Be yourself

When I was growing up, my Mum always used to say to be to create a good impression when I was going out.

She used to tell me that those first impressions that people had of me were the ones that would linger in their minds. If they were good, people would think well of me. If they weren’t, then it would be hard to change their minds from a negative impression. And that’s so true.

However, sometimes, I’d try too hard. And it always led to me creating an impression that I couldn’t live up to in the long term.

There’s something false about trying to be someone you’re not. You can try to reinvent yourself, to appear to be better than you are. Or perhaps try and come over as sophisticated, to be outgoing, or even to try and be enigmatic. But when you do, you’re setting yourself up for a fall.

Because once you try to be something you’re not, that’s an act you have to pull off forever.

I thought that what my Mum was trying to get me to do was be better than I was. That’s youth for you! It wasn’t what she meant at all. All she really wanted was for me to be polite, respectful, kind and helpful, all things I was more than capable of being.

I’d see a girl I’d fancy and immediately try to cool and trendy, two things I most definitely am not or ever have been. It never worked. And if it had, I’d have struggled to live up to it.

I’ve always been the one on the edges of a group, never quite being part of the ‘In-Crowd.’ The truth is, growing up that I liked the idea of being ‘Mr Charisma’ but that’s not who I am and as I’ve come to realise over the years, it’s not even who I want to be. And what’s more, I’ve realised that people with charisma, don’t even know they have it.

Growing up, I sometimes felt that to become more liked, I’d have to push myself, to develop this new personality, be somehow better than I was. I’m pretty sure that many of us feel the same.

Sometimes, I’d even try, but it was just so tiring. It was such hard work.

What’s more, looking back, I’m pretty sure that when I did, everyone could spot it a mile off because unless you’re one hell of an actor, it doesn’t ring true.

And even though sometimes, it seems to work, in the long run, it doesn’t. People can read you like a book and you don’t end up with more friends, you end up with less.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t try to improve yourself and become more likeable. That’s a noble aim, and what’s more, I think that through the course of our lives, we should all be trying to do that, to be the best we can be. But the goal should be to be a better you but at the same time to be real and honest.

What I’m saying is don’t try to change your natural personality. You are who you are. Be proud of that. It took me years to realise that.

I was well into my 50s before I became comfortable with who I am. It took me years to come to terms with the fact that, as much as I tried not to be, I’m a ‘heart on my sleeve’ kind of guy.

I always wanted to be black and white in my demeanour, because that’s often how I think. I have definite opinions on what’s right and what’s wrong. I didn’t like to see the shades in between. I tried to keep my guard up, not be emotional, not get too involved and to a great extent, I’m still like it.

But along the way, I decided that I’d had enough of trying to be something I’m not. I’m not trying to say that I was trying to be someone I’m not, I just tried to keep a facade up, a protective coat if you like.

But it’s not who I am. I’m not black and white. There are lots of colours in my personality. I can be happy, sad, introverted, extrovert, uninterested and intense all in the same hour.

If I’m amongst people I know well and am comfortable, I’ll come out of my shell, but amongst people, I don’t know well, I can appear aloof. It’s not a conscious decision to be like that, it’s just how I am.

I used to be uncomfortable being like that. I’m not anymore. I decided that it was best for me to just be who I am. What you see is what you get. No airs and graces. No need to be the centre of attention.

Don’t get me wrong, if I’ve got something to say, I’ll say it. I'm not a shrinking violet.

But as I’ve got older I’ve also learned some lessons in life. I’ve learned that pulling someone up because they’re wrong isn’t always needed. Sometimes, I don’t need to point out that they’re wrong and I’m right.  Sometimes, it’s so unimportant that it’s not worth it.

The only thing that would come from it is that I’d make them look smaller, I’d look like a ‘know it all’ and it would only be point-scoring. The only thing I’d have been doing, would be appearing superior.

People don’t like ‘know it alls’. They don’t like people who aren’t authentic. They don’t like egotists. They probably won’t say it to your face, but they think it all the same.

People tend to like people who are real.

It’s an odd thing, we all know it, but it doesn’t stop people trying to be something they’re not.

In my case, for years I tried to be a different person from the one I actually was. I tried to be what I thought of as better, more outgoing, more (here’s that word again...) charismatic. All things I most definitely am not. Why? Low self-esteem I would think.

