TSHP416 – Look Back, Let Go, Be Positive, Move Forward

What’s Coming This Episode?

Just take a step back to the same time eighteen months ago, what were you expecting of 2020/21? I doubt that you were expecting was what has actually taken place. As we and our communities are starting to get moving again we need to take the time to stop and do a quick audit so that we can really move forward physically, emotionally and mentally.

Now is time to review.

Enjoy the show, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

Show Notes and Links

Resource of the week

Stay in Touch

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Look Back, Let Go, Be Positive, Move Forward

Just take a step back to the same time eighteen months ago, what were you expecting of 2020/21? I doubt that you were expecting was what has actually taken place. As we and our communities are starting to get moving again we need to take the time to stop and do a quick audit so that we can really move forward physically, emotionally and mentally.

Now is time to review.

Our work is all about living in the present so the idea of looking back may seem odd. Yet we often only have a sense of the now because of our awareness of what was in the past. The trick in living the present is to let go of the emotional ties that bind us to the past and then we are able to create the future that we really desire.

Looking back and letting go
So, questions first and then we need to let it go…

1: List all the things that you really didn’t like about the last eighteen months
2: Identify anyone who hurt you made you angry or upset
3: What was the worst things that happened to you?

Letting go
Now write a paragraph about each of the events above stating what you truly feel about them. Light a bonfire or Bar-B-Q. Focus on each of the idea, thoughts and emotions that you have written on the paper, you may need to read each one out loud and then one by one burn each piece of paper while you consciously let go of all emotional attachments that you have to each event.

What is, is over, what was done is, is done. The last eighteen months have past and it will never come back. Let it go, let it pass, and allow yourself to be in the now. If you ruminate and relive negative past it is as though it is happening all over again, all the time, in the present moment – let it go.

Be positive
Look at things the other way around. What positive things happened last year?

1: What was your most positive moment of the last eighteen months?
2: Who was the most positive person?
3: Who helped you the most?
4: What was the best thing that you achieved?

Now, get the journal habit, write down your answer to these positive questions in your journal, and any other positive things that you want to remember about the last eighteen months. Keep your journal with you and add ONLY positive things throughout the rest of this year.

Move Forward
Living in the present, unencumbered by the past, allows you to create the future that you really want, a future the serves you well. Because we know that what you think about you will bring about and that, thoughts become things and, what you feed will while grow and what you starve will die, the power of positive intention allows us to create what we want. All we need is persistent consistent focus and determination.

So, questions, what will you create for yourself in the rest of this year?

1: Imagine it is New Years Eve 2021 and someone is saying a few words about your achievements over the last eighteen months, what would they be saying?
2: if you were to write an affirmation that would support you being able to achieve what you want, what would it be?
3: what will be your greatest challenges that you need to overcome to achieve what you really want?

Journal time again. Write the speech, create your affirmation identify your challenges. Use your journal throughout the year and refer back to it on a daily basis. Allow your ideas, dreams and plans to grow and develop, refine your affirmation, record how you overcame your challenges and, every time something good happens to you record it in your journal so that in a years time you will have a record of all the positive events that you experienced to look back on that will help creat your positive.

Be happy and live n the present and make the next eighteen months better than the last eighteen months.

Sean x

TSHP415: The Importance of Failure

What’s Coming This Episode?

In the last podcast we were looking at people’s fear of returning to the workplace and imposter syndrome. Alongside these fears is the fear of failure. I have been trying explain to people that what we see as failure may not actually be a bad thing, how else do we learn? As my American friends say…

…we don’t have problems we have learning opportunities.

Enjoy the show, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

Show Notes and Links

Resource of the week

Stay in Touch

We’re all over the web, so feel free to stay in touch:

Leave us an Honest Review on iTunes

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The Importance of Failure

In the last podcast we were looking at people’s fear of returning to the workplace and imposter syndrome. Alongside these fears is the fear of failure. I have been trying explain to people that what we see as failure may not actually be a bad thing, how else do we learn? As my American friends say…

…we don’t have problems we have learning opportunities. 

