Day 190: Nick Williams

April 8, 2010 at 12:01 am, Category: Featured, Inspiration

“I think one of my greatest pieces of advice to anybody listening to this would be, be willing to show up in anticipation sometimes of being inspired.  Don’t wait until you feel inspired before you show up to do something. … I think the act of showing up initiates the flow of inspiration.”

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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Nick, for agreeing to be part of the Project today, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?

Nick Williams: Hi, my name is Nick Williams, and I live in London, and I’m an author and a speaker and a coach and a workshop leader, and a genuine fan of inspiration.

Toni: Well thank you for that.  What a great lead-in to the first question, which is, when you think about that word inspiration, Nick, who do you think you inspire, and how does that happen?

Nick: The people I set out to inspire are people that are in a kind of position that I was perhaps just over 20 years ago, which was … I was in a kind of fairly corporate job in London selling computers to Japanese banks, and I’d certainly grown up with a work ethic that said as long as I wasn’t enjoying my work, as long as I was miserable and suffering and stuff like that, as long as I was doing that, then that was real work and I deserved to be paid for it.

But even though I was doing fairly well on an outer level, I was desperately, desperately unhappy inside.  I felt like I wanted a more inspirational life, and I wanted more meaning to my life, and probably thought “I must be stupid.  Why I can’t just get on with being miserable like everybody else?”

So I changed my life, basically, you know?  There was a lot more involved, but basically I changed my life.  I started running my own business.  I started my career as a coach and a writer and a speaker and stuff like that.  So I’m out for that, to inspire people that need to be inspired about work and what work can be.  So it’s people that are like that, kind of stuck in a career rut thinking “There must be more than this.”

My great passion is inspiring people to actually start their own businesses doing something they love and they’re personally touched by and find meaningful, so anyway they can build a business around living their inspired self and a spiritual purpose, if you might.

Toni: How does that happen?  Can you give us an example of a type or an example of inspiration that occurs when you work with someone to tap into them and allow them to change their life?

Nick: Sure.  You know, one of the ways that I kind of describe what I do today is I call myself an inspirer of people to new possibilities, because I think so many of us have grown up with, you know, unhelpful conditioning, and very limited conditioning.  So for example, tomorrow I’m going to talk at a University in London, and I’m going to do a talk about inspired entrepreneurship, as I call it, because that’s my company name is Inspired Entrepreneur.

Basically, you know, what I know I’m going to say to all of these people is something that they don’t hear from other people, which is you can find what you would most like to do, and you can be successful at it, and you can build a business around it, and you can get paid for it.  Now, in my experience, most people have not been told that in their lifetime.  So, one of the things I do is I just say “Hey, it doesn’t have to be this way.  There are other options.  There are other opportunities.  There are other possibilities, and I’m a living example of those other possibilities.”

Toni: How do you then help others to explore their potential when they’re going through that?

Nick: Well, I think firstly I try to get across to them … they actually have more potential than they realize.  I, like most people probably in this area, believe that most people have got incredible talent and potential within them but, again, most of them have not been encouraged to explore that in themselves.  I did some research for my first book and, by the time many of us are adults, most of us will have received something like nine times as many negative messages about ourselves than positive messages.

So I think many of us kind of grow up with a damaged sense of self-confidence and self-worth and self-esteem.  So part of my message is “Hey, you’re more than you believe you are.”  I’m sure … well, I don’t know … have many of your interviewees quoted that Patanjali quote, do you know, about inspiration?

Toni: Have they quoted what quote?

Nick: The Patanjali quote; do you know that one?

Toni: No, I’m not sure I do.

Nick: No?  May I share it with you now then?

Toni: Absolutely.

Nick: You know, this quote has been a cornerstone quotation, and I’ll share it, and I’ll tell you where it comes from.  It says, “When you’re inspired by some great purpose or some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break your bonds: your mind transcends limitations, and your consciousness expands in every direction.  Dormant forces, faculties, and talents become alive in you, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”

Now, that is my favorite quotation about inspiration.  It’s actually over 2,300 years old.  It came from Patanjali, who I think was the founder of the Yoga sutras.  So part of what I see my job is, is to say to people “Hey, you’ve got no idea what you’re capable of when you get inspired, but until you get inspired you won’t start to explore it.”

