Living Fully – Michael Doyle, Ep. 44

Podcast interview about living fully with Michael Doyle

Michael Doyle is a speaker, musician, business coach and author who believes that everyone has the power to follow their dreams and find themselves living fully. At the time of this discussion, he is just about to release his first book called “At The Helm: Take Control and Live Fully.”

Originally from Canada’s east coast, Michael has held a life-long love of music, and he spent more than a decade working as a professional musician, a financial analyst with the government, and an entrepreneur. While he was involved in many things enjoyed during those times – such as music – he also became aware that some destructive habits had weaved their way into the fabric of his life. As you’ll hear, April 24, 2010 was a transformative day for him. He woke that day, “tired, depressed and hungover,” and the honest reflection of what had brought him to that point precipitated a massive positive change toward the person Michael has become today.

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As I enjoyed the discussion with Michael, I began to suspect we’d been separated at birth! We’re both about the same age, we both love music, we both faced up to our habit of drinking too much alcohol and kicked it, we each have done a lot of personal development and self investment through courses and books and the like, and we both have ties to the same parts of Canada (each of my sisters currently resides in places where he’s lived, while Michael and I are both presently in London, Ontario). I found myself nodding my head in agreement a great deal as Michael spoke, and raced to write down much of what he shared. Indeed, I’m eager to read his book.

A lot of times our pain becomes our power.

– Michael Doyle

As you’ll hear, just about everything out of Michael’s mouth is quotable! He drops more nuggets of wisdom per sentence than probably anyone else has on this podcast so far. It’s a delight to listen to and it makes the episode loaded with what I feel is really helpful insight. It was difficult to pick out just a few key things to highlight here, but among all of the great bits of perspective Michael shared, some of my favourites were these:

1. Confidence Comes Last – As Michael says, “If we wait until we have the confidence to do something we’ll probably never do it.” He went on to say, “Once you start to build skills, that’s when the confidence starts to come. Confidence comes last in almost every obstacle I’ve worked through.”
2. Being Open to Receive – I misunderstood this for a long time, much as I did with the idea of loving myself; it seemed selfish to me. But that’s not it at all. Michael noted that, through the course of his personal growth and redevelopment, he discovered that being open to receive was his biggest block.
3. Underestimating what we can do in a long period of time – Michael said, “We as humans will over-estimate what we can do in a short period of time. We’ll try to schedule too much and will try to do too much. But at the same point I think we grossly underestimate what we can do in a long period of time. It’s about doing little things and being consistent and being intentional.” That’s a really great observation. I’m certain that he’s right and confess to falling into that trap in bits and pieces every day.

Indecisiveness will kill any dream. Imperfect action is the best action you can take at the time.

– Michael Doyle

Here is the conversation on living fully with Michael Doyle.