NOTE: Video by John Patrick Morgan. 4 April, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6G4Jpafbs8. Enormous gratitude to freelance editor Jessica Kelley for her relentless work in ensuring this transcript was platinum-grade! https://thewritekelley.com/

Appendix: 100 Hours with Steve Hardison

John Patrick Morgan

I wanna share with you my experience of investing 100 hours of my time in being with Steve Hardison, popularly known as ‘The Ultimate Coach’.

Before I go into sharing that, I wanna start at how I got there in the first place. So, if you don’t know, Steve’s fees are not small comparatively to other coaches in the world. Not the highest either, but they take a pretty serious commitment…

From being with Steve, and spending time with him, my experience of him on a personal side is that he’s a very modest person. I don’t know if he’ll like me saying this or not, but a lot of the money, maybe even most of the money that he receives, he gives away.

He really is a conduit for prosperity and affluence more than a collector of it. And so, when I look at his fee, what I actually see now is not an extremely high fee, but I see an extremely high commitment that he asks of his clients, and that he makes them as well… I was blessed enough, I am blessed enough to have had the experience of investing 100 hours with Steve.

As I share with you, I’m gonna end up going off in a daze from time to time. And when I do that, it’s just because so many of the memories about my intense experience of him are coming. And my intention in this video is to share them as they come as honestly and openly as I can.

But let me go back again. Before I even started working with him, I’d been wanting to work with him for two years, two years from the first time I’d spent time with him in person at his home in Phoenix, Arizona.

I flew out just for a two-hour meeting, a meeting that was basically happening because I had expressed interest in working with him and he saw the possibility of that. And so we sat in his living room. He asked me two questions:

‘Who are you?’ and ‘Why are you here?’

I don’t remember what I said to the first one, which is very interesting; I’ll mention that later. But with the second one, I said a couple things.

First, I said: ‘My whole life I’ve been learning to be good at what I’m doing by hanging out with the best people in the world at it. And as far as I can see right now in the work that I do of coaching and creating, you’re the best in the world that I can see, and I wanna be around you. I wanna learn from the best, and I wanna do that through being coached and growing in myself, but also watching and modelling and learning from your craft.’

And then I said: ‘And there’s another reason. My experience of you, Steve, is that the way you live in the world is truly fearless. Not fearless in the sense where I’m willing to face fears, but fearless in the sense that there’s an absence of fear inside you, that you actually see the world in such a way that there’s a lightness, that things don’t concern you. There’s not little worries. There’s not big worries. You’re just here. And that to me is an extremely valuable experience of freedom. I see that as a kind of liberation. And freedom being one of my highest values, I want to live inside the experience of that much liberation, that much freedom from fear.’

And later, when we got to talking, we created a name for this idea of living fearlessly, of having spirit intuition come through you into action, and to not be caught up in thinking in fear.

And we called it ‘Nothing’.

Nothingness, being nothing.

There’s nothing between a greater spirit, my intuition, and my action in speaking. I’m just in flow all the time. In summary, the reason why I was there is because I wanted to work with Steve to create Nothingness. Nothingness inside me, and the way I experienced it in him.

Then I went away and said, ‘I’ll be back, and I wanna work with you. I just gotta create the money’.

At that point, I’m was making probably just under a quarter million a year. So, coming up with a couple hundred grand to invest on coaching, I wasn’t sitting on that much cash for sure, and it was gonna take me a while to make it, but I was sure that I was gonna do it.

Two years went by. Long story short, it didn’t happen. And I realized in the summer of 2016, that wanting it wasn’t creating it.

And so, I decided to send him an email and say, ‘Steve’—this was August 23rd—‘Steve, by Christmas day this year, I will have the money to work with you’.

Short email back: ‘Great, looking forward to it.’

I was like, oh shit, now I gotta make—with taxes and expenses and all the other stuff combined—I’ve gotta make a few hundred grand in the next four months. And I’ve never made that much in a year in my current business.

And I made a secondary commitment silently to myself: I will not do anything counter to the point of working with you, Steve, in order to make the money to work with you.

Now, for me, that meant I won’t start getting in this place of scarcity, and acquisition, and trying to manipulate in a fearful way, or overworking too hard where I’m ignoring my family, or any of these things that would create an experience for me that might produce the outcome of the money to then be able to hire you that was counter to the point of hiring you.

So if I wanna hire you to learn to be more fearless and learn to live in a Nothing way, and if I wanted to work with you to be my greatest self and create with flow, then I’m not gonna do anything counter to that to make the money to work with you, because that would be hypocritical.

