Category Archives: empowering

If Tomorrow, Women Woke Up…

It’s a strange relationship that I have with the fitness industry. I love it. I truly do. It has enabled me to follow my ambitions and dreams that I thought were beyond me or that had passed me by. I get to meet like-minded people which means I don’t need to bore my wife with news on my new bench press personal best. And the gym is my go to place for getting my head straight. Not many people get to say that about their workplace.

But it is also full of crap. For all the good it can do, there is an element of the industry that feeds off our insecurities.

Dr Gail Hines said,”If tomorrow, women woke up and decided that they really liked their bodies, just think of how many industries would go out of business.”

The fitness industry would be one of them. And in the past couple of decades I believe that the industry has begun to target the other half of the population too. Since the end of the degradation of women in magazines such as FHM and Zoo and newspapers putting a stop to page 3 in the UK, publishers had to target men in a different way. So now they put half naked pictures of male physique models in their magazines and tell them that is what they’re supposed to look like followed by an ad for creatine tablets.

But, despite it being important for the fitness industry to have men across the world feeling inadequate, it is far more lucrative for females to hate their bodies. Or to put it another way, it is more lucrative for the industry to tell women that they should hate their bodies.

For example, we join a weight loss group and go through the torturous weekly weigh ins whilst discussing our ‘syns’. Gym classes are attended mostly by women who are promised that they will burn fat, tone legs bum and tums and blast their abs. Personal Trainers are qualified in form and rep ranges but are way out of their depth when it comes to the emotional side of WHY a person has approached them for help in losing 2 stone in a month. (Some trainers are very good, by the way, but do your homework on them before you give them your money.)

The industry wouldn’t survive if we woke up tomorrow, looked in the mirror and said to ourselves “I am good enough. I am worthy.”

And that doesn’t mean that if we did this we couldn’t still train and eat nutritious food. But we would have a completely different outlook on how we approach our goals. We can always want to achieve a fitness goal that entails lower body weight or bigger muscles, but we would start to do it on our own terms.

The industry wants to confuse us.

When I go to the telly shop for a new telly, I immediately regret the whole process. It’s not that I don’t want a new telly, it’s because I am confronted by a salesperson who begins to fill the air with jargon. Yet, even though this is off putting, I do get excited about stuff that a TV can do that I never thought would float my boat. It draws me in. All of a sudden, things like OLED, QLED, 4k UHD, refresh rates, bezels, quantum dots, low latency and resolutions are the most important things in my life.

Before I know it, I’m leaving the shop with a screen as big as the one at The Odeon and if I can figure out the settings I’m sure it can make me a cuppa tea and give me a foot rub.

Now, I’m not saying that these fancy things aren’t useful on a TV, but I would question if I really needed something so glitzy as the TV that I bought. They are buzzwords. They make us want and need something that we think we don’t already have. It makes us feel inadequate if we leave the shop without a TV to go home to our own TV. Our own TV that might have a wobbly button and it’s a few years old but it still works perfectly fine.

The fitness industry sells us our fitness like a TV shop sells us our TV. They make it sexy and an absolute necessity for our lives. Their jargon and their buzzwords, their special offers and their ‘must have’ product means that we fall for their pitch.

I’ll get a new telly that does what I want it to do in my own time and with the advice of those that I trust. And if we say the same thing about our fitness goals, then we could all sit back and watch the industry do a bit of sweating of its own.

Walk Along The Way

We get bogged down by the details sometimes. We forget to actually do, because we’re wrapped up in the how.

A how is only important if you’re actively doing in the first place. And then you start finding how to do it.

The 13th century poet Rumi said, “As you start to walk along the way, the way appears.”

In other words don’t dither, just do.

By all means have a plan. Have a plan B. But the more you sit on the finer details, the more it is less likely to happen. So sometimes, as Rumi alludes to, it is only once you are on your path will the journey start to become clearer.

Perhaps I told people too early about our relocation to Portugal. It means that what I told people 4 months ago is completely different today. Yes, the way is Portugal, but the plan has changed daily. I’m sure anybody asking me about it is wishing that they hadn’t bothered!

From selling our house, budgets, liaising with UK and Portuguese solicitors and consulates, renting or buying in Portugal, where exactly in Portugal we will settle, the business plan, the kids schooling and when we will actually buy our one way ticket is still keeping this journey a mystery. But there’s one certainty and that is that it will happen. We know that because we are walking along the way.

