The answer is Love. Now what is the question?

Here’s a couple of extracts from Di’s new book.

How much do you love yourself?

Do you feel that it’s immodest to love yourself?  Could this perhaps be one of the biggest limiting beliefs you hold?

There are two facts about love… the first is that no one can love you more than you love yourself.

The love you create and experience in your life will be in direct relation to the amount you love yourself.  If you do not love yourself, then how can you ever believe that anyone else can love you?  Truly, ask yourself that question, because it will be enlightening for you.  It creates a ‘push/pull’ energy.  You will ‘need’ love from others to make you feel complete, whilst rejecting it at the same time, not understanding what it is about you that there is to love.

The second fact about love, is that it will have a say in how you respond to anything. When life squeezes you, then you will respond with love, compassion and understanding if you are filled to the brim with self-love.  If on the other hand you are filled with bitterness or resentment, then with each person who responds negatively to you, instead of seeing through the eyes of love and understanding, you will see and feel their response as a personal insult, failing to see that they are dealing with their own fears and beliefs which they are projecting onto you.  This is when we choose to take every negative thing on board and allow everyone else to control how we’re going to feel on any given day… this is a very fearful place to be indeed…

Projection

One of the most amazing things is that whatever we’re feeling about someone, we will project onto that person. If you subconsciously don’t like someone, they will sense it very subtly from your eyes, the way you look at them, from your body language, and from something in your energy.  We find it very difficult to feel comfortable in the presence of someone we feel doesn’t like us, yet we’re often not quite sure how or why we know, we just do. 

I remember working with a client whose employees had a grievance against him, and he said to me ‘I’ve no idea why everyone thinks I’m bullying them, because I walk around all day at work with a smile on my face’.  However, the smile was hiding something – his energy was angry, frustrated, it came from his eyes, I felt it from him too.  Yet, trying to explain this is like trying to explain how or why electricity works.  We know it’s there, subconsciously we understand why we connect more with some people than with others, why we relish being around some people and can’t wait to get away from others.

One of the most powerful things I learned when I moved in with Andy was that the way in which he generally expected me to behave, was the way in which I inevitably ended up behaving in his company.  I was naïve to expect that I wouldn’t have to go through some ‘stuff’ after removing myself from a life and identity of 21 years, all my possessions and friends and plonking myself into a brand new life, with very few of my own things around me, into someone else’s home as opposed to my own, and into a brand new life and relationship.  Did I go through stuff… oh yes!  It was like being stripped down and having to start again.  Although I loved myself unconditionally before entering into the relationship with him, no one warns you that you’re going to have to start all over again when you go into a new relationship!  So, Andy would often wake in the morning wondering whether I was feeling good or not, and the moment he looked at me in expectancy of a possible bad mood, it was instantly created.

If on other occasions we went out and something would happen which Andy felt was likely to upset me, he would begin to behave in a manner in which this expectancy flowed from his eyes and it was actually that, not the occurrence, that upset me!  I learned very quickly that my behaviour around Andy generally reflected exactly what he seemed to be thinking about me.   These were such powerful lessons about projection for both of us…

We have now mastered the art of keeping ourselves happy, and allowing the other person to be exactly where they are, without any expectation of behaviour, or by joining the other of us in feeling bad… this is the quickest way to help those around you lift their spirits again. 

I then began to realise that I had also looked at others with expectancy in the past, resulting in my creating in them exactly the behaviour that I didn’t want!  Others would somehow read my expectations towards them in my energy the moment they came into my presence, and would then begin to behave accordingly. Each and every one of us does this regularly, however, the difference was that I began to notice it … and as soon as I noticed it, I realised that I had the power to change it!  My goodness… was I literally creating my relationships with other people simply by what I was focusing on in their behaviour?  Yes, I was! 

This was the biggest learning for me in how to diffuse a situation with love.  If someone is angry at you, or you are expecting angry behaviour from another, the way to help change the energy of the situation is to begin to look at them through the eyes of love.  When people are angry it is because they are struggling with something.  We, however, more often than not choose to see this as a personal insult.  If we choose to be understanding instead, it creates alternative behaviour in others…

So it dawned on me little by little that I was with absolute certainty creating my life with the energy I was emitting.  When I first learned about the Law of Attraction, it taught me that all I had to do was ask for something, believe it was coming and then receive it.  Basically all my thoughts became things… so if I thought about a black Mercedes, then would one inevitably appear in my driveway the following week?  No, most likely not, although a great deal of what I do think about does seem to magically flow to me. I believe that the Law of Attraction works on a much deeper level still.  It is created within our own energy – what we emit, we create.  This applies in relationships (intimate or otherwise), with animals, in job interviews, with sales… you name it!

