hardest step. That's

the writing it down and talking about it, getting it out of your head.

B - Believe in yourself and your dreams, which is a choice. Can you believe in

something simply because it matters to you, not because there's promises, guaran-

tees or assurances?

A - Act on your dreams to prove that you really do believe in them.

Get clear about your dreams, believe in your dreams, and act on your dreams is

kind of in a nutshell the simplest level what the program's about.

(Continued next page.)

Marcia Wieder continued…

MW: Step one is an intention, which is the rudder that steers the course of your

life.

Step two is about living with integrity, and intention and integrity together form the core building blocks for manifestation. You can't have one without the other. The

ultimate form of integrity is not just keeping your agreements with others or yourself,

but at a spiritual level keeping your agreements with God, which takes us to session three or step three, which is about living on purpose, which we just talked about.

Intention, Integrity, Purpose, Access your dreamer.

There seems to be a sacred relationship between those last two. If you turn the voice of the doubter down, you hear the voice of the realist who pretty much wants to know

―What's the plan?‖ Mostly it wants to know where are you going to get the time and where are you going to get the money, but before you turn it down you might want to

hear from it, because the doubter will get you your list of obstacles, and all obstacles either require a belief, a new belief, or a strategy to manage them.

Step three is purpose. Step four is accessing your dreamer.

Step five is dealing with your doubters. Step six is believing in your dreams.

Step seven is about personal practices, really focusing in on whatever your Achilles'

heel is and developing a practice to strengthen or change it.

Step eight is on projects and strategies. People are like, wait a minute, you don't get to strategy and projects until step eight? Well, it's not really a linear process. At

any point you might want to go back and revisit your intention or your integrity or your doubts or your beliefs. But as I said when I first began, people tend to go to

strategy too quickly, so better to have it later after you've really opened to the dream and you're believing in yourself and your dream, that opens up much more possibility.

Step nine is about building your dream team, which has to do with mastering enroll-

ment. What I would say is master manifestation, master the skill of enrollment. What I mean by that is your ability to share your dream in a way that inspires other

people to join you or hire you or invest in you, and you do that by making specific re-quests and making it easy for people to say yes.

Finally, step number ten is about living as a dreamer and realizing that this entire process can be used on any dream, personal or professional relationship, health, fi-

nancial, spiritual, community, even fun dreams. Ultimately once you really develop the skills and cultivate who you are as a dreamer – which in this work is a good thing

– it means you get an idea and you act on it, then you really get to live your life as a dream-come-true life.

I would say on all of that, that one of my personal goals is to change the way we think

about and speak about our dreams. So instead of it being, ―Maybe someday‖ or ―When I have the time and money‖ or ―When the kids graduate‖ or ―When I retire‖,

instead it's really about getting clear about what you want, believing in yourself, and proving that you do by taking action. That's where the rubber meets the road and it

gets very real. -8-

MW: It's very powerful, and at the Dream Coach training I'm taking people through

the process while I'm teaching them how to take others through it. Unlike most coach-ing trainings or most coaching schools where you would spend one to two or more

years becoming a certified coach, we can certify someone – and we are ICF accredited and approved – we can certify somebody in one week because it's a content specific

program, and the content that I am certifying people to lead, and make money on lead-ing, is the ten steps that I just went through.

Then we put a heavy emphasis on the marketing and the enrollment and the business

side, so we get very seasoned coaches who come who really love the spiritual compo-nent and love the business and enrollment side, because we have a saying ―Dream

Coaches get clients.‖ Then we also get brand new people who want to get into coach-ing, and this is a way for them to start earning an income as a coach, because we give

them a workbook and a manual to use with their clients. There's a structure and a process, and they can feel confident that the client will be well served throughout the

process. They can start earning money as a coach, and then if they love coaching and

they want to go deeper into it and get more skill building, at least they're earning in-come and they can afford to pay for the additional coaching programs they're going to

go to.

I: Very good point. What is a Dream Coach and what does it take to become one?

MW: Well, I mostly just talked about it. I would say

that a Dream Coach is someone who's committed to helping others achieve their dreams, as well as com-

mitted to achieving their own. People say to me, ―Well, my life isn't perfect, how can I become a coach;

how can I help others?‖ It's not about perfection as much as it's about intention, but intention with integrity is the core building block here.

I would say anyone who's committed to achieving their own dreams and helping others achieve their dreams has the quality of becoming a Dream Coach. Anyone who is inter-

ested in earning an income or an additional income stream by coaching and helping people find their purpose, clarify their dreams, deal with their doubts and take action is

a great candidate for us, and of course people can go to www.dreamuniversity.com and read all about it.

We provide 45 continuing education units through the International Coach Federation,

and it's a profound program. We really do go deep, and people get their circuits re-wired. People come and they go, ―I thought I was just coming for a nice little training.‖

Well, if you're working on the kind of concepts that we're talking about, of course you're going to go deep in the process. It's quite extraordinary, actually.

It's much more profound than anything that I knew I was creating when I created it.

I've been teaching it for about 20 years, and now I'm starting to train other people to

lead the training, so anyone who's interested in becoming a Certified Dream Coach and learning the program from me, the Founder of the program, should jump on it and

come as quickly as possible. (Continued next page.)

Marcia Wieder continued…

I: Excellent. You mentioned that one of the processes is overcoming obstacles. What are the biggest obstacles that stop us, and how can we overcome them?

MW: That's a great question. I would say that people think the biggest obstacles are time and money, but when I say to somebody, ―Well how much do you need?‖ the

most common answer is, ―I don't know, but I know I don't have enough.‖

The biggest obstacles that stop us from figuring out what we really need are doubt and fear, and we can deal with the voice of the doubter. If anybody can make my

one-day Create Your Future Now workshop or certainly in depth at the Dream Coach training, I am a master at this.

My purpose in life is to believe, so I've spent the last 20 years really developing how

do you work with doubt and limiting beliefs and fear, and I'm really considered a thought leader in this area. I'm quite proud of that. I would say in a nutshell you

want to hear from the doubter. Interview it, ask it to give you your list of obstacles, and then go through the list and identify which of them are an internal job, something

you're believing about yourself or life, and which of them require a strategy or a plan.

Most people are afraid of the doubter. They think it's the archenemy, but what I be-

lieve is that if it's part of you, it must serve a sacred function. It's the voice of pru-dence, and it wants you to look a little further. Now if you ignore that voice, it gets

louder and it gets critical.

At one point I did a job replacement on myself and I replaced my ‗inner critic‘ with an ‗inner coach‘, so I have to give myself validating feedback before I give myself con-

structive feedback. That's been very, very valuable and has brought me a lot more peace than letting this critic or inner doubter run amok inside myself. I think we want

to separate these voices out ultimately so that we can have greater integration.

I would say the short answer is hear from it, make space for it, and don't be so terri-fied of it. It's simply letting you know what it needs.

I: I really like that. I like how you divided them up. How do you deal with doubt, fear, and dream killers?

MW: I think here's what I'd say, is that if you haven't dealt with your own doubt and

you meet another doubter on the road, their doubt will magnify yours. But if you've dealt with your own doubt by the exercise that I just suggested, for example, and you

meet another doubter on the road, by contrast it actually becomes an opportunity to deepen your commitment and your conviction to your dream. I think on a day-by-day

basis, the coaching question for us to ask ourselves and each other is, ―Are you more committed to your dream or to your doubt, fear, or reality?‖ We can tell by the action

that you're taking or not taking every day.

I: I know I've mentioned some of them in your bio, but who are some of the big dreamers you've met?

-10-

MW: Oprah said that her dream was to create a company where people would come to-

gether, make a contribution, and together they would give back to the world. The audi-ence went crazy.

During the commercial break, Oprah came over

to me and she said, "Marcia, you know something that I know. It's all about believing in your

dreams." Oprah Winfrey said that if she had to attribute her success in life to any one thing, it

was that she believed in her dreams even when no one else did.

What I'll add to Oprah's wisdom is that sometimes

there's no evidence that your dream is a good idea or that this is the right time to pursue it, but the

question is where are you looking for evidence?

Don't look for evidence of whether or not you should believe in your dream in your checkbook or

in the stock market or on the news. Those are terrible places to look.

The place to look to decide whether or not you believe in your dreams is in your own

heart, and the big question is – and this is what Dream University completely stands for – can you believe in something simply because it matters to you and then demonstrate

that it really does matter to you, that you really do believe in it by taking action on it, because then and only then does it actually really have a chance of survival in your life.

I would say at the end of the day all of the Dream University programs are about the in-

ner and the outer connecting to your heart and soul, and then living in integrity and bringing who you are out in the world in a way that can have an impact, or make a con-

tribution, or bring value where you can make money and be paid well for doing what you

love if that's something that's important to you.

I've met amazing dreamers like Oprah, and then it's really the everyday people, and let me say the phenomenal coaches of the world, that I think are really leading this dream

movement. The only person I coach is Jack Canfield – other than that I've been training a thousand coaches, which I'm very, very proud of. As coaches we are visionaries, and

we have to believe in our clients' dreams and our own. Sometimes when there's no evi-dence for that, the way we show up in supporting and supportively holding each other

accountable for taking the next step for me is what the dream movement is all about, and also what coaching has always been all about.

I: Can you offer some shortcuts for success?

MW: Share your dream with other people, but it's how you share it that makes a differ-

ence. If you think about a visionary, a visionary has a vision or a big dream, articulates

it with clarity so people get it, expresses it with passion so people are excited about it, and big dreamers and visionaries invite other people to join them.

(Continued next page.)

"Marcia's right! You have to be able to identify what you really love and really want, before you can get it." ~Oprah Winfrey

Marcia Wieder continued…

In order to master manifestation, you want to master the skill of enrollment – very, very important, especially for coaches, because as we know, there's a lot of coaches

that really aren't making a living as a coach, aren't making enough of what they

need to be able to do it full-time. I think if you can do what you love, value who you are, charge what you're worth, have powerful enrollment conversations, and repeat

often, most likely you‘ll be very successful in sharing your gifts with the world at a time when the world really needs it.

I: That's very good. Thank you. What inspires you Marcia?

MW: I actually took a few years off and kind of went on a bit of a hiatus. I really

took some time to go in and to say ―no more‖ and ―no thank you‖ to what was no longer true for me. I was really in that passion quest mode of discovering what it is

that I wanted to do with my life. Like many people at 50 or above I started realizing my mortality and that I had a short period of time. I really was in prayer and medi-

tation and contemplation and emptying, and took up abstract painting for a while to discover who I am now and what is it that I'm most passionate about. The truth of

it is at the end of the day, the thing I'm most passionate about is teaching people

how to make their dreams come true.

I: So you touch others and change their lives?

MW: Well, that's what Dream University is all about. That is my life's work. In my thirties I thought, ―Well, isn't this cool, I wrote a book called Making Your Dreams

Come True.‖ I had something to say, and then I started speaking on it. In my for-ties I started wondering what was next. In my fifties, I realized that this is who I

am, why I'm here, what my mission is, and that's what my life is in service to.

I: Isn't that amazing?

MW: It's a blessing. Of course, the core of the work is helping people do exactly that – discover their purpose and live in integrity with their heart and soul. Anybody

who is hearing this who feels that's a call that you want to respond to, please con-

tact me and especially if you feel that you're a messenger. Our How to Be An In-spiring Speaker program is one of the most profound programs that I've ever at-

tended for really that inner and outer, helping you really discover who you are and craft your message in a way that you can really bring it to the world and have im-

pact. So take a look.

I: I loved that you grew into your life's purpose. It wasn't that you just knew it, you grew into it, and a lot of people don't know what their life purpose is.

MW: Well, you know what, I‘m in the process of growing. I knew at a very young

age, and then I had to grow into it and then I had to question it again and grow into it again, so I think it really is a process

-12-

MW: Don't look at your life and say, well my life doesn't look like that purpose, but

instead make the choices and changes in your life so that you line your life up to who you are, not vice versa.

I: I would love to know why you chose this arena as your life's work.

MW: You know, there are the dreams you have for life and sometimes there are the

dreams that life has for you. Almost 30 years ago I was doing volunteer work for the Make A Wish Foundation, and it so deeply touched and inspired me, that I knew

at some level that was my calling. I think when you're really open to knowing who you are and what your life is in service to, it shows up.

Click here for 3 special gifts from Marcia! "Focus more on your desire than on your

doubt, and the dream will take care of itself. You may be surprised at how easily

this happens. Your doubts are not as powerful as your desires, unless you

make them so.‖ Marcia Wieder

http://www.dreamcoach.com/certified/index.htm

Dr.

Richard

Johnson,

is a nationally recognized

spokesperson in the field of

retirement career transition and

adult develop-ment.

His fresh ideas and

enthusiasm for the holistic aspect of

adult development and maturation have

inspired scores of maturing adults to

follow their heart

and live more abun-dant lives.

