Author: rabbimax

It turns out that happy, successful entrepreneurs share a number of very interesting, psychological and social support strategies that almost guarantees their success. In a 2009 Study of Successful Female Entrepreneurs, the London School of Psychology published an article which analysed the belief systems and social support structures of female entrepreneurs.

What they discovered was alarming for anyone wanting to replicate their success. In addition to all of them maintaining positive mental attitudes, they also had very interesting beliefs about themselves, and had constructed concentric circles of success support.

What are Concentric Circles of Success?

Each of these women, had a deeply held belief that: “The Universe/God Loves Me and wants me to succeed” or “I am Blessed” or similar.

But in addiction to this strange self belief, they also had, a circle of close friends and family that would tell them that they were Loved, lucky, amazing, and that the “The Universe Loves them” and that “They are Blessed!”

If that wasn’t unusual enough, they also had a positive community, church, temple, synagogue or mosque which they visited up to three times a week, which also reiterated the same message from the pulpit and from within the members of the community. That God/The Universe Loves them, wants them to be successful, that they are amazing and blessed!!!

It is these Concentric Circles of Success Support that cause a fundamental change in the minds, hearts and lives of these women.

Each of us might have a particular belief which our close friends and family may reinforce, but not necessarily have a community which reiterates the same values.

Unfortunately it’s usually a bunch of really negative beliefs which our parents, friends and community reinforce.

But here in the above example, these are deeply positive beliefs which, become real and true for these people.

The reason why is because of the regular reinforcement, but also the continued evidence from people not in our immediate circle.

Homework:

Tell yourself “The Universe Loves Me and I am Blessed. “
Choose close friends and family that will tell you: “The Universe Loves You and You are Blessed.”
Find or Create a community that you meet Three times a week which believes and tells you that: “The Universe Loves Us and We are Blessed!”
These concentric circles of success, love and support create a fail-proof positive feedback-loop that The Universe is Love and Everything is a Blessing!

When you were a kid you had a sense that life was an adventure, that you were an explorer, discovering, learning and searching for more of the deliciousness of life.

As babies, we are pleasure seeking creatures, looking to enjoy the bliss of a warm milky embrace, or losing ourselves in the exquisiteness of high pile carpet or playing with food.

In some way you could say that we are wired for bliss, that we are bliss seeking souls, pleasure seeking animals because deep within us, that is our very deepest sense of being.

It could be it’s an evolutionary trick, that all creatures, all life seeks to avoid pain and increase pleasure. Freud penned the ‘Pleasure Principle’ to attempt to describe our core animal need for pleasure as need for sexual fulfillment.

But pleasure isn’t limited to mere sexual gratification, because we as Human Beings can get and experience genuine, deep pleasure and life satisfaction from an almost endless verity of sources.

Not only is our brain wired for pleasure and bliss but our entire body seems to be hardwired for it. Dr Bruce Lipton in his book ‘The Biology of Belief’ explains that almost every cell in a Human body has receptors for opiates (feel good drugs), even though there seems to be no need or evolutionary need for them to be there.

However, as we grow older, we are socially programmed to delay our gratification, we learn that we have to act like boring adults, to ‘grow up and stop enjoying ourselves too much’, and that’s a real shame and potentially one of the main reasons why adults are almost all mildly depressed.

You see, as children we get pleasure for loads of different places, we’re interested in everything, we’re fascinated by how everything works and how we can enjoy it by jumping on or off things, or sticking our fingers in to stuff or challenging our bodies to do fun things they’ve not experienced before.

But as adults, we have three or perhaps four things we get genuine pleasure from, and they usually are:

Primary Relationship
Job
Vice of some shape
That’s because our predominantly Christian Western Culture has made all pleasures a Taboo.

We have collectively embraced ‘Delayed Gratification’, and we live in the misery of a job we at best tolerate during the week, because we’re looking forwards to the weekend. We punish ourselves, getting up in the dark, commuting in the rain and freezing cold, remind ourselves that we’ve booked a holiday somewhere warm in a couple of months.

We self-medicate by getting drunk at any opportunity, watching mindless TV, trivia and titillation, buying things we really don’t need, because deep down we’re dying of quiet desperation. And as a culture we’re miserable because we’ve stopped all of those thousands of avenues of pleasure coming into our lives and flooding our brains with endorphins.

To combat this slippery road to hell, well-meaning New Age therapists, the mildly Buddhist inclined yoga mat carrying, meditation explorers, invented the new cult of ‘Mindfulness’, as a new way to sell their merchandise and help liberate the corporate types imprisoned by suits and constrained by having too much money.

But Mindfulness is a trap, which re-enforces the Western world-veiw and keeps almost everyone stuck in their heads and detached from really enjoying and rediscovering the Blissfulness of being in our body.

Most Human Beings have Five Senses and with a little bit of attention, fun and desire, each of our five senses can become a channel of genuine Blissful, almost orgasmic pleasure.

The Five Senses Exercise takes Mindfulness to the next level!

Each day of your working week, focus your attention on one of your Five Senses.

Monday could be Sight, Tuesday could be Sound, Wednesday Touch, Thursday Smell and Friday could be Taste.

Give yourself permission to really enjoy that one sense. Schedule at least 20 mins of your day to enjoying that sense, where you don’t do anything else, (try to block out your other senses).

You might want to listen to your favorite album, try a new food, touch plush upholstery, watch a beautiful sunset, rip oregano under your nose.

As you get used to allowing yourself to enjoy getting new pleasures from your senses, let yourself get into it deeper, give yourself permission to really get excited and lose yourself in the sensory experience.

And it’s at this juncture of fun and pleasure, just beyond mindfulness that you’ll learn to experience Blissfulness.

Eventually with practice you’ll become a fully integrated childlike spiritual hedonist, a genuine blissful lover of life. You’ll be a little kid in an adult body, jumping to experience everything life has to offer.

You’ll realize that life is here for you, that blissful pleasure is your souls’ true nature, that the very substance of the Universe is love and bliss because you can taste it, you can feel it in every cell of your body.

If your first few years of life, even had a couple of traumatic episodes, your brain would have changed. If you were repeatedly ignored, neglected or abused as a baby or young child, then it’s quite possible that some parts of your brain wouldn’t have developed at all!

Those parts of your brain, just above your Reptilian brain and the anterior structures those specifically between your right and left hemispherical lobes, might just not exist.

These brain structures would normally be help regulate your Fight or Flight response, these are the parts of your Limbic brain related to your sense of Self just wouldn’t have developed like those children who did have highly responsive and empathetic mothers or mother figures.

