OUR POSITIVE, ENLIGHTENING, AND SOMETIMES FUNNY BLOG

How do you rate yourself generally as a person? As a friend, parent, sibling, child, colleague, worker, and/or manager? Out of 100. Is it less than 85%?

At 2.30pm on Sunday 28 October I was holding my father’s hand when he died.

It may have been the origin of the word “selfie” that condemned it to the playground of narcissists and gave it a bad reputation.

If you see your horoscope in a magazine do you check it out? When I ask this question to clients I mostly get “yeah, but I don’t believe it!”

My response is usually “then why the hell read it?”

I love hearing how people have changed their lives after “learning-the-thinking-skills-we-were-never-taught-in-school”.

This one is a bit different.

I remember going to high school with a girl called Alison. She was born and raised in Australia but her parents were American. Alison had an Aussie/Americano sort of thing going on when she spoke. There were certain words she said that had a twang to them. Kinda cool at the time.

I went for a run this morning after checking my trusty weather App. I must’ve been holding my phone upside-down because literally in the middle of my run the clouds burst open and threw down a good 20 minutes of solid rain until I was nicely soaked through.

We know that setting our daily goals is one way to help us achieve them. Writing them down is going to get you even closer to transferring them into the DONE list at the end of the day - by a whopping 42% according to Dr. Gail Matthews, a psychology professor at the Dominican University in California.

I teach people how to develop new cognitive and emotional skills. Skills that are helpful. Helpful in leading a life that is happy, resilient, and thriving.

I listened to a terrific podcast recently by Dr Christian Jarrett. He interviewed two world experts in the psychology of procrastination - Professor Tim Pychyl at Carleton University and Dr Fuschia Sirois at the University of Sheffield.

Stress and anxiety are almost always caused by psychological and/or emotional forces.

You’ve heard of the 12 days of Christmas…well here’s the Thrive version!

If you’ve read Barbara Fredrickson’s book titled Positivity, you’ll remember it promptly starts with two versions of her “start to the day”. She refers to these two versions as Take 1 and Take 2.

“Tread the path of haunted souls. As darkness descends over historic buildings, the burial ground and empty pathways … the time comes to encounter the ghosts of our site.”

Four leaf clovers, lucky underpants, or that special charm bracelet that grandma gave you. Do you really believe they bring you luck? Really?

Most people suffering from depression and related conditions believe exactly as I did for many years; that there’s something fundamentally wrong with them. Some sort of misplaced connection that’s different to everyone else, like a badly-wired plug or a car with an intermittent fault that nobody else can experience or see but you.

If you really dislike the feeling of being “out of control”, the chances are you have a high “desire for control”.

It’s not uncommon to hear “I’m so stressed but I’ve no time to do anything about it”. I hear that from new clients, friends, and family. They’d love to but “there aren’t enough hours in the day”. Familiar?