Elton John, Billy Joel, Phil Collins and Freddie Mercury all have something in common – aside of a smidge of talent and the fact they all became pop-stars.

Watch Elton John perform “I’m Still Standing” or Billy Joel play “My Life” at their pianos; witness Freddie Mercury winding up for “We are the Champions” or Phil Collins on drums during “In The Air Tonight,” and you’ll see something magical happening, something that sends shivers down your spine.

But what is it that they do?

We’ll it’s the same ‘something’ that caused Bob Geldoff to pull all his music industry pals together and raise millions for charity back in the eighties with the hit Do they Know Its Christmas and the subsequent Band Aid appeal. It got Churchill to move the nation with powerful speeches and it is all that stands between you and your true greatness.

But what is that ‘something’? And is it simple enough to bring into our everyday lives?

We all have a gift for something. It’s something that we get inspired by. It’s something that when we do it we feel purposeful and “at one”.

Maybe you know what that is. Maybe you don’t.

When spiritual teachers talk about purpose, they talk about it as something we have inside us. It’s true we all have that special something… that something that is the music inside us, but essentially life is meaningless and empty, until we fill it.

I had that experience last summer when on holiday in Spain. There was no school run. No animals to feed. No work to do. I had a blank canvas and from it I created a new purpose.

Before last summer I had never noticed so obviously that we all have the power to materialise and dematerialise life so easily. We construct meaning to things easily and make ourselves purposeful, but how often does that purposefulness connect with passion and inspiration and cause electric sparks in your being?

Maybe now is the time to rethink things

best wishes
Neil

Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. Visit his website at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

A couple of years ago I suggested that my son take up music lessons with his grandfather. His Pappy is a professional musician, and if your child is going to become the prodigy that all parents’ hope they will be, you want them to learn from a pro, don’t you, especially if that pro happens to be a willing family member and it can save you a few quid!

Nine months later my son had had enough. It seemed like hard work. Sure he mastered the scales – nothing wrong with his fingers.  He could read the notes – nothing wrong with his memory – but he couldn’t sit still during the lessons and in the week in between each session we only ever heard him doing minimal practising.

After school he never took himself off to his room, plugged in the keyboard and shocked himself with some inspired notation. He never hit heaven, he never totally astounded himself or got excited. He never came to me, shook me from my work and said, ‘Listen to this, Dad. It’ll blow your tiny mind!’

We concluded it wasn’t his thing – each to his own – and he admitted he only took it up because he thought I’d be happy!

Stephen King once said, ‘Talent renders rehearsal meaningless; when you find something you love you do it until your fingers bleed and your eyes fall out your head… every outing is a virtuoso performance because you as the creator are happy.’

My son and I concluded: if there’s no joy in it, there’s no point in it and we agreed he’d be better off spending keyboard practice time searching for that ‘something’ else where he can hit that high, reap the rewards of joy and ensure his life becomes an energetic adventure.

Several years later, aged 13, he picked up a guitar. He’s hardly put it down since. He doesn’t enjoy the structure of “learning” but does enjoy exploring and trying new things. He’s in several bands and often trying out his new songs on the family.

Some of us pretend in life. We pretend to do what we think makes our parents happy. We pretend to enjoy work. We pretend to be happy while we sell our soul. We pretend to be artistic or creative but never put any real oomph into it.

And maybe -  just maybe – we drift through life with that thought that there must be something else out there.

This is your inspiration to not let that happen. Go and get blissed!

Neil

Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. Visit his website at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

What if life is just one massive talent show for us to show off our skills?

What if it’s a stage for us to use our abilities for fun and pleasure and for the pleasure of those around us.

What if life is not a practice for some future event that we hope will just drop out of the sky. What if we have to make it happen… one moment at a time.

Great writers write everyday. Their head and their brain won’t function until the story is told. Great coaches coach everyday because they have a unique gift they want to share. Great musicians play until their fingers bleed…

All of them love every single moment of what they do. It’s about passion. It’s about blissing out. It’s about happiness. It’s about en-thusiasm (emotion in motion).

When you get your emotion into motion and do what you love your emotion reaches its peak, and when you hit your peak, you make manifest all of your greatest desires.

Remember your heroes – great comedians, interviewers, musicians, singers, teachers, orators, sports people etc. They all have that bliss in their eyes. There hearts beat faster when they are at the edge of their performance. And that’s how they move you.

Why are we doing spreadsheets and sweeping roads when we would sooner be an artist or a holistic therapist? Why do we put up with snotty customers at the call centre or organise the bazaar for the WI committee when we could be in the blue-bell wood?

