First off – a little bit about me.
I’m Willie Nicol. I’ve done a degree at university, spent thirty one years as a police officer and then been a stressed out businessman for a number of years. I’m now a life coach, NLP practitioner and hypnotherapist ……. Bit of a change, right?!
Married, divorced and remarried; I’ve no children of my own (although I do now have a lovely stepdaughter who I absolutely think of as mine). We now live happily in Loans, near Troon in Ayrshire, Scotland.
I’ve experienced a lot of the ups and downs and joy and tears (and much more besides) that life can send our way. And I’m still here.
And, being a man of a certain age (and also as a product of my upbringing), when faced with these downs or tears, or any of the other problems life throws at us, I “just got on with it”.
I “coped”, I “managed” and I “got through”. And I never thought about asking for help to do so – because you didn’t, did you?
Getting through everything by yourself was a sign of strength and asking for help was a sign of weakness. Isn’t that how it works?
One of the biggest “knocks” in my life occurred over three years ago when I was suddenly and unexpectedly made redundant. With my future retirement plans in tatters, the “usual” emotions took over. I went through them all – stress, fear, worry, anger – you name it.
However, also around about this time, I attended a life coaching training course which I’d been booked on by my wife months earlier. Little did I know at the time that it would be the first of many courses including NLP and Hypnotherapy. During this first life coaching training course I had a “lightbulb moment” when I realised something I’d “forgotten” – that I was in control of my life and my future.
I also “remembered” that worrying or stressing about a problem doesn’t solve anything.
But how often do we all do just exactly that? We forget that we control our own lives and then ‘compound’ the effects of our problems by worrying or stressing about them.
This sounds so obvious that it’s almost an insult to our intelligence. But I do believe we can all forget not to worry or stress about things. I did!