When a mother responds and is empathetic towards her baby, the babies temporal lobe develops and grows into a number of structures that create a healthy sense of self and the world.

The child learns that the world is a safe and loving place that responds to her needs and provides for her.

When that reciprocal parental communication and nurturing isn’t present and the child is unable to regulate their primitive animal fears, and the Fight or Flight response become the dominant and most active part of the brain.

Mother Child Reciprocal Playing
Those parts of the brain relating to Time, (past, present and future), those parts of the brain relating to her body, and sense of self are simply absent.

This contributes to a sense of Generalized Anxiety, an ambiguous sense of Self, and an inability to forward plan and many other neurological and personality difficulties.

Other signs might include: poor sense of direction, lack of direction in life, poor co-ordination, nervousness, panic attacks, wearing tight clothing or back packs, avoiding eye contact, body disassociation, brain fog, mind going blank at the slightest stress, conflict avoidance, inability to focus especially around noise, anger, inability to self-regulate emotions and bodily sensations, not being aware of bodily cues such as thirst, hunger or being tired, not being completely honest because of fear of not fitting in and other maladaptive behaviors.

Their underlying childhood trauma, is mapped into the fundamental neurological structure of the brain. The childhood trauma, is part of the very personality and perception of themselves and the world.

Almost anything can re-traumatize this child as an adult, and often they will use alcohol, drugs and sex as a form of self-medication for their underlying traumatic stress.

They may have developed Fight or Flight ‘super-powers’, such as hypersensitivity, an over-active visual or auditory perception, unusual feats of memory recall and many others and or socially avoidant behaviors.

Because of the structural lack of those parts of the brain relating to Self, they may feel ‘Empty Inside’ or have a tendency towards depression or any number of personality disorders.

Thankfully there is some real, science and evidence based science that points to actual long term neurological healing of Developmental Childhood Trauma.

All of these treatments have the same thing in common, stimulating and helping to develop those parts of the traumatized brain that didn’t grow in those critical years of childhood.

In contrast to Talking Therapies, these are Neurological and Physical Therapies and practices that move and stimulate, that part of the brain associated with the sense of self and the body. As well as reducing the activity of the Amygdala and Reptilian Brain and the associated Fight or Flight Response.

They all seem ‘alternative’ but the science behind using these therapies shows they are far more successful at treating PTSD and Developmental Childhood Trauma than any Cognitive Therapy or specially designed pharmaceutical drugs.

A Regular Yoga Practice.

Dancing With Other People.

Regular Deep Tissue Massage.

NeuroFeedback Therapy. (Help Me Get a Emotiv Neurofeedback Headset)

EMDR Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. (Particularly Successful for PTSD).

Vipassana.

All this information is collected from a number of different talks and presentations given by Prof Bessel van der Kolk. You can watch the Video below and get his book The Body Keeps the Score.

https://youtu.be/53RX2ESIqsM

Depression is not simply a lack of expression. As Michael Bernard Beckwith would like us to believe. Many people, in the self-help industry myself included, have spent our professional careers preaching to our clients and followers how to avoid the pain of depressive feelings, how to stay positive, how to change your brain pathways, to essentially avoid the pain of the past. And although it’s an important skill to be able to do, to learn how to take control of your own thoughts and eventually feelings, there’s something that dies within us when we don’t embrace the full spectrum of what it means to be human.

If we stay positive the entire time, if we completely avoid ever allowing ourselves to feel pain or low moods, we stunt ourselves, we block our hearts, to our own suffering and more importantly to the suffering and pain of others. There’s a danger that if we believe that state of mind creates our reality, then we can easily lose the necessary human empathy for others less fortunate than ourselves, who aren’t able to change there feelings and their life situation just yet.

We’re meant to have fully living, feeling hearts of flesh, that are able to feel everything, to feel the immense gratitude to the Universe for everything in our lives, to be able to truly celebrate from the depths of our being, but also and more importantly, we’re meant to be able to feel and empathize with the pain and suffering of others.

If we numb ourselves with positive thinking, with making depression into a mere psychosomatic, spiritual, self-fulling prophecy, merely a lack of expression, then we disconnect with the millions of sentient beings on this planet who are feeling pain. And if we have cut ourselves off from our own pain, if we have denied ourselves the luxury and compassion of feeling our own, how are we ever going to have genuine heartfelt compassion and empathy for those who are suffering?

Being positive is all good and well, but don’t fool yourself too much, don’t create a ‘false self’ which hides your real wounds. Don’t push too hard at your mildly fake enthusiasm and pretend you are something you’re not.

Can we embrace our own pain and suffering, whilst not traumatizing ourselves again? Can we live with our pain, and yet still learn to live happily and be deeply grateful and happy?

As Micheal taught us in The Secret “It’s a FEELING Universe”, it’s not our thoughts that create reality but rather our feelings. Thoughts and words are not enough to make sense of being human, it’s not enough to try and change ourselves and the world with thoughts and words.

Words don’t hold the truth, they are like falling cameras, merely snapping at fragmented moments of the Universe. Words are secondary to our brains own experience of life, the primary language of our brain are feelings, colors, rushing of internal visual landscapes.

Depressing feelings can be so deeply heart wrenching and soul opening, that it takes you to fields within yourself that no spaceship can ever imagine to travel.

Often people with manic depression are the most expressive writers, artists and poets who because of their deep variety of feelings and experience are able to communicate and express truths about the human condition, about the nature of reality that other people who aren’t manic would never be able to.

So rather than ignoring and pushing our low moods into the grass, avoiding them, instead let’s realize that depression is part of the full range of human emotion, it is part and parcel of the process of rebirth, just as winter is to spring, and depression opens us up to authenticity and genuine empathy.

It’s about not fearing the pain, darkness and hurt, but allowing it to be and feeling it. It’s OK, it too is Divine… It too is what God wants you to experience as a human being and there in your heart break that’s where you become whole. As the Kotzker Rebbe said: “There’s nothing more whole than a broken heart.”

I feel it’s important to respect and notice our low moods just like we would notice and respect the weather. But just as the weather, our low moods are not us.

It might come as a surprise to some people reading this, but we are NOT our feelings, feelings are merely experiences, like the weather, low moods, like grey clouds come and they go and yes, if your not prepared for the weather, then it might be a little bit annoying all the way up to terrifying, but if you know that low and high moods are a natural part of being human, you can feel safe to feel them, to embrace them.

If you don’t feel even mildly depressed seeing homeless people suffering from mental and emotional health problems, addiction and social exclusion in our cities, then something human in you has died, if you don’t feel upset by other peoples suffering, how will you ever genuinely connect with another?

