I love facilitating trainings, teaching intensives, and providing coaching. I enjoy supporting transformation in others. What I am coming up against is I haven’t loved enrolling people in programs. It has felt like a mystery to me so I ignored that part of the process. With my coaching practice, I have been fortunate to have people to come to me through word of mouth referrals or through reading my blog. I have allowed the organic unfolding of my practice and have been very happy with the results, but now I have an event with a specific date. I recognize I have to do something if I want people to show up at a precise time and place. I can’t simply be available to serve them when they are ready and come to me.
 
This feels different. When I think about enrolling people for the event, I experience pressure. I feel nervous. I know all of these feelings are coming from thought, specifically, insecure thought. I am savvy enough to appreciate that any thought that creates an internal experience of pressure or discomfort is an insecure thought. I recognize I am feeling the emotional impact of believing my insecure thinking. I am not experiencing my thoughts as fluid, transitory and subjective. They are looking solid and real to me.
 
In fact, it doesn’t look to me like I am having any thoughts at all. It seems like I am seeing pure, unadulterated reality. However, despite the feedback of my sensory experience, I know I am caught up in a self-generated reality that is painful. I am gripped by the content of my thinking that is telling me: I don’t know how to enroll people; I’m not good at that; I don’t want to sell. Behind the thinking of resistance is the insecure thinking of my childhood: I’m not popular; No one wants to be friends with me; I am an outsider; I am alone; I am not good enough; I don’t measure up. It is amazing how thoughts can be invisible and yet feel so real.
 
I used to think I needed to heal myself from this thinking and that my personal and spiritual development was measured by not having these thoughts. Now I am much kinder to myself and understand that my worth has nothing to do with what I believe or how I feel. I don’t need to rid myself of negative thoughts to be worthy or to experience success. I have less suffering when I remember that even though the feelings feel real, the thoughts aren’t true. However, even when I forget this, I always wake up from my negative thinking. My mood will naturally lift, and I will have a fresh perspective. More helpful thinking will be available to me. From this mindset, I will see possibilities that were invisible to me before.
 
I have experienced dramatic shifts in my life from this understanding. I experience less internal stress and less external conflict. I find it easier to be more compassionate with myself and more unconditionally accepting of myself and others. Seeing that my experience, in any moment, is only ever one version of reality that is inevitably going to change, just as my thoughts are surely going to change, has given me tremendous comfort. I know that no matter how distressed I might feel, in the next moment, my experience could be completely different simply from having fresh thought.
 
This has also helped me to be more tolerant of other people’s upset. I used to be very bothered when someone was angry with me. I didn’t have room for that. I wanted to change their emotions because I found them so troubling. I thought I needed to fix things right away. Now I have more internal space for people to have their experience knowing it will change. They will stabilize, and so will I. Not only will thinking naturally change, but also thinking will naturally settle. As our thinking regulates, our mood goes up. Our consciousness has a less dense filter of personal thinking so we can experience our Authentic Self more fully.
 
When it comes to figuring out how to enroll people in my upcoming event, the same is true. As soon as my mood lifts, the insecure thoughts will become visible and look like thoughts rather than reality. I will see them as the chatter of my ego and my self-absorption. I know no one is going to want to enroll in a training in order to support my ego and flatter me. I can get over myself, and instead, focus on being of service.
 
I recognize I don’t need to get rid of my frailties in order to do the work I do, but at the same time, when I am serving another, my insecurities have to go on the back burner. I am a vehicle for delivering an experience that allows people to get unstuck from their limiting beliefs and negative thought loops. I help them understand their psychological functioning within the spiritual context so they can take their personal thinking less seriously and not be gripped by it. This allows them to experience greater peace, well being, joy and freedom.
 
My job is to check my ego at the door so the participants can experience the shift that is available to them. I know it is possible because I have experienced it, and I have witnessed others experience it. Our psychological suffering is reduced when we see how our experience is created from the inside-out. We have greater psychological freedom when we recognize the fact of thought and seeing how thought and consciousness create our reality.
 
When we see the implications of this, every area of our life is positively impacted. Clients tell me how their relationships work better, their performance increases, their stress levels decrease, their health progresses, their sleep deepens, their golf game advances, their finances turn a corner. All from the same teaching. I am enrolling in that. Not because I am special. Not because I am great, but because it works. Thriving is natural to each one of us. We don’t need an enlightened guru to help us experience our innate state of peace and equanimity. A simple heart-centered experience can point us in the direction of our enlightened nature. Then it is easy to wake up more fully to the truth of who we really are and create outside circumstances that reflect the beauty of that inner experience.