This came as a big surprise to me. Growing up, I’d never had much of a clue about romance, and although I had a lot of female friends (and still do), I reached the age of 30 without ever having had a girlfriend.

Why am I talking about this now? Largely because one of my readers, who’s turning 30 soon and has never had a girlfriend, emailed me for advice (or really, for encouragement – he knew what action to take already).

That reminded me that I’d never told the story here of how it is that I come to be happily married, when for most of my life I thought that was never going to happen. I think it’s a good story – and maybe it’ll be inspirational, not only if you’re long-term single but if you struggle with any elusive dream.

Meant for someone else and not for me

Let’s start at the beginning. I have a mild form of a genetic condition called Marfan’s syndrome, the main visible signs of which in my case are that I’m very thin, with a noticeably distorted back. I was always self-conscious about my appearance, plus I wasn’t comfortable with emotions. (My family are very emotionally reserved, even for New Zealanders.)

All this meant that I was shy around girls-as-girls (girls as people I was mostly fine with), and asking one out was an impossibly scary thing. I was also very nerdy and unconventional, which didn’t help. I had a strange hyaena-like laugh, deliberately dressed unfashionably, and since my intelligence was the one thing about myself that I did feel confident about, I displayed it at every opportunity. Power tip: This isn’t an endearing trait.

I didn’t have a girlfriend at school, but that was normal in a way, because nor did my two great friends. As it turned out, one of them was gay; the other was just as big a nerd as I was. Once he and I got to university, though, he got a more fashionable haircut, started to dress in jeans and satin shirts (it was the 80s), lost the horn-rimmed glasses (his sight recovered when we were in our late teens), and eventually started dating. I didn’t.

I was very religious at the time, and at least some of the time I rationalised my singleness as a “calling”. Trouble was, I didn’t actually want to be single, deep down, and that led to several years of emotional struggle and internal conflict that didn’t really need to happen.

When I needed sunshine I got rain

And then I created a couple more years of unnecessary pain for myself by falling for a fellow student who only wanted to be friends, not saying anything to her for months, and not taking “no” as her final answer (as I recall, she wasn’t as direct and unambiguous as she could have been, but still).

The two of us then joined the staff of a voluntary organisation that we’d both been involved with at university and went off to Australia to train together, living in the same house. This organisation, incidentally, had a policy that if you were on their staff and wanted to get married, your spouse also had to be on staff already or join, and you can imagine how that distorted things.

I wasn’t over her, but didn’t say anything for more months, by which time I was severely stressed by other things that were happening in my life (like training for an occupation I was completely unsuited for), and I took her second and more definite “no” very hard. I then had to continue to see her almost daily for a few more months, until I left the organisation when it clearly wasn’t going to work out.

Back home, we ended up at the same church. She started going out with one of the other guys from the course – the three of us had been good friends and hung out a lot – and they eventually got married. Still very emotionally vulnerable from severe stress breakdown, I didn’t cope with that well. (I actually turned and fled once when I saw her walking towards me.)

Round and round in little unhappy circles

So that experience overshadowed my romantic life, or lack thereof, for a few years afterwards. It didn’t help that my next serious attempt to start a relationship, with another friend, also got a “no” response. I did go out with a woman for about six months, but “go out” was all we did, and at the end she “clarified” that it had always been on the basis of being just friends – definitely not the impression I had, or the impression that the mutual friend who introduced us had had either. Either I moved too slowly and she lost interest, or her clarification was actually the truth.

There were a couple of times that women did show interest in me. One invited me to a film at the film festival – Blade Runner, which I had watched before and not enjoyed – and it took me a second after I’d said “no” to realise that she’d asked me out. After another second’s review, I decided that my answer stood, though. She was – well, to be honest, she was kind of a female me, and I didn’t find her attractive. (This was back before nerd girls were confident and sexy.)

And then there was the friend of a friend who came on so strong and so desperate that I got horribly nervous, and had to visit the bathroom four or five times during our dinner date at my favourite restaurant. We didn’t go out a second time.

And so I reached 30, having had a total of one date that both people present had definitely considered a date, and it had been – kind of a train crash.

I take action at last

Towards the end of the year I turned 30, though, two things happened that created a shift. The first was something I did. I was aware that I wasn’t good at expressing emotions, though I certainly felt them powerfully enough (my years of romantic hope and disappointment had shown me that – several of those many rejections, even some that were indirect and happened before I’d even asked, had plunged me straight into depression, no stopping, no waiting). So I went and took a community acting class. I figured that if I learned to convey emotions that I wasn’t feeling, I’d be able to translate the skill into conveying emotions I was feeling.