If we can change the concept of failure to being a learning point then our previous experience of failure can become a positive and not a negative. After all had we not had we not had the experience we would not have had the opportunity to learn the lesson.

The opposite of failure is an attitude

We live in a world of opposites that are totally dependent on each other, one cannot exist without the other. Hot and cold, high and low, rough and smooth, light and dark, happy and sad, positive and negative, rich and poor, good and evil, the list is endless. Yet each of these symbiotic twins are relative to each other. Though they only ever a relative concept. For example something will only seem cold if it is at a lower temperature of what we have labelled hot. Just as something will only seem hot if it is a higher temperature then what we have labelled cold. The difference between these twins is never an ‘actual’ measurement it is a ‘relative’ measurement.

Compared to the ceiling the floor is low. Compared to the sky the ceiling is low. Compared to the moon the sky is low. Compared to the Sun the moon is low. Compared to Alpha Centauri the Sun is low. It is all just the way that we look at it. Our concepts of success and failure have such a profound effect on our self esteem and our ability to function happily in our life. Even if you are on benefits in the UK, you may feel relatively poor but, you are actually in the richest 10% of the worlds population. I worked with someone who felt a failure because all the houses in their street has two cars and they only had one. This type of attitude os known in psychology as relative deprivation. Because it is a relative relationship our experience and beliefs will vary. 

My concept of success might be your concept of failure. 

Let’s say your success is to have one million pounds and for me five hundred pounds would be my success. You may then experience my success as a failure. When the average wage was about £18k I remember being told that is you did not earn £40k you were not even on the first run of the ladder. the ladder was their relative concept of success. Life is not a competition it is a journey. I is not what we have it is what we do that is important.

I have often said that I see competition as a senseless wast of time. My example is that if nine people embark on the 100 metre dash only one person will experience success while eight people will experience failure.

It is taking part that counts not winning

Competitive types tell this is the wrong way to look at it because the eight that didn’t win the race will be driven on to do better next time and become winners. The person who continually comes fourth managed to come third so this is a success. Or one runner improved their time and felt success. In my world to have competed at a high level meeting at all and to come last might be experienced as success and one not to be missed.

Failure could be the mother of invention 

I am reminded of Eddison and his quest to invent the light bulb. His problem was finding the right element that would glow without burning out that would create light. He tried over 200 different elements before he found tungsten that worked. That is over 200 experiences of failure, or was it. I have often thought about his tenacity. At what point would I have conceded failure and given up. Was it that each element that failed spurred him on to try the next in his determination to succeed?

Remember both success and failure are our own individual concepts

I suspect that it is our concept of failure that is vitally important to our achieving our concept of success. Just as there is no up without down, and there is no success without failure. The point from which we start anything is the down point and the goal that we are aiming for is the up point. When we look up to where we want to be we are setting our goal. Achieving our goal is our success and this is often tied up with our self esteem just as not achieving our goal is our failure and leads to a loss of our self esteem.

Learning from our failures

My experience, both personally and working with others, is that that the pain of failure is the spur that creates the energy that drives us towards success. A business person can learn from a bankruptcy so that it never happens again, we come out of a failed relationship with the knowledge that allows us to succeed next time, the injuries that we experience in training enable us to adapt to succeed in our sport.

When failures become learning points we learn and grow

So, I want to challenge the concept failure and the idea of success. In this world of twinned opposites we need to continually learn from one to achieve the other. So, I prefer to think of “failure” as an opportunity. We don’t have failures we have learning points that, if used consciously and creatively, enable us to move towards our success. In that sense there are never problems only opportunities.

Planning our success

Ok, so if we have a starting point and we have a goal we need to make the journey from one to the other. Most people set the goal too high and then don’t reach it. This is then allows them to label themselves self as a failure. To make the journey it needs to be broken down into achievable steps that create the path to success. 

