They say Bill has a £40 million fortune.

As he sat in front of me he said, “Habits. Daily habits, that’s the key.”

Key to Success: Do what you know needs to be done until you succeed.

It’s widely stated that a key to success in any endeavour is the ability to “do what you know needs to be done until you succeed”. The trick is staying focused enough to do them.

Course, not everyone wants £40 million, but we all have something we’d like, be it a physical object or a way we’d like to be.

And everyone leads a busy life these days. Our work life is busier and more pressured than ever before. We have a host of personal projects and things to fix and do in our leisure time. There’s also a multitude of distractions: mobile phones, email, TV and family and friends to help out, to name a few.

Working with a single purpose is the ability to deal with one thing at a time and give it 100%.

When our mind is fragmented it’s hard to focus and get things done. When I write newsletters like this, I close out everything else. I close the room door, (sometimes the curtains), put on music that supports the mood of the message. I pop on the headphones, close down my email and completely immerse myself in the writing.

I know I can’t give work 100% on a Sunday morning at home. First, I want to be with the family. Second I feel immense guilt if I have to. Third, I know my attention is wanted and needed elsewhere.

If I even think about work on a Sunday morning I have 3 other desires and feelings immediately clogging me up emotionally and mentally. I know can’t give it 100%.

And working weekends isn’t in my plans either. So, there’s no point even thinking about it now.

Similarly, I know I can’t focus on a speaking project if my in-box is open and pinging with incoming email. I also can’t sleep if there is an important letter I need to write and I run it through my mind at midnight. I have to make notes, so I can give 100% to sleep.

When I start a day with a clear intention, I am more satisfied and the day goes better. Plus at the end of the day I feel I’ve accomplished something.

I always allow time when it’s done to enjoy the feeling of satisfaction, before anything else happens. Self-appreciation is healthy, especially when, once you’ve done something, you notice how much more “head-space” you have now that task isn’t gnawing away at you.

Best wishes
Neil

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Trying to Get on Track & Stay on Track? I can help.

Visit my website: http://communitysoul.co.uk/

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And while you’re here, leave a comment below and share your thoughts on this blog.

Inspiration always comes…

We just have to be still enough to notice it.

In August 2005, just after the train bombings in London, amongst the fear and the negativity, I heard people say: “I want to change the world”. Then they shrugged and added, “But I can’t do it alone.”

I disagreed.

You see, a fundamental belief behind CommunitySoul is that you can change the world.

How?

I won’t happen if we trying to tackle the whole problem. That’s just too much of a big bite. The way to change the world is through changing the part of the world you influence and control.

Let me put it like this…

You will probably agree… that while you may know life isn’t perfect ( i.e. you may have some debt; kids you love, but can’t relate to; a spouse who you love, but lost the spark with) you may not be wandering around 24/7 trying to fix it all.

The truth is the problems most people face are “back of mind” issues rather than “front of mind”. What this means is that we go from day to day coping and getting by, but perhaps never really standing up for our highest truth.

Some spiritual teachers claim everything is a reflection. Others say, “As within, so without”. So this morning as I’m writing this to you, I’m thinking about changing the world and what the riots in major UK cities reflect that we have going on inside us. I’m also wondering about what our Prime Minister calls a, “Sick Society.”

My question is this…

When shops get looted, when cars get burned and people act violently against each other, what is it that is going on inside each of us  that is being reflected on a national scale?

For days I’ve been asking people if they know what the riots are about.

I asked my parents. I asked my children. I posted on Facebook. I read countless articles on-line. What became apparent is that the reasons are varied.

MendLondon website put it in a nutshell: “There was quite clearly a spectrum of reasons people got involved ranging from ego, boredom, peer pressure, anger, sheer bloody-mindedness, greed, territoriality, hatred and for a sense of thrill.”

Martin Luther King in Birmingham Jail

So, what are the riots reflecting in each of us?

For me, all this has happened at a time when I’ve just finished reviewing the life of Martin Luther King for my Life Purpose Group.