Purpose = passion.

Passion = enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm leads to joy.

Joy leads to the most wonderful, incredible manifestations of your dreams.

What are your passions? What enthuses you? What would you love to do that you dare not do? What did you used to do that you loved and haven’t done for a while?

Best wishes
Neil

Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. Visit his website at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

I remember one of my business coaches once saying to me, “What if you met someone who could give you 15 clients – what are your “Buts”?

I said, “but what do they want in return”, “but I don’t feel worthy of that” and “but nobody does something for nothing.”

This is what awareness brings us – it shows us the disparity between what we ask for and what we do to get that.

And it’s the same in a family scenario. We say to our children will you do this or that and we try to get them to do this or that and they don’t want to do this or that; and then we end up feeling fed up and resentful, or we feel like we should chuck in the towel.

But what the pain or frustration or anger or disappointment in our awareness is showing us is something we must address and until we find out how to change it, and start to act on what will work, nothing changes and we just carry on feeling fed up and wanting to throw in that towel.

And every time something like this happens, it brings up thoughts and feelings. And it’s our job to notice it and transform the situation.

Transformation breaks down into two words. Trance and formation. So trance is about the illusion or disillusion we live in… it’s the state of conscious or unconscious thinking and behaviour we live in… and the formation is about what we create as a result of that thinking and behaviour trance that we go about in.

So let’s apply this to taking care of the environment. You know that when we’re using our car or buying food in packaging that we’re doing some harm and we set an intention to do less harm. Then in your awareness, two weeks later you notice that you just drove to the shop in your car and then threw a sackful of plastic wrappers away. So now you have an intention, and in your awareness you notice where you’re not yet living it.

Let’s apply this to living in peace in the world. We want peace and harmony around us and we all know at our core that we shouldn’t cause harm in any way. So we start to notice day-to-day that we harbour a negative thought about another culture, race or neighbour.

So what we’re doing is we’re becoming aware. We’re starting to notice the disparity between what we say we want in our life and what we’re actually getting. We start to sift through the reality of our life and we start to realise our actions might need to change in order for us to have the peace and harmony or the environment we want.

Give it a try this week. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Best wishes
Neil

Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. Visit his website at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

One of the problems people have when they set an intention is the challenge of the knowledge gap… the gap between what you know – which is what got you to where you are now – and what you need to know to achieve what you want.

If you intend to run a business there are things you need to know. If you want better behaved children there are things you need to know. If you want a different career there are things you need to know…

And it stands to reason that for many of you that will be the case. Some people, however, having set the goal, maybe feel they know so much, that…  knowing where to start is a problem.

So you need to sift through all the possibilities and narrow this down to what it’s really going to take… And there are lots of possibilities. Let’s use business as an example here… if your goal is to have more clients you need to become aware of why you don’t have the clients. So the next thing, when you’re really clear on your focus is to pay attention. So what I’m talking about is awareness.

Awareness is all about your “in the moment attention.”  This is about what you notice about yourself and what’s happening to you as you strive towards your goal.

So if you want your children to be honest and co-operate with you and they don’t now, you need the bit of knowledge that allows that to happen. It’s the same with money, career, you name it.

So the part you need to be aware of is they need to develop a skill that “enables” what you want.

So the first thing we need to do is create a focus… know what we want. Then we need to open our awareness…

So lets say you want to change your career and someone shows you how to do that then you say “I need to think about it”. Then guess what? The opportunity goes by and you don’t change your career and you stay stuck.

A cow was stuck in a ditch and it prayed to God to help it out. A bull came along and offered help and the cow said “No, I asked God to help me.” A second bull came along and the cow gave the same response.

Praying again later the cow asked God why he hadn’t helped and God said “I did. I sent you two bulls who could pull you out.”

Strange isn’t that we’d do this kind of thing… but we do, don’t we.

We want something. We ask for something and opportunities come, but we fail to see how the energy of life response to our request and we stay stuck.

The key to this is being aware of what you ask for and how the Universe responds.

Best wishes
Neil

Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. Visit his website at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

When I met Jo in 2002, she asked if I fancied playing a mind game with her.

Now I’ve experienced mind-games in relationships before (haven’t we all), but I’d never been “invited” by my girlfriend to take part in one… they usually sort of just evolved.

So you can understand why I might have been intrigued.

This mind game involved writing down what you most wanted and then visualisation for 10 days, first thing in the morning, and last thing at night.

We took it all lightly and just had fun, especially when things we wanted materialised. We then shared the game with four friends and we all took part. Enjoying the outcomes.