The way has obstacles. It isn’t easy. But if anything is worth getting, then it has to be with full commitment, belief and a great deal of bloody stubbornness.

We’re learning along the way and we will make mistakes. But mistakes, and the unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, are what mold us into grittier and more determined people. We cannot get lost in our pain, because one day the pain will become the cure.

Think about something that you are passionate about doing. It doesn’t have to be anything at all like mine. This is your passion. Now visualize it. Live it for a few moments. What do you see? How does this passion that you have imagined as your reality make you feel? Can you see yourself smiling, laughing, dancing as a confident happy person?

Because that’s what following your passions should be like. Living your life how you want to live it should make you feel fulfilled. Don’t be afraid to find your happiness. You just need to start to walk along the way.

Messi Or Ronaldo? A SMART Debate

Having spent the past two weeks with kids obsessed with football at a multi sports camp and having two footy mad kids myself, the question “Who is better, Messi Or Ronaldo?” Is asked to me almost daily.

But this question isn’t just something that kids ask. People debating on the terraces, in the workplace, online and in pubs must be one of the most frequently asked questions in the footballing world for over ten years.

So, my answer is usually pretty boring to most people.

The problem with finding the answer here is that we are talking about two of the most gifted footballers to ever play the game. They both have different strengths to each other but they are considered some of the greatest ever because even their weaknesses are pretty strong.

But these footballers are once in a generation freaks who are exceptionally gifted. They are so good that players such as Neymar, Modric, Salah, Mbappe and Haarland simply get overlooked as the best in the world because, even though Messi is in his later years as a footballer, is still winning some of the greatest trophies in world football.

Kids score a goal and instantly celebrate with Ronaldo’s ‘Suuuuiii’ celebration. They are more than great footballers. They are icons. Kids want to be just like them. And when I watch some adults play football in the local park, I suspect they do too.

And whilst this enthusiasm for mimicking heroes is all good fun, I can see an issue with how we view ourselves and how it can affect our own expectations of our own abilities.

I’ll take you back to when I first started going to the gym. I would see the most physically imposing guy in there and want to look like him. He was the gym GOAT (greatest of all time). I would watch how he trained. I would notice the protein shakes he was drinking.

Yet all I was managing to do is raise the bar to a height that might have been way too high for me, my genetics, my lifestyle and crucially my health and physical development.

I didn’t need to be anybody else or aspire to anyone else’s goals. Sure, I can always ask questions and get training tips, but trying to become the same size as Triple H was a poor start to my gym journey. It can be demoralising and, for many people, ends in quitting the gym altogether.

My son Jonas is a terrific footballer for his age. As an under 9’s player he is currently playing in an under 10’s league and looks comfortable. But I do try to keep his feet on the ground. He watches lots of football on YouTube. Rather than watching video after video of Ronaldo and Messi, I would much rather he watched the leadership of Jordan Henderson on TV or even go to the local stadium of Scarborough Athletic and aspire to have the passion of their team captain Michael Coulson.

SMART

When you are wanting to create your fitness goals I would recommend the SMART approach. This stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time. And I’m going to look at the achievable bit for this article.

As I have stated above, I believe that many of us raise our bar to unrealistic levels and if we were to lower it then we would get to where we want to be much easier. It doesn’t mean that we can’t be brilliant at what we do, in fact, if we can look at our achievable goals realistically, then there’s a much greater chance of being brilliant at what we do.

Firstly, you need to recognise your competition. The only competition is YOU. Nobody else. You want to achieve just as much, if not better, than yesterday’s you. This could be by maintaining your physical activities from week to week, looking to achieve an extra mile on the treadmill, putting an extra couple of kilos on the bar, aiming for higher reps or keeping a stable nutritional diet. It doesn’t matter what Hulk is lifting on the platform. It’s your journey, not theirs.

