With Michael Neill

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Full Transcript

Michael Balchan 00:00

We like to say hi to everybody.

Michael Neill 00:01

You can do that?

Michael Balchan 00:02

And then you'll see cameras on, cameras off, probably throughout. But welcome, Diane, Maynard, Paul, Amanda, Vicky. Good to see you, Mary Ellen, Jana, Aureli. Great to see you. That's twice, I think, this week so far, I don't know if we're not going to be able to go three for three, but we're going to have a lot of fun. All right, and AJ recording's going. Am I unmuted? Yeah. Later, record. Yeah, I'm. I'm definitely hearing you. Okay. Well, fired up. Welcome back, heroic coach. We've got an extraordinary guest today, Michael Neill, one of the real early pioneers of coaching.

Brilliant author, just a great human being. Before we went live, Michael, I was celebrating you, the impact you had on me as a young coach, as a young guy getting into the idea of being able to shift who I was and to transform from the inside out. I know inside out coaching being a just a big piece of what you've done and gratitude appreciation. Wanted to start there and I know I did it already, but to let everybody know just the impact you've had and five million is that what you said? The YouTube channel? Yeah.

Michael Neill 01:22

Just cross like the five million views thing, and I'm like, that's a lot, is what I thought.

Michael Balchan 01:29

And to the five million people, or I'm sure there are some repeat viewers, pets probably not included, but five million who have experienced that and have been transformed by your work. So congratulations!

Michael Neill 01:44

Thank you.

Michael Balchan 01:45

I'd like to know, kind of out of the gate, you've been in this space for a long time. You worked with a lot of folks before anyone knew what coaching was, and now here we are, 2026, the age of AI, the transition there, a lot going on in the world, what's changed, and what are you most excited about right now as we sit here in the middle of 2026?

Michael Neill 02:11

Well, this whole thing is making me feel super old, just so everybody knows. Back in 1990, when I first started out.

Michael Balchan 02:22

Uphill both ways.

Michael Neill 02:23

I know, but one of the things that I had never heard of coaching, and so I didn't know what to call what I did. I was trained in enough modalities that called themselves therapies, so I called it therapy, and I didn't love charging people who really needed help, like weren't okay or didn't seem okay without help, and I struggled with that. And then when I came across this, and this is just how it looked to me, when I came across this field called coaching, where you made a real difference to people, but if you didn't, they'd be fine.

That to me was like, oh, that's great, and so I made that transition to coaching, and I did early coach trainings, and I trained with kind of anybody who'd have me, and then eventually over time, my understanding grew, and my way of doing what I do and the trainings I offer emerged. Now, what I think is just super cool is AI is here to clean up the industry because anything formulaic, anything by the book, anything that says, "Just do these five simple things." AI can do better than this. It doesn't have off days. It doesn't have to remember anything.

It can do it in its sleep because it doesn't sleep. So it forces us as coaches to actually be more human, to see what it is that's underneath techniques that really impacts people, and to bring that to the table. So I've found, completely unexpectedly, and I won't say against my will, but against my thought.

When I created or was persuaded to create by one of my clients who ran an AI company, Digital Michael, I was very resistant to it for all the reasons most people are resistant to things, what I discovered over it took us about a year before we were ready to release it, is it really does do a lot of the questioning part of coaching amazingly well. It asks really good on point questions. It listens really cleanly. I know it doesn't technically, but it seems like it does.

But what it's done for me is it's freed me up to focus on what can I do that AI can't. What can I offer that isn't in the simple dialog that you could have with a really good AI, and I think the one we've created is really good, and so I'm excited about how we evolve each other because it's like a game of leapfrog. We get better, it gets better, and if we want to, we can get better, and it's a brave new world for me.

Michael Balchan 05:21

I love that invitation and excitement to co-evolve. Right, everything on this planet has evolved together, and now we've got this opportunity to, as it does more and is capable of doing more. And for us who are in this, in some ways, the business of being fully human, and what is it? What is it? This experience that we're going through look like, and how do we navigate that with intentionality, with power, with removing any blinders? And I love the framework you have around like, look, you have thoughts. We all have thoughts.

Like, doesn't mean you have to believe them or take them as gospel truth. But how do we want to co-evolve together, and what is that space for us in the coaching space, where that's professional coaches using coaching as a skill set for our families, our teams, our employees, etc. How do we leverage these tools and also spend more time doing what feels more human and more value add outside of what these technologies might be able to.

Michael Neill 06:26

When we first brought out Digital Michael, I had a client who is a Sunday Times best-selling novelist, an amazing writer, and she was horrified. She said, "We need to meet," and we did. And we actually had a really good conversation, and she made some really good points about the perils. And I said the one thing I know is nothing good is going to come of approaching it with fear. So I don't know where it goes, but I know that fear is not going to help. So I have no interest in stoking that.

And for me, what I've found so far has been really delightful, and especially for coaches where we tend to be on our own or with a relatively small team if we have a team, what AI allows us to do is handle all the crap that has to happen in order for us to show up and be with another person. It's really great at doing that.

And so, for me, so far, while I'm not by any means saying, "Yeah, let's let it take over the world," I'm getting a hell of a lot from it, and I'm learning a hell of a lot from it.

And like I say, when it first, the very first use that I made of it was I would ask it to write a piece about something I wanted to write about, so I could see the traps of doing a good Michael Neill impression, because it does a great Michael Neill impression because it's been trained on all my work, but I can feel the difference between when I'm sharing something. It's almost like in my head I have Michael Neill's greatest hits, and I can hear them. Oh, it's time to cue up this one, and I know not to.

That's the one the AI version of me would tell. So I'm willing to take that extra three seconds to let something new and different come to mind, and so it forces me, in a really helpful way, to stay fresh and to stay relevant, and not to just fall back on, "I'll tell this story. I can just do this thing."

Michael Balchan 08:41

Well, let's step back then and go back to some of these. I think principles that you were fresh and relevant and new at the time, and now have become deeply embedded in the industry itself. And again, that's inside out the things you're doing in the Super Coach Academy. Some of these like things that again fresh and relevant maybe when you were starting and now just kind of part and parcel and first principles all those things. What are those some of those pillars of being in this kind of relationship and having both relationship of me to me and then in a coaching dynamic that are really just foundational?

Michael Neill  09:20

Well, one of the biggest things, and it sounds obvious in my head, but I know from talking with thousands of people that it's just not obvious, is human beings are actually freaking amazing. Like we are so capable, we literally have the intelligence of life running through us, we have this extraordinary capacity to notice things way beyond our knowledge base, and we have this incredible creative capacity that lets us generate something from nothing on an ongoing basis. The problem isn't that we need to work on ourselves.

The problem is that most people have no idea how to get the most out of themselves, and so for me, a lot of what has been taught as coaching was really kind of therapy light. It kind of started with the premise of okay, we're going to figure out what's wrong with you and make it better, but we're going to do it in a kind of a lighter way that's maybe less going so deeply into the past and things like that. Whereas if you start with the understanding that there is not a baby in the world that needs therapy, right?

We came out perfect and whole, and all that happened along the way, to make us seem less than that, is we got into a lot of really unhelpful habits of thinking that make the world seem much harder and make us seem much less capable than it really is, and than we really are. So for me, that's the most fundamental premise. This is not about creating a better you. If anything, it's a reclamation project. It's about how you get back to what's always been there underneath all the crap we inevitably pick up. I used an analogy recently that I really liked.

