FEATURE THE BEST YOU
MICHAEL NEILL’S REVOLUTION
Michael Neill is one of the world’s top life coaches, whose books sell worldwide and whose radio broadcasts are massively popular. Bernardo Moya interviews Michael Neill to find out how he came to be one of the most popular figures in the world of Personal Development – and what really makes people happy
M
ichael Neill’s likeable smile, his easy charm and wit shine at his trainings, book signings and on the radio. Confident in front
of an audience, filled with a calm wisdom and playfulness, he also emanates sincerity when he works closely with people. Michael is the consummate coach with a brilliant insight into people. Yet it was far from obvious that he would become a change-worker when he was younger. His father was an engineer who helped design the legs for the lunar modules, his mother was an organic chemistry professor and his brother and sister went to MIT and Harvard respectively. In contrast, Michael wanted to be an
actor, but the thing that brought him to the world of mind was his own struggle. “I grew up suicidally depressed from about the age of 13,” he remembers. “It got worse and worse... so I was forced to deal with psychology, which wasn’t part of my family’s make-up.” “I was incredibly loved,” he says,
remembering his early years growing up near Boston, Massachusetts, and knowing this made him realise his depression wasn’t anything to do with his family, but came from within. It was a theme he would return to years later in his book The Inside Out Revolution.
At school he found an escape in the
theatre, where he “got to be someone else” and since acting was his natural talent, he
pursued it, eventually getting a scholarship and moving to London at the age of 20. It was not the most auspicious of starts, he recalls, since he landed just as the Great Storm of 1987 hit these shores. “I was in a little bedsit where you put the 50p piece in to get the electricity working and I saw this storm outside and I didn’t have a radio or anything. I thought it was the beginning of the British winter. I’m looking outside at this hurricane thinking ‘this is like October and it’s going to get bad in December! ...I’m not going to make it!’ I was probably the only person in London relieved when I found out it was a hurricane!”
Michael became a professional actor in the UK, immersing himself in the British culture and learning what were universals among people, and what were just idiosyncracies of culture. Something of an
Anglophile, he loved The Clash, Black Adder, The Young Ones. “I was into British culture. I already drank tea!” he recalls. One day after living in the
UK for 5 years he received a letter that really made him think. “It was a vaguely familiar handwriting and I opened it and it said, ‘Dear Michael, you’re probably living in London, you’re probably married (which I was), you probably don’t have kids yet, you’re probably doing a lot of work at the BBC (which I was). It was a letter from me aged 15, that I’d done for a high school English class, and the teacher had kept it and 10 years later had mailed it out.” Perhaps at some
WATCH MICHAEL NEILL TALK TO BERNARDO MOYA IN THE BEST YOU VIDEO INTERVIEW
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Michael now smiles at what the world has to offer
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