He is a dynamic, en-gaging, and compas-

sionate teacher who

delights in seeing his students grow in

body, mind, and spirit.

Dr. Johnson is the

creator of ReCareer Success Inventory,

the Retirement Suc-cess Profile, The Life

Options Profile, and The Retirement Op-

tions Program, de-veloped from over

20 years of retire-ment research and is

dedicated to helping people lead enriched

and fulfilling lives in the second half of

life.

I: Briefly explain what is ReCareer?

RJ: Oh good, I‘m glad you asked that. That‘s sort of basic to the whole thing here.

A ReCareer is a new life purpose that can find its manifestation in either a new job or a new life direction or even finding new meaning from the current position or

profession that you happen to be in right now.

A ReCareer doesn‘t really occur or can't really occur until a person has moved de-velopmentally into the second half of life and usually that starts somewhere in the

40s, mid to later 40s. It‘s a time developmentally when people are looking more in the interior. They‘ve had enough life space behind them and some of those big

questions in life of ―Is this really what I‘m supposed to be about? Is this really who am I? Is what I‘m doing aligned closely with who I am as an individual?‖ By the

time we enter this midlife stage where we‘re really knowing ourselves better than we were before, we‘ve also experienced some of the bumps and maybe bruises

that come along in life and maybe even some losses. All of this creates a more ac-

curate hindsight, I guess, of looking at our life and saying ―You know, I‘ve got time to go here and I want to make this as meaningful and as satisfying for me as I

possibly can.‖

So what our job is at ReCareer is to equip coaches with the tools necessary to be able to help people who are either underemployed where their education and their

background is really much more than what their current position is asking of them and they‘re yearning to do more, or they are unemployed and I needn‘t point out

that our current recession has created an employment picture that for some people is pretty bleak, and they fit into this category as well, as well as people that I call

the empty employed. These are people who may be functioning in a fairly high status position, that may actually be utilizing their education and experience, but

for some reason now and maybe for a number of reasons, the position is no longer feeding them. It‘s not nourishing them at deeper levels and consequently they too

are looking for something and these sort of messages are coming from inside of

them and saying there must be more. So all of that and a lot more constitutes this whole notion and thrust of a ReCareer.

I: So basically what you were just saying about being displaced, more of them may

have lost their spark? Their passion and needs and desires are a little bit more challenged?

RJ: That‘s right. Something isn't connecting any longer. The position or even the

profession has become rather routine and matter of fact and they seem to be doing things by the numbers. They don‘t seem to be investing themselves with the level

of commitment they formerly were, and they‘re needing more and they want more. They still have a bunch of years ahead of them and want to make those years the

best they possibly can.

I: Who is a good prime candidate for the ReCareer?

(Continued next page.)

Dr. Richard Johnson continued…

RJ: Really, anybody in the second half of life who for whatever reason is feeling a need to be able to address the labor market better, either because you‘ve lost a job or

you‘ve been cut away from a job that you‘ve had for quite a long time so you‘re now

unemployed, or you‘re doing a job that doesn‘t fulfill you anymore or you have a job that is just way under your abilities and you want to change.

The fourth category I think are people who want some kind of enrichment in life. They

want to look broader. It‘s not simply a career issue. Good career coaching looks into other life arenas besides the career arena. I look at a person‘s life framework as hav-

ing six arenas that we operate in simultaneously and career is number one, two is fam-ily, three is relationships, four is self, our own self-esteem and body image, five is lei-

sure, and six is the spiritual life, however you manifest that spiritual life.

We‘re operating in all of those and I think one of things that makes this program differ-ent, what makes a ReCareer coach different from simply a career coach, is the fact that

we‘re looking broader. We‘re looking that all the life arenas come into play here with a person.

I: Okay. You just touched on it but who is the typical ReCareer coach?

RJ: Yes, you know our training has taught me some things. You

know, you never really know who‘s going to show up at your train-ing and I‘m kind of surprised that about half of our students now

our current coaches. They‘re people who are coaching, they do have coaching practices but they are looking to expand their level of

expertise and to get a new certification that enables them to ad-dress the second half of life people whether they‘re 45, 55, 65, 75

or even older, that there‘s a new call in our culture now for career coaching with these people, with people that are this age because retirement is being

redefined.

We‘re seeing people who are moving into retirement and then out of retirement and

then back into retirement, and I think you‘re going to see more and more of that. I see that as a trend and so consequently what that means is that we need people in our cul-

ture who are well-trained and well-equipped to be able to optimally help people who are in the second half of life.

I‘ll tell you, half of our students are people who are looking for a deeper knowledge

base in their existing coaching practices. The other half are people who have never moved or who are not career coaches themselves at this point but are looking to spe-

cifically focus on the second half of life people. They feel called to it. It‘s really a per-sonal calling I find. They describe it almost in spiritual terms. It‘s really quite interest-

ing; not religious terms but spirit like an internal move. These are people that are looking to set up their own practices in their communities and I think in any community

can have a number of ReCareer coaches, actually. The need in our culture right now for this kind of service provision is immense and I think it‘s only going to be growing.

-16-

I: As you mentioned there‘s several types of career coaching out there, and especially

different types of certifications. What is the difference between ReCareer certification and other traditional career coaching certifications?

RJ: I think first and foremost because we address a different developmental stage, a

different age level, that a lot of the content that is part of our program speaks directly to the needs and the desires of this age group. This is a very unique age group and

you can‘t talk to people who are in middle age and older the same way that you can speak to people who have not yet moved into middle age. There‘s a very clear devel-

opmental shift that occurs as a person moves into the middle years.

The big thing about the ReCareer certification program is that when you finish it you are equipped with the knowledge, the skills, and the competencies to be able to ad-

dress this later age group.

The second thing that is unique I think about the ReCareer program is that it‘s totally

assessment based. I like assessments and I believe that assessments are absolutely essential for coaching because it just gives you an entree to the person so quick. It

just bolsters and catapults the coaching sequence and the whole coaching process in a way that‘s almost indescribable because you just can move out so quickly here.

So the assessment we have here is called the RSI, the ReCareer Success Inventory,

and it‘s a 120-item instrument profile that a person answers and they take it online, It generates a 25-page report on this person. It measures 15 different factors; some of

them are absolutely unique to second phase of life coaching and career development. Other factors are more standard factors but still they are described and sort of spun so

to speak with this later life or this mature life perspective built right in.

I think what makes ReCareer coaching different, and the training certainly, is one, the age group we‘re targeted to or at, and number two is this assessment base that we

have with this psychometrically sound instrument that just adds so much power to the

coaching process.

I: That‘s an amazing tool, it sounds like. You said how many?

RJ: One hundred twenty items.

I: One hundred twenty items. That‘s deep information.

RJ: Yes, it takes about 30 minutes for a person to take it and it generates a document that you can get nowhere else. You kind of sit there and you say wow, how did they

know that? It‘s really kind of cool. As I said, I like developing instruments; I‘ve devel-oped a number of them. I‘m just a great believer in instruments. .

I: What is the foundation for the research that you‘re using to build the ReCareer?

RJ: Yes, the research started … I took my doctoral work at the University of Florida.

(Continued next page.)

Dr. Richard Johnson continued…

RJ: I usually call that the land of gerontology down there, and I did study gerontol-ogy and I studied career development and adult development and maturation, and

they are a flagship university in that regard. Actually, when I went there I didn‘t

know how good they were. Anyway, while I was there I recognized that there was a need. I surveyed all the career development programs that were out there and I

was stunned to find out that none of them focus exclusively and even directly on the second half of life individual.

I saw the need for this second half of life career coaching to be so broad, and so I

wrote a number of grants and assembled a body of graduate students and faculty. Even as a graduate student myself I was heading up this team of eight people that

set about to really try to identify what are the unique issues, what are the unique factors that relate specifically to what the Department of Labor calls older workers,

can you believe that? I don‘t call them older workers; I call them maturing workers or getting better workers.

For three years we studied this whole thing and we developed what became known

as the Florida Career Model. Not only did we do the initial research there but we set

up a career coaching office right there at the University that reached out to the com-munity in Gainesville, Florida, and northern Florida, specifically attracting these ma-

turing workers to come in. We field tested the whole thing and refined it and really brought it to excellence. That‘s the basic underline.

Since that time I‘ve worked on this pretty much steadily over time, sometimes in my

life more than others, and tried to augment all of that seminal research with a cou-ple of new things. New developments in career counseling, because I‘ve always got

my eye on career counseling, and the whole notion of abundance thinking is in there as well as the new thrust in what‘s become known as positive psychology, Martin

Seligman and all the work he was doing at the University of Pennsylvania, and other work in this area of positive psychology and tried to build all that in there as well as

some of the exciting work that is being done by Marc Freedman and his Civic Ven-tures and his Encore Career Program which I think is wonderful.

So I mixed all this together, the seminal research we had done at the University of Florida, Law of Attraction kind of stuff, positive psychology and the social entrepre-

neurship with Marc Freedman and Civic Ventures and mixed it all together and built this program that we now call the ReCareer Program.

I: That‘s an amazing amount of research.

RJ: There‘s a lot in it. I really compacted everything I could into it to make it pretty

high-powered.

I: It sounds like you spent most of your career in it. What tools do you provide to your coaches?

-18-

RJ: First of all, there is a paperback book that I‘ve written called ReCareer: Find Your

Authentic Work and it‘s a 257-page paperback book that really is the content. I tried to compact all the content background here. That‘s the text you would say of the pro-

gram. It also is the book that all the coaches would provide to their clients as well be-cause it serves as this reference material. That‘s number one tool.

The second tool is the RSI, the ReCareer Success Inventory itself and our coaches are

trained to become very facile in giving that and interpreting that to their clients, which is pretty special.

The third tool, I‘ve assembled a whole panorama of powerful questions for each of

these 15 factors so that our coaches … we never want them stuck in a situation of like okay, where do I go now? My client is saying this, and what do I do now? There‘s

never a time when you don‘t have a treasure chest so to speak of powerful questions; you can reach in there and really find the ideal question that‘s going to move this client

forward and see themselves in a different light.

That‘s really what we‘re trying to do is to allow our coaches to be able to enter into the

deepest kind of conversations. The most productive kinds of conversations and allow the clients to move forward in their life, to be able to see new panoramas for them-

selves but that also is true to what‘s inside of them. We‘re always starting from the ba-sis of what‘s inside of them.

The last tool to be able to do that is we provide with each one of these factors a num-

ber of what we call insight activities and these are sheets and opportunities. They are experiences for the clients to be able to extend and to personalize even deeper the con-

tent that‘s both in the book and that was generated in their ReCareer Success Inven-tory. It all fits together. There‘s four different toolboxes here that the coach can pull

from that fits together in sort of a seamless whole so they can offer something that really is unified and harmonious.

I: I can see why all those tools fit together.

RJ: So then, the real notion of re-careering is what‘s the purpose? What is your pur-pose? We belief that everybody is as unique as a fingerprint, you know, and that your

purpose in life is pretty singular. Our coaches trying to help people to identify what that purpose might be for them, and we‘ve devised powerful ways of doing that.

Learn more about Dr. Johnson’s work and the ReCareer Program:

http://www.recareerinc.com/

Kathy Esper,

The Practical Creator Coach, is the creator of

Spirit of the Horse and Creative Studio Pro-

grams, which guide

creative entrepreneurs to experience the kind of

success that feels good, and you can be proud of.

Using the right mix of infor-

mation and inspiration with the mystical spirit of the

horse creates the intersec-tion where breakthrough

energy can explode.

A leader on the ICF New England Board of Directors

for three-and-a-half years, and guiding and mentoring

coaches for almost six years, Kathy is tapped into

what leading-edge coaches at multiple income levels

are experiencing, and ap-plying the right responses

for results, because it‘s not always what you think it is.

I: What is the single big-

gest thing most creative entrepreneurs, including

coaches, overlook when it comes to making a good

living without selling their soul?

KE: It‘s kind of a two-part answer. What I‘m seeing

particularly right now is sort of the battle between

passion and purpose – what we‘re meant to do

within our heart – and cre-ating profit within the busi-

ness; and that‘s not just about high revenues and

bringing in a lot of money.

KE: How much money do you take home at the end of the day? So that disconnect really

comes, I believe, from too much attention either on the introspective or the intuitive side, or too much thinking in your head, and a disconnect occurs, and we often forget that as

coaches and creative entrepreneurs by nature our business which runs under the relation-ship business model. A lot of times we overlook that when we‘re applying different busi-

ness tools or skills to our own businesses, and I believe that‘s the biggest thing that they‘re overlooking, because they‘re too caught in one place or the other.

I: So it kind of pushes that creative side down a little?