And so, interestingly, me putting this constraint on my commitment to create the money to work with Steve was actually one of the most empowering growths in my work with him.

I told him that I was working with him even when I wasn’t officially working with him, because the little bits of emails that we had, I took those and I really kept them present to me, and have them grow me.

A week before Christmas, I was 100% short of my six-figure investment still.

I pulled it together by Christmas Eve.

I made all the money I needed to make, and I was able to email Steve on Christmas Day saying: ‘I’m in!’

It was very much so that my commitment to Steve, and my commitment to myself on creating the way that I know was possible for me, that had that all come together.

And when I sent him the money—one lump sum—my hands started to sweat.

Wire transfer is complete.

‘Oh, you can’t undo? Where’s the undo button? You can’t do that? Oh shit.’

Wire transfer is…

Just telling the story right now, my palms are starting to sweat again, just remembering. My heart started to race, I can feel it right now. And I had the thought, ‘Oh shit, what if he dies?’ (laughs)

I just transferred six figures, way more than I’ve ever used to buy anything before. I didn’t even put that much down on a house when I was buying houses. And *poof*, it was gone. It was in his hands, and I said, ‘What if he died?’

And one thing that I know from the little bit of engagement I’ve had with Steve right now, I said: ‘I’m creating everything in my experience.’

And so, I wanna create my own answer to that question. I will ask him, but as an afterthought, after I found my own answer to it.

So the answer that I created for myself was: Even if he dies, I’m still gonna spend 100 hours in his office. I’m gonna read his books. I’m gonna read his notes. I’m gonna sit there, I’m gonna coach myself and, this is the important part, I commit to creating my return on investment that I want.

At that point, the return I wanted to create was 10 times. I wanna create 10 times my investment, and I’m gonna do that whether or not he lives or dies.

That created so much freedom for me to be with him, and to really learn, and to really grow, because I didn’t have between us this concern about what I was or wasn’t going to create.

I say that, and it still crept up later in our coaching, which I’ll share with you as well.

But this is all the doorway into the beginning of our work, and into the work that we did together.

Steve told me on our first day that I was welcome to show up at his office 30 minutes before our sessions. That the door would be unlocked and opened. I’d be welcome that early.

And our sessions were two hours. Sometimes they went a little bit longer, but at least two hours.

For the next 50 trips to Phoenix that I made from Los Angeles, I got up in the morning, took an early flight out, sometimes the night before or stayed in the hotel. I was in the Uber 15 minutes before I could be at his house. I’d pull up to the driveway sometimes 31 minutes early, 32 minutes early, walk really slowly so that I can actually get into his office 30 minutes early, and really be in that space every single minute that I had access to it, for what I’d paid for.

Because it’s a big deal for me.

This is a big deal.

And right now I’m listening to my speaking, and I’m hearing the question that might come up.

And I was like, ‘Why was this a big deal?’

Well, it was a big deal financially. But it was a big deal because of who Steve is. Who Steve was and is for me, and who I knew that he was back then, and now feel affirmed and confirmed in.

It was a big deal—and it is a big deal—to spend 100 hours with Steve Hardison because of who he is.

There’s an aura that surrounds this man.

There’s an idea about him that travels through stories of him being loving, of him being powerful, in a way that you don’t really experience on Mother Earth, in the way that you don’t really experience meeting most people you’ll ever meet in your entire life.

And those stories and those ideas, when you hear them second-hand, third-hand, you have every right to be skeptical about them. And I think you probably should be skeptical about them. I was. I was skeptical before I met him. As I met him. While I met him. Before I hired him. After I hired him. 50 hours after I’ve been working with him.

But slowly, spending that much time with this man, you start to see how sometimes stories about a person are true.

And I can’t say that I know that stories about other people would be true, but I know about Steve, the idea that he is one of the most loving, maybe the most loving person I’ve ever met. The most loving person I ever met. In a way, that is shocking.

I thought I saw this with a client today that I was sharing with her, just saw the idea. I see ideas and I see principles around love. And whenever I do, Steve pops into my mind. Because as soon as I see an idea, an example of it is Steve.

And the idea today was that if we say to ourselves, ‘This person is too powerful for us, too successful for us, too famous for us, too high-earning for us, too high-achieving for us to be able to talk to or be comfortable around’… then that actually creates us having that same way of being with people that we see are less achieving than us, less successful than us, less powerful than us.

And in that same way, if we look at people, maybe somebody that’s downtrodden or homeless, and we say ‘this person is not worth my time’ or ‘this person can’t help me with anything’ or ‘they’re not worth helping…’

If we look down on people, the way of looking down on people creates the way of looking up on people. So, ‘that person is not worth my time’, creates the fear of that person, me not being worth their time. So one side creates the other side.

