Our main objective here at the National Coach Academy is to enable aspiring coaches to reach their full professional potential. One of the most effective ways to educate students about the world of coaching is by offering them a window into the world of real, practicing coaches and showing them all the different ways coaches make a difference in the lives of their clients.
We hope today’s interview adds another insightful glimpse into the dynamic world of coaching.
Today we are interviewing Murray Ansell. Murray is a Life and Business Energy Coach based in Los Angeles, CA.
NCA: Can you describe your coaching practice and the kinds of clients you typically work with?
Murray: Our coaching practice is called Life Energy Coaching. Your life energy is what is essentially attracting into your experience, what you experience. Life energy is a combination of your soul’s light and how that interacts with your physicality, with your genetics. The other reason for life energy coaching is because it is essentially helping you with your life because that’s what your life energy produces.
We tend to find and we attract people who are looking to really up-level their life in a way that is not just incremental but a complete overhaul. We got into this business as a result of a spiritual awakening that happened in what you might call “a dark night of the soul.” There was a bit of a challenge I was having in life and I needed to find some answers to resolve that issue.
What I later realized is that there are times in your life when your soul emerges and starts having more influence than it has had previously and that’s what happened to me. The intention of my soul, if you like, was for me to go through a transformation of my own energy and at the same time understand life energy. Understand how it works, what it is. As those recognitions would come through, they’d always be preceded by some challenge that would’ve popped up and that needed to be resolved and another secret would be revealed.
My wife and I went through this journey together and we became experts at taking other people through it within about 18 months of starting this journey ourselves. We were guided to start this practice, Life Energy Coaching.
People come to us fairly synchronistically. We’re not actively marketing the practice. People just have a need and they find out about us one way or another. I think it happens through some sort of soul connection.
We have programs that help people massively accelerate the process from living through the egoic mind, which is typical human behavior, to having the building blocks of that stripped out and taken away so they will live by the end of this process through their soul’s guidance. Their soul’s purpose will have emerged. That may be potentially to become a life energy coach but in most cases, it will be something that is unique to them and something that they have a very, very deep calling toward.
NCA: Can you shed a little bit of light on how the dynamic works in your coaching practice, where you and your wife are business partners?
Murray: That’s a very, very interesting subject because within relationships, we are always seeing the reflection of our own energy. That could be with money or it could be with business as a concept or it could be with an individual or an animal.
In a marriage, you’re going to see a reflection of the female that you have observed, learned from — your mother particularly, probably the strongest example for most people, or it might be a grandmother if you were raised by a grandmother, but also the lineage of your female ancestors.
Working with my wife has been really, really helpful for both of us in seeing the energies and the consciousness that each of us have the potential to run that are coming from the other gender.
While we work together, we’re also being partners in this process of self-transformation. What we needed to do that we’ve found that works much, much better than others was you have to take responsibility for your own reflections. When things are happening in a relationship that might not be what you would consciously choose — you’re having some disagreements about something or there’s some sort of drama in a relationship — you learn to reflect on that and to ask yourself what part of this is mine and at some level, you wouldn’t be seeing it if it wasn’t yours.
That might be because you’ve got an attitude of wanting to help others at a level that is beyond what’s healthy for you. Sometimes there are a lot of people who I think would get into coaching who want to be helpful and that’s great, but really the journey above all else is self-love — learning what is yours and what is not yours.
Working with my wife has been really, really helpful for both of us in seeing the energies and the consciousness that each of us have the potential to run that are coming from the other gender. Within the practice itself, Shirley has a particular passion for working with family relationships and both of us had to work through our own family relationships to be able to do this well.
I have another dimension that I’m more passionate about that Shirley, perhaps, and that’s in working with business relationships. I have a background in public accounting, investment banking, commercial banking, consulting and I enjoy that sort of stuff. But to be able to really optimize a business, the leader needs to be very self-aware. The other journey I like to focus on is working with business people and helping them understand how they’re creating the results that they are creating in their business because it’s always coming back to the personal stuff.
We have these two areas that we focus on but we work in each other’s areas as well because Shirley has a strong business background, having been in international banking herself in the past. I think different people are going to have their own different passions, but ultimately, everybody has got to work on their own personal stuff to be able to be their best in whatever those areas are. We complement each other.
We also do one other thing, I should mention, which is when we work together — let’s say we’re doing a speaking engagement, we’ve got an audience and we’re bringing people out to do hot seat type of work. It’s very interesting. Our processes are quite different. Shirley is very much working with the sensorial side of things. She’s working with feeling the body which is very important. I have a different method of working. I’m receiving guidance through a different mechanism which appears to be more mental.
When we’re working with individuals together in that sort of group situation, it’s quite entertaining actually because sometimes we get different answers and when we have that, it’s to reveal something new and something interesting. We have that aspect to the dynamic as well which could be quite entertaining for people.
The fundamental principle of living an enjoyable life is to be able to allow people to just be themselves and enjoy life yourself and to be yourself. We’ve raised kids in what I would call the Montessori approach. We were guided to put them through either Waldorf or Montessori and we just happened to have a Montessori little schoolhouse across the road when they were growing up and we put them over there. The principle is follow the child. You watch. You observe what the other person actually gravitates to and you help them develop it.
