You’ve reached a pivotal point in this journey. And something fundamental has already shifted, whether you’ve noticed it or not. You can’t go back anymore. Not because retreat is physically impossible. Not because the bridge has literally burned behind you. But because the person who could retreat no longer exists. That version of you, the…
You took the first step. Congratulations. That was the hard part, right? Wrong. You’re still early in your journey. You’ve got to the starting blocks, you’ve taken the leap, and now you’re continuing to move forward in the new situation you find yourself in. Before long, something will start to become clear. This new situation…
You were born open-minded. Watch a child encounter something new. They don’t filter it through decades of assumptions. They don’t immediately categorise it as impossible or inappropriate for someone like them. They just accept it, explore it, and try it out. That’s what you used to do. Somewhere along the way, you lost that. You…
Sometimes, in new situations, it’s really common to feel like you’re faking it. You’ve done the work. You’ve passed the exams. You’ve got through the interview, you’ve got the job, even the qualifications to prove you’re competent. Yet there’s this persistent voice in your head whispering that you’re a fraud, that someone’s going to find…
I wrote an article way back in 2012 about the good habits you need to develop to build the inertia for change. All of these habits are common sense, you may think. We’ve already talked about common sense earlier in our courses, and the lack of it is not doing the obvious, even when it’s…
There’s a condition I see on a regular basis when I talk to patients. It was first described by Aaron Beck, one of the fathers of modern cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), back in 1976, when he was researching the distorted ways people think and where therapy could help. This particular cognitive bias seems to affect…
For nine years, nobody could do it. For decades before that, people had been getting closer. And then the record just stopped, like it had hit an invisible wall. The four-minute mile. 240 seconds. A barrier that scientists, doctors, and athletes believed was close to the absolute limit of human capability. It’s a story about…
You consistently label yourself. Maybe you don’t realise you’re doing it, but you do. You look at yourself through the same stereotypes you use to judge everyone else, and in doing so, you can inadvertently put yourself in a box that you’ve never consciously chosen. Let me explain the problem with this in a little…
You know what you need to do. You’ve probably known for a while now. Maybe it’s the career change you keep talking about, the relationship you need to end, the health problem you’re ignoring, or the business you’ve been “planning” for three years. You’ve read the books, watched the videos, made the plans. You’ve got…
You’re stuck. You know you need to move. You’ve been stationary too long, but you’re not moving. What you need is leverage. Archimedes, the ancient Greek mathematician, is supposed to have said something that’s stuck with me throughout my career: give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum to place it on, and I…