And so, as I was thinking about that, obviously, the idea would be to not look up to this person and think they’re too much for me, or not look down to that person and think, I’m too much for them. But just to see everybody equal and lovingly.

And if there’s an example of that in the world that I know, it’s Steve Hardison. He sees everybody on level ground. He loves everybody equally. In the way you read about in spiritual texts, in the way you read about and hear about in stories, and I’m smiling and I’m feeling a floating feeling right now because it’s just, that’s what it’s like to be around him. It’s so comforting to be arm-in-arm with a person who’s loving everybody.

We’ve gone on field trips. He’s taken me out in his car out into the world, so I’ve gotten to be with him not just in his stories as he takes me on travels, but with him as we’ve travelled around. And seeing him interact with people who I might put a hand down there and a hand up there, just out of habit, ranking people socially, culturally, whatever. He doesn’t have that.

He’s as present and as loving with every living being that he comes across. Whether it’s the homeless person, the person sleeping in the trash, the billionaire that shows up at his house for coaching, or the tortoise that lives in his backyard. Same love, same presence.

To be with somebody who is that way is a gift. Why is it a gift? Well, going back to my first reason of wanting to work with Steve. It’s a gift because we learn through emulation. Steve’s way of loving everything and everyone in the world rubs off on you.

When I look back at the 100 hours I spent with Steve, the most valuable thing that I gained from that time (and even if this were the only thing I paid for 10 times over), the most valuable thing is learning through emulation the capacity to love, how to love.

And I could say ‘full stop’ there, but to expand on that: how to love others (despite what you might see in them or not see in them), how to love everything (despite what it might look like or not look like to you), how to love yourself.

Watching Steve love himself when he goofed up, made a mistake, stories got changed around and mixed up, whatever.

To be that loving has been such a gift to be around, and I have grown so much in my capacity to love myself. And I’ve watched how that has become a gift that’s just flowing out of me without me even trying. And I’m so grateful for that.

Right now, my mind is saying: ‘I will work with you again, Steve. I know that I will. I will spend another 100 hours with you. I will invest another 100 hours with you, even if the only reason is to spend more time around love in that form, in that powerful of a way. Loving yourself, loving others. The more I get to be with you as you do it, as you love me, the more I grow in my capacity to love me and to love others.’

That’s a really powerful point as well. I show up in conversation with Steve, wanting to talk about something or how to do something, or how to create something, or something I’m dealing with, and he’d bring me right into the moment of the conversation that we’re in right then, right there.

And he would show me where I’m not loving myself right here, right now, in my talking about the thing. And just that: seeing where I’m not loving myself, how I’m not loving myself now, in real time, that was so powerful in growing me.

Because you can talk about something that happens elsewhere in your life, but Steve’s capacity to see it happening now and show it to me now, that was an accelerated learning, and accelerated growth in my capacity to love myself.

Because when I could see that I’m not loving now, I can stop and change. Like you could talk about dribbling a basketball, but if you actually have one in your hands and you’re in the midst of doing it, somebody shows you something about how to do it differently, you can learn a lot faster than you can reading the books, talking about it later when you’re dribbling.

And that was the experience of how one of the most powerful ways that his capacity to love served me, because his capacity to love is what also creates his capacity to see my lack of love towards myself or towards others in the world. And so, I’m so grateful for that.

And Steve, I wanna talk directly to you, as well as I wanna share with others. I’m so grateful for your example of being loving. And, not just how that creates peace, but how that love is the foundation and the means for what you would call production.

You talked with me once about dropping story and creating story. ‘If you want peace, drop story,’ he said, ‘and if you wanna produce, create story’.

And I have loved so much that our work has so embodied both peace and production.

I have so appreciated my capacity to grow, and my ability to love, but also to use love to create in the world.

As you know, my passion is creating, bringing spirit into form. I’m smiling because it’s so blissful to have absolute faith and certainty in knowing that I can create everything I want from and through love.

Two years ago, two and a half years ago when we started, I had that as a concept. It was an idea I held, but it wasn’t as in my body, and as true, and as certain as it is now.

I wanna share more about my experience during the 100 hours. I don’t know why, but this story, this picture keeps coming to me.

In one of our early sessions, Steve was trying to make a point. I don’t remember exactly what the point was, but I remember his intensity. What was the distinction he was showing me? I don’t remember, but the way he was exemplifying the point was to climb on top of me and to put his hands around my throat and to choke me, and to slam me into a sofa to the point where I was like I had, I didn’t have my shoes on. I had to take my foot and I stuck it into his stomach, and I had to push him off me, while he was screaming something at me, and I’m like pushing him off.