I spent years looking at others and asking myself why I couldn’t be like them. What a waste of time and energy.

What I didn’t take into account is that everyone, and I mean everyone has their own challenges, their own doubts and their own insecurities. And none of us really want others to see that.

But trying to be something you’re not, just sets you up for misery. What it means is that you fake it, you attract the wrong people and when they realise, you lose them too. And how’s that going to help your self-esteem?

We all have ‘Our People.’ We all have flaws and failings, and what’s more, ‘Our People’ don’t care about them and often don’t even notice them.

And the things we dislike about ourselves are often why people like us. They’re part of the charm that we exude and part of our individual uniqueness.

Just remember, you don’t have to have more friends than anyone else. You don’t have to be better than anyone else. All you need to be is yourself.

All those years ago, when my Mum used to tell me to create a good impression of myself, she didn’t mean to be something I’m not, she just wanted me to be the best me that I could be. She just wanted people to see the real me. I didn’t get it until I had children of my own.

And here’s the twist – it wasn’t until I let my guard down, until I decided that I wasn’t going to keep hiding my imperfections and until I stopped trying to be something I wasn’t that I became comfortable in my own skin.

Even though I’m comfortable in my own skin, it doesn’t mean that I have stopped trying to improve myself. I’m still trying to be better. I’m still reading self-improvement books, I’m still trying to learn new things, develop a wider understanding and keep moving on.

And I thank my Mum for that because she wanted me to be the best that I can be. She instilled that into me. She created that desire in me. I didn’t understand it at the time.

But there’s immense satisfaction in knowing that, for all my faults, I’m a better, more rounded person today than I was yesterday, and next week, I’ll be better than I am today. That’s her legacy.

And it doesn’t matter if I’m not the flavour of the week. ‘My People’ get me, faults and all. And they don’t care.

And as the saying goes, ‘Those that matter don’t mind, and those that mind don’t matter.’

Be yourself. It doesn’t matter that you’re not perfect. There's integrity in being who you are. 

And what's more, it’ll make you a whole lot happier too.

 

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The decision that changed my life

I’d like to take you on a little trip back in time. The date is 23^rd December 2003. I didn’t realise it until a couple of weeks ago, but up until this particular day, I’d been playing ‘victim’ in my own life. Not for the 5 years, I thought it had been, but for 12!

Take a look at this photo. As you can see, it’s cold. It’s the day before Christmas Eve and me and my son James are working on this trailer.

I’d recently bought it to add to the fairground equipment I already had. It had been a horsebox and I’d bought it to convert it to a games stall.

We rubbed all the body down, cut two openings on one side, to which we added shutters that we could lift up to open the stall. Inside, we panelled it out, added electricity points and painted it up.

We took off the back door which would drop down so that they could walk a horse into it and added two doors to get in and out. And I made and sign-wrote a sign that attached to the roof of the trailer.

And it was on that very day, that whilst rubbing down the front of this trailer, wondering what I was doing outside in the snowy cold (you can just see the start of the snow on the bonnet of my car in the bottom left-hand corner and on the drawbar of the trailer), that a glaring realisation came to me.

It was a couple of hours after this photo had been taken. I was sanding down the fibreglass, my hands were freezing cold and I’m swearing to myself.

“What the f*ck am I doing out here? I must be mad. My life shouldn’t be like this. It wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for that bastard.”

It was at that moment that I realised.

Back in 1990, I had a business, putting amusement arcade machines and video games into pubs, clubs and shops from Weymouth in Dorset along the coast as far as Paignton in Devon. 

My son Henry was born in December of 1990 and due to the actions of one person, with me being more engrossed in my new son than keeping my eye on things, my business collapsed within a period of a month.

What happened shall remain private but I will say that I blamed what happened on one particular person – one who I trusted with my life.

It wasn’t until I returned to work a month later that it dawned on me what had gone on in the interim and the problems it caused.

The upshot was that we lost everything. I could have gone bankrupt, but after speaking with my Dad, I made the decision to sell everything I needed to sell in order to avoid it. And that’s what I did.

Over the next year, to keep the food coming in, I started market trading. And the stock I sold? My beloved record collection was my starting stock. It’s just as well it was large. Over that next year, it kept money coming in, but we ended up in the position where, by February 1992, we were about to be made homeless.

I won’t give you the details of the next few years as they were painful and I don’t really want to go over them in detail.

