Sailing To An Extraordinary Life with Piers Thurston

This week’s guest on the Higher Purpose Podcast is mindset transformation coach, Piers Thurston. He joins host Kevin Monroe for what the latter calls “a unique, different kind of conversation.”

Ten years ago a mentor showed Piers a different way of seeing the world. Once seen, he could no longer do his work the old way.

One thing that occurred to Piers in the last 10 years is that there’s so much richness in the most ordinary of lives. Kevin comments that he named his community This Extraordinary Life because the life we have is extraordinary if we embrace it.

Whatever we create in our lives lands much more beautifully, richly and effortlessly when we go with the wind rather than against it, if we sail rather than row.

Conventional wisdom, Piers says, is that we can achieve our goals if we work hard at them. Sailing, however, is intuitively capturing an inspiration coming through yourself. It emerges with an obviousness and direction, but not necessarily an outcome. Piers calls this flow. 

When we sense that what we see in our external world is real but not true, we have an opening of our aperture to emergence and sailing and resourcefulness. Ironically, Piers says, we become better at the external stuff.

Piers describes his approach to goal setting. He says he never lets today’s wisdom be tomorrow’s prison. He finds that he is now retroactively spotting goals after he has achieved them. They came through with such obviousness that he just acted on them in the moment.

Kevin relates how he feels frustrated with conventional goal setting methods. Piers explains that we’re not designed that way. When we get frustrated with our ability to set goals, we’re putting it all on us as this separate entity. However, if we see that we are a part of a broader system that it happens through and to, it takes the weight off.

Flow is when a freshness has occurred to see the same thing differently. It turns up with an obviousness and a clarity of feeling and lightness. Piers advises that you should be with the feeling in the moment.

An intangible understanding of the mind increases the likelihood of the emergence of flow.

Piers wants listeners to take away a lingering curiosity but also to be comfortable with not knowing. Press pause on what you’ve been taught and look afresh, he says. You don’t have to look far. You just have to look into what you already are.

Resources

Piers Thurston on LinkedIn
piers@makingchangework.co.uk