My foot is jammed into his stomach and I felt rock-solid abs (and I’m like, dude is in his 60s. He’s got ripped abs, ripped abs. That’s awesome. I just love that level of commitment in the creation of a body that fit at that age).

But more to the real point here is the deeper thought that I had: ‘This is crazy.’ I’m being choked out by my coach in his office. He’s screaming at me, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt this loved or cared for.

Okay, by my parents, at times, especially when I was younger. But not by somebody else outside of my family, and certainly not while being choked. That was an awesome experience, and that is another one of the things that I have loved so much working with Steve.

Now, I’m sure that he doesn’t choke most of his clients. We have a kind of physical nature together. We share similar physicality, which is another point here. Nothing that I’m sharing about my experience with Steve will show up in your experience with Steve.

If you decide to invest in working with him, it will be different. And I can promise you that because Steve lives so much from spirit, and so much from intuition, that the way he is with people, it’s almost like he’s a chameleon, like he’s different.

I’ve watched him with even my wife, and my son, and he’s different with them than he is with me.

And that’s not because he’s fake with me, and real with them. He doesn’t have ‘this one thing is the real thing’. He has deeper ideas and principles about himself that are so deep and spiritual, and the form that takes depends on the person he’s dancing with.

I pretty much guarantee he’s not gonna be on top of you, choking you. It will be different. He’ll do something with you that he’d never do with me. And I love that because there’s no script. There’s no preformed way of coaching or being. There’s no plan.

I’m sitting in the office and I would say 50, 60, 70% of the time, I know Steve is coming before he even gets there because I hear whistling, like zip-a-dee-doo-dah whistling, coming through his yard as he’s walking towards the office. He shows up with his arms in the air.

The sun is always shining in Phoenix, and my flag that he raises for me before every session waves in the background, a big smiley face for happiness. That’s our flag together.

And he shows up without a plan, with no plan, just completely open and ready, and a stack of notes and books, and ideas, post-its, scribblings. Possibilities for us in the session that have come to him in inspiration. He’s jumped out of the shower. He has a thought, he had to capture that in a post-it because maybe we’ll talk about it today, and I have no idea what we’re gonna talk about today. That’s the way he showed up, and I loved that dance between having so much preparation, and zero plan.

That to me has been such a gift, to see so many different examples of the dance between seeming opposites. He calls it dry rain, but that is one of the countless examples of a man who lives to serve.

Here’s a really important distinction that I’ve learned and I’m still learning. Full stop. Who lives to serve, ‘full stop’?

So, we can go back and we can look at the reason I wanted to work with Steve. One of the reasons is because I essentially—we could say in summary—I wanted the power that he has, the power that he has to create in the world, to create the business that he has, the life and all the miracles in this world. I wanted that power.

And I didn’t want it through means of fear, or anything that didn’t feel good. I wanted it through a very loving way of being, which he, for me, embodied. A powerful man, embodied love and a loving way of being.

Throughout our work together, he gave me more and more access to that. And then on the last session, I saw something that had me look back at the whole year’s journey and see it in a different way.

In our last session, Steve took me to run some errands. We finished our session, we had some time together. And before I took off, he took me to run some errands.

What were these errands? Well, first, we stopped at a shop, a cosmetics shop where he’d met somebody and told them that he’d give them a book (this is some days ago). So we’re just going back to bring that person a book. He spoke something, and then he’s taking action on it. Just a hug, ‘here’s the book’.

And on the way out, there’s music playing, a little bit of dancing in the doorway. Just joy flowing out of him in every moment. And I’m just glowing, smiling just getting to be with this.

And then we went to his mechanic. His car wasn’t being fixed at that time. It was fine. Why do we go? I wasn’t sure why we’re going, but we pulled up, we park, and he reaches behind my seat and pulls out a box of a couple dozen doughnuts and a marker. He writes a loving message on the front, appreciating everybody there for the work that they’ve done in the past. Walks inside, ‘just here to deliver some doughnuts’. Smile, handshake, and out the door we go.

And then the next stop was to pull into the dry cleaners. We get out, we walk in. Gives the owner a hug. Gives the owner’s husband a hug. The son says, ‘You don’t have anything here’. Steve’s like, ‘You already checked?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I saw you pull in’.

‘Okay great. Great to see you guys, I love you, love your service’, and then we leave.

And that to me, that right there, that had me look back on the entire year together and my desire to create and access this powerful way of being and see it in a different light.

And so what did I see?