KE: Sometimes it does. When you‘re too involved in the head … it‘s like a battle be-

tween the head and the heart. We can either get shot so far into our head that we miss receiving some of the most important information that can come to us, or sometimes

when we are in that intuitive space, which as Creators is a very natural place for us to go, we‘re not able to ground it with some of the practical structure that the business actually

needs.

I: What are some of the leading success indicators to measure the health of a coaching

business that are hardly ever talked about?

KE: That are hardly ever talked about – which surprises me because we are in the rela-tionship model and that is a slightly different type of business model. The indicators are:

One is client retention, and that‘s different for each coach. It depends on what your gift is, and what your programs and your services are; so client retention is something really

key to be looking at. It has a lot of information to tell us about the business. The second measurement is referrals. I know when I started out as a coach, and I

trained back in 2001 so we‘re going back eight or nine years, I guess, there was a heavy emphasis on the fact that as a coach you could just get business through referrals. As

the 2000‘s went on, we saw that we needed to do marketing, external marketing for a va-riety of reasons; however, the referrals never really went away. That‘s the heart of our

businesses under the relationship model. When I really looked at my own business and I

realized that my clients were referring multiple people to me without me even asking them, it kind of sparked something that we need to come back to the basics for our-

selves.

Retention, referrals – and then the third one is the conversion rate into the next level programs. Depending on what your business looks like, that could be a higher priced pro-

gram. That could be a deeper, a more intensive program. That could be a next step pro-gram. In the relationship model it‘s really important for us to look at the conversion rate.

I: What do you see as the leading contributor to the disconnect between marketing ef-

forts and results for coaches, and creative entrepreneurs?

KE: Really, it‘s that battle between the head and the heart. The primary thing that I‘m seeing is they stay in the intuitive or the energetic realm, which is truly a gift, but they

never really complete it and transfer it into what that means for their business. Many are

trying, because they‘re listening or modeling what other coaches or other business own-ers have done.

-21- (Continued next page.)

Kathy Esper continued..

KE: The key is, we have to tweak it a bit for each one of us because we‘re so unique. We all work under the same foundation skill set technology if you will, but each one of

us is unique, and we can't just make a clean transfer. We have to tweak it a little bit.

I: I‘ve worked with sales teams, and everybody is different. There is some tweaking,

like you said, and you have to appreciate that – understand what they‘re doing, but ap-preciate that and move forward in your own way.

KE: Absolutely. I see sometimes, or my experience of it is, when we move into that business skill and we‘re so heavy focused on learning what we need to do to grow our

business, it‘s almost like we go into a phase, and some of that intuitive, creative stuff is repressed a little bit. We know that we‘re supposed to be tweaking it, but we go into

this fog and we‘re just sort of receiving that information in our head and moving it out. Receiving it in, moving it out. It becomes almost like, I‘m thinking of an assembly line

right now as I speak those words to you. We need to bring the two into partnership. The head and the heart need to come into partnership for it to really work.

I: Definitely. Involving breakthrough energy is an important part of your work. How

do you define breakthrough energy, and why is it so pivotal for people?

KE: I define breakthrough energy as that intersection be-tween the inspiration and information. Inspiration is really

all thats intuitive, internal, all the good juicy stuff that we

get, and then there‘s also some information that needs to be grounded. That is where breakthroughs I see happen,

based on the context of how I use it in my work and why it‘s so important is because as we look at the business de-

velopment or even the personal development of the busi-ness owner, I actually put that into a creative process so I

can see where you are or where the business owner is as a stage in the creative process.

We need that breakthrough to happen because that happens right before we‘re ready

to go another level. What I‘m seeing happen is, different situations will show up for the coach or the business owner, the creative entrepreneur, but they‘ll keep hitting a wall.

They‘ll keep coming up against their stuff. They‘ll keep repeating the same pattern in a different situation. That‘s a clue that they‘re ready to break into another level, that

something new is ready to happen, and we need that breakthrough energy to give

them that boost to get beyond the level that they‘ve been operating at.

I: What are some specific elements that need to come together to spark breakthrough energy?

KE: There‘s actually three of them. One is inspiration. I define that as it comes from

the inside. So motivation is something different from inspiration. Motivation is much more difficult to sustain, because it‘s not truly your own. You have to be inspired.

There has to be a fire in your belly, if you will, and it has to truly be a fire; it can't just be some burning embers.

KE: The second element is the intellectual stimulation. I often talk with people about

when they feel fully alive, when they feel completely engaged with life and with what they‘re creating and what they‘re doing, and that actually does involve the brain in our

head. Again, it‘s that head that has to work in partnership with the heart or with the gut. Intellectual stimulation is the stuff that challenges our brain, that actually turns it on in a

good way, that is able to turn off the old recordings that might play in our head about what we‘re not good at or what we always get stuck up against. That stuff goes away with intel-

lectual stimulation and the brain focuses on wow, this is so cool; it‘s so interesting. That‘s a really important element.

The third one is environment, and the environment that you create or that you‘re creating

within has to be collaborative versus competitive. It‘s the supportive situation that pulls you towards your vision or your goal, versus running away from something that you don‘t

want to create.

I‘ll give you an example. You want to be moving towards a profitable business so that ―We

can invest in hiring a new team to bring the business to the next level‖, versus ―I don‘t want to make the same amount of money again; I want to make more money. I don‘t

want to make what I‘ve only been making and not cut a profit.‖ There‘s a difference be-tween that. That‘s not really inspiring when I think about running away from something,

and I could feel it in my own energy as I was speaking the example to you.

I: Tell us about the four stages of your Signature Process and the results it creates.

KE: Oh, absolutely, this is really fun for me. The first one is what I call claim, and this is where it's actually kind of a signature for who I am. This is where we cut away all of the

airs and the external stuff and we get right down to the nitty-gritty, and it's often a place where it can be a little uncomfortable. There may be some friction there. It may be some-

thing that you've been suppressing or that maybe you're judging in yourself. There's a lot of ways that our brain can play games with us, but the claim is really about cutting to the

core and stripping away all the external layers, because I'm less interested in how pretty

the website looks or the great office that you just invested in. I'm less interested in that. I really want to get to the core of what you're about and really the substance and the meat,

and that can be a tricky place to get to for a lot of people.

The second stage that we go into is once we've gotten to the truth, the real back to basics, we begin to connect. Obviously in the first stage we've connected to yourself, to your

soul, to your heart, to your purpose. Connect now, we're going to be moving it outwards, and I'd love to see you connecting to an environment that supports you, and that includes

people, it includes resources, it includes inspiring mentors, clients, things of that nature, tools that are going to support you, so we begin to ground it a little bit. What types of

things are going to support you to move in this direction?

Once we have that in place we move into the create phase, and the create is really, I use that language as when we get into the doing. In order to be creating we need to be in ac-

tion, and there are phases in the process where we're not in action but overall, creativity is

about action. This is when you begin to put your truth out into the space in a different way than you have before, and we see what comes back; what we give to the environment.

-23- (Continued next page.)

Kathy Esper continued..

KE: There's always something that the environment gives back to us whether we recognize it or not, whether we receive it or not, there are messages that are

coming back, and that's where we begin to decipher them and to create in the

create stage.

Then we move into the clear stage, because I believe that the deepest obstacles

or blocks show up when we're in that create stage, so it's not something that we necessarily play a brain game with, it's actually when we're doing, we can find the

pattern of where that wall is that we keep hitting. Where do I keep stopping

short? Where's my ceiling, if you will. Oftentimes it has to be felt at a cellular level. It can't be conversed about. That's the clear stage, when you're really in

motion. It's a perfect structure, if you will, or environment to bring that stuff up, because often that's the stuff that is right in front of us and we can't see it, we

don't like to admit it to ourselves, we've buried it, we can't intellectualize it; that has to be shown to us on a cellular level.

That right there is the key of the results that it creates. Once we get you to that

cellular level, once we get underneath what's happening, sort of peeling away the layers, shining a light on the dark spots, that's when you can move into whatever

you're ready to move into, break through that wall, move around that wall. What-ever you need to do, that's the space that it happens in.

I: That makes sense because you can't break through it if you can't see it. That

makes sense that you need to clear out those layers to get to the root, what's

really in your way.

KE: Isn't that true? And we hide that from ourselves a lot of the time.

I: We're good at that.

KE: We are good at that. It's a scary kind of thing, and I'd rather stay in my comfortable place.

I: I think we all would, but we can't, what you said, you can't progress, you can't

break through, you can't break through the next step until you start facing these things and move forward.

KE: Yes, and there's some level of friction within you. You know it on some level.

You keep hitting that while you keep hitting that ceiling, but you just can't … for

whatever reason it's in front of you but you can't see it. It's a protective mode, right?

I: It is. I don't know if you've ever seen Gordon Ramsay's show about the res-

taurants where he goes in and helps them save it. They‘re already losing money, they have to close, and they know it, they've called him, and they've asked him to

come in, and he tells them what they need to do, and they get mad at him. -24-

I: He knows that‘s why you called him; you know that on some level, but on the

other level you don't want to change, and that is why it's helpful to have a coach to help you get through that.

KE: I love that example, thank you. I haven't seen that program, but isn't that

so true? Doesn't that ring true? You come in and we're going to tell you where you need help and then I'm going to get mad at you. It happens; it's part of our

process, and I feel like that's an important message to speak to is maybe it's embarrassing when I get angry, I don't want people to know that, or I'm scared,

or I can't see what's right in front of me. That's an absolutely normal part of the process. You're doing good, you're in it.

I: You talk about how important it is to understand the role of breakthroughs in

the creative process. Can you say more about that?

KE: Yes. For me the creative process kind of … I think about it like the old 33

records, those big albums that we used to play, and sometimes there would be a scratch on the record and the needle would go around and around and around,

and it would keep doing the same thing, and I see that happen within the crea-tive process. You can be going along really well but, you're not fulfilling your po-

tential because you're hitting a certain point in the process but you're not getting through to the next level, so on some level you feel that you're not fulfilling your

potential and you're feeling the friction whatever motion it's coming up in. It's a really important piece in the process, and breakthrough tends to be very high

energy, and there are many levels of energy within the creative process. The breakthrough is really important because it sort of stops that record from

scratching.

One of the most significant or the most com-mon breakthroughs that I am seeing right

now, I am seeing a pattern for a lot of crea-

tive entrepreneurs and coaches where the breakthrough is in responding to events ver-

sus trying to manipulate them. What I mean by that is when something in the envi-

ronment shows up and maybe it doesn't look like what we want it to look like, they go and

try to make it look a certain way, and that's sort of the wall that they keep hit-ting because now you're blocked into what your past has shown you or what

your imagination can show you versus something really cool that's trying to hap-pen. You want to respond to it in a more intelligent way, and I use the word in-

telligence in a whole sense, meaning it's not just your brain but it's also your heart and your gut that's responding as well, and that's when life is able to give

us something far greater than we ever imagined.

I: As a coach that partners with horses, you bring the wisdom into your work

even when clients aren't physically in the horse's presence. How do horses con-tribute to creating breakthrough results? (Continued next page.)

Kathy Esper continued..

KE: Well, there are a few things with horses. First of all, their size; it's hard to ignore a horse. You can't be in the presence of a horse without being aware of it. They kind

of are a metaphor for that breakthrough point in the creative process or that roadblock

or that obstacle. They are going to catch your attention whether you want them to or not.

The really amazing thing about working with horses is they're prey animals, so their

language is in the energy. They're highly intelligent animals, but they just have a dif-ferent system than we do, and their brain does not allow them to sort of spin that re-

cord around over and over again. They have no time for it, and they have no interest for it.

What they teach us to do is threefold: They teach us to open up and receive mes-

sages rather than analyzing it or trying to make it what we want it to be, or sometimes getting lost in the drama of our emotion around it, so you want to open up to receive

the message. Then immediately once you've got that message you can adjust the be-havior or relationship through your environment, because there is a message coming

from the environment; it's pointing you in a new direction. Thirdly, they allow us to

release that emotion.

It's receive, adjust, and release, and it's so smooth it's actually artful. The beauty of it is because they are prey animals, they have to know what's coming in from the

environment and adjust immediately. They don't have time to wait and think about it, so they are able to transfer this finely tuned energy to other horses, and they are also

able to transfer it to human beings.

That's really cool because the HeartMath Institute in the San Francisco Bay Area has taught us that we have three brain centers in our body. Human beings actually emit

energy that the HeartMath center has measured from the brain in our head, the heart, and the gut, so the intestinal system, the intestinal tract. These are all areas where

we literally emit energy that can affect other people, and they measure that, and Can-dice Pert's research has also shown us that the cells in the brain, in the head, in the

heart, and also the intestines have … they‘re neural centers which makes them brains,

so we don't often use all of our faculties, all of our power.