A few years ago I trained a very active 50 year old lady who wanted to gain muscle hypertrophy. As time progressed and her personal bests were increasing she began to show me pictures of Karissa Pearce, who is a CrossFit athlete. My client wanted her physique. I had to attempt to manage my clients expectations. It wasn’t that she didn’t work hard enough in the gym but it didn’t meet the criteria for her achievable goals. Karissa Pearce was a professional athlete in her mid 20’s who was able to train full time and stuck to an incredibly tight diet to get the physique that she had (and still does). My client, despite her levels of enthusiasm and spirit, did not live the same lifestyle and I would not have been doing my job correctly if I enabled unrealistic goals.

The saying goes “Reach for the moon and you’ll land among the stars”. But it can only refer to your moon and your stars. Not Messi or Ronaldo’s, Triple H or Karissa Pearce’s moon or stars. They have their journey, you have yours.

So many young people give up on their dreams because they could not interpret that dream into reality. And adults do it too, until we become a society of people giving up because we couldn’t manage our expectations.

A child should be able to dream about becoming a World Cup winning footballer, but the reality based on statistics in the UK is that a talented kid at football who manages to be invited to an academy has less than 1% chance of making it to becoming a professional at ANY level. However, that shouldn’t burst a kids bubble. If they aren’t one of the lucky ones to make the professional level, then it is worth noting that there are over 5,000 football teams in non-League divisions. This is an excellent standard to reach which is often paid (depending on the league and the club). Just because you don’t have Ronaldo’s career, it doesn’t mean you are rubbish at football.

As a kid I would dream about playing for Liverpool FC and, although I don’t earn the weekly wage of Mo Salah, I did follow my ‘sporty’ dream eventually by becoming a Personal Trainer and I currently coach sports to children. And so we should dream, as long as you manage the reality.

I encourage my own kids to dream about their goals. But, just to give you an example of the sort of stuff they aspire to achieve, it involves mansions, high performance cars, professional football, becoming a YouTuber with millions of followers and traveling to the moon. These are all great ideas, but I also want them to realise that just having a home is winning at life too. Affording any car is a luxury. Having your health and talent to play at any level of football is amazing. Having real friends that appreciate you is special and just being able to see the moon is a blessing.

Reflecting on my own fitness journey, i now understand that my achievable goals are to be able to run and lift as well today as I was doing ten years ago. It’s to fit into the same size jeans as last year. It’s to meet new and interesting people. It’s to keep a positive mindset and feel good about myself. If I continue what I’m doing then I have a good chance in achieving this.

Please, keep dreaming. Aspire in doing whatever you want in life. It really does keep the fire in the belly burning. But when it is time to form your plan of action in your life, be SMART.

They Told Me I Couldn’t

Let me start with a quote from the movie The Pursuit Of Happiness. Smith’s character says to his child…

“Don’t ever let someone tell you that you can’t do something. Not even me. You got a dream, you’ve gotta protect it. When people can’t do something themselves, they’re gonna tell you that you can’t do it. You want something, go get it. Period.”

And whether they mean it or not, it is quite often those closest to you who are the ones who might be holding you back. They’re giving you your limitations. Smith’s character even warned his child, “Not even me.” Parents, partners, friends. They’re all capable of telling you that you’re not able enough.

But don’t blame them. Certainly not if they are misguided. We are all guilty of blocking a loved one’s ambitions. Just realize that every time they tell you that you can’t, they’re just showing their limitations, not yours.

However, you should try to surround yourself with as many people who tell you that YOU CAN as much as possible. My wife and I seem to work well at this. She knew that I was desperately unhappy in my previous career and, even though it meant less income and with a new born baby, she allowed me to follow my dreams of becoming a Personal Trainer.

Likewise, after being a stay at home mum for our two children for a few years, I encouraged her to go to college to qualify as a Massage Therapist. Financially it became a challenge, but we could develop a lifestyle that worked for our family and it made us happier.

Now, we are telling each other every day that we can take our business ventures to Portugal, despite some days the whole universe telling us that we can’t.

Along with the misguided people who don’t mean any harm, I can guarantee that you will have those people in your life who do. They will thrive off of your misery and failures. Yes, these are the toxic ones. Most of them won’t care about your problems and some will be even glad that you have them. Stay clear. These aren’t just the doubters, but these are the ones who will go out of their way to trip you up. They’ll look friendly, but I think that you know who they are. Insincere people are easy to detect.

So much of our success in life is determined by those we have around us. You need positive people to support you. As for the rest, just say to them, “You told me I couldn’t, so I made sure that I did.”