It would be like if your parents were blind, and you grew up in a blind community, and so they sent you to blind school because that's where everyone goes, and nobody asked, and it didn't occur to you that you weren't blind. So you would learn how to navigate life the way a blind person has to, and because nobody told you just assumed everybody was like you. You just went, okay, I don't see why we're doing it this way.

It seems kind of hard, but okay, I'll count the number of steps and I'll learn to read with my fingers and I'll do all this. But at some point, if you realize, wait, this is so much easier. I can just look, and then I'll see what to do. And then take it a step further. You look around and you realize actually nobody in the community is blind. They just all have their eyes shut.

And so, in some ways, a lot of what coaching is about is teaching people the difference between living with their eyes open and navigating from fantastic strategies with their eyes when their eyes are closed.

Michael Balchan 12:30

Then, what's the if blindness is the thing that we are all assuming and not actually questioning? And I love the metaphor, by the way.

Michael Neill 12:40

I do too. These things always just come out of my mouth, and occasionally I go, "I'm going to keep that one. I like that one."

Michael Balchan 12:45

That was good. I have to write that down. So, love that metaphor, and with that as foundation, then what are those? I listen to that metaphor, and I'm sure everyone here is listening to the metaphor and thinking, "Oh man, that must be really frustrating for the person growing up in the blind community and doing all these steps." We had a class yesterday. I love the David Foster Wallace, right? "How's the water, boys?" "What the hell is water?" metaphor, right? And it's easy to project that outward, like, oh wow, that must be so tough and sad and difficult or whatever for the person that has sight in the blind community, but is not leveraging it. The fish that doesn't even realize what the water is. What is that for us? How do we get back to that state?

Michael Neill 13:28

Closest thing I found to a universal, because some of it's idiosyncratic, but the closest thing I found to a universal is pretty much everybody has been taught that there is a right way to be. There's a right way to be. There's a right way to do things. Now, what that right way is can vary widely from person to person, family to family, community to community. But everybody pretty much agrees. Well, no, there is a right way, but you're wrong about what the right way is. That's the blind leading the blind.

If we start with an understanding that there is no right way to be, and you just look at nature does nature ever get it wrong? Nature's just nature; it does what it does. Then different questions become relevant, questions like, "What makes sense to me to do? How do I actually want to be, and what do I actually want to do or create in the world?" It may or may not sound dramatically different. I can tell you from experience, it is dramatically different because if I can't evaluate how I'm doing against a genuine external metric.

Then the only things I've really got are: Does it feel good and does it work? And the way I kind of my matrix for it is, if it feels good and works. Why wouldn't you do it if it doesn't feel good but it still works? Maybe if it feels good but doesn't work, maybe. But if it doesn't feel good and it doesn't work, why the hell would you keep doing it? And yet we train ourselves, we condition ourselves to do the thing because it's the right thing, even though we don't like it and even though it doesn't work.

Because if you just do it enough, and it's this-it's kind of nutty, unless you really do believe that there's a right way to be. In which case, it's perfectly sane. And I-that's just a fundamental. You talked about like tenets that I are fundamental principles of coaching. What I've come to see is that all behavior is sane given the premises, given the world we think we live in, given the way we think things work, given the thinking we have that looks real to us, what we do makes perfect sense.

It's just that a lot of that thinking and a lot of those premises are a little nutty, and one of those is there is a right way, and it just turns out there's not, but there are a million great ways.

Michael Balchan 16:07

What else?

Michael Neill 16:11

About what?

Michael Balchan 16:13

So premises, foundation of coaching. We've got this. Human beings are awesome. Like, yes, it's easy to say that, and it sounds.

Michael Neill 16:23

Simple.

Michael Balchan 16:24

But like to really and annoyingly.

Michael Neill 16:26

Get that we're not American. You got to kind of tone it down a little when you're speaking in Europe. But human.

Michael Balchan 16:32

Beings are quite cool.

Michael Neill 16:34

Human beings don't completely suck, but you can get away with that.

Michael Balchan 16:37

Yeah. There is no right or wrong way to do things in the abstract. All of our behavior relative to our patterns, our conditions, our rules, the environment that we live in is sane, and we can use. Does it feel good? And is it working? Is it helpful to me as a metric for navigating? Well, what is my right way to live? Right, and the Nietzsche quote asks, "What is the way?" There is no the way. This is my way. What is your way? Really deeply getting that. So, foundational pillars. What are some of those other foundational pillars that you find yourself coming back to over and over again? Something where it is, "Before, I saw the world this way. I had a chat with Michael, and now I see the world this way."

Michael Neill 17:26

There's an exercise that I do in groups a lot at the moment, and it's called "I Think, I Know." And you literally go around the group, and each person says one thing they think and one thing they know, and they don't have to be related. It can simply be, "I think I'm playing golf this afternoon. I know I'm talking to you right now." Like it doesn't have to be deep.

And what happens is the more you go around, the more people really start to feel the difference between all the different things they think, some of which are helpful, some of which aren't, and their inner knowing, the stuff that we actually know for ourselves-that we didn't learn and accept, learn and adopt. And when people start to get a feel for their knowing and just how reliable it is, they naturally start to refer to and live from that more, and I'll still consult their thinking because, like I say, it can be helpful. But it's the difference between the two.

Sometimes it's not quite this, but like in most cars, the nav system and the radio come through the same speakers. But knowing which is really helpful if you're trying to get somewhere, and being able to follow your knowing and not the random crap. One thing I remember: So my family are all like Harvard, MIT genius-weenie people, so it's always fun having these conversations with them because they challenge everything. Yeah, where's the science? And I remember one day we were hanging out around Thanksgiving, and I said to them, I said, okay. "Find me an original thought."

They said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Go through all the thoughts that you have and find me one that's actually yours, one that isn't something you picked up somewhere along the way." And it was fascinating because everybody came up with two or three, but 90 to 95% of the thoughts in our head aren't even ours, and so when you really start to see that, it gets so much simpler and more obvious to follow the stuff that is yours that has come to you and through you. And again, you don't have to throw everything else out.

But you take it under advisement. You don't treat it with the same respect that you would treat your own knowing, and that makes such a huge difference. And that's fundamental to the blind school thing. Like in blind school, you do what they tell you because you're blind. How else are you going to navigate?

But when you've got your sight back, when you have insight, when you can see from within, well, you can navigate life beautifully, perfectly in real time, without having to have a whole set of strategies and tactics and maps to and other people's best practices to try to do it. I'm not saying never use them. I'm just saying they become the backup tool, not the plan.

Michael Balchan 20:47

Insight, sight with sight from within. I know a lot of coaching is insight based, so to try and help folks see or generate insights. I'm curious if there's other ways you might define that or think about that, and then separate but different, and you can take either direction is thinking versus knowing. So this exercise of I think I know, and what's an original thought, and in some ways it's creating separation between our mind, the intellectual, rational, regional, logical thought process, and this part of ourselves that's more intuitive, less able to put a finger on, but has that felt sense of trueness, rightness, knowingness. How do you help folks make the connection between those two, and or trust the knowing that doesn't have research associated. But that's.

Michael Neill 21:50

Look, that's the question. It starts with you. Like being better at being full of shit is not helpful, right? So getting better at teaching people to see something you don't really see is not a strategy I would ever recommend. So you first, you get to be your first client, and as you see it in you, it just gets so much easier to find ways of pointing other people to it. So for me, I realized at a certain point, and I'm going to use language in a particular way, and it might not.

