Many years ago when I was knee high to a grass hopper, my grandparents often talked about moving from their semidetached council house on the dreary outskirts of London and buying a post office in rural Dorset. It was their life-long dream, and reflected the modest ambitions of the age. They even got as far as driving down and viewing a village post office just outside of Dorchester somewhere. The talking and … [Read more...]
Change Your Life In 5 Minutes
It's a myth that important life changes take a long time to make. Usually, the more time spent working on something the better the outcome, but this common sense has no place in the strange and weird world of change and motivation where everything works in unusual and unfamiliar ways. Sometimes the biggest changes we make in our lives are made in a few moments. Time has no bearing on making changes, and therefore … [Read more...]
The Myth of Medication
Do you remember when psychological distress and mental health problems were believed to be caused by demons and evil spirits, and treated by a witch or a religious zealot? It was quite a while back. Then, do you remember we all thought that emotional distress was caused by an imbalance of humors, which, quite logically led to all kinds of blood letting with big black leeches. And then along came medicine and doctors, … [Read more...]
How Up Tight People Learn To Let Go
“Up tight, up tight, what the hell do you mean I’m UP TIGHT...I DON'T NEED TO LEARN TO LET GO” I was in a counseling session and had made the fatal mistake of suggesting to Thomas, the most up tight person I had ever met ,that he was, well, up tight and needed to learn to let go. He was in my office and he was yelling his not inconsiderable red face off. I wondered whether it would be the first time in 10 years … [Read more...]
Self Motivation For Those Of Us Who Aren’t That Motivated
We can achieve amazing things when we really, really want to, yet somehow lack the motivation to do something comparatively easy like eat less chocolate or cut down drinking. And of course when I say "we" I really mean other people. Recently a friend of mine completed a charity walk across England in flip flops and another one drove a bus from Finland to Thailand and nearly froze to death in Russia, (the diesel … [Read more...]
Why We Don’t Change
It should be quite straight forward, shouldn’t it? We identify something in our life we want to change, whether it’s our weight, relationships, work, diet, exercise.... and go ahead and change it. Yet it’s always so difficult isn’t it. I grew up under the impression my grandparents were about to move to the country. Yet they never did. From grandparents to governments, our paths are strewn with good intentions. We … [Read more...]
Counseling Retreat or Butterfly Holiday
Have you ever been to a butterfly farm? We used to go to this place in the UK that was an unlikely combination of butterfly farm and otter sanctuary. It was great going into the big glasshouse where the big tropical butterflies where, especially on a rainy, grey old day. The warmth and colours were a stark contrast to the cold and grey out side, it was like someone had turned the brightness up. I was reminded of … [Read more...]
How To Be Happy Without Counseling
I once attended a grand opening of a Counseling Retreat Centre in England. Strangely one of the people who had been invited to talk was a local self made millionaire. He was an "ordinary" bloke that had started his working life with a modest market stall. He was so good at selling things and over the years his empire grew steadily. He worked his way up to running what is now a formidable import business supplying the … [Read more...]
A New Kind of Counseling Retreat
The first time I ever heard of a "counseling retreat" was when I was very young and had a holiday job working in what was at the time the "largest toy shop in the world" called Hamleys in Regent Street, London. Soon after huge mega toy stores arrived like space ships landing overnight taking over unwanted sites next to car parks and poor old Hamleys had to make do with a reduced tag line of, the "finest" toy shop in … [Read more...]
How To Make Your Mind Up
“I just really need to make my mind up” is a phrase often heard on our retreats. A nice phrase often used within motivation counseling is : “Ambivalence is an okay place to pass through but you wouldn’t want to live their”. In my travels as a counsellor and therapist I have met people who not only have lived for a long time in ambivalence, they seem to have set up whole residential developments with … [Read more...]