EPISODE MIKE BUNDRANT

EPISODE MIKE BUNDRANT [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:17.7] LC: Welcome to this week s episode of the Art of Authenticity. I m Laura Coe, your host, and thanks for joining me. Today, I ve got Mike Bundrant joining us. He is the founder of inlp Center. He is a Master NLP Practitioner. NLP is Neuro Linguistic Programming. It is a specific type of coaching that I love. It s really effective, and if you re a coach it is something you should definitely check out. He s also a retired psychotherapist. He no longer focuses on the psychotherapy approach, he mainly focuses on NLP. I understand why, it s Tony Robbins, a lot of people have popularized it, it s a really, incredibly powerful tool to get change in your life. Mike and I had a chat before the podcast, and we agreed to a very different format for the show. You re in for a real treat, hopefully you like it. I read his book, Your Achille s Eel: Discover and Overcome the Hidden cause of Negative Emotions, Bad Decisions and Self-Sabotage. It s a really short 30-page document. I felt like we could really get through this thing in the hour, and every single page that I read, I felt like he had outlined perfectly the process that happens when we move from our truth to an inauthentic life. When we re younger, we re susceptible to losing ourselves because of the various influences around us, and in order to survive we split away, as Dr. Shefali and many other people have talked about happens early in our childhood. We don t realize it, we ve attached to a self that isn t really us, and we now identify with this idea of our self, but in fact, it s really just negative emotions. It causes bad decisions and ultimately causes self-sabotage. This is Mike s theory on how this all happened, and what you can do about it. He has something called the aha moment to overcome and take action to remove this negative looping process from your life. We had an insanely deep conversation. This is definitely not the 101 chat, keeping it light. This was us moving through really, if you re ready for change, if you want to hear some detailed conversations with Mike and I about what you can do today to make those changes, this episode is for you. 2017 Art of Authenticity 1

Thank you so much for tuning in and I hope you enjoy today s show. [INTERVIEW] [0:02:54.8] LC: Welcome to this week s episode of the Art of Authenticity. Today we have Mike Bundrant joining us. Hey Mike, how are you today? [0:03:01.9] MB: Good, how are you doing, Laura? [0:03:03.0] LC: I am great. I m really excited for this interview. We were talking beforehand that we re going to do something a little different here. For those of you who have been listening to this podcast for a long time, we ve had authors and coaches, and Mike just brings this incredible combination of years and years of NLP, which we had one guest who had a background in NLP. Mike, if you could give us a little intro into NLP, that would be great, and then he also has this book that I read and I was like, I just want to walk through this. It has so many insightful, incredible ideas that I feel like anybody out there could get value from right away. Mike, if you could start of explaining a little bit about your background, give us a little sense of the things you ve been up to. You run a center, the inlp Center, but for many people they re not even sure what NLP is. [0:03:59.0] MB: Right. Okay, well, NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming. It s communication skills, interpersonal skills, and a sort of inner self-management set of tools that was developed in the early 1970 s. It s a very unique approach that focuses on nonverbal and nonconscious elements of communication. I learned that because my background is mental health counseling. I went to college and became licensed as a mental health counselor. I sort of learned it as one of the tools of the trade, and before long, I ended up teaching it and doing NLP certifications in the United States and Japan. NLP training kind of took over my life, and then in 2011, we decided to offer NLP training for lots of life coaches and business professionals, mental health professionals, we decided to offer the 2017 Art of Authenticity 2