Over the next years, as a family, we worked and started to get back on our feet. And when I say we, that’s exactly what I mean. By 2003, we had a business, attending fetes, shows, and fairs with fairground equipment that we’d started to acquire over the previous two or three years.

By the time this photo was taken, my sons James and Henry were 17 and 13 and they’d both been fully involved in helping us get our business open and continuing the project, as was my wife, Carol.

But on that day, with me berating myself about our plight being caused by this one person, I realised for the first time, that my ranting and raving wasn’t hurting him. I realised that for all the bitterness I harboured, it had absolutely no effect on him at all.

I remember thinking to myself that during all this time when I was eating myself up with anger, and the nights I was awake running and re-running the events through my mind, that he was oblivious to it and probably slept quite comfortably and most likely, never gave his actions a second thought.

I realised that day that whilst he may well have been the cause of the problem, that was all he was.

His actions may have precipitated the events that brought us into the position we’d found ourselves, but after that, everything that happened from that moment, was down to me.

And even though I worked every hour I could to dig us out of the hole, and now we were starting to get back into a more comfortable position again, deep down in my heart, I was still playing the victim.

I realised that my, ‘woe is me’ attitude had been holding us back for all these years. Everything I’d done, each thought I'd had, although aimed at rebuilding our lives had also been hindering every step of the way because of my ‘victim’ mentality.

I don’t think there was a day during those years when I hadn’t sworn at or blamed this other individual for the situation I was in. My anger was deep down. My stomach seemed to be continually knotted, sleep was something I rarely had. At night if I dreamed it always revolved about our situation.

I couldn’t see that inch by inch we were clawing our way back. All I could see was that we’d had to go to car boot sales to buy my kids presents on their Birthdays and Christmases during those first few years. I couldn’t forget that for 18 months, my wife and I had pretty much survived on beans on toast in order for us to be able to feed the boys properly.

All the time I was doing this, it was eating away at my soul and my self-esteem. And I couldn’t get out of my head that even on the day that my Dad died in 1994, I didn’t have enough money to put petrol in my car to get from Weymouth to Farnborough and that I’d had to go to my next-door neighbour and borrow £10 to get petrol to go.

And so all this anger and hatred inside me was affecting me day after day.

But at that moment, when I had this startling discovery, everything...and I mean everything changed.

At that moment, I realised that the biggest problem I had wasn’t all that had gone on before, but my attitude toward it.

What had happened had happened. But from that moment, everything I did was down to me. How I thought about it was down to me.

The realisation that I was hurting nobody other than myself was like a thunderbolt hitting me.

I then spent the next 20 minutes or so berating myself for being such a fool. Once again, I was beating myself up.

And then, with the snow falling, and my freezing cold hands holding the drill, I made, probably the most important decision I’d ever made.

I looked down at the snow-covered floor, dragged one foot along it until it made a line and decided that the other side of the line was the past – that’s where my anger, hatred and pain was. I’d stepped over it, looked down and I wasn’t going back over it anymore.

And from that day on, I stopped being angry. I stopped thinking about him and what he’d done. And started to move forward.

And over the next few years, my stupor lifted, my business improved and for the first time since 1990, I started to feel good about myself.

I started to see what I’d been through over those previous years in a different light. From feeling bad about what had happened to us, I started to see how, from virtually nothing, we’d started again and had got into the position where we’d rebuilt.

I started to feel proud of the things I’d done to move on. I started to see the accomplishments of the past few years.

It was the start of me moving on, in my business, in my life and most importantly, in my heart.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a fairy story. Not everything went right. I didn’t become a millionaire or even close.

But what I did become, was proud of who I’d become. Proud of the challenges I'd overcome, the ones that at the time, I didn’t see as successes, just failures. But as I often say these days, your strength comes from learning from your failures.

I haven’t come through it all unscathed. Those days of buying my kids presents from Car Boot Sales has never left me. I still feel that as much as I did back then. Christmas never comes without me remembering those years. Sadly, I’ve never been able to shake those memories off.

However, looking back, I know that we did what was needed and we always made to try to make them happy times for the boys.

And as I look back to that day, I think of it as my ‘flick of the switch moment.’ The day I got my self-respect back. The day I kicked my stinkin’ thinkin’ out. The day I realised that my attitude, good or bad, was down to me.