Steve went to the cleaners, not to get his dry cleaning. Steve went to the cleaners to express the love that he had for people.

To me, what I saw is that for the last 100 hours, I thought that all the work that we were doing of creating a loving way of being was creating a loving way of being because that love is a powerful means of producing in the world.

The love was the means to the end of having power to create what I want.

And I saw that Steve still creates what he wants. He wants to have clean clothes, so he goes to the dry cleaners, but it’s actually secondary.

Creating what he wants is secondary to being who he is.

‘Love is, I am that’, is social media that Steve speaks, and journals, and writes constantly.

That’s who he is. ‘Love is, he is that.’

And I saw us going to the cleaner without him even knowing whether or not there were clothes to pick up, because his primary reason for going was: he had love in him that he wanted to express and share with the people there.

It’s a subtle difference, but it’s such an important one. For me, it’s been such an important one, and I call that I am whatever I am, full stop. Because what I’d had throughout during the work with Steve, is the idea that I create who I am so that it can get me something that I want. I create who I am so that I can achieve something. I create who I am because that’s powerful.

And the difference that I saw in that moment is: Steve creates who he is, and he is who he is. For that reason and for that reason only.

Love is, he is that, full stop.

He is the universe, full stop.

Not so that he can be powerful and create what he wants. The paradox of it is—Steve calls it ‘dry rain’—it’s only through letting go of what you might get by being that way that your chance of getting that shows up.

The power that I came in wanting was (I can see now) the obstacle to me having it. The wanting of the power was the obstacle to me having it.

Over the 100 hours, Steve and I looked at all of the ideas that I had about myself, that were an obstacle to me being who I really am.

What does that mean? Who I think I am, who I’m being, my habitual way of being and who I really am?

What I learnt, what I take that to mean, was that there are thoughts that I have about myself and about the world when I feel fear, and out of habit (which largely are fear—not all, but largely).

And there are thoughts I have about myself and the world when I’m feeling loved, when my heart is spirited, and open, and free. I’m calling those thoughts, ‘who I really am’, and I’m calling the other ones ‘who I’m not’.

So, we could say be who you really are, or we could say be the most loving version of yourself, the most spirited version of yourself.

We spent two years looking at all of the ways that I was seeing myself (out of habit) from fear, and changing them, one idea at a time. Going in his office, I speak and he listens, and he shows me how I’m seeing what I’m seeing in the world out there and in my relationships, and in my business, because of how I’m seeing myself. And how that’s out of habit, and how it’s unloving, and he helped me to love myself in that.

And then I was able to see new ways of seeing that were more loving, then I’d take those home. And I’d practice believing them.

By the way, the way I approached my 100 hours with Steve was like I’ve just got into a PhD program at Harvard. Or I’ve just gotten on a top football or NBA team, and I’ve got the best coach, and my sessions are the opportunity to gain the insight that is extremely valuable, and it’s only really valuable if I take it and then train the shit out of it before my next session.

Steve won’t let me record the sessions. I hate it, and I love it. I wish that I had the recordings, and I love that I didn’t because it demanded a presence of me that had me get so much more out of the work when we’re together.

I’m scribbling notes as much as I can, trying not to break eye contact because of the transmission of the relationship. And then I leave his office, and I go to the airport in just a couple hours before my flight. And I take the written notes and I type them all up and try to remember as much as I can and expand them.

And on the flight home, I add more. And the next morning I’d wake up, and I’d open my notes and I’d read them, and I’d tidy them up, and I’d rearrange, and I’d add more. I’d try to remember the stories. And my few pages of written notes becomes 20 pages of typed notes.

And throughout the next week or two weeks, I’m reading them every morning and I’m getting them into me. And I’m taking all the exercises that he asked me to do, or the challenges he gave me, and I’m adding them to a list. I’m doing the work. And that, I think, has been part of what’s helped me to create a lot of value from the work with Steve.

Yes, he is a very, very special person. And being with him can be impactful, even if that’s the only thing that occurs. This way of being that I’m explaining right now where it’s like ‘train the shit out of it between the conversations’, I actually learned from emulating him, watching him do that.

Watching how much time spends on creating himself, and his journaling, and his meditation. I mean I got a glimpse of his calendar once, and most of it, 90% of it is like events that are for him to do things for his own creation.

Focus on love, love my wife, love the neighbors. Just like meditate on giving. It’s like spend time in gratitude. It’s like, ‘shit, man, no wonder he’s like this!’ This guy wasn’t born this way. He’s the result of a constant inner practice of self-creation. He’s the product of training the mind and the heart.

And that was something so special for me actually, because it took him down off of this mantle of special things that were just descended into the world, and it made him human.

