Being Present Through Noticing - Will Keiper

TUCP Intro/Outro: Thank you for tuning in to The Ultimate Coach Podcast, a companion to the transformative book The Ultimate Coach written by Amy Hardison and Alan D Thompson, each conversation is designed to be a powerful wake up call, reminding us of what's possible for you and your life. So if you're on a journey to expand your state of being, this podcast is for you.

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Ultimate Coach podcast. I'm your host, Ipek Williamson, today, I'm truly excited to be joined by a remarkable guest, Will Keiper Will is known as a change agent, helping people and businesses transform by doing things differently as a result of seeing things differently. He's not only an accomplished author and thought leader, but also a resilient individual whose journey has been deeply inspiring. He wrote 10 books, including two that he co authored with his lifelong coach, Steve Chandler, and he is about to release a new one, the 11th one, the power of noticing. I've had the privilege of working with will as I guided him through the Positive Intelligence Program as his coach. Let me brag a little, because it was a huge honor for me, and I also have been a part of his writing journey, providing feedback and support as he crafted this beautiful book. Welcome will I'm so happy to have you here today to share your insights, experiences and the power of noticing in everyday life.

Well, I'm the one who feels honored. Thank you for hosting and for inviting me. I'm delighted to be here and looking forward to our conversation.

Thank you will Can you start by telling us about your new book, noticing what inspired you to write it, and how has the journey of writing this book been for you?

Well, there were different drivers for leading me to decide on this particular topic. As you said, I've written, this will be my 11th book, and so there's a process, and the first part of that is to come up with an outline I got interested in the topic of noticing, and thought, Wow. You know, noticing is something that we we all know what it is, but I never really thought of it as something discrete, you know, that could be studied, or maybe there was more to it than met the eye. So as I started thinking about, what is the difference between, you know, sort of seeing something and noticing it, or hearing something and noticing it, or tasting something and really noticing it, I realized there was something going on and noticing that was deeper than I thought. So that's what led to it. And going back further than that, I had a very important animal companion in my life. His name is Baxter, and he's on the cover of the book, by the way, if you see the a picture of a Bishan Frieza on the cover of the book that is Baxter. And I didn't connect the dots between what I saw him able to do and noticing until much later. But in many ways, he was the inspiration, because from about the time he was one year old, I could see that he had a gift. And his gift was, you know, high flying military airplanes and other jets. Sometimes you can't see them in the sky. You know, they're just too far away, but because they there's a vapor trail from a jet that shows up behind in the there's a vapor trail, and so you can see that there's a jet there. You You know your assumption is right. If you see that vapor trail that a jet has just passed by. Well, this is a dog that's not even one foot tall, you know, from the ground, but he had a gift of being able to see jet trails and know what, when and what was going on, even if it was a mirror.in the sky was the most amazing thing. From his little his perch on the ground, he would look up and throw his head back and start barking at something first I thought it was a leaf or a tree. Or a limb or a bird or whatever. But what happened was he was actually able to somehow or other. I'm sure it's not possible if you talk to an A dog ophthalmologist. But anyway, I credit him with being able to do that, because it just went on and on, and I would go, Oh, there. And I would look up and there's a vapor trail in the sky. So anyway, he didn't just see the world. He really noticed. That is what I found later. I thought it was a perfect word for the difference between what he was doing and what everyone else was doing. So, but what happened? So I was inspired. And the book was going to be about, here's what noticing is. Here are the various elements of it, you know, our sensory impressions, our thoughts, our egos, our consciousness, the various things that are in the book about, you know, making that up. And that was going to be a very short book, because I thought, well, if it's about noticing, it shouldn't be long book. It should be short because you just want to notice. So that's the way that it started, and that was my outline. I outlined the book about 15 months ago or 16 months ago. I looked at the outline the other day, and it was a nice little book, but something happened about 30 days after I started writing that book, and I found out that I had I not only had cancer, but I had stage four colon cancer, and at The time I was walking and I came 30 plus miles a week. I was lifting weights and doing fitness training three times a week, and was in probably the best physical condition of my life. And it was only as the result of a routine colonoscopy that I found out that I Well, it turned out that I not only had colon cancer, but it had advanced and was in other parts of my body. So that began to change my thinking about what this book would be, not for a while, because I continued on, you know, writing about the noticing part, and really kind of completed that. And then I realized that, wait a minute, something else is happening here that might be insightful for people, and that is, how did I take noticing and apply it to this challenge, or these challenges that represented what I was about to go through in terms of, you know, chemotherapy, other treatments, and being, you know, having a confrontation more or less with the medical establishment, which is not what we do every day. You know, it's a whole different it's a whole different kettle of fish. So that became another part of the book. And then, you know, very like, maybe six months later, I realized that what the why of why I was able to cope with this challenge of the stage four cancer, and what the role of noticing was, how did I get there? And there was a transformational event that happened in my life. And by the time I had written those two parts of the book, I realized I left out part one. And Part one was, how did you get to this point where you were able to notice in the way that you were so you could apply it to, you know the the challenges and suffering and you know the surprises that come up in life and and talk about it in a way that people might be able to relate to. So that's the story of that led me to putting those pieces together. It started out as a little how to book, How to notice and what it is, and then it became more about, you know, a transformational event that occurred for me, or a series of events that occurred for me that led me to, you know, realize that We have much more native, many more native gifts, both in terms of our bodies and our minds, than we think we do.