Knowing yourself better, will make your own low moods and depression easier to manage, you might want to make sure you follow some of the great advice on this website for example, about sleeping well, being active, eating food that will encourage the stabilization and mood improvement, but don’t deny yourself the full range of human feelings.

It’s okay to feel and even enjoy all of the seasons of your moods, and when things get tough and you feel really low and very depressed, know that you’re allowed to cry, you’re safe to feel everything that’s in your heart.

Like tears, rain pours and at the right time you might even choose to go out in the pouring rain and allow yourself to feel everything it wants to give you. You will become a greater, more authentic human being for doing so.

Those people who have had secure, safe and loving childhood relationships, know it’s okay to feel upset without that defining who they are, they allow themselves to cry, they are able to then brush themselves down, knowing that they are deeply loved and cared for by their parents and ultimately by life itself.

Whatever happens, you can weather the storm, because eventually, just like a winter storm these clouds will pass, and there will be blue skies and sunshine, there will be moments of love, incredible joy, insight and laughter.

When you’re ready, you’ll be all of yourself from the highest and most bliss-ful to the lowest and most abys-mal without you cracking at the seams. You’ll be able to hold both and be both without being attached to either. All of you present to the wondrous glory of the great mystery which shines through you.

When you’re feeling happy, confident and hopeful, something happens to your body, its posture changes, your chest maybe open, your face smiling and eyes twinkling, your body-langue changes.

Hundreds of groups of muscles and tendons work together seamlessly without you even knowing, and you magically stand out above those around you, you seem deeply grounded, you exude something magnetically mesmerizing, there’s a bounce in your step makes it appear that don’t walk but rather you float effortlessly from one place to the next.

Any people around you instantaneously react to your posture, and they feel comforted and even attracted to it.

But it works the other way around too! Simply by consciously choosing to hold Positive Postures for a couple of minuets, your brain starts to produce the drugs that would have normally accompanied the posture. So by simply standing happy, you can feel happy, holding power poses makes you feel powerful.

The same is true for smiling too, if you force yourself to grin and smile, your brain will start to produce the internal drugs that make you feel like smiling.

So if you’d like a bit of a jump start to feeling happier today, make Positive Posturing, and fake smiling part of your morning or daily routine, stand large, smile and grin like an inane laughing Buddha or Cheshire cat, The lesson to take away is, when it comes to happiness you can, Fake It Until You Make It!

Anxiety, fear and mild panic attacks are surprisingly common, especially after a persevered argument or altercation with a friend, boss or random person. When we imagine that we’re being threatened our Fight or Flight response kicks in and we stop responding in a reasonable and calm way.

But there are lots of things, tools, tricks and techniques that can significantly reduce your general stress and anxiety, and may even work in cases of acute anxiety too.

F.E.A.R = False Evidence Appearing Real.

Often our worry and imagine the worst case scenario, and play our scenes that are often MUCH worse than the actual reality of the event we’re worrying about.

Focus entirely on something else.

Stop triggering your adrenal glands and insulin production:

Reduce your intake of caffeine, nicotine, coffee and tea. Replace them with Herbal Teas especially ones that contain, Chamomile and Lavender.
Reduce your consumption of Sugar, white flour products, such as white bread, rice and pasta. Replace them with Wholemeal versions, which are Complex Carbohydrates, good fats and protein.
Keep your blood sugars nice and even, if you need to, eat small and often.
Fear and anxiety come from fundamentally seeing and experiencing yourself as separate and distinct from the world, but that’s not the only way to view reality. You are One with the universe, and becoming aware of your connection and unity with others and the world will do amazing things to reduce your fear and anxiety.

Repeat to yourself for 20 mins: “I’m loved and safe just as I am”

Actively help others, for example: give bananas and clementines to the homeless? By actively going out of your way to help others, your own preoccupation with your own worries will fall away.

If the above advice doesn’t reduce your anxiety, please do contact your local C.B.T (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) practitioner.

What if you found out that an illegal drug was directly implicated in over 80% of violent crime? That this drug was taken at least 20 mins before the majority of murders, stabbings, shootings, random beatings and violent marital abuse? Wouldn’t you want that drug to be investigated, controlled or banned?

This drug isn’t alcohol, this isn’t Spice, or some new synthetic narcotic, this drug is Sugar, you’ve probably got it hanging around at home in your kitchen cupboard.

You may not believe it, you might be saying to yourself, what’s the harm of a bit of sugary deliciousness? the occasional naughty treat, or that wholesale secret sugar blow out? Right?

Psychologists found that children exposed to high levels of White Refined Sugar between the ages of 7 and 11 years old, where 50% more likely to burst in to rage, and behave violently as adults, compared to adults that hadn’t been exposed to Sugar.

White Refined Sugar does something to the brains of children and adults, and it’s not just that it stimulates the same brain centers as Cocaine, it also wires them for a predisposition for extreme rage and murderous violence.

There’s probably a number of reasons why it has this effect, sugar bypasses our body’s natural food processing system, and is molecularlly small enough to pass straight through into the blood stream and to the brain.

It effects the production of insulin and when our lovely drug filled dopamine sugar rush is over, we experience a sugar low, and then the horrible triggering our adrenal glands.

This is where the extreme low mood, violence, suicidal feelings and murderous rage rears there ugly heads.

So if Happiness is something you want to have more of, and anger, road rage and low moods something you want to have less of, then making sure you don’t have a low blood sugar crash, is probably a sensible idea.

If you’re new to all this stuff, this means, generally avoiding foods that will peak your blood sugars, (with refined sugars, white breads/wheat/rice etc) and eating more of foods with complex carbohydrates, moderate amounts of good fats and proteins.

Kids sometimes think that if they go to sleep before everyone else, they’re going to miss something, going to miss out on all the fun. And even as adults we seem to carry that same or similar belief around with us nowadays it’s called #FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) .

In addition to our own beliefs, we’ve got powerful ideas in our culture that deny the importance of sleep, and view it as a waste of time:, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”, and “party all night long!” and of course it is nice to stay up all night with friends and party till the sunrise, but that’s when you don’t have to wake up in the morning and you can afford give yourself the rest and time to recuperate over the next few days.

There are some people who simply have become addicted to working too hard and being continually exhausted, or staying up so late that they fall deeply asleep as their heads hit the pillow.

But sleeping problems are very common, being a lite sleeper, not being able to sleep or waking up in the middle of the night or very early in the morning and not being able to get back to sleep and feeling tired, grumpy and irritable most of the next day.

