Interview with Nick Williams
22nd July 2002.
By Louise Mclean, LCCH MARH.
Published in Homeopathy in Practice journal January 2003
Sitting high up on the 5th
floor of Waterstones in Piccadilly on a sunny July afternoon, I am interviewing
Nick Williams. Nick is a best selling author of the books ‘The
Work We Were Born to Do’, ‘The 12 Principles of the Work
We Were Born to Do’ and his most recent work ‘Unconditional Success’.
As well as being a writer, Nick is an
internationally established workshop presenter, personal coach and a trustee
director of ‘Alternatives’ based at St. James’s Church, Piccadilly, London.
I have just spent some days reading ‘The
Work We Were Born to Do’,
which is an incredible manual to help us find our true calling in life. The book covers every limiting self-belief
and block to finding or making the most of our true vocation and is extremely
thorough and practical in its guidance.
There is a strong spiritual slant and effective methods of breaking free
from past negative conditioning.
These books, I believe, are also
extremely helpful to homeopaths who have problems around money and valuing
their services. All of these aspects are
extensively covered in the books. I
believe that using Nick’s ideas can greatly help us transform our inner selves,
which will be reflected in our outer success, so that we are better able to
promote homeopathy and get public opinion on our side. Nick has been using homeopathy for about 15
years, personally advocates its use and says it is his first port of call when
sick.
What
made you decide to write books to help people find their vocation in life?
It was through missing my own
vocation. When I was a teenager and I
think younger, I felt that there was something else I had to do and like most
people just got caught up in paying the bills and making a living, not really
thinking about those big questions. So
for me it was about being successful on the outside but realising I wasn’t that
happy on the inside. It made me question
the purpose of everything and questioning my vocation, which is really to help
people with issues around work.
Do
you think that everyone has a particular purpose or do they grow into their
purpose?
Good question. I think where we confuse ourselves around
purpose is to think that our purpose is what we do. Our purpose isn’t what we do, our purpose
isn’t a job title, so negative as it might sound, our purpose isn’t to be a
homeopath really. Our purpose is more a
way of being, something to do with love, something to do with inspiration,
something to do with making a difference, serving and contributing. To look at
the level of being before we look at the level of doing and then our purpose
can take many forms. Once I began to get clear my purpose was about love and inspiration,
creativity and those things, I realised that could take a number of different
forms. It takes up writing, speaking,
coaching, the development of products, promoting other people, running
workshops. My purpose takes different forms but my underlying purpose is to
love, help and inspire.
In
your view, what percentage of people are not really working in what they enjoy
or what they are meant to be doing?
In my experience it is really only a
minority of people who do something they love.
Most of us have been brought up with the conditioning that we either
have to sell our souls to earn our living or we can do something we love but
don’t expect to earn much. I’m sure
that’s two beliefs that a lot of homeopaths can probably relate to. Many homeopaths have probably come to
homeopathy through another career they didn’t enjoy. I think there is a third way to make our
living which is when we find what we are inspired by and what we love, we can
actually be more successful at it. In my
experience, not many people are taught in that way, so not many people find
that way of living. At school we are not
taught to find our purpose and vocation, just to mould and distort ourselves so
that we’ll be attractive on the job market.
In my opinion the majority of people are not doing what they are capable
of doing and not living creative and true lives. I wouldn’t like to put a percentage on it but
maybe 95% of people are not doing what is really them.
There
is so much in life we have to do, such as filling in tax returns, household
duties, etc. Thanks to ever rising
bureaucracy, people can feel bogged down with just every day living.
Yes, it’s very easy to get caught up in
the detail of life and miss the bigger picture.
I think it is so important to remember our purpose, to remember what we
really are. That doesn’t mean that the
minutiae of life are going to disappear but to keep things in perspective. When we keep the love and inspiration at the
centre of our life, it gives life meaning. We’re never going to escape those
things but they can have a different meaning.
I would also suggest that as you become more successful in your
practice, you delegate some of those things.
As a self-employed person I used to do my own tax return and VAT returns
and I used to hate having to do it. Then
I asked my accountant how much she charges and she said £50 a quarter. It was such a delight to have half a day’s
work taken off me once every quarter and pay somebody else £50 to do it. So again it’s challenging this idea that you
have to do it all yourself, you have to do things you don’t enjoy. Do things you’re good at, do what you enjoy
like homeopathy and see how much you can delegate to other people that love
doing their work.