training online, and so that s how inlpcenter.org came into being. We re running the inlp Center trainings. I am no longer doing sort of clinical mental health counseling, I do have a small life coaching practice on the side, and I try to write about interesting things, like the book you and I are going to talk about today as well. [0:05:32.9] LC: In a nutshell, for somebody who is not heard - Tony Robbin s has kind of popularized NLP - but can you give like a two-second description of how NLP, what a tool might look like, and how it s different from classic therapy that I think more people are used to, learning about people s backgrounds, and trying to find a root cause, and looking at your internal life? [0:05:56.4] MB: Sure. I think I can do that in a nutshell. There s different kinds, different styles of NLP. Tony Robbins is more of the motivational, pump you up style. He s really great at that stuff. There s other people who use NLP for a variety of reasons, but then there s - our style is more for coaching and therapists and so forth. It s not so much pump you up motivational, but really understand the structure of your inner self, so that you can make changes to it. An example might be if somebody s coming and they re discussing a problem, maybe they re stuck in some negative emotion or what have you. What we re going to do with NLP, rather than talk about it, although we might do some of that, but we re going to find out the inner structure. As you re in that state, what specifically are you picturing in your mind, and how are you picturing it? That internal image has a structure that has qualities that really determine its impact upon you. What are you saying to yourself? What are you feeling, and what are the specific qualities of your feeling? Where in your body, and what s the feeling specifically doing in terms of the sensation? Then we can begin to sort of restructure how you re having this experience, so that it doesn t have the same impact on you. The metaphor I use is imagine being on a roller coaster, and you re sitting in the front seat of the front car, looking down the track, going down a big hill, and the wind s rushing past your face. There s one way of doing a roller coaster. 2017 Art of Authenticity 3

The other way would be imagine a thousand yards away from the roller coaster, watching people on the roller coaster. You re looking at it from a great distance. Both ways, you re still picturing a roller coaster, but those two ways are going to give you dramatically different experiences of the roller coaster. How we re structuring our inner experience has a lot to do with the outcome. How we feel, what we do, that inner state. That s one small example of how NLP might approach change work with people. [0:08:28.6] LC: Yeah, so in our mind s eye, when things are up close, and really intense, and vibrant, and filled with colors, we feel certain ways. When they re distanced and further away, just like the roller coaster. Awesome. I ve played with it, and it s not trained, but it s so powerful. Alright. Today, I really wanted to focus, Mike, on this book you sent me. I just was laughing out loud, even though this is such a serious topic, because I just have never seen anybody approach what I think is the source of so much pain and discomfort for so many of us with such an incredibly creative and truthfully funny style. You wrote a book, Your Achille s Eel: Discover and Overcome the Hidden Cause of Negative Emotions, Bad Decisions and Self-Sabotage. [0:09:18.0] MB: Thank you, by the way. I really appreciate hearing that feedback from you. That means a lot, I really appreciate that. [0:09:24.1] LC: Absolutely. I really mean it. What I was struck with is, literally- you guys, we ll make the link available on our site, but I think everybody should grab a copy. You start right away with, Hello. We ve been together for a long time now. Although you wish I was dead, even so, I m very much alive. This is coming from the first person of what you call attachment. Can you explain to the audience who is this person, what is this image that you re starting off with? [0:09:58.4] MB: Okay, the book deals with self-sabotage and why we do it. What s the unconscious motivation, and this idea of psychological attachments, which is different than 2017 Art of Authenticity 4

attachment theory, but it s sort of goes back to the days of Sigmund Freud and this sort of hidden thread in psychology since then. When writing the book, I decided it would be interesting if I assumed the role of the selfsabotaging part of the psyche, and I spoke directly with people as that part. Even though that doesn t necessarily happen to anyone, but I thought, What if it did? What if I became the inner demon and I said, You know what? I m going to introduce myself to you, and I m going to tell you all my secrets. I m going to tell you how and why I mess up your life. I just thought that would be a creative approach. [0:11:05.4] LC: It is, because first of all, it creates separation between the crazy thoughts in our head that bring us down and make us feel out of control, and anxious, and hurt, and hopeless in our self, right? Because right away you re saying, Hey, I m this entity. I exist, and I m separate, which I think was just really clever right off the bat. He goes on, you guys, to say that, your negative, frustrated, hurt, anxious, hopeless, out of control feelings feed me. In fact, such despair is highly nutritious for my type. Can you explain what you mean by that? [0:11:40.2] MB: Yeah, we re going with the book being called Your Achilles Eel, and I mean by that specifically an eel swimming in the ocean. I had in mind the lamprey eel, which is a parasitic eel. What this eel does is it attaches itself onto unsuspecting fish. It feeds itself on the fish until the fish become ultimately weaker and weaker, and until they die. This concept of a psychological attachment, it ends up being an unresolved part of you. Unresolved emotions, negativity that you got attached to long before you really were conscious. The negativity, this attachment, it feeds on more negativity, and is actually driven toward it. I sort of merged the metaphor of a parasite with this idea of self-sabotage and negative psychological attachments. [0:12:56.5] LC: I mean, again, the idea that something attached onto me, and it s not me, right? That really just resonated with me. The thing I work with my clients the most is these thoughts, 2017 Art of Authenticity 5