It made him what he really is: just a man who has created a capacity to love, and to be with people, that is profound. And he’s done that through constant practice. And that made him even more valuable to me, because I could see how I could be that—if I were just willing to put in that level of practice and work over time.

I wish I could take you into every single conversation that we had, and every single session, and show you the gifts that I received through being with him, how I left his office walking on a cloud, feeling so confident in myself. So happy, so peaceful, so certain.

As I share this now, I know a lot of time is going by, and I’m talking about how amazing and wonderful Steve is. And I hope that you are having some thoughts of skepticism.

How is this possible?

How can one man be so great, and so wonderful?

I hope I’m also speaking in such a way where you can feel the truth of it. But I also hope that you doubt me and that you’re skeptical of me.

Is this guy just somebody who’d linked into the Steve Hardison myth?

And he’s just falling for it all?

Maybe, but I don’t think so. You see, I’m not your average follower, and I kinda don’t like following people. I’m very much a maverick. I’m not really part of many communities. I’m kind of an outsider. I really despise the idea of following somebody in such a way where you abdicate your own personal uniqueness and power and responsibility.

And so I brought a very heavy skepticism to my work, and to the world of Steve Hardison. And I think it’s awesome that I did because the more that I did, the more I saw the truth of who he is and the honesty of it. We got to have some really great conversations about the ideas that I was holding in my mind about Steve that were becoming an obstacle to our work.

Really early on I had some concerns about our political differences. And by voicing that, we had such an honest and open and loving conversation about how we see things different politically. Not Steve and I necessarily, but all people, and the experience that it creates for us in a way that separates us.

And how we can see difference in such a way that we understand where it comes from, and it can actually create more love and togetherness.

Back to my previous point about there being a really powerful story around Steve and who he is, and the fear that maybe I (or people) just get drawn to that, and they lose their sense of self and their centre. They’re just following along with some great salesperson.

It’s so not that.

And the reason I know it’s not that is not just because I’ve kinda really valued not having that, but it’s because Steve is an incredible embodiment of paradox, and he is extremely loving, and extremely influential in his capacity to draw people towards him.

But unlike some kind of manipulative leader that just wants people following him, the closer you get to Steve, the more you find and locate your own uniqueness and agency.

It’s like the opposite of what you think would happen when you get close to somebody who has that much kind of influence just through who they’re being. He’s got the reality distortion field. He can distort reality simply through how he shows up in a room. Everything changes energetically in the room, the moment he appears.

And you’d think that if you get close to somebody like that you’d lose yourself. And you may very well do with some who are that way for their own self-interest.

But Steve is so loving, and he’s so oriented towards service, that the closer people get to him, because of that experience of him, the more he’s able to help them find themselves. And this is the most extraordinary thing about Steve, that I’ve found, is that he wields his power in service of people, finding their own truth and their own uniqueness. And so it creates this incredible magnetism that moves people towards him. And the closer they get, the less they need him, the less they actually know how powerful they are, the more they love themselves, the less they judge themselves, the less they think they need him.

And that’s why at the end of our 100 hours, I’m even more comfortable never having Steve in my life than I was before, like I didn’t think I needed him going in. I know I wanted him, but there was a sense of like, ‘oh I’ll be more powerful, I have this guy around’.

But now it’s like he’s just another man, he’s just another guy.

And just like Tiger Woods, just another guy. But if I want to learn to golf, hanging out with him is probably better than most people on Earth that I could hang out with.

LeBron James, just another guy, just another human. Steve calls them one sphincter, everybody’s got one butthole. Just another guy. And if I wanna learn to play basketball, spending 100 hours on the court with him, two hours at a time over the course of a year, it’s probably better off than a lot of people I could be spending time with.

And so, Steve is The Ultimate Coach, right?

Yes.

And if I want to learn to be a better coach, well, the LeBron James of coaching would probably be a good guy to hang out with, especially when he’s committed to helping me in that work.

If I wanna learn how to love myself and others, I might wanna hang out with the LeBron James of love for 100 hours, be around that. And not just watch it, but be able to be in a conversation with it. Help me learn how to dribble, Steve. You have.

Every single day, I have a conversation with myself inside my mind multiple times throughout the day. That is me talking to a thought, watching a thought first of all, listening and hearing a thought with a gentle open loving heart about myself, about my wife, my son, my clients, my business, people in the world.

I have a thought that shows up that’s not loving, that’s judgmental, that’s not useful, and I have a witness of listening to it that’s kind. I’m not judging it, and I’m able to love that thought and that moment, and the feeling of fear or anger, or frustration in the chest. It just melts and goes away. And I’m able to start to create a new thought that’s more loving, and more generative, and more useful.