Let me share an insight from the great man…

King said (when talking about the Vietnam war and the death of John F. Kennedy) that through our silence and willingness to compromise our highest principles we construct an atmosphere where events materialise.

He says: “By allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is the one who masters the art of shooting and techniques of killing, we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred become popular pastimes.”

Of course, since King spoke those words back in the 1960’s, so in addition to TV and movies we can add a whole host of violent video games.

As parents… business owners… as human beings… we all have choices and responsibilities about what to buy, what to create, what to sell, what to allow into our homes and what to allow into our minds.

For example, if we want the world to become a more peaceful less violent angry place we have to exert influence over the part of the world we control. That means we turn the TV over when we notice violence. We skip the movie with needless bloodshed. We don’t buy the game. We send a message to the creators, do make this. When profits are hit, they will stop making the movies and people who do not have your ability to switch off from violence will see less of it.

When I started to do this, I found it hard to begin with, as I broke old habits.

Andey, playing guitar

Is it possible that as you make that choice your children will see less violence and be less aggressive?

When my son was 13 years old his behaviour became uncharacteristically aggressive. I noticed this coincided with him playing on the Playstation.  We spoke about it and regulated his time with it. Coinciding with other changes in his life (we took him out of school) he sometimes complained of  boredom.  Boredom, with some parental love, allowed him space to experience who he really is and discover a purpose and one day he picked up a guitar. Four years later he began teaching music, enrolled in a music course at college, played in a various band, regularly gets on the stage at open mic nights and records his music in a studio.

As I said, inspiration always comes. Can you see how that materilised from noticing what came out of the boredom which not playing a Playstation allowed?

Can you see how it created opportunity?

Would you agree he discovered something worthwhile and purposeful?

Here’s another example…

My 11 year old daughter watches almost no TV. As a result, her mind is not swamped by – and therefore not programmed by – the adverts or images we have not chosen for her to see.

In our home DVD’s and game stations are mostly for weekends, and only after working together as a family. My daughter contributes to the household. She has taken on a role as a team-player in the home. We pay her for chores and she learns the cause and effect of effort and reward, and financial responsibility.

Father and daughter ready for a dinner party

We also speak about games she plays and who she plays with and how they add meaning to her life. We talk every day about life in general and work with her to resolve issues.

Her is a recent one…

A teacher had been shouting at her and this upsetting her. After speaking with me she went to the teacher. She promised to give respect to the teacher and asked for respect in return (i.e. not being shouted at). The teacher responded positively and now has an excellent relationship with my daughter.

Do you believe she is learning to respect our home?

Do you believe she is learning a healthy respect for money?

Do you believe she has an understanding of her importance to the family unit?

Can you see how she is learning about having a healthy self-respect and how to communicate her needs?

Contrast that with a child left to watch TV or play video games all day long, who is given “hand-outs” like pocket money, allowed to leave their dirty undies on the floor and their plate by the sink after dinner and whose parents are both run ragged. Think about what that teaches a child.

Following King’s suggestion we create an atmosphere where events materialise. And what materialises if we love our children so much that we do everything for them?

Dependency?

State hand-outs?

An inability to contribute?

Failure to understand worth as a human being place and value in society?

Lack of care for society?

Frustration?

Anger?

A generation who covet nice things, but lack the knowledge to lawfully create having it.

My commitment, back in 2005, was to do what I could to change the world through changing the part of the world I influence and control. I aim to do this in my finances and in my relationship with my wife. I do this through my business. I encourage everyone who takes part in my Life Purpose programme to try what I suggest and then use the programme material to lead by example and inspire their children.

How we raise our children is just one of the ways we can influence and control world change.

As we change, the world around us changes. The example you create has a ripple effect on others beside our children. It ripples out to their friends and teachers, our partners, the people we work with, our friends and neighbours.

Most of us don’t need a government to create new laws to make the world a better place. Most of us know that governments are big machines that take years to bring about changes. Experience shows that commercial interests and economic growth is often a higher value than moral rightness.

