In 1939, the New Yorker published a short story titled The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Written by James Thurber, the partially autobiographical story and the expanded novel that followed three years later introduced readers to a meek and unassuming man with a wild fantasy life.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story (film versions have starred Danny Kaye and Ben Stiller), you’ll find no spoilers here. But it’s enough to say that Walter has what might be best described as an incidental relationship with reality.

During rare lucid moments when reality does intrude on Walter’s overpowering fantasy life (he believes himself to be, among other things, a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon, and a louche killer), he is confronted by a world he doesn...

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Well, that escalated quickly, didn’t it? 

There we were, meandering gently towards the end of 2021 and looking forward to what we hoped would be a relatively normal year and before you know it we saw war in Ukraine, endured an economy in meltdown, said a tearful farewell to Her Maj and watched the UK change prime ministers more often than Imelda Marcos changes her shoes.

And that was just the big stuff. 

What we all need now is a bit of peace and quiet – time to reflect and recharge, a little oasis of calm in which to breathe, take stock and re-energise ourselves for a new year with new challenges and new opportunities.

Unfort...

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Andy Warhol once predicted that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Well, the future is now, and unfortunately – for all of us – that prophecy has now, to some extent, become a reality of regurgitated and unfiltered narcissism in which everyone has an opinion and we’re all entitled to it.  

Humans aren’t designed to be in contact with this many humans and we certainly aren’t designed to be exposed to all of their thoughts, all of the time.   

Self-help consumerism has exploded.   And like an unceasing episode of projectile vomiting...

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Over the last few weeks, it’s become more and more apparent to me that the real price of the cost-of-living crisis is our collective mental health.

I’m not here to pile on the misery – we all know it’s hell out there right now – but we all also need to understand that good mental health (or recovering from poor mental health) means acknowledging the problem and then dealing with it. 

The situation we’re all facing is bad and getting worse, so where exactly are we right now? 

I’ve often said that, as health crises go, the mental health crisis we face not just in the UK but globally dwarfs the Covid-19 pandemic by many multiples. It�...

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It seems sometimes as if the world has turned into a kind of global supermarket where the only thing you can buy are cheap promises.

Life has become so hideously competitive that wherever you turn there are 101 dubious offers designed to get your attention, each one promising more than the last, each one with about as much substance as fresh air.

It’s not just limited to the retail sector, it also swarms through business and life and leisure and love, and everything in between. And the noise is constant, whether you’re in the market to buy, or not.

We’re accosted at every turn by yet another not-to-be-missed change-your-life-in-an-instant deal. It�...

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On Monday I had the privilege of being asked to lead a session on mental health in the workplace for the TruMunity Unconference in London, a recruitment event for HR leaders and recruitment professionals with informality and learning at its heart.

When thinking about what to talk about, I kept coming back to the role business has to play in tackling the mental health crisis the UK faces.

A study into wellbeing in the workplace recently estimated that around 97 million work days are lost each year in the UK to mental health issues.

Imagine the impact of that figure for a moment. It equates to more than a quarter of a million years. And if you’re ...

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Over the years I have treated a great many people struggling with a variety of psychological issues. Some of the issues I treat are straightforward, some less so. But more often than not the root cause of the problems my clients face is one of the unholy trinity: love, money and work.

Years ago, as society began to understand the DNA of mental health, it was a commonly-held belief that debt caused depression. To an extent, that’s still the case. But there’s increasing evidence to show that the opposite is also true and that a significant life event like the loss of a job, chronic and debilitating poor health or the d...

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“But the root of all these evils is the love of money, and there are some who have desired it and have erred from the faith and have brought themselves many miseries.” – First epistle of the Apostle Paul to Timothy

I find that quote from the New Testament intriguing; not because it is a religious text – each to their own on that score – but because it seems to me to be a metaphor for the power that material wealth can have on our emotional wellbeing.

The words the faith, for example, could easily be interpreted as a sense of morality or of right and wrong. And the notion that the desire for, and acquisition of, wealth can bring misery seems to me to have more tha...

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Your relationship with money is one of the oldest relationships you will have in your lifetime, so it stands to good reason that your money beliefs may well be outdated.  In essence, many of our beliefs about money were formed in childhood before we even had any!

This is no problem if we were born into a household with a healthy relationship to money, but adult life can become a financial snake pit if you weren’t!

Many of our beliefs around money are inherited from our parents, or those in our immediate sphere during childhood. Our conscious, rational mind doesn’t develop until around the age of 9, up until this point our subconscious is in control. This means we are highly impressionable to all around us and we often take what is told to us and absorb it as the ‘truth’....

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Abundance is a big issue for many people and being friends money is important if we want to live a comfortable life. Money itself is neutral – sounds obvious but how many times do you get angry and frustrated money? the thoughts and beliefs we have about it that cause the problems, so much of the time we put ‘our stuff’ on money and then blame money for it. If you don’t feel subconsciously that you deserve it, you can end up throwing it away through overspending, or underearning through not charging enough for your services or by not valuing your time by continually giving it away for free. If you were brought up with toxic beliefs around money (such as ‘money is the root of all evil’) you may find this is especially true for you. One of the easiest ways to find out what your subconscious b...

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