Yeah, it's well, as a person who witnessed this whole process like from the beginning to today, and I can attest that it started as one thing, and at the end, I think it came to a place where it has been your story of noticing, it has become your story, rather than helpful book about noticing.

True. No, I definitely. I call myself the noticing guide now, because I feel like I've got found a little piece of ground that I can stand on and claim something and that I know more about noticing than about anybody else, and and how powerful it is. So anyway, our journey, you've, as you said, You've been witness to this for more than a year that we've been working together as I've been able to do chapters and sort of sandwich my treatments in and keep the book going and all of that. So I'm very appreciative of the things that we've been able to do along the way, and for your inputs,

Same here for me too, well, it has been a honor and pleasure and privilege for me to be a part of that, like project. It has been way more than a project, like a baby, that it

Is like that. I like to think every book is almost like, I call it climbing a mountain because I haven't had a baby. But, you know, climbing a it's like climbing a mountain there. You never know what you're going to see over the next horizon. There are going to be challenges there it. It's like a problem solving exercise all the time. How can I say this better? Or what did I not say? Or what's not here that should be here. So it's definitely a process.

Yeah, and you within the book. And always, when we have a chat, you and I, you always emphasize the importance of awareness and being present. And it is important to you and it is also important to me. Of course, can you share how these concepts have shaped your life, especially during challenging times?

Well, one of the insights that I got in this process was that a lot of what we do to ourselves as humans isn't necessary. And for example, I believe, and you and I talked about this topic before that, in the wool, when we're still a fetus in the womb, a baby, not yet born, that we have, we have natural gifts. We have the sensory gifts of not we haven't opened our eyes yet, but, you know, our senses are in development, and they develop at different stages and rates. But in the womb, we have those, and we have it's there's proof that we have awareness, uh, while we're in the womb. And so we have and our brains are developing. They don't have learning in them yet. They're beginning to learn. You know, what are those sounds and catalog? Oh, that's a friendly sound. That's my mother's heartbeat and things like that. But, you know, basically what I believe is that that we are born with a gift of sort of a spirit and a spiritual awareness, even I'll call it spirit awareness, not religious, but just an energetic awareness, an aura, a light, something, all of that is present when we arrive here through being born. And then, you know, as we start to learn and grow, about the time we become toddlers, we start to learn that we're not just awareness, and we can't just take things that they as they come, that we're separate from everybody else that you have. You know, you're you and they're them. You're separate. They're separate all the stuff that you have seen in your world, your toys, your bottle, your mom, those are all different objects. And so we start having the structure for thinking about the world, and we move into our heads, in a lot of ways, starting that we think about things and we we think about them in that context that I just talked about, which is called the duality in some circles. You know, when there's more than there's two, there's you and the other thing, or there's an object and the other object. So anyway, the point of that is just that what starts to intrude are not only our thoughts, but what we think about our thoughts. And we move from that pureness of awareness, which is just being present, just being actively present, and noticing what's around us, as we were able to do in the womb. And that's why I think that noticing is so powerful. It's the first gift, in a way, that we had. Noticing is awareness. But what what I think happens is that if we could do less thinking and generate more awareness of what's around us in the moment that. Do ourselves a favor, because a lot of our thoughts are, frankly, not helpful to us. Sometimes we're very critical of ourselves. We may talk about this a little bit later, but we judge ourselves. We judge others. None of that has to do with what's actually going on. All of that is what we generate as a way of conducting ourselves in the world, the way that the generations before us did, the way that the people around us do. So we learn all of that, and we begin to overlay these things on top of what would be just the natural way of going through life and experiencing things. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying this is what we do, but most of us lose sight because of the power of thoughts and the power of others and the and the desire to be to navigate the world in a way that keeps us in the normal zone. In other words, we don't want to be outliers. We want to you know, that's why, if you you watch teen girls and boys, teenage girls and boys at a high school, you notice that they dress pretty much the same. You know, the hairdos are the same, the sunglasses are the same, whatever the outfits are, well, they're in a range there. There's not too many outliers. There's a reason for that. We're conforming, and we are taught to conform, firstly, by our caregivers and parents, because it's easier to have discipline in an orderly house than to have, you know, kids running amok and without any rules. So we start that. But what that does is that puts layers over natural awareness that makes it more and more difficult and sometimes, and I was one of these people, you know, my thoughts, my brain, my mind, got to be so noisy that it overwhelmed whatever awareness I might have once had, and basically was controlling everything about me. So awareness is superbly important, and just being aware that it's not there is a starting so, you know, I think that in writing the power of noticing. For me, it was about reminding people that the natural gifts that we have are very powerful and that you can go a long way if you trust in your ability to notice, to hear, to interpret and not to judge, evaluate, categorize, all of which takes you off of what you're actually experiencing in the moment. So awareness is very important. And I think a lot of people are under the misconception that awareness is something you can't get there just being a normal human being. You have to be you have to meditate, or you have to take some sort of mind bending drugs to to get there. Or you have to have a near death experience, you know, so that these things are brought to you in sort of a shocking way, or with the meditation practice, and you're an expert, teacher and practitioner of that, you know that it does work over time, but I believe that there is, there's a fundamental awareness that we all have that is extremely powerful, and I would call it like this, that people have awareness as a natural gift, and frankly, I think that the idea of enlightenment isn't that far away, either, and that it's not for just a rarefied few people who've been able to do 25,000 Hours of lifetime meditation, then all of a sudden, go to a mountaintop wearing a saffron robe or not, and all of a sudden have something happen that says, Oh my gosh. I didn't realize I'm noticing things around me in a way that I never did. So what I believe is that noticing is awareness, and that awareness isn't an is not enlightenment, but it's on the road to enlightenment, and that means that we all have this power so and I'll give you one illustration of it, and I mentioned near death experiences. These are not these happen to anybody, and there are now 1000s of documented cases of near death experiences, and when they're reported back, they're almost always the same. There's white light and there's stillness and there's calmness and there's a sense of almost joy and happiness. These are repeated. Over and over and over. These are people. They were in the womb, just like us. They were adults, just like us. Maybe some of them were kids. They go through this experience and then go, Oh my gosh, I have to touch that again. Well, it wasn't outside of them. It was part of the awareness that they had and the insight that they got in a moment and they came back to tell us about it, what I'm saying Epic is that I believe that we have all that awareness just we cover it up with our noise and our judgments and our thoughts and our desire to get ahead, our attachments, our our desires for stuff, you know, all the things that can get in the way, we absolutely let them get in the way, and it's masking the most powerful thing we have, which is being present in the current moment and Not judging what we're seeing. I call it life's flow. I think life's flow is delivered to us. Do you notice that almost no matter what you do, the way things are going to be, that's the way they're delivered to you. You can influence them. I'm not saying you can't. If you want a Maserati, you can't get a Maserati. You can't be the top salesperson in your company. You can't not be a priest. If you want to be a priest, you you can become a doctor. You can be an adventurer. You can do all those are not the who you are. Those are what you do the rest of it, but the WHO YOU ARE BEING which to go back to our ultimate coach, the ultimate coach book, the book of being. You know who you are being is this essence that we're talking about right now, I'll put a period at the end of that sense.