Sometimes we get so used to this type of pattern that we think it’s normal and being waking up depressed or in a bad mood as part of our personality. “I’m not a morning person!” or the countless caffeine cult memes which say: “Talk to me after I’ve had my coffee”.

The problem is that it’s proven sleep deprivation, continued disturbed sleep, or erratic sleep patterns, do contribute to changes in brain chemistry, having a detrimental effect on the actual brain structure and can be a major contributor to depression.

And the crazy thing is, despite it seeming anti-intuitive, it turns out that sleeping less doesn’t make you ANY more productive! People who sleep for 12 out of 24 hours get just as much done, in those 12 waking hours as people who only sleep 4 in their 20 waking hours.

Sleeping more, makes you more productive, it makes you happier and healthier.

So if you are committed to your own happiness, if you’re serious about getting and remaining happy, then good, deep, regular and healthy sleep is going to have to be a priority.

There will be those reading this who are parents of young children and babies, and will be screaming and pulling your hair out in incoherent monosyllabic utterances vaguely resembling sentences, that it’s impossible to get enough sleep when you’re a parent of young kids, but I beg you to seek the help and support of your immediate family, friends and community to invest in your own sleep. Getting as much sleep as you can will benefit your own mental health and the well-being of the entire family.

If you’ve got a new baby, sleep when it sleeps, wake when it wakes, allow yourself and indulge in sleep at this important time. It can be an amazing opportunity for you to rest and recuperate with the rhythm of your baby.

Either way if you’ve been having difficultly sleeping, the following advice will be useful:

Make sure you’ve got a comfortable bed, soft sheets, covers made of natural fibers and a heavy duvet.
De-clutter your bedroom so it becomes a place of sanctuary, rest and retreat.
Don’t do work or watch TV in your bedroom.
Make sure your room is dark, without much light pollution.
Turn down the temperature of your home when you’re sleeping.
Get in to the habit of winding down, before bedtime, perhaps, reading a book, or listening to relaxing music or a calming meditation.
Cut down on, or if possible totally eliminating caffeinated stimulants.
Drink chamomile and lavender herbal teas a couple hours before bedtime.
Take a power nap during the day.
If you find yourself waking up worrying about things you think you need to do tomorrow, place a pad and pen next to your bed and write a list of those ‘important’ bits of information and tell yourself, now that it’s written down, you can sort it out in the morning.

The bottom line is that sleep is really important and it’s a fallacy to imagine and continue yourself that you don’t need it or even worst don’t deserve it.

You need sleep, and once your get into a habit you’ll desperately look forward to the absolute luxury or resting, winding down and sleeping soundly throughout the night and you’ll wake up, happy rejuvenated and ready to dance your way through the day.

The mystics talk about Deep Relaxation being a form of “Redemption”, and they’d be right.

We are all overly stressed, working too hard, quietly exhausted, unnecessarily nervous, socially anxious, frightened and holding on to far too much tension deep in the very tissue and bones of our bodies.

Most people don’t even know how stressed they really are, because we’re culturally habituated to long term, low level stress as something normal and to be expected, because we’ve all got jobs and responsibilities that cause us stress on a daily basis.

Bombarded by noise, visual distractions vying for our attention, caffeine, email, messenger, comparing ourselves to who society thinks we should be, traveling to and from work in urban environments, relaxation and especially a therapeutically significant deep relaxation may seem hard to come by.

You might find it in a relaxing bath at the end of a long day, you might stumble across it the moments just before you’re falling asleep, or during a massage treatment or accidentally in a meditation session.

But more than anything else, Deep Relaxation is something that we all desperately need to include in our lives, and need to learn how to feel it, to experience it, and to allow its calming warm embrace to wash over us with the most incredible delicateness imaginable.

Deep Relaxation could become part of your daily lifestyle, and integral and foundation of your personal identity.

It could literally change your life and change your internal body chemistry, by lowering levels of cortesol, adrelinine, and increasing the release of dopamine and seretonine.

Regular experiences of Deep Relaxation in a similar way to meditation, will rewire your brain, calm your nerves, improve your mood and help you to feel much, much happier in life.

You can gradually learn to relax almost every muscle in your body (although avoid relaxing your tummy muscles fully) and discover the bliss-like joy that Deep Relaation can bring.

The idea is that the more you enjoy the experience of Deep Relxation, the more you’ll want to experience it, and the more internal relaxation drugs you’ll eventually release and become addicted to. This way, you’ll learn what it feels like to be very relaxed and notice when people or situations move you out of that feeling zone.

One day you’ll be so used to being a feeling relaxed that you just won’t understand the attraction to getting stressed and having a panic attact. Deep Relaxation will feel normal and totally lovely and who you really are.

I’d recommend two daily Deep Relaxation exercises, first thing when you wake up, sometime durring the day and just before you go to sleep :

Progressive Muscle Tension Relaxation

Breathing out darkness and breathing in light

Healthy Relationships are like searching for the Holy Grail in Disneyland.

According to recent relationship science only 11% of couples are in an emotionally secure and healthy relationship.

Which means that close to 90% of people in relationships are struggling or are deeply unhappy. That’s bad news for you and bad news for the billions of people effected by living in unhealthy relationships and relationship breakdown, including children, friends and family.

This is especially bad news for anyone, who is still idealistically looking for ‘the one’ or ‘Mr/Mrs Right’, especially those who’ve been reading those super-unrealistic spiritual shopping lists of the new requirements of what we can expect in an enlightened man or woman.

Let me just say this again only 11% of couples are in healthy and emotionally secure relationships, 50% of people currently married or in relationships will split up and get divorced, while the other close to 40% of couples live unhappily together, for the sake of their children, or just for convenience.

Your chances of happily ever after are slim, and this depressing science based figure of 11% seems so counter-intuitive and contrary to every romantic thing we’ve been fed by society, friends, western culture and the media.

We’ve all grown up with an unspoken romantic dream, that we’ll find someone, settle down and live happily ever after. That we’ll find someone who will make us happy, that will tick all of those boxes, that will fill that deep emptiness we feel in our hearts.

We’re born into a culture which paints happy and healthy relationships not only as the norm but something everyone can expect, and demand but without any real education about how relationships work or how we can make them work, it’s as though Nature and “Love” will take care of it. “All you need is love.” Or that “when you find your other half, you’ll feel happy, and you’ll be complete.”

You might assume that simply being a nice person, having intelligence, wealth and good looks might help to sustain a healthy relationship, but unfortunately the evidence doesn’t agree.

Pretty people don’t have better or longer relationships, as long as you’re earning enough money to cover your bills, being wealthy doesn’t help much either.