The week before the class finished, the second thing happened: my father died suddenly. I was able to grieve him much better and more openly – the class had done its work – and my emotions began to open up. I also – this feels a little disloyal, but it’s the truth – felt released from the pressure of his expectations, including the expectation of not expressing emotion. He was a good man, but like all of us he had his issues, and emotional expression was definitely one of them. He’d been through the Depression and World War II and had learned to cope by not talking about it.

A fortunate friendship

My father’s death was the trigger for me to get back in touch with a friend I’d made online the previous year. This was the late 90s, when the Internet was still relatively new to most people and a lot of today’s ways of connecting didn’t exist or were in their infancy. But a guy I knew slightly on an email discussion list had started a site for people to meet each other, including as “just friends” with no romantic expectations, and I’d decided, “Why not check it out? What could be the harm?”

A woman had posted there with a very interesting-sounding profile, and she was just looking for a friend, so I emailed her. I was apparently the only normal, non-creepy person who contacted her, and we started mailing back and forth, discussing books, and our personal struggles (including with singleness), and psychology, which she was studying, and everything else that came to mind. But then she started having computer issues, and we lost touch for a while.

When I emailed her about my father, I was also emailing another woman, who had contacted me about an article I had written on singleness on my now-long-gone Geocities website (remember Geocities?). I mentioned this second woman to the first woman, Erin, and she became indignant that I’d been emailing someone else (however innocently). This was my first clue.

We started swapping audio tapes in the mail (this was before MP3s or Skype, and you could only do video on CD-ROM). She has a pleasant voice, and I started to notice an attraction – and started to suspect it was mutual. Summoning up all my courage, I asked. It was mutual. YES!

It was the very early days of Internet romance, and it had a bad reputation. To the initial dismay of her fellow psychology students and her father (“How do you know he’s not an axe murderer?”), we decided it was serious. I went and met her – she lived in California – and then a few months later brought her out to New Zealand for Christmas to meet my friends and family. They approved, not that they got a vote, and we were married in February of 1999.

What I learned

I’ve passed 1500 words here, and I haven’t brought out a personal development lesson yet (which is what this blog is for, after all). So here it is.

If you want a change, make a change. Your life isn’t going to magically change by itself and suddenly work out when it never did before. Work on your confidence, your ability to listen, your ability to connect, your emotional management skills. Worst case: you’ll be a better and more interesting person and you’ll like yourself more.

Secondly, learn to take action. The reader who emailed me has an excellent plan: read some of the books he’s bought about confidence and interacting with women, and then join an online dating site and start practicing. I wasted far too much time having conversations in my head that should have happened outside my head, where I would quickly have learned what was what and had the opportunity to move on.

And finally, don’t take it all so seriously. Enjoy your life as it is now, let go of some of your emotional overinvestment in particular outcomes, and roll with the punches. If you’re working actively on improving your life, you’re taking action, and you’re able to become resilient to rejection, disappointment and loss, eventually things do improve.

Keep the questions coming, by the way. If there’s something you’d like me to write about, or write more about, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or send an email. I love to connect with my readers and write about what you want to know about.

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That’s the question I asked – and answered – in my talk last weekend at the joint conference of the NZ Association of Professional Hypnotherapists and the NZ Association of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

I’ve been putting my main focus on this site on the personal development side of hypnotherapy lately (and branching out from hypnotherapy into other personal development tools and techniques, as well). But if the body and mind are one system – and I argue that they are – then taking care of your physical being is also part of your personal development.

So here, in a break from the continuing How Not to Change Your Life series, is some background on mind-body interaction and what that means for your ability to take charge of your own wellbeing.

It’s not a recording of my exact talk (and the people who were there participated in a Q&A session afterwards, which was excellent – I definitely was not the only person with relevant knowledge in the room). But it’s based on the slides I used, with minor changes, and my narration over the top.

Most of my colleagues don’t have a lot of scientific background (and I’m just a well-informed layman myself), so it should be accessible to you even if you aren’t a professional in the field.

Next week, back to the How Not to Change series – I’ll be talking about letting the urgent override the important. Don’t miss it.

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I’m a lot happier now than I was when I was younger – I experienced depression intermittently from my late teens until about my late 20s or early 30s. Life lessons are often things that you can only learn by living them, of course, but here are three that I wish I’d learned sooner.