It was the day I finally got it. The day I realised that whatever happened in my life, good or bad, my attitude was down to me and no-one else. No matter what happened in the world, it was up to me how I reacted.

I had lost everything I’d worked for in my life. I’d spent years blaming someone for everything bad that had happened after that. And finally, I’d learned the lesson that my attitude controlled how I reacted.  And I was the only person who could control my attitude. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not perfect. There are still times when my attitude is bad, but I realise quickly and set about changing it.

But when I look back, the day before Christmas Eve, 2003, was the day my life turned around. It was the day I grew up and became a man.

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Success and failure..they're just events

 

I have a question for you. Why do we judge people on how successful they are?

We all do it even if it’s a subconscious thing. We look at a homeless person on the street and in our minds we conjure up how we see them.

We see a guy collecting trolleys in a supermarket car park and come to a decision about him.

We watch as a bin man collects our rubbish and empties it into the lorry and have an opinion on them.

We see janitors and cleaners and come to an assumption of the person.

Even when we think we don’t, we do. It’s human nature. It’s the way we’re brought up whether we think so or not.

We look at the executive climbing into his Mercedes or BMW and we think we have them tagged to a certain position in life.

We look at friends and family and see how they’re moving on in the world and we judge them by how big their house is, how new their car is, what kind of holidays they take what schools their kids go to.

We look at the celebs with their super lifestyles and we do the same as we do with our family and friends, we make a decision on where they are, defining whether they’re a success or a failure.

It’s something to do with the way we look at the world. But in every case we’re wrong. And here’s why I think so.

Success and failure are not what people are. Success and failure are just events in a life’s journey.

The executive who gets a promotion isn’t necessarily a success. The promotion was. It may be that the person’s so engrossed in their business life that they’ve neglected their family to achieve it. If that’s the case I don’t see the person as a success.

The lowly paid road sweeper may be viewed as a failure. However, he may have a loving family awaiting him or her when they get home. They may have a relationship with their spouse that makes them smile and laugh together on a regular basis. I wouldn’t see that as a failure.

If you look at the rubbish collector as less than the high-flying executive, just wait until your rubbish collection isn’t done for a month or two. You’d soon realise who would be more important to you.

In regard to my own life, I’ve learned that whether I’m a success or not has nothing to do with how high I’ve risen. I’ve had periods of my life when all has been going swimmingly, when I’ve been earning good money and holidaying in far-flung places. Was I a success then?

How about when we lost my business? When I was in the council offices day after day telling housing officers that me and my family would be on the street in the matter of days as we were about to lose our home due to events that were out of control? Had I become a failure then?

When I look back at the times, I sure felt like a success when all was going well and definitely felt like a failure when it wasn’t.

But the truth is that when all was good, I wasn’t a better or worse person – the events leading up to it were successes and when everything went wrong, it was the events that were failures.

I was still the same person. My values and ethics hadn’t changed. My thinking and my actions may have done. But who I was hadn’t.

As I’ve got older, I’ve learned that people aren’t successes or failures. Our conditioning has led us to think it is. Our upbringing and the people surrounding us, along with the media have helped to make us look at people in that way.

But when you strip it down, it’s the events and actions that are what are the successes or failures. It really isn’t the other way around.

Don’t get me wrong, all of us have fallen into the same way of thinking about it.

However, I’ve learned as I get older, not to beat myself up when things go bad and not praise myself up too much when things go well.

Sure, when I’ve worked hard, applied myself and things have gone well, I’ll pat myself on the back and think I’ve done well, but I know I’ve also often worked hard and applied myself when things haven’t worked out so well.

When my business fell apart, it wasn’t because I’d stopped working. I was working as hard as ever. Circumstances beyond my control happened and situations meant that what I’d been doing no longer was getting the results they had been.

And when I lost everything, I felt like a failure. But I wasn’t. Mind you, the events that happened certainly didn’t help.

And sometimes, things have gone wrong for me because I’ve made the wrong decisions along the way and I’ve beaten myself up and thought of myself as a failure. But once again, I wasn’t a failure.

I learned things that made me stronger, I learned new things along the way to help me to grow and move on once again. The event of my failing lead to my understanding and then progressing toward another success.

Success is a pervasive thing. It turns heads when it happens. I’ve certainly done it internally too. When I was younger I can remember thinking that I was the bees-knees when things were going well. That’s why I felt so bad when things went wrong.