Forward Base you success

Forward basing is an exercise that I use with individuals, couples and teams who need to achieve a goal. You can do this right now in your kitchen, If it is a team I am using a gym hall. On one wall I stick a big sheet of flip chart paper. On this I write where we are up to in the NOW. On the opposite wall I put another sheet of paper. On this I write where we want to get to, this is the GOAL. The next job is to put sheets of paper on the floor that become the stepping stones from where we are now to the goal we want to get to. This is the plan. Each step is set at an achievable distance so that with each step there is the feeling of ongoing success. Once the steps have been set out we then can create a timeline along the wall so that we have the steps that we need to take set in a time frame. This is a plan.

None of this is set in stone. The time frame can vary and the steps can move. If one step is not completed we go back to the previous step and either try again or adapt or change it. The point of forward basing is to create a flow of continued success that builds self esteem and drives us on to our desired goal. When we forward base we are able to use success rather than failure as the drive towards our goal.

1: What do you consider to be your failures?

2: How can you turn these into useful learning points?

3: If you were to forward base what would you write on the NOW sheet and what would be on the GOAL sheet?

4: From this you can create your steps and your timeline.

Failure, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder only you can define your failures and acknowledge your successes. In my own life I have had many learning points. The only failures that I would Identify have been when I didn’t attend to the learning points and then needed to repeat the lesson. I also acknowledge that I have had many, many successes and that makes me a happy person who feels successful.

Take care, be happy and successful 

Sean x 

TSHP414: Do you feel like an imposter?

What’s Coming This Episode?

Self doubt seems to be the new lockdown lurgy. I have working with so many people who over lockdown that have lost their self confidence. The fear of going back to the workplace can make people feel vulnerable. Let’s talk about self doubt and how to manage and overcome it.

Enjoy the show, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

Show Notes and Links

Stay in Touch

We’re all over the web, so feel free to stay in touch:

Leave us an Honest Review on iTunes

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Do you feel like an imposter?

Self doubt seems to be the new lockdown lurgy. 

I have working with so many people who over lockdown that have lost their self confidence. The fear of going back to the workplace can make people feel vulnerable. Their role and the position they have held in the organisation, often for many years, seems daunting to the point where they feel like they are an imposter or a fraudster. For some this has not only been about doing their job but now simply living their life. This is the seed of anxiety that can lead to them becoming over alert and vigilant leading to feelings of anxiety. When we develop anxiety it can get us to the point where are now beginning to make the mistakes we were fearing we would make in the first place. It is that age old principle that ‘thoughts become things’.

What we think about we bring about

The feeling of being a fraudster or an imposter is much more common than we realise. I deal with it all the time as people feel that they are living and unreal or dishonest lives. Right now as we are trying to come out of lockdown it is on the increase. I have seen GPs, consultants, surgeons, directors, chief execs, actors, performers and worriers in a variety of industries feeling that they cannot do whatever it is that they have been doing for many years. There is an internal conflict and inner doubt. It is as though logically they know they are okay at their job but emotionally they feel that they just can’t do it any more.

Self doubt can be destructive and is often intimidated by other people or circumstances as we have seen from the effects of online trolling and domestic abuse. It can happen after redundancy, divorce or even retirement. The prolong absence from the workplace in lockdown has, for some, had a similar affect. However it is not all bad.

Some self doubt may be a good thing

I believe that a healthy level of self doubt is not only a common thing but, I would maintain, is a positive things. It is powerfully useful to question what we do so that we can review and improve ourselves. It is that mindful magic of being able to observe ourselves positively, not critically, and respond and change as is appropriate to be a better version of who we are.

Arrogance is not confidence

We can mistake the ‘knobby know it all’ for someone who lacks self doubt. However, when someone feels that we are always right some people can then see this as confidence. Sadly, those that need to be always right usually lack the confidence to be questioned or to question themselves. It can be short journey of confidence to arrogance. Once we feel that we know it all we have no where to go and nothing to learn. At that point we become emotionally and mentally stunted and tend to disconnect from those around us. If I believe that I know everything then you have nothing that you can tell me or show me therefore whatever you say is really meaningless.