While many things happened quickly, some took longer – one in particular took two years.

We had both been imagining our ideal homes. I wanted to live by the coast, Jo wanted rolling countryside. I wanted a suburban house, Jo wanted animals. And as time passed and I continued to visualise I began to think actually… you know what… by the coast is nice, but rolling hillside sounds nice too and animals sound nice, but what about cleaning them out and feeding them. I wasn’t sure if I wanted all that.

And I imagined it was 5th November and I was on the beach at Christchurch in England and I was facing the Isle of Wight, running sand through my hands having signed the papers for a new house the day before.

Two years later a friend invited us to stay at his house with him. While we were there he asked us if we’d like to go for a trip. It was a lovely day so we said okay. Now we were all interested in how we use the subconscious mind to get what we want. And we were talking about how that comes about as we walked.

And as it happens we were on a beach, and I was down in the sand, collecting bottle tops for a charity appeal. And there I was running sand through my fingers and I looked up and there right in front of me was the Isle of Wight. And I looked behind me and there right behind me was the spot I’d imagined I’d be when I had signed for my house, which is exactly the way it had worked out. The date was 31st October, so 5 days early.

And you know the funny thing… where we live is in rolling countryside. The front of our house looks like a suburban cul-de-sac, while the back of the house backs onto rolling countryside with paddocks and fields with horses and cows and sheep. From my kitchen window I can just see the sea. And my house is in a road called Cross Farm Road, built on old farm land.

So there is a perfect example of getting what you focus on.

What are you focussed on and who will you try this game with?

Best Wishes
Neil

http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

As Dan Millman said during the Spirited Living Summit: “If you want to lose weight, you don’t need to go on a radical diet, just start eating from a smaller plate.”  And as Celebrity Coach, Michael Neill said when I interviewed him, “Change doesn’t have to be painful.”

When you want it to happen, the next logical thing is for it to happen!

We can take small steps and we can allow ourselves some enjoyment and fun.

It’s not always possible to immediately go from a situation in life to your desired result, but we can often get there by taking several easy and natural steps.

A few weeks ago I asked, “What would be better than this?” If asking this question can make things 10% better, then you can make things 10% better than that.

In personal development we’re often told to write down our goals. This is a useful exercise because we gain clarity and put a little more focus into what we write. This is a great first step.

If you draw it out, too, you deepen that connection and you also stimulate the other side of your brain. This is a great second step.

New age teachings recommend we visualise what we want – sitting down and imagining things as we want them to be. And this can be a lot of fun – especially when you let your imagination run riot with juicy possibilities!

But I’d like to offer you a step I add, which may spice things up a little…

When you can imagine what you want to happen now, as you go about your day, or as you make dinner, doze in bed or while you’re out walking or sitting down in front of the TV, you’ll find it coming to you easier and quicker.

We do this when we fall in love. While we’re eating, we’re thinking about the person we’re falling in love with. We imagine what our next date will be like… what we’ll say… how we’ll say it… what we’ll wear…

And you do this with your visualisation to the point where what you want to happen feels like the next logical thing to happen.

When you get to the point of positively expecting it to happen, it will.

Best wishes
Neil

http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

We all have things we want to make a little better.

We all have challenges…

The challenges might come in relationships, at work, with our kids, with our health or something else. So there is always something we want to make a little better.

The first thing to do is the step so many miss. And yet this step really isn’t that profound. In fact it’s simple. It’s profoundly simple. So let me share what it is…

The first thing we have to do to is to make a decision to change things.

I “made” a decision to make my life better in 2002. And it doesn’t matter how good or bad life is, if you want something you don’t yet have, you have to make a decision. If you don’t, nothing changes.

There will be some people reading this article today, who have made a commitment to live life to the full and who will not turn back. These are people who will make a note and who will never look near them and there are people who are ready to make life different – however big or small the change.

In 2002 I was signed off work with a back injury, broke, obese and at this time 33 years old with two kids, and single again after 5 years of abuse. So I couldn’t really go anywhere or do anything much and… to be honest… even if I could… I’d probably have been so depressed no one would have hung out with me for long.

That left me with one focus. That focus was on what would make life better. Nothing else mattered for me at that point and there has been one question that has made a massive difference to me.

The question I ask is, “What is even better than this?”

To ask this question it doesn’t matter how good or bad life is. Asking this question can always make things just a little better.

One afternoon, after a satisfying day, I was laying on the sofa, grinning at the ceiling and I asked, what would make this even better, so I called Jo in for a hug, because sharing my good mood was better than keeping it to myself and it made the moment a bit more special.