One thing I didn't tell you was HeartMath did some research that said the energy that we emit from the heart is 5,000 times stronger than the energy that we emit from the

brain and the head. I have not seen stats on what we emit from the brain and the gut, however, it's somewhere in the middle. It's not as strong as the brain and the

heart but it's said to be stronger than the brain and the head. Not only are we not working with a full deck of cards, so to speak, we're not working with the strongest

brain. In working with the horses they help us to turn all of those on, to reconnect to all of those faculties, and they do it in such an organic way because they just transfer

it to us. It's not like we're modeling after them. Anything we get from them is on a cellular level.

-26-

I: Excellent. What inspires you Kathy?

KE: You know what inspires me is the truth. What I mean by that is these are the harder truths for us to look at or the truths that we kind of hide, so whenever we can

strip it all down and get back to basics that's what really inspires me; let's get to the nut of this thing.

I: How do you touch others and change their lives?

KE: Probably with the way I feel about coaching and the whole craft of coaching. I

have really high standards around my own coaching, and I have strong boundaries. A lot of coaches will comment to me … some clients recognize it, but they recognize it on

a different level than coaches do, with all due respect to coaches, get the model that I'm working under and the strong boundaries and the high standards that I have

around my own business and my own work. I often hear about how that touches peo-

ple and influences other coaches in their own business.

I: That's great. What is the single most important thing coaches and creative entre-preneurs can take away from our conversation today that will reconnect their passion,

purpose, and profits?

KE: I would have to say it's listening to the most uncomfortable messages, the things that we want to suppress, the things that we want to sweep under the rug, looking at

our truth. Just looking at it even though it's uncomfortable for us. Strip it all down. Get to the truth, because without that piece in place – and I'll speak for myself, – I

can sometimes get caught in this. Just because we're coaches and we know how to do this and we do this for a living and we model it for others, we're still human beings,

and this stuff can still catch us. We're human beings, and the difference is the way we respond to it is the quicker we can get out of it, so just strip it down. Listen to what's

really going on. Look at it in the face, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Success Tip From Kathy:

True success, the kind you can feel good about, is not about putting more knowledge into your head, and it‘s not about waiting on change. It‘s about consciously integrat-

ing what you already know on a cellular level; it‘s about allowing true change to happen through you.

If stretching into more of who you are meant to be benefits you and the peo-

ple around you , please visit http://budurl.com/bostonretreat to open possi-bilities for your next level of growth.

Susan Rae Baker

is a Life and Business Coach, Motivational Speaker, Award Winning Author of The

Last Box – A Women’s Guide to Surviving Corporate America and co-author of Step-

ping Stones to Success alongside of Dee-

pak Chopra, Jack Canfield and Denis Waitley, to be published in the fall of

2010.

Susan is currently working on her third book, Defining Moments - A Gathering of

Women’s Journeys.

She has become a nationally known Expert

forTheStreet.com and SmallBiz Amer-ica.com and is also a regular guest appear-

ing on local NBC, ABC and Comcast sta-tions.

Susan has become a most respected and

engaging speaker, teacher and leader in the field of Life and Business Coaching.

Her aspiration in life is to help people be-

come what they were designed to be, so that they can live a happy, fulfilling and

successful life.

I: Please share with us a little bit about your award winning book The Last Box, a Woman’s

Guide to Surviving Corporate America.

SRB: Sure, I would love to. The Last Box has really taken off and won Moms Choice Awards,

Silver Honoree for Women‘s Issues choice for 2009, and it‘s a finalist in the Forward Magazine

Book of the Year Awards. I‘m really thrilled about how far it‘s gone. It was also at the New

York Book Expo last year.

I: That‘s wonderful!

SRB: It‘s a great book for any woman in any

workplace who is looking for a great tool to keep by her side at all times.

-28-

SRB: The book describes some of the different personality types that you meet in the

workplace, including those who you want to aspire to be like and those who you might want to run from. So, it‘s a great companion for anybody who wants to survive in the

workplace these days.

I: What would you advise women today who are not enjoying their job but feel there is no way out during these tough economic times?

SRB: The great question of the day actually, and I would say this much. Until the re-

cession passes over if you are not happy in your job, if it‘s just not feeling right for one reason or another, it‘s great time to start exploring by figuring out who it is you are,

what are your passions, what are you looking to really do in your lifetime that is going to make you happy. Whether it is working for someone else in a different career, or

becoming an entrepreneur, try to get that all worked out right now. Maybe it‘s beefing up your resume, maybe having to rebrand who you are to get what you want. When

the time is right, when the market is not so saturated with the unfortunate people who

have lost jobs lately, that would be the better time to start looking. If you have a job right now that you can hang in there and tolerate, and you are getting paid and you

can pay your bills it is really a better thing to stay a little safer than it is to be taking a big leap right now. It is a great time to start looking at yourself and exploring what

your future could look like.

I: Well, how much should women tolerate at work?

SRB: Well, they should tolerate very little, actually. It all depends on what it is that is in their face at the time. Is it somebody that is making your day at work miserable?

You don‘t tolerate that. Do you have a boss that is constantly looking over your shoul-der? You are not going to be as productive as you would like to be. What do you do

about that? Do you go on with the day? Or, do you have a sit down chat and say ―Look, I realize that you want us to get as much work done as possible, but I have to

tell you that the more that you stand around me and look over my shoulder, the less

that I can get done, and I would believe that you might feel the same way if your boss is looking over your shoulder all of the time.‖ So, if you just let people know down the

road how you are feeling, they will usually back off.

Is there a lot of undermining going on? Are people looking at you as a threat to their job? That happens a lot in the workplace, especially amongst women, unfortunately. If

that is going on you can typically sense it. People are whispering behind your back, they are forming little clicks, and they are not letting you in. When you start feeling

that, you don‘t have to tolerate it either. If it‘s the right time, look for somewhere else to work, and hopefully you won‘t run into the same problem. Or address the problem.

Find out who the key person is in that click and try to have a conversation with them and say, ―Look, I‘m feeling a little left out here. Is there something about me that is

keeping me from being a part of what is going on here in the community at work.‖ and just feel them out.

A lot of times that does bring the truth out.

(Continued next page.)

Susan Rae Baker continued...

SRB: There are going to some smoke screens so it is all about following your gut. If you don‘t speak up nothing is going to happen, and you‘re going to continue to be mis-

erable because they are going to continue to do the same thing over and over again

every day. You‘re going to be not feeling really great about getting up in the morning and going there to work.

I: Not to mention the damage to yourself-esteem.

SRB: Oh, absolutely. How many times have you seen or felt this going on, and you just

start feeling smaller, and smaller, and smaller to the point where you start looking be-hind your back every time you walk through the door. Who‘s looking at you now?

Who‘s talking about you, now? You start developing a complex about yourself and start looking at what‘s wrong with me? It‘s really more like what‘s wrong with them!

I: Right!

SRB: What is their problem, I haven‘t done anything to them. I have never said any-

thing unkind to them, I haven‘t gotten in their way. So, you have to get in there, talk

to the people who are organizing that little ring. You can figure out usually who the leader is and get it out. Get it out in the open rather than going in there and suffering

every day and walking out thinking there is something wrong with you, and typically it‘s not you.

I: I would think that you would feel much better if you took action, take the right

steps, etc., and get it out in the open. You can only feel good about handling that properly.

SRB: Absolutely, and one of the people I mentioned in The Last Box,

A Woman’s Guide to Surviving Corporate America is my favorite of all and that is the hidden agenda queen. This is the type of person that

we are talking about right now, who can make your life miserable and make you feel terrible about who you are, and what you're doing.

They‘re even cunning enough to steal your great ideas, rather than

reward you for them, just so that they can look better in their bosses' eyes. That‘s the type of person that you really address or just stay

away from them. But, if you don‘t get it out, and you don‘t approach them and talk about the situation it‘s not going to go away.

I: I can believe that. What is your best advice for those who have

lost their job?

SRB: For those who have lost their job, it is very similar to those who are considering changing careers while they are still employed although they have more freedom to

move about. You have to do some soul searching. You have to make sure that you're even on the right career path. For many, many years I kept doing the same job over

and over again that I knew that I could do well, but it really wasn‘t the best fit for me. So, I didn‘t always survive as well as I should have. If you keep repeating something

that‘s not working over and over again you're just setting yourself up for failure.

SRB: So, the first step that I would take is to reexamine who you are, what are your pas-

sions, start looking at whether or not you need to rebrand yourself just like a business that is not doing well rebrands themselves. When I say that about an individual you want to

make sure you‘re on the right career path. Do you have to tune your image up a little bit in order to get that next best job that you‘re looking for? Find out who you are, what you

really want to do and then find really good ways to connect with people who can get you to that job. So social networking, the face-to-face networking out in groups to make yourself

known, works better than some of the online career sites like Monster.com or Career-Builder.com. You can spend a lot of time there and get nowhere. But if you go out, and

you make your desires known to people, people who know people, this typically works bet-ter and faster.

That way they will all be able to see you face-to-face and think wow, I really like this per-

son, I‘m going to sit down and have a chat and find out more about them. When you get into a pool there online you‘re out with thousands and thousands of other people looking to

do the same thing. So, it minimizes your chances.

I: Well, I look at it this way, if somebody were to send you a resume and you were looking

at it and another person was standing there telling you about themselves, which would you hire?

SRB: Oh, the one that is in front of me!

I: Exactly! Exactly, I don‘t think we will ever get away from face-to-face networking, get-

ting to know people.

SRB: In doing business do you want to buy your life insurance policy from someone online that you never met? Or do you want to meet somebody and shake hands with them and sit

down, have a conversation and have them ask you questions, face-to-face about what your needs are for the future?

I want to shake hands with somebody, I want to see their facial expressions, I want to see their body language, I want to see if they‘re dressed professionally and how they act. You

can‘t do that if you‘re trying to purchase something online. You don‘t know who you're buying from. So, someone looking to employ someone would rather get a referral from

someone they know and trust, get introduced and meet you face-to-face, because that really takes some of the question out of it all.

I: I agree. Tell us a little bit about the Defining Moments: The Gathering of Women’s Jour-

neys.

SRB: Well, defining moments came right at the end of my completion of The Last Box, and it‘s kind of fun the way it started. The very moment I finished, that night a couple of my

girlfriends came over to just celebrate and chat and two of them had never met. They had heard about each other and before the night was over the one helped the other realize po-

tential that she hadn‘t even uncovered yet. As they are walking out the door, I looked at

the one and said ―This has truly been your defining moment, hasn‘t it?‖ and then I said, ―That‘s it! that‘s the next book!‖

-31- (Continued next page.)

Susan Rae Baker continued…

SRB: Finding out what kind journey people have been on is my intention for Defining Moments - to gather women‘s journeys. Women who are courageous, fearless, just

really strong women who have been down a tough road and many of us have. My

intention is to encourage, inspire and motivate other women through their stories. So, it‘s building up and I‘ve been looking and casting my net out all over the place

for the women out there who have a journey they have been on that they would like to share with others. I am asking them to submit their story to me, it will get pub-

lished in my book alongside some very incredible women. So, if you want to get published along side of some incredible women and help others through your story, I

invite all women to do just that and submit their story. I‘ve been stretching out my deadline now for all of the right reasons and today I can stretch it out again. I can

stretch it out to the end of July, but pretty soon the publisher is going to say Susan that‘s it! So, I do encourage those who want to participate to get back to me fairly

quickly.

I: Wonderful, it sounds like it‘s going to be a great book. I am looking forward to it. So, when should we start looking for it?

SRB: Probably, in the fall. It takes time to get it all together, and I still have not created the cover. That‘s the fun part about doing a book. I have my thoughts, my

ideas and I‘m looking for it to be a very beautiful book that women are going to be able to cherish for a long time.

I: Excellent, excellent. You also have Stepping Stones to Success, tell us a little bit

about that?

SRB: Yes, I do, that is something that is just happening and again, I am very proud to be a part of this project. Stepping Stones to Success is a book where experts

share strategies for mastering business, life, and relationships and I am a co-author with Deepak Chopra, Jack Canfield and Dennis Waitley. It‘s one incredible lineup

and I‘m very proud to be a part of that lineup. That book should also be coming out by the fall. The sooner I finish my part, the sooner the book can come out; but I‘m

already starting two booked speaking engagements around it. So, I‘m really looking

forward to doing that. Just getting out on the road for book signings and book tours - it‘s going to be an exciting fall, to tell you the truth, everything is coming in the

fall. So, it's going to be a fun time.

I: You are going to be two or three books with you to your book signings, it sounds like?

SRB: It sounds like it, doesn‘t it. I think I‘m going to have to get a bigger SUV, to

cart all of my things around in. Either that or I‘m just going to have to stay on the road all of the time and never be home but that‘s okay. I love being out there and

meeting people, and if I can help some people along the way then my job is done.