I think one of the things that are important
is to keep shifting your focus. It’s so
easy to focus on the problems of life, where your practice isn’t working, those
things. I think it’s very important to
keep your focus on what is working, where your successes are. Learn through success not just through
failure. Learn from other homeopaths who
are doing well and see how you can support each other. Focus on the things that you want to develop
more of, not just the things you don’t want.
Learn from success, learn from other areas, other alternative
practitioners and see what you can learn about how they practise. My message is that it’s okay to be successful
in the alternative world. I think the
alternative world needs more success. Yes,
absolutely.
So
many books and self-help courses try to help us deal with our negative and
painful emotions but your cure is simply owning and accepting them.
I think there’s a big difference between
personal development and self-improvement and self-acceptance. For many years I was caught up on the path of
personal growth and self-improvement, which I am not saying are wrong but I was
trying to get rid of the parts of myself that I didn’t like. The parts that I
thought were unacceptable and would get in the way of success for me. If I’m honest, I don’t think I ever got rid
of any of them! In a way by keeping
focussed on them, they just got stronger and I ended up feeling quite
despairing at times. I loved what the
spiritual teacher Ram Dass said when I asked him to talk once. He’s been on his spiritual path for 40
years. He said he was not sure that
during his 40 years of being on a spiritual path he had ever got rid of
anything that he didn’t like about himself.
What he had done was develop a new relationship to it. So he still gets depressed sometimes but
instead of going, ‘Oh no, I’m depressed again, oh, how terrible’. It’s more like, ‘Oh hello depression, I
haven’t seen you for awhile, how are you doing?’ Just take the whole thing a lot more
lightly. So don’t resist those things
but somehow embrace them.
I that think ultimately everything just
needs our love, compassion and acceptance. Whether it’s anger, whether it’s
violence, whether it’s pain, whether it’s suffering. It’s not about getting rid of them. It’s about transforming them through love. I think that’s the key message that doesn’t
get out in the world. Especially in the
medical profession, they talk about ‘fighting cancer’ and ‘fighting illness’
and battling with things. I think on the
whole that what you battle with, you just make stronger, giving it more
power. So what you overcome with love
and what you accept, you can heal. In
the 12 Steps Programme they say you can’t deal with a problem unless you’ve
accepted it. You don’t fight your
problems, you accept them and then they begin to transform.
Do
you think that really is the only way, that there isn’t another way?
I don’t think there is another way,
other than to truly accept things. Our
fear around accepting anything is that we’re going to be stuck with it for the
rest of our lives. It works the other
way, the more you resist, persists.
The paradox is the more we resist, the
more we get stuck with things. The more
we can truly accept things, the more we can transform them. That’s a great paradox that most people don’t
know and they spend their whole lives trying to fight things, rather than
accept them. It’s not always easy and
sometimes painful. I used to and I still
do sometimes, get depressed for no apparent reason. I used to think I’ve had dinner with Wayne
Dyer and spent time with Deepak Chopra, so I shouldn’t get depressed. I run Alternatives. The truth is that I get depressed sometimes
and the best thing I can do is accept that I get depressed sometimes. Then it’s not so bad but when I’m fighting
it, I feel terrible. There’s a huge
power in truly accepting something. It’s forgiveness as well, forgiving
ourselves for being depressed. Our
feelings are valid.
I would just like to say that the
important message in the first book and even more in ‘Unconditional Success’
is to remember our wholeness, that there is a piece of us that is whole, that
has never been hurt. So even if we’re
ill, even if we’re suffering, even if we’re in pain, our wholeness is still
there behind that. For me that is the
key message - that our wholeness is not a place to get to, it’s a place that
still exists. There’s an expression that
in every person there’s a piece that is whole and unbroken.
I
think it is wonderful the way you share so frankly your own innermost feelings
and experiences throughout the books.
