The Richard Nicholls Podcast

Although I’m not a relationship coach or a couple therapist a lot of clients will come to one to one therapy and discuss their relationships, with many of them saying things such as “I don’t know what a real relationship is supposed to feel like!” I think that in a society that looks at so many things in life as disposable it can be very hard to think of something in your life as permanent, and may even be a bit scary for a lot of people. Which is why so many clients say to me that they feel trapped when they’re in a relationship yet they feel lonely and insignificant when they’re not.

I was asked in an interview recently that if I had to choose one thing, what would I say is the most effective way of boosting happiness? In order to answer it I needed to think about all the concepts and exercises that I wrote about in my book to see if there was a common ingredient or theme. What I found is that pretty much everything I wrote about needed a foundation of appreciation, of gratitude in order for them to be of any help.

Have a think about the following question for a moment. “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time, assuming that the higher the step the better you feel about your life, and the lower the step the worse you feel about it? Which step comes closest to the way you feel?” This question is asked once per year by Gallup, the famous poll company. They ask a thousand people in each of around 150 countries from around the world to work out how happy each country is on average. Gallup don’t just ask this one question though, there are many more. They ask about their relationship status, how many children they have, how many friends they have. They find out how much time people spend driving to work and whether or not they mow their own lawn or get the kid down the road to do it for a fiver. There are many other organisations that undertake similar research and if you take all of the data from all of these different sources and stick them into a computer you can look for correlations, so we can see what influences us for the better and what influences us for the worse. It makes some very interesting reading and some of it genuinely surprising.

When someone says Be a man, what do you think of? Act tough? Don’t cry? Or do you think manning up means to take responsibility for your emotions or accept mistakes and move on? The idea of “Manning Up” seems to mean something different to everyone. YouTube channel Cut created some word association videos once and one of the phrases they asked a group of men to respond to was Be A Man, and it was really quite interesting to see the variances. They edited it together so that the youngest were at the beginning of the video and the eldest at the end, starting with 5 year olds and ended at aged 50. The reason this was so interesting to me is because the younger someone was the more similar their responses were. Most of the under 30’s associated being a man with being tough and strong, especially the youngsters. It wasn’t until they were in their 30’s that they seemed to find their own voice and the closer they got to 50 the more they saw Be A Man as a cliche that shouldn't have any relevance and instead associated manliness with honesty, embracing emotions or trusting themselves and walking their own path. It reminded me of something that Piers Morgan said during mental health awareness week. It was in response to an article that said that 2 thirds of British adults have experienced mental health problems, which is true but that doesn’t mean that 34 million people are suffering with mental illness all at the same time which the headlines often exaggerate it to, so as to get your attention. But the thing is, rather than acknowledge it as click bait and start a sensible discussion, Piers Morgan made the mistake of saying “What utter nonsense, Man Up Britain” and it started a flurry of almost 2000 replies that gave quite an insight into what people think about mental health.

It might sound daft to some people but gloomy weather does have an impact on our mental health. If its grey on the outside we can easily slip into a grey on the inside feeling, which leads to behaviour that might makes things worse, hiding away from everyone and refusing to leave the so called comforts of home. Here are my top 5 tips for combatting the winter blues!

The one thing everyone has in common is that we will all in some way be touched by death, whether it’s thoughts about our own demise, or having to deal with someone else’s. And what’s really important to understand, whether you’re trying to be a supporting friend or you’re a grieving widow, it’s important to understand the rules of grieving, of which there is only one…

Last week I noticed that my Sky TV hard drive box was getting full. There were a lot of satirical news programmes that I hadn’t watched and they were probably out of date. There were documentaries about topics that if I was really that interested in I’d have watched them by now. And it made me question why I’d set them to record in the first place. The conclusion I came to was that it was FOMO

Clients will often tell me that they feel overwhelmed with even the simple things in life, their house is a mess and they just don’t know where to start putting it right. Guess what their homework is?

Last week Ant McPartlin spoke out about his struggles with Depression and Anxiety. Making it public because he thinks that it’s important that people going through a rough time ask for help so as to get proper treatment. Great! But he followed it by also saying 'I feel like I have let a lot of people down and for that I am truly sorry.' That’s the part I didn’t like, because...

Presenting a Podcast about how to be positive and enthusiastic when so many people are sad and angry is difficult at the best of times, and last week felt like the worst of times. What good can possibly come from the murder of innocent people?

Being British it’s always a pleasure to see a bit of sunshine, especially this time of year when it’s unexpected, and a few weeks ago we had a weekend where the sun shone and the temperature was the same as it is in the summer. And, whilst relaxing and watching my son bounce on a trampoline in the garden my wife said to me “If it was always like this, people would be a lot happier.” My instincts were to agree and I started to nod my head in agreement before stepping back and thinking about it first.

It’s almost Easter already and even though we’ve put the clocks forward it seems like only yesterday when we put them back an hour in the Autumn. Time flies! I’ve mentioned before that 12 months to a 60 year old will obviously feel 6 times quicker than it does to a 10 year old but there’s also another reason.

Are you following the FA Cup at all? I’m not a huge fan of football myself, but I know enough that when I see that lower league Sutton United are playing Premiership side Arsenal it’s worth looking up from whatever I’m reading and go “Huh? how did that happen?”. Now, we all love an underdog story and so it would be amazing to see Sutton United beat Arsenal, it’s the stuff that films are made of! But the underdog lost. Arsenal beat them 2-0, but the difference in the 2 teams are like George Forman fighting George Formby! It could easily have been 10-0 but Sutton kept their energy levels up and surprised Arsenal with how well they could play. They walked off the pitch at the end of the day with their heads held high knowing that they did their best.

Political divisiveness often gives rise to a tirade of reasons on social media why the other side is wrong. With the rise of right wing extremism throughout Europe and the USA there seems to be a lot of people wanting Brexit to fail and Donald Trump to fail as President simply to prove themselves right. But it’s worth looking at these things with a more positive stance. Whether you think these are good ideas or not we should still want things to work out well. Deliberately wanting things to fail just so you can be proved right is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. A phrase with a nasty origin that goes back to the year 870 when St. Aebbe the Younger, the Mother Superior of a Scottish monastery, talked her fellow Nuns into disfiguring their faces order to render themselves unattractive to the incoming Viking invaders, so as to protect their chastity. It worked, the Viking pirates saw the noseless Nuns and were so disgusted by their faces they turned their backs on them. But the Nuns never got much of a chance to high five as the Viking Pirates burnt their Monastery to the ground with them still inside to teach them a lesson. Hey ho.

It’s a new year! Time to join in with the tradition that every January we draw a line in the sand and decide to do something different with our lives. Because doing it in November or December just feels wrong!