But let’s take a step back a moment. We’re all going to make wrong decisions. We don’t wake up in the morning and think to ourselves, “It’s a great day to see if I can cock everything up and wreck everything.” Of course, we don’t. And yet, we all do it at some stage. It’s how life is.

The fact is, we make our decisions based on the knowledge we have at the precise moment we made that decision. And sometimes, we don’t know enough. The truth is, it’s often we don’t know enough.

I’ve never learned anything from any of my successes in life. When it’s all honky dory, I’ve learned to be aware.  That’s when things can go wrong. When you start to feel as though you’re a success, you can take your foot off of the pedal. And if you do it too often, that’s when things can trip you up.

But I can honestly say that when I’ve failed, that’s when I’ve learned those life lessons that have made me uncomfortable. It’s at those times when I’ve had to look inward, see where I’ve gone wrong, think about what I needed to learn and then adjust, and start again.

The things that happen to us are what shape us. Our ego is what makes us think we’re successes or failures. And when we think we’re one or the other, it’s about perception. Compared to whom? Where’s the baseline?

My vision of who is successful could be completely different from yours. It’s the same with failures.

I’m friends with people who on paper are millionaires. You can look at them and see the trappings they have around them and consider me to be a failure alongside them. In fact, in the past, I’ve done the same.

For me, that changed one day with a conversation with one such person.

I was a Director of a non-league football club back at the beginning of the 2000s. I’d been co-opted onto the board after a meeting of directors.

I remember one day, going to a Board meeting and looking out at the Director’s car park. There were brand new or recent Jaguars, Mercedes, BMWs and a solitary 10 year old Vauxhall Cavalier in there. Guess which one was mine.

During the meeting, a contentious issue arose and it was being discussed. As always money was being talked about. They were going around the table discussing how much money they’d recently put into the club and how much they needed to put in. And they were sharing thoughts about the situation as they talked.

Eventually, the conversation came around to me. I was embarrassed about being involved as I didn’t have money to put in. I replied that based around the fact that as I had not and did not have any money to invest into the club, I shouldn’t really have any input into this situation. The meeting continued and I have to say I felt like a fraud and that I shouldn’t be there.

At the end of the meeting, the Vice-Chairman of the football club, a partner in a multi-million-pound engineering company with good Government and Ministry of Defence contracts, came over to me and asked that I dropped by his office the next day to see him.

I did and thought that I was going to be asked to leave the board. It wasn’t the case.

He told me that he understood why I didn’t want to get involved in the conversation about the money, to which I said that I didn’t feel I had any right to contribute because of my financial situation.

He then proceeded to tell me that I should have no need to have been worried to share my thoughts. When they’d invited me onto the Board of Directors they knew I wouldn’t be able to contribute financially to the club.

They’d invited me onto the board because I’d shown in the previous two years how much I’d contributed to the club, firstly when I’d joined the Supporters Club and also as Chairman.

They’d seen the amount of work I’d done to improve the club. How I’d used my signwriting skills to brighten up the snack bars, how I’d cajoled supporters into helping decorating the lounge areas.

How I’d led the Supporters Club to raise a record £44,000 during the previous year, funds which directly input toward the main club funds. How I’d come up with an idea of converting a room into a bigger snack bar, got a team of people together to do the building work, how we’d raised the money to pay for it and buy the new equipment to kit it out and how the new snack bar was now making more money than it ever had.

They’d noticed how not only I was working around the club, but I’d enrolled my wife and my two boys to man the snack bar on opening days.

And it hadn’t gone unnoticed how I’d offered to take over the task of writing, compiling, typesetting and getting the matchday programme produced with two days notice when we’d lost the person who’d been doing it, abruptly.

He then went on to tell me that because what I and my family did around the club, my opinion was greatly valued, that the Directors felt that what I did made me as worthy to be on the board as they were and that they were well aware that while the other directors all ran businesses that could continue when they weren’t there, they knew I was a sole trader and that when I was doing things for the football club, I wasn’t able to run my own business.

He told me that I may think I’m a failure compared to them, but that I was equally as important to the club as they were and the other Directors said that because I didn’t have a big business, my perspective was different to theirs and how I saw things was different from theirs. That’s what made me valuable and appreciated as an equal on the board.