I do share a lot of my own personal
experience and that’s what makes me powerful as a teacher. It’s because I’m willing to be
authentic. The truth is that we all go
through difficult times, we all go through fear, we all go through pain. Part of the problem is that we beat ourselves
up for it and say we shouldn’t have it, that we shouldn’t be going through
pain. All of us do. I think where my message can be powerful is
that I’ve been through all those things and I still do sometimes, yet I do
great things as well. So it’s not about
being fearless and courageous and never having to go through emotions. It’s just about being human. Knowing within every
single person there is ordinariness and there is greatness, and embracing
them. We’ve all got our weaknesses,
we’ve all got our vulnerabilities and we’ve all got something great inside of
us. Accept it all. I think what the world is crying out for is
more authenticity. We don’t want people
with glib answers, or more gurus with everybody at their feet. They just tumble when they’re revealed for
what they’re getting up to behind the scenes!
I think the power of authenticity is enormous. I’m not saying you should dump all your
issues onto your clients, what I’m saying is honesty can be powerful. Personal disclosure touches and inspires
people.
Childhood
conditioning is rife among people and hard to undo. What is your opinion?
I would totally agree. The first part of the work that I do with
many people is to help them find what inspires them, what they’re motivated by
and what they feel their sense of purpose is.
The next question for most people is how do they undo the conditioning
that goes against that? So many of us
have negative conditioning about how you can’t earn money doing something you
love, you shouldn’t earn money doing something you love, life’s got to be a
struggle, life’s got to be difficult, money love and spirituality don’t go
together. A lot of us have self esteem
issues that we don’t think we’re good enough, all those kinds of things. So I think undoing conditioning is a really
our life’s work. For me, one of the
adventures of being self-employed, as many homeopaths are, is it gives us a
lifelong opportunity to undo our conditioning.
Running our own business can be a way of reclaiming our own power,
perhaps for the rest of our lives, and for me that’s what makes it so exciting.
Tell
us more about your views on being self-employed and running a small business.
I think because homeopaths do spiritual
and good work, healing work, that there is a belief that you shouldn’t earn too
much money out of it. I would really
challenge homeopaths around that belief and habit. Their work is valuable,
their work is important and the more people who get their work and benefit from
it the better and the more money they make the better. Their financial success will come because
they’re booking in so many people. I
think healers should do well. I think
healers should be successful. There’s
nothing wrong with earning money doing something you love. How can you really help people if you’re
struggling in your own business? You
need to be a good example of enjoying what you do and being successful at
it. So I would really encourage
homeopaths.
I don’t know what the code of ethics
around marketing is for homeopaths. I would suggest that marketing your
business should not be separate from the work that you do. A lot of us step back from marketing because
we somehow think marketing is a bad thing.
I have an acupuncturist friend who felt that no one was really marketing
acupuncture, so she’s started doing it herself and has articles in the press
now. I would suggest that homeopaths
really just get out there and talk about homeopathy more, give demonstrations
of it, tell stories about it, write articles.
So in a way the success of homeopathy is it’s marketing. You market it by telling stories about its
success, not by trying to sell it as such - how homeopathy has helped
people. So I would really encourage
homeopaths. Doctors will call that anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence is the same as saying we
came in here, we had a drink, we had a conversation and we left. That’s anecdotal evidence. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t true.
You can still share stories of how homeopathy
has helped people. I would really
encourage homeopaths to get over their reluctance to blow their own
trumpets. The world needs more
homeopathy! I’m just kind of challenging
that reluctance to put yourselves out into the world, challenging that reluctance
to be successful.
Can
we talk more about peoples’ defensive attitude and conditioning around money?
Money is such a big issue. Yes, there
are people that are charlatans in the healing world as well, that do make lots
of money and don’t have integrity but I don’t think it need follow that money
needs to lose you your integrity. I
think you can be very successful and still have integrity. The integrity has to
do with who you are and what you’re about.
You can have integrity whether you’re earning no money or thousands of
pounds. That’s for me not really the
issue. I think it is about undoing a lot
of our conditioning and most of us have grown up with the idea that money is
bad and not spiritual. So you are either
in the commercial world where there is no love, no spirit or you are in the
world of spirit, love and healing but money shouldn’t be involved in it. I think that the challenge that many of us
are facing these days is to bring the two together. To do work that’s spiritual, to do work that’s
holy, to do work that’s loving and healing and to be successful at it, to earn
good money out of it and not to be ashamed of that. We need new models for spiritual success, not
spiritual sacrifice. We’ve got enough
models of sacrifice and the world doesn’t need more sacrifice! The world needs more true success.