Thank you. Thank you. And first of all, let me tell you this, everything you said resonates 1,000% with me, and I feel like when we are born, we are little Buddhas, little golden Buddhas, and we have access to all of those things that maybe when, like near death experiences, bring to the person, because it is just not getting out of wanting and getting into one, but it's just remembering, remembering what we were at the beginning. It looks like that to me, but I want to get to the ultimate coach and Steve Hardison and you, you and he know each other for quite some time, as far as I know, and yours is one of the names mentioned in the ultimate coach book. Will you tell us how you first met with Steve?

Sure, I'm not Steve Hardison, about 15 years ago, and at the time, I was working with Steve Chandler, who was my coach, and is still my coach. That's a sidebar, but we have a lifetime coaching agreement just so happens. So one of us has to pass away before that deal is over, you know, so but anyway, Steve Chandler was coached, is coached by Steve Hardison, and has been for, I think is coming up on 30 years now, when Steve very early on in Steve hardison's coaching career, he began coaching Steve Chandler. So anyway, Steve Steve Chandler suggested that I meet Steve Hardison, and so I went to Steve's house at that time, and we met, not officially, sort of an informal meeting, but with Steve Hardison. Nothing is ever informal. He's always on a mission for something. It doesn't and whatever it is, it's got his full attention in the moment. And it's not one thing. He might have 10 of those things. But if you happen to strike a chord on any of those things that he's processing at that moment, he will light up like a pinball machine, and off you are off and running on a topic that you didn't even know existed five seconds ago. You know. So this happened with us because he was working with a with a professional football player at the time, a Tongan from the island of Tonga in the South Pacific. His name is deuce, lutui, l, u, t, u i, and deuce, who was a player for the Arizona Cardinals and National Football League in the US team at the time, and through a variety of circumstances, which Steve was trying to coach another person on that team, the quarterback, the. Quarterback got traded or went away or something, and but Deuce heard about the fact that Steve Hardison was about to coach the quarterback, whose name was Matt Leinart at the time, was about to coach him. And he says, Hey, what about me? So anyway, they met, and Steve started coaching deuce lutui. That was about the time that I met Steve, so he told me that he'd met this, this man and Deuce is about maybe 666, feet, six inches tall, and weighs, well, something north of 350 pounds. I'll just say that sometimes he could get, you know, close to 400 I don't, I don't know what that is today, but, but he's a door, you know, basically a person that was a door, a very thick door. But anyway, Steve described to me his initial meeting with him and Steve asked him a question. And deuce lutui is a offensive lineman. He plays on the trenches, what they call on the trenches, on the line of the football team. And he asked him a question. He said, Who's the best offensive lineman in the NFL? And Deuce was quiet, quiet, quiet, thinking, thinking, thinking. And Steve couldn't wait anymore. He says, you ask me, I think I'm telling the story, right? Steve's got there. It's all online. You can see this. It's a beautiful story. It's worth seeing. It's in the book too. So anyway, so this is kind of important that. So Steve says, I'll be you. You be me. So he turns around saying he asked so Stu asked me the question, who's the best offensive lineman in the NFL? And Steve Hardison did in only his way. I'm the best lineman in the NFL. It's me. There's nobody else, you know. I'm the person who and so he was, he was showing Deuce that, you know, without some sort of a commitment to what it is that you're doing and where you want to be and who you are, you know how you want to show up, that nothing much is going to happen. But what came out of that moment was the there's a phrase the best offensive alignment in the NFL, those letters, T, B, O L, I T, n, f, l, and you can look those up. There's not a Wikipedia article, but it will come up on a Google search, T, B, O, L, i, t, NFL will come up, because what happened is Steve artisan took deuce lutui mission to become that person, to be the best offensive lineman in The NFL as his coaching reason for living, for for deuce. And I got swept into this, because this had just happened, and Steve was telling me this story, and I said to I said to Steve, wow, I can't believe this, but my then wife, her family was had been great friends with the King of Tonga. And Deuce was a Tongan subject. He was a king, still a kingdom at that time. So Steve says, Wow, I wonder if we could get him to come to one of Deuce his games. And so all of a sudden this TBO lit NFL movement was off and running. He tasked me to reach out to the King of Tonga to see if he would fly to the United States for Thanksgiving, because there was going to be a game on Thanksgiving at Cardinal Stadium where Deuce would be playing. And it would be so meaningful for for Deuce and help deuce on his journey. Steve Hardison felt that if the King of Tonga could actually be there and witness this. So anyway, Steve Hardison is a force of the only thing I think force of nature is probably the the three words, I would say any no one will disagree. If you said, is Steve artisan force of nature? Absolutely, he is. So. Anyway, I got swept into this going off trying to find out how to get in touch with the King of Tonga and then that. But that was a little bit longer term. But next week, Steve created a banner about maybe three feet wide and 25 or 30 feet long, with letters on it, T, B, O, L, i, t, NFL, he and I went to the game, and we unfurled this banner in a section where there was no seats, and we held it. There. I think it was Monday night football game, actually. So the entire world was watching. And that began people asking, all over the world, all in the United States, all over the world, in the football world, what the hell is T, B, O, L, i, t, n, f, l, and so was launched the story of deuce, lutui and TBO, l, i, t NFL. But it's just a small illustration of how Steve artisan has impacted the world, because that's one client, that's one client, and he's had, I'm sure, hundreds during his career, and that's why he's called The Ultimate coach. So anyway, that's how we met, and I've known him since, and have kept in touch with him and my child. I wrote a chapter for a book I wrote called life expectancy that told the deuce lutui story, but I told it related to commitment, and that deuce, and I don't want to spoil the story, but Deuce was committed, but he wasn't as committed as Steve Hardison was. And so there's I would just say this commitment requires daily renewal. If you don't renew your commitment daily, then you let happen whatever is going to happen. So I would recommend to your listeners and seers video viewers that they look up the tbolitnfl story and Tui and Steve artisan, and see about this story. I mean, it was an amazing but Steve Hardison, from absolutely just a guy who wasn't supposed to be the client, became the client. And then this story and this movement that involved 1000s of people, it's an unbelievable story. I recommend it. It

is and you know, this is already in the book, but the video, there's a video of it like, right, right.

Thank you for reminding me.

Yes, it is unbelievable. And that was part of my coaching training, really, because the platform that I got my coaching training, our instructor was Steve Chandler's student, and when I first came across this story, TBO nit NFL was during my training. So I was introduced to both Steve, Hardison and Steve Chandler right at the beginning of my becoming a coach. So it is amazing story, but the background that you shared here is also so valuable and so fun to listen to. Thank you so much.

Yeah, I'm sorry I forgotten that. Of course, it's in the ultimate coach book, and the chapter on deuce lutui That's in the appendix also, the chapter that I wrote is in the appendix of the ultimate coach if anybody wants to see about that as well.

Yes, thank you. So now I'm gonna ask about Steve Chandler, because yes, he's your lifetime coach and you two also co authored two books. How did that journey unfold? Like coming together and deciding to write books together?

