Hi there,

As you read this, I’ll have just emerged from five days camping off-grid at a wonderful song-writing retreat on a rewilded site on Dartmoor, one of the UK’s great wildernesses.

When I say ‘camping’, I mean cosied up in a sweet little camper van. I did this retreat a couple of years ago, also in June, and the weather was Baltic. We had torrential rain and temperatures plummeting to 6c at night. Next week isn’t exactly looking tropical either. While I admire the fortitude of my fellow songsters who’ll be sleeping in tents for five nights, I’ll be quite happy in my warm, dry bed.

This week we’re continuing the June series of articles, centred around three nuggets: one FACT, one REFLECTION and one ACTION. Our theme for today is tolerating the difficulty of change

Here are your nuggets:

1️⃣ FACT: When you do something that feels uncomfortable or unfamiliar, your brain can register it as a mild threat and release adrenaline and cortisol Those are the same stress hormones that are involved when we face genuine danger.

This process is uncomfortable by design. Our brains and bodies constantly seek ways to return to the status quo, even when what’s ‘known’ is no longer doing us any favours. So when you venture into unfamiliar territory, your brain has to work harder to process what’s going on. The resistance and unease you may feel when you push against an old pattern is the sensation of your brain actually changing.

2️⃣ REFLECTION: Many years ago there used to be these huge signs on Sydney Harbour Bridge, warning motorists who strayed into the wrong lane, “WRONG WAY, GO BACK!”. They terrified me, even when I was in the right lane.

Change can feel a bit like that in our bodies. Many of us take discomfort as a sign to stop trying to do things differently and run back to what’s familiar. But discomfort doesn’t have to be a warning klaxon. You could decide to explore your resistance with compassionate curiosity, and treat it as confirmation that you’re moving in the direction you want to travel.

Over time, when we’re actively building a life that matters, we learn to recognise the difference between discomfort that limits us and discomfort that’s simply the price of growth.

3️⃣ ACTION: This week, choose one thing that you’ve been putting off because it feels uncomfortable. It might be a conversation, a decision, or a first step toward something you’ve been wanting for a while.

Before you approach the task, set a timer for two minutes and sit with any feeling of discomfort that comes us, without trying to resolve it. Describe it. Where do you feel it in your body? How does it shift? Does it end up feeling as solid as it did to start with?

Then take that action. By doing so, you’re honing your ability to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’, which is one of the main ways in which we can deliberately grow.

Make sure you’ve put our coaching session in your diary

On Wednesday 24th June, Sue Revell – celebrant, coach and podcaster – will lead us through her brilliant framework: I Gotta Be Me: Creating Great Days on Purpose. I’ve done some of this work with Sue and I promise you’ll find it both valuable and enjoyable.

Most of us spend far more time thinking about what we should be doing than who we’re becoming. Sue’s signature ‘I Gotta Be Me’ approach helps us find our flow and do our best work without shrinking or performing.

The session is free for paying subscribers. If you’d like to benefit from our monthly, live, group-coaching sessions, you can upgrade here:

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Below are the details to join:

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Hi there,

Many of my readers and clients have made good headway on their timelines and are exploring life at the riper end of the age panorama. (Can you tell I’m tying myself in knots trying to avoid using the word ‘older’? 😄)

At 64, I’m ten years past the point where I can claim to be in mid-life. I’m constantly surprised when I see my age written down because I can’t quite fathom this number – and it’s only going to get bigger until I run out of road.

I was only nine years old when my beloved Scottish Granny died, at the age I am now. The photo at the top of this article is one of the few I have of us together – I’m the baby she’s holding. Granny was only 56 when the photo was taken but it’s clear that a tough life had already turned her into an old lady.

Age is preoccupying me at the moment

We had two birthdays in our house last week. My Dad turned 90 and Mum reached 88 two days later. It moves me to see them so young in the photo above (aged 25 and 23), already with two babies and my Mama a few months pregnant with number three.

We’re so lucky that although both my parents have health challenges, they’re mercifully free from dementia. That’s not to say I haven’t noticed cognitive decline, though – it’s one of the main reasons I moved in with them.

It’s normal that the human brain slows down as we age.

Information takes longer to process, short-term memory declines and attention becomes harder to hold on to. But there’s a misconception that this has to start happening at mid-life.

A caveat, though. For women, the fiction is partly true because the menopause years can play havoc with our brain functioning. That was certainly the case with me – in my early 50s, my brain fog was so alarming that I went to see my GP to ask for a dementia test. He was singularly clueless about most matters relating to women’s health, especially menopause, and in the end it was the practice nurse, herself red-faced and sweating, who educated me about the impact plummeting oestrogen can have on our brains. It took several years before I felt a return to a more normal level of operations.

As I mentioned in last week’s article, I’m running a series of articles in June, each of which focuses on a particular theme and offer three nuggets: one FACT, one REFLECTION and one MINDSET TIP. As you may have gathered, this week’s post is about growing older, and specifically the experience of arriving at mid-life.

Below, for paying subscribers, are this week’s nuggets, plus a description of the mouth-watering group-coaching my friend Sue Revell has lined up for us on 24th June.

Here are this week’s nuggets on mid-life:

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Hi there,

I publish my weekly newsletter at 07:15 every Tuesday morning, UK time. This month actually has five Tuesdays and they coincide with me being away for two weeks (including a few days of fabulous, off-grid camping adventure on a piece of rewilded moorland with a bunch of music-makers – can’t wait!).

It’s also my Dad’s 90th birthday this month and my Mum’s 88th so I’m organising celebrations. Then, when I get back from the wilderness, I’ll be managing a building project and doing a heap of painting and decorating.

Phew.

Rather than put myself under pressure to write and schedule five chunky articles in advance, I’m going to give myself and you, dear reader, an easier time with short posts that are relatively simple to digest and process, but still (I hope) offer something useful to chew on.

A couple of years ago I also had a particularly full June (including going on the same songwriters’ retreat), and decided to post a series of reflective questions instead of my usual long-ish articles. This year I’m following a similar path, each week offering three nuggets that orbit a particular theme: one FACT, one REFLECTION and one MINDSET TIP.

Here are this week’s nuggets on the topic of deliberately taking empty downtime:

1️⃣ FACT: When you’re doing nothing in particular – staring out the window, for example, or folding laundry, or day-dreaming – your brain activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network (DMN). This is a set of interconnected brain regions that are most active during restful periods, when you’re not overly focused on a task or what’s going on around you.

The DMN plays a crucial role in various cognitive functions, including self-reflection and emotional processing. It enables your brain to take care of essential housekeeping, like consolidating your memories, processing your emotions playing with creative insight and highlighting patterns. Some of your most important thinking happens when you appear to be doing nothing at all.

2️⃣ REFLECTION: For many of us, our lives are so full of ‘stuff’ that we don’t often consciously make space for inactivity. Indulging in what one of my teachers witheringly referred to as ‘goofing off’ can land us with feelings of guilt, due to our internalised stories about laziness, work pressure, or the need to prioritise other people’s needs.

I invite you to read and absorb this statement:

It’s possible that the most useful thing you might do for yourself today is nothing.

We tend to trust the thoughts that arrive at our desks more than the ones that arrive in the bath, and yet, arguably, the bath may have a better track record. A client of mine has his best ideas while he’s idly waiting for the kettle to boil. My own tend to arrive when I’m in the shower – which is why I keep a waterproof diver’s slate hanging on my shower caddy to capture them before they disappear down the plughole:

3️⃣ MINDSET TIP: When you next feel the urge to pick up your phone to check emails or binge on wild horse rescue videos on social media (ahem, memo to self), acknowledge that desire and take it as an invitation to pause.

Try putting your phone down and giving yourself full permission to just sit with emptiness for sixty seconds. You don’t have to spend a long time in your DMN zone, but note that staying a little longer than feels comfortable is where the good stuff tends to happen.

There you go, short and sweet

Our live group-coaching session for paying members is a special one this month. My dear friend, Sue Revell – coach, podcaster, celebrant and woman of humane wisdom, will take the lead. Sue’s particular magic involves helping us to explore our identity and get to know ourselves at a deeper level. I’ve benefited from Sue’s programmes and I promise this will be really valuable.

Look out for more details in next week’s article and in the meantime, please ink this date in your diary:

• Date: Wednesday 24th June

• Time: 7:00pm – 8:30pm BST (2:00pm EDT, 11:00am PDT)

If you’re not currently a paying subscriber and would like to benefit from this and our other live coaching sessions, you can upgrade here. We run 11 of these a year:

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Let me know in the comments how you get on with the prompts above. Until next week, much love and take care,

Hi there,

My folks have lived in a slightly scruffy village near the coast in Scotland for the last 25 years. I’ve visited them often and spent lockdown here. Fifteen months ago, I quit my nomadic life to become my parents’ carer-companion and this place became my permanent home.

Around the corner from us was a house I passed every day – let’s call is Number 6. I could almost see it from our driveway. I must have passed this house hundreds of times on my way to buy the newspaper and fresh rolls each day, yet I’d have been hard pressed to describe it beyond ‘ugly-ish bungalow with a front lawn and roses growing up the front in summer.”

Something can be right in front of us, but largely unseen until, for whatever reason, it commands our attention.

Why is the house around the corner relevant?

Because ten months ago we moved into it. We needed a bigger home and this one was so conveniently close that we didn’t look at anything else.

Number six comes with a wrap-around garden that’s much bigger than we needed or wanted – none of us are natural gardeners. It was the end of summer when we moved in and I was so busy knocking down an internal wall and covering up acres of shiny, dung-coloured paintwork that I didn’t pay much attention to the outside, other than mowing the grass a couple of times, while swearing at the antics of the spiteful lawnmower ‘gifted’ to us by the previous owners. Towards the end of the year I also planted an evergreen hedge inside the picket fence at the front to provide some much-needed privacy, but that was it for outside.

But in between threats to kill the lawnmower, I couldn’t fail to appreciate those climbing roses, red and buttercup-yellow, scrambling over the pebble-dashed exterior in joyful abundance. Or the apple tree in the back garden, dropping small, sweet fruit as summer burned its way into autumn, then winter.

And that’s when the seeds of curiosity began to germinate. What would spring reveal about this garden, which had settled down to two lawns, black soil borders, a load of unremarkable shrubs and a few bare trees?

It’s been the loveliest unfolding

Watching the transformation, day-by-day, has given me so much pleasure; from the first tiny shoots of the bulbs, poking through the dark soil at the end of January, to where we are now, in the full blaze of floral abundance.

First we had snowdrops, followed by daffodils, narcissi and fragrant muscari. The camellias lining the drive came alive with perfect lacquer-red and peachy-pink blooms. Hyacinths and tulips arrived, and the ornamental cherry at the front put on an epic show of clouds of sugar-pink blossom.

And what can I say about peonies?

They astonish me. Initially there was no sign of anything at all – just bare earth. And suddenly the shoots were shouldering their way through – I was so excited to see them!