So the decisions we make as mother’s father’s and business owners and human beings about what we watch, what we buy, what we sell, what we allow into our homes and into our minds will determined the pace with which consciousness shifts in our country.

As we make better decisions, the decisions made by those around us become better.

Take the green issues for example. Whether you believe in global warming or not does not matter. The fact is we are polluting the air and raping the resources of the world by the way we live. Governments have been talking about the problems for years, but have solved it yet?

But you and I both know the solution isn’t new laws. It’s about us doing what we have always known to be the right thing to do.

Some of my choices (and yours may be different) are to grow some fruit and veg at home, walk when I don;t need to drive, stop buying things that I don’t need and that have little or no real purpose, recycle, reuse, refuse (and more often than not borrow from a friend or family member).

In this article I have only scratched the surface of a much bigger debate, but…

Are you starting to see how much power you really have to influence changes in the world?

Are you seeing how much more control you really have over your life and the issues that face you?

Can you see how world change ripples outwards from the choices you make?

If we can define our purpose… what’s most important to us… we can start to change the world.

As Ghandi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

CommunitySoul is all about helping people improve their everyday experience in life. You can sign up for a FREE hour exploring Life Purpose with me at www.communitysoullife.co.uk

Good wishes
Neil

Neil Fellowes
Director
CommunitySoul

Two guiding principles I go by are:
1.    Know my purpose
2.    Remove obstacles and things that don’t work

Since childhood we’ve been told what to do by our parents, teachers and religions. At work we were told what time to arrive and what time we could leave.

Our peers influence us and so does the TV. And under the weight of all this influence, I suspect that many of us have hardly given much thought to what we really want.

Sometimes I think it’s a bit like we’ve all been hypnotised and just don’t have the brain space to think, so we do what’s being strongly suggested to us.

Our mind reacts to suggestions, and from those suggestion emotions can rise: be they love, anger, joy or hate.

People who succeed on their paths are the people who have learned to control their minds and handle the suggestibility more effectively than others. They have learned to respond only to what is good for them and ignore what is not so good.

Probably one of the biggest influence on our minds is the TV and media. Through news broadcasts we can be manipulated into feeling angry or fearful of other races, cultures and religions and ignore the fact that we’re all human beings and our spiritual priority – above all else – is probably to ensure co-operation and avoid domination.

Advertising is incredibly suggestive. When I was trying to lose weight, I found that whenever I sat down in front of the TV I wanted to eat. Then I realized that a large number of the adverts were food adverts and that after they came on I wanted food.

By knowing my purpose, it allowed me to see the manipulation of the TV. The choice then was, do I watch TV or am I mentally strong enough to self-manage my stomach?

Try following my two guiding principles:
Know my purpose
Remove obstacles and things that don’t work

Lotsa Love
Neil

p.s. If you need more help try our Life Purpose Programme – www.communitysoul.co.uk/lifepurpose.htm

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And while you’re here, leave a comment below and let me know what your guiding principles are.

At any point you decide you don’t like what’s happening in your life, you can begin to create something different.

It works like this…

We have a thought and suddenly it is now forming in consciousness. That thought will become reality in the next few seconds, minutes, hours, days, months or years. How long it will take to come into being will be dependent upon how much energy is required.

By energy I mean your conscious and subconscious energy, the urgency of your physical energy and actions, the amount of emotional energy and the amount of energy joining from other people. A rider here is also how much baggage you are dragging that might stop you from making necessary mental and physical changes.

Your energy combines with other energy forms outside of you. Like attracting like, joining together – thoughts externalising themselves and becoming physical.

What I failed to understand many years ago was that in struggling to survive day after day in a reality that didn’t work for me, I had chosen to forgo a reality that did work, that supported and strengthened me and led to bigger and better things manifesting in my life.

How we focus our minds for extended periods determines our outcomes. If we focus on things that we don’t enjoy, we compromise other things we could be enjoying.

When we say “Yes” to something we don’t want. We say “No” to something we do want.

When I focussed on getting through a day without abuse, I compromised living a life of freedom and happiness where people were kind to me all day long.