Oh, that's a most of my journeys have been pretty interesting. I I used to say that nothing ever happened to me and I never did anything interesting. But then when I started writing, and I had to come up with things like to tell a story or two. I realized that a few things along the way had happened, and Steve Chandler was one of them. I got connected with Steve Chandler. First I was going to move I was a, I'll say, a public company executive. I ran public companies in the US as CEO and president and so on. And I was making a career transition after a number of decades doing that to being a business advisor, a consultant. And I thought that a good thing to do would be to write a book as a way of, you know, sort of introducing people to who I was. So I met Steve Chandler at the very beginning. And Steve is a prolific author. He's written now 40 books altogether. So I started working with him to have him coach me on how to write this first book, which was called life expectancy and so, but in terms of the coaching itself, I wasn't a good listener at that time. I had, I told you, I had this noisy mind, and I was more of an outbound communicator. I wasn't the world's best listener, and so I didn't. Listened to him much other than underwriting things for maybe five years or so, I went by before I started realizing that, oh, wait a minute, maybe, you know, there's more I could get out of this relationship than just me talking and feeling better, that I got things off my chest, whatever they were. So that's the way the relationship started. And Steve, Steve is a wonderful, humane person, really humble, egoless in so many ways, and is able to be, is a great listener, is able to be fully present. So I had this great example of a way to go through the world that was very different from what I was doing. He was sitting right, you know, across from me, or in front of me, you know, but I wasn't listening. I was telling, you know, I was, I didn't have the I didn't have awareness. I was had all this, this world of things going on in my my world, and but he stayed the course with me, and he he would send me books that he thought I might be interested in. At first, those were about writing, and then later they became, oh, you might this might be of interest to you. And it was a Byron Katie book about her way of approaching inquiry, which is called the work, which is just basically interrogating the problem, you know, like, how do you know? Do you know it's true? How do you know it's true? If it's true, so what? What if you did the opposite, you know? What if you turned it around? Would that make a difference? And basically, it began the it was really interesting that there was this way of examining these problems in a what way I hadn't thought about before, like put the hot light on those the problem, and say, Are you really true? In other words, is this thought real? And should I believe it? And that began, and that was began the real, I'll say, journey toward transformation. It was a transformation for me at that point, but ultimately, something that he gave me led to that which I think we're going to get into, and I'll just move right into it. It's like, what about that transformation? What happened was he sent me up and he would, this was going on. He'd send me something, I'll say, every week, or every two weeks or years, you know, a decade went by. He's sending me this or that. Books show up. There's a book. He didn't know it. He wouldn't say, read it and tell me what you think it was just like here this you might be interested in this. And then he sent me a link one day to a video. It was by a person named Gary Weber. There's no reason that anybody would know Gary Weber. He's in a philosophical branch called Advaita Vedanta, and he's in a sort of extreme was once considered extreme branch of that. But anyway, the video wasn't about that so much as it was about something that happened with him. And what happened with him was he said, I learned how to shut off one of my brain networks is called the default mode network. We have two, we have several brain networks, but we have two principal ones. One's called executive network. The other is called the name is strange, but default mode is when you're not in executive mode, that's where you are, but and when you're in executive mode, you're on task, you do things, you make a list, you solve a problem, you're talking to someone, and you're paying attention. You know all those things in executive one default mode, well, you might be self reflective, you might be daydreaming, you might be zoning out. You might be thinking back in your history. You might be thinking forward, you might be worrying about something, but it's noisy. That is, can be very noisy. It was for me, and I found out, I thought that all the stuff that was going on with me, that I was being very proactive, and so all that was executive mode, but it wasn't. It was just a very noisy default mode network in my personal brain. So Gary, in this video, said that he was able to learn how to turn off that network like it was a table lamp. And I went, Whoa. This is what I need. And then I tried to turn the page on the video, like, where's, when's Gary going to tell us, you know, how to do that. What's the first step that I do? Well, that never came in the video, but what the video did for me was I realized that it could be done. It's like pioneers, you know, you you. In the US or in Canada, you know, the the expeditions that went from Montreal to the West Coast? Well, once the first people got there, people knew it could be done. Or once people the once Lewis and Clark got to Oregon through the Oregon Trail and got to the coast, people knew it could be done. Well, Gary didn't tell me how, but I knew it could be done, presuming he was telling the truth, and I believed it. I did believe it. So I started on this process. And there's a chapter in the power of noticing, which is called How to quiet your mind, which is what Gary didn't do. He didn't tell anybody what he did. I I decided I had to do that. So what happened was, is I began exploring techniques. So I didn't know where to start, so I started exploring things that I thought might help that reduce the noise level first. So I looked in my environment, what things were producing noise. You know, did I have my what notifications do I have on my phone? Could I change those? Could I make them less intrusive? Could I turn my phone over when I wasn't using it? Could I not have it at dinner, you know? Could I turn down the noise in my in my house, you know, all those things. So I started with that, and that helped. That wasn't the answer. And then I tried other things out of the world of meditation. Focus on your breath. Focus on your physical your body. Rub your fingers together. Rub your palms together. Feel the ridges on each finger. Feel the feel your palms. All those things, those things I started calling switches, because what happens is that when you change your attention from here, from your brain the default mode, let's call it, but let's just say, from your brain, your thoughts, to something else. You've done it. You are no longer in your thought. You have moved yourself out of your thought, which means the noise level. Maybe it didn't go down by a lot, but it went down. It went down a little bit. So if you take care of your environmental noise, and you start taking down the noise in your head, and you start looking at the people around you have been deciding maybe this person is too noisy or uncomfortable for me to be around. You say, I don't want that. So you start making choices that start to add up. And so pretty soon I found that I had this little bit of space, kind of like having a little elbow room for quiet, stillness, silence. And I thought, Wow, if I can do that for a second or a few, maybe I have pretty good elbows. Maybe, you know, maybe I can make it bigger. So that became my methodology, is, how can I make this quiet last for longer? And I go on to explain the various things that that I tried, and I recommend other things too, but I ended up the transformation that we're talking about is I ended up learning how to be still at will. In other words, I could just turn off the lamp, turn off the thoughts, and as I became more familiar with what that was, which was just basically getting rid of distractions. I told you before we talked before about all the things that we layer over. I was put I was starting to hold these layers off and get things out of my way. I think one of the things that is so powerful in coaching is just helping people get things out of their way that are necessary to be there. But what happens is we start defaulting to having all this stuff that we think is part of our comfort zone, but a lot of it isn't in our best interest. A lot of our thoughts aren't in our best interest. But I digress. I was able to get to that, to that place of quiet and maintain it, and now today, I'm able to be in that space as my norm. And if I find myself and I've had relapses, when I'll go back into letting my thoughts carry me away. There's a chapter in a book, I did that in trying to get something that would help me with my my cancer treatment, and I became obsessed and diligent and just carried away with it. It wasn't good for me, and anyway, but a relapse is a. Opportunity for you to correct yourself