1. Exercise is good for your brain

As I mentioned last week in Conveniencing Ourselves to Death – or Challenging Ourselves to Life, I’m reading John J. Ratey’s Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain at the moment. He starts the book by talking about a revolutionary approach to physical education in a particular school district in Michigan, USA. Reading about it, I really wished that I’d been taught PE like that.

See, when I was at school, the emphasis was on sports. There were people who were good at sports and people who weren’t, and I was one of the people who wasn’t. I still had to do the compulsory fun run (nobody could ever explain to me why, if it was fun, it had to be compulsory) and all the other sporting nonsense, with the outcome being that I became convinced that a) I’d never be any good at sport, b) it wasn’t enjoyable and c) I would stop participating in it as soon as possible. Which I did.

The approach Ratey describes has the emphasis on fitness. The teachers set out to teach the kids, not rules of sports that they’ll never play again, but how to work with the bodies that they have to get the best out of them. Even if that is never going to be running as fast or jumping as high as some of the other kids.

They put heart rate monitors on the kids, and rather than measuring how fast they’re moving they measure how hard they’re trying. You get marked based on your physiology, not the physiology of the next kid who might be a future Olympian. And the teachers expose the kids to as many options as possible to find something that they’ll enjoy doing that gets them moving, breathing, and increasing their heart rate.

Because it turns out that when you move, breathe and increase your heart rate, you get better at learning and produce more brain cells. Your body and mind both become more efficient, and your mood generally improves as well. And you have more energy (something I always struggled with).

If exercise had been sold to me like that when I was 13, I might have done more of it when I didn’t have to. I’m now getting fit with the 100 Pushups challenge and kayaking, and thoroughly enjoying it (I’ll have more to say about fitness challenges next week). But I missed out for years.

To be fair, nobody really knew any better in 1985, but I still feel a bit cheated.

2. Emotional expression is OK

My family were never very good at emotions. My father lost his father at the age of 9, during the Depression, was raised by a very strange mother who was mentally stuck in the Victorian era, and then fought in World War II, and he had a lifetime’s practice at avoiding his emotions. My mother aided and abetted him in this.

When I was 30, I figured out that I wanted to be able to express my emotions more freely. My solution was to take an acting class. It worked pretty well, too, and just as well – right about the time the class finished, my father died suddenly.

I was able to grieve much better than I otherwise would have. What’s more, over the following two years a friendship I’d had with a woman I knew via email became a romance (the first real one I’d had) and then a marriage – a marriage which I’m continuing to enjoy today. I’m pretty sure that both the acting class and the emotional shock of my father’s death enabled me to open up and become someone who could have an emotionally intimate relationship.

A lot of things would have been easier earlier on if I could have done that at a much younger age.

3. Suffering is only pointless if you learn nothing

I’ve done some very stupid stuff, and it’s been immensely educational, though usually in retrospect. Was it Oscar Wilde who said, “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want?”

The worst time of my life came just after university, in my early 20s. It’s pretty difficult not to do stupid stuff at that age. I made some major mistakes – not the kind that kill anyone, fortunately, and most of the harm came on me, but at the time it all seemed pointless.

My favourite episode of Star Trek (TNG, naturally) is when the all-powerful alien Q gives Captain Picard an opportunity to change history so that he didn’t make a particular youthful mistake. The thing is, though, it turns out that without the mistake, instead of becoming a bold leader, Picard ends up a hesitant, unpromotable junior ranker of no great significance, and he pleads to have things put back the way they were. I love that episode, because it’s the story of my life too.

Without the bad decisions that plunged me into stress breakdown for a couple of years, I wouldn’t be very kind, very gentle or very understanding of others’ struggles and failures. I was an arrogant young pup, not smart enough to know that constantly showing yourself to be the smartest guy in the room isn’t a formula for success or happiness. Though I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone, I also wouldn’t wish to have avoided it – because I’d have had those lessons to learn sooner or later. (Or, far worse, not learned them at all.)

It might have made it easier, though, to get through those times if I’d known that.

How about you? What do you wish you’d learned earlier?

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The end of the year is approaching, and I have a lot of new subscribers to my mailing list (which includes these blog posts). In case you feel like you came in partway through the play – and also because I’m planning to do things differently next year – today’s post is largely about “what this blog is about”. (I will give you something to do, though, because I’m like that.)

When I named my blog, about three years ago now, I wanted a name that reflected my emphasis on living life purposefully and taking charge of our own lives. “Living Skillfully” was what I came up with.

It’s originally a Buddhist phrase. I’m not a Buddhist, but I have a lot of respect for what Buddhism contributes to the techniques of personal development.