What we are thinking about, however angry or frustrated we are, we draw like-minded people towards us.  Energy attracts like energy.  Negative people don’t enjoy being around positive people one little bit!  Not unless they’re ready to begin the journey that is… I remember when I first became so excited about positive thinking, my usual group of friends when I had loved moaning and complaining about everything soon began to resent my entering into a room, even saying ‘Oh great, here comes Miss Positive again!’… it was hurtful at the time, but a very necessary and powerful learning for my journey.  As my journey progressed I began projecting that I wanted happiness, I loved being around happy people, and they loved being around me – I had changed.  Our energies no longer matched… and with an understanding of how and why energies attract each other, it all makes perfect sense.

It is for this reason that it is absolutely essential to love yourself fully before entering into a relationship.  If you do, you will attract someone who loves their own company too… if you love your company, your partner certainly will.  Someone who loves themselves would never be attracted to someone they needed to ‘fix’ or someone whose energy drained them.  You may say this happens… but I would disagree.  The self-love would not be from a place of genuine authenticity if so.  For instance, many people take on partners that need ‘fixing’.  Now this is a sign that the ‘fixer’ gains something by ‘fixing’ another, they generally get to feel better about themselves, feel worthy, feel superior… make sense?  So yes, they may say they love themselves, but realistically if they still need this sense of stimulation to feel good about themselves, then how can that possibly be true self-love?…

I am loving this journey… sharing my truth… and saying it exactly as I see it!    ♥♫♪

From Frustration, Anger and Divorce to Authenticity, Love and Acceptance

Hi, I’m Andy Nicholson, relationship and authenticity coach and personal development trainer.

I’m living the life of my choosing, I have learned to love and accept myself, I have learned to love and accept others (although I’m not always as wonderful at this as I might like!! – I am still a work in progress).

It was not always like this…. Five years ago after redundancy and divorce, I was mainly angry and frustrated – I was not in control of my life or my emotions. I was stuck, disempowered.

Then I came to realise that I could become very empowered. I was in fact at a crossroads in my life. Before me was a blank sheet of paper, on which I could design the life that I wanted…

But what did I want? What was possible for me?

I did not know. All I knew was what I did not want. The truth is that I was proud of knowing what I did not want. I felt that it gave me direction, helped me to make choices. I even gave myself kudos for this strategy in life. In my 20s it seemed to work, I seemed to be happier than some of my peers who perhaps did know what they wanted (or thought that they did) and were angry, fearful or depressed for not achieving their desired outcomes. Some even looked up to me for doing what I did.

Then, in my 30s, after my entrepreneurial businesses had ‘failed’ I knuckled down into a career, got a mortgage, a pension, got married… I did all the ‘normal’ stuff. I felt that I did not have enough fun and took life too seriously – but I believed I ‘had’ to, I was conditioned to think like this – the good old protestant work ethic…. So I made attempts to be more fun, more outgoing, I even chose a wife who was very much a fun, party animal, extroverted, the life and soul, needed at least three expensive holidays per year…. She warned me against marrying her, as she felt that she may be too much (for me, for many men) – her statement “I’m a nightmare, don’t marry me” fell on deaf ears. I felt that I was a match for her concerns. Boy, was I deluding myself! Now don’t get me wrong, my ex-wife is a wonderful woman, we just had different expectations, a different pace, differing priorities, values and beliefs. The truth is that her life works for her. Mine was not working for me and in many ways, I unwittingly tried to use her to fix me.

So there I was, 39, uninspired by my job, divorced, directionless. At this point, I bumped into an old friend of mine. After listening to my tale of woe (I poured my heart out – dumped all my frustration onto him), he suggested that I go along to a monthly meeting. No, it was not religious, it was about personal development (PD). I’d actually come across a few ‘PD’ and self-help books in previous years, and whilst interesting and inspiring, like most people, once read, I just carried on as normal, deluding myself that I did not need to change me – I just needed the world to change and give me a break!

I enjoyed the personal development get-togethers. Some great speakers started to challenge my mind-set and my beliefs and gradually open me up to new possibilities. I also enjoyed being around people who were more positive. Of course, I believed that some of the speakers, who had achieved great things, had some special talents that I did not possess and could not possess, so I did not intend to try to emulate them. It was safer and easier that way.