When I focussed on food to provide me with emotional – internal pleasures, I failed to externalise my desire to find a way to find a relationship that could meet my emotional needs and help me become healthier, more confident and more self-motivated.

When I focussed on being broke and worrying about money, I compromised getting out there and finding something that brought me an income.

What I’m talking about here is consciously taking back the control of your life. Finding integrity. Finding the fragments of your life that have become splintered, drawing them back to you, learning from your experiences and then recreating life in a way that is full of purpose, ful-filling (filling up the full) in every way.

A big juicy hug,
Neil

What can you do to take back control of your life? Leave a comment below…

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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

In this article I’m going to lay things on the line concerning a couple of phrases you may have heard being banded around spirituality circles. I’m doing this because I think we all owe it to ourselves to develop a fuller relationship with certain areas of our lives. Through the experience of doing this, we can grow.

One of the favourite phrases I hear in New Age spirituality is: ‘Give what you want to get.’ If you want money, you give money and money comes back to you. Another quote I hear in spirituality is the old Gandhi quote, ‘Be the change you want to see’ or its sister, ‘Act as if.’

Spirituality and Money
For many people The idea of ‘Giving money to get money’ hasn’t worked. And why should it? If you’re only going to give in the hope or expectation of getting, there is something wrong with the transaction – it’s being done with a motive.

Since many people involved in spirituality have money issues, let’s apply this ‘Give what you want to get,’ phrase to money. When people hear this idea their response is most often: ‘But how can I give when I have nothing to give?’ or ‘I can hardly afford my bills!’

In this sense the ‘Give what you want to get’ ideal may as well be substituted for ‘Let’s hit and hope.’ I suggest this because the phrase in itself usually only brings up desperation. For me, this type of quip, offered within spirituality concerning money, is nothing more than a cop-out comment offered by people who don’t have any practical knowledge of how to make money, respect it and nurture its growth so we can effect change in the world.

Spirituality and The Practical
In the ‘Act as if’ suggestion we do have a little more practical opportunity. Speaking from experience (having been obese once upon a time) how can you be twenty stone and ‘act as if’ you were the person who is one hundred and four pounds lighter than you. He could run without his inner thighs catching fire. He could tie his shoe laces without his belly getting in the way and do the downward dog in yoga without being choked by the double chin.

So what do we do with these phrases?
I admit, I have wanted to gather up all the people who proffered such airy-fairy advice and lead them all to the tallest tower in far far away land (I did think I might put pink fluffy stuff on the prison bars). I’ve come out the other side of that thinking now and hope I can offer you something of substance.

Money and Spirituality
Let’s go back to ‘Give what you want to get’ and money. For a moment just think of the possibility that you don’t actually have to give money to get it – I know you suddenly feel relieved, don’t you? Good. And what if it’s not about giving money per se? What if all you have to do is give yourself to the experience and relationship you have with money?

I didn’t like my financial situation and wanted to change it forever. During a twelve-month period I immersed myself in understanding my experience and relationship with money. I read books. I met millionaires. I got in conversation with people who were wealthier than me and examined my own attitude and habits towards spending, budgeting, savings, longer-term investments.

Quite literally I gave myself to the experience and relationship of money. I learned a greater respect and appreciation for money. I came to understand money. I nurtured my relationship with money. I cared for money. I cared how I spent it. I cared about the people I spent it with. I grew to love it and accept it as part of my experience and came to really honour it for the choices it gave me.

The Act of Spirituality
With ‘Act as if’ we may have to chunk it down (forgive the pun). If you are twenty stone and want to get to twelve, start by aiming for nineteen stone. Get to understand that the best way to eat a lot of food is to live a long time! Start to swim or walk once a day and build up your endurance over the course of time. Start your food education. Investigate what goes into your mouth and the effects it has on your body. Read. Research the Internet and speak to people who enjoy the kind of health and vitality you’d like to have. Get to understand your relationship with food, exercise and health. Notice how food affects your spirituality. Pay attention to when you’re really tired or just being lazy – yes there is a difference! You may also want to consider my Special Offer on coaching.