For a few weeks now, all around the garden, tight red and magenta buds have been exploding into massive, sweet-scented, double blooms, bigger than two fists. Those initial flowers are mellowing down to a rich, blousy pink. New ones are still coming through, but I’m already noticing the same pangs of anticipatory sorrow that I felt when the daffodils faded.

There’s still so much to see, though. Right now we have bluebells, rhododendrons, azaleas and flowering quince, as well as tall, lavender-blue flowering spikes and a shrub with beautiful orange blossoms. Alliums are pushing past strawberries and pansies. A few messy leaves have appeared that I know will become lofty hollyhocks, when they grow up, and swathes of purple iris blooms are about to be born.

As for the climbing roses, the first two yellow flowers have appeared and its scarlet companion is loaded with buds – I’m enjoying every second of their build-up to glory.

I found myself standing on the pavement on Sunday morning, marvelling at this garden, and grateful to those who planted it with such thought and care. I’d been walking past all this beauty for years, without ever really seeing it.

The garden was never hiding. Every spring, without fail, all this glorious abundance existed, while I glanced at it from across the road and saw an ordinary bungalow with a lawn out front and a few roses climbing up the wall.

Which makes me wonder, what else have I been looking at without truly seeing?

What this garden has shown me

The mind is, among other things, a ruthless efficiency expert. It can’t attend to everything, so it makes decisions about what needs our full attention, and what we can leave to run in the background.

This selectivity helps us to function well enough to get through the day without being overwhelmed (though I confess the exact shade of deep aquamarine of the sea on a calm day, or the quality of light at seven pm on a fine May evening can still fire up every sense and make my wiring crackle).

But the same mechanism that protects us from overstimulation can, over time, turn the familiar into wallpaper. We stop really seeing the homes we live in – both the bricks and mortar one and the breathing, bleeding one we inhabit. Our oldest friendships become like songs on repeat. The events we’ve survived, the capacities we’ve built and the yearnings we’ve felt since childhood can get downgraded to background noise. We assume we know everything about them so we stop being curious.

Shall we try something to bring the wonder back?

Below are a couple of suggestions for ways to bring ourselves and our environment back into magical focus.

I’d like you to pick one thing in your life that you look at every day, and perhaps haven’t truly seen for a long time.

It might be a person you love, or a view from a window, or a skill you’ve had for so long that you’ve stopped thinking of it as remarkable. Hold it in your mind for a moment, because we’ll come back to it.

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Hi there,

For 14 years as a therapist, I believed mindset was the greatest influence on how we experience reality. “If we can reshape the way we think”, I reasoned, “we can create lasting change in our lives”.

That may actually be true for a tiny subset of super-healthy humans who live comfortable, threat-free lives. For the majority of us, though? Nope. I was wrong.

Of course, how you think and the stories you tell yourself (aka beliefs) matter enormously, but they’re not the main influence on how you feel and act. And if you want to make changes in your life, mindset alone can’t determine whether lasting change is actually possible for you, regardless of how much you want things to be different.

So if Mindset isn’t top dog when it comes to enabling change, what is?

Before I tell you what really shapes your reality, let me share something.

I trained in Hypnotherapy and Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT – a form of CBT that equips us to identify, challenge and change unhelpful beliefs, emotions, habits and behaviour). I firmly believe in REBT and have yet to find a more effective form of therapy or coaching for belief-work.

But, like any therapeutic intervention, it works for many people, but not for everyone. And it doesn’t necessarily even work for one person all of the time.

Why is that?

For years, I’ve been trying to identify the mysterious piece that makes the difference between those of my clients who successfully transform their limiting beliefs, and a few, ostensibly similar people who have a ‘nearly, but not quite’ experience.

Let’s take two clients, equally motivated and committed to change. They pay their money, show up for sessions, engage with the process and do the assignments. Each has several a-ha moments in the room, but only client #1 is able to achieve the lasting change she came for.

Client #2, for all her determination, may feel a positive shift while we’re working together, and even for a little while afterwards. But then, the apparent transformation begins to come apart.

This client understands the theory and has all the the cognitive tools she needs, but somehow she comes out of her time with me feeling like she’s failed. She blames herself for the fact that whatever magic took place between us is quietly (darn you, AI, for hijacking one of my favourite words) fading away, leaving her almost back where she started.

That is not OK with me

We therapists can’t do the work for our clients. We provide the safe space, guidance, encouragement, boundaries and accountability to help you achieve your therapeutic goals, but you have to do the grafting.

For my clients who put in the effort but find lasting change elusive, the unhelpful habits start creeping back. Anxiety can return. Their improved sense of self-worth can begin to regress. The old limiting beliefs regain the ground they lost during therapy.

That is definitely not OK with me – so much so that I sometimes experience flickers of feeling dishonest or fraudulent. If you’ve met my values, you’ll know that honour is my compass. It feels dishonourable to me to say yes to working with a client and then not to be able to help her achieve her objective.

I know these feelings are a consequence of beliefs that some might consider limiting (“I must be able to help my clients. I must not let them down”), but I choose to hold on to those stories as a spur to keep raising my game.

So it’s crucial that I work out why the work I do lands for many, but not for all.

Over time I’ve realised there are other factors at play

If you’ve been a regular visitor to Substack and other social media over the last couple of years, I’m sure the phrase ‘nervous system regulation’ won’t have escaped your notice. Every therapist and coach has been talking about it – I’ve referenced it too.

Essentially, your central nervous system (CNS) is your body’s messaging service, enabling your brain and spinal chord to communicate with the vast, voluntary and involuntary neural networks criss-crossing your body. This messaging system tells your body to move, think, feel, digest and so much more. It controls what you experience through your senses, and decides how you respond to situations within and outside of your body.

There’s a lot to be said for the theory that a CNS dysregulated by stress, illness, grief, fear, or any other threat, can impede change. And it’s proven.

So why didn’t that feel like the whole story to me?

And then a door opened

It was this quest for answers that saw my hand shoot up earlier this year when Shannon Eastman, who I’ve known for several years, announced that she and two medical doctors were launching a pre-beta, 12-week course called The Human Operating System Architecture (HOSA).

I’ve followed her research journey around trauma and nervous system regulation with interest, but this new training suggested something different. It’s solidly evidence-based, built around biology, physics, neuro-chemistry and quantum elements.

Instincts vibrating, I leapt at the opportunity to join cohort 1 – and it turned out to be even bigger than I’d expected. Learning about HOSA over the last three months has enlightened me, challenged me, and answered every question I had – plus a whole load I hadn’t even known to ask.

Crucially, I’ve come out of the programme with:

• An understanding of why some clients aren’t able to achieve durable change.

• The beginnings of an evidence-based strategy for identifying and supporting those individuals.

• A clearer idea of which therapeutic modalities to use for which clients.

• Clarity on the gaps in my skillset that need filling.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that learning about the human operating system has been the most impactful personal and professional development for me since 2012, when I made the decision to go back to college to become a psychotherapist.

Please note, I’m not yet licensed to communicate the HOSA framework so I’m going to use my own language to explain a few basic principles, which are part of a wider, general understanding.

It was from the HOSA team that I learned this:

The CNS is just one small part of the puzzle

There are actually twelve independent, interconnecting systems in your biology. Dysregulation in any (and, most likely, all) of them could be blocking your attempts to change aspects of your life. No wonder I instinctively felt that CNS dysregulation wasn’t the whole story!

By the way, the irony isn’t lost on me that for several weeks at the start of the course, my own biological system was so overstretched by the events of the last year that absorbing anything new was a struggle, never mind navigating this level of learning. I have a heap of catching up to do and that’s now possible, thanks to following the guidance below.

In the next part of the article I’ll outline for my paying subscribers seven simple things you can do to help yourself if you’re stuck and unable to make lasting changes in your life.

If you’re not a paying member of Born for Something More, and you’d like to read this entire article (and attend our monthly, live group-coaching sessions), you can upgrade your subscription here:

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Hi there, lovely More-Mindsetters,

I did some research a few years ago to identify the biggest mindset issues affecting entrepreneurial women. Low self-worth emerged as the leading challenge, which while dismaying, didn’t surprise me, due to the experiences being shared in my therapy room.

If people who have the ideas, energy, skills and drive to to run their own businesses rate themselves poorly, what hope do the rest of us have? Sadly, I’ve haven’t heard anything in the years since I did the research to suggest the problem is easing.

Although self-worth tends to rise when things are going well and fall when they’re not, this isn’t always the case. Even on good days I’ve heard the nit-picking voice in my head trying to undermine me. Fortunately I know how to handle it these days.

There are plenty of coaches who provide solutions for improving how we feel about ourselves. Then there are the spa days, new routines, gratitude journals and positive affirmations that social media pushes at us. These activities can definitely have a short-term positive effect, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the majority don’t lead to lasting change.

When you feel self critical or inadequate, that feeling is not a cause – it’s a consequence. There’s something else going on beneath the surface that’s leading you to doubt your value.

It happens to us all

In my experience as a psychotherapist and mindset trainer, I’ve found one consistent fact about human beings: everyone has the occasional self-worth wobble, no matter how confident and successful they might appear.

It might show up as:

• Imposter syndrome, which around 70% of business leaders admit to experiencing at some point. (I suspect the real figure is a lot higher because some people would rather die than admit they occasionally lose the confidence plot!)

• Doubting whether you’re capable of pulling something off.

• A nagging anxiety about whether others actually like or respect you.

• Believing you’re the least interesting person in the room

• A persistent feeling that you’re not clever or successful enough to achieve what you want to.

  

Why doesn’t fixing ourselves from the outside work?

In a nutshell, because low self-worth is largely an inside job.

Here’s something that might be useful to know: your brain is, quite literally, wired to hold onto the bad stuff more than the good.

Neuroscience shows that our brains have a negativity bias, meaning we pay more attention to bad experiences than good ones. Looking out for danger was a survival strategy that helped keep our ancestors alive as they precariously navigated life on the steppes and prairies.

Unfortunately human evolution hasn’t caught up with modern times yet and the impulse to focus on the bad stuff lingers on.

Our negativity bias is what can cause us to focus on one critical comment for days, disregarding the ten compliments we received at the same time. And it’s one reason why willpower and positive thinking often fail to shift deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. I sometimes suggest using the mirror as a coach – and in the right circumstances it can be very effective. But you can repeat “I am enough” in the mirror every morning and still spend the rest of the day feeling like you’re not.

Affirmations can be useful too, but they can’t shift your perception of yourself for long when the problem is happening at a much deeper level.

What’s really kicking your self-worth?

The answer lies in several places, including:

1️⃣ Your experiences (both good and not so good) throughout your life, and how you’ve been able to process them.

2️⃣ The impact your current environment is having on every cell in your body.

3️⃣ Your unconscious mind and, more specifically, the stories you’re holding on to.