Then, after 10 months of attending the PD meetings, two relationship coaches gave a talk that would cause me to change my life. I’d been separated for nearly a year. My divorce had come through, yet the feelings were still raw. I felt like the marriage had been a waste of time, effort and a lot of money. I had yet to be able to take anything positive from the experience, especially any learnings. I felt like I was likely to make the same mistakes all over again (and I was).

I had been going out on lots of dates, courtesy of match.com and Dating Direct. Initially, this was just to get me out of the marital house and have some fun – living under the same roof for 10 months whilst separated was not much fun. I quickly found that I was able to feel more like my old self when out flirting. Yet after a while, there I was again, seeking the answers and my happiness outside of me, from others – seeking recognition and affirmation.

The 2 ½ hour talk by the relationship coaches, who were married, blew me away. It challenged so many of my beliefs about relationships and challenged my very identity and behaviour as a man. I had to know more. I signed up for their four day retreat at their base in Austria. Three months later, I had the most enjoyable and eye-opening four days of my life. I loved their teachings, it all seemed to make so much sense and yet was so contrary to how I ran my life. I recognised for the first time that I possessed an awesome set of values, and a lousy set of beliefs. I was living my life according to my beliefs, out of alignment with my values – hence I was unfulfilled and frustrated.

Picture – Andrew on top of the world (well, a small mountain) in Austria.

While in Austria, I also started to recognise that only I could take responsibility for my life and achieving better outcomes and more happiness. No one could do it for me. It sounds obvious now, yet how many of us are kidding ourselves…? On the Sunday, over breakfast, whilst discussing the meaning of life… I had an epiphany!  The work of the Retreat was completely in alignment with my values. I found the Retreat owners to be inspiring and I felt passionate about their purpose in life. I wanted to help them to help others like me. Plus, I had all these business, marketing and IT skills, which their ‘cottage industry’ could benefit from – I could help them to spread the word.

So to cut a long story short, 6 months later I moved to Austria, lived and worked at the retreat for 20 months, and almost by osmosis (and by attending over 30 days of training that they offered), my outlook on life transformed. While in Austria, I still liked female attention. I dated a couple of girls and flirted with a couple of others. While I was gradually awakening to myself, I was still in some denial. I was denying my potential. Although I felt that I now had my ideal vocation, I still would not face up to what I wanted in an ideal relationship. I underestimated and under-valued myself.

After 12 months in Austria, I decided that it was time to stop playing games. It was time to claim what was rightfully mine – the life of my dreams, a life and a journey that I wanted to share with my soul-mate (whoever she was). My role in Austria was not stretching me enough and I did not feel that the opportunity to grow at the same pace would remain open to me.  I also put out my intention to meet my soul-mate and I trusted that I would find her when the time was right. This was in April 2007.

Around the same time that I went to Austria, I enrolled to train in NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), a branch of psychology and personal development that is based around how the brain works and how we think and behave. NLP introduced me to the concept that we all a have wildly different values and beliefs. Along with our innate talents and learned skills, this is what makes us unique – who we are and how we behave.

Andy’s Values
2006	2008
Love Happiness Integrity Connection Growth Health Humour Passion Affection Creativity Family Freedom Abundance	Happiness Pleasure Zest for life Balance Connection Health Purpose Freedom Direction Contribution Congruence Growth Creativity

Having identified my values, I started to want to be more congruent with them and to act with integrity. This lead to two things: firstly, a desire to go back to the UK in order to create my life how I wanted it, living my purpose rather than supporting someone else’s and secondly the desire to find my soul-mate.

You can see in the table opposite how my values changed over two years. I discovered more purpose, energy and enthusiasm, placed myself my purpose and my freedom above the need to please others and seek approval. This shift in values reflected what I had learned from my mentors in Austria about ‘turning up my masculinity dial’.

Being a kind, empathetic and supportive person, I’ve never had too much trouble getting in touch with my feminine side. We all have masculine and feminine aspects to our character. Many would say that to be a balanced and whole person we have to embrace and integrate both these energies, i.e. the yin and yang.

At the end of a 10 day relationship coaching training course in Austria with 12 other people, we were each rated (by the group) on our behaviour and how we outwardly expressed ourselves in terms of masculine vs. feminine energy. This was a fascinating and nerve wracking experience!! My score came out as 59 masculine and 44 feminine. Both scores are out of 100, the theory being that we will typically spend 70-80% of our time displaying the core energy of our gender, i.e. I would typically be 70-80% in my masculine and 20-30% in my feminine. As I said, a fascinating and not un-controversial subject! Again, to cut a long story short, I reckon my energy is now more like 75-80% masculine and 30-35% feminine. This shift has definitely helped me to become more authentically myself.