-32-

I: That‘s wonderful How did you get into coaching?

SRB: Well, I spent many, many years, again working for other people in the health-care field in financial services. I‘ve done consulting work, and helped other businesses

start up, and you know, eventually I came home one day and knew that this is not for me. I really feel that a lot of corporations, a lot of large businesses need help. One

of my goals is to work with the executive level with companies to retrain the leader-

ship team. I found the same problem wherever I went repeat itself. I‘ve always been someone who likes to help other people I also knew that I was an entrepreneur.

I wasn‘t quite sure how I was going to use it and a few years back I met a very well known life coach who I aspired to be like. I said to myself after listening to her one

day, ‗that‘s what I need to do, that‘s what I would love to do‘ after hearing her speak. It took a while for me to get to that point where I could take that leap of faith and just

stop what I was doing and start doing this.

So, just getting out there and getting started, taking my certification course and writ-ing the book, everything started happening at the same time. I have found it to be

the perfect fit for me. I also love to go out and do motivational speaking. It‘s very gratifying for me to walk away from sitting with a client and know that I have helped

that person in an hour‘s time, and knowing that each time that I sit with them, I‘ve done something good. I think there couldn‘t be a more fulfilling job for me.

I: That‘s great, and it sounds like listening to her was one of your defining moments.

SRB: Yes and you know, most of us have more than one. I have had many! So, when I do my part of my own book, I have to stop and think ‗okay, how many of my

stories do I want to share at one time?‘ Many of us do have many defining moments depending on your age. Certainly, raising four children and now having two little

granddaughters, there are many defining moments. Giving birth to your first baby sure does define you.

Raising your children, going through the hurtles on the roller coaster ride, and we

have journeys to look forward to that we have never expected. The road just twists and turns and you go with it. It‘s really quite amazing how it can mold and shape you

and if you are very careful, you‘ll allow it to mold and shape you in a positive way. I have seen it time and time again through my own trials and tribulations and can sit

here and tell everybody, yes there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the light

at the end of the tunnel. It will happen and a lot of people, a lot of women and men, go through each day struggling, and wondering if they are ever going to get out of it.

I can honestly tell them, yes you will. You will get out of it. These books will help show you how.

Learn more about Susan Rae Baker:

http://www.future-endeavors.net/

Helen Kerrison

is an inspirational speaker, presenter, coach, trainer, and Conscious Commu-nication Specialist. She combines intuitiveness and emotional awareness

with a results-oriented and pragmatic approach to motivate and inspire those she works with and deliver profound, insightful and sustainable results.

Helen comes from a communications and marketing background and spent 10 years working in global companies prior to setting up her own company, Insight in Business,

in 2005. She is a certified corporate and executive coach, a personal development coach, NLP trainer, and EFT practitioner. She empowers her clients to develop the

knowledge, self-awareness, and communication skills they need to build effective, powerful, and successful relationships.

Communication in its many forms has been central to Helen‘s life. The study of lan-

guages and the love of travel led her to live and work in a number of countries around the world; first Italy, followed by the United States, France, and Brussels, Belgium

where she currently lives.

I: I‘ve heard you‘re called the ―Conscious Communication Specialist.‖ What does that mean?

HK: It‘s an interesting question. Conscious Communication – I think what it really

means is that much of what we say, much of what we do, much of how we behave is actually not conscious. It‘s driven more by our subconscious. As our subconscious is

subconscious, we‘re not actually aware, nor are we in control of our behaviors and what we do. We‘re not in control of how we communicate, so really what I do is I

work with people to help them understand how their subconscious is affecting the way

they communicate, help them actually get a deeper understanding of that and make that conscious, to help bring them into conscious communication rather than subcon-

scious communication, if that makes sense.

I: Yes it does, actually. What impact does this have on the way we communicate?

HK: I think the first thing probably is to just explain a little bit about how the subcon-scious mind and conscious mind work. Each of us think on a conscious level, and also

have a subconscious. The subconscious is more intuitive. It‘s instinctive. It‘s actu-ally programmed, and we accept what goes into our subconscious without question,

which means we‘re not often aware of the reasons why we do behave or say the things that we do.

Our conscious mind, what we think is actually driving our behaviors, is actually a

very, very small percentage. Science has certainly done research into this, and it

seems upwards of 95% of what drives our behaviors comes from subconscious. That‘s great if your subconscious is actually working positively for you, but there are

times when it can be really, really unhelpful.

I: I can see that; 95% seems quite high. That‘s an amazing number.

HK: Yes. -34-

I: What can we do about this?

HK: That‘s a great question, and there is a lot

that we can do. I suppose the first thing really is to become aware; become aware of how we do

operate, and that so much of our hidden stuff, so much of the stuff that we pick up when we‘re

younger, is actually driving us now. If you like, it‘s like the writing on our walls. It‘s the stuff up

there that we don‘t question that is sort of pro-grammed and we follow.

By understanding that that‘s what it is, we can

change it, because it‘s not actually written in stone. You can take the eraser and wipe it out

and replace it with more positive feelings, more

positive beliefs, and therefore change the way that you see your world. By changing the way

that you see your world, you‘ll interact in a dif-ferent way with other people.

I: What you say makes complete sense to me

because I tell my daughter, my nine-year-old, decisions and things that she thought when she

was four – things that might scare you, etc. – you can take them back out and look at them

from an older perspective and say, does this really make sense for this situation, because a

four-year-old will associate everything to having a bad teacher, let‘s say, and then they associate

that with school, when school wasn‘t the prob-

lem. When they take it back out and re-examine it, even as an adult they can then look at it from

an adult‘s eyes, and a lot of times, our mes-sages, like you said, were given to us when we

were small children that we took in and we made life decisions on.

HK: Yes. That is so, so true. I work with peo-

ple and they‘ll say things like, ―I can't do that.‖ As soon as I hear that I say, ―Okay, what makes

you think that? What are your reasons for not believing that you can do that?‖ Generally, there

is sort of a pause when they‘re thinking, and of-ten it goes back to a time when they were told

they couldn‘t do it, or ―You’re useless at that.‖ Or, ―Don’t worry, I’m not any good at that, so it’s

okay if you’re not.‖

(Continued next page.)

Helen Kerrison continued…

HK: This sort of belief is instilled and it runs through, it‘s like a thread that runs through their lives; however, once that is recognized for what it is and just as you

said, then the possibilities are endless because you can just say okay, I actually

choose not to believe that anymore. It wasn‘t a valid belief when I was five or six, and it‘s certainly not a valid belief now. It‘s really about understanding the power is within

you.

I: When you‘re grown up, then it‘s the elephant tied to the tree thing. In India, they‘ll tie the small elephant to a big tree and then he pulls and pulls and pulls and pulls, and

finally gives up and quits pulling. Then you‘ve got this adult elephant who won't even try to pull on the tree, because they think they can‘t, and you‘re describing that per-

fectly.

HK: So much of how we are is programmed. We see, we watch, we observe, we take it all in and react the same way. You see that very much in families. The people I‘ve

worked with who are maybe fearful or don‘t feel they‘re good enough, or don‘t feel that they deserve the good things or what they want to try and achieve, but when they

take the time to look back, they often come up with, ―Well, my parents were like that.‖

Money is a classic. People‘s views and beliefs about money very much comes from their parent‘s situation. ―Money doesn’t grow on trees. We can't afford it.‖ This sort

of stuff, and it‘s frightening.

I have done a lot of work on myself and so many of the things that I‘ve said, good-ness, that comes straight from my parents; I‘m just repeating. We all do it. It‘s really

understanding that that‘s what it is, and that it‘s not your future life; it‘s your past, and your past is not your future. You‘re making your future now, here and now, this

minute. Once you can recognize that, then there‘s so much more. There are so many more possibilities that open themselves up to you automatically.

I: Oh yes; then you can put it in the proper perspective and move forward in a new

direction, or a better direction.

HK: Yes, that‘s right. Actually, you can achieve stuff that you‘ve never really thought

you could do. That‘s what is so amazing; you actually thought up all these new ideas. If you withhold judgment on things, if you‘re prepared to look at things and say, is

that right? This person said that to me, this teacher said that to me, etc., but is that true? Did that apply then? If it didn‘t, then it certainly doesn‘t apply now; and even if

it did apply at that time, you were six. Things move on. It‘s really about letting go of the negative stuff from the past and allowing yourself to live now. I think that‘s the

key thing.

I: Excellent. What can you teach us today so our readers can take a step towards getting the best out of themselves and their relationships?

HK: As far as communication is concerned, I think there are some basic elements of

communication, the actual sort of skills involved with communicating that perhaps we don‘t take enough care of, or we‘re not perhaps conscious enough about, and I think

there‘s one skill that I would put at the top of the list here.

-36-

HK: Now, when we are children, there are certain communication skills that we‘re

taught. We‘re taught how to talk. We‘re taught how to read. We‘re taught how to write. However, we‘re never actually taught how to listen, and I think listening is one

of those skills that we don‘t really value. We don‘t understand the significance of lis-tening. Most of us listen just to reply, to respond. We don‘t actually really listen to

understand. Listening is really key to this. It‘s about listening with ears and listening with our eyes, understanding the meaning of good communication. Good communica-

tion is not you talking. Good communication is getting the response that you ex-pected. If your response is not what you expected, then your communication has not

been effective.

Really, the listening skills are being able to actually hear what the person is saying, and have our interpretation of that per-

son‘s words as close as possible, and when you‘re not sure to actually ask. That‘s often what we don‘t do, and that‘s the

cause of many, many conflicts. Our own perceptions, our own

thoughts, our own judgments, everything that we bring to the communication, these thoughts, what the other person is actu-

ally saying, so we make assumptions, we judge, we emotional-ize, we distort, we dismiss, we generalize. We‘re doing all that

before we even open our mouths to respond, because we‘re do-ing all that inside our heads as we are hearing the other per-

son‘s words, because we‘re not actually listening effectively.

I: I see. Basically, you‘re talking about actively listening, not thinking about what you‘re going to say, paying attention to what they‘re saying and understanding, and

trying to feel or know and relate to what they‘re saying?

HK: Absolutely. You know, actually it‘s not an easy thing to do. It‘s something that you have to almost practice at, because it takes a lot of focus not to let external stuff,

not to let your own thoughts actually impede what the other person is saying, and how

you want to actually listen to that other person. It sounds quite easy, really listening, and in actual fact you find that within a few seconds your attention has started to wan-

der; it actually takes quite a lot of practice to listen really actively and really respon-sively.

i: It seems like there‘s a lot to do. Where do you start?

HK: Yes; you know what, it never really stops. It‘s all part of the learning, and it‘s all

part of your own progress. Probably I‘d say mainly the place to start is all about tak-ing responsibility for yourself. It‘s about mindset. It‘s about being open. It‘s about

changing yourself. It‘s about being at cause, which means being responsible. In the case of communication, for example, if something, a certain message you want to put

across, you don‘t put across very effectively, then you take responsibility for that. It‘s not the fault of the other person.

It‘s the same with everything in life. If something doesn‘t work the way you want it to, if a relationship is not going well, or if something happens – and I see this often

with my kids and I‘m sure you do with yours – they say, ―Oh well, it’s not my fault‖ whereas the actual fact is it‘s your responsibility, whatever changes.

(Continued next page.)

Helen Kerrison continued...

HK: Even if somebody has done something which you don‘t deserve or which you feel is unjust, you take responsibility for bringing that situation about and once you

can do that, things become so much easier, because you take back your power. You

take back your control. As soon as you blame somebody else for something, you give them that power. I think probably the first place to start is really there, being

at cause, being responsible, understanding how that works, understanding your thoughts, your emotions, and being willing to make changes.

I: I see. What inspired you to become so passionate about communication?

HK: This is an interesting one because I hadn‘t realized that that was my thing, if

you like, until probably relatively recently; five or six years ago. Looking back on it now, I look at my childhood and I look at my parents. I basically had parents who

didn‘t really communicate. There wasn‘t a lot of communication going on, and I don‘t know whether it was in direct result of that, but I always loved to talk. I al-

ways loved communicating when I was little, but certainly when I was in high school and words were what I used. I can remember when I was small, I used to write. I

would write all the time. I‘d write these books. Of course, I would sort of copy the

style of my favorite author, but I would write all these books, and then as I got older it would be words, and contact with people and communication has always been

really, really important to me.

Later on, I obviously took languages at University, and lived and worked in different countries and experienced different cultures that the communication part became

even more obvious to me. Then, at a certain point when I was deciding okay, what do I want to be, what do I want to do, for me it was all about people. It was all

about communicating. It was all about sharing. Sharing with people the joy of ac-tually good communication, of getting the message, of being understood. For me,

being able to coach people, being able to train people, being able to share some of my passion for communication is really, really what it‘s all about.

