Mindfulness Mode

Michael Neeley is a podcaster and an entrepreneur. He's a business coach and he empowers other entrepreneurs to live the lives they've always dreamed of. He's the host of the podcast, 'Consciously Speaking', and also his new podcast, 'Buy This, Not That'. Michael used to be a knight in shining armor; he was an actor who spent a good portion of his career on horseback before starring in a couple of soap operas and some independent films. Michael's son, Tristan, was born back in 2002, and at that time Michael decided he wanted to leave the smog of Los Angeles and settle in an area with clean air and clear skies. So Michael made a transition and has moved to a role where he enlightens others as a mindfulness business coach.

• Website: www.MichaelNeeley.com

Bruce: How do you get grounded in your life, Michael?

Michael: For me, meditation plays a big part in it and it's not about like sitting down on a cushion for 45 minutes at a time. It's more like, uh, you know, while I'm going for a walk, if I'm walking the dogs, I can use that as a meditation. It's a matter of fact. It was so cool. I walked them yesterday, I took them over to this little park area that we have here near my home and I unleashed them and let them run and I laid down on the grass and stared up at the sky and meditated for about five minutes. It was total bliss and just little things like that where you can relax the mind and let go of all of these crazy monkey mind thoughts that are running through our heads about our business constantly. If you're a solopreneur or even about life in general, you can get caught up in all this stuff instead of just, OK, here I am. I'm just a human being.

Bruce: Your son Tristan was born in 2002. Has He inspired you to be mindful? Has He taught you anything about being grounded and being centered?

Michael: Well, Tristan is my constant teacher every day and you know, he's my why. He's the why of what I'm up to in the world and that's the part that I've got to bring mindfulness back to. If I get too caught up in doing the work and I don't spend the time with him; he's the reason that I'm doing the work. And so if I don't take the breaks to spend the time with him, then it kind of defeats the purpose. And so yeah, he's a constant teacher to me.

Bruce: How will mindfulness play a role in your upcoming event that you're doing?

Michael: A lot of people look at business and they don't see the correlation of how mindfulness plays into that and I know maybe in larger corporations it's less relevant in the bigger picture. Certainly on the smaller scale and when we're talking about the people that I'm attracting for my event, which are visionary Solopreneurs, as I call them, people who are in business for themselves, the mindfulness piece is often the difference between success and failure. What I mean by that is that we get in our own way. We get caught up in either the minutia of the work or we get caught up doing the wrong things because we're looking for a sense of, you know, checking off the list, tick boxes instead of really being mindful about, OK, wait a minute, let me tune in here. What do I really want? What is going to be the best for my business and how can I move forward in a way that's conscious and fully present?

Bruce: Tell us about some of the speakers that are going to be at your event. I know it's called, Your Authority Blueprint Live.

Michael: It's going to be a rockin' event and we're going to have Jay Fiset there, another fellow Canadian. Jay does work with a Mastermind To Millions. I didn't realize how conscious Jay was and how mindful he was until recently when I had him on my show. He's just really a cool guy. So Jay's going to be there. We've got Brady Patterson from Success Road Academy, also a Canadian company. Brady is going to be there. Uh, we're going to have Tiamo De Vettori, who is a singer, songwriter. He's going to be sharing some inspirational music with us. [Tiamo was recently named L.A. Music Award's "Singer/Songwriter of the Year" & San Diego's "Best Songwriter] Tiffany Largie is going to be there. I mean we're going to have a wonderful lineup of some great talented motivational speakers to help people break through. Melanie Benson, another person who's really great with mindset is going to be there sharing some of her wisdom and expertise to really help us move beyond these blocks that stop us. And then of course, where the authority blueprint comes in is we're going to share the business side of it is how can you create a name for yourself in the industry that's really gonna catapult you onto the scene in a big way. And that's the business promise of it. We're going to show you how to build that blueprint.

Bruce: On your podcast, Consciously Speaking, you help people wake up and you consciously create awareness, but I'm curious about your other podcast called, Buy This, Not That. How did that come about? What's the story?