Extreme Dieting

We get so wrapped up in extremes these days and, perhaps in the age of the internet, it is more apparent than ever for us humans.

Everything we do and say is often interpreted as a hyperbolic representation of us as individuals. Others do it to us, but we are likely to do this to ourselves too as some sort of self fulfilled prophecy.

If you publicly laugh at an Alf Garnet joke you are judged to be a right wing fascist and if you welcome black mermaids in a new kids Disney  movie then you are labelled a woke looney lefty.

I do both. I confuse the extremists.

But something very dangerous is happening to our culture that I, as a personal trainer, feel should be addressed regarding what we eat. Diets are becoming more and more extreme by the week.

I decided fairly quickly in my life as a PT to avoid creating meal plans for my clients. Even if they specifically asked for them, if they were not an elite athlete that had to continuously hit certain weights (boxers, jockeys) and macros then it was not necessary. The average gym goer will not benefit from such an extreme method. And if a fitness professional demands that you follow a meal plan then I would suggest that they are trying to upsell their product.

Apps such as calorie and macro counters are usually a good place to begin a weight loss or muscle hypertrophy journey. Even then, they are only necessary for a few weeks until you can discover what each meal can provide in terms of nutrition.

But the problem with meal planners is that they are…

A. Designed by someone else.

B. Do not account for your different moods or hunger throughout the day and

C. Can cause you to feel demoralised when you cannot follow it.

My life, for example, is not so well structured that I am able to prep and eat a certain meal at a certain time of day every day. Will I always have those ingredients in the kitchen? Will an emergency at work or home derail my timing? With food costs going up, will I be able to afford these meals? Is my PT telling me to buy, prep and eat all of this while he plans my life in his bedroom and his mum makes him his tea?!

(The last one actually happens, trust me.)

And what if I miss a meal or find an alternative food? Does this waste all of my previous efforts? Should I just give it up as a bad job? Maybe I’m just not ready to lose weight/become healthier/ build muscle.

No!

It means that I’m human. I’m not programmed to eat half a chicken breast, one handful of broccoli and one cup of rice at 12:30 just because it is written on a piece of paper on my fridge door.

Yesterday, I had the following breakfast…

Two white buns, buttered. Inside each of them I put one slice of bacon, one hash brown, one fried egg, mushrooms, one slice of black pudding and baked beans. Here’s the evidence…

I enjoyed every guilt free moment of it because I have no restrictions on my diet. But I can only have this ‘no food ban’ in place if I keep to some sensible rules…

* I make sure that I eat fruit and veg throughout the day.

* I don’t eat extra high calorie meals every day.

* I try to vary my meals regularly so that I do not fall into a rut resulting in boredom or habit forming.

* I acknowledge the calories and macros of each meal, but even more importantly, I recognise how each meal makes me feel. For example, do I feel sluggish? Am I drinking extra water due to excess salt consumption? Do I feel satisfied? Will this meal sustain me in whatever activity I have planned to do next?

My breakfast from yesterday isn’t a bad meal. It becomes a poor choice, however, if I were to have it today and tomorrow and the day after and so on. So I won’t.

Instead, my breakfast this morning looks like this…

This drink consists of one apple, a banana, a pear and plenty of spinach topped up with water. This is my usual start to the day, but yesterday I just fancied a change.

Both breakfasts made me happy.

Extreme dieting methods can be damaging to your relationship with food and ultimately your health. So let’s look at a few steps to a sensible approach…

* If you find yourself craving a certain food and have started to eat this for the past few days then this can create a habit that is unwelcome. Even a fruit and veg smoothie using the same ingredients every day can be detrimental. Try new and different fruit and veg for example. This will ensure that you remain interested in making a fruit smoothie each day if that is your goal. And as much as I loved my full English breakfast in a bun, the calories and trans fats are not something that I can put into my body each day. Keep it to the odd occasion.

* If you are going out for the evening and you know that there will be lovely food and drink on offer, then approach this occasion sensibly. You want to have a good time without calorie counting every single drop! For a day or two, cut back on calorie dense foods. For example, stay away from a full English in a bun or a takeaway in the lead up to a night out. Also, I find a good workout on the day of a big night out helps me stay focussed. It doesn’t ruin my enjoyment, but If I feel the effects of a workout it enables me to keep my goals in the back of my mind even if I’m ordering the gin and tonics.