We might change it and play with it as I go, but I realized beyond a shadow of a doubt one day that I wasn't broken and never had been. Now, I'm sure people had said that to me, along with all the people who told me I was broken and listed exactly how, but it didn't mean anything. It wasn't plausible to me until I actually just one day got it. And it's that capacity of the mind to have a thought that doesn't come from its knowledge base, that doesn't come from its information set, that comes from somewhere deeper.

That's the stuff that transforms lives. That's the stuff that impacts in a big way. All of my coaching, training, and work now is around impact. Like if it doesn't have an impact, who cares? It may be beautiful, but impact is the currency for me, and insight is so much more impactful. What you actually see from beyond your limited knowledge base, no matter how big your limited knowledge base is, that's the stuff that changes the game. Everything else might be helpful inside the game you're already playing.

Michael Balchan 23:45

I love. I love the turning back to like it starts with you, and that look. If what we're trying to teach, coach, invite awareness of is inner knowing and a knowledge that is not transmittable through teaching, instruction, etc. And you're not doing it, then you can't do it. It's like just.

Michael Neill 24:06

Yeah. So like, okay, am I allowed to use a visual, or is this going to be the audio? Okay, so this is going to be messy.

Michael Balchan 24:12

Are you. Going to bring a pony in? I'd love it if it was a pony.

Michael Neill 24:14

I would love to bring a pony in. In fact, now I feel bad that I'm not bringing a pony in.

Michael Balchan 24:19

I might have something around here. I'm in my daughter's toy room right now. Oh, this is beautiful. Yeah, let's go.

Michael Neill 24:24

Okay, so the way most people think about coaching is there's wisdom, and as the coach, I'm going to go to that wisdom so I can share it with my client. So I need to learn lots of stuff, and if I don't like wisdom, I might say information, I might say knowledge, I might say technique, and I need to develop my connection with that so I can give it to the client. What I'm saying is my job as a coach is to show the client they're already connected up to this.

They just don't use it anywhere near as much as they could. So it doesn't matter that I mean if I don't know that for me I can't I can point to it, and occasionally somebody will look, and because it's really there, they'll see it. But that's completely different from when I know it, and I stay with somebody and keep pointing them in whatever ways occur to me until they start to see it too.

Michael Balchan 25:43

I don't quite know how to frame this up, so bear with me.

Michael Neill 25:49

Well, I get it right because I only answered the right question. Okay.

Michael Balchan 25:52

I'll give it my best. I'll at least commit to that.

Michael Neill 25:54

Sure.

Michael Balchan 25:55

So, what we think is coaching poorly defined is I got to know this wisdom, this information, these insights, and be the conduit of that to the client. More powerful coach in this framework of like the client has the wisdom. Can I point to that the client has the wisdom? Let them learn to develop that relationship, which is built on a foundation of me having done that for myself, not seeking wisdom out there, but seeking wisdom internally. Beautiful, powerful, awesome, and what about those times when you actually do have the nugget that's like the wisdom that the person would benefit from being given?

Michael Neill 26:37

Okay, so I will be very hopefully clear. I don't think anything's off the table because I don't think there's a right way to coach, which means I don't think there's a wrong way to coach.

Michael Balchan 26:49

Yep.

Michael Neill 26:50

But there's a difference between my sharing the best I've got as a catalyst to spark your seeing, rather than sharing it because I think you need to see what I see.

Michael Balchan 27:03

Can you say that again?

Michael Neill 27:05

Yeah.

Michael Balchan 27:06

That was well said.

Michael Neill 27:07

Something like that again.

Michael Balchan 27:08

Sure.

Michael Neill 27:08

Right.

Michael Balchan 27:10

AI, Michael could do it. I know he freaking could mess with that. I hate that guy.

Michael Neill 27:14

He's so on point all the time, right? But like, if I don't need somebody to see what I see, but I know that if they look where I'm looking, they'll see what they need to see. So one of the ways that I can get people to look is by telling them what I see, but not as a, "Therefore, this is what you need to do," as a, "Hey, if this resonates, great," but this is going to kind of point you in a direction to look in, so that you because here let me tell you something shocking.

Smoking is bad for you, right? I think there is a statistic that actually I remember it from a few years back. I think four out of 100 people actually stop smoking because their doctor tells them it's bad for them. Right? Who cares? Yet, is it true? Absolutely, best as I can tell. Is it helpful? Not really. Like the problem with advice is when I really need it? I can't hear it, and when I can hear it, I usually don't need it because I've already seen something for myself. So it's not useless what I see at all.

It can be incredibly impactful. But there's such like I remember you mentioned Steve Chandler.

I remember Steve coached me back in the mid 2000s and I remember him saying after our year together, and Steve and I were close, so this isn't an out-of-school story, but him saying I think you've done better than any client I've ever coached, and you've done less of what I've told you to do than anyone I've ever coached, and I said to him that's because I wasn't looking for you to tell me what to do, I was looking to hear what you would do so I could hear what I would do. And for me, that's a really powerful relationship.

It doesn't mean you're not allowed to give advice. Like that whole notion of you have two ears and one mouth, so you should listen twice. Like I have two nostrils and one asshole. I don't know what the implications of that are, but the fact is there is a time to listen, and there's a time to share. And if you're paying attention, you'll notice, you'll get a feel for it, as opposed to trying to calculate, "I should do this much of this and that much of that," which is again just back to the right way to do.

Michael Balchan 29:46

It. And if there's no right way to do life, there's certainly no right way to do coaching.

Michael Neill 29:51

I got kicked out. Well, I didn't get kicked out of the coaching conference. I just didn't get invited back to it. But I did a demo at a coaching conference with a surgeon who had developed some new surgical technique and wanted to be able to teach it to more people, but didn't have time. The session was amazing. Like by the end of it, and he followed up with me over the next few months. He'd seen how he could do it and how much easier it was than he thought it was going to be.

And after the session, I'm feeling really good about it. And the person monitoring the session goes, "Well, can we speak about the elephant in the room?" I didn't see an elephant, so I said, "Sure." She said, "Well, that wasn't coaching. You just told him what you thought." I said, "Did you not see the bit where he had all those insights and is going to go off and do the thing he wanted to do?" Nope, I did it wrong. I understand, but it's just not a helpful way of looking at things, and it's certainly not true.

The currency of what we do-I'll say it again-the currency of what we do is impact. If it makes a big impact, you're going to be able to do whatever you want with it. People will find you if it's not having much of an impact. Getting better at selling it's not going to make a difference.

Michael Balchan 31:12

I appreciate that, and just your depth of grounding in this, where it's like, friggin' give advice, point to what you're seeing. Just don't need that to be what they receive. That's beautiful and brilliant. Love that. I want to go back to you and Steve, and we've had Steve on a couple times. Love Steve, and obviously the another kind of pioneer in the space, and your approach to the business of coaching and how folks should think about fees, I think, is also a similar level of groundedness and rootedness. Is like, is it helpful? Is it real? Are you having an impact?

Don't charge too much that it makes you have less of an impact. Don't charge too little so you have less of an impact, but you were you started out. I remember a story of your being in like a booth at a coffee shop or a diner or something. Is that?

Michael Neill 32:10

Yeah, to my wife's dismay, my first probably year and a half, two years of coaching, I made about 150 cups of coffee and a couple of slices of pie, because I just wasn't comfortable coaching for money, but I was really comfortable coaching for coffee, and we called it coffee cup coaching, and so I had a booth at the 101 diner that I would go to, and people would come and I'd coach them for a bit, they'd buy me a coffee, and I mean to be absolutely honest, sometimes I'd pay for the coffee.

