🤔 Think Again

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  • CONSISTENCY IS THE KEY TO EVERYTHING…

    20th July 2026

    Today, I want to talk about how just showing up every day—day after day—will always be talent. Consistency is usually the key to everything in life. Consistency eliminates excuses and builds up real trust in yourself. 

    Over the years, I’ve slowly discovered that it’s the small, ordinary actions performed every day, or week, that create extraordinary outcomes. If you just show up daily or weekly, your momentum builds on its own. That sense of reliability matters infinitely more to you than having somebody else’s approval. 

    Real and lasting transformation isn’t achieved loudly and once in a flashy way, but rather quietly through persistent effort that compounds over time. When you know that you will honour your commitments to yourself, you unconsciously become someone that you can truly believe in. 

    When you skip showing up, your motivation evaporates, and your progress stops. However, if you’re consistent, it will gradually transform any humble effort into remarkable results in the long run. Consistency is the only bridge between dreaming of something and actually creating it.

    Here are some examples: 

    – if you regularly train three times a week, even for short periods, you’ll find that in around six months you’ll become much stronger, fitter, healthier, and genuinely come to enjoy it. That’s what consistency builds.

    – If you practice one skill for just 15 minutes daily, a year later, you will have devoted over 91 hours to mastering it. Your real expertise then emerges quietly.

    – If you save just £10 weekly, by the end of the year you will have saved £520 without feeling it. Wealth always grows when you show up faithfully like this.

    However, it’s also true that rigid routines can sometimes stifle growth and overlook what actually needs to change. Life isn’t predictable, and sometimes flexibility matters more than stubborn repetition. Blind consistency also risks missing crucial moments. 

    So today, show up for yourself consistently in small, quiet ways. Real change happens there, not in grand gestures, just through daily repetition. Remember, consistency is the key to everything!

  • WE SO OFTEN MISTAKE QUANTITY FOR QUALITY…

    13th July 2026

    Today I want to talk to you about why we so often mistake quantity for quality. It’s a tempting way to measure progress, but it’s a really bad bargain, and the cost tends to show up quietly, in work that never quite does what it was supposed to do.

    Have you ever noticed how we seem to have built a world that counts things? Hours worked, tasks finished, content published, etc? The unspoken assumption behind all of this is that whoever produces the most must be doing the best work. 

    There’s something genuinely satisfying about a long to-do list with things crossed off it. But crossing things off and doing them well are not the same achievement. That difference is usually invisible; right up until the moment it suddenly isn’t! What changes things isn’t doing less; it’s doing things with more care instead.

    The second look before you finish something and send it. The hour spent on the one thing that matters, rather than doing the 10 other things that just need doing. That’s not perfectionism; that’s the difference between doing work that holds up and doing work that quietly and quickly disappoints you and others.

    Here are some examples:

    – Someone who reads only 20 pages of a book with real focus will retain far more than one who skims 100 pages for the sake of it. Understanding and coverage are not the same thing.

    – A small business owner who delivers 10 genuinely good customer experiences will earn more referrals than one who processes 50 transactions without much thought. People remember the ones who paid attention.

    – A writer who produces one considered article a week will earn a more loyal readership than one who publishes daily content that never quite says anything. Readers return for substance, not frequency.

    Paradoxically, there is actually a fair argument for volume, as producing a lot is how you build a skill. Not everything here needs to be a masterpiece, and sometimes, done really is better than endlessly revised. The problem isn’t quantity itself; it’s when quantity becomes a habit that we stop questioning.

    So, today, remember that the goal was never to do more, it was always just to do better, and to do it in a way you can stand behind, so that you can consciously realise whenever possible that we so often mistake quantity for quality!

  • WE ARE SO SUGGESTIBLE…

    6th July 2026

    Today, I want to talk to you about why you’re more suggestible than you think, and how you can use this to your advantage if you do it right. That’s because your brain can’t actually tell the difference between someone else’s external voice and your own internal voice. 