A Task for You to Consider This Week:
Where in your life do you use or subscribe to superficial metaphors or thinking? How can you develop your experience and relationship with it?

To those of you who know us – may I express my deep appreciation for your interest in CommunitySoul. You inspire me to continue writing and finding new ways to teach people how to live consciously and work together for a better Community.

I hope that today’s article will be of help to you or someone you know. I hope I have not offended your religion or spirituality and wish you a wonderful week!

Neil

Leave a comment: Do you live consciously and work for a better Community? What are your thoughts about this article?

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

“Resolve to make at least one person happy every day, and then in ten years you may have made three thousand, six hundred and fifty persons happy, or brightened a small town by your contribution to the fund of general enjoyment.” Sydney Smith

What's your ripple? Have you tried to move away from the same old patterns and find fresh new ones?

New Year is traditionally an opportunity for a fresh start, but all too often, within days, we’ve slipped back into the same old ways as the previous year.

If things didn’t turn out in the way we hoped during the last year, then perhaps returning to the same old patterns and principals and accepting the world as it is, is not our most inspired idea. I think intellectually we understand this, which is why we make New Year resolutions and declarations of change at various points throughout the year.

If Edison hadn’t continually made changes to his experiments, I might not be writing this article with a light bulb shining over my desk. Like Edison’s experiments, it may be part of our grand design: to experiment, acknowledge the results, what they mean to us and then modify what we tried. Therefore each time we try, we move closer to the experiences we most desire.

I wonder if our resolutions are an opportunity – a golden nugget – to get to know our inner self. When we make the resolution to give up smoking, to lose weight, get fit, get rich or find love, we are resolving to find something of real value about ourselves.

Whenever we declare a change the Universe responds to us. It asks us through our in-the-moment experiences: Do you have what it takes? Are you determined? Will you work hard enough? Will you stick at it? Do you have the backbone? Guts? Relentless focus? Do you love it?

Following our resolutions we may discover a few things. Maybe we are lazier or have less willpower than we thought. Perhaps we beat ourselves up too much, get depressed, fail to understand others, or play out a victim role.

Remember: It’s the journey that counts – not the goal!

How are your resolutions going?

Best Wishes
Neil

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Have you made any resolutions this new year? If not, why not? If so, have you followed through. Would love to hear from you, so feel free to add a comment.

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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

Free-will is important to us all. Wars have been fought for it and we’d fight them again if we realised someone was trying to take our free will away from us. But have you considered that your free- will is being eroded in such a subtle way that, before you know it, you’ve lost it?

Our will-power is best considered when looking at what we eat. Eating well is vital to our well being – you don’t have to be Einstein to know that. Yet many of us have given little consideration to what we put in our mouths, other than to think about the explosion of flavour.

I’m going to go on here and talk about food, but you could just as easily substitute what I say about food to what happens with your TV set, your cigarette smoking, drinking, newspapers and the negative stories and the business of life and do-do-doing.

For around the first twenty-two years of my life I ate what my mother cooked for me.  Beyond that I ate what my wife cooked for me, plus what the advertisers told me was good for me. By the time I reached the age of twenty-five I was eighty pounds overweight. By the time I reached thirty, I’d ballooned by another seventy pounds.

Looking at the statistics of obesity, I’d say my experience is quite typical. It all happens because we fail to take responsibility for what goes into our mouths and because advertisers know how to get us in a buying trance where we ignore everything else except the feeling of their product in our stomach. This failure to take responsibility is what determines that we live our lives according to someone else’s will.

Is it any different in other areas of life: sitting mesmerised, channel hopping – nothing’s on but you can’t turn it off; you know smoking is bad for you, but it makes you feel a little happier with life; the news is disheartening, but you read it anyway, with a morbid hope that by somehow reading it, everything will get better.

And what can you do when TV advertisers make pizza look mouth-watering, chocolate look sexy, they tell us milk has calcium that’s good for our bones and that wine is good for the heart. And we believe what they tell us… usually without question.

Why?