4️⃣ Your mental and physical health

For sure #1 will have had a big impact on how you feel about yourself. I have a lot to say about that, and about and #2, your current environment, but those are for other articles. For now, let’s focus on #3 and pay a quick visit to #4, further down.

Your unconscious mind and your stories

Some of the beliefs that are negatively impacting how you feel about yourself have their roots in old messages you absorbed during childhood. Others are more immediate and current.

Either way, when something happens that triggers one of your psychological hotspots, your unconscious mind is prone to making demands about yourself, others and the world around you. Most of the time, you won’t even be aware you’re doing it.

Typical unconscious demands might sound like:

I have to do well... You mustn’t ignore me... I need to know this will turn out OK... It mustn’t be too hard... I have to do it my own way...

When we make demands like these, there’s an unspoken “or else” waiting in the wings.

• I have to do well – or else it means I’m rubbish.

• You mustn’t ignore me – or else it means I’m boring.

• I need to know this will turn out OK – or else I can’t cope and I’m weak

• It mustn’t be too hard – or else I’ll feel inadequate

• I have to do it my own way – or else I can’t bear it

Below we’ll look at why stories like these are so unhelpful. I’ll show you how to catch them while they’re happening, and how to rebuild a typical demand so that it’s healthier, more helpful and more flexible.

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Hi there,

Is there an aspect of you that hasn’t yet been fully expressed because thinking about the changes it would require feels too uncomfortable?

Is there someone you know you could be, or something you know you could do that would bring you huge satisfaction?

If so, knowing how to expand your comfort zone is an essential skill to learn. It’s the main requirement for shaping a life that keeps pace with who you’re becoming.

Let’s back up a minute

Several of my mindset training clients are senior managers who want to escape the corporate world and work for themselves, doing something valuable and satisfying.

One of them, Rebecca**, wanted to leave her HR job and build an independent coaching business, working with executives experiencing burnout.

She’d trained in her own time for nearly three years and had saved enough money to support herself for a year. She was excited at the idea of running her own business and inspiring others, and I knew she’d be a brilliant coach – it was a clear part of the ‘something more’ she was meant to be.

But she couldn’t bring herself to make the leap. “I’ve almost handed in my notice several times, and then I talk myself out of it,” she told me.

If she really wanted to do this, why was she so stuck?

I’ve been on that particular cliff-edge and it’s scary. Yes, leaving a stressful – but safe – job could offer an exhilarating flight into a more satisfying life, buoyed by the up-winds of passion and possibility. But making such a big leap also carries a risk of crash-landing on the rocks of failure, exhaustion and debt.

Rebecca faced an onslaught of uncomfortable thoughts and questions:

❓ There are so many uncertainties - where’s the guarantee I’ll succeed?
❓ I need my partner to be fully OK with this, otherwise I’m being selfish.
❓ What if I mess things up and then I can’t get back on the job ladder?
❓ Others have way more experience – why would anyone choose to work with me?

The result of Rebecca’s internal stories was paralysis and a swift retreat back to her comfort zone. The thought of remaining in her job may have felt almost unbearable, but it was a known kind of unbearable.

A friend of Rebecca’s suggested she come to see me.

During our first session, Rebecca asked me whether she’d been wrong to train as a coach and whether she was deluded in thinking she could go it alone. I didn’t know her well enough to answer those questions, and it wasn’t my job to do so.

But as I got to know her, it became clear that her problem wasn’t in her choice of future career, it was that her comfort zone couldn’t expand far enough to tolerate the unease of making such a big change.

This is how a comfort zone works

It forms through repetition and strengthens each time we make the same choice in the same way. Over time, we use our comfort zone as a reliable guide, even though it’s restricting us to a version of ourselves we’ve already outgrown.

Let me show you what I taught Rebecca

Expanding your comfort zone is less dramatic than you might expect. It involves understanding how a comfort zone forms, then using the exact same process in a conscious way, to expand, rather than remain as we are.

I find it helpful to think of it unfolding in four phases that circle back and repeat as you expand into different areas of your life. The four phases are: observing what’s happening, trying something different, growing into the change, and then living there.

Or, in summary:

Below I’ll show you how each of these phases work and how you can implement them in your life.

Read more

I’m bewitched

If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed that I’ve recently taken a research dive into the business of witchery.

I mentioned in last week’s article that I felt strongly called to write a song about the witch hunts in Scotland during the 16th to 18th centuries. The frenzy of fear that grew up around those who were somehow ‘different’ was particularly heinous in Scotland, which had five times as many convictions as other European countries.

A conservative estimate suggests up to 4,000 people (83% of them women) were prosecuted under Scotland’s Witchcraft Act of 1563, with up to half of those being executed, usually by strangling and burning. Most were subject to harsh interrogation, and many were tortured.

Under the Witchcraft Act, it was an offence, punishable by death, for anyone to practise or seek out witchcraft, sorcery or necromancy. The church and the law sought to punish and silence women suspected of such behaviour, including herbalists and midwives. Those who were outspoken, independent or unconventional were also at risk, as were the elderly and those without family.

In this climate of fear, anyone could be accused. Family, friends and neighbours spoke out against each other. Even something as simple as swearing or frowning at another person could be read as putting a curse on them and land you in jail, or worse.

As a forthright, childless woman in her sixties, with a professional qualification in the dark art of mind-reading (aka a therapist), I wouldn’t have stood a chance.

A couple of weeks ago, while doing research for my new song, The Witch of Torryburn, I came across the Witches of Scotland podcast. This fabulous listen is hosted by Claire Mitchell KC and Zoe Venditozzi, who teamed up to seek justice for those persecuted as witches.

With beautiful serendipity, I discovered at short notice that these marvellously self-titled ‘quarrelsome dames’ were giving a talk on Saturday at Falkland Palace, literally 15 minutes’ drive from where I live. It was sold out but I went anyway, certain (in a witchy way) that I would get in. And of course I did.

It was extraordinary to sit under a 16th century painted ceiling, in the chapel in which James V lay in state for a month after his death, in the very building (familiar to fans of Outlander) in which his grandson, King James VI, only child of Mary Queen of Scots, met with his Privy Council in 1597 to examine and moderate the frenzied impact of witch hunts.

It’s even possible that James VI may have written some of his seminal book, Daemonologie, at Falkland. Despite the King’s attempts at moderating the situation, his book contributed to the spread of witch-hunting and did immeasurable harm by indelibly associating witchcraft with satanic worship.

I won’t lie, I felt every beat of that history.

What does all this history have to do with this newsletter?

Plenty, because the witch hunt isn’t over.

People in many countries, including Sub-Saharan Africa, India, Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia and South Africa are still being accused, punished, tortured and murdered for the crime of being accused of witchcraft. Almost all of them are women.

And the persecution of witches isn’t just something that’s happening in those places. It’s still impacting us – here, today – in the form of the witch wound.

What is the witch wound?

‘Witch wound’ sounds rather dramatic at first hearing, as though it belongs in folklore, rather than modern life.

But it describes something many women recognise the moment it’s named – as I certainly did, when I first heard the term about ten years ago.

At its heart, the witch wound is an inherited, collective imprint carried by women through time. It’s a kind of somatic memory, passed down through generations of women who learned, in very real ways, the terrifying cost of being too visible, outspoken or different.

I’m doing an enlightening study programme at the moment that includes epigenetics in the curriculum. Last week we discussed the fact that trauma can rewire us at a molecular level, altering every one of the body’s 30 trillion cells, including those involved in reproduction.

This modification gets passed down to the next generation, and the next, and the next. In fact it can impact how our descendants feel and behave for at least seven generations. At least. That’s a minimum of two hundred years of impact.

The relentless fear our ancestors felt at being exposed to the witchcraft hysteria, never mind the terror of those actually accused of witchery, is still being felt today – by us. It’s encoded in our DNA.

How does the witch wound show up now?

On paper, life for women in much of the world has improved beyond recognition. We have legal rights, access to education, financial independence and the ability to shape our lives in ways that would have been unimaginable a century or two ago.

But we don’t live our lives on paper and there are still many huge threats to women, including from some who publish on this platform.

Over time, the witch hunt trauma has been internalised and as well as making a mark on our biology, has evolved into a cultural memory, passed down through stories, conditioning, expectations and the signals girls receive from birth about what is and isn’t acceptable.

The witch wound lives in those signals:

• It can emerge as an unconscious caution, felt by otherwise capable, thoughtful women.

• You may find yourself holding back in ways you can’t explain – uncomfortable with being seen too clearly, speaking too boldly or trusting your instincts.

• You can see it in your hesitation before speaking up in a meeting, even when you know exactly what needs to be said, or that shrinking feeling when you’re about to share something personal or creative.

• You might notice it when you soften your opinions to make yourself more palatable, or second-guess a decision that you know is right.

• It shows up in the powerless rage you may feel when you’re expected to hold back your voice, creativity or power.

Many women have a complicated relationship with visibility.

Being seen can feel both desirable and risky. Success can bring a shadowy sense of exposure, as though we’re inviting criticism, rejection or unwanted attention if we step into the light. Praise can feel uncomfortable – something to be batted away or downplayed.

If you tune in to your self-talk when that feeling hits, there’s often a low-level monologue running in the background: how will this land? Will they judge me? Will they think I’m too emotional, too ambitious, too much? This kind of narrative doesn’t always stop us but it certainly shapes how we feel.

Of course these patterns are influenced by our lived experiences, but they’re also shaped by an ancient thread; one that’s taught women over many generations that safety can only be found by living in line with expectations and staying inconspicuous.

How can we tend to our own witch wound?

To heal, we need to become aware of the ancient patterns that have been running in the background, and consciously loosen their grip.

I recommend you approach building this awareness with compassionate curiosity, rather than judgement – there’s usually a good reason why you learned to be cautious.

Below I suggest a few ways to do this, and then outline how can we preserve our identity as magical women:

Read more

I felt like writing something a little different this week.

Julian Barnes’ sort-of novel, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, was a huge seller when it appeared in 1989.

I loved this playful collection of loosely-linked stories and essays, which explored history through fact, fiction and philosophy. My favourite was Parenthesis – the “½” chapter referred to in the title. This tender reflection on love and history made me feel as though I’d caught a glimpse of Mr Barnes peeping through the pages of his book, telling us: This is me. This is us.

Parenthesis doesn’t seem on the surface to have much to do with the rest of the book, though – until you realise that it’s everything to do with the rest of the book.

Today’s article is a rumination that could be viewed as the ½ chapter of Born for Something More. This is my parenthesis – with a little mindset sauce on the side (with apologies to Julian Barnes).

A brief return to the vortex of stuckness

Last week I found myself accidentally trapped in what I referred to as the vortex of stuckness (VoS) in an article I wrote on the topic. I made up that term because the official description, ‘cognitive narrowing’, feels boringly inadequate to describe the combination of helplessness, frustration and paralysis that grips us when we’re stuck and can’t see a way out.

