The behaviour of normal people is rarely appropriate. How could it be! Because normal behaviour is generated automatically – you don’t have to think about it, you just react – by your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind is highly effective at enabling you react – it is this ability that has got us so far as the ‘superior’ species. But, as I said, normal behaviour is rarely appropriate – because that same subconscious mind is permanently focused in the past – your childhood years – and it uses this past ‘stored knowledge’ to dictate your current automatic behaviour. With information that is so far out of date being used to dictate your behaviour, how could today’s behaviour be appropriate to what is actually happening now?

Worried about money, anxiety about job security, worried about children, fearful of personal security, obsessed by feelings of inadequacy – such are the things that entertain the normal mind. Sadly, psychology confirms time and time again that the normal mind is plagued with negative thought. This negativity is formed in the subconscious – that part of your mind that was programmed with this form of negative thinking during our childhood years – and is nurtured by the ubiquity of bad news, negative comment and the horror stories on which the media thrives. We are surrounded – from within and without – by the negative.

It’s bizarre. I know plenty of people who have told me that they do not know how to how to relax. One client told me that he feels guilty sitting doing nothing on a Saturday – he feels obliged to fly around the house and garden determined to find something to occupy him. Another client recently revealed that, whilst Saturday morning is his golf morning, and although he actually goes out for his eighteen holes, he doesn’t really play! He can’t – his mind is wandering back to all that happened during the week or what’s going to happen the following week. He’s out on the course but, not only is he not relaxed, he’s not even all there! Even better, a friend who doesn’t have a care in the world – great job that he’s really on top of, great personal life, great everything, told me that when he plays golf he cannot prevent himself feeling guilty – feeling that he should be in the office or at home!