I went home and thought about it that night and realised that the only credit I could take from the conversation is that I never give up and always try.

I wasn’t a success because the Supporters Club raised that much money. I may have encouraged and come up with ideas, but the success was because all of the committee of the supporters club pulled together and did their bit to help the club. The combined efforts produced the success.

I was on the board because my efforts got me noticed. It was the efforts that made me successful in becoming a director.

The credit I’ll take is in following what’s known as the circle of success. I’d thought about something, put ideas forward, which we’d given a try, and then tried something else. Some things worked, some things didn’t, but we kept going. The more we did, the more things worked and in the end, we were successful.

Unfortunately, though, the circle of success works both ways. As I said earlier, you can sometimes be successful because of the things you did. You’d become motivated by following the process.

Then, when you stop doing the things you’d been doing, motivation drops. And because motivation drops, you do less, and so your motivation drops again.

And as your motivation drops, you procrastinate. You stagnate. You stop getting ideas, you stop thinking positively, and you end up back where you started, or sometimes worse off.

And the only way you can get better again is to keep doing. And it’s in the doing that you get the success.

So you see, all those people we see who we think of  as successes because of how we perceive them aren’t really. It’s the events themselves that were successful.

And to be honest, if you learn from the failures, and keep at it, you’ll get more successes.

At the end of the day, we honestly don’t need to judge ourselves or others as successes or failures.

Most importantly, the only really important thing is how you see yourself.

Me, I’m a work in progress. I’ll not be finished until it’s over. Sometimes I have successes, sometimes I have failures.

If I am anything, I’m a trier. I don’t give up, I try to do the best I can. Sometimes, I win sometimes I lose, but I never throw the towel in and accept defeat. I keep learning and I move on.

I try to be kind, helpful and honest hardworking and respectful of others. That’s good enough for me.

It’s up to you how you see me. And it’s also up to you how you see yourself.

Don’t let life’s lessons ever make you feel a failure, because you can learn and move on. And by moving on you’ll have more successes and that will bring you hopefully, to where you want to be.

Do the best you can, give it your best shot. It might work out, it might not. You won’t be a success of failure either way.

But you will respect yourself and feel good about yourself when you know that you’ve done your best.

And at the end of the day, that’s all you really need.

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What YouSay When You Talk To Your Self...

Over the years, I’m pretty much convinced that I’ve been my own worst enemy. And I’d go as far as to say that the same applies to you.

And here’s why I think this is the case. Have you ever found yourself thinking any of the following; “ I can’t do that.” “I wish I could talk to people like ......... does? I’m rubbish at that.” “I’m useless.” “I’m fat.” “I’m no good at...” “I can’t.” The list is ongoing and endless.

The one I’ve been most guilty of is comparing myself to others. I’ve got a brother-in-law who can walk into a room and be talking to a stranger as though they’ve been friends for years. I’ve never been comfortable doing that. If I’m in a room full of people I don’t know, I’m always hovering around the edges.

When I was a teenager, my cousin was taller, more confident and better looking than me. I used to watch the girls flock around him and it made me feel like I was third grade. Can you relate to that?

It took me years to recognize that the reason I felt inferior to others was that I spent all my time telling myself that I was. I’d watch others and compare myself, and pretty much all of the time it was unfavourably.

It was also unfairly. We don’t know what other people’s situations are. On the outside, they may appear to be confident and have it all under control but what I’ve found is that they’re not perfect, and they have their own insecurities too. I think we all go through that, especially when we’re young.

It was in the 1990s that someone told me about a book called ‘What To Say When You Talk To Yourself.’

I thought that it was a silly title. After all, we don’t go around talking to ourselves all day, do we? People would look at us and think we were mad! But the truth is we do. Just not out loud.

When I was told about this book, I was sceptical. The reason being, I’d not long lost my business, and at the time, myself and my wife we eating beans on toast regularly so that we could feed our kids properly. We were doing everything to keep our heads out of the water, whilst at the same time I was beating myself up in my thoughts all day, even though, I didn’t realise I was doing it. I remember thinking, how was talking to myself going to improve things?

Outwardly, I was trying to move on, trying to rebuild our lives and yet I couldn’t see that actually, I was a fighter, striving to improve. All I could see was a loser, trying to pretend he wasn’t.

