What’s Your Little Hot Pie Of A Thought?

Part of The Life Change Blog Series.

I stood in the staff car park at Plymouth College and stared up to the sky. It was the end of the week and end of the day, I was late, as usual, and felt tired. I had just had an interview with a student who had failed (he had submitted an essay that clearly wasn’t his. He didn’t even know what it was about). He left the room in a barrage of abuse, kicked over a chair and swore at me, stamped out into the corridor where he continued his tirade against me, the college and “all the other useless educated wankers.”

The deep irony was that the essay was about motivational counseling psychology.

I sat for a while in the empty classroom watching the rain clouds blow in from the sea. I just had to muster the energy to drive across town in rush hour traffic, pick up my wife, then drive back in the other direction and pick up the children from school (not all of them, only our 2 little boys) and then stagger around a supermarket the size of Belgium to do the weekly shop before driving the 50 miles back home.

But all the while a little thought sat at the back of my mind. It was a warm, glowing little thought like a miniature heat lamp that they use to keep pies warm in canteens.

It was a little hot pie of a thought and kept me warm on cold days. It was a thought that I got from an advertisement poster that I used to stare at on the tube train when I lived and worked in London. It said “Swap the tube for the Tuk Tuk” and had a jolly cartoon picture of a typical South East Asian motorized tricycle with a beaming office worker in the back seat.

It didn’t matter that I always felt tired and was sworn at by spotty students who couldn’t even be bothered to write their own essays about motivational counseling psychology, because one day I would swap the tube for the Tuk Tuk. I would leave the cold and the grey and the abusive for the warm and the vibrant and the friendly and start up a small counseling retreat in SE Asia; somewhere that people could go for guaranteed sunshine and relax and sort out their problems all in one go.
But as much as this little glowing thought would keep me warm on those cold Friday afternoons, another more sinister thought loomed just behind in the dark recesses of my mind, “it was never going to happen.”

As the years rolled by and our little family grew into a bigger family it dawned on me that moving overseas with 2 little boys to a land where you have no contacts, no friends and no work was not going to be as easy as just swapping the tube for a tuk tuk. It was going to be a massive upheaval and massively complicated.

It was time to take my own medicine, listen to my own motivational counseling, take a deep breath, a leap of faith and make it happen. And so we did. It actually works.

Ten years ago we created Life Change Holidays, and opened our Counseling Retreat in Thailand, we quickly added a Life Coaching Holiday and then a Couples Therapy Retreat specifically to sort out relationship problems. We now spend our time helping people overcome problems and dilemmas and generally making little hot pies of thoughts come true.

Counseling Retreat

If you would like to change your life, get away from it all and sort out your problems in one go (and make your little hot pie of a thought come true), whether with a Counseling Retreat or Couples Therapy Retreat, and have a great holiday in the sun at the same time check out our holidays and send us an email.

Counseling Retreat find out more.