    You know how someone criticises you once, and it sticks in your head for years? Or how a passing comment from someone at the beginning of the day can ruin your whole day? That’s suggestibility at work. All you’re doing here is believing something positive about yourself.  

    This means that whatever you say to yourself has exactly the same power as what someone else says. This isn’t just positive thinking; you’re already proving how suggestible you are every time you believe something negative about yourself. 

    The only question is then whether you keep letting random people programme your brain, or whether you’re going to start doing it deliberately yourself. If you’re going to be suggestible anyway, you might as well be suggestible to positive things you say, not negative and harmful things that others say. 

    Here are some examples:

    – Athletes use this technique all the time, without necessarily realising it. They say things like, “I’m stronger than I think”, or “I’ve got this” during a difficult stretch. This makes it feel easier for them because their minds accept it and their bodies respond accordingly.

    – Morning self-talk changes how your day goes. Tell yourself you can handle whatever comes up that day whilst having breakfast, and you’ll notice you approach problems differently that day; not because you’re magical, but because you’ve given your brain an instruction and it’s following it.

    – When panic or anxiety starts building up, telling yourself you’re calming down actually works. This is because your suggestible brain treats it as information rather than just wishful thinking. This thinking then starts shifting your nervous system to match what you’ve said.

    But you can’t just tell yourself you have abilities you haven’t developed or circumstances that don’t exist. Telling yourself you’re fluent in another language won’t help if you’ve never learned it. Self-suggestion only works with psychology and behaviour, not with objective reality, or skills that require actual practice.

    So, today, remember to use your own suggestibility on purpose. Deliberately say to yourself what you need to hear. Plant seeds in your mind that actually help you, and let your mind believe what it’s told. You are susceptible to things other people say, so start saying things to yourself, and you will believe them!

  • WHAT YOU LEARN FROM THE SHIP OF THESEUS…

    29th June 2026

    Today, I want to talk to you about how the Ship of Theseus thought experiment may be the most useful question you have never properly sat with. (Theseus was the hero in Greek mythology, famous for slaying the Minotaur). 

    The Ship of Theseus story is about a legendary ship preserved in Athens, whose planks were replaced one by one as they decayed. Eventually, nothing original remained, raising one of philosophy’s greatest unanswered questions: is it still the same ship?

    Most people pause at that. The pause is where the thinking starts. It’s not really about ships at all. It’s asking what holds anything together across time. Is it the material, the memory, the meaning, or simply the story we keep telling ourselves? That question has no clean answer, and that is the point.

    Here are some examples:

    – Your body replaces most of its cells roughly every seven to ten years, yet no one seriously disputes that you are still you. Identity is not a matter of matter alone.

    – A childhood home rebuilt after a fire, brick by brick, is still called their home by everyone who grew up there. Memory makes it real in a way that materials never can.

    – A long marriage holds two people who have each changed almost beyond recognition from the day they first met. What persists is not the people they were, but what they’ve quietly built together.

    Yet some things do become entirely different; insisting otherwise can blind you to what something is now. Someone once said, “A person never crosses the same river twice, because the river is never the same and the person is never the same”, yet we do return and feel we’re visiting the same place. 

    So, today, try to ask yourself, what is truly holding together the things and people you care about. Once you start looking, you find this question everywhere, so we can really learn from the Ship of Theseus thought experiment!

  • THE MORE YOU CHASE A FORGOTTEN THOUGHT, THE MORE IT RUNS AWAY FROM YOU…

    22nd June 2026

    Today, I want to talk to you about why the more you chase a forgotten thought, the more it runs away from you. I’ve noticed this happens to me constantly, and I’m guessing it happens to you, too.

    The moment you start chasing a thought that you have or want to remember, you’ve already lost and you have forgotten it. That tight, desperate grip we place on our memory sometimes only pushes it further away. The harder we squeeze, the more it escapes. It’s really frustrating and irritating, isn’t it?