I read the book but didn’t take a lot of it on board on the first reading. 30 years later, I’ve probably read the book 10 – 15 times, each time accepting a little bit more, that the content in the book made sense and that by changing what I said to myself in my thoughts, I could improve.

It’s one of life’s mysteries as to how we believe it when we think negatively of ourselves and say that “we wouldn’t be able to...,” and yet we can’t believe ourselves when we tell ourselves, “we can.”

It took me into my well 50s to start to like myself and accept me for who I am. I eventually stopped telling myself what I couldn’t do because when I looked back over the years, I amazed myself at what I had done.

I realised that even though I’d been skint a few times, had lost a business and had to sell everything I had around me to not become a bankrupt, even though I beat myself up every day for years and thought of myself as a victim in the years that followed, and while all this was going on, I’d joined a hospital radio station and within 18 months was Chairman of the station and found myself mixing with the top people at the hospital in question.

Also, having taken my eldest son to watch a football match at our local football club, within 3 years, I’d joined the supporter’s club, become a committee member and then Chairman and also was invited onto the Board of Directors having guided the Supporter’s Club to raise the most money they’d ever raised, up until that time, in their history. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t do it all, many people contributed, but I did the majority of the planning and organising.

And at the same time as all this was going on, I was trying to build a new business at the same time.

I didn’t realise I had qualities that I didn’t know I’d possessed because I’d never had cause to use them before. And they weren’t apparent to me until another of the director’s who was a multi-millionaire company owner made me aware of them one day.

None of us knows the qualities and capabilities we have until we’ve used them without realising. I’ve not achieved anything close to many of my friends but that doesn’t matter. I’m travelling on my own road. I’m not in competition with them. I am in competition though, with myself. I’m aiming to be a better me than I was a year ago, a week ago, yesterday.

My greatest quality is that I’m open to learning. I made a pact with myself that I would never give up trying to be a better me.

My point of all this isn’t to boast that I’m someone special because I’m not.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I’m average. I’m better than that. I didn’t at one time think so but I do now. Why? Because a man who became a mentor to me once said, “Average is the top of the bottom, the bottom of the top, the cream of the crap!” Outspoken I know, but it rang a bell with me for some reason – at the time I felt like I was at the bottom and I didn’t want to be there anymore.

We’re all born with no skills, no attitudes, no negativity. We all start in the same place. If we all start in the same place, who’s to say where you can end up?

I love to see successful people. They do different things but they all have some similar qualities. I try to learn from them. I’m sure that we can improve ourselves just a tiny bit at a time. I try to pick up little tips from them and use them to get a tiny bit better than I was. And then find another.

And I sincerely believe if we can change our thinking, change the way we talk to ourselves about ourselves, then with effort and persistence, we can all get better. We can all be prouder of ourselves. And that’s an admirable position to be in.

It’s not about wealth, it’s not about fame because in the end they don’t matter.

In my opinion, the only person whose opinion of you matters is the person you face in the mirror each day. It doesn’t matter if your family and friends admire you if you don’t like yourself.

It’s taken me until now to realise that I actually like myself and who I am. I like my ethics, I like that I’m still striving to be better. I like that I’m still trying new things. I’m not where I want to be yet. I doubt I’ll ever get there.

I now like the person in my mirror. He’s been through a lot over the years. And he’s got to the point where when he talks to himself, he’s stopped telling himself how useless he is and now realises he’s actually way better than he used to think. And he knows that there’s still more to come.

A lot of the things I’ve learned along the way came from reading ‘What To Say When You Talk To Yourself’. I understood its principles a little more each time I read it. I’ve picked up something different each reading, something that has helped me realise I’m better than I spent years thinking I was. I’ve read that book so many times, it’s falling to pieces.

I’m aware that I’m improving. And I’m convinced that if I can do that, anyone else can as well. You’ll be in a fight with yourself and some of the time you’ll lose but there is a turning point.

I remember mine succinctly. And when you reach it and draw the line in the sand and tell yourself that you’re not going back over it, you’re on your way.

You will stumble, you will take the wrong path occasionally, but when the will is strong enough, the facts no longer matter. When you’re ready and make that decision, you’ve already won. You’ve just got to keep going.

In conclusion, what you say to yourself matters more than you realise. It’s not the only thing you’ll need to change along the way and it won’t be easy. But it’s worth it.

My hope is that it doesn’t take you as long as it’s taken me.

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