In this solo coaching talk, Mary Schiller challenges the common belief that personal change requires waiting for a sudden insight or new idea. Drawing on her own experience living with post‑traumatic stress disorder and her discovery of the 3 Principles through Michael Neill’s The Inside Out Revolution, she explains how she tested the principles by deliberately letting feelings arise without trying to change them. Over a two‑month period she observed that emotions tended to resolve themselves when she stopped intervening, confirming the idea of a natural well‑being set‑point. Mary argues that the faster path to change is to experiment— to sit with anxiety, stress, or uncertainty and observe what happens— rather than to wait for an insight. She shares practical habits, such as using moments of stress as cues to pause, let feelings be, and trust that answers are already present. Throughout she emphasizes curiosity, personal verification, and the freedom that comes from not trying to solve feelings as problems. The talk concludes with an invitation to connect via her website and email for further coaching.
Chapters
Hello, hello, it's Mary Schiller, author and coach of MarySchiller.com. And before I start this talk for today, I want to just invite you to visit my site at MarySchiller.com. And if you haven't subscribed, I would love to encourage you to do that, and you'll receive 2 free audio downloads from me, about an hour in total of audio coaching, and they're all about how to live the life that you really want to live. In today's talk, I'm gonna be addressing something that I hear quite frequently, not just from clients or people who I'm just chatting with. Um, hi Shirley! But I also hear it from other coaches. Uh, and that goes for coaches who are based in the 3 principles like I am and other coaches as well. That a person, in order to have some kind of a shift— hi there, Shirley, hi Laura— needs to have some sort of an insight. And what do we mean by insight? Well, I think most people refer to that as a new idea, let's say. Well, I think that if we keep saying that we have to wait for an insight before we can change something, first of all, I don't see that as true in the least. As I was discussing with somebody on, I think it was my audio from, or my video from yesterday, you know, I went through most of my life dealing with what the traditional world calls a post-traumatic stress disorder, and yet I was able to create a lot of things in my life. I didn't feel horrible 100% of the time. Sure, I had some anxiety and fear and all kinds of stuff like that. But at other times I didn't. And even when I did, I was still able to function quite well. I was able to earn two graduate degrees. I got remarried. I raised my daughter. I had some interesting work that I did, lots of things like that. And I certainly didn't have any quote unquote insights around my situation or anything related to these principles or anything like that. That's not what was going on at all. And so I think that people can get themselves unwittingly into trouble if they keep saying, well, I'm waiting for an insight around that, or I don't see it the way you do, or I haven't seen what you see. And coaches who say things like, you know, you won't change until you have a new idea. I just don't see that as truth based on my own experience. And one thing I can share with you too is that When I first discovered these 3 principles through Michael Neill's book, The Inside Out Revolution, I didn't just sit around and wait for a new idea. I took some action. And to me, that's the quicker way to sort of see something new for yourself is to take some action. And what I did by taking action, what I mean is that I tested it. You know, in Michael's book, he talks about the fact that we have and this natural set point— I don't know if that's the word he uses, but that's kind of how I heard it— of well-being and health and happiness and all these things that I had been searching for my whole adult life. And essentially, if we don't worry about whatever feelings we have, if we feel anxious or we feel depressed or sad or grief-stricken or whatever it is, that those feelings have nothing to do with what's underneath. And if we just kind of let them be and not try to manage them in any way and not try to worry about them, then we'll experience more of this natural state. Well, I wanted to know if that was true. I didn't just accept his word for it. Certainly, as much as I like Michael, I didn't just accept that as truth. And I didn't, you know, sort of take that in and go, oh, well, I don't see that for myself. So I'm just going to wait until I do. No. I experimented. Every time I felt anxious, I would sit there with it and wonder what would happen if I didn't try to change it. If I didn't worry about having it, if I didn't try to make it go away, what would happen? And time and again, I found the same thing occurred, which was it took care of itself. And over a period of probably 2 months or so, during that initial period of coming across these 3 principles, I gradually stopped doing any sort of intervention in my feelings. I simply let them be. And I found that that was a great way to have a new idea about something was to actually test it. You know, if I think that there's this notion that, you know, things just have to happen. Or new ideas just have to occur, or, you know, if I don't see something for myself, then I'm just going to sit and wait until I do. Well, to me, that isn't how it seems to happen, that there is something we can actually do to find this out and to discover more for ourselves. So for example, you know, the way that I kind of live my life now is when I feel myself kind of getting worked up or stressed or I'm, you know, searching for an answer to something, that's a sign to me to just sit and wait and to not worry about having that and know that, you know, what I need will— is already here and will make itself known to me. So if I have, you know, a question that I'm trying to answer or like something related to my business that I'm trying to sort out, I no longer worry if I have any feelings like, oh my gosh, I've got to get this together. I just kind of let those things float on through. And I know that the answer is here. And the only reason that I know that the answer is here is because I've tested this over and over and over again. And I still do that. I still, you know, am the curious kind of person who wants to know, is this really true? So I keep kind of verifying it to myself. I also know that there are tons of things in my life, tons of things that I will quote unquote never see through, you know, that always will look real to me, that will never look like my thinking, that they will always seem tangible. And I just don't mind anymore. Again, it's another thing of, so what, you know, so what if I can't see through everything? I'm never going to do that. So I just don't worry about it anymore. And taking the worry off of everything, to me, has been a huge help. Because there's nothing for us to worry about. A feeling is simply a thought. And that's what we're designed to have. They're not problems that we need to solve. And so if you find yourself in this headspace of, well, you know, I can't move forward, or I'm feeling whatever feeling and I'm waiting for an insight to help me make it go away. There's a quicker way. And that's to test what I'm telling you and test what you're learning and see if it's really true. Conduct experiments and see what happens. And you might just find that that insight that you're waiting for either comes through or you don't need to wait for it anymore because you already have seen this for yourself. So I hope this has been helpful to you today. And again, I invite you to visit me online at maryannemcpherson.com. Mary@maryschiller.com. And of course, if you'd like to get in touch with me personally, I'd love to hear from you. So post a comment here or email me at mary@maryschiller.com. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