Michael: Well, you know, that's an interesting piece as well. We talk about our clients, you know, running into certain situations or questions and for me the questions kept coming up over and over again, like, well, what's the best mail service provider, email provider or what's the best webinar hosting platform? And I found myself answering questions over and over again, like the same questions and I thought, you know there are a lot of solopreneurs out there struggling with these same things. What if I were to .... [Tune in to the Podcast to hear more from Michael Neeley]

JV Crum the III is a speaker, a coach and the best-selling author of Conscious Millionaire, the book that’s changed thousands of peoples’ lives. It can impact you too by helping you learn how to consciously grow your business and transform your life. JV is the man who has personally built businesses and is now the host of three podcasts under the branding of Conscious Millionaire.

Bruce: Would you explain the mindfulness of money, JV?

JV: I think there are multiple pieces to it. Every client I work with, because I work with clients who are typically high achievers and now they want to go to a new level and one of the things, because I work with a lot of coaches, that's my primary market, but I also work with seven figure service businesses that want to add at least another million in the next 12 months.

Bruce: So what's the biggest reason that people have these money blocks?

But you've got to address that. And it's not a one time thing because we have levels. Once you get to, let's say you're at one level, but now you want to double to another level, you've got to go through this process again. You know, I'm looking on and going, well, you know Berkshire-Hathaway. He used to be the richest guy in the world, but right now it's Amazon, right? So and he's at a hundred billion and in our lifetime we're going to be all here when there's the first trillionaire. Just a few years ago we thought fifty billion was a whole lot of money. Now we're for the first time at a hundred billion and it's really mindset. Now they're going to do different activities.

They're going to leverage higher. They're going to be in a position to leverage and leverage and leverage because that's how you really build wealth, but it's having the mindset and thinking about your life and your business and money differently and asking different questions that get you to that next level. Everybody has to go through this kind of, I deserve, and at some point you'll have gotten through that. But for most people, if you're not yet at ten million, I think you're still going through that and you may still be going through it if you're not yet at a hundred million because we just have different layers inside of us.

You help people get to their first seven figures. You know, that's the majority of the work I do because I know when I got there I was 25 and all of a sudden I could buy a four story brand new four-story home on the water, have a Mercedes, go to Europe, you know, that was now my playground and I grew up in a little town with two or three hundred people.

When you ask how poor were we? Imagine this. We had an eight party line and what that means is there were eight homes that shared the same single line. And when you wanted to use the phone, you'd have to say, Delores, would you mind getting off the phone? I need to make a phone call. You'd have to bargain with your neighbors on the phone line and there'd always be the little old lady who listened to everybody's calls. Nobody could afford to have their own line when I was growing up in the little town I lived in.

Bruce: Did you have your bathroom in your house?

Bruce: You talk about passion, purpose, and values in your book. And I know you're all about that. You don't just talk about it, you live it. Share with us about the mindfulness behind that.

JV Crum the III is a speaker, a coach and the best-selling author of Conscious Millionaire, the book that’s changed thousands of peoples’ lives. It can impact you too by helping you learn how to consciously grow your business and transform your life. JV is the man who has personally built businesses and is now the host of three podcasts under the branding of Conscious Millionaire.

Website: www.ConsciousMillionaire.com/challenge

Free Gift: Get the seven figure formula instantly. Get JV's book instantly (Conscious Millionaire) and you get the three day challenge to totally set up your business so that you're ready to have a trajectory called "Double my Business in the Next 12 Months. Click on the above link.Podcast: Conscious Millionaire

Bruce: Would you explain the mindfulness of money, JV?

JV: I think there are multiple pieces to it. Every client I work with, because I work with clients who are typically high achievers and now they want to go to a new level and one of the things, because I work with a lot of coaches, that's my primary market, but I also work with seven figure service businesses that want to add at least another million in the next 12 months.

I only work with people who really have high goals and even though they have the high goals, nobody ever ends up on the phone with me or on a zoom or anything or even on the show usually without really having a deep desire to help people. But there's something I've identified called the money purpose wound. That's the name I gave to it because they're purpose driven, but a lot of times they have conflicts about making more money.