But it was really interesting because about five years on, my wife actually said to me one night. She said, "I used to get so upset with you for not recognizing your value and not charging people, and when I see what you're able to charge now, I can see that's because of all that time you charged coffee." To be honest, I didn't do it for that reason. I just did what I knew to do. I was comfortable charging coffee. I was not comfortable charging money.

I'm a big fan in what I call no brainer pricing, and what I mean by that is if you have to think too much about it's going to get in the way of your being able to do it. And no-brainer pricing changes over time. What the price you don't have to think about the price where if somebody goes, well, that's really expensive, you can honestly go well, then don't do it. That's a great fee for you to charge. And over time, and everything I teach is about over time.

I am not interested in teaching somebody who wants to coach for three years, make a bunch of money, and retire. But if you think you might want to be doing at least this kind of work for the next 20 years, I'll spend as long with you as you want. And over time, I promise you that number goes up. Every now and again, interestingly, it's come down. There have been times where I've dropped my fees because that became the new number for a while, and then they went back. I don't care what my fee is.

I don't think it means anything about me, but I know I note with interest that there's always been a number that I don't have to think about, and I've note with interest talking to people. I sometimes call it Goldilocks pricing. Right? You just play with it, and you make up a fee, and you go too high, too low, too high, and everyone finds a fee that's just right. And it's for now, and that will change over time. But if you charge your Goldilocks price, you never have to think about it.

Michael Balchan 34:45

Does it feel right and does it work?

Michael Neill 34:50

Comes back to that again. Yeah. As opposed to what does it say about me? I don't know that you're an aardvark. It doesn't say anything about you unless you make. It means something about you.

Michael Balchan 35:03

What are some other principles that you're using as Michael, as like you on a daily basis? None of us make it through the day always dialed, right? You've got your moments. You stub your toe. The wife pours cold coffee. I don't know if you like cold coffee. I quite like room temp coffee, actually. Some people say I'm crazy. Like that's the grossest thing I've ever heard. Like I want to drink it fast.

Michael Neill 35:29

Think I let my wife make the coffee?

Michael Balchan 35:31

So in those moments where something happens, you forget that you have sight and you're back in the world of blindness. What do you personally do to try and come back?

Michael Neill 35:46

So this has changed over time. One of the groups that I assume AJ has been sharing links for is the Impact Academy, and one of the things that I've started sharing a lot in the Impact Academy lately is that I used to think that a big part of my impact as a coach was that I usually show up pretty high, like expanded with sight, and there have been times over the past few months where I haven't, and they have actually been as or more impactful, and I had to really look at what the hell that was about.

And what I've realized is, it's not showing up high; it's showing up as you actually are in this moment that has the impact. It's being yourself as you are, not super coach self, not amazing you. Like sometimes I do feel amazing, and sometimes I feel like crap. But if I show up feeling like crap and let myself feel like crap, it doesn't get in the way at all. I didn't know that until I knew it, and it takes all the pressure off to try and always be on or see again. That's back to that's what AI does.

That's not what humans do, but if I can be as comfortable having a conversation with you when I've got all sorts of crap going on in my head, and I'm just not paying that much attention to it, as when I don't have much in my head and I'm blissed out, and beauty and rainbows are floating in my mind, which happens. But I often find that even within an hour conversation, or I do a lot of 20-minute conversations, that changes throughout the conversation.

So this idea that you've got to be in an optimal performance state to be impactful just turns out not to be true. I didn't know that till I did. But does it make a difference if you're actually as you are? Yeah, that one makes all the difference in the world.

Michael Balchan 37:59

And there's a couple.

Michael Neill 38:00

Sorry, that just came to me because you're coaching other humans who have the same thing going on with them. So your willingness to be as you are and still perform without you saying a word shows them, oh, I don't have to be somebody else in order to perform either.

Michael Balchan 38:22

You've pointed a couple times to this, like I didn't know it, and then I did, or the same bit of information that people said, and all of a sudden I got it, and things just shift, and then it has to be that internally driven piece. So sticking with showing up as we are, which may or may not be tied for first as like the most difficult thing to do much of the time. Now that you've gotten that insight, and now that, when you find yourself not being that, what is the pointer to come back?

Michael Neill 39:00

Well, so if I can play back to you what I just heard you say, so if you find yourself not being how you are, how do you get back to how you are? You can't because you can't not be how you are. What you can do is get caught up in trying to be different. So if I notice that I'm trying to be better, that's a bit of a clue, a little bump: "Wait, what am I doing?" If I find myself thinking, oh, I need to be a good listener now. Oh, I'm talking too much. I should, right?

Those are little clues that oh, okay, I've started thinking there's a right way to do this. So let me go a little wider, because again, for me, I realized a couple of years ago, and this is my language for it: being myself is the best game in town. Now, I don't mean being Michael Neill; that would suck. But Vicky being Vicky, Paul being Paul, Amanda being Amanda, and Areli being Areli, that is the best game in town because they can wake you up at three in the morning and you can do it.

And so the more you realize that being yourself isn't just a good idea or a good way to be, it's actually what allows you to perform at your best consistently over time, then the idea of trying to be somebody else loses a lot of its appeal. Like I used to love as a kid Captain Crunch Crunchberry cereal, and then I moved to England and they didn't do Captain Crunch, and it was devastating. But I got over it.

And then 14 years later, I moved back to the states, and I was so excited the first time I go to a grocery store. I am like, they have Captain Crunch, and my wife's looking at me like I'm nuts. I'm like, I'm getting it, and I can't even wait. Like I get to the car and I rip it open. It was terrible. It didn't take any time to stop eating it. I just it didn't taste good anymore.

We lose our taste for trying to be somebody else, trying to be better than we are, when we fall in love with the flavor of us, and that's not an ego thing. It's actually the opposite. Ego is our self-image. Ego is the way we want to be seen or the way we want to see ourselves. This is about being who you are, regardless of what you think other people think, and let the dogs out because otherwise they're going to scratch like hell.

Michael Balchan 41:27

Yeah. The dog dogs don't have a problem with this, by the way. They're great. The dogs always ask. Oh yeah.

Michael Neill 41:36

They're good. They've it's not their first rodeo. They've been like, oh, Dad's doing an interview again. All right.

Michael Balchan 41:42

No, yeah, no internal mind. But the importance there, like being who we are as we are in the moment too, and not the preferences that I used to have when I was just in this environment, and being willing to the Ralph Waldo Emerson line of not carry around the corpse of our past, but be alive to the thousand-eyed present. Who we are in this moment, and it's the same as the picture behind you, right? Like, if we're trying to connect the client to the wisdom in some way, shape, or form, we're trying to make them different than who they are.

Michael Neill 42:13

Right? Whereas to use that metaphor, we don't have to connect them to the wisdom they already are. We're just showing them how they already work. People work beautifully. We're beautifully made, right? Like all of nature, we're self-correcting mechanisms. Our psychology is self-correcting. If we leave it alone, we come back to ourselves. But we jump in at the first sign of trouble and try and fix it. It's like, oh my God, I'm a little off. Let me go do a technique. And it's like, if you waited another five minutes, you'd be back.