You might think that intelligence helps but it doesn’t, even the most intelligent and gifted people on the planet, really struggle to make relationships work: Einstein, Elon Musk and even Tony Robins (self-help guru), all succeeded in many areas of human endeavour where most people fail, but failed to be able to create and maintain long term healthy and secure relationships.

It seems that unhealthy relationships can’t simply be fixed with super clever thinking or problem solving, and healthy relationships can’t be created using state-of-the-art computer algorithms, well at least not just yet.

The most depressing statistic gleaned from ‘The Science of Happily Ever After” is that at very least 97% of singles on the dating scene are seriously unlikely to ever be able to build and sustain healthy secure, long term relationships.

But there is some slim hope.

There has been a lot of research in the field of relationships over the past fifty years, and the main evidence based science of relationship styles is called ‘Attachment Theory‘. In it they studied how very young children react to being left by their primary caregiver/parent and how the children and parent behave on their return and suggests that there are at least 3 main types of reactions, which to a large extent effect all of our subsequent relationships.

These are:

Secure – loving, healthy inter-dependence where both parties feel safe to be together and be apart.
Avoidant – needs aren’t met, they become overly independent and avoid real intimacy for fear of being hurt.
Anxious– not sure if they are loved and constantly testing if they are loved, pushing and pulling.
Despite over 60% of the population claiming to be open and able to be in a secure relationships, as mentioned above, the proof is in the pudding and only 11% of couples are actually in a secure relationship.

The interesting thing to remember is that once a healthy loving couple are in a secure relation, it’s unlikely that those relationships will come to an end any time soon, but there is some movement in both directions approximately 3% of the population. Individuals can move from healthy to unhealthy relationships, and more importantly, people can move from anxious, avoidant relationships and personality styles into long term, secure and long-term healthy loving relationships.

And for a relationship to truly grow and blossom we need to be able to move from the anxious and avoidant styles into secure style relationships.

Therapists disagree about how to help people and couples in anxious or avoidant styles of attachment. Traditional talking therapists who have been educated and trained in Attachment Theory, suggest that their clients can learn to experience a form or surrogate secure attachment with the therapist. Others suggest that a form of talking therapy called Imago can be done within the dysfunctional relationship itself. The theory, which is based on a mixture of Attachment Theory and Freudian ideas, suggests that we are actually romantically attracted to people who are most likely to touch and open our deepest emotional wounds, respectively, and it is with our romantic partner that we can learn to talk and listen to each other in a way that both are understood.

There is hope! You can move from anxious or avoidant personality/relationship styles into secure personality and relationship styles.

Here’s how you can do it:

Heal your relationship with your parents. This is perhaps the most challenging but most rewarding thing you can do to move your deep-seated relationship with life and current and future relationships from avoidant and anxious to secure and healthy. This might mean learning to understand and forgive your parents for not being perfect or indeed being neglectful or even abusive. This doesn’t mean you have to let them hurt you any more, but understanding that they were probably also neglected as children and their emotional needs were most definitely not met.
Learn to accept that Life Loves You. Our primary relationship with our parents, is often transferred to how we view and experience the world around us. Our childhood reaction to our first relationships become an emotional lens which we view the world through. Life might therefore seem unfair, hard, painful or cold and unsupportive of who we are and our needs. But this can change, and you can learn to change your relationship with life and the whole world. Just as the Earth supports all of life, and provides for every creatures needs, so too Life loves and supports you.
Be in more loving and secure relationships. If you’re already in a relationship and you both want it to work, then you can both help each other to create and model a more loving and secure relationship style. Yes, there will undoubtedly be difficulties, but as you both move to heal your relationships with parents and life, you’ll be able to create a better and healthier relationship in your current one. You can learn how secure relationships work and model, identify, feel and behave in ways that feel like secure and healthy relationship styles.

Life Coaching traditionally doesn’t deal with your messy emotions, instead it helps you clarify your goals, change your thinking and beliefs and your actions. This behavioral approach, which is borrowed from CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) works for lots of people who are otherwise stuck in their heads, but unfortunately, what the industry is blind to, is that, even for those people it does work for, it’s not a long term fix.

It’s like trying to move your body across a room with just your head, your head and your thoughts are great, but it’s your whole body, your whole self that actually moves you forwards in your life. It’s the same with your life, having goals, taking control of your thoughts is hugely important but if you’re emotionally sabotaging, in pain, anxious or angry, with all the good will in the world, it’s not going to work.

You might have noticed that in almost all of the life coaching books, courses and training workshops, there’s a section on ‘imagining’ and ‘visualizing’ your ‘ideal future’, the problem with that is, it’s not vital that you are good at visualizing, or have a great imagination.

Many people who aren’t visual thinkers struggle and give up at this point, and believe that there’s either something wrong with them or that life coaching doesn’t work. But what the exercise is meant to help you do is, ‘Emotionally Identify’ with and get excited by the FEELING of that potential, ideal future. So it doesn’t matter if you can’t imagine, what you have to do instead is Feel, and if you can get excited and feel what it might be like to live the life you dream about, then you’re more than half way there to making it become a reality.

So if you want to move your life forwards, it’s vital that your emotions are not only involved but they are happy and excited by the prospects of you changing your life for the better.

The problem is that most of us are deeply emotionally wounded by life, and by the time we are adults we’ve been run over by heart break and punished by society so many times that our hearts are almost completely unavailable for the task of getting truly impassioned and feeling that we even deserve to be happy.

So if we truly want to move our lives forward, we are going to have to deal with our often whirling negative emotions, and heal our emotional scaring. The best, quickest and most powerful way to heal your heart is annoyingly simple.

The technique I’m going to share with you is very simple but for many it is also very difficult. And before you dismiss my suggestion, let me explain how it works on a deeper level.

Whether you’ve heard of ‘Inner Child Therapy’ or not, it’s easy to understand that we’re shaped by our early childhood experiences, traumas and identity. Often as children we where powerless to have any agency over our own lives. We probably didn’t have a perfect or ideal childhood and even if we think we did, often out inner child is still hurting from some either minor or major need for love not being met.

As adults we internalize elements of our parents, the things they taught us about life and about ourselves. But as adults now, there is no one else in our heads, we are merely replaying the voices or our parents. But as adult we also need to take responsibility for our own thoughts and the feelings they create within us.

In order to fundamentally change our lives we have to challenge the deepest held childhood beliefs, which limit, sabotage or hold us back from living a life that we can truly love.

This will take some time and even a bit of effort, but as I mentioned it’s a very simple technique that you can do anywhere as many times a day as you can until you notice and start to feel the deep shift that it will undoubtedly create in your heart and your life.