    This is because your mind usually works better when you’re not interrogating it. It’s almost as though focusing conscious attention on a blank space makes it deeper, whereas you’ve got to stop looking to actually find it.

    There’s something almost spiritual about letting go. It’s not laziness, it’s just knowing when to step back and realising that the best way through sometimes isn’t always pushing straight ahead.

    Here are some examples:

    1. You’re mid-sentence talking to someone new and, even though they just told you it, their name just vanishes. You search and search your brain, feeling foolish. Then you’re buttering toast later, and suddenly there it is.
    2. That song you always loved plays constantly in your head, but try as you might, for the life of you, you just can’t remember its title. You hum it obsessively for days, getting nowhere. Then one morning, it just appears in your mind without warning.
    3. Your keys. You’ve lost them again! You ransack the house frantically, growing more panicked. You stop, breathe, and give up the search, then spot them on the windowsill immediately.

    Some will always argue that you need discipline and deliberate practice to strengthen memory. They’re not entirely wrong: focused study does help sometimes. But there’s a real difference between learning something new and recovering something already known.

    So, today, try to notice when you’re gripping too tightly at a thought. Loosen your hold, breathe, and let it breathe and remember that the more you chase a forgotten thought, the more it runs away from you!

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AVOID NEGATIVE SELF-TALK…

29th November 2021


​We have to be very careful sometimes to avoid talking negatively to ourselves. 

It is all too easy for us to see the bad in things sometimes, or be held hostage by our fears that we may not be able to do something. We all have lots of underlaying worries and we usually always default to the negative versions of things and then see the worst possible scenario, as we usually tend to inflate or exaggerate our fears. Your brain automatically thinks of the worst thing sometimes.  It is like you also want to sabotage yourself unconsciously. It is like having someone inside your head constantly telling you that you cannot do something.

But self-talk can be both positive or negative – it is always up to us.  You cannot silence that inner negative voice completely, but you can ignore it and try to remember that it is just your fears that are talking.  There is also always a difference between the message that we get from our brain and the way that we choose to respond to it. 

I know that this is something that is often quite hard for us to do naturally, as we frequently grow up and become increasingly cynical over many years, perhaps as an unconscious self-defence mechanism.  However, we can also choose the opposite way to look at things if we really try to.

For example, we often hear people referring to themselves or others as a ‘pessimist’ or an ‘optimist’ and seeing a glass as ‘half-empty’ or ‘half-full’. Some people even like to try to say that they are not one of these, but instead are really a ‘realist’ or a ‘pragmatist’, but this often sounds to me like a pessimist talking!

Another example is the: “What if?” questions, which are usually quite negative and are just the pessimist inside of you talking and asking: “What if this or that happens and things turn out for the bad?” But you can actually flip this question around most of the time and instead ask yourself something like, “What if this or that turns out to be for the good and not for the bad?”

Imagine it is like in a fairytale or children’s story and you have to make yourself resist going down the bad path, which only leads you to bad things and instead choose the good path, which only leads you to good things and which eventually takes you to the enchanted castle at the end!   The irony is that we usually laugh at characters in films or on TV with negative emotions and outlooks on life, such as Eeyore, from Winnie The Pooh, or Marvin the Paranoid Android, from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (I am sure you can think of many more characters like this). 

If that person were outside of you who was constantly saying negative things, you would simply laugh at them and ignore them.  Yet, because it is your own voice telling you something inside your own head, you tend to give it more credibility and take it more seriously.

You must not dwell on things and let them take over your thoughts. You also have to often let go of things and move on.  For example, you find that, sometimes, your brain just seems to go back unconsciously to some of the worst things in your life from many years ago, which has nothing to do with what you are doing at the time.

So, this week, if you hear that little voice inside yourself talking negatively and saying that you cannot do something, try to ignore it if you can and realise that it is just your unconscious fears probably talking to you and do not let it control what you do!

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