And when you start to really see that-not take my word for it-but you start to just kind of go, oh, what if I didn't mess with it every time it was a little bit off, you'd realize, oh God, where's I'm already so perfectly made. Like I one of my teachers, Sid Banks, used to talk about you're never more than one thought away. Well, I have my own version of that, which is most people are never more than one nap away from being back to themselves, like I honestly think we could prevent wars, divorces, all sorts of things with naps, right?

I think they got that right in kindergarten.

Michael Balchan 43:31

Love naps.

Michael Neill 43:32

Big fan of naps. That's the conclusion. What? What did you take away from the podcast? They're like, "Naps. More naps."

Michael Balchan 43:39

That's like,

Michael Neill 43:40

I should get my Clients to nap more. Okay, great. You heard us. Perfect.

Michael Balchan 43:43

So then, bring us back to the role of a coach, and again, whether that's acting as a coach in a professional capacity as a leader, working with teams, clients, etc. If we've got this truth of self-correcting mechanisms and wanting to help connect the other person to the wisdom that's already there of who they are and show up and all that, combined with a goal-directed performance orientation that can often come into play in different spaces. And, wait a minute, so I'm a coach, but I'm actually not doing anything except trying to help the other person recognize that they don't need me. They're just great as they are.

Michael Neill 44:26

So that's one of those. Like I understand because a lot of people say, "So I'm just doing nothing?" There are different roles that we can play at different times as a coach. So job one is waking somebody up to who they are and what they're capable of. But after that, it's often really helpful in a world of the blind, where everybody is telling you how to live, as the best possible ways for blind people to live, to have somebody in your corner.

Someone who knows that you're sighted and can remind you of that, because we are bombarded 24/7 with the right way to be. We are bombarded 24/7 with what we're supposed to do and what our life is supposed to look like and what our marriage should be like or should we be married or what like so it's incredibly helpful to have people in your corner who don't see the world that way. It's incredibly helpful to have somebody who can help spark your genius, spark your wisdom. It's not that you don't have it, but sometimes, like that's what I got from Steve.

Like he would say stuff, and that would spark my own knowing. So part of our one of the ways I teach now, I more often teach this as being a catalyst than being a coach, because what you're doing is you're sparking insight, you're sparking wisdom, you're sparking levels of performance, and that is an endlessly fun job. And I, my mom was a professor of organic chemistry, and I probably won't get this exactly right, but I always loved the word catalyst because it's something that starts a reaction but isn't consumed in the process.

So as a catalyst, we can do amazing things for our clients without getting burnt out or caught up in making it our job for them to perform better.

Michael Balchan 46:35

Beautiful. I love that catalyst as a word, right? To spark it without being consumed by it, and if it's true and seems true, we have this natural power and capacity to navigate through the world, and yet we're navigating through a world where we're bombarded by other ways of seeing things. It can be quite helpful to spend and get as much resources as we can, anchoring us into the worldview, the reality that we want to be living in.

Michael Neill 47:05

And I think so. I don't know if this will come through. I didn't use to have these, but we got them made for our Sharing the Feeling trainings. Okay. So this is like the first time I ever did a model, but it's a really helpful one, and I just want to run through it. So the intelligence of life is the foundation. That's another word for wisdom. It's not our intelligence. It's just the intelligence of life, and we all have it.

Then the thing that makes the biggest impact, and I'll lift that up again later, but the thing that makes the biggest impact is the feeling of presence, the feeling of us. It's that William Blake had that wonderful line: "I see through my eyes, not with them." There's something in us that's alive. That's us, and the feeling of that. When people get in touch with the feeling of that in themselves, everything changes. They start living from a different foundation. Okay, I'll go through it. So then, the next one is connection, right? When you are connected with somebody, they can hear you.

If there's no connection, you can be brilliant, but they can't hear you. Then your ability to hear them, to hear beyond the words, to hear what's really going on, and then, and only then, above the waterline, the visible bit of coaching is pointing, right? That's what everyone thinks the coaching is. Well, I'm going to point them towards the truth. I'm going to point them towards wisdom. Yes, that's part of it. But without the foundation of this intelligence, without the foundation of the feeling of the presence, without connection, without listening, nobody cares what you point at. Pointing isn't the point.

Pointing is the final piece of the puzzle, and it's a skill, and it's a learnable skill. Like, and I'm not suggesting it's not important, but without that foundational stuff, pointing is just yeah. I talk pretty sometimes. Nobody cares, right? Knowing where to point is very helpful. And then ultimately, like the top of the pyramid, that's the impact. It's their awakening. It's their feeling. It's their insights. It's their performance. That's what they're paying us for. That's our job. But the way we produce that is built on the foundations of everything that goes before it.

Michael Balchan 49:48

How do you think about universalizing? Is that a word?

Michael Neill 49:53

It is. I'll go with it. Well, I don't know what you mean by it, but let's use it.

Michael Neill 49:57

So tell me about universalizing.

Michael Balchan 49:59

So I'm thinking about intelligence as a foundation, right? A felt sense of presence, that connection, that capacity for listening, all of which is under the surface. Pointing is this last piece towards impact, results, etc. Transcends and includes coaching, right? That's great relating with other human beings and universalizing what we're talking about here in a coaching context to operating modes of being again for the parent, for the leader, for the manager, for the friend, for the whatever, and for people who are cautious or hesitant around coaching or the word coach or I'm not a coach, or whatever. Creating an insight for them to actually see that no, this transcends and includes whatever label I'm kind of throwing at it. How do you think about bringing these tools, sharing these tools, inviting others to deploy these tools?

Michael Neill 50:58

Only one of these tools, if you want to call them tools, is context-relevant: pointing. I don't have a better thing to call them. I can be anywhere with anyone, and the intelligence of life is going to run through me and them. I can be anywhere with anyone, and the presence that I am, and the presence that they are, can connect. I can be with anyone anywhere, and my listening will make a difference without any context, without my having to have a coaching relationship, a parenting relationship. Pointing is very context dependent.

The way I point as a parent is very different from the way I would point as a husband, which is very different from the way I would point as a coach or as a friend, and that's the one where the context matters. And for some conversations, being a coach is a very helpful context because it gives permission for me to point very directly to things that, with a friend or a family member, I'd be more circumspect because I want to stay friends.

Michael Balchan 52:01

What is pointing? How do you define pointing? And you talked about permission being pointed at in a coach like way without some sort of permission by a stranger is often what creates those like whoa.

Michael Neill 52:15

So no, like look, my best friend and I have been for 38 years now, once a week, pretty much 48 to 50 weeks a year for 38 years. Gone for what we call the Talk on the Walk, right? We used we started in the UK, we brought it over to California, and one day he said to me, and this was like 20 years ago, he said, "Gosh, I'm so grateful that I get to hang out with this coach that people spend all this money to work with, and I just get to talk to you for free."

I said, "Oh, you don't think I coach you, do you?" He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Do you want to experience what it's like to be coached by me?" He said, "Yeah." After half an hour, he said, "Please, just don't coach me. I just want to be your friend," because as a coach, I'm really direct. I just say what I see, because I assume that's why you hired me, because you want to see something useful and fresh, and you want to be impacted. I don't presume that even with my friends.

But here's the thing: like I've got three kids. My youngest is 24. My oldest is 31. I made a very conscious choice 31 years ago. I'd already been a coach for a while, not to try and coach my kids. I wanted to be their dad. I did not want to be their coach. But what they got from me on good days was they got presence, they got connection and they got listened to, and from time to time I pointed as any parent does.