At the end of September, I changed the second part of the name from “Your Mind and Health” to “Change Your Life”. My emphasis has been shifting, from “health through mental skill” to “personal development” – but health is a personal development issue (as I’ll be saying repeatedly).

My last two projects, the free Simple Stress Management course and the Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding course, were about getting junk out of the way so that you can move and grow. (I’ve reflected this theme in an update to the look of the blog, by the way – I just had a coaching call with Mars Dorian, and he pointed out that it was looking cluttered.)

My next two planned projects are a stop-smoking course and a membership site to help people enjoy improving the state of their bodies, and I will be talking, as I’ve always talked, about improving your physical health without substances or devices, by mental techniques and behaviour change alone. But that’s the how. It’s the what and the why that are more important.

photo credit: Benimoto

To explain further what I’m on about, I’ll give my answers to some questions that Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz came up with a little while ago. Naomi’s stuff isn’t to everyone’s taste (you need a high tolerance for swearing, for a start), but she comes up with some gems sometimes.

What’s your game? What do you do?

I help people who want to change their lives for the better and live more gloriously.

I connect them with resources (including their internal resources), and show them simple techniques that can give them a sense of progress and control.

I help them evaporate the ghosts of past painful experiences that are standing in the way of living a larger life.

I offer them the kind of appropriate challenges that help to build capacity to deal with life.

And I remind them that what you pay attention to changes your experience of life, and you get to choose what you pay attention to.

This isn’t “The Secret”, or even a secret. I can point to science (real science) to back it up, and it’s all based on techniques that are widely known (but not widely enough). Living Skillfully is all about deliberately shifting your attention to get better outcomes in life – choosing the life you live instead of just letting life live you.

Why do you do it? Do you love it, or do you just have one of those creepy knacks?

Both, of course. I love to see people open up and connect to greater possibilities. It’s the best thing in the world. But I also seem to be quite good at it.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen the cycle where someone comes to me thinking, “I’m not sure if this will work”. They go away after the first session: “I’m  not sure that worked.” Then in their daily life, they start to notice that they’re thinking and feeling and acting differently, quite naturally and effortlessly, and they say, “Hey, how does that work?”

Who are your customers? What kind of people would need or want what you offer?

Ordinary, busy people with real lives, jobs, perhaps families, responsibilities and the constraints that come from having all those things – but who still want to be more than they are.

People looking for a way, in the midst of their lives, to fulfill a little of their dreams.

People who are willing to work on changing because they can see the value they’ll get.

People who are tired of being passengers in their lives, and who want to steer.

People who want something they can do to improve their lives while they mow the lawn.

What’s your marketing USP? Why should I buy from you instead of the other losers?

(That’s Naomi’s phrasing, of course.)

I break down really effective techniques so that they’re easy to understand and put into action. (I don’t just offer vague encouragement and motivational quotes to make you feel comfortable because you’re thinking about personal development. I give you methods that work to actually do personal development.)

I’m grounded in science but focussed on practicalities, not theory.

I use what I teach and it works for me. (I’ll talk about that more in future.)

And I cut to the chase.

What’s next for you? What’s the big plan?

I want to scale up so that I’m working with enough people to achieve something really remarkable.

I want to put people back in touch with their bodies so that they’re actually living life instead of being lost in a trance.

And I want to put them in touch with their dreams and help them to live out their best values.

So, next year you’re going to hear a lot about bodies and minds – but from a personal development viewpoint, not a medical viewpoint that’s all “this wetmachine should work better, give it a pill”.

I’ll still be listening to you as you tell me what you’re interested in, of course (see below). But living a better life embodied is going to be my main emphasis.

Oh, and while I think about it, I’m planning to start a podcast in the New Year, as well. At the moment it’s called “Personal Development Views, Reviews and Interviews”.

Action Now

So here’s the thing for you to do that I promised at the start of the post. It’s all very well for me to have plans, but I want to make sure that I’m listening to you and giving you what you want and need to live a fuller life.

Is there anything else you want to know? Anything that particularly strikes you out of all of that? If you could change your life to be more like your ideal, what would that look like and what would you need in order to get there?

Tell me in the comments.

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Not comix (which are quite a different thing, much more intellectual and anarchic). Comics. Superhero comics. (Various webcomics, too, but I’ll talk about those another time.)

This surprises even people who know me well. For one thing, I’m more or less a feminist (if a man can be a feminist, and I know this is fiercely debated), pretty nearly a pacifist, and have a master’s degree in English, whereas superhero comics are full of women in skintight costumes whose breasts are bigger than their heads, contain pretty much wall-to-wall fighting, and are generally considered not too intellectually demanding. (That last point has a lot to do with why I like them, actually.)