So it becomes chicken and egg.  And most of us will say “Well, when things work out, then I’ll get really inspired.”  So part of my invitation to people is to say “Hey, take the baby steps to start getting inspired, and then you can discover that you’re capable of more than you realize.”

Toni: I have found that – thank you for that quote – and what I have found is that there are a lot of people that come to the interviews with many different definitions of that word, inspiration.  So when you’re working with people and you’re asking them or telling them that they need to be inspired, there may be some people out there that do not know what that means to be inspired; so how do you answer that question?

Nick: Yeah, I don’t know that … I often don’t even give a definition of inspiration, because I think inspiration is more of an experience than it is something that people should you know, think “Am I doing it right?  Am I being properly inspired?”  But I suppose the experience that I most commonly use when I’m talking about inspiration is when my mind opens to greater possibilities, when I feel like I’m alone with something greater than my own personality.

You know, whether you call that your muse or a higher power or spirit, to me the word doesn’t matter, but it’s about expanding your sense of consciousness to something greater than just your personality and whatever you call it, your ego.  So for many people,  it’s even believing that there is greater possibility in them than their ego or their personality, and then how do they tap into that and how do they then kind of take action and even begin to build their life around it, which is what I love to do with people.

Toni: It’s very exciting.  It’s very exciting, and rewarding, I would imagine.  Let me ask you then, Nick, what inspires you?  What do you need to be inspired?

Nick: I think I need a belief in something greater than me.  So for me that would be, you know, a God or a higher power.  Because if I’m here on my own, if I’m left to my own devices and resources, then I can find that a bit depressing sometimes, so I think I need to believe that there’s something greater than me.

I think what I’ve learned is not to wait for inspiration to strike me, but to be willing to act in anticipation of inspiration, because, you know, I’m a writer.  I’ve written five books, I write lots of articles and all sorts of different things, and I think what I’ve noticed is that I don’t always feel inspired to do the things that I know actually that I love to do.  But when I start doing them, I feel inspired to do them.

I love a quote that I heard from someone … “Do you write when you’re inspired, or do you write when you are, you know, at a particular time every day?”  He said “I sit down to write at 9:30 every morning.  I tend to find inspiration strikes me about 9:35 each morning.”  And I think one of my greatest pieces of advice to anybody listening to this would be, be willing to show up in anticipation sometimes of being inspired.  Don’t wait until you feel inspired before you show up to do something.

Toni: What great advice that is.

Nick: Thank you.  Yeah, I think the act of showing up initiates the flow of inspiration.

Toni: Nick, you had stated earlier that what put you in the place you are now is a place where you were that you were unhappy with, and there’s so many people that find themselves in that place.  So what happened that gave you the courage to remove yourself from that place so that you could get to where you are now?

Nick: Thank you.  Great question.  I think there were two forces at work, you know, the force of pain or desperation, or the force of inspiration and that sense of possibility, that sense of there being a greater life.  So I think for several years I struggled with the idea that this sense of a greater life within me might just be my imagination; it might just be fantasy.  In a way, I can only say in retrospect, you know, it wasn’t imagination, it wasn’t fantasy.  It was a whole new life wanting to be born through me.

So what’s my advice?  Number one, believe in your most heartfelt dreams.  You know, what felt like a fantasy to me just 20 years ago is my life today, so I really encourage people to treasure their most heartfelt and inspired ideas because they’re often, you know, a life of future attractions being shown to you.

But secondly, you know, and very much more kind of realistically and honestly, my advice is also to recognize that when you really get inspired, there is a twin force that usually kicks in, and I’ve come to call that twin force resistance.

And what is resistance?  Resistance is all the 101 different ways that each of us has to stay stuck, to resist our inspiration, to go into inertia, to procrastinate, to distract ourselves, to pretend, you know, that we don’t know that we do want to do something, when we know in our heart that we do want to do it.  So I call that force resistance.

