The Richard Nicholls Podcast

I've been thinking about this topic for a long time and I've been a bit wary of talking about it because what I mean by "it's the thought that counts" is that it's our own thinking that counts towards whether an experience is a good one a bad one or simply just is. And with some really quite extreme situations too. But I don't want it to come across as if it's our own fault if we feel bad because something happened to us. It belittles someones experiences to say "Oh you're traumatised are you? Try thinking differently about it!" Because that's not quite how the brain works.

Regularly clients will tell me that they've had frightening bizarre thoughts, sometimes about hurting, or even killing, someone that they care about. Odd as it may seem this is something that everyone experiences, but it doesn't really get talked about for fear of other people thinking we're strange or even dangerous. So I want to put your mind at rest that if you have thoughts like this, you need to remember that they're just thoughts, they're not reality.

If you Google the words "how to be more productive" you get 187 million results. Interestingly that's the same number of results as "how to learn Romanian." And although everyone learns in different ways we all know the answer to both of those questions. If you want to learn a new language, you need to read it, listen to it and absorb it until you understand it. And the key to that is simply to practise. And the answer to how to get more things done is simply to "do more things." But is everything really that easy? Can it be so black and white?

It's often said that optimism isn't all it's cracked up to be. That expecting the best only leads to disappointment, and I can understand why but I think it's important to see the difference between expectations and goals.

It's a new year! And for a hypnotherapist who specialises in helping people to make changes in their life people will often say to me things like "I bet you'll be busy at work in January then, all the New Years resolutions." Yet, it's nothing like February, when all those that have tried to make some changes are a month in and can feel themselves giving up and need help. Which raises questions doesn't it? Because if the changes you make are something you actually want, then why would we feel like giving up?

Have you ever met someone with a wooden leg? Not a real wooden leg, but a metaphorical one? In the 60’s, a psychiatrist called Eric Berne, turned some common problematic psychological processes into what he called “Games People Play” One of which he called the wooden leg game. Imagine a man with a wooden leg who has used it as an explanation for why his life is unfulfilled all of his life, he would often say “If it wasn’t for this wooden leg, I could have been an athlete.” Or when he complains that he’s unemployed he says “What do you expect from a guy with one leg?” The wooden leg game can hold us back from enjoying life and feeling fulfilled, and there are many things that can be your wooden leg. People will say…

Depression is a huge topic. It’s a big problem in the 21st Century and to try and understand it by listening to a single podcast episode probably isn’t going to be enough. Even 4 years at medical school wouldn’t do that. But I hope that with today’s episode I can help you to gain a bit of extra insight into it and I encourage you to read up on it if it’s something that you feel you need to understand more about.

Imagine you're invited to a friend’s house for a party and you find yourself chatting to a total stranger. If they were to say to you "So, what do you do?" What's the first thing that pops into your mind? Go on, what do you do? Do you swim? do you play cricket? Do you party? Of course, we all know that what they really mean is "What do you do for a living?" It may well be simply small talk just to get a conversation going but what someone does for a living is the usually the first place people tend to go when learning about someone else. And I think it's worth questioning whether that’s appropriate, because there's more to us than our job.

Many people feel a need to be unique, to be different from everyone else but that shouldn’t be at the expense of our sense of belonging. If we’re missing belongingness in our life then we can often feel as if we’re insignificant, unimportant and may as well crawl under a rock to die. Sure, be different, you’re life is your own, and any self esteem boost you get from your uniqueness can be used to help you recognise that actually, we’re all different, we’re all unique.

Is there something you want to achieve that you know is going to take a while? Maybe something that has many steps, such as getting fitter or writing a dissertation? If so then you need to be aware that doing anything that brings you closer to the end result is better than doing nothing at all. That might seem obvious, but it’s not uncommon for people to be really hard on ourselves for not putting in maximum effort.

Despite their setbacks and failures some people seem to have the ability to brush things off and bounce back almost stronger than before, they seem to have a grit and determination not to let bad experiences affect them. Is this something than can be learned?

If we’ve hurt someone then I think it’s probably healthy to feel bad about it, to wish that we’d behaved differently and to want to make amends. But what isn’t healthy is continually beating yourself up over it or to think of yourself as a bad person because of what happened. Feeling bad because you hurt someone is guilt. But feeling as if you’re a bad person is shame, and they’re a bit different. Guilt you can do something with, you can learn from it. You can apologise, make amends and move on. But shame? There’s not really anywhere to go with that, and I think it’s important that we recognise that good people can do bad things, just like bad people can do good things.

Did you know that if you're physically tired then you will estimate hills as steeper than they actually are? And that a place in the distance is further away? But did you also know that it's not just our physical resources that influence our perception of the world?

There’s an annoying quirk to our psychology that means we can easily be drawn towards the exact thing that we’re trying to avoid, as the old saying goes 'be careful what you look for, because you just might find it.' Because the alternative means that you might have made yourself part of the problem, rather than the solution.

Making decisions can be hard, and not just with the big things in life. Sometimes even things that should be insignificant in the grand scheme of things can paralyse us. So how do we get around it? Todays episode is about just that. Getting a better perspective on these things and even the bigger ones too.