What if, regardless of your past history or the current economy, your dreams really could still come true?

What would you be most excited about having happen in your life over the next few weeks, months, or years? Would you like to experience dramatic breakthroughs in your career, business, or finances? Deeper love and connection with your family and intimate relationships? How about seemingly miraculous improvements in your own levels of health and well-being?

For the past 19 years or so, I’ve been a professional success coach—someone who gets paid to help make people’s dreams come true. In that time, I’ve learned that not only are there many different types of dreams, there are also all sorts of different ways to reach them.

Whether you want to make more money, build your business, start a family, or save the world, chances are that your approach up until now has been primarily practical—that is, focused on what it is that you want and what it is that you think you need to do in order to make it happen.

If you’re a reasonably progressive thinker, you’re probably also aware that one of the reasons you want what you want is that you believe it will in some way enhance your experience of being alive. But as you may have already begun to realize, if you really want to have a more enjoyable life, reaching your goals is not enough. You’re also going to have to find a more enjoyable way of getting there.

The secret is learning to succeed from the inside out. When you learn to live your life in this way, stress disappears and worry becomes almost nonexistent. You realize that you were born happy and the worst thing that can ever happen to you is a thought—generally speaking, a thought about whatever you think is the worst thing that could ever happen to you. Things still won’t always work out as you’d hoped or planned, but that just becomes a fact of life, instead of a problem to be solved. And since you live in a state of being full (of life, joy, love, and peace), going outside yourself to “find fulfillment” loses most of its appeal.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you won’t still do all sorts of weird and wonderful things with your life. It just means that you’ll be using what’s inside you to create things on the outside instead of doing them the other way around.

So how can a coach help?

A Course in Miracles tells us that “All miracles involve a shift in perception,” and that’s a good place to begin thinking about this idea. Traditional coaching takes place primarily on a horizontal dimension—coaches assist their clients in getting from point A to point B. Yet lasting, sustainable change nearly always happens in the vertical dimension—a deepening of the ground of being of the client and greater access to inspiration and spiritual wisdom. While this has generally led to an either-or approach to success and personal growth and a sharp division between therapy and coaching, transformative coaching (or, as I like to call it, “supercoaching”) uses the vertical dimensions to create change on the inside while you continue to move forward toward your goals on the outside.

The kinds of “vertical” changes that transformative coaching leads to can be usefully viewed on three levels:

Level I: Change in a Specific Situation

Often people will hire a coach (or go to a counselor, therapist, or friend) to get help with a specific situation they’re struggling with. They may want to deal with a difficult person at work, succeed at an important negotiation or job interview, or stay motivated as they train to beat their personal best at a sporting event.  At this level, people go from fear to confidence, from unease to comfort, or from inaction to action. The impact of this kind of coaching is generally project specific. Once the difficult person has been handled, the interview completed, or the race run, people get on with the rest of their lives in much the same way as they did before.

Level II: Change in a Specific Life Area

Sometimes we’re less concerned with a specific event than we are with a whole category of events. This is why we find coaches specializing in any number of life areas: relationship coaches, sales coaches, parenting coaches, confidence coaches, presentation coaches . . . the list goes on and on. People hire these experts to help them develop their confidence and increase their skills in whatever area they may be having difficulty. Like performance coaches, these coaches will help with specific situations, but they tend to measure their impact not just by how one situation changes, but by how their whole category of situations changes.

Level III: Global Change

The ultimate level of change is transformation, or what I sometimes call “global change”—a pervasive shift in our way of being in the world. At this level, it’s not enough for us to develop a skill or change a feeling. It’s our intangible “selves” we want to change, and in so doing, we change our experience of everything.

Each of the three levels maps across to a certain kind of intervention. When we want to make a change in the moment or in a specific situation, we apply a technique. When we want to make a change in a broader context, we install new strategies. But when we want to actually change lives, we need more than just strategies or techniques. We need a whole new paradigm or perspective—a new way of seeing.