If I had any other advice to anybody, it would also be to recognize that as soon as you get inspired, you are likely also to experience resistance.  You know, all of us can recognize having had a brilliant idea and then talking ourselves out of it in 30 seconds.  I can still do that today myself, but I’ve got much better at catching myself and going “Hey, there I go, I’m going through resistance again; hang on here.”

So my advice would be, learn to recognize and  understand and move through your resistance, because I think many people get caught because they get inspired, they get into feeling resistance, and then they wait until that fear of resistance goes away before they move forward.

So for me, it is very much a part of courage, which is, you know … I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to, you know, act in spite of my fear.  It’s been hundreds if not thousands of times, but I know that every time I do that, I grow as a being, you know?  I become more confident, I become more of myself.

Toni: That is such hard work.  I know that I have experienced that myself, and I think that that is a form of hard work, that if people haven’t moved through that resistance, that you so beautifully put, I think that that is a whole different level of hard work experience that is on the flip side of that is so rewarding.

Nick: Yeah, you know.  To me, it’s the willingness to do the personal growth work, to grow bigger than your fears, to grow bigger than your doubts, to grow bigger than your fantasies of what could go wrong.  Because most of us are just, you know, brilliant at looking at what could go wrong rather than what could go right; so, thank you, yeah.  You know, I think for those of us that want to achieve our potential, we really have to be willing to understand, encounter, and go through resistance regularly.

Toni: The fourth question of the Project is how do you explore your own potential?  So what do you do about that?  And if countering the resistance is part of that — which I think there’s such value in what you’re saying here — what do you do?  How do you … are there tools you reach for, are there systems that you use?  What do you do when you’re facing that wall of resistance that allows you to take the steps necessary to walk through them?

Nick: Thank you.  Another great question.  Well, number one is I do believe … I think each of us, if you like, has a destiny.  You know, there is something and somebody for us to become in this lifetime.  So I see my life as constantly evolving, so I’m forever asking myself, my soul, the question “So what’s next for me?”  Because that’s the thing that usually will inspire me, and it will usually cause fear in me, too.  So I navigate those two forces within myself.  “What am I inspired to do?  What am I most avoiding doing?”  I do that so I’m tuned into those two energies within me.

And secondly, you know, sometimes I avoid it, you know?  I still go into resistance sometimes, but I know that I always come back to having the courage to do something, and I know sometimes it takes weeks or months for my resistance to kind of collapse.  But I think also that I kind of get older now, and I’m more mature.  I’ve begun much more to make myself accountable.  So I think one of the ways that we can keep our resistance going is to keep ourselves isolated, and you know, kind of be our own worst enemy, and I know that sounds off the hook.

So more and more as I get older, I get myself coached by other people.  I have kind of relationships, you know, kind of mutual relationships with other people where we hold each other to our greatest potential.  But I do think there’s tremendous power in becoming accountable to other people so that we don’t allow ourselves to talk ourselves out of what we know we’d most like to do.

And the truth is, at times, you know,  I just have to face my deepest, darkest fears, but because I do believe in something greater than myself and something greater than my fear, it’s not like I’m going there alone.

And also, I guess if I’m really honest too, I have to go through some of my own pain sometimes.  And sometimes, you know, I have to go through some kind of healing, if you like, to really heal some old pain or some old emotional wounds that I seem to carry around with me.  And it seems to me that’s just the willingness to do the work of living an inspired life.  And then I come out into clear water again and everything goes fantastically for a while, and then back to some other level of resistance to deal with.

Toni: Absolutely.  Nick, you have been absolutely wonderful in this interview today, and you’ve given all of us a lot to think about, and tiny bits of strategy in here on how to live that inspired life.  We will post a link at the bottom of this interview on how people can view a website or blog, or I know that you said you have a couple of books as well, and we want to make sure that people can access them at the bottom of the interview.  So for the time that you’ve given, for the value that you have given us today, thank you so very much .

Nick: Oh, my great pleasure.   Thank you for asking me.

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For more information about Nick Williams:  www.inspired-entrepreneur.com

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