I: That‘s interesting, because it sounds like you were reaching out even though you

were raised in a family that didn‘t communicate very much on all levels, if you were

writing all the time. I always think it‘s fascinating how our passions seem to choose us. Like you said, you didn‘t know it but if you find it … it finds you, actually.

HK: You‘re so right, and even though you don‘t realize when you look back … when

it happens, you realize that that‘s what it is. You look back and you say, yes, I was getting signs all the time. They were there the whole time. I remember my father,

who was a very quiet man, extremely quiet, where my mother was the opposite, and so there was sort of a conflict there all the way through childhood. It‘s great

when you do actually recognize what it is that‘s your thing, if you like, your passion. You get out there and you work on it and you share it. That to me is so, so wonder-

ful. I am grateful for that every single day. It‘s wonderful stuff.

-38-

I: It‘s amazing because it does – it chooses you, and then like you said, it puts you

on the path and then suddenly you look back and you say wow, I have everything I need for this, and this is what I want to do. Now you‘ve explained how you were in-

spired to go into this, how do you inspire others?

HK: I was reading something about this just yesterday. Sometimes we do things and almost it‘s sort of intuition. We don‘t know necessarily how we do it, and first we

have to think consciously about how we do things, and what the effect we have is. Looking back on it now, I think I‘ve always been very, very enthusiastic and passion-

ate about stuff, and I think that rubs off on people. I think it‘s contagious. I think when you‘re like that you find something that really does empower you and makes

you sparkle, if you like. It brings out the best in you; then other people will automati-cally be drawn to you and take some of that from you as well because you give it with

joy and absolute pleasure. I think when I‘m working with people, that‘s probably what happens. I don‘t know, but certainly I get that feeling that my enthusiasm and

my passion are contagious. I just love being able to work with people that way and to

bring that to them.

I: Yes, when you‘re living authentically, you can just see it when somebody is and when they‘re passionate about what they love and what they‘re doing. It‘s like a

magnet to people. Speaking of that, what do you have coming up, and how can our readers work with you?

HK: I have several things in the pipeline. I‘m doing series of live workshops around

different aspects of conscious communication, so it might be around self-confidence, increasing self-awareness, these sort of areas. These workshops are live and obvi-

ously I‘m based in Europe, so that‘s mainly for a European audience. However, my workshops will be turned into teleseries. The first one is coming up fairly soon, within

the next five to six weeks, so all that information will be on my website. That‘s one aspect of what I do. I do a lot of work with people individually using teleconferencing,

video conferencing.

I: What final words would you want to leave us with today?

HK: I think it‘s going to be about openness. It‘s about being open and curious, al-

most with the curiosity of a child – the curiosity of a child being able to discern as an adult, and every journey starts with a single step, and communication is no exception.

Taking the first step and then seeing more and more and learning more and more, and probably when I talk about communication – everybody thinks they‘re great at

communicating. We all think we‘re good communicators, but sometimes we actually don‘t know what we don‘t know, and so I think that‘s the first step. Open up your

mind to what you don‘t know. That‘s how I start.

Discover why things aren‘t working and change them.

Communicate with ease in every situation. Manage everything with time and energy to spare.

Learn more about Helen:

http://www.insightinbusiness.com/

Brain—

Mind—Body

Connection

Series Part 2,

featuring

Dr. MA

Greenstein ,

the publisher and editor-

in-chief of the e-zine BodiesandSpace.com, as

well as the chief brainiac of the George Greenstein

Institute, an online com-pany committed to serving

the public good by bringing

forth best brain and mind fitness platforms and prac-

tices for working and living well and green in the 21st

century.

An internationally recog-nized author, public

speaker, and coach special-izing in working with young

leaders, educators, and en-trepreneurs, especially cul-

tural creatives, Dr. G. re-gards whole brain coaching

and consulting as ideal

forms for empowering peo-ple with refreshing new art

and science info, and strate-gies for thinking, feeling,

and doing. Dr. G. is com-mitted to fostering a metab-

olically balanced and pro-gressive conversation re-

garding some simple ways to improve our resilience

and adaptive patterns of pursuing fluid meaning in

our work and in our lives. and edutainment.

and Dr.

Conrad Milne,

bringing a perspective of mind-body coaching

in both athletic and leadership realms.

Conrad is Professor Emeri-

tus New Mexico State Uni-versity and former sports

advisor for ten years to the Minister of Sports in the

Kingdom of Bahrain. Dr. Milne was also Master

Course Conductor and

member of the original writing team for the Na-

tional Coaching Certifica-tion program of Canada.

Dr. Mullen is credited with numerous international

conference presentations and publications including

physical activity for the young child, physical edu-

cation for the homeschooler, and

exercise walking.

I: What is brain-based coaching, and how does it

differ from other coaching approaches?

MAG: The term – I should mention, ‗brain-based

coaching‘ is used both by people who are really in-

vested in understanding the way in which the field

of neuroscience, which is really exploding, can bring

some insight into the coaching practice.

(Continued next page.)

-41-

Brain—Mind—Body Connection Series Part 2,

featuring Dr. MA Greenstein & Dr. Conrad Milne continued…

MAG: It‘s also a term used to address how in fact we understand the brain itself as an adaptive and integrative and holistic aspect of our human-beingness.

I: I see. You‘re also quoted as saying, ―The brain makes culture, and culture

makes brain.‖ What does this mean for coaches, coachees, and those interested in

changing their life today, right now?

MAG: Let me go back to something. If you would bring in the word ‗brain‘, when you think of little kids, they see like a gushy, grey thing. In teaching young de-

signers, you say brain and they say, ―Oh, it‘s science – kind of scary.‖ If you begin to think about the brain and start to talk about what has been understood in neu-

roscience, and particularly as a field that is self-identified as in a very young stage, if you look at it from the standpoint as an exploding science in the 21st century,

you begin to get hold of a very radical proposition for coaches, for educators, any-one that really is interested in change culture, and that‘s the idea that our brains

are plastic, or neuroplastic.

I grew up with a mother who said, ―You can't teach an old dog new tricks‖ and yet today as I was walking before we had this conversation, I saw a three-legged dog

on a leash who I see every day when I take my walk, who has clearly adapted to

walking with three legs rather than four. So the big sound bite and takeaway for all the people reading this is that we are adaptive and integrative and that our

brain is able to lay down new neural networks that help to change how we think, how we feel, how we intuit, how we create.

As I said, I‘d like people to understand that by bringing in a brain-based point of

view we‘re really talking about recognizing our own biology, our own physiology, our own somatic or mind-brain connection, and that we understand that we‘re

adaptive and integrative. The tips would be to look at those aspects of your life where you are already doing that to create newness and novelty, that are stimulat-

ing to learning something that‘s a challenge, but also brings a certain amount of satisfaction and joy. We‘re talking about recognizing the power of being able to

change and understanding that it‘s novelty that helps make that change.

Second is that there is ample and exciting research on the role of cardiovascular

exercise and to some degree aerobic exercise on actually making our brains and our minds stronger, more fit, more healthy, more adaptive in being able to really

just perform in an everyday sense.

The third, actually, is some kind of stress reduction, meditation, contemplative practice that brings a reflective inner sense of oneself, to calm oneself down, to

create a quite mind, to create an empty space so that are brains can actually do the work of, if you will, imbedding what we‘re learning and to create a less stress-

ful system in a culture that is really highly stressed. Exercise, stress reduction, and creating new novel experiences change how we learn and how we function.

-42-

I: Dr. Conrad, earlier this year, the world was captivated by outstanding perform-

ances at the Winter Olympics. Many of the commentators talked about the ath-letes‘ mental preparation, mental control, and peak performance. What does that

mean in respect of mind and body control?

CM: What we saw at the Winter Olympics with the elite or world class athletes is that it is really paramount that they have what we call absolute critical position on

their mental readiness. If they want to reach peak performance, which we often call ideal performance state, this is really the consequence of both the physical and

the mental factors that we‘ve been talking about here, as obviously the mind and the body cannot really be separated. It‘s interesting, because each of these world-

class athletes that we‘ve watched, they really had their physical and their technical skills well honed to perfection, but unfortunately there‘s only one winner, and the

difference we know from winning the gold medal and placing third can often be measured in milliseconds or even centimeters.

In spite of an expectation to do well or even wanting to do well, many of these athletes will fall short of their expectations, and of

course this begs the question, so what provides the edge to win? Sports psychologists have been working on this topic and prob-

lem and question for some time, and they‘ve come basically down to identify that it‘s really the person with the most desire and the

best focus at any given time. I think we see that in a lot of sports where we see baseball players or pitchers, for example, have a

great game and no one can touch their fast ball or whatever, and the next game they‘re knocked out very early.

All these attributes of desire and focus of course are all learned mental skills.

Those really have to be developed over time with systematic training. It‘s interest-ing, because some of the researchers have found that only mental readiness has

been shown to really significantly predict Olympic success and we see this in a va-

riety of other sports as well.

This is what they‘re talking about, being prepared, being mentally ready. Some of them are at that position for that particular moment, and others have missed it.

I: That‘s interesting, because I recently interviewed Daniel Coyle, who wrote The

Talent Code, and he talks about the system of teaching, that kind of focus and how to learn quickly, which I thought was very fascinating. What are the mental skills

elite athletes learn in their training to reach their peak performance or ideal per-formance state?

CM: There are a number of ones that sort of make up a common skill program,

mental skill program, that we could focus upon. All of it is really to control their thought processes in these beginning stages when we take the young athlete, de-

pending on their age and their sport now, we try to take them through the relaxa-

tion and breathing exercises where we try to teach to control or to manage their arousal and anxiety, because we found that without one‘s emotional control then

these later skills that we will introduce such as focusing and concentration and re-focusing and imagery will not be successfully acquired. (Continued next page.)

Brain—Mind—Body Connection Series Part 2,

featuring Dr. MA Greenstein & Dr. Conrad Milne continued…

CM: Once they‘ve done that and they can control their emotion, then we move on to what we call the intermediate stage where we get into self-talk where they can en-

courage themselves, thought stopping, really working on these cognitive skills to manage confidence levels and performance, as well as being focused. Once we‘re

able to get them to manage these skills, we do get into imagery visualization training

programs. There are, as you are well aware, many techniques associated with im-agery and taking the athlete through these in an attempt to control emotion and im-

prove their performances and develop concentration and so on, but they all take long periods of training, long hours of hard work, and real commitment, and this is what

we see with the elite athletes of the world, this commitment.

I: What mental skills would be included in a normal mental training program for athletes?

CM: Those are the ones that I‘ve just sort of mentioned there. I would also say that

some of the other characteristics that we found, that I first eluded to, the most desire and self-control is really related to commitment now, especially the most desire idea.

As we are obviously aware, it takes incredible commitment to reach the top in any professional sport, and the commitment to train your mind to focus totally on execut-

ing your best performance skills under what we‘ll consider very stressful circum-

stances that we see in athletics is really something that takes years and years of training.

We also know, obviously, that commitment alone does not guarantee success, but the

lack of commitment will certainly guarantee that you will fall short. I also mentioned the self-control aspect was vital for peak performance, or what we‘ll call the ideal per-

formance state. If you are not able to maintain your composure and your emotions during the heat of the contest, then you end up losing your focus and performance of

course will be affected adversely. By reacting emotionally, it‘s not only upsetting, but it also drains you of your mental and physical abilities as well, because you expend a

lot of energy in this.

There are a lot of coping strategies that need to be developed. There are also many distractions that can occur to upset one‘s self-control, such as the official‘s what we

will call an ‗unfair call‘, or some poor playing conditions such as wind or heat or cold,

or even the audience interaction, whether it‘s just heavy, loud noise, or booing, or any personal name-calling; all of those tend to create a negative frame of mind and lower

our confidence. We tell the coaches and athletes that something really only becomes a distraction if you let it distract you. You really don‘t lose your performance skills be-

cause of distractions; you let yourself lose the focus, and that allows you to execute your skills ineffectively.

These world-class athletes that we‘ve witnessed a few months ago really have the

ability to adapt and refocus in the face of these distractions. This is what we‘re trying to teach the young athletes through visualization or imagery training, to help them be

able to cope with these extraordinary forms of pressure. -44-

I: So Olympians are ironclad focus masters?

CM: Yes; well, not all of them, obviously, because some of them didn‘t reach their expectations, and so I think that‘s the difference, that on one given day, one athlete

will outperform the others, and yet on the very next day, that person could come back and be the winner. It‘s like in the sport of golf; being able to put four rounds together

at high levels, or pitching nine innings, this sort of thing; to keep your focus is really

what‘s needed, and I think that‘s where we lose most of our effectiveness in our per-formance skills is that we lose the focus. That‘s what we try to train these young ath-

letes to work on.