You’d think, considering what I do for a living, that I’d avoid falling into the whirling maw of the VoS, and it’s true that these days I’m more of an occasional vortex tourist than the regular visitor of yore.

But occasionally I still do succumb to total stuckness – usually when I’ve temporarily forgotten that self-awareness is the number one life skill. When I do manage to plug back in and become aware that I’ve fallen into the VoS, I can usually pull myself out with the help of my handy mindset toolkit.

How I rescued myself this time

In the article about the vortex of stuckness, I outlined a process to help you exit the whirlpool safely. It’s worth a try next time you find yourself getting dragged down.

But I also gave a brief suggestion that deliberately letting ourselves get creative can work well too.

So last week I sat down and wrote a song.

Within a couple of hours I felt loads better: calmly energised, emotionally lifted and much less stuck. I’ll fill you in on how it came about in a minute, but first, a wee bit of history.

Music et moi

I sang all through my childhood. Until my mid-20s, singing in choirs, groups and, later, supporting small bands as a backing vocalist (never wanted to be a soloist or front-woman), was a significant part of my life.

And then, I just… stopped. The rationale was that I could either invest time in singing, or I could pursue being a writer. Doing both to the standard I’d set for myself just wasn’t sustainable. Choosing writing seemed like the sensible option because I could use it to earn a living.

What I didn’t realise was that cutting myself off from being involved with music would create a wound that would refuse to heal. It took me decades to fully understand the extent to which I’d harmed myself, but eventually I did. Choosing to come back to singing – and now writing songs as well – has undone a lot of the damage.

The new song

I felt this song coming for a while. I didn’t know anything about it, beyond that it would be a narrative folk ballad that tells a hard story. I wanted to honour something real that reflects my Scots heritage.

For a while I zig-zagged between coal-mining (plenty of tragedies to choose from here in Fife) and fishing or maritime rescue (ditto), but neither felt respectful or appropriate. Many of these events have occurred in the last century and I don’t want to be exploitative or insensitive to the families of those who were lost.

One of the best examples of the genre I can think of is Gordon Lightfoot’s epic The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which describes the sinking of a large freighter during a storm on Lake Superior, with 29 lives lost. I’ve been a bit obsessed with the song since I first heard it during my teens. The minor-key melody is simple, repetitive and a perfect frame for the story, which is told with truth and respect.

If you don’t know the song (and even if you do), I suggest you search online and listen a few times. The more you hear it, the better it gets. Be prepared for it to stay with you.

Then an idea muscled in and after that there was no other.

Scotland has a terrible history with regard to witchcraft persecutions. Between the 16th and mid-18th centuries, over 1,500 Scots, the vast majority of them women, were executed in horrible ways for the crime of being different. Fife, where I live, has one of the worst records; hundreds were tortured to confess, then put to death, usually by strangling and burning.

As soon as the idea arrived, I knew this was what I wanted to write about. Last week this narrative story-song started coming through and within a couple of hours I’d captured 12 verses and a plain, Celtic melody, honouring a real woman who was persecuted less than 30 miles from where I live.

After months of prodding me that it was coming, the song arrived with such ease. It’s far from perfect but it’s what I’d hoped to create – a story-song about something that matters, rooted in Scottish music traditions.

It’s only a week old and already dear to me.

Bringing the song to life

My cousin lives locally and is a terrific guitarist. We meet in a rehearsal room every two or three weeks and spend a joyful couple of hours creating music. For the first time in my life I’m a lead voice – and enjoying it.

Towards the end of our session last week, I introduced Colin to the new song. We worked out the chords together and within 15 minutes, we’d performed it straight through. I left that room on such a high.

There’s something very special about hearing something you’ve built come to life in such a multi-dimensional way. I’m so thankful that I get to do this with my talented cousin. We may perform and/or record some of out songs at some point – if we do, I promise I’ll post a link to this one.

We humans are creators

The human central nervous system is quite possibly the most complex thing in the universe. Science still don’t understand the full breadth, depth and detail of the brain and related hardware, nor the extraordinary software that goes with it – our minds.

But what we do know is that the power of our imaginations is limitless, as is our ability to make something, where before there was nothing.

Using our imaginations to explore possibility, and then bringing something into being out of that exploration using our skills and talents, is one of the most deeply satisfying aspects of being human. It’s also an extraordinary privilege.

So if you write, paint, cook, craft, make music, sculpt, invent, draw, code, build, sew, knit, decorate, carve, dance, design, film, teach, blog, brew, garden, perform, coach, or any other form of creating – or you’ve ever wanted to – then please play.

Refresh your appetite for creating by reminding yourself what you love about this activity. Relish what comes out of it and appreciate yourself and your effort, even if – especially if – it’s not perfect.

Above all enjoy the glorious feeling of the mindful, focused flow state that can emerge when you allow yourself to create. It will lower your heart rate and blood pressure, calm your nervous system and help you live a longer, happier life.

To finish up

After cutting myself off from music for all those years, it’s become a key part of the adventure of exploring the ‘something more’ I knew was within me; an adventure that led to the birth of this Substack publication nearly three years ago.

I now believe with all my heart that we owe it to ourselves to find and do the things that light us up. Being creative engages and energises us. It satisfies and heals us. It trips our pleasure sensors and makes both ourselves and our world better.

I’d love to hear what creative activities bring you ease and joy – do share in the comments so that I can enjoy the vicarious pleasure 💖

That’s all for this week. Remember, our next group-coaching session for paying members is on Wednesday 29th April – I’ll send you the link next week.

Take care, and sending love,

Hi there,

This is the second and concluding part in our mini series on how our self-talk affects our body. If you haven’t already read part one, I suggest you take a quick look at that one first.

Last week I wrote about the ongoing commentary most of us have going on in our minds. It’s disheartening quite how much of our self-talk relates to our bodies, how critical the tone is, and how much this way of thinking influences the way we feel about ourselves.

In part one I shared my moment of profound realisation about the harm I was doing to myself through constant self-criticism:

That was a seminal moment for me. It radically changed how I thought and spoke about my body, which in turn transformed my self-worth, as well as my health and fitness. I have no doubt that it also freed up the final piece of energetic space I needed to become my ‘something more’.

Evicting those long-held beliefs

As I shared in part one, many of the old stories you may be holding about your body were influenced by other people, cultural conditioning and what the younger version of you was experiencing.

They may feel like facts, but they’re really just tales that have acquired a ring of truth through constant repetition.

Here’s a real-life example. For more than four decades, I wouldn’t wear anything tucked into my trousers because when I was seven years old, my older brother told me I had a fat, ugly bum. I barely had a bum at seven!

But the comment took root and led to volumes of self-criticism over the years, until I finally understood that my body is home and allowed myself to let it go.

I won’t pretend you’ll be able to evict your old stories with the ease that I did in that moment, or that you won’t encounter some inner resistance on the way to changing your beliefs.

But know this: your thoughts and beliefs about yourself aren’t fixed. Your stories may be deeply embedded, but they’re not unshakeable.

You CAN change the way your mind works and you won’t need to do anything complicated to make a start.

Below, I set out five simple steps that can help you start thinking about your body in a kinder, more constructive way. I’ll explain why they’re effective and provide clear actions for you to take.

Step 1: Give yourself permission to let go of old beliefs

Read more

We all have that moment.

It might be your first grey hair, or a new line on your face, or catching a glimpse of your mother when you look in the mirror, or waking up and realising you no longer bounce back as quickly as you used to after a night out.

For most of us there comes a point when the thought consciously lands: My body is ageing.

My moment came when I was lying beside my cousin on a sun lounger by the pool on holiday. She’s a couple of years older than me. I peered over my book and noticed something strange about my legs in the sunlight.

“My thighs look… wavy,” I said.

She didn’t even open her eyes. “It’s a family thing. All our collagen buggers off the second we hit 32.”

I was six months past that milestone.

Horrified, I fled to the changing room to inspect the damage. Back then, my legs were probably the only part of my body I felt reasonably good about. As I peered at them from every angle in the gloom of the changing room, I could see that my thighs were definitely not as smooth as memory served. I realised with a jolt that my cousin was right. How had I not noticed this calamity happening?

WHOOSH. Suddenly I felt intensely mortal – and more than a bit sick.

What followed may sound familiar to many women.

After this unpleasant moment of awakening, I became hyper-aware of the passage of time and its effect on my body. I started catching odd glints of silver in my parting. A broken vein or two. The start of crow’s feet around my eyes. Cellulite. And (oh crap) back fat.

The irony is that I was often told I looked younger than my age, but that didn’t do anything to arrest my critical scrutiny. I would immediately point out signs of ageing they hadn’t noticed, as though it was important to set the record straight.

Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t really seeing my body at all. I was narrating it, constantly and critically, and then reacting to my own commentary.

The Turning Point

Years later, as part of my therapy training, we were encouraged to work on our own patterns. I chose to focus on my relationship with my body. During my first conversation about this with a fellow student, something suddenly clicked:

I realised that my body isn’t a collection of parts for me to approve or reject. It’s my home, and I can’t move out. This is where I have to live for the rest of my life.

That thought was like a slap and literally left me speechless for a few minutes (I’ve written about it before).

Then the uncomfortable questions came tumbling in:

❓ What damage was I doing to myself by constantly criticising my home for life?

❓ How could I ever feel at ease if I couldn’t accept my home?

❓ As a therapist how could I, with any integrity, offer to help others manage their unhealthy beliefs if I couldn’t deal with my own?

Realising my body was ‘home’ changed everything.

Once that belief arrived, the shift to unconditional acceptance was immediate. That’s quite rare – normally it takes time and effort to replace an existing limiting belief, especially one that reminds you regularly that you’re not good enough.

In this case, though, the new ‘home’ story was so irrefutable, so compelling that my mind swallowed it whole. The old narrative caved in without a murmur and a new one was born:

I don’t have to live in this body, I get to live in it. It’s an extraordinary, miraculous, complex ecosystem – and what a privilege that it’s all mine!

Instead of treating my body as a problem to solve, I was now asking myself, What do I want my home to feel like? How do I want to live here? How am I going to celebrate and cherish and nurture it?

I listened carefully to the answers that came up and took action on those that felt right.

When you change the story, you also shift the feelings and behaviours pinned in place by the old belief.

• Instead of self-criticism, I felt stirrings of compassion for my body and myself.

• Instead of feeling ashamed, I felt privileged to own this home.

• Instead of forcing myself to exercise, I made it a conscious priority.

• Instead of chasing diet fads (anyone remember the so-called ‘Heart Foundation’ diet?), I wanted to reward myself by eating in a healthy way.

It was an entirely new feeling, this eagerness to look after my body. I found myself doing things I’d never expected, like taking up running and actually enjoying it. I lost weight I’d been struggling to shift for years. Most of the hives and allergies I’d suffered from for ages simply disappeared.

Within a year I felt stronger and more comfortable in my body than I ever had before. The most important change wasn’t physical, though, it was the sense of peaceful ease that came from accepting my body as home.