the things that are going on your head all day long, they re not really you. To really start separating that is such a difficult process. Do any of these sound familiar? Criticism, pessimism, rejection, control, loneliness, frustration, anger, and you go on, self-sabotage, emptiness. You can thank me for all of these. Even though we experience all of these things, we don t know where they re coming from. We want to be free of them, but yet, we have attached to them. Is that the point? [0:13:43.6] MB: Yeah, we want to be free of them, but we re attached to them, and in a really strange and bizarre way, we are unwittingly setting ourselves up to experience more of the same. I would agree with you that that s not who we really are. It s not our authentic self. It s not what we deserve, it s just what we have become attached to. It s what we ve become accustomed to. I can give examples of how we might set ourselves up to experience more of the same. I think at some point in the book, I do. I m sure we ll get to that, but that s the idea. We re attached to it. It s not our authentic self, but we re driven in some strange way to continue to remain attached and experience more of the same. [0:14:40.9] LC: I think you make the point that I think so many people don t say, but they fear. You may not even know who you are without me, right? I think that ultimately, when people think about making a change away from even the things that are the most negative in their life, the relationship that s not working, the job that they hate, right? The financial decisions that are causing so much misery, they don t know who they are without these negative situations. You go on to say chronic negativity falls into three categories, and this really got me, because I feel like it was so succinct. The feeling of being controlled, the feeling of deprived, and the feeling of rejected. How did you decide on this these three categories? Why those three? [0:15:27.6] MB: Why those three? Well, they really come from classic child development, from infancy up through five, six years old. There s some child development theorist that - classic child development theorist - that suggest that we go through certain stages where control, rejection, and deprivation are at issue. 2017 Art of Authenticity 6

They came from that, but even more so, I thought they fit. In other words, those three categories really do encompass a lot of the ways that we end up seeking trouble. Where we end up getting ourselves into really tough emotional situations and being in a rut. In some of our work at the inlp Center, we take each of those three categories, control, rejection, and depravation, and we talk about the various different styles or types of control, rejection, or depravation that we practice. But that s the way it came, and it does seem to fit a lot of our experience. [0:16:41.1] LC: Yeah, when I read the description, I couldn t think of much more, right? Feeling at mercy of outside forces that you can t control, and feeling deprived, like something feels empty inside of you, or feeling rejected, right? Worthless, unwanted. [0:16:56.0] MB: Hurt, humiliated, outcast, you bet. [0:17:01.6] LC: This is the part that, I think, if this is coming from childhood and the experiences we had with our parents, this is where you say that the attachment, the eel as you put it, comes in to save you. Why save you? [0:17:16.8] MB: Yeah, I like that concept, and save you because one of the things that happens when we re kids, especially young infants and babies. I mean, we re having a psychological experience, we re having an emotional experience. The problem is, we re setup for pain in a lot of ways, because when we re young, we don t have any patience. We don t understand that there is a world beyond our own needs. We don t understand that Mom, while she may love me, if I m hungry and I don t get something immediately, as a baby, I become enraged. I don t have the sense of time, I don t have any boundaries, I don t see Mother as a separate person with her own needs, and she s in the middle of something and so she s got to take a few minutes, and so in a way, we are setup to have these experiences where we feel controlled, deprived, and rejected on a pretty continual basis. A two-year old who wants to stick a car key in the light socket and isn t allowed to, is going to feel controlled, right? You know, even parents with really great intentions who are doing the right 2017 Art of Authenticity 7