Give the question a try…

Best wishes
Neil

http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

As you probably know by now, we’ve been helping people – people just like you and me – to live life with purpose, passion and spirit at work and in everyday life for around five years.

The word community means “coming into unity” and CommunitySoul was inspired by a vision of people coming into unity with your soul… expanding, gently growing, being all you can be… loving life… engaging with the adventure of life.

For a long time I’ve been aware that anger, frustration, pain, fear and the like are just pointers – reminders that we have become disconnected from what’s  most important in life.

I’ve had my fair share of the painful side of life and used it time and again to resolve what’s happening. I’ve also taught others how to do this and have seen their lives changed beyond belief in a short space of time.

It’s using the pain points in life that have helped me create a life I love. I’m living in a place that’s at the base of the Mendip hills in the south west of the UK. I’ve got horse paddocks behind me and hills all around, and in the distance I have what an estate agent would call sea glimpses.

Jo and I got married just over a year ago and and for that I took 6 weeks off. And that’s not something everyone can do.

I have two kids, with who I have great relationships, and I’m one of the blessed parents whose kids tell them what a great dad I am (and it’s not always preceding a request for money or a lift!).

I’m engaged in work that  I  adore and find inspiring, serving people who want to become more… and I love that as human beings we can always expand a little more.

I’m not ever-so wealthy, but I am debt-less, and I could take six months off work without worrying and it feels good to have that kind of security.

And I’m sharing this with you because…

I want you to know that whatever setbacks you have, whatever you go through, you can build the life you want to live, from whatever starting point you are at right now.

When you are unhappy with something, it’s evidence that something needs to change. And you are the one who has to… and who can… change it.

Best wishes
Neil

http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

“Ignorance is the night of the mind, a night without moon or star.” Confucius

Living on the outer edge of my comfort zone has helped me explore the mystery of life a little and I’d like to share some of the experience with you in the hope it provides an added source of inspiration to you.

Do you like to have a plan for the day?

When I used to wake up in the morning I wanted to feel certain about the day. I wanted to know where I had to be, how I would get there, how much everything cost, how much money I’d earn, even what I’d eat. I guess it was little wonder then that almost everyday began to follow a pattern, right down to turning off the TV news at bedtime.

After an horrific head injury in 1995 followed by a divorce, I came to understand that life had an impermanent quality and for several years I rebelled against much of the structure and certainties I’d previously created to feel secure.

It was then that I fell in step with a ‘What’s meant to be, will be’, philosophy.

After drifting for a time I began to wrestle with myself. My home was a mess, my car was in a state, my shoes had holes in them, my hair looked like the birds had been having an all night orgy in it. I was so overweight that my clothes were such a bad fit I looked like a sausage about to burst the skin!

In Honest Reflection…

My life reflected a lack of respect and gratitude for the comforts afforded to someone living within one of the most privileged cultures in the world. And here I was; not caring for my body – the vehicle gifted to me for my journey through this lifetime – and not keeping my home space a clutter-less void that left room for the magic of life, instead it was filled with the old and the battered.

But guess what I did?

Each day I made demands on the world, for more – more money, a better life, for unbounded success and love.

In my first novel Black Water, a Place of No Hope, the two main characters, a soldier and a missionary, are in the worst place on earth – a prison pen, held by terrorists, in a jungle full of cannibals on an island surrounded by sharks (and, before you ask, this place really does exist outside of my imagination). While the soldier is searching for an escape, the missionary is meditating, content she has all she needs in the world. The soldier finds her lack of attention on how to escape annoying and confronts her.

Yet she is focussed on the simplicities of life that are all too easily forgotten…

The missionary’s responds to him. She says she cannot ask God for more until she has honoured what she already has – in this case, air, water, sunlight and a few moments of peace from her captors.

From the small beginnings of honouring the simplicities of life, I have, a step at a time, learned to ‘return the favour’ for all I have, just by appreciating what I now have.

In reply for my gratitude I’ve been shown the world in greater wonder and realised I’ve been living an adventure.

When opportunity is put in my path – and sometimes this is quite scary – it somehow takes me to the edge of my comfort zone then flicks out a helping hand. If I want to hold my breath, take the hand and go with it, usually I’m blown away by what follows.

Life with a sort of plan…

These days when I wake up, I may have a few appointments or some work to get done, but I neither wake up to a regimented life or a ‘whatever will be’ attitude. These days I’ve found the balance – what “Might be and what is”.

Best wishes
Neil

http://www.communitysoul.co.uk