Ageing stopped being terrifying

I no longer though of growing older as something that was being inflicted on me. Most of the time I was able to embrace the passing of time and I was curious about the changes maturity was bringing.

I can’t say I didn’t have the odd slip-up or feel occasional regret for the passing of my youth (I’m human), but in the main I stopped thinking of growing older as a problem and started to view the evidence as an intriguing badge of honour.

I like my silvering hair. I relish not having to run the gauntlet of unwelcome attention that comes with being a younger woman. I enjoy the greater trust and security that my obvious maturity invites.

Yep, overall, I’m pretty happy in my precious home and I enjoy looking after it.

The real driver of how we feel

Most of us have an internal script running in the background. I often describe our self-talk as an inner radio that’s always on, whether we’re paying attention or not.

Some of what we broadcast is neutral stream-of-consciousness stuff. Some of it’s pragmatic and useful, feeding us ideas for solving a problem or dealing with a tricky situation in a constructive way.

But a surprising amount of our self-talk, particularly when it comes to our bodies, is unnecessarily critical.

Separate studies carried out for ITV’s Tonight programme and Glamour magazine showed that 97 percent of women have negative thoughts about their bodies, with an average of up to 34 negative thoughts a day. Some experience far more than that.

Most of those negative body thoughts aren’t dramatic or extreme, but even small thoughts can do a lot of damage when they become frequent and habitual. Over time, a comment here, or a comparison there can build a picture that feels familiar and convincing.

That’s the part that often gets missed.

The voice in your head can feel like the truth, but it’s really a collection of learned observations, assumptions and borrowed opinions that have been repeated often enough to sound authoritative. If someone else spoke to us the way we sometimes speak to ourself, we’d call it bullying.

And some of the voices in our head aren’t even ours. They belong to people we’ve known, stories we’ve heard or conditioning we’ve absorbed without ever consciously signing up to them.

A different way to think about it

Before we get into how to change our self-talk, it’s worth pausing on one simple question.

What would it be like if the voice in your head felt like it was on your side?

I’m not talking about toxic cheerleading or unrealistic positivity. I mean a fair, supportive voice; one that could help you navigate your days in a safer, more self-supporting way, rather than constantly spilling micro-aggressions into your mind.

How would that affect the way you feel about your body?

Once you open up to the possibility of thinking in a different way – of re-tuning your inner radio to a more helpful station – it opens up so many possibilities.

And this isn’t just about your appearance, it’s also about how you experience your life.

Coming in part 2…

Next week I’ll walk you through a straightforward way to change your self-talk so that your inner radio can support you, rather than undermining you.

I’ll show you how to notice when an unhelpful script is running in the background, how to question it without getting stuck in overthinking, and how to replace it with something that actually helps.

I’ll also share a simple exercise you can use to begin shifting how you feel about your body in a matter of minutes.

Please note, the ‘how-to’ section of the article will only be visible to paying subscribers so if you’d like to be able to access it, simply upgrade your subscription.

Subscribe now

That’s all for this week

Thank you for taking time to read this article. I’d love to hear about the moment it first hit you that you’re living in an ageing body, and how you feel about that – please do share in the comments

If you’ve found the post useful, I’d be grateful if you’d like and restack it so that others can find it.

Take care, and sending love,

PS – Our next group-coaching session for paying subscribers is on Wednesday 29th April – make sure you save the date in your calendar. I’m thrilled to share that I’ve just firmed up another lovely guest expert for our session at the end of June.

Hi there,

How have we arrived at the last day of March already? This month, given what’s happening in the world, I’ve been focusing on our nervous systems and how we can shift from survival mode to a calmer, more expansive state. This is the final post on that topic – for now.

If, like me, you came of age in the last millennium, it wasn’t uncommon to hear references to people’s ‘nerves’. As in: “It’s her nerves,” accompanied by a knowing look, as some poor (usually menopausal) soul was skewered with nosiness and faux, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God pity.

‘Nerves’ was a catch-all caricature that referred to a middle-aged woman at the edge of her tether, riven with anxiety, exhausted, often medicated with Valium or gin, and most likely headed for (or having) what was termed a ‘nervous breakdown’.

This unfortunate had probably spent the best part of 30 years doing everything for everyone, with little in the way of support, resources or validation. No wonder she was stretched as thin as a blade.

And it was always a woman – somehow men seemed to be exempt from nerves (which was a whole other lie).

Fast forward to 2026 and we would identify that this woman’s nervous system was dysregulated – and with good reason. She would be viewed with more compassion because, in the hopelessly over-stimulating world of today, this degree of stress has sadly become endemic.

What do we mean by the nervous system?

In psychological and coaching circles, people tend to refer to the nervous system in terms of how activated or triggered we feel, and our capacity to recover when we’re out of balance.

While this has elements of truth, it implies that a dysregulated nervous system is mostly to do with the mind and emotions. In fact, how we think and how we feel emotionally are largely outcomes of something much bigger and more fundamental.

Content warning: massive simplification coming up so if you’re a neurologist or neuroscientist, you may want to look away!

Your nervous system is the network your body uses to communicate with itself and keep you alive. It’s a miracle of complex efficiency, involving biology, chemistry, physics and quantum mechanics.

That’s it in a nutshell. Let’s look a little bit deeper.

Your nervous system comprises two main systems:

🧠 Central nervous system (CNS) – the mighty combination of your brain and spinal cord.

⚡ Peripheral nervous system (PNS) – all other nerves connecting your CNS to the rest of your body, divided into:

• Your somatic or voluntary nervous system, which enables you to control conscious movement and provides information on what your senses are observing,

• Your autonomous nervous system, which controls a huge number of actions that are largely outside your conscious control, like digestion, sweating and blood circulation.

The #1 job of your nervous system is to keep you alive.

Your body makes thousands of micro-adjustments every second to help you function. For example, your senses are constantly detecting changes and threats inside and outside your body. Your brain interprets those changes and tells your body how to respond by sending electrical and chemical signals along a 45-mile network of nerves, at up to 270 miles per hour, largely without you noticing a thing.

The effects, however, are cumulative. After a while things can start to break.

Because most of the functioning of your nervous system is outside your conscious control, when you’re under continual pressure, you can’t simply think your way back to equilibrium. You need to tackle this at the root.

Here are a couple of related posts you may wish to check out:

It Isn’t All in Your Mind

What Puts Energy Pennies in Your Jar?

So what does a dysregulated nervous system look like?

A dysregulated nervous system is one that’s consistently overloaded with a multitude of tasks, conditions and threats.

Simply keeping you upright and physically functioning requires a huge amount of energy. If you factor in acute or chronic stressors, such as poor health, physical or emotional pain, care-giving demands, relationship problems, precarious finances, bereavement, lack of sleep or poor nutrition – and especially if several of these are stacked on top of one another – the pressure this puts on your body can plunge you into a state of red alert.

This can show up as:

• Over-activation – you feel reactive, tense, anxious, wired.

• Shut down – you experience brain fog, memory issues, lack of energy, low mood.

• Boom and bust cycle – you alternate between over-activation and shut down.

When your nervous system is stretched, your mood, immune system, sleep, cognitive function and other systems are all compromised. This has the effect of making your body unconsciously feel as though it’s standing on a crumbling cliff edge, struggling to return to a state of safety.

And this is exhausting, because when your system is in crisis, simply staying upright takes more and more energy. In fact, fatigue is so prevalent that Doctors have an acronym for it – TATT, meaning ‘tired all the time’.

According to research by Hamilton and Round, at least 20% of people visiting a doctor present with fatigue as a primary or high secondary symptom, and this is believed to be just the tip of the iceberg.

After a relentlessly challenging time recently, I felt like this for much of the last six months. Not much fun, huh? But things are improving for me and here’s why:

How do we help our nervous systems find equilibrium?

Here are five relatively simple things you can do to gradually ease your body back to a place of safety. They’re all now part of my self-care routine:

Read more

The title of this post may make some people feel uncomfortable.

I’m not going to apologise for that, though I will alert you that the content mentions death and loss, which may be triggering for some.

I originally had a different topic in mind but earlier today I came across an article I wrote several years ago that landed on a tender spot. I’ve decided to give it a refresh and publish it here on Substack because the message feels important.

But first, a reminder about our next live session for paying members

You won’t want to miss this month’s group-coaching session on Thursday, 26th March as it’s being led by my wonderful mentor and therapy supervisor, Beverley Harper.

Many of my readers have reached mid-life or beyond, and by now we’ve all racked up a fair bit of self-awareness. Rationally, we know we’re good enough – but we can understand that fact and still not feel it.

So how do we climb out of that paradox and fully accept that we are worthwhile?

In her session, entitled ‘Self-Worth and the Nervous System: Why Lasting Change Begins in the Body’, Beverly will answer that question for us in a beautifully practical way.

The session will include live exercises and give us a deep understanding of:

✅ The true nature of our ‘not good enough’ stories. and how to heal those painful early experiences that keep sabotaging us.

✅ Why approaches like affirmations and positive thinking alone can’t heal the self-worth wound – and what’s needed to actually achieve lasting change.

✅ How EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) can work directly with the nervous system to rewrite our self-worth.

You’ll come away from the group-coaching session with a clear understanding of why fixing your self-worth issues has to involve your nervous system, not just your mind; plus how it actually feels to start updating an old neural pattern through your body.

NB: the date of the session is not the usual last Wednesday of the month. Instead, this month it’s taking place on Thursday 26th March, from 3:00pm to 4:30pm GMT. Please save the date – the Zoom link is at the bottom of this article.

If you’re not yet a paying subscriber and this sounds like a session you’d like to attend, you can upgrade your subscription here:

Subscribe now

Right, let’s get back to the topic of this article

I was in a car, travelling home from a tumultuous 24 hours in hospital, supporting my cousin through the traumatic birth of her baby, when my phone rang.

And that’s how I learned that Louise, one of my closest friends, with whom I’d laughed, travelled, shared stories and adventures, celebrated, confided, cried and danced for 36 years, had passed away unexpectedly. She was only 51.

Louise wasn’t prepared to die. She came home from a long plane journey, felt unwell and sat down on the sofa, and there her heart stopped. Her worried mother, Mary, drove over and found her.

My first thought on hearing the news was “It can’t be true! We’re meeting for a catch-up this weekend.” But we weren’t, and we never would again.

It’s been just over 10 years since Lou died but there are still times when I really, REALLY want to talk to her.

What makes it even more heart-breaking is that her 80-year old mother was left to try to make sense of her daughter’s estate – and frankly, it was a mess. Lou’s phone and laptop were both password-protected so no-one could get into them. Mary had no idea what arrangements her daughter had in place for insurance, mortgage, etc – they were all locked up in emails. She also had no clue how to contact most of Lou’s friends.

And the worst of it was that Louise had made a will while still married to her ex-husband, who was not the best of men. Her own family knew she’d written a new will, but it hadn’t yet been notarised. The draft was on the locked laptop and therefore impossible to access.