Well, the relationships I have with them and what they've gone and done with their lives is so gorgeous, even though I did relatively little pointing. So the foundational stuff is foundational, but often in and of itself, is the source of impact. The pointing is kind of on top. Sometimes it makes a big difference. Often you don't even need it because people will figure it out themselves. But sometimes it's faster if you can point, and that's why I like the context.

Michael Balchan 54:21

Yeah, and so pointing in a coaching context, and at a high level, is directing someone's attention to something. I don't need them to see what I see, but I want them to look at what I'm looking at.

Michael Neill 54:31

And that's a really nice way of putting it. I like that. And what I would say is there's two places that I notice myself point most consistently. It'll be three by the time I'm done, maybe four or five. So the three things. It's the Spanish Inquisition. The four things. All right. So one thing that I find it incredibly helpful to point to is truth, and by truth I just mean things that just are true for everybody, no matter what. So, "There is no right way to be," I think, is the truth. Stuff like gravity is true for me.

That's why I call them principles, because that's just how it works. You can call it by a different name, but it's just how it works. Some stuff just works the way it works. So that would be one thing I point to a lot. A second thing I point to a lot is what I call loose threads. So often somebody will say something just as if it's completely obviously true. That just makes me kind of do a Scooby-Doo face, and go, "Huh?" It's like, when somebody says something like that, It's like seeing a loose thread on somebody's jacket.

You almost can't help but pull on it. Now, sometimes the thread just comes off and it doesn't do anything. Sometimes it tugs back, and it becomes a bit contentious. But sometimes when you pull on those loose threads, it unravels. And so, when somebody's faulty reality, faulty premises start unraveling, that makes a tremendous difference.

And then the third place that I'll often point is what I call small fires, where you see somebody light up, you can see the light come on, you can see they're a little inspired, and it's like if I see a small fire, I want to pour gasoline on it. I want to see how far we can spread it, how much they can grow with it, how far it can take them. And so I notice it's not so much deliberate, but I notice those are the three places that I have found it most consistently useful to point.

Michael Balchan 56:41

And outside. Outside of the coaching context, you said the pointing might be different in a parenting context and a leadership context. How does it change?

Michael Neill 56:50

Well, for me, and again, of course, I can only talk for me about this stuff. I notice that with my clients, I assume a level of permission to say what I see. Now that doesn't mean I won't still ask within a session. It doesn't mean that I won't. If I sense that they're having trouble hearing me, or they've gotten a little in their head, or I've gotten a little in my head, I won't hold back. But generally speaking, I assume that you've given me money because you actually want to be impacted, so I'm not going to hold back.

I don't mean I'm a dick about it. I just mean I'm not going to hold back. With my kids, 90% was that I wanted to keep them alive and safe. The rest is up to them. So I remember when one of my daughters was 20, and she wanted to drop out of university, and she'd had a tough time, and my wife and I really felt like it would be great for her to finish, and so I remember this conversation. We went for a long walk with the dogs. There's a place near here called Paramount Ranch. It has burned down now.

It's an old movie set, and I said to her, and this is just what occurred to me to say. I said, My wife, Nina, and I would love you to finish school as a favor to us, and I said, and I can tell you that it's the last favor I plan on asking you for until I ask you to let me walk you down the aisle if you ever get married. And I saw the relief in her face because she was having all these arguments in her head about why should I stay? Why should I go?

Here are all the good reasons why I should finish. Here are all the reasons I should leave. But when I just pointed out, look, I'm not trying to be reasonable. I'm asking you a favor, which I was, and she stayed. Now, in the end, was that the thing that made the difference in her life? I don't know. But it brought us closer, and it worked out great. So that's different. Like I'm not there to tell her. I want her to find her own life. I want her to live her life her way.

But I don't take it as my job to make her see everything that she could be seeing differently about. Whereas with a coaching client, yeah, that's what I'm being paid for. Does that highlight the difference?

Michael Balchan 59:24

Yeah, and how about for the executive for the leader?

Michael Neill 59:29

Well, again, assumedly, if I'm talking to them in this context, they've hired me.

Michael Balchan 59:35

No, so the executive, the leader who's talking to an employee, direct report, whatever, and I draw an immediate connection to like smoking is bad for you, right?

Michael Neill 59:46

So I worked with the head of a movie studio once, and he was infuriated at the negative feedback he'd gotten in his performance 360. He was saying, "I pour my heart out and I work my ass off, and this is the way they talk about me." I had read the 360, and I can't say too much more, but it was pretty negative. I asked him what he meant, and he said, "I tell them what's going to make them better filmmakers." I said, "Oh, you think they can hear you?" He said, "What do you mean?"

I said, "Look, for a lot of these people, you're their hero. They grew up watching your movies, so they're already kind of in awe and take everything you say way too personally. You're a different generation than most of these kids, so for a lot of them, you're their father, their substitute father, or even their grandfather. There's all that noise on top. And third, you're their boss, so they feel like they have to act like they hear you." So the fact that anyone hears anything you say is kind of miraculous.

Now, when he and I followed up about a year later, and he moved to a new studio, and he was so happy, and he was so miserable the first time, he said the one thing from our coaching that is now part of my orientation to every new hire at our studio is I get that I'm your hero, I'm your dad, I'm your boss, but I want to be able to have these kinds of conversations with you. So by him contextualizing the conversations in the relationship, people were able to hear him differently.

His intention never changed, but the impact of his communication changed dramatically.

Michael Balchan 1:01:52

And bringing it back to impact, if it's not impactful, like why bother? Like the impact is where the value is. And we just had Marcia Reynolds on a couple of weeks ago, and she was talking about impact and coaching without impact is like, what's the point? We got to be able to see it. So, I would love to do a couple things. One, tee up for folks. We've got around 25 minutes left. If you have heard anything today that you want to go deeper, and you're having a challenge to think about how to apply it to your life.

If you've got a challenge, an opportunity that you're excited to lean into to overcome, if you want to be more connected to that self that you are, and would like to come up and interact with Michael, please do think about what would make the next 20 minutes the most valuable for you. And then, if you'd like to connect, hit that raise hand button. In the meantime, while we give some folks time to think about that, what they might want to come up and talk about.

Actually, I don't know if you have good pointers too or invitations for folks when they think about the opportunity to get coaching. That would be useful shares as well.

Michael Neill 1:02:58

Look, I have one. Ask the question you actually want the answer to.

Michael Balchan 1:03:08

That's It. I love we see one hand. While folks think about that too as well, you've given us a ton of different tools, frameworks, techniques, shifts in perspective. Super valuable. Are there any that we haven't talked about yet that you really want to make sure that we bring into the conversation?

Michael Neill 1:03:26

It's not really different, but I want to reiterate: if all you did differently as a result of this conversation is the next time you sat down with a client, you showed up as you are in that moment and just saw what came from that. That'll transform your coaching, guarantee.

Michael Balchan 1:03:48

And the dining room table and the boardroom and every space you enter. Where can folks go to find you? Find more information. Point them to any sort of programs or offerings. Or where would you encourage folks?

Michael Neill 1:04:02

Look, AJ is, I'm sure, doing a lovely job of sharing all that. But I will talk about two things. So the next big program, nine-month program we got coming up, starting in October, is called Sharing the Feeling. So MichaelNeill.org/sharing-the-feeling. Not the most original URLs, but they work. And then our sort of ongoing coach mentoring training is called the Impact Academy and MichaelNeill.org/impact-academy, and so those are the two very coach-relevant resources. One is ongoing, and one is a nine-month training coming up.