I: What are the coaching or leadership challenges you experienced as an advisor to the Ministry of Sports during your stay in the Kingdom of Bahrain?

CM: I went there to implement the Canadian National Coach-

ing program, and ended up being advisor to the Minister of Sports because of my background in sport and teaching, be-

cause I had been a coach in high school as well as college, and then went into the academic side of it all.

The biggest problem that I face, I found is the culture. Work-

ing the Arab culture, which is so different from ours here in

North America is very, very difficult, and it wasn‘t until I really later, unfortunately, understood the culture and how to work

in it, that I able to make any real improvement. I think the culture is very male-oriented, and so when we deal with fe-

male athletes it‘s very difficult because maybe by age 15 or 16 they‘ll put on the hijab, the scarf, and their career in swim-

ming, for example, will be over. The same with gymnastics. Some of these are real problems to work with.

I go back a couple of times a year to work with them. It‘s an ongoing process, but

the whole idea of the mental area of coaching in athletics was really foreign to them. It‘s just slowly now being incorporated through the various programs that we‘ve initi-

ated, and we‘ve got some leading coaches who are actually using it, and the other coaches can see it and the advantages of it, so it‘s slowly taken hold. It is a great ex-

perience. The Bahraini people are very, very friendly and hospitable, and I just love

my time there.

I: Very interesting. Thank you, Dr. Milne. Dr. G., how did you get attracted to this

arena in your life work?

MAG: I would say that it really started at the age of three when I realized that I was

given a chance to actually help people problem-solve really early on. I didn‘t come into the official practice of coaching until I myself had injuries. I trained as a dancer.

I had been involved in the creative visual and performing arts community and teach-ing at art and design schools and got very dissatisfied with education, the way it pre-

vented people from learning and getting to their best selves as we‘ve been describing today.

(Continued next page.)

Brain—Mind—Body Connection Series Part 2,

featuring Dr. MA Greenstein & Dr. Conrad Milne continued…

MAG: For Dr. Conrad, I trained in mental practice early on in my dance training, so I‘m familiar with the mental practice work and thought there were all these

great strategies that the University was not addressing and learning, so I was go-ing to start my own institute. I got injured and couldn‘t actually do all the physical

teaching, so I just started using my own voice, and one thing led to another.

In addition, I want to mention that in starting the e-zine, I‘ve been a writer my en-

tire career and decided to stop writing for other people and just really start pub-lishing my own work and then publishing work of many bloggers who really do

want to write. We thought that coaching would probably be the best framework for how to get those practices out into the world wide web.

I: Interesting. Very good.

. MAG: I worked cross-culturally most of my career,

working throughout the Asian Pacific region, and one of the things that interested me the most about the coach-

ing model was when I took a training, I was invested in a cultural relativism. I believe that cultures handle their

things differently, so I was very interested in the idea of

how do you get to a model that works at a universal level, but also works at a local cultural level? When I

came to the neuroscience space to approach the coach-ing, I actually found my answer, because everyone has a

brain, and while the brain is shaped differently by food and light, where you are in relationship to the equator,

and where your relationship is to cultural value, the fact remains that everybody has the capacity to learn. I find this one of the most exciting things about the

coaching field, is that I think it‘s actually a new learning model.

I think it pulls in the best practices that we‘re beginning to find. Harvard is com-pletely investing in this; USC, a lot of universities are very invested now in under-

standing neuroscience, what it tells us about the way we learn, the way we decide, the way we make choices. In fact, the way art itself and creativity amps up our

ability to know anything, amps up cognition, helps kids with test scores, that sort

of thing. Because I was coaching, which is a positive psychology model, if you really understood how people learn, how we focus our attention, what were the

teaching techniques that actually help young people, whether they‘re going through business or they‘re going into medicine or they‘re going onto the world

stage as a creative person, how you actually help them is by understanding how communication works. That piece, I think, is really, really critical, and that we‘re

just beginning to understand in the coaching practice, those who elect to coach coaches, to really understanding the learning, the cognitive model.

-46-

MAG: If I could add one more thing, it is the relationship to human feelings, because as

Dr. Conrad points out, it‘s the feelings, the desire, that makes or breaks how the brain actually values anything. How it values paying attention to anything that it sees or hears

or touches or smells or tastes. Helping people learn how to learn, whether it be a coach or a student or an athlete or an artist or CEO is really a new science and an entirely new

way of approaching how we become most effective in what we do in our lives.

I: Very interesting. Thank you. Dr. Conrad, could you please answer what attracted you to this field?

CM: I grew up in a very sport-oriented home with a father and an older brother who I

tried to emulate, who was an exceptional athlete, so sport was big and I loved the com-petition, so physical education became my interest and of course for most young boys in

Canada. They didn‘t want to be a mounty, I think they wanted to be a coach like they do in America. I became a high school coach, but I tired of that quickly because I really

wasn‘t prepared properly as an undergraduate student to be a coach. I had no real idea

of anything, certainly not the psychological areas. These were not even talked about way back in those dark ages of the fifties.

I went on to graduate school where I really thought my best work could be working with

young children as they learned their fundamental motor skills, because it‘s with those skills that they are able to play the sport. If they don‘t like it or they‘re not good at it,

they‘ll not like it, and so they end up becoming a spectator. Now we‘ve seen the conse-quences of that with the unfit children we are seeing and overweight problems, etc.

That really was what got me into it. The coaching was because of my background in physical growth of children; the perception motor development of children is really what

got me into the coaching program in Canada. Then when I moved to the United States, I was just able to develop those programs even further, both in New Mexico as well as

now overseas in Bahrain, and in around the Persian Gulf as well. I really enjoy my work, even at retirement age.

I: Thank you. Dr. G., where do you see the field of mind-body connection going in the coming years?

MAG: I‘d like people to walk away with realizing that the brain, as Dr. Fisher at Harvard says, The brain is in our bodies. It‘s extended through our bodies. It‘s extended

through our nervous system, and that nervous system is engaged in the world.

There‘s a kind of rabid materialism that fits into wanting to reduce everything to neuro-chemistry and neuroanatomy, and the picture in terms of brain imaging, the pictures

that can show what‘s happening in the brain. I myself am very interested in this whole area of neurotechnology and brain imaging, because it does draw on my background and

my work in the visual arts, and with artists.

I would say in terms of the field going forward, the neurotechnology is going to be a

huge piece in helping us understand mind-brain relations. The epigenetics area is going to be huge in helping us understand mind-brain in the sense of understanding what we

think and what we do literally changes the genetic expression as it was explained to me by geneticists who are working in this area.

(Continued next page.)

Brain—Mind—Body Connection Series Part 2,

featuring Dr. MA Greenstein & Dr. Conrad Milne continued…

MAG: I would say that what we‘re beginning to understand is how powerful what we say to ourselves, what we think, what we do has direct impact on the actual

physiology at many, many, many levels that can be researched, and that we‘re no longer operating with an idea that our minds and brains are somehow disconnected.

In saying that, I want to add one more thing to the controversial argument within neuroscience itself. There are people that generally practice neuroscience and think

that the mind is the brain, and then there are those who would argue, and I‘m speaking here of Jeffrey Schwartz who is a UCLA psychiatrist who has been really

quite vociferous about this, that the mind is not the brain, that what we think and do is not necessarily even of the same order of reality that our brain is.

There‘s actually a lot controversy and discussion, which does push a field forward.

To sum up what I‘m saying, I think we‘re moving towards a greater understanding of integration, understanding the complexity of mind-brain relations as in body proc-

ess, we‘re moving towards the kind of interdisciplinary scholarship where we bring teams of people together to understand the complexity of being a human system,

and it‘s a really exciting time, an incredibly exciting time. In a century that‘s new and fresh and has new young people who are very technologically savvy that can

help us advance the technology for being able to do some of the hard number-

crunching to make our awareness possible about the mind-brain relation.

I: I agree, and I think even in mind health as well. Dr. Conrad, what are your thoughts on this?

CM: I can only speak, obviously, for sport at this point and the athletes, and I think

it‘s these elite contests that we see at the Olympics or World Championships where younger athletes will look and watch and listen to these stars that we presently have

in the various sports, and to hear what they do and say about their readiness prepa-ration, because we know that‘s the key. Jack Nicklaus said that back in his golfing

days, the readiness preparation is the total key for performance, and so we need to get the young athletes ready, and I can see that coming more and more now.

We even laugh about Yogi Berra and his famous quips were he said, ―Sport is 80%

mental; the rest is in your head.‖ We really do see that as a population that sport is

really mental game now, especially at these high, high levels, and I think as more young people get involved with this, as we‘ve been talking about at various levels in

neuroscience side of it and so on, I just think that that will just keep our programs going and make it better.

I think the sooner we can get it down into the younger athletes the better because

we see so many young athletes. We‘ve seen studies were about 85% of American children are involved in youth sport, and by 12 or 13 years of age they‘re just about

gone. We‘re down to about 10%. There are a variety of reasons for that, but I think we could keep them involved, not just to be sports per se, but to be active and

to be healthy, and that healthy lifestyle as well.

CM: I like this teaching idea that Dr. G. was talking about. I think from being in the

Gulf and working in Thailand at some of these other places with their programs, it definitely needs to be cross-cultural, and that‘s a big, big key.

I: Thank you. Dr. G., what is the most important thing a client seeking coaching should know?

MAG: First, I‘m so lucky to be on this call because my colleagues are so smart and

have already done all the heavy lifting answering your question, so I thank them. What I could add to this is a quote by my father, after whom I‘ve named my insti-

tute, because he was my first coach. He always told me, ‗There are no hopeless situations. There are only those who feel hopeless about them.‖

When we‘re looking to change, we are looking to change perspective. From my own

experience and what I‘ve really committed my own path to, and seeing evidence of, when you help people go inside and connect to their own inner world, their own in-

ner life, their own reflective selves, they can feel the truth of what they‘re doing. Martha Graham said, ―The body doesn‘t lie.‖ I‘ve learned that when you‘ve helped

people come back to their bodies, to their feelings, to their own breath that every-thing can be put into place.

I: Very eloquent, thank you. Dr. Conrad?

CM: Well, I totally agree with what has been said, and I don‘t know how much more I could really add, but I always feel that there is no one way to do things, and every-

body has different attributes and strengths and weaknesses. I think the coach has to really know his player; in this case, in sport, to be able to lead that child in the right

direction to achieve his or her potential. I think that‘s our whole job, helping them reach their potential.

The bottom line, to me, it‘s still up to the individual to perform, and that‘s what was

said earlier, and I really agree with that. I always like to use this quote from that favorite English philosopher, Bond … James Bond … when he said, ―Never say

never.‖ That‘s what we try to get across to these young athletes.

I: Thank you, Dr. Conrad. Dr. G, What most inspires you about being a part of this field?

MAG: What really comes to mind – I want to speak on behalf of the people I work

with, which is the millennial generation and certainly the Gen-X generation, this is a generation that likes to be social, that likes to connect with one another, and what I

really love about coaching and coaching this generation is that it stands in complete defiance of this Republican notion that everybody has to pull themselves up by their

bootstrap and they do it alone.

I think what coaching does, when it‘s done at a really high level, is it captures this spirit of how profound relationships are in helping people grow, and to bring in the

neuroscience piece is that we now know that humans really are like other mammals, profoundly social, and that coaching goes right at that piece of relationship and

builds on it. To me, that is really the most exciting thing about this field.

(Continued next page.)

Brain—Mind—Body Connection Series Part 2,

featuring Dr. MA Greenstein & Dr. Conrad Milne continued…

I: Thank you. Dr. Conrad?

CM: I think back again to working with the coaches. I just thought now of one of my Bahraini coaches in his oral defense of his Master‘s degree in coaching that we offer

said that I had affected his life drastically or most significantly and made a life change

for him, a lifestyle change, and so one of the other professors on the panel, said, ―Well, what happened?‖ He said, ―Well, he taught me all these basic self-confident

skills, all these basically mental skills of self-confidence and commitment and dedica-tion and so on, and I applied it to my work, and now I was able to go and speak to my

supervisor, and now I‘ve got this great job.‖

I had no idea that what I was talking about in sport would have any effect on his per-sonal life, but I think this is what happens, and any one of us who have been teachers

appreciate it when students come up and say how much they enjoyed the influence of our teaching on their lives, and I see that in coaching. I go back twice a year to Bah-

rain for short periods of time, and I just see how these coaches have moved from A to B and I see them growing and growing, and that inspires me to keep growing.

I: Thank you, Dr. Conrad. Dr. G, how do you see others most motivated and in-spired by what you have learned and what you share?

MAG: Yes. I‘m the lucky one because I‘ve been teaching my entire career, and

there‘s nothing better than having a student run up to you at a coffee shop 15 years later and saying, ―You changed my life.‖ That‘s pretty cool. It‘s incredibly cool.