As a result, the majority of her estate went not to those she loved, but to the sisters of her ex, who had never welcomed her or treated her with kindness.

Mary couldn’t face the trauma of challenging the will and those people refused to do the decent thing and give up this unexpected bounty.

Sadly, Louise isn’t my only person who’s been gathered way too young in recent years. I lost two wonderful cousins, one of whom passed away shockingly abruptly. He too was 51 and hadn’t made a will. Those he left behind had to try to make sense of the fallout while mourning the loss of a beautiful human being.

My own will is wildly out of date

My situation now is very different to how it was 10 years ago, when I made my will. I’ve been saying for some time that I need to sort things out so that when my time comes, the executor of my estate won’t be faced with an endless admin nightmare.

When someone dies, the people who love them are already stumbling through shock and grief. Layer on the tangle of crucial admin, and it very quickly becomes overwhelming.

It would take months for someone who’s not me to unravel my labyrinthine trail of house, bank and insurance matters, subscriptions, passwords and business stuff. Months that my family shouldn’t have to spend tidying up after me while grieving.

Coming across this article again has given me the impetus to take action.

So I’m going to get ready to die.

I’ll put aside a couple of hours every week to pull together the information my family will need if I become seriously ill, or if I go to sleep for good. I don’t think it will take more than a couple of months.

I have one of those expanding files with numerous pockets, which is going to become my ‘in case of emergency’ (ICE) file.

These are the sections I’ll have in my folder:

✨ Powers of attorney – including financial and property affairs, plus welfare (including instructions regarding resuscitation and life support in case I’m severely injured or permanently incapacitated.

✨ Medical history – NHS card, health conditions, medication, allergies, etc.

✨ Funeral/memorial preferences – what I want done with my remains (I’m considering donating my body for medical training, if they’ll have me), plus specific wishes regarding a memorial celebration.

✨ My will – an inventory of assets and beneficiaries, plus any extra wishes and conditions, signed, dated and legally witnessed. Also a named executor.

✨ Other documents – birth certificate, passport, driving licence, etc.

✨ Property – I rent out my house so I’ll provide documents relating to proof of ownership, tenancy agreement, insurance, council tax, and other matters.

✨ Insurance – all policies I currently hold (home, car, travel, business, life, etc), indicating which ones pay out on my death (some credit cards do too).

✨ Financial – details of bank, savings and investment accounts, pension, credit cards and any other debts, tax and national insurance, plus regular outgoings that need to be cancelled.

✨ Professional – everything to do with my business and clients. Banking and accounting, memberships and subscriptions, who needs to be notified, what needs to be cancelled or refunded, any ongoing commitments, and what needs to be done to close down or transfer my business assets.

✨ Digital footprint – I won’t keep this in the file but will leave a clue as to where to find a list of logins, passwords, PIN numbers and 2FA for email accounts, online banking, social media, etc. I’ll include instructions on how to close down or memorialise the few social media platforms I’m still active on, plus a draft post to inform my connections that I’ve headed off to the great beach in the sky.

✨ Contacts – my address book goes back decades and my phone has hundreds of contacts in it. Relatively few really matter so I’ll provide a list of key people to notify.

✨ My story – I may include some notes in there about how I’ve got to this point in my life, the people, places and situations that have had an impact on me, and what and who I’m grateful for.

Phew…

One could look at this as a difficult project, but I choose not to. I have an outline to follow now and I’m going to tackle it one piece at a time.

I know creating this file, and making the decisions that need to be made, will tidy up aspects of my life that currently feel quite overwhelmingly undone. Getting end-of-life ready will bring me and my family peace of mind and that feels like a kindness to all of us.

An important thing to note is that this isn’t something to do once and then abandon. It will be an organic, ongoing project and I’ll update the file regularly to make sure it’s in good shape for those who will lovingly sweep up after me.

And there’s something I hadn’t quite expected. Even thinking about this has made me notice more clearly what matters – the people I’d want to be contacted with news of my passing; the pieces of music and writing I’d choose for remembrance; the small things that make me “me” that I’d like my loved ones to know; the ways that preparing now could offer solace later.

Those little realisations have brought me a surprising sense of order, comfort and satisfaction.

What about you?

Are you all sorted, or do you feel, as I do, that you could be more organised in your end-of-life planning? Feel free to share your experiences in the comments. Of course you could always join me in putting your affairs in order, if reading this has spurred you on?

If you’re in need of some comfort after reading this post, you could try this article on how we choose to take up space, or this one, about my ‘church’, or this one, celebrating friendship (Louise is in that one too).

Anyway, that’s all for today. Until next time, take good care,

PS - Here’s how to join our live coaching session this week:

• Date: Thursday 26th March, 2026

• Time: 3:00pm to 4:30pm GMT (11:00am EDT, 8:00am PDT – please double check time in your location due to seasonal clock changes

• Zoom link:

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Hi my dear ones,

I’m much less active on social media these days than I used to be, at least in terms of contributing to conversations. The reactivity and polarisation (not to mention the acreage of soggy AI bleargh) are quite discouraging.

But there’s still beauty to be found online, especially here on Substack. And every so often, you still come across someone who renews your faith in humanity on one of the main channels.

One example is Ryan Morris, a photographer who runs a Facebook page called The Human Collective. It’s a celebration of local people and their stories here in Fife, Scotland, where I live. Ryan started it to honour his mother’s passing.

The premise is simple: he seeks out decent people who live lives of service, and he interviews and photographs them with kindness and sensitivity. There’s no grandstanding, just celebration, compassion and love. I never fail to feel soothed and uplifted when I read one of his posts.

We need those moments of relief in these frazzled times

I know many people are feeling both wired and exhausted at the moment – and no wonder, with all that’s been inflicted on the world during this long, harsh winter.

Our beautiful planet can feel like a precarious place at times. Those further up the sensitive spectrum are especially likely to be feeling it, due to their greater responsiveness to stimuli, depth of mental and emotional processing and more highly developed sense of empathy. (Paying subscribers who want to know more about being a highly Sensitive Person [HSP] can watch the recording of the group-coaching session I did on the topic here).

This month I’m focusing on ways to regulate our nervous systems.

In a minute I’m going to share with you three very simple ways to calm your state in the moment, but before I do, I wanted to tell you more about this month’s live group-coaching session for paying members.

I’m thrilled that my therapy mentor and supervisor, Beverley Harper, will be leading the session for us next week. The title is:

Self-Worth and the Nervous System: Why Lasting Change Begins in the Body

NB: the date of the session is not the usual last Wednesday of the month. Instead, it will take place on Thursday 26th March, from 3:00pm to 4:30pm GMT. Please save the date – the Zoom link is at the bottom of this article.

Topics that Beverley will cover:

✅ Why the “not good enough” story is not simply a belief, and why that distinction changes everything about how we heal.

✅ How the nervous system encodes painful early experiences as neural tags: automatic, body-level threat responses that fire faster than conscious thought.

✅ Why affirmations, positive thinking, and insight-based approaches alone can’t reach the part of us where the self-worth wound actually lives.

✅ The neuroscience of memory reconsolidation, and why this gives us genuine hope for lasting change.

✅ How EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) works directly with the nervous system to create new somatic reference points for self-worth

Practical aspects of the session:

This will be very much a hands-on session and Beverley will lead us through these effective live exercises:

⚓ A guided interoceptive exercise to locate how “enough-ness” and “not-enough-ness” feel in your own body, making the invisible visible.

⚓ A full facilitated EFT tapping session targeting the neural tag of “not good enough,” moving from acknowledgement through to embodied affirmation.

⚓ Reflection and integration time throughout.

What you’ll come away with:

💛 A clear, accessible understanding of why change at the level of self-worth requires working with the nervous system, not just the mind.

💛 A direct, felt experience of what it means to begin updating an old neural pattern through the body.

💛 A practical tool – EFT tapping – that you can use whenever you need to.

💛 A new framework for understanding the knowing-feeling gap: why you can know you’re enough and still not feel it, and what to do about it.

The teaching part of the session will be recorded but if you can tune in live on the day, you’ll really benefit from the exercises and being able to ask questions and share your experiences with Beverley.

There are still a few paying subscribers who haven’t yet joined us for a live session. To set your mind at ease, this is such a lovely, supportive community. Each session offers a therapeutic space where you can learn, grow – and if you want – share your own experiences, in complete safety. We’d love to welcome you.

I promised you 3 ways to calm your nervous system

When we feel stressed, whatever the cause, that’s a signal that we feel under threat. If the stress is due to loops of unhelpful thinking, we can address that by recognising our stories and the impact they’re having on us, and doing a mind reset.

But we can’t always think our way out of feeling agitated. Stress impacts us physically, as well as mentally and emotionally. When cognitive ways aren’t working, we need to tackle the stress in every cell in our body through physical means.

Below I share with my paying subscribers three quick and simple ways to do this:

Read more

Hi there, how are you doing?

I know many of us are reeling right now from the awful things humans are capable of doing to one another.

This decade has not been easy; in fact it feels as though we’ve been riding one stress wave after another for the last few years.

In my post last week, Finding Solace in a Time of Fear, I shared a couple of beautiful created works that comfort me when things feel overwhelming. This week I’ll continue the theme of nervous system regulation by showing you a simple process I and my clients use to ease anxiety.

“I won’t think about it. If I ignore it, it’ll go away.”

When our emotional, psychological and energetic bandwidth is stretched spiderweb-thin by stress and bad news, there’s a temptation to try to avoid feeling anxious by pushing away difficult thoughts. You might even feel it works – for a short while.

But what happens when I say, “Don’t think of a fluffy white mama sheep with her little twin lambs – just don’t!”?

Baaaaah! There they are in your head.

And if I say, “Absolutely don’t think of those two little lambs frolicking around their mother in a green pasture!”?

Wheeee! There they go, tiny hooves flying, having a fabulous time.

The paradox is that trying to avoid thinking about something focuses your attention on the very thing you don’t want to think about, whether that’s a doughnut or a difficult conversation.

When the thought you’re trying to push away comes burdened with uncomfortable emotions like fear, shame or guilt, it’s even more likely to keep popping up. Your mind finds the thought threatening and wants you to do something about it, so it puts you on high alert and keeps reminding you about it.

We all have an inner danger radar

It’s embedded in our amygdala – the alarm centre of our brain. Avoiding thinking about something we find disturbing can increase the radar’s sensitivity. This ramps up the unconscious feeling that things are unsafe, which can trigger further anxiety. If we’re tired, unwell or struggling to cope on multiple fronts, the problem escalates.

Over time, if we don’t come to terms with what’s bothering us, our radar can become hyper-reactive to things that normally wouldn’t trouble it too much. Left unchecked, this can escalate into mental health issues like generalised anxiety disorder and social withdrawal.