As Walt Whitman said, though, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Somewhere deep down inside me there’s some kind of consistency. (I can only assume.)

Anyway, here are three life lessons I’ve learned from superhero comics.

1. With great power comes great responsibility

photo credit: Eneas
Spider-Man has been through a lot of changes and reinventions since his creation in the 1960s, but at the core he’s always a decent, human guy who is continually crapped upon by life from a great height, but (with a few exceptions, which only serve to humanise him further) does the right thing anyway.

His Uncle Ben’s wisdom – that with great power comes great responsibility – is familiar enough to seem trite. But when you really think about it, especially in the context of Spidey’s life, it’s all about living up to your potential and using what you have in the service of others.

Great power inherently carries the risk of exploiting others. When you’re really powerful, you can do what you like because very few people will try to stop you. Glance at the celebrity news from time to time (then look away quickly) to see how well that generally works out for people.

I’m white, male, middle-aged, middle-class and heterosexual. To have any more hegemony I’d have to be dead. I’m also a hypnotherapist, which is kind of a low-level superpower – not over other people so much (that only works inside the comic books), but over my own body and mind. It’s up to me how I use all that. Great responsibility.

What great power do you have that you can use for others’ benefit?

2. You can’t beat a good team-up

photo credit: Willrad
One of the most popular formats for comics is the “team-up”, where two or more superheroes join together to face a threat that they can’t defeat individually. There are also some great team comics – the Justice League, the Avengers, the Teen Titans, the Fantastic Four.

Team-ups work much better for heroes than they do for villains, and there’s a simple reason. Villains are always out for what they can get, while heroes have a higher purpose, a dedication to the welfare of others.

I can’t always triumph over my challenges alone, either. Sometimes I need to team up. That’s one reason I’ve been doing a lot of guest-posting lately. I also get coaching from several other people, because there are things they see (and know) that I don’t.

Who could you team up with?

Everyone has a weakness

photo credit: Randy Son Of Robert
I thought a lot about this last one. Should I use “No truly important character ever dies permanently?” “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry?” “You’re a person if you act like a person, regardless of your appearance?” All good lessons. But I went for “Everyone has a weakness” because it’s so fundamental to comics that it’s just silently assumed.

No matter whether the character is an Olympian god, the Last Son of Krypton or an immortal being who eats planets, there’s always some way to defeat them. There’s always a balance, always a solution, always a way to carry the day. (And it’s not just because someone who just automatically won all the time would be unbelievably boring. Life’s really like that.)

And the inevitable consequence is this: Great power or not, there’s some way in which you’re vulnerable, and only by connecting up with your team are you going to be able to overcome that and then find the inevitable weakness of your opponent. (You see what I did there?)

One of my weaknesses is that I enjoy thinking about things more than doing them.

What vulnerability do you have?

If you’d like to team up with me for any purpose, including to work on your weakness or develop your great power and its responsible use, contact me and let me know. I’d love to partner with you.

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Sarah is one of my clients, and she very kindly and completely spontaneously offered to let me interview her about her personal growth journey from disintegration to integration, and how working with me has contributed to that journey. She originally came to me to stop smoking, but (as you’ll hear) it turned into much more than that.

I’ve split the interview into 4 short videos, totalling about 20 minutes. If you want just the audio, you can download it here.

In part 1, you’ll hear:

• why a 38-year-old single mother-of-two and aspiring actress thinks it worthwhile to spend her scarce time and money working on personal development,
• how smoking was a way for her to avoid herself and the circumstances of her life,
• how she didn’t want suffering and stuckness and hating herself to be her only story, and
• why she came to me to find ways to cope, become stronger and find out who she really is.

In part 2, you’ll hear:

• what you should do if you start smoking (or whatever) again after you’ve stopped,
• how important it is to do it for yourself and nobody else,
• how to get beyond powerlessness and being stuck to be at home in yourself,
• how “negative integration” can stand in the way of being your whole powerful self,
• about motherhood, grace, ease and perfectionism, and
• what happens once you take away the smokescreen.

In part 3, you’ll hear:

• how facing things and speaking to yourself more kindly can flow over into better mothering,
• how deep love can be hidden under feelings of incompetence and overwhelm,
• how getting out of your own way improves your relationships,
• how much difference 6 weeks can make,
• how powerful it can be to work with a single metaphor over an extended period, and
• about finding the “resonant core of your deep self” and persisting in following your heart.

In part 4, you’ll hear:

• what to do if you feel stuck,
• how to get your self back and find joy, and
• what I do and don’t do to help you change.