Of course there are people who are genuinely confident and people who do genuinely know a lot of things. The truly confident person is secure enough to question themselves and to allow other to question them without feeling insecure or reacting emotionally.

Are you confident?

Where does your confidence come from? Or where does you lack of confidence come from? For me, I think that in the first instance it is down to the parents and our upbringing in the early time of life. This is when we establish the foundation of who we are. Unless something happens to make us review and reprogram then we just carry on the same story line for the rest of our life.

Reactive anxiety

We may lose confidence in who we are or what we do at any time in life. This is often a reaction to an event. It could simply be that after a car accident we now question our ability to drive, or for a surgeon following a patient death, an actor who get bad reviews, a sales person who fails to hit their target, a mother who can’t stop her baby crying, the list is endless. The stimulus will vary but it happens when what we thought could always do, or when the things that we did without even thinking are called into question or simply no longer work.

This sense of failure happens to most of us at sometime and then we question our own ability and that is when we can then feel like an imposter. Everybody else sees us and the situation as business as usual and they do not see what is going inside us. If we dare to share with other people what we are actually feeling we often get a ‘pull yourself together’ or ‘don’t be so stupid’ message. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you’. This does change how we are feeling.

Emotion and mind

A developing sense of imposter syndrome can develop from a conflict between our thinking and feeling. The thinking self knows that we are qualified, experienced and capable but the emotional self adds in just that little pinch of doubt. It is then that we can begin to feel like a fraud, that we stupid, incapable.

Mindfulness

I am in danger of sounding like ‘mindfulness fixes all’ though it is usually true. When we have imposter syndrome it is an anxiety and we know that anxieties are learned behaviours which if left alone become our habits. We may begin to learn the concept that we are a failure or that we got it wrong through direct experience or from other people that are influential in our life such as parents, partners, bosses and so on. When we engage in mindfulness we can observe what we are thinking, feeling or doing and we can decide whether or not we want to feed this idea with our attention or starve it by letting it go. 

‘What you feed grows and what you starve dies’.

Perhaps most importantly in mindfulness our observer self can observe our thinking self and our feeling self. Also it can observe what other people are saying to us and how we react to it. It is this observer self that gives us the ability to choose to respond rather than to react. We can then decide whether or not we want to own the feedback that other people are giving to us. Most importantly we have choice.  It is when we have choice that we have the potential to change. If we cannot see the choice then there will not be any change.

In the extreme when we feel unable to shift the negative feelings that make us feel like a failure or an imposter we may need to see a therapist or do a mindfulness or self development course. Most importantly we do not have to put up with it we can change it.

If you are going back into the workplace try and go in with an open mind and pre-empt what might happen. Remember that most of the workforce will be feeling exactly the same things and may need our support to get back into it.

If we all look after each other we will al be okay!

Take care, be happy and be yourself.

Sean x

TSHP413: Retail Therapy After Lockdown

What’s Coming This Episode?

Life is returning to ‘normal’ in the UK and a wall of cash is ready to hit the high street from those that are fortunate enough to have savings from the past year. What makes us want to spend, and what precautions should we take to keep our money out of the hands of scammers?

Enjoy the show, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

Show Notes and Links

Stay in Touch

We’re all over the web, so feel free to stay in touch:

Leave us an Honest Review on iTunes

We’d be amazingly grateful if you could leave us a review on iTunes. It will really help us to build our audience. So, if your like what you hear (and would like to hear more great free content) then visit our iTunes page and leave us an honest review (all feedback gratefully received!).