So again, I would really encourage
homeopaths to look at their own conditioning around money and see where they
think it’s wrong to be successful. It’s
not. It’s almost like the world needs them to be successful. As I was saying earlier, if you achieve more
financial success, it will be because you’re helping more people. Be proud of financial success, don’t be ashamed
of it.
I certainly found earlier on my
spiritual path, I’m getting better at it now, a reluctance to really value
myself in financial terms. We give away
our time too much. We don’t say, ‘I’ve
trained for years to become a homeopath, I’ve invested in myself. I bring a lot of experience, I bring a lot of
skills to bear and I deserve and am willing to earn money in return for
that. I’m willing to give my time a good
value’. It is really the time that’s the important thing and the
experience. At the end of the day it’s
little white pills. It’s the time you spend with patients and the hours of
study. So I would really encourage
homeopaths to value their time, to value their experience. That it’s not just the hour spent with the
patient, it’s the years they’ve spent in training to spend the hour with the
patient. Yes, thousands of pounds. It’s okay to value yourself. I do believe that patients and clients will
value us to the level that we value ourselves.
So we may not be earning much money and we think if we put our fees up,
we’re going to lose our patients. I
don’t think that’s necessarily true.
I’ve seen homeopaths and other healers and when they’ve put their prices
up their clients say to them, ‘I wondered when you were going to do that
because you’re not charging enough at the moment’. Clients know when we’re undercharging. They know when we’re not valuing
ourselves. Often we’re the last to
realise it. So, I’m not saying you are
going to go out and necessarily double your fees, although a lot of your
patients may be fine with that. It’s
about you really valuing what you do, so that you are not defensive about
asking for money for what you do. If you
really believe in what you’re doing and the value of what you’re doing, so do
your patients. Yes, and they’ll get even better.
Yes. So if you’re hesitant,
you’re doing yourself and your patients and your clients a disservice
really.
I’ve been using homeopathy for years and
actually the first homeopath I used was a very expensive one. How
much? I think he charged £100 an
hour or something like that but I was willing to pay that and I valued him to
the level that he valued himself. He was
a homeopath to some of the celebrities and people like that but again you can
take homeopathy and find a different market for it. Maybe at the moment you’re targeting one
market where people can’t afford very much.
You could take what you already know, what you’ve already got experience
of and find new markets for it, so that people would be willing to pay you more
than you’re charging at the moment. You
wouldn’t necessarily have to change what you do, you could change the market
and the people you’re dealing with.
I’ve certainly found homeopathy
incredibly useful. I’ve been using it
for probably about 15 years now and it’s helped me through a number of my own
personal health challenges. It really
underpins my sense of well being. It’s
my first line of resort if I’m not feeling well or feeling ill. I’ll self prescribe and I still have a
homeopath who I see but I don’t see that regularly now. My girlfriend prescribes us remedies if we’re
on holiday, if we have too much sun, or too much food, so I’m a great advocate
of homeopathy. That’s why in a way I
would say you’re robbing the world when you’re not being successful with your homeopathic
practice!
Charging
more for services gives the impression they are more valuable. Many homeopaths who want to help people fall
into the trap of fear of charging too much.
I think it’s important to know that as a
homeopath you are also running a business and to be more commercially
orientated. I work with a friend of
mine, Barbara Winter, who is a self-employment advocate. She says something wonderful which is ‘run a
business that you would be the first customer for’. So think about your own business and think about whether you inspire
yourself. If you were coming to see you,
would you be inspired by you? And if
not, think about it, think why you wouldn’t want to come to you and turn it
around. Think how can you get more
inspired about your own business. I
think it’s so important that we to run our business in a way that we would want
to be a customer. If you don’t, then
really question why you’re doing it and how you could change to do it with a
bit more inspiration or passion or love or raise the consciousness around what
you’re doing. Because if you don’t like
the way you’ve been doing your business, then you’re robbing yourself and
you’re robbing your patients of the benefits.
How
do you find the attitude of corporate business to your work?
I’m finding there is a lot more openness
and to some extent, spiritual awareness, in the corporate world. Even this morning I was doing a presentation
to some high achievers and there were 8 people in the group. Several of them came up to me and said, ‘you
know, this is just what we’re thinking about’.