thing are going to cause their small children to feel negatively. Of course, bad parents, inattentive, neglectful, abusive parents, only exacerbate the problem. We end up, as children, having this consistent experience of negative emotions. Of course, we have positive emotions as well, but we experience a chronic negativity. Again, the worse your parents are at parenting, the more negativity that you re going to have. How does the eel save us? Really, they only option that we have, according to this theory, is to build up a tolerance for the negativity. To learn how to deal with it. We can t make it go away, we can t change our circumstances, and so we build up a tolerance for it. We familiarize it, we learn to handle it, and in a strange way, it s not uncommon that we learn to take some form of pleasure in it. For example, you have the little boy who, when he does something wrong, his mother or father or somebody overreacts and punishes him. He does something wrong again, and he gets punished and again and again, parents are overreacting. Then at some point in his life, it occurs to him that he could push Mom s buttons. All he has to do is this, or that, or the other thing and Mom flips out. Pretty soon, this kid is pushing Mom s buttons and kind of giggling about it, right? It s those kinds of scenarios, where suddenly there is introduced kind of a forbidden fruit mentality in it. We know it s wrong, but somehow we want to do it, right? This is, according to this theory, a way the psyche learns to handle negativity, is we sort of develop an appetite for it. [0:20:53.5] LC: Yeah, a resilience to it sounds like you re saying as well, and almost then, I would think that little kid is getting a little control back if they re in a situation, right? The motivations can become interesting. If Mom s doing this over and over, now I can do it too, right? It becomes maybe harder. [0:21:12.8] MB: Exactly. Now, the kid is seeking more of what has always caused him pain. That s sort of when that transition from, Oh my gosh, this is overwhelming and I can t survive this way, into finding the way to make it pleasurable. Make it into a forbidden fruit, or familiarize it, or building up this huge tolerance for it. That s sort of the eel coming along and attaching, and 2017 Art of Authenticity 8

saying, I am the one who has an appetitive for this stuff. I eat negativity for lunch, and I m going to take care of it for you. [0:21:59.0] LC: Yeah, you go on to say, Are you still with me here? A few questions for you to consider, and what I thought was so fascinating in these questions, right? Have you ever wondered why people choose to do things that cause them unhappiness? Have you ever tried to give up behaviors that cause you guilt, shame, personal angst? What I could point out in each one of your questions is you ve taken the victim and the blame out of the question. I don t know if that was intentional. Most people would say, What do you mean? I don t choose to do things that are causing unhappiness. This is happening to me, right? I don t give up behaviors that cause guilt. I feel guilt, and shame, and personal angst all the time because of this person, that person, this situation. In this narrative, you re restructuring that there is all these ways in which we choose unhappiness. Negativity, guilt, giving up an achievable goal, inviting controlling, rejecting, emotionally unavailable people. I mean, it s flipping this whole paradigm on its head and saying you know, Why are you making those choices and not wanting to let it go? That was intentional on your part? [0:23:10.0] MB: Yes, absolutely. What I really think happens, I do think we make choices, but they invite further pain into our lives. I think those choices are unconscious, or semi-conscious choices that we don t recognize. It s just we find our self in this situation again, and when you re working with someone one-on-one, you can usually trace it back to when the self-sabotaging choice occurred. For example, a woman has a history of being in a relationship with controlling men, and she s miserable, and so she finally gets out the relationship and she goes and finds another relationship with what? A controlling man, or rejecting, or depriving. So her constant experience is, Oh gosh, it s happening again. Why do I end up with these jerks, you know? But if you dig into it and trace it back, you can usually find something like, what were the red flags that you overlooked, that you talked yourself out of confronting? What were the things 2017 Art of Authenticity 9