This emotional self healing exercise must been done every day, ideally in the morning and before you go to sleep. Closing your eyes and placing your hands on your heart, say to yourself “I am Safe and I am Loved”.

Repeat this like a mantra meditation over and over, for at least 20 minutes. You might notice that to start with this is really difficult, there might be voices within you that challenge or argue against this message. That’s okay, the voice of discontent is actually the voice of your ‘Inner Child’, she is probably very upset with your adult self.

But stay with it, even if at times the words seem meaningless, keep allowing yourself to say the words until the opposition calms down, and you begin to feel something mildly positive.

Eventually and with dedication and practice, this daily mantra meditation will seep into your conscious and unconscious mind and heart and you will start to actually feel a genuine love for your inner child and for your self.

This simple affirmation, heals your inner pain and suffering, your inner parental archetypes start working to help and support you, giving you unconditional love and support, your childhood scars slowly start to mend and heal themselves and you begin to truly feel that you deserve a happy and joyous life.

Our minds are like a car engine, it seems that they are always running, always thinking about and ruminating over something. At night our conscious mind is in ‘neutral’ and when we wake, we put it into gear and off we go!

The problem is that just like a car our minds do have a steering wheel, but for some reason most people where never told about it, and they sit there, in the driving seat of their lives, with their hands firmly folded, and wonder why when they put their foot on the gas, they often end up in ditches, hitting trees, lampposts or heading over the edge of a cliff!? often screaming: “Why is this always happening to me?”

So what is the steering wheel in our mind and how do we grab hold of it and learn how to change the direction of our thoughts and focus?

Most people, find it difficult to believe that they can have any control of their own thoughts, often people feel more like victims of their thoughts than the director and originator of them. But you can, with practice, learn how to grab hold of that internal mental steering wheel and change what you are thinking about and emotionally focusing on.

Our thoughts and imagination are super powerful in shaping and effecting the direction of our lives and the quality of life, and it is our ability to take charge and control of our thoughts that determine whether we are a victim of out thoughts and end up in hitting every bump in the road or taking charge and directing our life towards the open road, towards an epic, glorious action packed adventure of a lifetime!

The problem is that for many people their minds are often full of negative, self-loathing and damaging self talk, and imaging the worst case scenarios. For others there mind might be full of noisy conflicting voices, images, feelings and thoughts, which makes the notion of taking charge of their own thoughts seem almost impossible.

The basic premise is that:

1. There is no one in your head apart from you!
2. You are the source and originator or all of the thoughts in your head.
3. You have the choice to think about or not to think about anything you want to.

When I first came across the idea that I was totally responsible and in control of my own thoughts, I found it counter-intuitive, and the opposite of my own internal experience of my own thoughts. For me at the time, thoughts existed somewhere else outside of me, or as a jumble of arguing voices fighting for attention.

The first thing to do, to learn to grab the steering wheel in your head is simply to see if you can focus on something for a minute.

Exercise 1. Focus On One Thing For One Minute.

For example you could choose an interesting object or anything and allow yourself to focus completely on that one object for a minute. You can think about where it comes from, what it’s made of etc… and just notice if you can do that, or if you find your mind wondering on to other things, like work or other random stuff?

If you can keep your attention on that object for a minute, then well done! that is you touching, and putting your hands on the stbeep-volumeeering wheel of your mind and ultimately the rudder of your life!

If you foun
d that difficult, there are a number of fun exercises that I’ve developed that have helped me to take complete control of all of my thoughts, and will help you learn how to take more control of your own mind and the main organ that determines the quality of your life.

Exercise 2. Play With the Internal Audio Dials.

You may think in any number of ways, people all think differently, some are more visual thinkers, others more auditory, but even so, there is something you can to to start to take control of your thoughts. If you are plagued by random negative thoughts, or a jumble of noisy voices in your head, then if you follow this you’ll be able to take more control:

If you imagine that there are two audio volume dials for the noise in your head, you can slowly turn down the volume of the rabble of thoughts in your head, and with the other audio volume you can turn up the volume of your own internal speaking voice.

You can do this so that eventually the main voice is your head is the one that you would normally speak with. This voice can become the main and dominant voice in your head.

Exercise 3. Record Your Random Stream of Consciousness.

All of the jumble of voices, images and thoughts in your head and heart, feel that they are really important, otherwise they wouldn’t randomly interrupt your work or other important stuff.

In this exercise you’ll need a pad and a pen, or equivalent. The idea is to direct all of your internal thoughts to line up in an orderly cue, inform them that each of them are important to you and you value them. You want to be able to record them for prosperity in a book, ask them to line up and one at a time, you’ll write them down, without judging them. This might get a little tricky as they are often inclined to push and shout, but just reassure them that everyone will get their turn and that if it’s super important they can, have another chance by getting to the back of the cue, once they have been written down.

So one by one, write down each of these random thoughts, don’t judge them, just write them down, once they have been written down ask them to go, simply go out into the universe, they have been witnessed and recorded, (like interview, if you feel they need more consideration you could invite them back, but for now say, good bye!).

This process of writing down all of your random thoughts might take a relatively long time, but if you get in a practice of doing this for 20 mins a day, after a few weeks, you’ll probably notice that there are a lot less random noisy voices in your head.

What I found, when I invented this exercises was that, after a while there was not that much in my head at all. Eventually there was only a pretty simple and boring poem. Don’t read too much into the random stuff that comes out of your brain, just let it be, and leave it recorded in your note pad, without re-reading it, unless it is amazing of course.

After practicing all of the above mind controlling exercises you’ll find that, after a few weeks your brain will be much quieter and distinctly calmer.

If you’d like to learn more about these and many other mental resilience exercises or learn how to do it in person simply book your Initial Consultation!

Happiness is largely a choice, something you can learn to significantly change. It’s a science mental resilience, self love, healthy relationships,of gut bacteria, nutrition, exercise, emotional healing, life purpose and self-empowerment.

MENTAL RESILIENCE

Learn how to master your thoughts, so that you radically reduce and manage anxiety or stress. You’ll learn how to control your thoughts. I can teach you how to calm your racing thoughts, to take back control over your own mind. Learn how to think positively, and eliminate unhelpful, random thoughts which might be undermining your movement forwards in life. The techniques that you’ll learn will take practice but they are easy to implement and the results are amazing.

EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING

Emotionally focused life coaching helps you change how you FEEL about yourself. It’s our Primarily Emotional Identity (P.E.I) that shapes and motivates real change. Re-identify with happier, more life affirming emotional identities, takes serious emotional effort, intelligence & maturity. It also takes a little bit of craziness or “insanity” and a willingness to jump outside of ourselves.

