Mikal's mission is to help high achievers awaken their natural wisdom to create profound fulfillment, deep peace of mind, and a perfect balance between everything truly important to them.
With a corporate background and starting and running 3 businesses, Mikal has spent the last 14 years coaching business founders, owners, and leaders to get more life out of life and more business out of business.
He is a mind mechanic with 35 years of experience in mindfulness, personal and spiritual growth, and 30 years of experience coaching others in these fields.
Mikal is an international speaker, certified firewalking coach, author of 5 books, and creator of Modern Meditation for busy people.
In addition to coaching entrepreneurs and business leaders, Mikal and his wife Kathy offer relationship coaching. With 30 years of living together and growing up with 3 children, they have learned and experienced a lot and have co-authored a book about their journey together.
Seeing how many relationships are struggling or have gone stagnant, they have decided to offer couples coaching.
Mikal Nielsen, Life And Business Coach
Please introduce yourself and tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better. My name is Mikal, born and bred in Denmark. I spent half of my life there, but unfortunately not a super happy one. Being shy and physically week, I was bullied a lot, and to make matters worse, I didn't do that well academically either. The only thing I had going for me was a natural aptitude for math, so I did a few years of extra study of economics and did my apprenticeship as a banker. This was in the days when computers were starting to take over and I fell in love with those things. Yes, I know, sad but I was good at it and I turned my financial career into a computer career. On the personal front, as you may be able to deduct, dating and relationships with girls was definitely not my strength. So ending up in a two-year relationship and getting married, was quite an achievement. Well, that was until she found another guy and we got divorced after a grand total of 6 months of marriage. Something drastic had to happen to turn my life around, so I bought a one-way ticket to Africa, and backpacked through more than 40 countries for the next three years. And it was in Africa that I met my wife to be, who I am still with now 30 years later in an ever-growing and deepening relationship. We dated on three continents and six countries, moved in together in Paris and moved to her home country of New Zealand where we have been ever since, growing up our three children now out in the world doing their own things. Thank you for that story and background. It looks like you didn't just leave your home country but also your career behind. So what have you been doing all these years in New Zealand? Yes, I decided to leave my corporate career behind to pursue my new passion for personal growth, both for myself as well as supporting others. Before leaving Denmark, I had been certified as a Firewalking Facilitator, so that's what I did initially when arriving in New Zealand. I facilitated a few firewalking weekend courses, which was both extremely challenging and amazingly fulfilling. This really cemented my deep desire to support others in their life journeys by sharing what I had learned, while continuously learning and growing myself. And that is essentially what I have been doing for nearly 30 years now. The only two things that have changed, is how I do it and the tremendous growth I have experienced myself. So what way are you doing it these days, who are your clients and how specifically are you helping them? For the last 14 years, my focus has been on one-on-one coaching for business owners and business leaders. I used to mostly do group coaching, but I am finding it more fulfilling to work with individuals as I can focus the coaching specifically to that person and therefore go in much further depth. This suits my skill set and personality the most. And what makes it really fascinating as well as challenging, is the great variety of problems and issues people are up against.
For some, it is purely around their business and how to run and manage it well and for others, it is about personal issues, typically around health or relationship. But for most, it is a combination, so in essence I'm a mixture of a business and life coach, or as I often put it, a life coach for business owners. Tell us about your greatest achievements so far.
Hmmm... that's a challenging question as there has been a great variety of achievements.
One would be taking a choir who had never made it to the top 3 at national competitions, but with my coaching, making it to the top 3 five times in a row and becoming national champions twice.
Around the same time, I had my first book published which landed me on both national TV and Radio.
Another achievement was writing and self-publishing a book in less than 3 months, as well as writing another 3 books. On that front, I will also have to include writing two books together with my wife, one of which has just been published in conjunction with our relationship coaching, which by the way is a major achievement in and of itself, doing coaching together with my wife.
However, the biggest and most fulfilling achievement is seeing the incredible growth and transformation taking place for many of the people I have coached and supported over the last three decades.
On the personal front, I must also include the 30 year relationship with my wife, growing up with our three children and lastly, walking over those red glowing coals barefooted the first time and later becoming a certified Firewalking Facilitator, all of which were major achievements for me.
Congratulations on those achievements! So is that it for you or are there still more achievements in store for yourself and your business?
Based on my life journey so far, along with my life purpose and passion, achievements will keep manifesting. I don't have a crystal ball so I don't know what they will be, but I'm fine with that. On the other hand, there are a number of things and areas I am consciously focussing on to create growth and deeper fulfilment. Would you be willing to share a couple of those with us? Sure! There are two things that are strongly there for me, both of them within the field of my calling and passion with coaching. One is attracting the perfect person to pass all my knowledge and coaching tools on to, who can then take the coaching to the next level using their personal experience and wisdom. The other is to fully step into coaching couples together with my wife and physically establish our F.Y.ReTreat centre for couples who truly want to take their intimate relationship to a whole new level of depth and fulfilment. This also includes completing and publishing our new book ‘Intimately Entwined ‒The His & Her Story' which is a combination of ansupport tool autobiography of a relationship and a supporttool. Sounds like coaching really is your thing. Is it based in any specific modality or spiritual belief? No. It is based in 35 years of actual experience of personal and spiritual growth, exploring lots of different modalities, including extensive work with Tony Robbins, a full year at a meditation centre and running three different businesses.
So if someone wants to explore the possibility of using you as a coach for them, how do they get started?
Firstly, because I primarily do one-on-one coaching, I am very limited in the number of clients I can serve at any given time. Because of that, I am very careful with who I take on. As my coaching goes deep, I can only work with people who are highly committed to their own growth, has the courage to meet the challenges that come with such a journey and are open-minded to explore.
The way I go about that, is by first having a brief 20-30 minute Zoom meet. If it makes sense to both of us to go further, we do a 60-70 minute deep dive session, after which it will be very clear if I'm the right coach for that person. If I am, we will then step into a tailored program.
And what are the costs for this for those who are interested?
The first Zoom meet is free and so is the deep dive session. As for the coaching programs, that varies a lot depending on length and intensity. This will be clear after the deep dive session.
To support your readers, I have created a specific link for BRAINZ that you can include at the end of the interview. This link will take your readers to my calendar to find and book a time for the initial short discovery session.
As I said, spaces are limited, so if nothing is available at the moment, come back next week and try again. Here is the link.