* Appreciate ALL food types. And you can do this whilst acknowledging that high nutritious food is excellent fuel for your body and your mind. Don’t be down on yourself if you’ve been fuelling your body with great nutrition but suddenly find yourself chowing down on a full English breakfast butty. Eat it and move on.

* Stay away from extreme diet sites and companies that want your money while you question yourself and feel inadequate. And don’t take too much notice of Dave from admin who lost 2 stone by following the new fad Facebook diet. You will lose weight on any diet that puts you in a calorie deficit. But you’ll only keep it off if it doesn’t require extreme measures such as very low daily calories, counting your ‘syns’ or taking pills. Your approach right from the off has to be sustainable for your lifestyle.

* Buy high nutritional food and bring it into your home. Cupboards and fridges should be stocked with 80% of the high nutritious foods and 20% of the rest of your favourite foods. Once it is in your home, you can start making some of your favourite healthy dishes and freezing them. Sauces are easily made in large quantities and frozen in those tubs that you get from the takeaway!

So, before I get asked about this, I’ll comment on it now. Are syn’s from Slimming World really all that extreme?!

Well, this is a method which…

1. Calls higher calorie foods a syn. Ok, it means synergy to SW, but does the term syn trigger something to you which means it is bad for you? I’m afraid it’s poor taste in light of the mental health problems we have as a society regarding the way we look. And

2. Bananas are a ‘free’ food unless it is mashed. Then it becomes a syn. Three points on that…

a) A banana has never ever been a reason for a person’s weight gain. Mashed or unmashed.

b) If we demonize the poor mashed banana then what of the full English butty?! What chance do we have with our physical and mental health or weight control if we see mashed up banana as a reason why we are failing?

c) banana gets mashed when you put it in your mouth. Sooooo…..

Whether it is the PT writing out your next week’s meal plan, the media with their hyperbolic headlines or the big companies with very clever marketing campaigns, you can be sure that they are all capable of taking us to the extreme when it comes to the food that we eat.

I hope, with a little common sense and a step back from the nonsense, we can all start making some delicious choices from now on.

Turning Anxiety Into Excitement

As my son and I walked away from his opportunity to do football training with the older kids the other day I noticed that the anxiety had overcome him. The coach was fantastic, he tried to encourage him to join in. The kids are a good bunch, they would have welcomed my son. But the occasion got too much for him. He just couldn’t do it.

It isn’t the first time. At an open trial event at Leeds United, a similar thing happened. And there’s been lots of scenarios where he has not joined in with something because of this. He gets anxious and I get that. My first ever fitness class in front of 30 experienced class attendees was a disaster because I could hardly get my words out or move my feet. Not a good start for  a coach trying to lead the class!

Being good at something and even excelling to become successful at it requires much more than skill and intelligence. My son has this at football in abundance. His ‘football brain’ is excellent for a 9 year old. He has an instinctive mind of knowing what to do in certain situations of a game that is unusual to have at his age. But it’s no use if he can’t walk onto the pitch to showcase this ability. This is a different skill entirely.

Turning anxiety into excitement is an art.

American author Simon Sinek has spoken about the Nerves Vs Excitement situation. During the Olympics he observed that the interviewers would ask the athlete if they were nervous about their upcoming event. Almost in every reply, the athlete said that they felt excited. An elite athlete who has reached the peak of competing at the Olympics won’t get nervous. Despite their talents, had the nerves gotten the better of them then they surely wouldn’t have made the cut to represent their country at the Olympics in the first place.

We could define being nervous as having sweaty palms, a faster heart beat and a future cognitive thought process whereby our minds come up with negative outcomes such as tripping up, losing or getting injured.

And yet excitement could be defined in a very similar way. Sweaty palms, a faster heart beat and, as for the future cognition, this would be our minds coming up with positive outcomes such as winning a gold medal, breaking a personal best and celebrating.

But the interviewers are actually commenting on their emotions. It is them who would feel anxious. They’re not the elite athlete.

And this can be seen in many other, non-sporting contexts. The Great British Bake off contestants will talk of being nervous about baking a cake. Mary Berry would feel excited. She is an expert and the contestants are amateur bakers.

