Letters

The Winds of Change What happens when change gets out of control? Listen to Audio Tell me Do you want change? Do you like and embrace change? Do you dislike change? Do you fear change? Or are you one of those who just isn’t bothered about change? There are three types of change Number one, change we want and have planned and is under our control, like changing jobs, moving house, or engaging with a new partner. Number two, change thrust upon us by everyday circumstances. We can manage it but would prefer if it hadn’t happened because it’s not…

Lessons from the Wilderness How I came to understand the biggest mistake I ever made and how to avoid it 21 days ago, I completely lost the plot. I had a massive catastrophic and complete nervous breakdown. I was ‘out’ for three days and was then kept going by the love and friendship of two people – you know who you are – who ‘picked me up brushed me down’ through their daily intercessions. “Forgive me Father for I have sinned” – not something I would normally say or address the Higher Power, but over the past few years I…

Your Greatest Fears Fears, Dreams and Decisions The other day I met someone who was really nervous. Granted he was giving his very first two minute impromptu speech at a Toastmasters meeting but that wasn’t really the reason. The question was about describing your greatest fears or dreams. You see, his greatest dream is also his greatest fear. Now you and I know it’s quite easy and even common to put these two things together – we can even find ourselves doing it – sometimes! Sometimes you and I may have a big ambition or a dream that we have…

The Love Paradigm What is ‘Love’ all about? What is Love? The answer to this question has been eluding ‘mankind’ for aeons. It’s not even clear when this first became so important to us. It doesn’t help the English language has such a hard time with it. We use the same word to express our feelings towards our pets, our job, our sport, our possessions, our spouse or life partner, sexual activity, our parents, works of art, music, our children, our country and so on and on, and all this serves to do is completely confuse the issue! Other languages…

The Coaching Conundrum Does having a ‘coach’ represent some sort of ‘failure’? ‘Coaching’ gets a bad press. Most people don’t really know what it IS, what it means to ‘have a coach’ or to ‘be coached’, but the fact is the vast majority of successful people – really successful people in business, sport and entertainment to name a few have people who ‘coach’ them. Unsuccessful people on the other hand, people who ‘get by’ or never quite achieve what they want, don’t believe they need someone to help and guide them. What they believe is they can do it by…

New Year – New Start? What’s the meaning of ‘New Year’ and is it time for a ‘new start’? We’re at the beginning of yet another year. this one happens to be called 2024 but as you may know I’m not really convinced about the ‘years’ we work with because in my opinion they’re artificially created from various calendars which have been manipulated by philosophies and religions over the over the millennia. Now if we want to define the year astronomically the best time to start would probably be the Winter Solstice when the nights in the northern hemisphere are…

The Secret of the Universe A Summary and Extension of last week’s Masterclass The secret of the Universe is something people have been seeking for millennia. What I can tell you is the answer to ‘life, the universe, and everything’ is not 42 as supposed by Douglas Adams in ‘The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ series despite the millennial efforts of mega-computer Deep Thought. The secret of the universe is very simple and Einstein nailed it “Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but…

Robot Wars Stand down Red Alert – false alarm The press, usually one or two of those with red header banners, delight in posting scare stories about how vicious robots powered by sinister ‘AI’ are about to take over the world and, like the Daleks of Dr. Who, exterminate us all. This is really irresponsible juvenile behaviour and editors should know better because there are still many people, often those who read this type of paper who, like my grandmother firmly believe “if it’s in the papers it must be true” even though in her particular case it may have…

Why Do We Get Paid? How Does it ‘Work’? A good question I thought when it first came up at one of my coaching groups. At first it seems obvious and it’s something we take for granted. We do a ‘job’ for someone making use of our energy, skills, knowledge and experience and they give us payment, usually in the form of money, in return. We also get paid when we sell something, transfer ownership of something, to another individual or other entity such as a business. This is the common understanding: payment follows an exchange of something from one…