This is another great example of how I have transformed my experience of life. From all of my study and learnings, I have created what I call my model of Authentic Transformation. This is not a process of re-inventing yourself, or swapping one false self, for a slightly better false self. This process of true personal and spiritual (with a small ‘s’) development is about identifying who you really are and learning the tools that allow you to be authentically you, in all situations and roles. Whilst what I learned and how I turned up my masculinity certainly helped me a lot as a single man, when it came to putting this into practise within relationships, it was not without major challenges…

Towards the end of my stay in Austria, in July 2007, I received an e-mail from one of the dating sites that I had been on a few months earlier. A lady in America had read my profile and sent me an email. I’d not been on the site for several months and my membership had lapsed. I had no desire to start a transatlantic relationship. Whilst online, I looked at who else was also online – there were only a handful of people. I immediately resonated with one of the profiles, a lady from the Highlands of Scotland. We connected and clicked straight away. I happened to be back in the UK the very next week, for the first time in a year. I cheekily invited her to fly down and meet me. She did, and the rest is history… I’d been looking for my soul-mate and I’d found her. Six months later, I moved back to the UK and Diane left her life in Scotland to come and live and work together with me. We had only spent three weeks together in those six months. The fact that we had both done a lot of work on ourselves, and were able to be ourselves without any egos, masks game playing, without the need to try to impress, made all the difference. Our story is featured in other articles.

By loving ourselves 10 out of 10, we were able to accept ourselves and speak our truth to each other without any neediness and falseness. Some people may thing that loving yourself at a ‘10’ is arrogant, egotistical, selfish or even narcissistic! It is not. In fact it is the most self-less thing that you can do. For when you are full of love, you only have love to give others – you lose the need to blame, criticise, judge, hate…

Now it may seem like I am painting a very idyllic picture and everything has been plain sailing. That is definitely not the case. Intimate relationships are one of life’s most challenging things. Not only do you have to master your own behaviour, you have to learn to do so in close proximity to another, very different being. Diane and I are very different. We seemed to accept each other in principle, there were still aspects of each other’s behaviour that we each found challenging. Whilst we share many values, beliefs and our purpose in life, our personality styles are very different. This caused us some challenges, especially living and working together 24/7. Throughout, we have remained convinced that we are soul-mates or ‘twin flames’ and we have experienced amazing connection, synergy and love.  We have had to learn new tools and insights to enable our love to flourish and achieve its true potential.

Ten months into our relationship we enrolled on a training course about the Enneagram personality ‘typing’ system. I had been aware of a variety of such systems; whilst interesting, they all seemed rather complex, confusing and hardly earth-shattering. The Enneagram was different, it dealt with the whole person, you could really identify with it. For us, it was like the missing piece of the jigsaw. It finally explained why Di and I were so different and it allowed us to understand, accept and embrace those differences. We now use the Enneagram with many of our clients.

The other missing piece of the jigsaw for most people is their fears, underpinned by limiting beliefs. Whilst working in the PD industry, I noticed ‘pareto’ at work; only 20% of people seemed to take what they had been taught and use it to transform their lives and achieve the results that they wanted. They other 80% did not – they unwittingly seemed to treat the process as an intellectual exercise, ticking boxes, perhaps becoming ‘course junkies’. When I met Diane, she was Susan Jeffers first and only ‘Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway®’ tutor. I now teach this incredible workshop, based on the best selling book, with Di. It is the most powerful agent of change. It is also the first step that most people need to take in their journey; a step once taken that enables anyone to play full out in all aspects of life, taking and applying the most from any other training that they do.

With these tools and experiences, we believe that we have created a framework that can enable anyone to turn their lives around, overcoming fear, limiting beliefs and unhelpful models of the world; connecting with their values, personality style, emotionality, purpose, personal responsibility and accountability. It is an holistic approach – one that can deliver both immediate benefits and a transformation that takes months rather than years and hundreds rather than thousands of £s.

So in summary, growing up and learning to take responsibility for your life is a process of:

SELF AWARENESS to SELF-ACCEPTANCE to SELF-ACTUALISATION

Self-actualisation is a term used by the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow, who created the wonderful model ‘the hierarchy of human needs’ – this is another powerful tool of self-discovery that we use. For me, self-actualisation means being the best that I can be. During this process of authentic transformation, you also learn to accept and value others and their differences. This journey can also be thought of as evolving from:

DEPENDENCE to INDEPENENCE to INTER-DEPENDENCE

When life goes according to plan, most of us learn to move successfully from dependence to independence. When life gets hard, we may become fiercely independent, not letting others in, or we may relapse back into co-dependency seemingly unable or unwilling to take responsibility for ourselves. Inter-dependence is being able to accept, cooperate and collaborate with others, learning to give unconditionally and also to be able to ask for help and to willingly receive.

