The Interview.
I was having a pot of tea in a West End Hotel with a friend that I had only just recently met. We were having a wonderful conversation about life's journey - the challenges, the triumphs and the extraordinary people that you meet along the way.
Towards the end of our conversation, she leant over and asked me if I knew Nic Askew. I was speechless.
I told her about how I had come across his web site Monday9am the day before and how I had set the intention of meeting him. She smiled and said "Well guess what... you will be! I'm meeting him here for a coffee in 15 minutes!" Talk about the combined power of synchronicity and intention!
I sat with the two of them for around 20 minutes before I had to head off for another engagement. I had heard enough to realise that I wanted to know more.
A few weeks later, when our diaries matched, Nic and I got together for a chat.
In the two hours that we spoke, Nic held me completely captivated with his ideas about life. So much so, that I completely forgot to flip the tape on my mini recorder!
We spent a lot of time talking about his incredible thirst for searching out the things that made him feel most alive. This full engagement with life had taken him places such as the Amazon and Congo rivers to lead rafting expeditions as a teenager, all the way through to briefly pursuing a career as a Flamenco guitarist.
Another thing really hit home was Nic's level of self awareness and complete confidence in his own intuition. He spoke so fondly of how he met his wife and how he proposed to her exactly three weeks after that initial meeting! Now this is not as brash as you might first think. He said that he was thoroughly convinced that he was going to marry her after just two days!
Setting up Monday9am again was another thing that just seemed destined to happen.
Nic was was looking for ideas to bring to life peoples experience of the world. And then one day the idea for Monday 9am just popped into his head as he sat in a cafe. In his words "I know exactly where the idea came from but it had nothing to do with me!"
Nic knew that it was just something he had to do and he just went ahead and did it.
He borrowed a friends camera, went over to London Bridge at 7am on a Monday morning and just captured peoples expressions as they made their way to work. He had no real idea or intention for the piece, all he knew was that it was something he was supposed to create.
He has since gone on to interview and film a wide variety of fascinating people living incredible lives. Many of these people are in the public eye but he has also captured many who are not.
During our conversation we spoke a lot about success and what it takes to be sucessful. Over the course of his life, Nic has explored many different philosphies, from both Western and Eastern. From our dialogue, I definitely consider him to be an authority on the functioning of the mind.
One point he kept emphasising is the fact that each of us create our own realities. These realities emerge out of the belief structures that we hold within our own minds. In his opinion, in order to reach our full potential as human beings it is imperative that each of us examine our own existing beliefs and ask whether or not they are our own. The short films that Nic creates and shares through Monday 9am are designed to help people with this very process.
The thing that personally affected me the most in our conversation was the concept of filling your mind with the things that make you feel most alive. We are all on a journey and we all have the potential to explore the things that makes us feel most excited.
And if you are anything like me, watching Nic's short films will definitely get you more than a little inspired about this wonderful thing we call life!
To find out more about Nic's films see www.monday9am.tv
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