I‘m big on intrinsic rewards, so that is why I teach, but if I could add something else,

like my colleagues I‘ve had a chance now to work with people who are brain injured, and what I‘ve learned is whether one is brain injured or just trying to work and amp

up brain health and effectiveness, something that cuts across culture is this issue of power. At a time when people feel because of the cultural values that they have no

power or that because the government is in such a fix, in turmoil, that people feel dis-empowered by their leaders, to zero in at the very basic core level of what it means to

be able to make a change in the world, that is so basic to humans.

That seems to be the piece that everybody I work with feels is the difference, that somehow because we got to thinking and intuiting and opening up the doors to crea-

tivity, the very specific kinds of practices that they felt they had more power to make

a change; that I think is a big learning for me.

I: Thank you. Dr. Conrad?

CM: I see the eyes of the coaches and even the athletes that I work with, when you see that proverbial light bulb light up and they finally catch it, they‘ve got it, I think

that‘s what really is an inspiration to me too. I look at some of my more senior coaches over there in Bahrain now, who after 10 years are finally starting to really use

the mental factors in their coaching, in the game situation, and I do spend time sitting behind the bench and near it so I can watch their mannerisms and so on.

-50-

CM: It‘s just really exciting to me to see them put into practice and action what we‘ve

been talking about, because if they can see it working and we talk about it after, it‘s just such a pleasure and a joy to see that what you‘ve been struggling over a number

of years to have them comprehend it as it does take hold.

I: One last question. What do you consider your great contribution to the mind-body

connection, your great work?

MAG: You‘ll forgive me – I‘m not quite sure if I‘ve gotten my greatness yet or my greatest contribution. I think I‘m in the process of showing to the world now, but if

there were one thing that I see as the place where I feel my greatest love, where I feel like I‘m most in flow and has the greatest, if you will, reward for others, is when I help

people come back to their bodies. It‘s been my great lesson I lived to tell. I think that

probably so far has really been that piece; and who knows what will happen in the next 20 or 40 years.

I: Dr. Conrad?

CM: I don‘t know whether I have any great works, but I just count it a real privilege to

be able to have been part of a national coaching program, not only for Canada, but what‘s been used around the world to really educate coaches, because as we grew up

as some of you have and been involved in with sport coaches in particular, some of them were totally uneducated in the whole area of coaching philosophy, administration,

management, sports medicine, psychology, biomechanics, you name it.

It‘s a large field of knowledge, and it‘s just been a pleasure to work and to train coaches and to help them be better coaches. That was my whole thrust, and in turn we

feel the athletes deserve the right to have the very best coach that‘s available, and

that‘s what we‘re trying to do here, especially in Bahrain, is that they do get state-of-the-art type of sports science information coming in, so they can use it to really reach

their goals because that‘s what we want them to do is reach their goals.

Learn more from Dr. MA Greenstein at :

http://bodiesinspace.com

Joshua Zuchter

is an International Synchronicity and Business Coach, Inspirational Speaker, and guest expert for the media. Over the past 10 years, Joshua has worked with over 700 busi-

ness owners and individuals and has given over 800 seminars and workshops. A special-ist in understanding the mind, human dynamics and consciousness he has recently

been touted as discovering and teaching what some are now calling "The Holy Grail of

Personal Growth".

As an international life coach, Joshua has clients including both individuals and entrepre-neurs from around the world and gives workshops as well as private keynotes and semi-

nars for corporations, organizations, and associations. Described as an inspirational speaker with a dynamic and engaging presence, Joshua is a unique blend of empower-

ment and enlightenment.

Joshua has created one of the most successful coaching practices in Canada. He has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs and small business owners to build their business

and to attract greater success. He has also worked with many individuals and execu-tives helping them to create and live more fulfilling lives.

-52-

I: What have you found to be the main difference between seasoned business owners and

those who are just starting a business and how does spirituality tie into each of those?

JZ: When it comes to bringing spirituality into business there are actually five elements that are significant and that blend the concept of going more deeply with also running a

successful business. But before we even approach how it applies to business it is impor-tant to understand or define spirituality.

There are many different opinions and philosophies about what spirituality is. In my ex-

perience and what I teach is that being spiritual comes down to the idea that there is much more to us as human beings than just having a physical body. If someone were to

come from another planet, for example, and were to look at this planet they would see all of these things moving around and would have no idea that these things that we call hu-

man beings are more than just physical shells. When we go more deeply into these physi-cal shells we would find that we have emotions, an intellect, creativity, energy fields, a

spirit and so on. The deeper we go the more we find. The idea of being spiritual means

connecting with the deeper parts of who we are to the deepest levels that we can fathom and beyond.

Both start ups and seasoned business owners have to use the same tools and techniques

to achieve and create success in the business. Really, though, the more aligned and con-nected they are internally with their passions, purposes, and in my field our inner wis-

dom, the greater the successes.

Of the five elements the first is one of the most profound ideas that I share with my cli-ents and in seminars. That is that anything that we experience with our business is a re-

flection of what is going on within us. For example, if a life coach is having trouble at-tracting wealth, or clients, the first thing that we do in our coaching together is to explore

how this could be more of an issue within them rather than about their business. Most en-trepreneurs instinctually look to the business and ask what they are doing wrong in the

running of it. In my work, though, everything is a reflection of us in some way, including

an abundance of clients or a lack of clients.

In the same way, an issue with finances is rarely, if ever, a true issue with finances; it is an issue within the individual somehow.‘ So what we aim to do is discover what the issue

is within that person. A simple and concrete example would be the idea of worth or being of value. When an individual truly recognizes his/her value, others do as well. I find this

with all of the clients that I work with including the two-thirds of my coaching practice who are business owners and coaches. Any time we notice that they‘re having any chal-

lenges we go inside them and find out what is going on there. As soon as we discover what that is, and they change their perspective on that, their business almost magically

changes as well. As such, they all-of-a-sudden start attracting again, their finances open up and so on. This is also why many refer to me as a Synchronicity Coach. Contrary to

the old paradigm of working hard, attracting clients can be easy if we simply line up with those internal elements that are a part of what we think of when we use the term spiritu-

ality. So, it is quite interesting how that can occur, even though we may not even talk

about finances at all.

I: Right. (Continued next page.)

Joshua Zuchter continued…

JZ: The second element, and this is significant to the concept of being spiritual, is that deep down within us, we all have what some people would refer to as a soul or

a higher self, inner being, inner wisdom, and what I typically refer to as one‘s heart

of hearts. My experiences have shown me that the more connected we are to that heart of hearts, the more we‘re guided to where we need to be.

If an entrepreneur is wanting to develop a business in a certain way, for example,

when that person taps into their deeper self, they can actually gain some ideas, creativity and be guided to exactly what they need to do first. This may sound a bit

bizarre, but I actually hear quotes while I am in the midst of coaching my clients. These are ones I have never read or heard before. One of my favorites that came

recently is on selfishness; ―Selfishness is ironic, as sometimes we need to be more selfish in order to give more to others.‖

In the coaching world and in the spiritual world this is an interesting philosophy be-

cause most people shun the idea of being selfish, which couldn‘t be further from the truth.

I: I completely agree with that.

JZ: Most people are not willing to do that because we‘ve been taught by others that we shouldn‘t. So people actually begin feeling bad about taking that time with them-

selves, when really that time is likely important recharge time and will help others in the long-term.

That quote is an example of something that I heard. I have never read it, nor have I

ever seen it before; it just came to me in an instant and so the more we connect within ourselves, the more we are guided and that is a significant element to running

a business.

Over the years I have come across some interesting research that shows that busi-ness owners specifically, seem to have exceptional instincts. I suspect this is often

out of necessity and the result of facing challenges in business that require tapping

in to overcome.

The next element is about maintaining vision. When we drive a car, or skate, or rol-lerblade, for example, we typically look far ahead down the road. We do not look di-

rectly in front of our car. So, when we‘re driving, we are maintaining our vision down the road while also maintaining some awareness of what is directly in front of us.

The key here is to do the same with business. What most business owners go through, at some point, is a loss of the expanded vision. In essence they lose sight

of their vision. In the personal growth field and spiritual world we talk about vision. In the business world, it is called a business plan.

I: Right.

-30-

JZ: Really, it‘s the same thing. A key to maintaining vision is to be reminding yourself

of the vision and adding at least one idea to it each day. There are many ways to create a vision: Write it out word-for-word, create a vision board, or, a vision box for which you

would clip out neat images and ideas and place them in a nice box to review now and then. If you think in a more linear fashion, you could use a simple Excel spreadsheet

and create a timeline. We have all of these neat tools out our fingertips to help us in keeping our vision, and again, that‘s a part kind of blending in the idea of being spiritual

and with business.

I: Yeah, I get that. Often I think it has to be whatever resonates or feels right for you to do. For some people it is writing, for others it is the vision board, that‘s what draws

you in and it taps into that creativity in your mind and thus brings it forth, I think.

JZ: Exactly! And that‘s the idea of reconnecting deeper inside. So, our vision, in a way, helps us to connect more deeply. It connects us with the inspiration that we were

moved by in the first place when we started our business.

Another key is that there is always an inflow and an outflow when it comes to business

and finances as well as the spiritual order of things. In business there is always going to be a rise and a fall. We are always going to have great months, and we are going to

have less than great months. That is going to occur forevermore. The key is not to get caught in focusing on the not so great months. Focusing strictly on the outflow and how

money is going out and attempting to reduce expenses is not as helpful and can easily lead to becoming lost in reducing expenses.

After about a year of starting my business, it was probably one of the hardest times of

my life, and I was on the verge of bankruptcy, I was eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch and dinner every day for a few weeks because I didn‘t have any

funds to buy anything else and the main issue that I had was that I was so focused on what was not going right within my business and how high my expenses were that I had

lost sight of my vision for my business. I was so focused on the outflow, I was trying to

cut back my expenses that I wasn‘t involved in thinking how I could create more inflow. What actually shifted me out of the challenge I had, avoiding bankruptcy, reestablish

great credit, and paying off some of the debt I had amassed in a quick period of time, was focusing on what I could create and how I could increase my inflow.

I: That‘s what happens!

JZ: The simple act of focusing on creating a new inflow and allowing the outflow to go

as it does will just foster a balanced state, and as a result, our business will take care of itself naturally.

I: I think that this is a very big one for most people.

JZ: Absolutely! And the last element of blending these kinds of spiritual concepts into

business is a significant one. It is to be okay with falling. Put in another way, be okay

with failing. Failing and falling in the context of business are the same thing. (Continued next page.)

Joshua Zuchter continued…

I am a big fan of movies, I tend to watch tons of movies and my clients laugh when I refer all of the movies to them; because instead of having a huge book list they

have a huge movie list; If you are very visual, one of the best movies I have seen

that teaches this concept about falling is the newest Rocky Balboa film. There is a powerful scene where Rocky is speaking with his son and talking about this exact

point about falling and getting up again. Even Sylvester Stallone the actor himself, has shown this especially when he started his career. It is a remarkable story and I

highly recommend seeing the film to get a sense of what we‘re talking about. Essen-tially we try to avoid falling because we‘re afraid we‘re going to hurt ourselves, and

we do the same in business. We think we have to get it perfect, we have to get eve-rything right on the first go and the truth of the matter is, if we look at the top busi-

ness owners in the world, we find these individuals have gone bankrupt or failed many times. If they haven‘t gone bankrupt they have come close many times…

They have opened and closed businesses many times.

I: What‘s amazing is that they quickly step right back up!

JZ: You got it! What they developed is a belief in themselves and in their ability to fall and then just get right back up. What I teach people now and what I share with

people is to let yourself fall a little bit.

What I like to teach is to be okay with falling and actually encourage becoming good at it. The irony is that the more apprehensive we are about falling the worse the

falls are. So, when we fall, we really hurt ourselves. This a significant key and one

that I would like to stress - to be okay with falling and making sure that you get up.

I: I think that is excellent. So, what programs do you offer to people to help them feel more in tune to business and life?

JZ: I offer two items. First, of course, is my coaching that is really based on this.

Although I do work with my clients on copy writing, article writing, master with mar-keting, website steps, strategizing, product development etc., really we weave in all

of these principles into the running of their businesses. During the major drop in the economy all of my clients who are business owners, actually had booms in their

businesses – despite what the economy was showing.

The second item or program I offer is called The Discovered Art of Core Journaling. In a way, it is a method of coaching yourself. You write down questions and then

you receive answers to them. This is a four and half hour home study program and

is available on my website. I even still use it to this day if challenges ever come up for me. I simply use this tool and method to clear the challenges and it is highly ef-

fective fairly quickly. When we realize we have all of the answers inside of us, there is no more need for questions… All that is required is engaging in life and creating

what we meant for.

Learn more about Joshua Zuchter: http://www.joshuazuchter.com/

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