And every single time that happens, it is me internally emulating the dialogue that Steve had with me, over and over again for 100 hours.

And so, Steve, you are with me every day.

When we met for the first time in London, before I was at your house in Phoenix, 3 or 4 years ago, you grabbed me by the shoulders, you lifted your sunglasses up, you looked me in the eye, and you said, ‘I create you everywhere I go’.

You are creating me everywhere I go now, because the conversations we had over 100 hours are still happening inside me, between me and the other me inside me, and that is creating me.

So I want everybody to understand what I’m saying here. To spend 100 hours with Steve Hardison is to learn to be with yourself in such a way that Steve is with the world. To love yourself in such a way that Steve loves the world. His loving of you and his loving of the world will become the way that you love yourself.

If you take session and the insights, and you practice them, too, it will become the way that you love yourself. And when you love yourself that way, you will love everything that way automatically, spontaneously, freely, because everything we relate to in the world is a projection or reflection of how we relate to ourselves.

Halfway through my coaching program with Steve, I had put so much focus into self-love, I’d taken it completely off creating in the external world, and my business was going downhill.

I made less money in my first year working with Steve over two years than I did in the prior few years, and I was fucking angry.

December 31st, looking at my income for the year, I fucking lost my shit.

I went over to the wall, and I had a lot of the work that we’re doing hung up, declarations to myself, and I ripped it off, and I was screaming, and cursing, yelling at my wife, ‘I’m not mad at you. But this is fucking bullshit. It isn’t working’, and I had a fucking moment. I was cursing Steve, I was upset.

But the cool thing was, I was able to come down from that experience, and love myself even though I was that mad. And I found peace, and I relaxed around it.

And the other cool thing was that I had experienced so much love and receptivity from Steve, such zero judgment, such Nothingness, that I knew that I could even tell him about it.

So, at the next session I told him. Told him how I felt then, what I did, what I said. Somebody said once that talking to Steve Hardison is like speaking to a jet engine or a vacuum cleaner. It just sucks everything. It just hears, absorbs everything.

And I think that he’s not just present in the sense that he’s attentive. That’s the openness. But the experience of everything you have being sucked out of you is like we always have stuff we wanna speak or wanna share, but it’s the fear of what people will think if we share that, that has us hold back.

The more time you spend with Steve, the more you get that there’s nothing that you could say that would have him judge you. That openness and that love just sucks everything in you out of you.

I was so clear that I could say anything to him—I am so clear that I can say anything to him—that I brought all of that to him.

That’s another part of the experience of love from Steve, is the ability to say anything and be anyone and not be judged by it. I mean that’s what we’re all dying for, right? If we could just know that we’d be safe no matter how we showed up, no matter who we were being, then we could be all that we are.

Steve creates a space for us to be that, and to say that, and to share that, and to find out that we’re safe, and that grows us. That grew me.

Even if you don’t think that you’re holding anything back, spend time around somebody who would love you that unconditionally, and you’ll find out there’s stuff that you were holding back that you didn’t even realize, because suddenly it’s showing up for you because you feel safe and loved unconditionally.

That has been such a gift, to have a truth deeper than what I know sucked out of me through an unconditional ‘loving listening’.

Steve, your zest for life, your spirit, your capacity for love, your absolute certainty in the capacity that we all have to create anything and everything we want in every moment, has been such a gift to me.

You know you talked about how one of your clients once said that ‘you have pathological certainty’, which I love.

Pathological certainty. Like absolute certainty that everything that you speak can and will be created.

For me, that’s just what happens in the presence of Nothing.

Certainty is what it looks like when you don’t have anything in you that’s between you and spirit, intuition, whatever else is there.

It looks like certainty. I experienced it as, ‘it’s not my concern’: how, if, when, why, all that. It’s just gonna happen. And so that’s been a super huge gift to me, too. All of the different ways, all the different ways into Nothing.

I know this conversation is kind of going in lots of different directions and I’m jumping around. The reason I wanted to make this as a video is because while I was trying this and I can write well, and I can articulate a lot of these things, but…

Well, first of all, we first connected when I made a video for you many years ago.

If anybody wants to see that, it’s my personal internal commitment in reference to Steve’s video, TBOLITNFL.

And there is always something that happens in video that I can’t capture in text.

And really what I wanna capture here for people that are interested in working with you or that are in your world, that are working with you and could see another perspective on what that work is… I want people to just feel me. And to feel the transmission of my experience of being with you, and I feel that this is a means for that to happen better than my writing could.