Take my Dad, who’ll be 90 in a few months. He’s extremely good at avoiding unpleasant realities, which can put us into conflict as I’m more of a problem-solver. Dad’s avoidance habit has left him with anxiety and OCD, which tends to skyrocket when things get stressful (e.g. when we were going through a challenging house sale last year). On the surface he seems to be steering well clear of the issues but underneath he’s a bag of nerves.

So let’s not take ourselves there, OK?

I can’t change the fact that the Middle East is on fire, or fix any of the other horrible realities of the world right now. But I can give you a quick and effective process to help you deal with the anxiety you may be feeling, and strengthen your ability to recover.

Mindset training process to help you manage anxiety

Try this five-minute exercise next time you feel the fear rising and threatening to unbalance you. It can quickly help you become more resilient and better able to take action to help yourself and those around you.

1️⃣ When the worry comes in, don’t push it away – that only drives it deep into your subconscious, risking creating a neural pathway to constant anxiety.

Instead, deliberately allow the fear in, and sit with it for a couple of minutes.

Then, rather than judging the situation as being terrible, get curious about what you’re experiencing:

• What does your anxiety feel like?

• Where is it located in your body?

• Does it have a shape or a colour?

• What physical symptoms is it producing?

By allowing yourself to sit with your emotion and explore what it feels like, you may find the anxiety subsiding. You prove to yourself that you can cope with confronting difficult feelings and this builds resilience.

2️⃣ Now place your hand over your body where you located the fear. Close your eyes and let your mind go blank:

• Imagine you’re breathing into that hand and take a slow, deep breath for a count of four.

• Hold the breath for four…

• Then slowly exhale through your hand for a count of eight. Imagine the tension releasing through your hand, leaving your body with your out-breath.

Do this for six full breaths, focusing only on your breathing, allowing your mind to be still. If thoughts flood in, acknowledge them and consciously choose to let them go, then turn your mind back to your breathing.

(NB, acknowledging and letting go is not the same as pushing something away and avoiding thingking about it.)

After six breaths, shake your hand, flicking away the last vestiges of tension.

3️⃣ Anxiety kills your ability to be solution-focused. By now you should be feeling calmer, so re-engage your creative mind by asking yourself these 3 questions:

❓What story am I telling myself about this situation? Is that story helpful to me?

❓Realistically, what would be a better outcome than what I’m going through right now? (A better outcome could be an improved situation, or even something as simple as feeling less anxious and better able to cope.)

❓What action can I take right now to make that better outcome more likely?

Note what comes to mind. You may want to grab a notebook and scribble down your thoughts.

These three little interventions literally take five or six minutes and can leave you feeling calmer and less stressed. Try them next time you feel the tension ramping up, and let me know how you get on. It’s also a great little exercise to do with your kids or partner when they feel stressed.

Please do ask in the comments if you have any questions.

That’s all for today.

Remember, our theme for this month is nervous system reset. In our group-coaching session for paying members in a couple of weeks, my brilliant mentor Beverly Harper will guide us through some highly effective ways to manage our nervous systems.

Please note, the timing of March’s session is different to our usual slot. It will take place on:

• Date: Thursday 26th March

• Time: 3:00pm - 4:30pm GMT (11:00am EDT, 8:00am PDT)

I promise this will be a good one. If you’re not currently a paying subscriber and would like to benefit (only £12 for a month’s access, or £80 for a whole year), you can upgrade here:

Subscribe now

Until next week, much love and take care,

Hi, my dearlings,

I’ve spoken to several people this week who feel weighed down by the terrible things happening in our world. Many of us feel anxious, hopeless, numb – or all of these.

When I sat down to write today’s article, I realised I’d already written what I want to say – in a post I published a couple of years ago.

So, when you’ve finished reading today’s piece (which I’ll keep relatively brief), I suggest you head to this article: A Mote of Dust Suspended in a Sunbeam.

Whenever I feel this way, I return to Carl Sagan’s words and the short animation I linked to in the article. I hope you find some comfort in it.

More words to console us

Another regular source of solace for me is the work of poet, Wendell Berry. Today I went in search of his heartbreakingly beautiful poem, ‘The Peace of Wild Things’:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world,
and am free.

May we all find our own version of still water and feel the presence of day-blind stars. May we find again the grace of the world.

An update on our monthly group coaching sessions

My paying subscriber base is tiny and you mean the world to me – I’m grateful to each of you for choosing to invest in your growth via this channel.

The monthly live coaching sessions are a key benefit of your subscription and we have a lovely crew of ‘More Mindset’ stalwarts who attend regularly (I heartily wish I could find a time that works for everyone).

For the first two years after launching Born for Something More we focused on a different coaching topic every month. Creating, delivering and video-editing each session took me the best part of three days.

When you also factor in the full day it takes me to write my weekly article (every word comes out of me, not AI), I was spending around 85 working days a year – or 17 full working weeks – creating content on Substack. That’s quite a chunk of time.

And then, last spring, I became a live-in carer to my parents, a role I had to make work alongside my one-to-one coaching work. Delivering a new mindset training session every month became a stretch too far.

The last thing I wanted was for the quality of the group-coaching to suffer, or for me to start viewing these monthly events as a burden. It was clear that I needed to find a more sustainable way to make Born for Something More work, for you and for me. That led to a bit of a shake-up.

How the monthly sessions have changed

While you told me you found the live sessions helpful, you also shared that the part you valued most each month was the Q & A section at the end. We’ve had so many rich discussions, with members asking questions, sharing wisdom compassionately and supporting each other through deep listening.

With this in mind, I decided towards the end of last year that the majority of sessions would become ‘ask me anything’ events, and that’s what we’ve done. We usually have a theme to kick things off, or we may begin with a bit of mind-play. Last month’s exercise proved to be a fascinating deep dive into self-awareness. Those who were there, thank you so much for your whole-hearted participation and support.

With this change to a more therapeutic format, confidentiality is paramount so I no longer publish a recording of these sessions.

We do still have our live goal-setting workshop each year in January, which is recorded. Also, to keep things fresh and interesting for you (and manageable for me), every few months I invite a guest with specific expertise to host a session. These are recorded too.

Subscribe now

We had some fascinating hosts last year and the wonderful line-up for this year includes Beverley Harper, who’ll lead our session at the end of this month.

Beverley was my first tutor when I started training as a therapist. She’s hugely experienced and the safest possible pair of hands – we’re so lucky to have her with us this month. She’ll walk us through how we can regulate our nervous systems and self worth in the current climate of stress and sadness.

Please note, to make sure of Beverley’s availability, the timing of March’s group-coaching session departs from our usual slot. Please save this date in your diary:

• Date: Thursday 26th March

• Time: 3:00pm - 4:30pm GMT (11:00am EDT, 8:00am PDT)

That’s it for this week.

I hope you’re taking good care of yourself and those you love. I came down with an energy-sapping virus last week and have been giving myself as much rest as I need.

Let me know in the comments how you recentre yourself when the world makes no sense.

Until next week, sending love, my friends.

x

We’re all familiar with feeling stuck

It’s part of being human that sometimes we feel helplessly locked into a situation where the exits are either hidden from view, or reaching them requires more effort, knowledge or resources than we believe we can lay our hands on.

When we feel stuck, often we don’t have the energy to make change happen. The situation can feel as though it’s happening TO us, rather than being something we have a choice about.

There’s science behind that feeling.

When you’re under chronic stress, your brain’s threat system ramps up. As your amygdala (your internal smoke alarm) shouts louder, your prefrontal cortex (the part responsible for perspective, planning and rational decision-making) may dial back, leaving you feeling overwhelmed, powerless and out of options. Basically, you’re in survival mode.

Rationally, of course, we can probably find fixes that don’t involve turning the world upside down, but ‘rational’ isn’t uppermost in our skillset when we feel stuck. We’re more likely to be caught in a weighted spiral of negative feelings, avoidance and inertia; the more we avoid dealing with the situation, the heavier it feels.

Behavioural psychology has shown that avoiding dealing with something temporarily reduces anxiety, which makes us more likely to keep avoiding it – and that’s how the trap tightens.

Let’s take a look at some typical ‘stuck’ situations.

• You’ve done something wrong and can’t find your way past it.

• You can’t stand your job, boss or colleagues, but you don’t believe you can find another job and can’t afford to be unemployed.

• You’re trapped in a relationship with someone you no longer love, or who you know is keeping you small.

• You’re working all hours in your business but success feels so far away.

• You feel the world is heading in a terrible direction and there’s no way back.

• You’re deeply in love with someone you can’t have.

• You’re in a rut - you want to tear everything up and start again, but you don’t know how or where to start.

• You’re in serious debt and can’t see a way to get financially straight.

I’ve been in a few of those situations and know all too well that helpless feeling of struggling to keep my head above water, with no easy or safe way to escape from the current that’s trying to suck me under.

The impact of feeling stuck

When we feel hopelessly trapped in a situation, it can affect pretty much everything, including our thoughts, emotions, behaviour and physical wellbeing. Our whole experience of life is impacted.

The good news is that we don’t have to tackle all of these factors at once to make change happen. The various systems feed, take from and regulate each other, and if you’re able to change just one, the others can start to loosen.

Let’s look at them one by one:

🌿 Thoughts

This is one of the lynchpins of feeling stuck. When you’re mired in stuckness, you get pulled into the belief that it’s too hard to take the actions that would help you get unstuck. Your mind churns and you tend to repeat the same stories over and over again: “This is awful. Why did I let it happen? I feel helpless. I don’t know how to fix it. I wish someone would rescue me.”

Studies consistently link these negative, repetitive loops of thinking with higher levels of anxiety and depression and lower levels of effective action. If feels like you’re running on the spot – burning mental energy without moving an inch.

When you’re stuck, your brain’s confirmation bias goes to work, filtering out evidence that you might actually be able to find another way. The creative, problem-solving part of your mind can’t get a look-in and negative thinking becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

🌿 Emotions

On an emotional level, being stuck may lead you to feel any or all of:

• Miserable

• Helpless

• Resentful

• Anxious

• Uncertain

• Insecure

• Out of control

• Alone

• Afraid of being found out.

Neuroscience tells us that emotion is the unconscious mind’s way of sending up a flare to let us know that something matters. The problem comes when we treat the emotion as a verdict rather than as information. “I feel helpless” can all too easily become “I am helpless.”

Is it any wonder so many end up feeling trapped?

🌿 Behaviour

Your behaviour changes when you feel stuck. You may procrastinate, overwork, scroll, withdraw, snap at people, over-explain or stay silent when you need to speak.

Avoidance and overcompensation are two sides of the same coin: both keep you occupied and neither moves you forward. You behave in ways that act as an anaesthetic and reduce discomfort in the short term, even if it deepens the problem in the long term.

Being compassionately curious about what you’re doing and not doing – and how you’re doing or not doing it – can provide valuable information about your level of stuckness.

🌿 Physical wellbeing

Feeling trapped can also invade your body, showing up as symptoms that may include tight shoulders, neck and jaw, broken sleep, digestive issues, hormone disruption and headaches.

