First published 29 March 2021 on Your Best Year Starts Here with Nigel Risner.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
The book was done. I had the printed manuscript next to me while we recorded, bound in two separate bits because the printout was too fat for one, which makes it look a lot bigger than the actual book will be. Nigel reckoned I'd mentioned it on 130 episodes.
One section of Done Beats Perfect is about operating as if you're already the person you want to become, and I wanted to share the acronym from it, ALIVE. Before I could start, Nigel jumped in with a story from a week's training with Jack Canfield in Santa Barbara. On the last day everyone had to turn up as the person they'd be in five years. Nigel told the room he had to leave because his private plane was waiting to fly him to New York for a talk that afternoon. A year later he was in Santa Monica with the family and really did have to fly off to a gig in New York. No private jet, mind.
A is acceptance. I asked Nigel to guess and he went with actualisation. Wrong. Most stress comes from the gap between what we expected and what's actually happening, so the sooner you accept where you are, the sooner you can move on from it. L is love. Pretty much everything I've ever regretted, I did from fear. Nigel's version is to imagine a yellow Post-it on everyone's head saying "Please love me" and talk to them with that in mind.
I is integrity, which for me starts with being honest with yourself. I asked Nigel if he'd ever walked on stage feeling out of integrity somewhere in his life. He has. And he told me about Jack Canfield asking him to run an exercise where you press a wooden hunting arrow into the soft part of someone's neck, because Jack didn't feel right doing it that day. Nobody in the room would have known. He handed it over anyway.
V is vision and E is energy, and the vision goes nowhere without the energy. For Nigel it's fuel. A Robin Reliant that's been looked after will go better than a Ferrari running on nothing. Then at the end I said the book should hopefully be on Amazon by the end of March, and Nigel stopped me. Hope is not a strategy, apparently.
The short version
- Accept where you are today. Most stress is the gap between what you expected and what you got.
- When you're stuck, ask yourself what love would do next.
- Be straight with yourself first. If you're out of integrity, it shows on stage even if the audience can't tell.
- A vision with no energy behind it goes nowhere. If you're not excited about who you're trying to become, you haven't found the right thing yet.
Energy is fundamental. And if you look at the word fundamental and you break it down, it's either fun or it's mental.
Neil Martin
Remember, Neil, hope is not a strategy. So let's not use the word hopefully, okay?
Nigel Risner