Along the way they've picked up ideas like, I got these gifts for free so I have to go out and give them to people for free. Here's an important distinction between, are we coaches and entrepreneurs, are we really in the business of saving people, which is where that kind of wounded mindset and poverty mindset and I've got to go save them and it's wrong to charge them, or are we in the business of empowering them and selecting to work with people that we resonate with, whoever that group is, but we're here to empower them and when we make that distinction, we come to a new set of decisions and those decisions are, it's not our responsibility to decide if somebody wants or is ready to be empowered.

It's our responsibility to empower them if that's what they want and once we let go of we have to go save people and convince them, right? We have to convince them that they want to do something more with their life. That's a losing journey. And I know because I used to be in that business, right? I used to believe that I used to help people where I believed in them a hundred and ten percent, but they were acting at fifty percent and I thought if I just kept believing in them at a hundred and ten percent, finally they'd get the spark.

But you know what? I've come to a conclusion. People self choose whether they connect with the spark, it's our job then to empower them because they want to move forward. It's not our job to try to convince them they're ready when for whatever reason, and there could be so many different reasons. Their soul is not at that place at that moment. You've got to let them choose to be there.

Bruce: So what's the biggest reason that people have these money blocks?

JV: Well, you know, it's interesting because I can't even tell you what the seven are, and I'm not even embarrassed about that. In my book there's a chapter on abundance mindset and I came up with seven areas of limiting beliefs. I can't even tell you what six of them are because from working with so many clients, I found they all had the same one and here it is, but different people are gonna say

Patrick and Sam Cullinane are relationship experts; expertise which has resulted from their experiences as they moved through the ups and downs of the rocky marriage they endured with each other. The first decade of their 20-year marriage ended with a twelve-month separation and signed divorce papers. The second decade was an invigorating climb back up the mountain which can be described as refreshed love and intimacy leading to newfound closeness and personal growth. Their challenges and discoveries are shared in an easy-to-follow, authentic format in their recent book called, Bigger Love: How to Have the Love of Your Life for the rest of Your Life.  Patrick and Sam now teach their own proven methods to other couples who yearn for over-the-top relationships.

• Website: www.BiggerLove.com

• Patrick: Sam Cullinane

• Sam: Well, mindfulness allows me to understand what I'm feeling to begin with because I think a lot of times I just let, I realized now that I've let my emotions sort of push me around in my life. Now I recognize I'm not my emotions. They are something that happens to me. So those recognitions have changed my life entirely.

• Patrick: Well, that's interesting because we spent a day with a Peruvian Shaman last year who talked to us about breathing and ever since he was talking to us about it, I see it. I'm like, oh my God, somebody told us about this last year and so he was talking to us about this now and so you know how the universe conspires to put things in front of you once you figure it out. Um, but yeah, we will use just taking a normal breath in a day where we're doing what, 28 percent capacity of our lungs and feeding your body. And so just just forcing yourself to breathe when I feel any stress or laying there having trouble sleeping or any of that, I just breathe. I try to maximize my lung capacity, hold it for a little bit, oxygenate my body and then breath out. Then I have to do that, focus on my breathing when I meditate.

• Sam's Book: Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny and Ron McMillan

• Patrick: Sam brought up the fact that she thinks the biggest bully she sees is me bullying myself. Do you know what I mean? My dialogue of beating myself up and that kind of thing. So yeah, absolutely. not doing it. It's, it's part of the love yourself thing.

Rob Harsh is all about adventure. In fact, he even created an Adventure company where he takes people on mountain treks, multi-sport expeditions, caving, kayaking adventures and other high-risk nature trips. Rob believes the best way to face adversity is to surrender yourself to whatever is there. That's what he did when he faced stage four lung cancer and was given a four percent chance of survival. Rob transforms people's lives by sharing his extensive proven survival skills to lead people to win in business and to win in life.

• Website: www.AwakenedAdventures.com

• My meditation teacher.

• Mindfulness has helped me to see beyond my emotions. I think the fallacy is that we are our thoughts. We are our emotions, but we are really so much more than that.

• Breathing is quintessential. We never stop breathing. For me, it's been an important aspect and an important focus with my lung cancer.