So these elite athletes and Mary Berry have one thing in common and that is the fact that they have practiced their craft a million times before. And during this time there will have been some disastrous events and many soggy bottoms, but they kept on going. Practicing and perfecting their skill until it wasn’t daunting to them in any way, just exciting.

I could only get over my fears as a class fitness instructor by going back to the class each week and training my emotions to get better at it. I knew that I could lead a class, but I had to keep repeating it several times to lose the nerves.

And I know that, had my son trained with the older kids the other day, then he would have been a little bit more prepared for the next week. And the week after. And the week after that. Until a time would come where he felt nothing but excitement to train with them.

One way in which I worked with my initial anxiety about my first few classes was to announce to the participants that I was nervous. I even tried to laugh and make a joke of it. This broke down any barriers that were there between me and the class participants. I became one of them. After all, there are plenty of gym goers who are extremely anxious about stepping into a gym. Them knowing that I was nervous too, seemed to put us all at ease. We could work through it together. I am now about to stand in front of a class full of people whether it be two people or two hundred! The adrenaline would be there, but it would be excitement and not nerves.

We don’t need to be elite athletes to transfer anxiety into excitement, but we do need to keep turning up. Start by thinking about what could go right instead of what could go wrong. Sure, such as life, things won’t always go as you would like, but if you can be at peace with that in mind then the rewards are massive.

Just remember, we can all be guilty of a soggy bottom before we create a masterpiece.

A Beautiful Failure

Let me be clear right now about your latest derailing of your goals; it will not define you.

The extra food that you ate, the missed fitness class, the duvet day or the excessive alcohol that you drank will not define your success or your failure.

You have simply experienced a moment in time that didn’t fit in with your goals. Fuck it. Move on.

I like to give the occasional quote by some literary genius or scientist to emphasize my point in my blogs, but this time I present to you a football manager… Liverpool’s Jürgen klopp. This week, in the same week that I lost the sale of my house, thus waving goodbye to a very nice house in Bem De Fe, practically having a none existent exercise routine creating an appetite for poor nutritional food and Liverpool facing knockout in the Champions League against Real Madrid, Klopp gave me a golden piece of wisdom.

“Just try. If we can do it, wonderful. If not, then fail in the most beautiful way.”

Fail in the most beautiful way. I love that sentence. We fail all the time. And when we do, we have two options. We can either crumble and give in, or we can learn something from it and go again.

How do we fail? In our daily lives we get situations that let us down, we divert from our personal goals, we forget something important, we are disappointed in our behaviour or don’t give a good account of ourselves. These are all things that we have to deal with. Managing this and responding to it is where the real success happens.

Failure does not define you, but your reaction to it will.

So when you fail, do it in the most beautiful way.

Everything Flows, And Nothing Stays

We are all in a constant process of change. How you choose to adapt and evolve is largely down to you as an individual.

Your thoughts and feelings are probably very different to those of 20 years ago. Or 10 years ago. Or one year ago. And even less.

In the time that you click onto this page and read up to this point, your brain has inputted, stored and refreshed this information and it will keep happening every 15 seconds of your life. This continuity field allows the brain to call upon past experiences, snapshots and perceptions and use it in present situations. And because the brain is constantly collecting this information and storing it, we adapt our beliefs, thoughts and feelings along with it.

Once we know and understand this, the quote by Soren Kierkegaard starts to make sense…

“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

The brain is constantly traveling back in time to recall each moment that is relevant for the present experience of the individual. Collecting stored data to form appropriate actions. This is how we are able to scan words when we read.

But, despite these most amazing things happening to our brains, we are the director of change and evolution. This is how habits can be broken and how past experiences can be used for strength, positivity and future happiness.

Heraclitus said…

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

What did he mean? My interpretation of this is that once you step into a river the water is displaced with new water and the nature of the river is changed permanently. You are also changing.

Just because you have experienced a moment in your life does not mean that you must replay it. It just needs a little rethink, or in the case of your brain, a rewire. We can train our brain to do as we want. We can change what we don’t like, but your brain needs new material to process.

Neuroplasticity is the term used to describe the brain’s ability to adapt to different circumstances throughout your life. Affirmations, which is a technique to instill a positive mindset through repeated words and sentences, is the most popular way of achieving this brain rewire.