about this guy that you told yourself would probably be okay, when they were really red flags? So at some unconscious or semiconscious level, the choice point is identifiable. We so often set ourselves up. We re on a diet and things are going well, and we re at a party and we go, Well, you know, just this once I ll have a piece of cake, or whatever. We just talk ourselves right into the very thing that causes us to fail. [0:25:01.5] LC: Right, the third piece, and the fourth piece, and you say the bottom line is, I m an ugly truth, you ve always tried to avoid me, and when you ve had to confront me, you attempted to annihilate me. You see, I m a survivor and I can outmaneuver the best of them. That s such a great sentence, too, because the hooks that this has on you after years and years and years of living this way, it s very difficult to break those hooks. Is that what you meant by outmaneuvering? [0:25:34.6] MB: Yeah, and it can be very difficult. Most of the time, it s either extremely difficult or impossible, because we take the approach that I just want to kill this part of me, right? Or we deny it. We just wish that it would magically vanish, or we even try to use will power and override it. Do everything but take a square look at it and say, This is what s going on with me. This is what I m doing. This is what, at some level, I m seeking. We do everything but confront the truth of the matter, and we can t out maneuver it that way. At least, that s my experience. [0:26:24.1] LC: Yeah, so this is where you introduce Aware, Hold, Act, and call it the acronym AHA, which is super cute and easy to remember. So 100% this was my experience. This is what we re taught, right? Shove it down, get over it, get past it. Come on, man up. All of this stuff, deny it. As one client said, slap a smile on it, right? These families say all this stuff, and mainly it s because we feel like it s weak to deal with any emotional state. In fact, the real work and the real strength comes from what you re going to describe here by first becoming aware. Can you explain your process of AHA: Aware, Hold, Act? 2017 Art of Authenticity 10

[0:27:11.8] MB: Sure. By far, the first step is the most important, because again, our tendency - and for the reasons you ve mentioned - our tendency is to deny it. In fact, it s really absurd. What we re really saying here is we re unwittingly seeking what we hate. We re unwittingly setting ourselves up to get the very results that we complain most about, and that s absurd. Who wants to admit that, right? Who wants to know that about themselves? And so that s why becoming aware of what s really going on is the key. [0:27:54.1] LC: Well, Mike, it flies in the face of everything your family taught you, which is why I believe you can be in this position in the first place. If the answer to all of it is get over it, you would never be aware of it, right? That s not what you were taught, and that s what this feeds off of, is that you re never going to be aware. Its existence depends on it. [0:28:17.5] MB: Right, it also flies in the face of say, positive thinking culture. Where you re supposed to think positively, and look at the bright side, and all of these things which are really valuable in and of themselves, but thinking positively does not stop self-sabotage, necessarily. It doesn t stop these patterns, because the negativity, the difficult spots that we get in over and over and over again, are so familiar to us. The rut that we often live in, we ve come to call home. So that safety and familiarity of the devil that we know is so much more powerful and primal than positive thinking. [0:29:05.9] LC: Right. Positive thinking, in my experience, is like, Be grateful. So okay, you re in a big negative space in your life, and you see people saying, Gratitude is the solution, so what do you do? You sit there and say, I m grateful, I m grateful, I m grateful, and then you recognize this isn t working. You re like, I suck, and it just goes right back into the negative thinking. I don t think you can force your will on yourself to be grateful. [0:29:34.2] MB: Yeah. In the awareness piece, there s a shift that occurs. Because if you just let the negative thoughts, and overlooking the red flags, the excuses you make that enable you to go and eat the cake, if you just let that negativity run on autopilot, then it s just negativity running your life. But if you confront it by honestly acknowledging what you re doing, then I don t consider that negativity. I consider that being truthful. 2017 Art of Authenticity 11