Retail Therapy After Lockdown

After we did the podcast on smell several people have spoken to me about the idea and other ideas around it. Most seem to agree with me that the constructed world that we live in is no longer natural and rather than smelling like us it smells like a chemist pallet of poisons. Someone said to me that they started thinking about when they were a kid and the phrase ‘someone who has a nose for business’. They payed out to me the tapping of their nose with the first finger of their right hand which, when I was kid translated as ‘good deal’ or ‘a word to the wise’. Anyway the conversation continued to the idea of being  able to smell a rat, a fiddle or a bad deal. Then, we talked about the variety of scams that are now hitting us from the internet. That took us back to another podcast when we had spoken about one of the main deficits in online video calls is the complete lack of smell. The comment was ‘online it is harder to smell a rat’. Interesting comment especially as a we all, apparently, are cash rich from the savings that we have made in lockdown.

Money, Money, Money

Money makes the world go round!  Or so they say. In lockdown the world of retail has, in many ways, ground to a halt. At the same time savings have grown. Now the shops are opening up again and they want our money.

Is it time to send, spend, spend ?

Money is a fantasy. It doesn’t actually exists. The piece of paper, the token, that we call a note, is just that. It is a piece of paper. Every bank note, in every country, has some kind of statement that implies that it is a token that has a value, “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of…” yet if you were to go to the bank of England and ask for your pounds they will probably think that you are mad. The basis of money is that we, as society, agree that the token, the note, has a value that we all agree to maintain.

The need to use money tokens to get beyond the problems of barter became an essential. After all if I am buying your chicken and I want to trade my cow how will give me my change? Anyway, we all use money, often in the form of credit, to create a pool of energy that we can exchange for goods and services, and Christmas means spend, spend, spend. 

If you follow our blogs and the podcasts you will realise the importance of the relationship between various addictive issues/substances and the production of dopamine in the brain and, guess what, money is the same. The need to spend money can spike our dopamine levels. the need to continually spend is a dopamine addiction. Dopamine is known as ‘the love drug’. It is produced by the pleasures centres in the brain and creates feelings of happiness and euphoria. It is these feelings that we crave and become addicted to.

When we crave a ‘love object’ that we just need to buy, our brain is telling us that it needs a squirt of dopamine. But dopamine is a fickle friend. As soon as we achieve our love object, as soon as we buy what we were craving, the drive for dopamine ceases and the love object becomes yesterdays news.  

Lockdown lust

Have you been craving to buy something, perhaps spending many weeks or months saving the money. Now at last you can buy it. It may be your flavour of the month for a little while but soon these feelings will wear off. The problems is that because of your addictive habits your brain will now crave more dopamine. So now you will need a new love object to get it going again. More spend, spend, spend.

Advertisers know this and, like Apple, will change their designs and specifications to keep the dopamine needs of their followers flowing. No one really needs to continually update devices at the rate that the market dictates and yet we all buy into it. Sales people and teams understand this and their sales techniques are designed to get our juices flowing, to increase the flow of dopamine.

In big stores the lighting, the music and the displays all are designed to create more dopamine and, to create the need to have, to own and, to buy. 

When your expenditure exceeds your income, on a regular basis, and you are not living in poverty, then you are probably addicted to retail therapy. What that means is, that like all addicts, you have trained your brain to connect an activity, in this case spending money, to the production of dopamine in your brain’s pleasure centres.

Just as there is nothing wrong with having the occasional blowout on booze there is also nothing wrong with having the occasional spend fest. It is all a matter of proportion. It is when it is out of proportion that it becomes a problems and that means therapy. As with everything in life when you have a problem do something about it, see someone, talk, seek help.

So what cravings have you developed in lock down? What are your love objects?

Holiday? Meal out? New car?

Our drive for retail therapy can leave us open to be scammed. Right now there are lot of scammers who know that we are craving a money dopamine hit and they are after us. Watch your texts and emails. Question before you respond. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is.

My resource for this week is to download the app for your bank and use the facilities and advise that they offer. They all have information about how to avoid being scammed.

Overall when it comes to money the deal is…

love people and use money, do not, love money and use people…

Be happy and spend responsibly enjoy

Sean x