Do your self-work. Understand yourself. Get some coaching potentially from people who are very self-aware, who have the perspective to help you see yourself at the deepest or highest perspective.
NCA: In working with your clients, what would you say is the most rewarding part of your career and on the flip side of that, what is the most challenging aspect of the work that you do?
Murray: The most rewarding part of the career is definitely the near-instant results that client get. When you’re doing life energy coaching, as a coach, you are bringing through a higher guidance, an intuitive guidance from their soul essentially. You’re also bringing through high frequency light or energy that is extremely powerful in a sense of transforming the client’s energy. We’re only able to do that because we’ve done this for ourselves and created a channel that it can come through.
When that energy is used, which just automatically happens with coaching, it shifts everything down to the roots of whatever’s blocking the person in the areas that they’re trying to address. You’ll see sometimes within hours, but definitely within 3 days, the person’s experience shifts completely in the area that we’ve coached them on. That’s extremely rewarding to us in the next week when we are having the next coaching call to hear all of the changes that they’ve experienced and the joy that they’ve had with that.
The challenging part of this for us has been the very, very deep transformation that we chose to go through. It was necessary to get through it in order to do the work and to be able to help others to transform very, very quickly. That means addressing most of the problems of being human which include relationship issues, financial issues.
We didn’t do anything in the area of health issues because most of the health issues are results of consciousness or results of ways of thinking that are inaccurate, that aren’t aligned with love. As those peeled away through all the transformational work, we just found out that we had a lot more energy and we just never had any health issues. You do become very healthy doing this work.
Those are challenges that are largely in the past and now we’re just using the fruits of all of that work and enjoying the process.
NCA: It sounds like working on your own mental health has translated to physical health as well.
Murray: The body responds to what we think. The subconscious is running our body, right? Our subconscious was programmed before we were born. When we’re gestating within our mother, DNA is being activated within her by her energy. She’s our world at that point. Patterns are being formed or activated before we’re even born and we’re getting conditioned by our environment around us — what we’re seeing, what we’re receiving, what we’re being told and accepting as truth. All of that stuff is programming us subconsciously and the extent that it’s aligned with who we are as love, our soul’s purpose is going to be great.
NCA: Can you recall one mentor who more than any other was the most vital to your success as a coach and in what ways did this mentor help you thrive?
Murray: This is an interesting question and one that you’ll get a different answer from me probably than just about anybody else. As I mentioned earlier, my journey has been a direct result of a spiritual awakening and from the very beginning, I was guided or mentored through my higher self. All of us have this part of our energy field which is called the higher self. And the higher self allows us to get out of our mind and connect with what you could call a higher guidance. I’ll call it infinite intelligence — that’s certainly what I was plugged into.
When we talk about infinite intelligence, we’re talking about parts of us actually that all human beings have the potential to be connected with. There are energies who have mastered and who have had lifetimes on this planet where they’ve reached a level of mastery and they have not needed to come back to this planet but they are available as mentors. You would think of somebody like Jesus, for example, or the Buddha, or great human beings who are now teachers from a higher dimension. That was a big part of my guidance team. Also, the energy transformers of the angelic realm. They were also a part of this. Not human mentors, but mentors through the higher self.
This is what we open up for others. Everything that’s happened to me and to Shirley, we have been given the ability to connect others with this experience for themselves. That’s where the mentorship comes from. It is the most customized mentorship that you could possibly get. Not from me, but from these beings because they know exactly who your soul is, what it’s trying to do, and what it needs you to achieve and they’ll help you change your energy to get into that state where you experience it.
NCA: What guidance would you offer to somebody in the very beginning stages of their coaching career?
Murray: What they need to know is self-awareness. They will be much, much more valuable as a coach the more self-aware that they are. All of us had started off with this programming I was mentioning earlier, this conditioning, which is really a false reality. But it’s an opportunity to learn. All of us have this unique purpose so it’s no accident that we were born to the people that we were born to, that we grew up in the environment we grew up in, that we’re experiencing whatever we’re experiencing now. There’s opportunity to become self-aware through understanding that stuff. Understanding why that is so.
The recommendation I would give to anyone is do your self-work. Understand yourself. Get some coaching potentially from people who are very self-aware, who have the perspective to help you see yourself at the deepest or highest perspective. Because the more you understand yourself as a template for humanity, essentially, the better you’ll be able to help others and to reflect back to them what they need to see for their greatest benefit.
Human beings as mammals are always looking to learn from others. We’re modeling others, essentially. When we’re tiny, little children, we’re programmed to just model those who appeal to us. As a coach, you’re obviously a vehicle that somebody could model. So you want to be the best vehicle that you can be. That’s why I suggest that you sort your own stuff out first or as much as you can.
You’re not going to be able to completely do that. It’s always a work in progress, but it’s important to understand certain principles — particularly that principle when I talked about working and living with my lovely wife — that principle of reflection. All of us are always seeing a reflection of our own energy.
Life is not random. Our programming is producing our energy and if we don’t like the mirror, don’t blame the mirror. That’s how we get to understand ourselves. If we have the humility to recognize that we’re playing in the hall of mirrors in this game of life and it’s all providing an opportunity for personal growth. That’s the thing. We do tend to copy others but that’s not authentic is it? We need to be the most authentic we can be so others will model that.