Affirmations are often short sentences that can be easily remembered and stored in your brain. And as we have discovered, once your brain has inputted this into its system, it will roll it out when needed.

Governments and ad companies use them too! So it’s not some hocus pocus stuff that some people want to believe.

I’m lovin’ it. Just do it. Get Brexit done. Build a wall. These are just a few examples of successful catchy earworms that are/were repeated to us constantly but there are actually thousands and thousands of other examples of clever affirmations that are instilled into our brain in order for us to act how that particular campaign wants us to act. Well, the good news is that it is actually YOU in control as long as you can counter the influences from around us.

You just need to keep telling yourself and reminding yourself of your aspirations, needs and life goals. If a burger company can make us keep going back to eat burgers with the same texture of cardboard and a government can instruct a whole nation to strip themselves of their rights and leave the EU whilst they titter all the way to their offshore accounts, then I’m sure that we can all manipulate our brains with our own affirmations. Positive affirmations.

When you stand in the river, it changes. Make sure that you change what you want to change too by giving your brain positive things to process. Because when it comes to it, your brain will be using this information to enable you to make those changes.

Continue to remind yourself who and what gets you out of bed each morning. Keep telling yourself how well you could do the new job that you have applied for and repeatedly remind yourself of your health and fitness goals. Write stuff down. Put it on a white board or on the fridge door. Keep your favourite affirmation as a screen saver. Anything at all to allow your brain to compute those words and keep them.

Everything keeps changing. You don’t have to be the one thing that doesn’t.

Worrying About What Others Think

I must have spent what equates to years of my life worrying about what people think about me. Certainly as a teenager I wanted to feel accepted by my peers in some way. And then in adulthood along came social media, where ‘likes’ and ‘thumbs up’ became far more important in my life than they should have. In job interviews, social settings and on social media, I wanted to be liked and wanted.

But then it stopped.

I didn’t suddenly turn into a person who didn’t care about what others thought about me, but I did become very aware of my change in attitude on whether or not somebody liked my personality, accepted my dress sense, my political opinions and my interests. I care, but don’t cry about it if somebody doesn’t like me for whatever reason. I do me. They can do them.

My ‘resting bitch face’ can be a hindrance. Maybe I can look angry or disinterested when actually that’s just my face! I don’t just walk around with a smile. I need to be approachable in my profession, whether in the gym or in my future projects. Yet I can only continue doing me, otherwise people wouldn’t get me, they’d get fake me.

Did age change my attitude to being accepted or not?! In my experience, older people tend to have less of a filter. Am I just getting old?!

My appearance is deceiving. I’m bald, so I shave whatever bits of hair grows on my head. I weight train and eat a lot, so I am of a larger size. I have tattoos including flags of communist countries, guerilla warfare leaders and football club badges. People might judge me on this. Also, I’m open about my politics. Just the other day a parent at my son’s football match asked me why we chose Portugal to be our next place to live. Without hesitation I said it was because Portugal is in the EU and we want to get out of Brexit Britain. I could have just said ‘For the weather’, but then it wouldn’t be me.

Yes, if I make friends, I can lose them pretty quickly. I just can’t say what I think people might want to hear. And I appreciate transparency in a friend. They can call me a dick if I’m being a dick. No hard feelings. It’s the people that can’t take it when I pull them up on something. It needs to work both ways. I don’t need them as friends. They can fake it elsewhere.

Remaining calm and focussed when I get labelled, misquoted or misrepresented is something that I still have to learn to deal with. After all, I am human with all the same sensitive emotions as the next person. I’m not a robot. But a piece of good advice from author Morgan Richard Olivier is something that I always refer back to.

She said…”Letting people be wrong about you or a situation while keeping your peace and focus is the most misunderstood power move you will ever make.”

You see, becoming comfortable with yourself is one of the greatest super powers that you can possess. You can spend a lifetime trying to impress people. How we look, think and behave are being judged all of the time, and yet, by whose standards?

Will my life be any different if Graham from Dudley gives me an angry face emoji because I am happy to refer to Sam Smith as ‘they/them’ on the internet?

Would I feel any better if I were to explain to Sally on the Co-Op till that I’m not a far right football hooligan, just a follicy challenged lover of Liverpool FC?

I don’t need to explain myself. And you don’t have to explain yourself.