If you are in a similar place to where Sarah was at the start of our work together, contact me and let’s talk about how you can follow her great example. (And yes, I can work with you remotely over Skype.) Or just pick up my free ebook, How to Stop Smoking.

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photo credit: Jesse757

Not about controlling other people. (In fact, I kind of have a Thing about not controlling other people, because I hate other people trying to control me.) And not even so much about being in control of what’s happening around me, because I figured out early on that that wasn’t realistic.

My Thing is about being in control of myself.

This is why I’ve never got really drunk, for example, and in fact why I hardly ever drink at all.

I realise I’m unusual in this – at least, in how much I’m like this. But what it does is it gives me a lot of empathy for people who feel out of control, and a powerful motivation to learn techniques for getting back in control.

Which is why I do what I do. I work with people, typically stressed, busy people, who feel that their thoughts, emotions and behaviours aren’t completely under their control and who are increasingly unhappy about that. And I help them to regain that sense of control, so that they can decide on the direction of their lives and turn their attention to living their best life without being held back.

In my case, the out-of-controlness in my life has mainly been my emotions. (For other people it’s more thoughts or behaviour, but it’s all linked together somewhere down in there.) In particular, I went through an experience of several years in which I felt very out of control of my emotions.

I did my master’s degree in one year, which the university I attended let you do in that particular field, and I was involved in a lot of other things that year as well. In retrospect, I was doing too much – and it wore me down and made me emotionally vulnerable.

I fell in love, and it wasn’t reciprocated, but I had so much fear around saying anything that I didn’t find that out for a long time, and then I kept hoping, and had so much fear around saying anything that I didn’t find out again for a long time that the answer was still no, and in the meantime I’d started training for something that I wasn’t suited for or any good at, and living with too many other people, and members of my close family, in another country, were ill, and I was extremely short of money and then I got ill (from the stress), and there were times I wanted to hurl plates at my housemates I was so angry, and there were times I wanted to kill myself I was so depressed, and I started to have panic attacks whenever I was in a crowd, and the upshot was that I couldn’t work full-time for several years and carried the hurt and bitterness for many more years.

So I learned a lot about stress.

And I learned a lot, over the years that followed, about personal development and about how people work, because I wanted to understand myself and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t go down that path again.

And finally I discovered hypnotherapy. And once I figured out that it wasn’t about someone else controlling you, but about you having more control over yourself, I realised that this was what I’d been looking for.

Around the same time I started learning to meditate, which is another path to self-control. In the form I practice it, it’s about letting go of superficial thoughts (which include emotions) and allowing your true self to arise.

One day it was my turn to lead our little meditation group, and nobody else happened to turn up. So I was sitting by myself in an empty building, and fear came to visit, because I also have a Thing about being alone which is deeper and more buried than the control thing.

So I let fear go, and fear came, and I let fear go, and after about 20 minutes the timer went off and that was OK. Nothing terrible had happened because fear had come.

And the following weekend I went to a hypnotherapy conference and was more confident and gregarious than I’d ever been in my life.

photo credit: Jeremy Burgin

So my point, and I do have one, is this: If you’re feeling out of control I can completely relate to that. I mean, if I tell you I can control my skin temperature and stop my shaving cuts from bleeding and alter my heartbeat (all of which is true), it sounds like I have some kind of superpower and that I’m totally on top of things. But the reason I can do that stuff (which is a lot easier than it sounds, and also a lot less useful) is that I wanted to learn how to be in control of more important things, like fear and anger and sadness. And stress.

But enough about me. What’s your stress story? I realise you might not want to tell it publicly, so I’ve put a form below that posts, anonymously, to a place that only I will see. I look at all the responses, and I keep them in mind in everything I do, because I want to help other people feel in control of their stress too.

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It isn’t, though.

photo credit: emdot

I was having a conversation the other day with Gareth of Fight Mediocrity, on his guest post for Catherine Caine (she who is awesome online and teaches others to be likewise).

He’d read my last post about replacing caffeine with meditation, and commented, “It’s not that the give up coffee message doesn’t reach me. You’ve definitely given by far the best argument I’ve seen for it. But coffee for me isn’t about the caffeine. It’s about what it represents.”

Which got me all excited and helped me to become aware of something I’d not yet fully articulated. Here’s my reply:

Exactly, and this is always the difficulty with change. Things are not just themselves, they’re what they represent to a person emotionally.