Over a year we’re bombarded with this image or that. They come via our TV, on billboards, in magazines, via the Internet. It is little wonder that if we don’t have a strong will and line drawn in the sand, that we will eventually succumb to the power of the advertiser.

When we think of their product, we remember how delicious it looked. When we taste it, we know it will taste fantastic – because the advertiser told us it would – when we smell it we remember it for next time.

And we then get bombarded with more adverts telling us this or that is for us. Our will weakens and once again we succumb to the advertiser.

It’s little wonder the nation is gaining weight, under stress, fed up and feeling like identity with our selves has been lost.  It’s like we’re in a trance drifting along a pavement, remembering the tasty images we’ve seen on TV; remembering the feeling in our mouth; remembering the experience of eating; remembering the smelling the bread or the coffee as the waft of crispy chicken wings drifts along the high street as a call to you, to stop in, fill up and feel good.

It’s like we can’t help but smoke, or drink, or work because we know we’ll get sacked if we don’t.

But do the processed foods that look good on TV and taste sensational in our mouths sustain us? Do our habits or addictions or our lifestyle make us feel good day-to-day. Are we functioning at maximum output or left with the sense that there must be more to life.

Reclaim your free-will. Don’t just eat things because you have always eaten them or because the TV says you should -  don’t trust anyone who has a vested interest in the product. If they are advertising the product, they’re making money on it and might not have given your overall health much thought.

And why should they?

A food manufacturing company makes food. It’s your responsibility to choose if you want to eat it or not. If you want to feel great and look good then choose the food that goes with that. If you want to feel sluggish and enjoy having rolls of fat hanging over your belt then buy the food that goes with that. It’s your right to have bad breath and have smelly clothes as much as your right to have perfect health; it’s your right to do what you’re told at work as it is to have respect for your personal life.

How do you make these informed choices?

Remember every decision you make is like putting fuel inside you. It ignites your passion or douses the fire. You wouldn’t put diesel in your unleaded fuel tank would you? Don’t risk putting fuel in your engine that might cause you to lose power. Reclaiming your will power put the right fuel in your tank, every time.

Best Wishes
Neil
What do you think? Do you have control of your willpower and free will? Would love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to leave a comment.

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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

Has your mind taken over your spirit?

For most of us, we are driven by what seems to be our needs – emotions and wants. Those needs and wants are driven largely by what we perceive success to be. These perception are created by our masters…

Masters?

Yes, masters. I’m talking about the masters who taught and still teach us how to think and behave. I’m talking about our parents, teachers and peers. I’m also talking about the media, advertisers and clever marketers. Together they make us formidable machines that are driven by unconscious minds.

We literally become machines that will behave in an almost pre-programmed manner, irrespective of whether the current situation warrants the usual behaviour. Some of these masters condition us over time, others plant triggers in our heads, better know as subliminals.

It works like this:

In a relationship I act out the kind of behaviour I saw my parents act out.

In life, I act out the kind of metaphors my parents gave me – work hard for a living, money doesn’t grow on trees. I live these day-in, day-out.

When I sit down to watch TV, I like to sit down with food. If I forget, the advertisers remind me. Before I know it I’m in the kitchen hunting food, despite the fact I want to lose weight and have good dietary habits during the rest of the day.

The trick is to reverse the cycle – get the spirit to drive the mind. Here is how:

1. Sit down in a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. Now ask your spirit where it would like you to go next on your life path.

2. When you have an answer, consider the possibilities of what needs to be done to get you on that path. Don’t get any fixed or rigid ideas.

3. Create a plan that you think might work and begin to probe and see if things work.

4. Monitor what happens. See where the plan works and see where it takes you and where it doesn’t.  Be aware at all times of when the mind kicks in and tries to take over, saying you ‘should do this‘ or ‘you should do that.’

Whenever the mind takes control you begin to run on auto-pilot. You have to become what they call in quantum physics, the observer.

How do I become the observer?