To break the chains of personality addiction, to admit we are addicts to our fundamental feelings and begin the process of emotional re-identification. Changing ourselves on such a primary level means that the person we thought and felt we were has to die. We have to let go of all the pain and suffering in our lives, to embrace it learn from it and let it go. To realize that we are not our suffering.

At the center of every Self Help book or program is a chapter or paragraph about “Self Love”, but actually doing and practicing being loving and kind to yourself after a lifetime of self loathing can be very difficult and hard to actually put into practice.

HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS

Relationships can be amazing, but they can often be very difficult too. Learn how to create a deep loving, healthy and long-lasting relationship. We more often or not learn how to be in relationships from our parents and often that example isn’t always the healthiest or best for us in the long run. Men and women often end up in relationships that directly or indirectly reflect those relationships with their own parents. There are three types of relationships styles: anxious, avoident and secure, that we inherit from our childhood relationship experiences. We often continue to have and create the same type of relationships as we had with our parents. But for a relationship to truly grow and blossom we need to be able to move from the anxious and avoident styles into secure style relationships. The other important factor in heterosexual relationships are the roles of men and women. In our culture men are often psychologically emasculated and women are masculated. Sexual polarity diminishes and mediocrity sets in. Relationship Coaching re-polerises the sexes and encourages both partners to move up into a deeply secure loving relationship.

NUTRITIONAL HEALTH

The Key to happiness is a happy Gut because 90% of Serotonin is produced in your Gut. Learn how to improve you gut health and your total happiness. Giulia Enders in her international best selling book “Gut” explains how our gut flora and bacteria are the bodies biggest producer of serotonin the natural feel-good drug. Enders and Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride in her book “Gut and Psychology Syndrome” have gone a long way to proving the link between the gut and depression and other psychological disorders. It turns out that general antibiotics given for any number of normal medical conditions can totally wipe out our healthy gut bacteria and therefore our own natural source of feel good chemicals and drugs.

People unknowingly continue with their sugar filled, carb rich diets which in turn feeds the bad gut bacteria causing more yeast production and the weakening of the gut wall. Often this can lead to a situation called “leaky gut syndrome” where toxins that should be eliminated by the bowls are managing to get into the blood and brain causing all kinds of negative psychological effects.

But it’s not all bad news there is a way to fix the gut and replenish your gut with good powerful healthy gut bacteria.

PHYSICAL ACTIVITY & WELL-BEING

You exist in a body and your body is the place where Happiness is produced and experienced. Regular fun, hot and sweaty exercise is vital for a healthy and happy body but more importantly regular physical activity has been proven to be significantly better at beating depression than any talking /psychological therapy. But it’s important to find ways to get moving that are genuinely fun and give you pleasure otherwise it’s unlikely that you’ll being doing them for very long.

It seems that in order to be truly happy, simply having enough stuff, isn’t enough. We need meaning and purpose in and to our lives.

This is because being human, is an inherently strange experience, compared to the non-existence that came before it. We are on some level aware that before we were conceived we don’t have any memory of existing at all and now being alive, we’re supposed to feel completely comfortable being the only species on Earth conscious of its own mortality.

This need for meaning and purpose, a need to make sense of our lives is at the core of what it means to be human. For whatever reason, simply being alive, simple subsistence living, doesn’t seem to make us happy, for some reason, human beings need a purpose, a reason, we need to be able to make sense of being alive.

We aren’t merely content with accepting the status quo, we long for self awareness, for connection, for inner peace and feel as though our life has made a difference.

Therefore the desire for a life mission, ideally one that will benefit the world, feeling that what we do is sacred and important, is at the heart of what it means to be self-actualized. It means you have figured out what you are doing here, and what is you lifes’ mission.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs puts “SELF ACTUALIZATION” at the TOP of the pyramid! Which means that eventually if we genuinely want to be happy, in addition to our basic needs of food, shelter, safety and community, we will also need to learn how to practice self mastery, fulfill our true potential, how to find creative and ultimately spiritual fulfillment.

In some sense we could see it the other way around, we are all much more that just human beings, we are also spiritual beings searching for meaning and for deep happiness being human.

So this is your task, to discover your purpose, to find out what you are truly here for, what is the meaning of your life and to live your purpose with passion.

Everyone is unique and has something extra-ordinary to contribute to Life, everyone, no matter their situation can find meaning and happiness.

When we live with meaning and purpose, believing that our every thought, word, and deed does in fact make a difference, then our lives can become touched by the extraordinary. We have more health, joy and laughter. We feel brighter, more connected, and others feel more enriched in our company.

Have you ever noticed that loads of Self Help courses, books, etc offer you a “Money Back Guarantee”? That if you follow their EXACT ADVICE and don’t see the results your looking for they promise to refund the full price of whatever it is?

I’ve been there, we all have, being really excited about a new Self Help book or program or holiday retreat, giving it your best shot and then a few weeks later BLAMING YOURSELF that it didn’t work or the changes didn’t last that long, and you’re back to where you started from?

You’ve tried “Will Power”, you’ve pushed yourself, you’ve even gone so far as to “Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway!” But it doesn’t last. Your body fights back, the animal in you doesn’t appreciate you having your foot on its back, forcing it to do things that it doesn’t want to do.

You might wrongly assume that “Will Power” and “Discipline” is what you need to move your life forwards to where you deep down believe it should be.

But rather than really moving you forwards it pushes you artificially towards, hopes and dreams that you are not entirely comfortable with and ultimately short lived. This is because “Will Power” is built on the premise, that you are rubbish, lazy or stupid and you have to fight yourself, “toughen up” and change, to get results.

That’s why almost every single Self Help program DOESN’T actually work long term, and why many of them, offer a “Money Back Guarantee” because that small part of your brain that ‘Knows’ what you’re meant to be doing doesn’t have the “Will Power” to fight the REST of you without there being some kind of internal mutiny.

We can “try” to stop a bad habit, to get more positive, change your life, but your heart and body is, at best begrudgingly going along with it for a while, or at worst saying “F*K YOU, I’m not doing this sht! I’m gonna sabotage this big time!” Using “Will Power”, you are just continuing to beat yourself up and tell yourself that you’re “not good enough as you are”.

However externally successful people think they have become using “Will Power” and “Discipline” – inside they’re really crying. Inside unfortunately, they’re probably not as happy as they could be, because they’ve been fighting themselves, instead of loving and nurturing themselves.