And so my clients, and students of the AHA solution, learned to recognize their attachments and be truthful about them. I ll often teach people how to write what s called a personal truth statement for now, or maybe it s more of an absurd truth affirmation. It s really confronting yourself by saying, let s say that my attachment is to rejection, and I tend to hang around people who reject me a lot, and then enable them by not expressing how I feel or giving them any feedback at all, and so forth. The people who are nice and decent to me, I m not attracted to them at all. They re boring or what have you. So I m just gravitating toward this, My life is this rejection machine, and that s the reality of what s happening. So a true statement would be something like, Today, I m going to seek as much rejection as I can. Today, I m going to interpret the world in a way that leads me to feel rejected at every opportunity. It s not meant to be an affirmation. It s meant to be a reflection of what I m actually doing. I walk into a social gathering, and the first thing I m scanning for is people who are looking funny at me, people who are better than I am, people who are dressed nicer than I am, people who are wealthier than I am. I m comparing myself to them going, I m scum, and so what I m literally doing, and this may all just be happening on autopilot, but what s actually happening is I m walking into the social gathering looking for opportunities to feel rejected. Less than. [0:32:06.5] LC: Dude, that s so powerful, because affirmation statements are so popular on Instagram and everywhere. It s just be inspired, be yourself, be your truth and step into your light, and all that stuff. But I mean, god, the truth is our affirmations, truthfully, they are these death sentences walking into rooms, but nobody deals with that part first. They re trying to slap the positive affirmation on top of it. [0:32:33.2] MB: Right, and then usually, when people really become aware of what they re really doing at a deeper level, what their autopilot is doing, they re blown away. Because it is absurd. I mean if you look at my day and I am going through the day constantly feeling less than, and low self-esteem, and anxious, what I m actually doing is looking for every opportunity to feel rejected. That s absurd because I hate rejection. 2017 Art of Authenticity 12

This is me consciously going, I hate it. I m miserable, but at the same time, I m not going into the room going, Oh, who s here that I can connect with? I mean, I m not doing that. [0:33:18.5] LC: Yeah, but you re talking about personal agency and giving that back to people. This is your choice, to walk into the room and say, Let me see how many times I can be rejected, or You know what? I just want to be victimized today a hundred times today. That s my personal goal. Great day, you know? And if we started with that much truth, then we might make a more rational decision, but we bury it. We just deny it and blame. [0:33:44.6] MB: And as long as it s buried, we can t make any choice about it. As long as it s outside of our awareness, it s also outside of the reach of our choice. We don t really acknowledge or recognize that s going on, so we can t do anything about it. But what happens as you start to become aware is that something happens really naturally, which is at some point, when it really dawns on you what you re doing, and it makes sense why you would be doing it given your early life training, then you start to go, Do I need to do this? If I had something else that I could do, what would it be? And so now you re in the realm of making a conscious choice, as opposed to just having this thing on autopilot that you re a victim of. Then you could start thinking of, What else could I do? What else should I do? and so forth, and that s the Halt part. Where, when you re aware, the more you become aware, the more control you have over the process. At some point, you ll be able to stop and say, What are my other options? and that would be the Act on New Information part of the AHA. You get a different idea, and suddenly, now I have something else I could do. When you go through the process deeply, there might be other tools and other work that may need to be done along the way, to do some letting go and so forth, but when you get through the process, you have this inner transformation. Where now, when you walk into the room, those thoughts, those rejecting thoughts don t occur to you anymore. You ve healed that attachment, and that s the point. 2017 Art of Authenticity 13