Exactly. So the thing was that you could catch yourself doing that and move yourself back to what works best for you, what is benefiting you. So this whole being in the moment and being able to turn off the switch brings me to the Positive Intelligence Program That we work together. And you even came in as a Guest writer and wrote an article as one of my newsletter editions on your experience, and I'm eternally grateful for that. Was my pleasure in that article, you said, I quote, I found it meaning Positive Intelligence Program, very insightful, and was introduced to many tangible tools and practices. It turned out to be quite validating of this switching approach I learned into in my own discovery process. I call the process of quieting My mind is both teachable and learnable. So without going too deep, will you share which part of the work the program resonated with you the most, or brought you a new perspective? Will

Sure I'm happy to I think the bigger picture for us as humans is that we have two operating systems. One is a body. I'm just going to condense it down to two. We have more, but we have two fundamental operating systems. One is our bodies and the other is our mind. We have other dimensions. Of course, we have a heart, and we have we that may be an operating system in itself, and we have a spirit, and that's could You could call operate. So I don't mean to leave those out, but I want to just focus on those two with bodies we we have, and I'll just focus on one thing with a body we have, a best example, sensory impressions. Sensory impressions are gifts. If you're born and you have normal physiology, you have all the five senses, and then you have your brain to help you interpret what you're visualizing, tasting, seeing, hearing, touching, so on, you don't there's not a lot of learning there in terms of how to operate, right? You know how to operate? Well, what you have to learn is, what are the distinctions between the fragrance of an apple and an orchid, or the baby pooped versus a rose outside in the garden. You know, those are two different things. You start learning those distinctions, and those become part of our experience, and then knowledge and our ability to discern. We don't talk to ourselves about those things. We go, ooh, or whatever it is, those gifts are extremely powerful, natural gifts and and they're wonderful. The even more powerful operating system that we have is our mind, to me, but there's a big distinction. It didn't come with the same kind of built in operating manual that our bodies did we naturally see, hear, taste, touch, feel, we do all of that with just nature. It was a gift. If only we had gotten the one that was about how to operate your brain, it would have made life so much easier. But we didn't get that. What we got got was basically, I would call it a blank slate, very powerful engine. Everybody's a little bit different, but, you know, very part of the brain, the mind, is very, very powerful and but instead of there being a class in school where they teach you, okay, here's how you operate this magnificent machine that is your mind, there is never such a class. The class is about one and one is two. You know, the founder of Google was surge blah blah blah. You know, it the, you know, the history of Canada or the United States began with blah blah blah. Our bodies function in this fashion. We look at biology, we so we learn, we learn, and we get that knowledge in our heads. And therefore we think we're we're creating knowledge. We're creating, but it has nothing to do with the operation of the brain itself. So I think one of the most powerful things I've ever been introduced to was Positive Intelligence, because it's about that. It's about how do we better operate our minds and our brains in a world where we've learned to be critics of ourselves and to let our. Thoughts take us over and to bolt emotions onto those thoughts so we really don't forget them, you know, in other words, oh, I remember that. That was horrifying, you know, and because you bolted emotion onto the thought so Positive Intelligence, to me, is a framework for this operating system of the mind. It's a framework that's already built. You don't have to go and figure it out for yourself. Which we, you know, I tried for decades, which you can look at me and see it's been more than a few I've tried for decades to figure out that operating manual, and the closest I've come to to that operating manual is positive intelligence. And my started with my own exploration, which I I wrote about, but then at the end, by and I didn't have positive intelligence at the beginning, I started working through that problem. By the way, I didn't have positive intelligence until I had finished that chapter and shared it with you, and that's when we started working together. But to me, what it we need to shift at a personal level, no matter your age, the focus from learning equals growing our knowledge to learning equals learning how to manage our brain. It is, to me, the most exciting developments that are taking place today in the world are about that you're right at the crux of it in terms of Positive Intelligence, because it teaches you how about this. I call it switches, but how to move yourself from out, from your head to something else. I learned this in another way, but the tools of Positive Intelligence were affirming, and they can be practice. As I say, Positive Intelligence you can it's teachable. How you manage your brain is teachable and learnable and positive intelligences, and I'm not, I don't get paid for this, but she's a great coach, I'm telling you, but I'm just saying that this is, it's a structured framework for changing what was my biggest problem in life, and I was a very high achiever, but I didn't have happiness quotient. Now I do. I'm joyful almost all the time. I'm happy I have stage four colon cancer. I'm still happy. I go through my days. I appreciate what's around me. My mind isn't running away with me saying, wait a minute, you have to remember you have you have cancer, and it's probably going to kill you, and therefore you should be worried about that and spend your time on that. I don't do that because I now know that's I don't have to that's going to take care of itself when, if that time comes, it will come. But when that time comes, I will worry about it for a minute, and then I will go back, saying, Wait, I better enjoy this experience here. So I know that's a little off the but it's the Positive Intelligence is like, it's the way you look at the world with opportunity, as opposed to a glass half empty. I think it, it's a framework that allows you to be looking for opportunity, not for problems. Even if you're a problem solver, it's not about fixing the problems. It's about changing your way of approach and using this device, this mind to in a way that is about what's the opportunity in this