Simple. You have to learn to monitor your thoughts and begin to question them. By questioning them you become aware of them and can then choose which ones serve you and which ones don‘t. This is much more profitable than making the same mistake ten times and wondering why you keep getting the same result. The question here is always about who is in control…

Was the spirit driving the mind or was the mind driving the spirit?

Love and Good Wishes
Neil

Leave a comment and tell me what drives you — your mind or your spirit? Why?

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

Do you press the self-sabotage button?

When we begin to do better than we’re comfortable with, we can deliberately do something to take us back to what we are used to or keep us in a holding pattern.

Anyone who has weight problems will probably be able to tell you that maybe on a certain day, when they suddenly felt lighter or maybe on a day which was stressful, they hit the sabotage button and reverted back to the old way.

It happens.

But why does it happen?

One of the reasons is we hit an upper limits of success – we hit the ceiling of what we can cope with for that moment. We’re unable to accept our self as something else… in other words, the success we once wanted now feels uncomfortable.

When I launched my first novel, I had full hall of people. I signed hundreds copies that night. I was in the newspaper, on the radio, was having books delivered by the box load and it was all very exciting. People were buying several copies and telling me they would frame one and I heard stories of people who were buying them and stopping their spouses from reading them because they wanted the copies to stay in pristine condition.

While this would be only limited success with someone like Robbie Williams, I found it all bizarre and it was something I didn’t feel comfortable with.

I hit the self-sabotage button and began to wallow in the success and a loneliness that I felt that no one, or anything, could fill. And I guess this is where a lot of musicians and film stars end up when they start taking drugs.

Thankfully I didn’t go along that route and was self-aware enough to capture what I was doing several weeks into it. But that said, getting out of it wasn’t so easy.

Why am I telling you this story?

I’m telling this story because I know many people reading this article want to be public speakers, writers and authors or make a big difference to other people and what may hold you back is the responsibility.

Yes, you will have people look up to you who tell you how much you changed their life; and while that is lovely, we must always keep in balance the fact that it is the clients that make the change… we just give them the space to make their own realisations and transformations.

To you making profound differences to others,
Neil

Have you reached your limit of success? How did you react? Would appreciate your comments.

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

If we accept our comfort zone and never step out of it, we will never be all we can be. In this article I want to explore this, using children as the theme.

When you change what you do, the world around you changes.

I’m sure most of recognise that there is something we’d like – an experience or an opportunity that we haven’t had yet.

A number of people reading this article will want life to be be better in some way. They may want this change to happen but they may not be wandering around 24/7 trying to fix the problem.

But here is the truth. The problems most of us face are “back of mind” issues rather than “front of mind”. What this means is that we go from day-to-day coping, but never really healing the issues that gnaw away at our happiness.

Because these issues are back of mind, they are rarely noticed. They may be thought of every few week or months when the issue starts to cross a pain threshold.

For example, your teenager may be rude to you at 7.30am, but as the day moves on you might not think about that again until it happens again later. Then you wish it would be different, but then you forget about it again.

Years ago, when I was a stepparent to two children as well as a parent  to two of my own, I recognised the pains and stresses of blending two families together, especially when the kids were rude and disrespectful. Things didn’t work out in that relationship and when I left I had some issues to heal in my parenting.

I didn’t always like how my own children behaved and it would have been easy to blame them or try to change them, but I recognised that they were who they were because of who I was.

This is so because they reflected what I taught them about how they could be through my actions. So, it made sense when they did something I didn’t like, and I needed to change what I did that may have caused that to happen.

The result has been that the frustrations and pains, many parents have, just dissolved for me, one issue at a time.

It’s been nine years since I started practicing this and with one teenager and one tweenager, I’d have to go back almost 5 years to when I last felt stressed with my kids’ behaviour.

In fact, the other day I was saying how they have both become amazing people who I would readily choose as friends, because of the fine qualities they demonstrate.

So many parents feel exhausted, stressed and disrespected. Yet it doesn’t need to be that way. Just ponder what you have done that allows or causes them to be who they are. When you change what you do, the world around you changes.

Lossa love
Neil

What have you accomplished from ‘change’? Leave a comment!

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