A little bit of background

I help people change their lives.  To be honest I’ve always felt the desire to help people, and when I began to get results using these methods on myself, it never crossed my mind to work with others.  I never set out to be a therapist of Life Coach or Trainer – I was going to be a journalist.  But once you know how to change a food addiction, and your mate’s sister sitting next to you at dinner confides in you that she’s hooked on pizza, why wouldn’t you help?

That was always my core drive, and still is.  To help people.  Now I’m not a complete altruist, because it’s my business and I expect to be paid.  But that was my passion – Maybe you’ve seen “Star Wars”, when Obi Wan Kenobi told the Imperial Storm troopers “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” and they let them pass, instantly changing their minds.  “Wouldn’t it be really cool to be able to do that!” I thought.  I want someone to come to me with a problem like “I’m comfort eating cos I’m depressed”, and with a wave of my hand I tell them “Stop it!” and they stopped.  That would be magic!  Real magic.

My own family health record was atrocious.  My Mum had high blood pressure and would later develop all sorts of weird and wonderful ailments, many of them rooted in fear and psychosomatic illness – what the dictionary defines as a physical disease that is thought to be caused, or made worse, by mental factors.  Even my brother had hospital treatment when he was very young.

See, we grew up in a small cottage in the middle of nowhere, with dogs in the house, mice in the garden and my Dad’s racing pigeon lofts at the bottom of the garden.  We didn’t get out of bed until the coal fire was lit and the water was warm enough to wash with.  There was asbestos in the roof tiles and house dust that looked like tumbleweeds.  My mates at school would be running round in short sleeved shirts and I’d be dressed like a spaceman I had so many layers on – and guess who caught the cold!  No surprise that I got ill at least twice a year, especially in November.

Funnily enough, my Dad used to refer to it as “Black November”.  He told me that in his lifetime November was always cold and dark and wet, and he’d get ill every November.  And he installed that into me as well.  He’d developed testicular Cancer and as a kid I remember him going for radiation therapy.  He’d beaten it, but later that would play on my mind, especially when my brother got ill.  My Dad also had a hard time breathing – years of working with homing pigeons had given him a condition called “pigeon lung”.  Cruel that his bobby actually harmed his health.

My earliest memory is waking up in Strathclyde hospital with pneumonia, aged 4.  I’m told I had been left outside in a pram and got sick.  I would catch pneumonia again in 1986 only six weeks into a new job. Another Christmas in hospital.  Somewhere in between I was told I had an allergy to house dust, so they took me into hospital and cut open one of my nostrils to make it wider.  How the **** does that work?