Saving the Planet It’s not the Planet we need to Save After a recent international conference ‘world leaders’ were castigated for not ‘doing’ enough to ‘save the planet’. This is the pinnacle of arrogance believing it is even possible for the so called ‘human race’ to do anything even slightly significant to affect the evolution of a planet – any planet, other than blow it to pieces, through their meagre third dimensional mechanical efforts. Everything is energy, all we can do is transform it from one manifestation to another. The planet is an energetic ecosystem locked in its own cycle…

The Freedom Paradigm It may not be what you think it is A speech to the RSA – Royal Society for the encouragement of arts, commerce and manufactures – 24 May 2023 You and I are already free – completely free – all we have to do is find it, fund it and feel it – but it’s not that simple. Before we can find freedom, we need to know what it is. What most people understand as Freedom is really Liberty and the two concepts are quite different. To paraphrase Viktor Frankl in ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ about his…

The Creators Getting Things Done This final group is really made up of the people who ‘get things done’. The creatives, the people who think constructively, and those who are at least somewhat aware of who and what we are. Generally, one way or another, these are the ones who ‘make things happen’. (Rather than just talking about it). The ’seekers’ are always looking for ‘the answers’. Some of them might be ‘scientists’ who start with a supposition or hypothesis as to what the answer to a particular ‘question’ might be and through a process of experimentation attempt to discover…

The Talkers Outbound ‘Communications’ The next two groups are the ones who talk a lot. They also tend to have an ‘agenda’. They are driven to make a point and are wrapped up in their third dimensional view of the world and personal human existence. They aren’t really interested in humanity in general and have a distorted idea of what humanity really is. Although similar there are two distinct groups in this selection of folk. One is externally focussed on other people and focus on the particular group or ‘calling’ with which they align themselves.  The other is all about…

The Quiet Ones “The Silent Majority” The vast majority of people on this planet have no idea (or very little) about what’s going on. You and I (and everyone else) are infinite spiritual entities inhabiting (temporarily) a physical body, which together make a ‘human being’. This is however, meaningless to the ‘quiet ones’ who just don’t realise this or have been conditioned or convinced this is ‘nonsense’. The ’quiet ones’ believe whatever they are told by an ‘authority’ they recognise which may be a religious, governmental, political or media organisation. This doesn’t mean they necessarily agree with it, but they…

Only One of Us The Secret of who and What We Are Before we discover the different behaviours I’ve identified over the years I need to explain this. Many people over the millennia have claimed to have had ‘conversations with God’. (We’ll discuss the concept of the ‘higher power’ another time – for the moment please ‘take it as read’) One of the most recent is Neale Donald Walsch who published a series of books between 1995 and 2017 entitled ‘Conversations with God’. These were written in the form of a conversation with a different typeface for the two ‘participants’…

“We the People” But who ARE the ‘People’? Who are ‘We’? In the next few newsletters, I’m examining ‘us’, the concept of ‘we’ as a people, as individuals, as groups, as types and as a whole. What we are and apart from “mostly water”, what are we ‘made’ of? We are individually unique – which means we’re all ‘different’ and although this uniqueness applies to our external appearance, that’s only one element of the story. What makes us really different from one another is how we behave, how we operate, how we think, and how we feel. No two people…

The Ultimate Impostor Syndrome “Making [insert country name] Great Again” http://thefreedomletter.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/TFL_011.mp4 There are very few people on the planet who haven’t, at some time or other, been afflicted at least at some level by so called ‘impostor syndrome’ – the feeling or belief they are in some way ‘not up to the job’. Of course, it’s not always a specific ‘job’ as an employee. It may be a role such as parent or some other personal relationship position – often a source of annoyance between all varieties of ‘life partners’. It wasn’t always this way, it’s a syndrome of ‘modern’…

The Psychology of Taking Offence The Rise of the Professional ‘Offence Taker’ I’ve noticed recently the Police have been called out on the grounds some individual has ‘been caused offence’ by someone else. Now, there are some laws about disturbing the peace and keeping public order which might apply if this wasn’t just an individual matter – but there is also an offence of ‘wasting police time’. It seems to me ‘taking offence’ has become something of a fashion. We are of course completely free, if this is what we choose, to be ‘offended’ by someone or something or to…