Well, will I so appreciate your kind words, and I'm really taken aback. Thank you so much. And you know you are kind of an expert in noticing, and I so love the switch, like using the switch metaphor for this, but it means so much to me everything you said about Positive Intelligence, because, yes, the idea with Positive Intelligence is that every adversity, every challenge, can be turned into an opportunity and a gift, even if not right away in time, there is a it's kind of 100% that everything comes at least with one gift, and you got it really well, and you implemented into your lives. And I, I'm so happy for that. Now I want to get to a question that I asked all my guests, that is, you know, at the back of ultimate coach book, and also in the front part of the book, there are some questions. So for you, which one of those questions you think you need to focus on at this moment in time in your life?

Well, I. It's one from the back of the book that is the one that goes something like this. Who would I need to be, to be to live the most extraordinary life I can live? I like that question, and I think that for me, that being that person has become a gift to me. It so that's who I want to be. I was able to manifest that in this process of my the transformation to quieting my mind, and then the other things that happened in my journey of grace, I call that, to get to this point with Positive Intelligence and the idea that we can get out of our own way, I think this is really, it's such a simple thing to say, but I think we get out of our own way, we already can be the person to live an extraordinary life. In fact, I think that if we just begin noticing, which is what the book is about. You know, is that just that idea of being actively present where you are, what does that mean? It means you're not in your past, you're not revisiting history, you're not thinking or worrying or planning about the future. Because when we do that, we aren't actively present. We don't see the richness of the people around us. We don't experience and fully. We don't fully listen to them. When we go out in nature, we don't even see it. We walk down the street without seeing that there's a sunset, or that the stars are out, or that the clouds are beautiful, or that the breeze is rustling the leaves and the trees, nature fills us up, and so when we are not actively present, we're somewhere else. But it's not in the life that we are living. It is in our heads. It's in somebody else's environment. It's so I think for me, just the reminder of an extraordinary life is available from where we sit right now, each of us, big nature, is available everywhere in the world to everyone. It's not a function of race, creed, color, geography, intelligence, or anything else big nature is available, and honestly, can change your life if you just let it. You know, to be with a with by the lake or river or in the air or walking or by the mountains, or it just absolutely it's bigger than us, right? And we're a part of it. We're energetically part of it, but it's bigger than us, and we need that for perspective. I think so. Anyway, that's my longish answer to a short question.

Okay, now we get to the three rapid fire questions. So first of all, first one is your role model who has been the most influential person in your life.

There's no question about that. It's Steve Chandler, because he took me. First of all, I think it shows the value of patience in a teacher or in a coach, because he was patient with me for 10 years while I was continuing to avoid looking at most of the things he was sending me and avoid listening to me. I wrote a chapter for the book about Steve and that relationship, how I thought he cheated me at one point. Even though he's, you know, almost a saint, I will say he's certainly a sage on Earth in terms of spirit, a spirit guide for me. And so without a doubt, you know, he's been very influential in my well being, me living my best life right now. So Steve Chandler, he's he's a coach, an author, a trainer, but basically he's a person changing lives one by one, as a spirit guide on Earth,

Beautiful. So he said, until you give up on yourself. I will not give up on you. That's something that coaches. I feel the same way when I work with clients, and I keep believing, believing that whoever is right across me Will is getting closer and closer to where they meet with their true self, right? The second question, is your biggest achievement? What accomplishment are you most proud of in your life or career?