[0:35:40.1] LC: Yeah, I love it, and you say, To do the work of releasing what I m up to, yes me, your attachment, you have to consciously realize what you re doing that makes your life a prison, right? And then you can make the choice if you want to be free. So I love it. Mike, this is so powerful, and I think anybody out there listening, if you like this, if you are interested in checking it out again, I ll have the links on my site, and Mike can share his thoughts. He s written blogs and all sorts of different articles, you can find it online as well. We ll have all of that. So Mike, everybody who comes on the show talks to me about what it means to have an authentic life as well. Given you ve spent so much time thinking about it, what then does an authentic life mean to you? [0:36:29.3] MB: I think being authentic means being self-aware and honest. For me, an important part of that honesty is honesty about your limitations. In other words, and this goes back, I think authenticity develops or can develop along the life cycle. When we go through different stages. I m 49 years old now, but when I was 29, I was in a really different place developmentally, where I really wasn t aware of or honest about my limitations. I was charging ahead, trying to make it in the world kind of thing. A really different place developmentally. So as we mature and learn about who we are, we learn about our limitations as well, and our shortcomings. Then we develop much more compassion for other people and their limitations, and really learn to see other people just as people like me. When you get to that point, I think you are now swimming safely in the waters of authenticity. It s a long process though to get there. I believe. [0:37:54.8] LC: And do you practice? I m sure you practice the systems that you ve developed, having put the time and energy in. I ask people what their daily practices and habits are to stay in an authentic space, but has this become now something that you do just as a habit, or unconscious pattern, that you don t have to work that hard at? Or how is it for you now? [0:38:18.3] MB: It just gets easier and easier when - part of me being authentic, when we first developed the AHA solution, one of the attachments under control, one of the ways we go about seeking to be controlled, we call the rebel, and if there were ever an emotional rebel on this 2017 Art of Authenticity 14

earth, it was me, right? Rebels seek to be controlled. I mean, consciously, they are so antiauthority. Nobody tells me what to do, don t even expect anything of me. In fact, whatever you are expecting of me, even if I expect that of me, but if you re expecting of it of me, I m going to do something else just because you are expecting it. That was me. The rebel is really seeking to be controlled. If you line up 10 people, and nine of them are basically cooperative, and do what they say and what s expected of them, and the 10 th person is a rebel, who s the one that gets intervened on, right? The rebels are constantly attracting monitoring and intervention without really knowing it. So that was me. When I realized that, I was like, Oh my gosh! There s just things with my relationship with Hope, my wife, and so part of my authenticity was saying, My gosh. I am such a rebel, and what that does, it just screams at you to come and intervene, and try to get me to fly right, and so I began to acknowledge every single day what I was doing to rebel and seek that sort of negative attention from her. It took several months to work out, and that was sort of my project for that period of time, and now I don t feel that within myself anymore. Then I m sort of on to the next attachment that is going on with me, and trying to be honest and figure that out. That s one way that I, over the years, the attachments have really softened or disappeared, and so on and so forth, and so one of the things that I do every morning is as I just sit down and notice how I m feeling for five or ten minutes. Just kind of do a body scan, and notice what s there is there. Am I basically feeling okay? Then I ll just sit there and breathe. There s some old familiar feeling that I have, and what that s about? So on and so forth. You know, I try to express what I m learning through my writing and so forth. There are times where I really discover something that s sort of emerged that I need to work on, and other times I go through sort of long periods of inner peace. 2017 Art of Authenticity 15

It just depends, but for me, it is all about a personal growth oriented lifestyle, and it s all about the process and sort of being honest about where you are in your own process. [0:41:34.1] LC: I love that. Mike, thank you so much for coming on the Art of Authenticity, sharing your thoughts and your work. This is the first time I ve walked through somebody s work like this, and I really enjoyed it. I hope you did as well. [0:41:46.9] MB: Yeah, that was fun, I really appreciate you sort of putting that level of thought into it. That was really interesting. [0:41:53.4] LC: If people are looking to find out more about you, where can they find you? [0:41:57.0] MB: Best place to go would be INLPcenter.org. That s our main website. A lot of that website is centered around NLP and life coach training certification for practitioners, but there s an articles tab there, too, that has a lot of personal development articles on it and so forth. There is a video on it as well that is sort of a 20 to 30-minute walk through of self-sabotage and how psychological attachments work in. It is sort of explained with examples, without the eel metaphor. [0:42:43.1] LC: Awesome. Thanks Mike. We appreciate you sharing your wisdom. [0:42:46.8] MB: You bet. Thank you, Laura. [END] 2017 Art of Authenticity 16