The Spiral of Life It’s not a ‘circle’ or a ‘wheel’ There are many coaches and the like out there who talk about the ‘circle of life. Dividing your life activities into varying numbers of sectors and then analysing and assessing them to give a ‘score’, often out of 10, for each life area. I’ve seen this done with anything between four and twenty sectors. The process then is more often than not to ‘balance’ these sectors, so they all have the same score and form a circle. Do more of those with a low score and less of those…

Communications Breakdown “What we have here is a failure to communicate” “What we have here is a failure to communicate” – Rod Steiger to Sidney Poitier in the 1967 movie ‘In the Heat of the Night’. It is said we live in the ‘communication age’ – well, we may be in an ‘information age’ but there’s not a great deal of communication going on. It’s more of a ‘Tower of Babel’ situation. It seems everyone is talking at once and not many are listening, really listening. The late Steve Shapiro, a sales coach and speaker, described the two magic words…

The Decision is Yours But what Happens next? “There is a single mental move you can make which, in a millisecond, will solve enormous problems for you. It has the potential to improve almost any personal or business situation you will ever encounter … and it could literally propel you down the path to incredible success. We have a name for this magic mental activity … it is called DECISION” – Bob Proctor It’s not clear though which comes first, the decision or the choice? For some it’s the choice to decide and for others the decision to choose. The…

The Story of Pat and Mick There’s no such thing as a straight line This is a story about Pat and Mick. Pat was a customer of mine when I ran a printing business in Liverpool. I used to typeset and print his newsletter, so I got to know quite a lot about his thinking. Mick was my next door neighbour in Knutsford, and we spent some time in conversation. Pat and Mick had something in common – they were both Professors of Economics, one at Liverpool, the other at Manchester and the European University in Florence. One was economic…

Reinventing the World – Part 2 Taking Back Control There are degrees of centralisation and decentralisation. They perhaps overlap a little in the middle but at one extreme is total autocratic control – dictatorship – and at the other anarchy by which I mean absence of any cohesive principle such as  common standard or purpose and the lack of any ‘connection’ between individuals which puts it beyond any form of decentralisation and into simple chaos. Decentralisation is not about a complete lack of order or organisation, more about absence of power and control over individuals by a group of people…

Reinventing the World – Part 1 The Story So Far – How did we get to where we are now? From the last two articles you’ll probably have guessed I might be talking about the phenomena of centralisation and decentralisation, and you’ve probably also guessed I’m a proponent of the latter. Many people are talking of decentralisation as something new. In fact its exactly the opposite, Decentralisation is the way things were for millennia but I’m not proposing we go back to the Middle Ages and beyond. Back then, and up until now, it has always seemed centralisation, putting things…

The Business Paradigm What is ‘business’ really all about and why has it gone ‘wrong’? ‘Business’ is a term which has many people confused. There are many different ideas about what a business actually IS, what it does and how it operates. The problem arises because there are so many different forms and functions of ‘business’. They range from ‘micro’ one person operations to multi-billion global corporations employing many thousands of people. The media and ‘popular culture’ tend to lump these all together under the one heading – ‘business’. But there are businesses who employ people and those who don’t,…

The Enemy of Change? What is it holding us back from incremental and significant change in our society? It’s about time we stopped expecting our elected and unelected politicians to be able to do, fix, or change anything. Having been one, albeit at a low level and not connected with any particular faction or party, I know how difficult it is to make things happen or stop anything happening. You see, we don’t live in a democracy. We may use  some form of democracy to elect our representatives but to whom are they ‘representing’ us? Originally it was to ‘the…

Are We Measuring the Wrong Things? And Are We Measuring All We Need? To paraphrase my friend Peter Thomson ‘every action has a corresponding measurement’, Indeed every action we take should be measured – even to the extent without  measuring it’s not worth taking the action. You see unless we measure what we do then we have no idea how effective it is in achieving the result we are looking for. But there is an assumption here which is about what exactly it is which needs to be measured as there are many aspects or options in measurement. As a…