Yeah, very interesting. There was my pro. Three transformation. Life was very full of business. I ran global companies as CEO. I was a board member of eight different public companies, on the boards of companies in France and Japan and elsewhere. And if you had asked me that question before I was able to quiet my mind, I would have a long list, and probably would spend an hour telling you, oh, this would wait. No, no, this was better than that. And they were all about stuff and achievements and getting material things and, you know, changing companies by order of magnitude, things like that. But today, you know, my biggest achievement, I think, is just being able to go through without going into the chapter and verse of what chemotherapy is. I went through 12 rounds of very challenging chemotherapy last year, and I did it without getting caught up in suffering, which is, I can tell you, was hard to do, but not really, because what I was, I just became, I just noticed where I was, who I was with, what was going on. I didn't judge what was going on. I withheld judgment. I just took it in, and I tried to show have gratitude for what it was that I did have. So it was a combination of those things, but I would just say that my ability to go through what what is challenging, you know, I think of it as the the analogy is that chemotherapy is like a form of suffering, right? But we also suffer when we have a breakup, when we lose a job, when we transition career, sends you to that also successfully, when we have a child who has a problem and they're trying to work through it, or they're ill, or, you know, all these things bring suffering to our lives. And so I view that process of chemotherapy, it was a kind of suffering. So why not apply the same tools, which is, don't get caught up in it. It's not something you have to overthink, understand it, yes, be curious. Yes, notice what's going on. Ask questions. Yes, all of that. But there's no reason for it to become the defining thing in my life. And that's what I learned, is that it wasn't. It isn't the defining thing in my life. It wouldn't be if I were back in it again. It would not be the defining thing in my life. You know, who would be my life is really here and now, and that's, you know, part of my subtitle is my transformative journey of grace to here and now, meaning this active presence in the moment. So to me, that's my biggest achievement. Wow.

I so love this will and it's quite amazing comparing, being able to compare when you are the master of your mind, how things unfold, compared to when your thoughts, your judge, your Saboteurs are running the show. How that it could be. So the difference is huge. Absolutely. Thank you for sharing the difference between

A life of randomness and chaos and noise and one of joy and contentment. It honestly is that simple. Yes. Doesn't mean you can't have things, by the way. It doesn't mean you can't have things and be and do and go. All of that is available, you know, even though you're present here and now, but you're creating the future. You can only do it from now.

Absolutely. Thank you. So the third one, your superpower? If you could have any superpower, what would it be and why?

I think it's along the lines of what we've been talking about, in terms of how powerful our thoughts are. So my superpower would be to be able to hand to everyone something they could just hold in their hand, and when they holding that in their hand. They don't have to listen to their thoughts. Or if they listen to their thought, they know it's okay to challenge it. They know it's okay to say, is that really true, or is that really necessary? Or is that a thought that just came out randomly for me, just appeared on the screen? That is my my life going by. So I think that would be my superpower, would be to give people that tool that would just say, Look your thoughts. When you're making plans and you're making a list and you're doing Yes, you go with that. You create that's proactive, and that's huge. A part of your brain that's built for that, but when all this other noise is going on, just try to be still. And if you can't be know that, you can inquire like, is that really true? Thought? Is that something I really need to listen to do? I really need to worry about what's going to happen a year from now, if something else happens in the meantime that would cause it to come about. We spend our lives worrying about things that never come to pass, you know? And so anyway, I think that would be, that would be a great superpower to have, is to enable people with that gift.

Yes, that would be really a good superpower. So I want to ask lastly, what message would you like to share with the listeners of ultimate coach podcast, especially those who are maybe on their own journeys of transformation or maybe going through a little bit of tough time?

I think one of the things we all do with the passage of time is we allow whatever our status quo is, whatever it is, the furniture, the car, the places you go to eat, the shows you watch on TV, they become kind of reruns for us. You know who they become, status quo. I had a status quo where I was diagnosed with a seizure disorder when I was a child, no, no when I was a young adult, sorry, when I was a very young adult, and I took medication for it for decades without challenging that original diagnosis that became part of my status quo. Oh, I'm doing this. I just let it continue to happen. So to me, I think the the biggest challenge that and gift we can give ourselves is to ask the question, why am I still doing this, no matter what it is, and I'm not trying to disrupt relationships or the furniture or where you what, what you watch on TV, but, or in the case of taking medication, should I still be taking this medication? Does it still apply? Oh, now that I'm taking these other six medications, should that make a difference for the first one? Okay, there's just one question. Why am I continuing to do this? I think in business, I've often said that if the status quo hasn't been challenged in a while, the passage of time is a good enough reason to challenge so I would leave you with that, that I think challenging our status quos small and large, there's a lot of value in that, and don't wait too long before the cobwebs come in and or we have so much clutter in our rooms that we can't get to what was what's a clear path.

Wow, beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much will for sharing the gift of you with us in our conversation and in the way you show up in the world. You've been a gift for me in my life, and also a gift to our community and our listeners today. So thank you. Thank you for who you are being and for being my guest today.

It's my pleasure to be with you. It's my pleasure to know you. I'm so appreciative of having the opportunity to talk about the power of noticing and all of these things that honestly just became a part of that journey that are really about how to live a better life, I would say. And you're a part of that for me and I, I appreciate you deeply. Thank you.

Thank you, and thank you our listeners for being with us one once again, and hope you can join us again next time.

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