Even the guy running the whole group, who runs a business called Top
Achievers, said ‘You know, there is a growing spiritual awareness amongst
corporate people’. So it’s really
finding the ways in that you don’t threaten them too much. So I go in talking about purpose, about
meaning, about inspiration and I talk about love to certain extent, loving what
you do and a sense of love in our work.
I find those kinds of ways of approaching it don’t raise people’s
defences so much. For me it’s about
finding a language, a point of engagement, so that people will listen rather
than their eyes glaze over and think ‘who the bloody hell is this guy? What’s he doing here?’ Again for me it’s around my own personal kind
of embodiment of my own personal integrity.
I only talk about what I feel I’ve been through myself, so I aim to not
just be a messenger but to be the message, who I am conveys what I’m about.
‘I’m not saying, well I’m not like this but I think you should be like
this’. I really try and embody what it
is that I teach as well.
I think somebody said to Ghandi once,
‘What’s your teaching?’ and he said, ‘My life’.
I would like to think my life is my teaching. As much as I’m able to, I embody what I teach. I think that comes across to people so if
you’re trying to take alternative ideas into a more corporate environment,
check out how comfortable you are with what you believe in. If you feel defensive about it, that will
show up. The more confident, the more
open you feel about it, will show up as well.
And as much as possible, don’t be attached to the outcome. I’ve come to see myself as a seed-sower. I go into as many situations as I can, I sow
seeds and I share ideas with people. If
they don’t like them it’s not my purpose to change people. It’s my purpose to help people change if they
want to. If they don’t want to change,
that’s not my job. Since I got that quite
a few years ago, I feel that I’ve become more powerful and more effective. I want to help people change if they want
to. So I think that’s the key. Don’t make people wrong. Love and accept them as they are and show
them ways to be different.
Is
your book ‘Unconditional Success’ a
continuation of ‘The Work we Were Born to Do’?
Yes, ‘The Work We Were Born to Do’
is very much about helping people reconnect with a sense of inspiration and a
sense of purpose. It’s really a practical work book about how you find your way
again if you’ve got lost in the world of work. It’s very much about encouraging
people to find the best in themselves and to bring it to their work. Not just to find another job.
‘Unconditional Success’ carries on
looking at what success means when you’re living your purpose more. So success is about material things, it is
about money but it's about a lot more than that. It’s about living your purpose, about being
creative, about living a more loving life.
It’s about how we can integrate our material and spiritual life, our
commercial and spiritual life. It’s got
a lot of ideas how you integrate those two and for many people, just to believe
they can integrate it. Who we are, what we do and how we make a living can
become much more unified and is an enlightening idea. So again it’s a practical book, it’s inspiring,
there’s lots of case studies in there.
It’s a continuation of taking the whole area of success, and the idea
that for many, success is conditional.
If we are doing certain things, we’re a success and if we’re not, we’re
a failure.
I’ve suggested a new starting point,
which is to say that actually we are already a success because of who we are
and how we were created. So success is
not a place to get to, it’s a place to come from. It’s about reconnecting with our wholeness,
our spirit, our essence and working out how to create our life from that
place. If we are trying to create
success because we feel we are worthless, no amount of outer success is ever
going to fill up the space. It’s about
learning to fill up the space so that we feel richer inside. We find our inner riches not just the outer
riches.
We create our outer riches through finding our true inner riches.
I’ve been thinking about the Buddhist
idea of right livelihood more recently as well.
The Buddhists say that when you find your right livelihood, your life
then becomes an ongoing journey around that.
So I would really keep encouraging us to have our ongoing adventures
learning around our work. Learning about
ourselves, our creative abilities, more personal awareness, how to make our
business more successful on lots of different levels, learning how to help
people at greater levels, so that our work can be an ongoing journey in growth
and adventure. Our own businesses are
the perfect vehicle for growth. It can
be a lifelong journey. The Buddhists say
that you can keep falling in love with your work. I like that idea, as I have times when I
begin maybe to get a little bit bored and I ask myself what would inspire me
next. Then I end up falling in love with my work all over again, discovering
new aspects, new ideas and new levels of consciousness, new corners to
turn. So really just to say, what a
wonderful position it is to be a homeopath and to run your own business, to be
in this place of freedom really. To
learn for the rest of your life without anybody constraining you. What a wonderful opportunity that is.