Some of the key learnings from my own journey include:

•    I am way more than my fears, beliefs and alter-ego
•    No one else can do it for me; they can help me to see more clearly and find ‘my way’
•    The answers are not outside of me
•    The answer is not to seek an intimate relationship to fill me up or fill the gaps in my life
•    Be open to new learnings, new perspectives and to challenge my beliefs – constantly
•    To become free of ego, opinion and judgement
•    To accept and embrace that we are all different
•    Real love is free of fear
•    Unhelpful behaviour and unresourceful emotions are largely habitual
•    More empowering behaviour and emotions can be learned
•    We are all innately good inside. We all have a ‘higher self’

Much has been written in recent years about the importance of ‘emotional intelligence’, yet there is little practical help out there to achieve it. Everything that Di and I have learned and developed in our coaching and training business is about helping people to become emotionally intelligent, to be able to live and love with others in inter-dependence, and to live the self-actualised life of your dreams.

We are giving at talk at the ‘Starting Over Show’ in London on Sunday March 7th 2010, where we will also have a stand. Do come and see us.

Andy & Di x

www.executive-relationship-coaching.co.uk www.dimacdowall-lifecoaching.co.uk

‘Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway®’ is a registered trademark of Susan Jeffers, PhD and is being used with her express permission.

Great Feedback from Solihull Business Club

The feedback from Solihull Business Club was “thanks for delivering an excellent presentation“.

“Businesses do have personalities which cascade down from the top, and too often in the UK that is a negative energy which hampers everything the company dreams of doing, I do agree that being able to bring a positive energy in to any organisation is a key ingredient for success.“

Our presentation was titled:”What’s at the Cutting Edge of Personal Development, Coaching and Mentoring? How Can It Help Me And My Business?” We discussed how fear, limiting beliefs, a lack of emotional intelligence in management and leadership are all interrelated and drastically hold businesses back from achieving their true potential, on all kinds of levels. The solution… we demonstrated how to manage emotions, overcome fear, promote great energy and manifest great connections between staff, management and customers, attracting outstanding success utilising the Law of Attraction. Our coaching, mentoring and training can facilitate this within individuals and businesses/organisations.

We have been invited back next year to present the club with even more inspiration and thought provoking, awareness raising material.

Here’s what Charles Willcock, Chairman, Solihull Business Club had to say:

“In the current economic situation if you have any doubts about the future,  and how to handle the challenges all around you, Andrew Nicholson and Diane MacDowall provide a refreshing thought provoking, energising presentation which helps you realise that, you have the potential to change your situation for the better, if you want to make that change“.

We are looking for more speaker engagements like this, so do let us know if you are aware of any.

Thanks, Andy & Di

PS. For those who missed our rendition last night, here is a video of ‘The Gratitude Dance’ on YouTube.  TRY IT! Notice how your level of vibrational energy and joy rises. This is a simple, effective example of one of the many many things that you can do to float up the emotional scale and promote emotional intelligence.

Welcome to Andy & Di’s blog

Welcome to our blog, which is for anyone and everyone. It is also for all of our coaching and workshop clients to keep in contact, see what we are up to, keep up with our latest news and ask us questions, sharing in the answers.

The blog is also for anyone else who wants to learn how to transform their life, their outcomes and their level of happiness, find fulfillment, find their purpose and live authentically.

Throughout the blog we will signpost you to great resources to help you to overcome fear or anxiety, turn around limiting beliefs, understand yourself better, understand intimacy and relationships and create and manifest the life of your dreams, completely on-purpose. Where appropriate we will give you links to the relevant pages on our web sites or on other people’s. Here are our web sites:

• www.dimacdowall-lifecoaching.co.uk
• www.connecttoyourpotential.com (our all new website) – check it out for the most powerfulwasy to manifest to your fullest potential

Have fun reading and contributing.

Please note that all postings on this blog, unless otherwise stated, are Copyright Andrew Nicholson & Diane MacDowall © 2008 and are protected by a Creative Commons Licence by Attribution Not for Commercial Use No Derivative Works click here if you are in any doubt about the terms of this. Postings written by us on this blog can be copied in their entirity (not altered) and reproduced (not sold) so long as the following is also included: Copyright Andrew Nicholson & Diane MacDowall © 2008, http://cosmicattraction.wordpress.com

Love and light

Andy & Di x