Man, I so love that when I came to you and shared the freak-out I had around my income, and I said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m still sure I’ll make it work. I’ll get my value here’. You almost stood up out of your chair and kind of slapped me around. Not literally this time. ‘You’ve already gotten your value, way more value than you even wanted.’

I was like, ‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

I had to sit back and think about it. What has gotten better? What has changed? And then when I looked at it, I looked at how much my experience of life has improved through loving myself, how much my capacity to create everything I want for the rest of my life has increased through my ability to see who I think I am, and to let go of who I think I am, and to create who I think I am, which creates my experience of the world, which then creates my actions that generate material and results in my world. The relationship that I now have with my wife.

I mean take any one of these things, look at the investment that I’ve made. If I had to go back and give the money back and not have that, would I do it? Hell no.

I love how you helped me to see the value in the investment that I’d made, that I’d already created. I love that because that is a perfect example of how something from the outside can sound like just a story, just a perspective to have something look like it’s valuable, and how it’s only from the inside of feeling a person’s love and their total commitment to you, that you can know that this isn’t for him. It’s for me.

I can feel how little the money matters to you, and I can feel how much the money is an instrument of commitment, your commitment to me. My payment is a reflection of your commitment to me. It’s such a beautiful and wonderful feeling to pay somebody and to know that payment is a commitment to me. And I look forward to the next time I get to do that with you, Steve.

And anybody watching this who’s on the fence, get the fuck off it.

Trust something deeper.

Man, you are so awesome, Steve.

One of my favorite ideas is that admiration is projection, and I brought that into my work with Steve, and I’ve carried it with me on the way out. What do I mean by that? Well, all of these things that I see in Steve, that I love, that I admire, I personally believe they are projections of my own capacity. They are projections of my own desire for who I can be, who I want to be, who I know I can be.

And that doesn’t make it less. If anything, it makes it that much more: Steve embodies my highest capacity. I may never embody my highest capacity at the level that he has.

In the same way where everybody can have the abs that Steve has. Most people don’t. Not that they can’t, but he’s an embodiment of their highest capacity, in the stomach!

He’s also the embodiment of our highest capacity to love. And so, my admiration is a projection of my capacity. And I have known that going in and I’ve known that coming out. To me, that’s like, ‘Shit, I wanna spend as much time as I possibly can with this man. I wanna be as much like him as I possibly can!’

Not because he is something other than I, that I think is better than me, but because he is me. He’s just being the deepest, truest, most loving version of me, where I’m not yet.

Steve is ‘I am that’.

And I think that we all need heroes. But not heroes in the sense where the hero is to save us from a villain; hero in the sense of a projection, a way of seeing who really are, and as a means of accessing that.

Steve is my hero. He’s my hero because he is the greatest version of me, and I love being around him, I love being in conversation with him, I love learning with him, and from him, because I’m learning to be who I am.

To love like that… I’m so grateful for the moments in which I spontaneously love somebody and I speak truth to somebody in the way that I didn’t before.

Steve, you create me everywhere I go. Because every moment of my conversation inside my head, in which I am loving towards myself, was born from our conversation. It is an emulation of our outside dialogue.

You create me everywhere I go as a loving man, as a loving father, as a loving husband, as a loving coach.

I’m so grateful for that.

Our work was the impetus for your legacy through me. It has changed the destiny of my entire family, of my son, my wife, my mother.

Our own destiny has changed, everybody I know, my clients, the 30-something people I’ve worked with over the past couple of years when we’ve been working together. It’s like their lives, everything, that’s the cool thing about love. You’re like a hammer that comes down from the universe of love. It whacks the ground and it just ripples an earthquake of love throughout everybody that the hammer lands on.

It hit me, BOOM, and then it just goes out from me, to all my people, my people. You say you are the universe and I see how you love the universe through one person at a time. And I have also appreciated so much the power and just focusing on one person at a time. Not strategically, because of what it might create for me, but because of the love that it generates and amplifies. It’s awesome.

I love when my friends, family, clients, have an experience in their world that I can see is a direct result of our relating and our dialogue. Which I can see is a direct result of my dialogue with you.

Love is, you are that. And I’m so grateful for that, Steve Hardison.

And for anybody else watching this, get the fuck off the fence. The best decision I have ever made is to work with Steve Hardison.

(Okay. Best decision I ever made was to marry my wife and to have kids, have my son.)

But the best other decision I ever made, besides my family, is working with you, Steve.

Love is, you are that, so much.

I am so grateful, and I can’t wait to see you next time, and I look forward to our next 100 hours.

Bye bye for now. Much love.