That’s what a lot of diet programs miss. Cake is not just cake. Cake is celebration and comfort and memories, and besides that it changes the state of the brain and pushes some dopamine around… There’s a lot more to it than “eat apples instead of cake”, which is why so few people make the switch.

So (in my opinion) as well as understanding the literal and scientific and rational things that are going on, it’s important to understand the emotional and symbolic things too. Not either/or but both/and.

What I do (which is how the conversation got started) is help people who want to change their behaviours, thoughts and feelings. I want to do an excellent job of that, so I’m studying health science to learn not only what behaviours are particularly worth changing, but also the ins and outs of helping people to change them.

I also read a lot in the field (as you’ll see if you follow me on Twitter). And here’s what I’m increasingly concluding: Hardly anyone ever does anything for a purely rational reason, even when we think we do.

I’m not the only person thinking this, either. There are several books around at the moment about irrationality and how to work with it. We’re finally getting over the 19th- and 20th-century myth that humans are rational and emotions are an aberration.

Ironically (I’m never sure now if I’m using that word correctly, but I think I am), we’ve come to this realisation through the application of science. It turns out that if you set out to measure human behaviour objectively and dispassionately, you discover that it’s neither objective nor dispassionate. And people don’t respond to things as what they are.

We respond to things as what they remind us of.

This is the entire reason, of course, why poetry works – also symbolism, art, literature, ritual and ceremony. This is how politics works, and marketing. (Eating burgers doesn’t make you look like, or attract people who look like, the slim, beautiful models who are holding the burgers, but that’s the association the burger advertisement creates.)

This is the reason why, when your partner says or does something small and entirely innocent that happens to remind you of that thing your mother always did, you practically tear their head off.

And this is the reason that I can help you to change your state of mind, and even your patterns of behaviour, by sitting you in a chair and talking to you, getting you to imagine things.

If you’ve been listening to me talk about my Emotional Circuit-Breaker Toolkit, you may have got the wrong impression. You may be thinking that it’s about switching off your emotions so you don’t feel them any more. Not even slightly!

What the Toolkit is about is breaking the automatic cycles of emotion that take you round and round the Emotional Hamster Wheel and keep landing you up in the same place, only worse. It’s about understanding the process of your emotions so that you can work with them and end up where you want to end up, because emotions are a good horse, but a bad rider.

photo credit: cmaccubbin

And the way I get you there is by working with imagery, metaphor and symbol, with the things you already think and know and feel. A lot of it is based on scientific research, but it’s not about turning your body and mind into a cold technology. I’m not very interested in pure theory. I think application is the really important part.

“Many thinkers and scientists want to think ‘without the heart’ in order to be objective – which is an illusion, because one can in no way think without the heart, the heart being the activating principle of thought; what one can do is to think with a humble and warm heart instead of with a pretentious and cold heart.”
- Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot.

And one can think with a wise and conscious heart rather than an unruly and impulsive heart that does things you don’t understand or like. That’s what the Toolkit is all about.

If that sounds at all interesting, then join my Beat The Rush List for the Emotional Circuit-Breaker Toolkit. Members of that list get preview material and a very substantial discount (really, if you don’t join Beat The Rush and you end up buying the Toolkit for full price, you’ll kick yourself. See what I did there?)

What in your life isn’t just itself, but what it reminds you of? Tell me in the comments.

(Update: Gareth got a post on Letting Go out of the same conversation. It’s good.)

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When I was young I wanted to help people, so I joined the staff of a religious organisation that had helped me while I was at university. Unfortunately, its approach to helping people was like the Greek legend of the bandit Procrustes, who had an iron bed that all travellers must lie on. If they weren’t big enough for the bed, he stretched their limbs, and if they were too big, he cut pieces off until they fitted. There was only one true way, and it turned out not to be my way.

I couldn’t use my creativity or my intuition; I had to try to be exactly like the leaders, and I wasn’t much like them at all. There were interpersonal problems, too; nobody’s fault, no malice involved, but no less painful for that. I ended up in a major stress breakdown, depressed and very ill, and took several years to get back to the point where I could even work full-time. I didn’t lose my faith, but it froze over and became a hard, rigid, rational thing. I felt safer that way.

That experience put me off working in a direct people-helping role for years. Instead, I used my skills to arrange information, first as a book editor and freelance nonfiction writer, then as a technical writer and corporate trainer, and finally as an IT consultant. I was drifting, accepting whatever job opened up for me next – but I was also collecting valuable skills. I began to get a vague sense that someday they’d all come together.