One of the reasons why we find ourselves stuck and unable to move forwards in life is because our emotions, personality and identity are in conflict with the more rational part of our brain that “knows” exactly what we’re meant to be doing.

The problem is that we’re all addicts, addicted to the drugs of emotion or “personality”, and it’s very difficult to let go of those feelings because we’re 98% “Pleasure Seeking Animal” and only 2% “Rational Human Being”, what we get pleasure from and our identity are deeply associated with each other.

If we just stopped for a moment an listened to the dull quiet rumble of everyday life, we would notice that, without the phone, tablet, computer, T.V, radio, newspapers, magazines and frenzied busyness of our lives, without the constant noise in our heads, life is actually rather quiet, dull and for many unnervingly boring. It’s on this background of the boring, mild and gentle ups and downs of everyday life, that the painful or amazing peaks and troughs in our impressionable emotional life, really stick out.

These peak emotional experiences, very strong or overwhelming feelings are also a combination of internal drugs, hormones and chemicals that we become secretly addicted to. We then create and reinforce the neurological patterns, thoughts, that trigger the flood of these drugs as often as we feel we need to.

These could be intensely positive or negative feelings, or no feelings at all, you’re inner emotional addict (body) doesn’t mind. It’s hooked to the intensity of these emotional experiences, so we secretly hold on to them, cherish them, get pleasure from them and unconsciously recreate situations where we can re-experience them again and again. Therefore, peak emotional experiences become very important and significant to us.

We identify with these peak emotional experiences and because no one else is feeling what we are experiencing, we identify with them on a very deep level of our being.

We wrongly assume that these unique feelings and experiences define who we are. “This is who I am.” It’s our Primary Emotional Identity (PEI) which shapes our view of ourselves and the world. So in order to truly transform our it would be sensible to discover what our PEI is and where it originated from? Once you’ve found out what you PEI is you can learn to change it.

Of course I am also interested in thoughts and our internal dialogue, however, positive thinking is not enough to truly change our lives and who we are. That’s why our emotional selves our PEI is so important in this transformation.

To Re-identify with happier, more life affirming emotional identities, takes serious emotional effort, intelligence & maturity. It also takes a little bit of craziness or “insanity” and a willingness to jump outside of ourselves.

To break the chains of personality addiction, to admit we are addicts to our fundamental feelings and begin the process of emotional re-identification. Changing ourselves on such a primary level means that the person we thought and felt we were has to die.

We have to let go of all the pain and suffering in our lives, to embrace it learn from it and let it go. To realize that we are not our suffering. We are not the lessons the University of Hard Knocks/ aka University of Life, has taught us.

Who we are is that person we were before school, before our parents, teachers and peers knocked the joy of life out of us. And who we dream we can be, given the love and support we desire to fulfill our potential, and live happily ever after.

Moving Forwards
When we where kids, we got pleasure from hundreds of different places. All of our senses were involved in exploring and discovering more about the world. We were mini adventurers, little pleasure seeking beings in search of even more fun.

But then something happened, they through you into school, told you to shut up and sit down, stop exploring and playing and start learning that you are not the only person in the world.

By the time we’re adults, we don’t get pleasure from many places at all, perhaps from our job, our primary relationship, and something else and if one of those three or four sources of pleasure get undermined we’re in trouble.

We’ve forgotten how to play, how to switch off from the business and productivity. I believe that “Pleasure” and “Identity” are our primary motivators, so expanding our sources of pleasure, getting in touch with our inner child and allowing that child to move us forward. It’s not enough just to look at your life now and know what you’re not happy about, to realise what you don’t want. Because that will only move you forwards out of a lacking.

So whatever dream you have for your future, make sure it’s something that makes you deeply happy, an idea, vision or feeling of who you’d like to be and the life that you’d like to live, which gives you deep down pleasure, fulfillment and contentment.

Have You Taken The “I LOVE YOU” Challenge?
Have you taken the “I love you!” challenge? To say “I love you” to yourself 1,000 times a day for 30 days! (AMAZING RESULTS!)

Saying I love you to yourself is the easiest and most powerful way to change your life forever! It is ridiculously easy to do but can have profound and life changing results in just 30 Days!

At the center of every Self Help book or program is a chapter or paragraph about “Self Love”, but actually doing and practicing being loving and kind to yourself after a lifetime of self loathing can be very difficult and hard to actually put into practice.

I’m a life coach by practice and have been coaching people from all walks of life for over 17 years. This simple but challenging exercise has been the most powerful tool in my coaching practice and it has had dramatic and sometimes almost miraculous results.

My challenge to you and anyone who you wish to forward this challenge to; say i love you to yourself 1,000 times a day for 30 days and see what incredible results follow.

Say I Love You To Yourself ™ is a campaign to promote world peace, real inner healing and personal development, joy, love, by saying I Love You To Yourself.

I’ve been a Life Coach for more than a decade and in that time I have investigated, discovered and developed many powerful personal development tools that have hugely influenced and changed the lives of the people I coach.

Say I Love You To Yourself ™ is inspired by Ho’oponopono as taught by Dr. Len, and the Positive Affirmations of Louise Hay.

I have personally found that simply saying I LOVE YOU to myself, is one of the most profound and life changing personal development tools available!

Radical body re-composition is not only possible it’s entirely achievable. Given the right support, training and lifestyle advice. Moving away from the western diet and lifestyle towards a more minimalist, spiritually aligned way of living, which centres ourselves in our deepest truth.

It’s a lifestyle, prioritising your well-being, and personal growth and development, and it requires a number of fundamental changes and different ways of living our lives, which are very different from the way we’ve been taught and the way we’re grown up.

One of the biggest changes and challenges is Intermittent Fasting, getting into the habit of skipping breakfast, drinking black coffee, black or green tea and maybe even skipping lunch.

This gives you body a chance to digest your food, and start to eliminate damaged cells throughout your body, but mainly recycling the damaged protein cells which make up the tensile strength of your new developing muscles, which then makes you stronger.

Making sure that you’re getting adequate protein to support your muscle growth. The recommended quantity of protein is probably about 140-200g of protein a day. This can be significantly challenging if you’re not used to getting that much protein in your diet, and it’s not a simple as just drinking protein shakes, because they’ll end up just going through you.

Muscle growth mainly takes place when you’re sleeping. So making sleep a pleasure rather than a chore, is vital to changing your bodys make up, reducing fat and increasing muscle.

Stress is a major factor which often contributes to slow fat loss and difficulties in gaining muscle. So learning how to reduce your stress and ultimately eliminating mental stress is vital for increasing your baseline testosterone, and generally feeling better, stronger and more alive.