Motivate Yourself

Clients will often tell me that they feel overwhelmed with even the simple things in life, their house is a mess and they just don’t know where to start putting it right. Guess what their homework is?

Last week Ant McPartlin spoke out about his struggles with Depression and Anxiety. Making it public because he thinks that it’s important that people going through a rough time ask for help so as to get proper treatment. Great! But he followed it by also saying 'I feel like I have let a lot of people down and for that I am truly sorry.' That’s the part I didn’t like, because...

Presenting a Podcast about how to be positive and enthusiastic when so many people are sad and angry is difficult at the best of times, and last week felt like the worst of times. What good can possibly come from the murder of innocent people?

Being British it’s always a pleasure to see a bit of sunshine, especially this time of year when it’s unexpected, and a few weeks ago we had a weekend where the sun shone and the temperature was the same as it is in the summer. And, whilst relaxing and watching my son bounce on a trampoline in the garden my wife said to me “If it was always like this, people would be a lot happier.” My instincts were to agree and I started to nod my head in agreement before stepping back and thinking about it first.

It’s almost Easter already and even though we’ve put the clocks forward it seems like only yesterday when we put them back an hour in the Autumn. Time flies! I’ve mentioned before that 12 months to a 60 year old will obviously feel 6 times quicker than it does to a 10 year old but there’s also another reason.

Are you following the FA Cup at all? I’m not a huge fan of football myself, but I know enough that when I see that lower league Sutton United are playing Premiership side Arsenal it’s worth looking up from whatever I’m reading and go “Huh? how did that happen?”. Now, we all love an underdog story and so it would be amazing to see Sutton United beat Arsenal, it’s the stuff that films are made of! But the underdog lost. Arsenal beat them 2-0, but the difference in the 2 teams are like George Forman fighting George Formby! It could easily have been 10-0 but Sutton kept their energy levels up and surprised Arsenal with how well they could play. They walked off the pitch at the end of the day with their heads held high knowing that they did their best.

Political divisiveness often gives rise to a tirade of reasons on social media why the other side is wrong. With the rise of right wing extremism throughout Europe and the USA there seems to be a lot of people wanting Brexit to fail and Donald Trump to fail as President simply to prove themselves right. But it’s worth looking at these things with a more positive stance. Whether you think these are good ideas or not we should still want things to work out well. Deliberately wanting things to fail just so you can be proved right is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. A phrase with a nasty origin that goes back to the year 870 when St. Aebbe the Younger, the Mother Superior of a Scottish monastery, talked her fellow Nuns into disfiguring their faces order to render themselves unattractive to the incoming Viking invaders, so as to protect their chastity. It worked, the Viking pirates saw the noseless Nuns and were so disgusted by their faces they turned their backs on them. But the Nuns never got much of a chance to high five as the Viking Pirates burnt their Monastery to the ground with them still inside to teach them a lesson. Hey ho.

It’s a new year! Time to join in with the tradition that every January we draw a line in the sand and decide to do something different with our lives. Because doing it in November or December just feels wrong!

Look around you. What inspires you? Who inspires you? Are you the stupidest person in the room? If not, then you should be. And here’s why.

I have a question for you. How much of your real life do you reveal to the external world around you? If someone asks you how you are, do you bombard them with your frustrations about your selfish spouse? Or about how you feel that your life is going by too quickly and there’s a sense of impending doom everywhere you go? Or do you say “Fine thanks, you?”.

Many people fall for the mistaken belief that being likeable is linked to something innate and unlearned, something you must be born with. As if it’s linked to how attractive or talented you are. Yet in reality being likeable is simply a matter of understanding other people, empathy. A skill that can easily be learned.

It sucks being a loser. Everyone wants to win and it seems to have become built into our culture that failure is not an option. But it is! As a 9 month old child how many times would we have fallen over when learning to walk? How many mistakes did we make when learning to speak? How many answers did we get wrong in our tests at school? And how many job applications do we have to send out before even getting an interview, let alone offered a job? As the old Chinese proverb says “Fall down seven times and get up eight”.

How do we develop extreme opinions? And why do some people need enemies in order to be happy? All will be revealed!

Almost 2000 years ago the man who was to become St Paul wrote that “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character” Nietzsche put it quite well with his phrase “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”. This process is often referred to as Post Traumatic Growth, the idea that we can grow stronger because of adversity.

Critical Thinking has allowed us to learn that the earth isn’t flat after all, and that it’s definitely older than 4000 years. It’s meant that Doctors no longer use chicken poo to try and cure baldness or blow tobacco smoke up someones bum in an attempt to cure a hernia. In today's episode we look at the importance of Critical Thinking, especially in the run up to the EU Referendum.