Michael Balchan 1:04:37

Beautiful, AJ will drop the links. Appreciate you, AJ. Diane, welcome.

Michael Neill 1:04:43

Hey, Diane.

Diane 1:04:46

Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. I don't know exactly where you're all placed, but I know that I'm coming to you from Australia, and it's a nice 6:30 a.m. for me. I really resonated with what you were saying about just turning up as you are, and I guess in a way, my question is still actually around that because I'm a caregiver to my daughter. I've gone through significant challenges on our journey together and on my journey as a mother, and I'm positioning myself as a coach for other caregivers who are also wanting to create a business.

So I really love online business as well, and so I'm trying to merge the two of those. So one of the things I've struggled with is that the first six months of this year was a really hard season for me, and I'm only just coming out of it, and only just coming back to sort of reconnecting with the business that I'm wanting to create and the people that I'm wanting to connect with. And so, I'm just wondering if you have any particular thoughts or advice.

It's one thing to show up as you are, but sometimes those seasons are actually really hard. And I found myself actually just back in survival mode and stuff like that. I'm just wondering if you have any, I guess, particular tips. The thing with caregiving is that the job never ends. And so I still want to actually have a business, and I still want to know that I can operate that business when I'm maybe back in a season of that, and wanting to help other people that are trying to do the same thing.

So, I'm just wondering if you have any kind of tips or advice as to what might help you still take that step, still show up as you are, even if that season is actually just a really hard one.

Michael Neill 1:06:37

Well, I've got a question, and then I've got a couple of thoughts. What's Plan B if you're not going to show up as you are?

Diane 1:06:44

I just disappear.

Michael Neill 1:06:47

I like my plan better.

Diane 1:06:49

Okay. So like it's like if you had a good.

Michael Neill 1:06:52

Plan B, I'd consider it. But like that's so okay. Then here's a couple of thoughts. One is there's a difference between when I say showing up as you are and which thoughts you give access to your mouth. Like I can feel like crap, but I don't have to make the conversation about how crappy I feel. So that allows me more leeway, right? I don't have to vent my feelings on the people that I'm caring for because, in fact, what they're picking up is the feeling I'm in most of the time.

And if that feeling is presence, presence allows me to be sad. Presence allows me to be overwhelmed. Presence allows me to be upset, but the presence is the larger feeling, and that's the one that gets communicated through everything I do. So knowing that, it's not like, well, all they're going to get is my upset. No, they're going to get my presence, and yeah, they might notice that the flavor of that presence has some upset in it today. It's like it's got chocolate sprinkles instead of cherry sprinkles.

Then the second thing is this is where your knowing really is your best friend, because you can tune in at any moment and ask, "What am I up for now? Is now a good time for me to put a little time in on some emails or something for my business, or is now a really good time for me to eat pizza and have a nap?" Even though it feels like the answer will always be, "Eat pizza and have a nap," I promise you it isn't.

Diane 1:08:43

What could I do right now in this moment with the energy that I have, given.

Michael Neill 1:08:47

Given where I'm at, there are certain tasks in any business that can be done when you're half there, and there are other tasks that really require your full attention, and so you will start to learn yourself, and you just really get a feel for okay, this is a really crap time for me to do that. But I could do these things. I could get these things off my list right now. Or actually, I'm kind of flying. I'm going to forget about work-life balance and work my ass off right now because I got so much going.

And I know I'll catch up later. So if you don't need it to always be the same, you'll find a really natural rhythm. I don't know if you surf. You're Australian, so maybe you do. But like, it's a surfing thing. You have to go with the waves as they come. You can't force the waves.

Diane 1:09:39

Hmm. I think, like, what sort of has been the struggle is like when you're trying to get something off the ground. So, like earlier in the year, I was meant to be connecting with a new client and then connecting with a new coach for myself. I was just like I was at the hospital every day. I was then caregiving afterward at home, and just that onboarding sort of stuff felt really difficult because there's so much involved in that initiation of new business. Whereas it didn't feel like if the relationship was already up and going, it would just be it's okay. I can just turn up for the call for the hour, and that would be okay. So I guess in that moment, you said there are always some tasks that can be done and others that can't.

Michael Neill 1:10:34

Two things it suggests to me, and again, this is just what occurs to me. One is if I know that onboarding is going to require more of my time and attention, then I probably want to design some sort of a backup care system for when I need to onboard.

Diane 1:10:51

Yeah.

Michael Neill 1:10:52

Because I know that's going to take more of my time and attention. So if it's predictable, I can plan for it. So that's less of an issue.

Diane 1:10:59

Can I automate it in a way? Like maybe how can I even use AI to help in some of that?

Michael Neill 1:11:03

But see, now you're coming up with your ideas, which is the point. Yes. It's like, "Oh, if I know this bit is like this, I can make arrangements for it." Those predictably harder things are actually more manageable. The other thought, and I don't know if this will make any sense to you, is: what if it was supposed to be difficult sometimes? Like, what if that wasn't meaningful? What if it's simply, yeah, starting a new business is difficult sometimes, particularly when you've got other things you've got to do. Then you probably wouldn't give yourself crap about how difficult you're finding it.

Like that's the truth. Most worthwhile things are difficult sometimes. Now, if you're finding it difficult all the time, no, that's problematic. If you hate it, well, then why are you doing it? But the fact that sometimes it's difficult, yeah, that's just true. Not a problem. That's just the game you've chosen.

Diane 1:12:07

Yeah, that's business.

Michael Neill 1:12:09

Yeah.

Diane 1:12:12

Awesome. Yeah, thank you so much.

Michael Neill 1:12:15

You're welcome. Appreciate.

Diane 1:12:15

You.

Michael Neill 1:12:16

Thanks.

Michael Balchan 1:12:18

Thanks, Diane, and good luck. What's up, Areli?

Areli 1:12:22

I am excited. I feel like I get to double dip with the Michaels. I am coming with a confession. I am an extremely heavy user of digital Michael Neill. I think we had an experimental 700 credits at one point, and I think I've used 620. Seriously, I have. I think I was probably the person behind the decision to like give you X number of characters that you could use in a particular question because I'm like, he's a great editor. Anyway, so I hope I didn't break it.

But here's the thing, because digital Michael Neill, even digital Michael Neill, is starting to get fed up. Because I have an idea, I think I want to do this. I want to. I think I can. I think it's going to work. And then I freak out, and I start looking for permission. And if I am annoying enough, digital Michael Neill will give me permission. What I haven't succeeded in hearing from Digital Michael Neill is the kind of pointing that helps me understand that I don't need permission. Does that make any sense?

Michael Neill 1:13:30

I think so. But my question, as real Michael Neill, is well, okay. Instead of waiting for digital Michael to give it to you, why don't you just take it? Like, why do you need permission from something else?

Areli 1:13:49

That's what I know.

Michael Neill 1:13:51

Well, so let me ask a better question. Is it okay with you if you do it your way?

Areli 1:14:00

I'm laughing because I just want to make sure I'm doing it the right way.

Michael Neill 1:14:11

Well I can point you to some wonderful blind schools. There are quite a few of them on the web. They'll tell me the right way for only $1,999.99.