• Book: Freedom From The Known by Jiddu Krishnamurti

• Let's go do the Eco Challenge", which was a very famous race back at the time. And, he looked at me and said, "Well, I don't know if you're quite ready for that."

Krysti Turznik is a speaker, author, and life coach and even studied to become an ordained minister. She has a Masters Degree in Metaphysics, Bachelor of Science Degrees in Biology and is a consulting hypnotist. She has extensive experience helping brilliant people get out of their own way and live the life they were truly meant to live. Through mindset, motivation, and meditation she shows them how to create a life of miracles and magic where every day feels like a day at the beach. Krysti lives in Wisconsin with her husband, daughter, and four cats.

• Website: www.Powerful-Mind.com

• Dr. Wayne Dyer

• My emotions have had a significant impact because they helped me to really tune into who it is that I am in every moment.

• Whenever I feel like I am out of sorts, I return to breath. So I just focus on taking three deep breaths, slow and easy, and it helps me to really center myself and make choices from that point.

• Book: The Power of Intention by Dr. Wayne Dyer

• I was fortunate that I personally didn't experience much of that.

JB Glossinger is host and creator of The Morning Coach; a successful podcast that's been downloaded over 22 million times. JB is a speaker, a coach and an author. He holds advanced degrees in business and metaphysics. His degrees provide great credibility but JB says his street education is what has delivered the best life-changing lessons. He's talking about black eyes, being near bankruptcy and more. JB is the author of The Sacred Six: The Simple Step By Step Process For Focusing Your Attention and Recovering Your Dreams.

• Website: www.MorningCoach.com

• Eckhart Tolle (Author of The Power of Now)

• It's huge. I wish I could stay in it more. You know, I wish I could be more mindful.

• Breathing's big. I mean, if you start to understand the fundamentals of meditation, a lot of people don't know how to do it, really if you just focus on your breath.

• Book: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

• I actually am very blessed and that I got along with everybody. I never really had any issues.

Mellissa Seaman is a Stanford educated lawyer turned intuitive business Strategist. She's the creator of Soul Gift Quiz which has helped thousands of people worldwide discover their deepest gift; to align with life fulfillment and business success. Fortune 100 executives hire her to help them become channels of genius to create products in the world in collaboration with the highest power to make sure they create things that matter.

• Website: www.SoulGiftQuiz.com

• My daughter Clarice

• Mindfulness makes my emotions possible to live with. My emotions are big. I'm an emotional type. My emotions hold a lot of charge and a lot of intelligence.

• Breathing is just the first touchstone. It's everything, you know, the breath is everything.

• Book: The Presence Process: A Healing Journey Into Present Moment Awareness by Michael Brown

• What comes to mind for me is that I do work with a lot of parents of very intuitive kids and I call them dragon kids because sometimes these kids have so much energy in their bodies that they might get labeled as having some condition, whether it's ADHD or autism.

Andrew Darlow is an award-winning photographer, writer, consultant and product developer. He specializes in helping people take better photos, organize their images and videos, and create prints from their work. He has appeared on many radio and TV programs, including WOR Radio (NYC), Animal Planet, WLOB (Boston) and KCTY (CA), and his work has been featured in numerous magazines and websites, including People Magazine, Professional Photographer and Women’s World Magazine. The author of four photo-related books, his newest book, Focus and Filter, covers tips and techniques for taking better photos, finding the right equipment and organizing your gear. He has also just launched a video course to accompany the book. Additional tips, more excerpts from the book and links to free video training can be found at www.WorkflowSchool.com.

Contact Info

• Website: WorkflowSchool.com

Most Influential Person

• My Dad.

Effect on Emotions

• I believe that when you try to do good for others and you try to think about ways in which your actions can impact the world in some way, I think that's mindfulness.

Thoughts on Breathing

• Well, until I started meditating, I didn't realize the power of breathing, but now that I've done it so many times and I've followed my breath in and out, I can see it even more.

Suggested Resources

• Book: Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Bullying Story

• Well, as far as bullying, I'm fortunate that I was never beat up. I've listened to some of your guests and it's heartbreaking to hear what they said about them actually being physically assaulted.