“Don’t worry!” they say. “Think about something else”. Who on earth wants to worry? Who wants to be agitated or afraid? No one, obviously. But it sometimes seems inevitable. ‘Don’t worry’ is, like ‘Keep calm’, or ‘Don’t think of a pink elephant”, an instruction that...

joyriding n. informal: the crime of stealing a vehicle and driving very fast. I think perhaps I should point out that by calling my new book ‘Joyride’ I was not trying to endorse or recommend to readers that criminal activity described by the Oxford English...

I was asked to give a short talk. It’s something I’ve done more times than I can remember. In fact you might say that among other things I’m a ‘professional speaker’. I motivate people and try to change them for the better through my words. I don’t really have any...

I punched the four-digit code into a little metal box on a pole by the side of the dirt track and sat waiting for what seemed like several minutes while the electronic gates slowly opened, all the while trying to keep my mind free of any insecure, negative thoughts....

‘… the domestication of humans and animals, the specialization of labour, growth of culture through shared ideology, introduction of taxation, and above all the dependence on farming and other agricultural practices…’ Google the word ‘civilization’ and you’ll find a...

A client of mine told me she had given up on love and intimacy, saying that after several bad relationships she no longer wanted anything to do with ‘emotional entanglements’, as she put it. She had completely lost faith in men. I thought about the problem for a while...

The email was innocuous enough. There was nothing exactly negative about it, but I found myself irritated, unsettled and if I’m honest a bit angry. The client who sent it – let’s call him Stuart - had recently been on one of my courses and was updating me on his...

“See that concrete wall over there at the end of the circuit? What do you think would happen if we headed towards it at 130mph, then braked at the last minute, say, twenty feet from impact?” “We would die.”    “Exactly!” I was having a driving lesson at a well-known...

The subject is stress. What could be more thought-generated than anxiety? After all you can’t see it, hear it or touch it. There’s no denying it’s a response to external stimuli, but so what? There is nothing mandatory about it. In other words no one has to feel it....

Something that I’ve struggled with over the years – and maybe you have too – is the whole paradox that is the act of forgiveness. It’s such a simple word, to forgive, and it feels right that we should do it. It’s at the heart of the particular religion that I was...

I was in La Conner, just outside Seattle, one of my favourite places in the world, at the end of a weeklong retreat to raise my consciousness level. It had been a wonderful experience and I was positively glowing from all the insights I’d been sharing with like-minded...

I got an urge to give my first ever mentor Paul a call, just to say hi. Paul was the man who selflessly took me under his wing about ten years ago when I had only just encountered NLP and was eager to learn more. He was, (and still is, now in his seventies), a hugely...