Areli 1:14:24

Oh my god, amazing! No, sincerely, like I'm laughing. After 600 conversations, all that microdose coaching, that truly had not sunk in yet. I think I need permission because I think there's a right way, and like I want to make sure that I'm doing it the right way. So tell me, I'm doing it the right way, so I can do it. Yes, I can just do it. And if it's not the right way, it won't work. If it's not a good way, it won't work. If it's.

Michael Neill 1:14:49

A way that works, right? And by the way, if anyone's wondering what insight looks like, it looks a lot like Areli just did. It's not that subtle. Thank you, Areli.

Areli 1:15:03

Thank you.

Michael Balchan 1:15:09

Unmuted. Yeah, there we go. All right, we've got space for one more too. What's the question that you want an answer to? Hey, sweetie, you want to come say hi? I told you I was in the girls' toy room, and they're back from camp now. Ah. By the way, Michael, I really appreciate the 90% safe and loved, and the rest.

Michael Neill 1:15:28

Is up.

Michael Balchan 1:15:29

To them. And I also just appreciate Aureli, your experience with Digital Michael Neill, and being able to bring that. And I know we touched on the beginning. This is Cameron.

Michael Neill 1:15:44

Hello, Cameron.

Michael Balchan 1:15:48

Okay, can you take your dolls and got it? And that sense of feeling, and one of the things you talked about in digital Michael Neill writing for you is like it just didn't feel right, and someone else might maybe pick up on a little bit, but your attunement to, "This just doesn't feel right," that iron string vibrating, à la Ralph Waldo Emerson, is really important. Whatever happened in the exchange with Areli, too, just feeling into it, I celebrate that.

Michael Neill 1:16:20

Yeah, and by the way, I will just flag. I'm sure again, AJ has done her job. But if you want to try Digital Michael for free, Michael Neill AI, you can find it there. So, do we have one more? Going once. Going twice.

Michael Balchan 1:16:50

Dog.

AJ | Team Heroic 1:16:53

We do in the chat if I can just put that in. So please tell us of a time when you failed with coaching a client, how did you fail, and what did you learn from this? He says, "Sorry, I have no mic to use."

Michael Neill 1:17:08

Okay, so like the one that comes to mind immediately was a client who had come on a training with me, so I'd met them, and they were a lawyer from the European Union and a very serious person, and they had some huge insight, and for the first time in their life, they were happy. They'd had a very difficult childhood, and what started out as a request for business coaching got to the point where they said, "I've signed up for assisted suicide. You have four weeks to sort me out before I essentially kill myself."

Now, this was before I did the work I do now. Now I would have handled it in a completely different way, but at the time I still thought I could save her, so I just did everything. I hired other coaches to work with her out of my money. My wife has never gotten involved in my coaching business. She asked me to stop working with this person.

It was affecting me so badly, and finally, it got to the point I was teaching some course in Denmark where I just wrote an email and I wrote, "Hey, I think we've maybe gone beyond the remit of business coaching. Could I encourage you to accept a refund and do something that would be more helpful for you?" Her response was, "Oh, I thought this was going very well," which to this day I don't understand. What I initially learned from it was, "I quit. I'm never doing this again. I hate people."

What actually stuck was it doesn't work for me to try to live somebody else's life or save them from themselves. What works really well is for me to be me and point other people towards being them. So that's my best answer for now.

Michael Balchan 1:19:20

Beautiful. I saw Patrea too. I don't know if Patrea was.

Michael Neill 1:19:27

Patrea. Yeah, you're welcome to come on if you'd like.

Michael Balchan 1:19:31

I think she had her hand up, but maybe no video.

Michael Balchan 1:19:36

Sure. We'll see, and if not, I do have a closing question that we can go to. I see Patrea. There we go. Another awesome hello.

Patrea 1:19:47

Michael. Yes, another Australian-friendly time zone. Michael, how are you? Thank you so much for your shares, etc. It's been great to meet you. My question is around a new client. I've got a new client at the moment, and they're quite closed off. I generally haven't had someone so closed off, and I guess I'm just wondering how do you interact with someone like that? I've only had one session so far, and they were recommended through a past client. And I guess I'm just wondering, how do you tend to work to open someone up a little, to be a little more open. Yeah.

Michael Neill 1:20:43

I don't want to make this sound like a formula for what I do because I do whatever I do with each person. But one thing I do notice that I have done many times when that kind of happens is I'll ask them why they're there. Nobody has to work with me. In fact, it's not always that easy to work with me. So I think sometimes people show up and go like, "All right, fix me if you're good enough." It's like, "No, I don't have any interest in getting you to do something."

Like, if you want to change, I can almost certainly help. If you want to get better at something, I can almost certainly help. If you want to enjoy your life more, I can almost certainly help. But I don't care if you're ever any different than you are now. Not because I don't care about you, but because however you are now is fine. If you want to change it, great. I'll help. So I really put it back to them. It's not my job to get you to want to be different. It's just really honest.

And people nine times out of 10, people then open up. One time out of 10, they say, "You're right."

Patrea 1:22:00

See.

Michael Neill 1:22:00

I don't know why I'm here either, and then they leave. But that saves you a lot of time too.

Patrea 1:22:06

No, well, that's good. So basically, as you're saying, being very present to how they're showing up as well, and calling it like I see it.

Michael Neill 1:22:18

Well, yeah, and just it's an honest question. Why are you here? And not everyone can answer it. But if somebody goes to the trouble of hiring you, there's usually a reason that they did.

Patrea 1:22:37

And beyond that, depending on how they respond, what if it turns out it's their personality?

Michael Neill 1:22:46

You know what? Now this is me, and again, this is why it's hard to say because everybody's different. I've got to be honest. I don't think I've ever had that conversation with somebody where it didn't resolve one way or another.

Patrea 1:23:00

Okay.

Michael Neill 1:23:00

Either they want to do something or they don't, and if they do, I'm really good at helping, and if they don't, I don't need them to. I don't think they need me to, and so we part as friends. Okay, like I'm unwilling to take on the job of getting somebody to do what they don't want to do in the first place. That makes no sense to me. Even though it's something people sometimes hire coaches for, it's like, can you help me do the thing I don't want to do so I can get to the place I think I need to get to so that I can be happy? No, I will not do that. I have no interest in doing that. That sounds terrible.

Michael Balchan 1:23:40

Beautiful. Thanks, Patrea.

Patrea 1:23:43

Thank you, Michael. 

Michael Balchan 1:23:44

This has been incredible. Appreciate the presence, the connection, the listening, the honesty, the aliveness, the realness. What's one thing that we can do for you as individuals, as a community, to spread some ripples out into the world that you'd like to see spread. What's one thing we can do?

Michael Neill 1:24:03

Oh. Look! If you like Digital Michael, tell people about it. Like I have been blown away. I had very low expectations. It has exceeded my expectations. It's a way for me to have conversations with thousands of people instead of dozens. So I would love it if you tried it. You don't have to do it if you don't like it, but try it. And if you like it, please share the free trial. Share it with people. I'd love to see it help everybody who's up for being helped. That would be my request.

Michael Balchan 1:24:36

Beautiful. Appreciate you deeply. Appreciate everyone for joining live. Everyone who catches the replay, fired up. Lots of notes here that I'm excited to either throw out the window or apply. We'll see what happens.

Michael Neill 1:24:50

Everything to play for. Nice to meet you, Michael, and thank you, everybody. Very much appreciate you.

Michael Balchan 1:24:55

Cheers.

Michael Neill 1:24:56

Bye.

*AI-generated speech-to-text transcription. May contain inaccuracies.*