Eventually, I grew enough inside that the very straight and narrow faith I’d been following became too constricting. I realised that there must be more to it, and found myself hanging out with a group of fellow burnouts, dropouts and rebels from the mainstream, meeting in a run-down old building on the city fringe. One of their mottos was, “Thinking allowed, thinking aloud allowed”. I slowly started to rebuild and restructure my inner life, and to explore in strange new directions. During this time I also met my wife, and discovered emotional resources that I didn’t know I had.

Meanwhile, I still had very little energy a lot of the time. I started to think that some kind of personal practice might help, and eventually found a Tai Chi class at a local high school. This gentle, balanced exercise, along with improved eating patterns, started to rebuild my energy, and eventually I began to search again for a way to help other people grow and change. I took a wonderful, transformative course on creating rituals and ceremonies, and made a significant step forward in my own healing, but that wasn’t quite it. Then I found hypnotherapy.

I took a community class first of all in self-hypnosis, and even though it wasn’t well taught, it was still amazingly effective in helping me focus and moving me forward in my emotional recovery. So I enrolled in a training programme to become a hypnotherapist.

Now all my experiences and skills are drawing together, as I’ve suspected for years would eventually happen. I use my creativity and intuition to put together metaphors for healing, either in the moment in the therapy room or when I create my audio recordings and ebooks. My editing and technical writing helps me translate scientific research into practical, clear steps that ordinary people can take in their daily lives, to solve their problems and come closer to their best selves. My past explorations in symbolism, ritual and spirituality enable me to draw on centuries-old traditions of personal transformation to complement the science, and acknowledge the richness and complexity of human experience. And I use information technology to reach more people worldwide with my resources.

So that’s how I got here. I didn’t follow a map or have a guide; it took me 20 years of wandering around in the underbrush, more or less at random. The thing is, now that I’m here I can call out to other wanderers – you, perhaps – and guide them on a more direct path to their own authentic goals.

If you’re in Auckland, New Zealand you can come and see me in person, but wherever you are in the world you can connect with me over this marvellous Internet dingus. At the moment I’m putting together a reference group to help me map out what resources would benefit people most in their current life situations. If you’d like to be a part of it, my email address is in the blog sidebar, or you can leave a comment on this post. Or direct-message me on Twitter: @MRMHypno.

Thanks.

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photo credit: ralphbijker

So here are the three things I’ve learned from engineering.

1. Assume there is a solution to every problem.

Engineers are great problem-solvers. That’s their natural bent, their default mental attitude. They approach every problem with the unspoken conviction that this problem can be solved, by us, using the resources we have and the techniques we know about.

Sometimes, of course, the problem can’t be solved, or can be solved but not at a reasonable cost, or would require resources or techniques that we don’t have. But that’s not the engineer’s starting point. One tendency I dislike in myself is that I often start out assuming that something can’t be done. A good engineer starts out assuming that something can be done, and then sets out to find out how.

photo credit: telmo32

2. Don’t assume you know what the solution is until you understand the problem fully.

I allude to this principle in one of my Seven Steps to a Change Plan videos. We limit ourselves too much if we start out assuming the solution before we’ve fully explored the problem. This is something I catch myself doing with my clients sometimes. It’s why it’s important to have a variety of techniques available and be practiced in not only using them, but also deciding which one to use. But the key thing is: Understand what the real problem is before you set out to solve it, otherwise you’ll solve the wrong problem and the real problem will still be there.

There are plenty of examples of engineers solving the wrong problem, of course. But a really good engineer will explore the “problem space” first before the “solution space”.

photo credit: Meanest Indian

3. It costs one-tenth as much to maintain something correctly as it does to fix it when it breaks.

The application of this one to personal relationships is obvious. The time and effort you spend on keeping your relationship healthy on a day-to-day basis is going to be much less than it would cost you to restore it if it broke. Whatever else has happened in my day, I try to make positive contact every day with my wife, even if it’s only a hug or a kiss goodnight. We spend time listening to each other and talking about our concerns, because if we just let things drift, one day one of us will be in for a nasty shock. We’ve both seen it happen to people we know.

Same thing with your own health, of course. You can spend some extra time, effort and maybe money on healthy eating and exercise now, or pay the costs of neglected health later – medical bills, arduous rehab, and restricted activities.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to sell prevention. Factory managers don’t value it, and nor do we as individuals. The future isn’t real to us. The present is real to us, and in the present, we could spend time and effort on routine maintenance, or we could use it for something urgent. And why is it urgent? Could it be because you’ve neglected routine maintenance?

photo credit: aussiegall

There we are, then: Three things I’ve learned from engineering. I hope you’ve found something to apply to your life.

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