Chronic stress also elevates cortisol and keeps us on high alert. Over time, this can take a toll on our immune system, mood and concentration.

And the fatigue! Feeling stuck has a way of robbing us of energy, leaving us feeling perpetually exhausted. I know whereof I speak, dear reader.

Often, the place we need to start unsticking ourselves is paying close attention to basic factors like getting enough rest and eating properly. If we don’t create space to process what’s going on and fix the basics, our physiology will keep poking us until burnout or breakdown forces us to pay attention.

Speaking of which, in March’s group coaching session I’m hoping to invite a very special guest walk us through ways to regulate our nervous systems. We may have to move from our usual date to accommodate the session – I’ll provide as much notice as I can.

Mind over matter

Over 2000 years ago the Stoic philosopher Epictetus said, “It’s not the event that disturbs us, so much as our view of the event.”

What this means is that, although what happens in life has an impact (of course it does), what affects us even more is the meaning we attach to what happens.

Modern cognitive psychology backs this up. Our interpretation of events can drive our emotional and behavioural response more powerfully than the event itself.

The stories we tell ourselves shape our experience

We all know people who are trapped in their own drama and seem to inhabit the role of martyr or victim. And we know those ‘lucky’ others who seem to sail through life attracting all the best opportunities.

The crucial distinction isn’t that one is unlucky and the other isn’t, it lies in their mindsets and how well they handle the knocks.

The victim thinks, “Nothing works out for me” and endlessly repeats the behaviour that attracts drama. The lucky one looks for the outcome she wants, then thinks and acts in a way that makes the most of opportunities.

Psychologist Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset reinforces this. People who believe abilities and situations can change are more likely to persevere, experiment and adapt. That behaviour alters outcomes over time.

Neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to rewire itself through repeated thought and action – means change is always possible. It’s not instant, nor effortless, but it is within your gift.

You could even think of feeling stuck as a blessing.

Those negative emotions are indicators that something matters deeply to you, and they’re a clarion signal that your life needs to change.

There will genuinely be times when you can’t alter the situation in which you feel stuck, but you can always, ALWAYS, change how you approach it. That in itself can empower you to transform what may feel like the poor hand you’ve been dealt to a worthwhile choice that mines the best from the situation and enables you to make the most of your abilities.

If you focus on how bad you feel, you risk overlooking the best tool you have for pulling yourself out of the vortex of stuckness: your creative, resilient, solution-focused mind.

You are stronger than you know, and you are not helpless.

As a Mindset Trainer, I support people to get unstuck.

For things to change, we have to do something different – and that starts with thinking differently.

The rest of this post is a shorthand version of a process I teach all my clients. It’s been tested in cognitive behavioural therapy, behavioural activation research and resilience training. I haven’t yet come across a situation it can’t improve.

The basis of this 7-step plan is that it moves you from an emotional state of feeling trapped and out of control to a state where you’re back in the driving seat. It can equip you with a powerful problem-solving resource to play with, plus self-awareness, emotional resilience and a stronger sense of your own worth.

Here’s the 7-step process to help you get unstuck:

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Hi there,

Recently I found a business card tucked into my wallet from a woman I met at a networking event a while back. She’s doing extremely well in the online business world and has built something impressive. On the back of her card I’d written these words: mindset self-care.

I cast my mind back to the meeting with… let’s call her Sarah.

We’d been agreeing on how important it is not to let self-care slip through the cracks when you’re building a business. It’s so easy to prioritise growth, clients and visibility, while telling yourself you’ll pay more attention to yourself ‘when things calm down’.

I asked Sarah how she took care of herself. She told me about her personal trainer and the alternating Pilates and CrossFit sessions. She was fastidious about eating well – breakfast was a green smoothie stuffed with protein and super-foods and she ate raw two days a week.

From the outside, Sarah appeared focused and organised. She had heaps of ambition and clearly knew how to execute. And yet she admitted to me that she often felt stuck, and her fuse was growing shorter by the day – not ideal when, alongside running a business, she was also trying to be the best possible mother to her two year-old daughter.

As she talked, her attention wasn’t fully on me.

• I noticed her eyes scanning the room, scared she might miss an opportunity.

• Her language was full of obligation: must, should, got to, have to.

• She was vigorously self-critical about a situation she thought she should have handled better.

• She was preoccupied with an event she was running the following month, running through what might go wrong.

Listening to her, I quickly worked out that her particular PACES hotspots (the 5 ways in which we sabotage ourselves) were Perfectionism and Self-Sovereignty – a classic combination among busy entrepreneurs – and one I know well 🙄.

She HAD TO do things well, and she HAD TO do them her way. Failure wasn’t an option.

It was also clear that although she was taking care of her body, her mind was under constant strain.

I complimented her on looking after herself physically, and then asked: “So what’s your mindset self-care routine?”

“I haven’t got time for that,” she replied, “especially if I’ve been up during the night with my daughter.”

That’s when I scribbled ‘mindset self-care’ on the back of her card, to remind me to write about this topic.

What do I mean by mindset self-care, and why does it matter?

Your mindset is your beliefs + your habitual attitudes. It’s how you approach life.

Decades of research in cognitive psychology reveal that it’s not simply what happens in life that determine how we feel and behave, but the meaning we give to what happens. The stories we repeat internally influence our emotions, our decisions, our results – and ultimately, how we experience life.

Taking care of your mindset is at least as important as taking care of your physical health because what’s going on in your head creates your reality.

There are many ways to look after your mindset

These five activities are a good place to start and needn’t take up a huge chunk of time. I recommend you start by introducing at least two of them into your daily routine.

Read more

Hi there,

If you’ve been reading Born for Something More for a while, you’ll know free subscribers aren’t short-changed. I’m grateful to every one of you for spending time here and want to make sure each post brings value to readers, whether you choose to be a paying subscriber or not.

When I was reflecting on what to write for this week’s article, the word ‘potential’ jumped into my mind and dug itself in. There are quite a few articles in the archive that play with the topic and I decided to do a compendium post – but there was a problem. Two of the articles are ‘More Mindset’ pieces, which means they’re in the paid archive. This week’s post is for everyone, though, so free subscribers wouldn’t be able to read them.

It only took a second of reflection to decide what to do. In the spirit of abundance, I’m taking the paywall off those posts so that everyone, both free and paying, can read and (I hope) benefit from them.

Before I get to that, its been a funny old week.

I want to thank those who contacted me after last week’s post. It was a short one because my 89-year old father had a TIA (mini-stroke) while I was writing the article and we had to call an ambulance.

Alarmingly, this turned out to be the first of three brain events Dad suffered over the course of 24 hours. TIAs can be a warning that a major stroke is on the way and we spent most of Tuesday in A & E, while the stroke specialists tried to work out what was going on. They put Dad on blood thinners to mitigate the risk and our GP is pushing for a neurology consult in case the episodes are seizures, rather than TIAs. A week on, we’re not really any the wiser, but things seem to have stabilised, thank goodness.

I’ve reduced the night-time checks on my Dad to once every three hours, rather than the hourly checks of the first few days. Still feeling a bit thick-headed from lack of sleep, though – parents of newborns, you have my respect!

Thank you again for those who reached out with kind words. I was very grateful for your care during those challenging few days.

Right, let’s get back to potential.

Who are you capable of becoming?

So many of us live with that feeling that there’s ‘something more’ out there for us. It’s a constant feeling of expectation; of potential not yet fully realised. We sense that life would be more fulfilling if we could only work out what our something more is.

Certainly this proved to be the case for me. When I finally understood my something more – and gave myself permission to live that life – the nagging ache vanished and was replaced by a feeling of deep fulfilment and rightness that’s never left.

I’d like to share three articles that provide guidance and reflective questions to help you explore your own potential. You may have missed them the first time around, or one or more might be exactly what you need to revisit today.

1️⃣ More Mindset: It’s All About the Seeds

There’s no point asking “Where are the flowers?” when the seeds are still in your pocket.”

In this article I talk about the ‘unplanted’ seeds we collect along the way. What do I mean by unplanted?

We rarely regret the things we do; it’s the stuff we don’t do that lurks in the unconscious layers of our minds, affecting our self worth and our potential for fulfilment. Those unplanted seeds are like tiny joy leaks, haunting us with feelings of regret and inadequacy.

The article offers guidance on how to review and reflect on past dreams and desires that haven’t bloomed yet. Could they still be brought to life, and could they point you towards the something more you were born to be?

2️⃣ How Do You Know if You’re Born for Something More?

In this article I provide six questions to help you figure out the DNA-deep knowing that there’s something more you could be doing or being. There might be people out there who genuinely have never been troubled by this feeling but I’ve not met one.

Regardless of whether you turn out to be a yes or no, the exercise will stretch your self-awareness, which I firmly believe is the ultimate life skill. If you already have a clear affirmative feeling about this, as I did, the questions could help you gain clarity about the direction of your ‘born for something more’.

3️⃣ More Mindset: Have You Factored This Into Your Cost of Living?

This one centres around a single question that it takes courage to answer, but I believe you’ll never regret asking yourself. It’s a question which:

… demands that we be honest about whether we’re moving forward into joy and fulfilment, or coasting along in the “it’ll do for now” lane, or endlessly circling the “maybe some day” roundabout.

As I say towards the end of the article:

“If quite a few of these examples are triggering you, then, my darling, it’s way past time to make some changes, and you probably know it.”

I’d love to find out whether one or more of these three articles spurs you on to get curious about your potential. Let me know in the comments.

That’s all for this week. Take care and I hope you have fun exploring your something more.

Sending love,

PS - Our next group-coaching session for paying subscribers is 7:00pm – 8:30pm GMT on Wednesday 25th February - please save the date.

I’m racing to get this off to you as my father had a TIA (known as a mini-stroke) early this evening. The ambulance paramedics were brilliant. They didn’t feel he would benefit from an eight-hour A&E experience tonight (we’ve had quite enough of those recently, thanks) so we’re spared that ordeal. I’ll take him to the GP tomorrow and arrange a referral to the TIA clinic.

I need to stay with Dad until he goes to sleep, so I’m afraid this means the article I originally had planned for you this week won’t happen.

I don’t want to leave you empty-handed so I’m including a short (less than 10 minutes) recording from last week’s group-coaching session. It’s a guided meditation on how to install a ‘safe place’ anchor – one of the simple techniques I walked you through in last week’s article, ‘3 Ways to Rapidly Shift Your Mental State’.

This technique can be an effective way to change state when you’re feeling low, anxious or overwhelmed.

I suggest you read (or reread) last week’s article, then listen to the audio. If you’re able to play it two or three times over the next few days, the messaging may embed more deeply and make the anchoring process more effective. I find last thing at night, just before I go to sleep, is a good time to listen to guided meditations as I’m more relaxed at that time.

I hope you’ll have a listen. If you do, and you use the technique in the near future, please let me know in the comments how you get on with it.

That’s all for this week. Until next time, take good care,