Sergeant Major’s, Maccy D’s and a nice bowl of fruit.

If how I’ve felt for the last three days is any guide to the amount of tox that’s being released by this diet then I should be feeling on top of the world by Wednesday. Right now, I’m just hoping that the headaches, nausea and tiredness will be worth it.

I don’t do these detox diets often, partly because I don’t like choosing to feel really manky the next day but mostly because by the time I need one, I can’t be bothered with the hassle and rethink of all the auto-recipes I use. Fortunately I have Gill, who came to the rescue both for me and her as she took an executive decision, to which she is legally entitled what with being on the board of Burkinshaw Consulting Limited, (the company that Tony Burkinshaw Cognitive Hypnotherapy trades under), and after extensive research judging by the number of laptop hours she invested in the venture, she laid it on the line as to which particular detox we would pursue.

This one majors on juicing, although we do have alternatives of soup or brown rice and steamed vegetables. For a treat. Obviously.

I’ve never really got my head around the benefits of juicing. I absolutely get it that the juices of raw vegetables and fruit, particularly of the organic variety, are full of vitamins and enzymes together with a shed load of that catch word of dietitians the world over ‘nutrients’. These are good for the body because our evolutionary path was very much via the hunter-gatherer root, (if you’ll pardon the phonological ambiguity), and we evolved with raw fruit and vegetables as one of our main sources of energy, vitamins, minerals, (it’s always good to have a smidgen of dirt knocking about on your food – that’s where a lot of the minerals are, after all). At the end of the day, we function better eating the food we were designed to eat.

This makes sense. Unlike MacDonald’s and its ilk, (a sort of miniature Elk, I’m told), who firmly believe that we need a large dose of manufactured foodstuffs carefully designed to keep us going or, more likely, coming back for more depending on your point of view. Not that I’m averse to the odd Maccy D’s every now and then, I don’t want to get all evangelical about this. This is a personal detox after all, not one that I have any intention of recruiting you to.

So why the hell am I putting you through all of this dietary nonsense? Basically its this.

I was surprised by the degree of feeling proper crap that has come about as a consequence of this round of detox, together with a minor sideline about juicing which I have yet to some back and finish off. Think of it as a looped metaphor. It will all come together in the  end. I hope. I haven’t planned this particular post out, so I’m not entirely certain that I’ll succeed. Let me know how it goes.

Meanwhile back to the future, (good idea, pity they had to go through three evolutions to get to make the one they most wanted to, although I suspect there’d have been a good deal more dust and grime than the film seemed to think was apt for the wild and the west). Anyway. You’ll probably have noticed that one of the themes running through my few posts on this blog is that there is such a thing as the mind-body connection. You know, whereby what you thinks affects how you feel and how you feel affects how your body responds and how your body responds affects your health, which then goes and affects every damn thing you’ve just read through and sets up one or more of those vicious circles, although why they’re vicious and not just negative feedback loops is probably all down to marketing and advertising.

Mostly, however, I’ve focussed on how past experience affects stress, anxiety, fertility and how we hold pain, finding it almost impossible to let these go without someone showing us the way.

I’ve not talked much about how constant pressure from the world affects your general state of health whilst you’re still coping, albeit you may not be particularly at peace with the world or revelling in unbridled happiness. It’s a bit like the situation Jonathan Miller referred to way back in the 70′s when he talked about the idea that becoming ill was a tactical choice we make at the point we find we can no longer function. Think about it. If you have a cold, you tend to go to work, look after the family, and generally function normally other than a tendency to moan a lot or act like a true martyr not complaining at all whilst making sure that everybody knows that you’re not complaining at all. You know the type. I’m not letting on which one I am.

It gets different if the initial cold turns out to be ‘flu by which I mean actual influenza and not just that your cold is far worse than everyone else’s. I’m talking about temperature spikes, the shivers, hallucination, chronic muscle ache, migraine style headaches, you can’t see properly and it’s pretty much impossible to move let alone think. That sort of ‘flu.

There comes a point in the progress of wellness to ‘flu where you’ve been struggling on, forcing yourself to function way beyond where it was sensible to stop because you don’t want to let anyone down. And then, despite your best efforts, you can’t make it in to work, (always assuming that you thought it was worth making an effort in the first place). You decide that you can’t carry on. And what happens? Your mindset changes from being unwell to being ill. You take yourself off to bed and can’t get out of it for three days.

You went from hero to zero in 60 seconds. This is what Jonathan Miller was referring to when he said becoming ill was a choice. He absolutely didn’t mean that we choose to bring illness on ourselves, he meant that there is a point beyond which each individual tallies up the pros & cons of forcing yourself forwards and once that reaches a sufficiently negative tally, (which is different for every person and situation), you make a choice to down tools and enter a self-protection mode of being. You shut down as much as possible so your body can recover and recuperate. You move from being unwell but functioning normally, to being ill.

This is why some people can ‘soldier on’ (where do you think that phrase came from – there are way more important things on your mind than being ill when life or death threatens, including having to face down a drill-sergeant bellowing in your ear to stop being a whatever it is he’s telling you to stop being and which is way too impolite for this post), and others can’t. (Back track, it does read correctly, honest). It all depends on you personal tally and your personal situation both external, (caring for children is a big driver to continue functioning), and internal, (your father despised weakness so your unconscious is locked into ‘we’ll show him’ and you’re never going to give in. Even though he died fifteen years ago).

It’s a fairly obvious changeover with illness or injury. At one moment you can carry on, at the next a switch flicks and you can’t. Decision made. The cons outweigh the pros. It may be an unconscious decision but it is a decision nonetheless. According to Jonathan.

Unfortunately, it’s more subtle with stressors of the mind. If the particular stressor is slow and insidious, you may not even notice just how much pressure you’ve been under. If the pain is ongoing and permanent, then even at a level most people could handle for an hour or so, after six moths and longer it gets tougher to function. It drags you down. Yet you may not have reached that point that your unconscious flips the recovery switch and shuts you down. Sometimes it just doesn’t notice how tough it’s got.

Enter again the mind-body connection. If you’ve been under prolonged stress, low-grade illness, long-term pain at a level which hasn’t stopped you functioning, you’ve never been dumped into recovery mode by your unconscious. So the mind-body connection link has been working in full reverse for some time, storing up the negative processes which have followed as a direct result of this long-term difficulty. Guess what one of the consequences is?

Your body doesn’t metabolise particularly well. You crave foods that give short-term relief because that’s the nearest thing you can get to looking after yourself. You slowly deplete your body of essential long-term micro-nutrients and don’t metabolise away the build up of waste. Toxins.

Enter the detox diet beloved of magazines whenever there’s a lack of other interesting articles to publish.

So I find myself on one of these diets.

Why oh why am I so surprised that there’s apparently so much crap to be flushed out? I really should have expected it. Without any detail, because sympathy is not the aim here, here’s a brief resume. Since 2005, we found out that we all had undiagnosed conditions which affected our ability to function, I’ve had two (minor) heart operations, both daughters were diagnosed with serious and permanent health conditions, I became redundant and set up a business and Gill had to leave work for health reasons. There is more but so what, you get the gist. This has all been low to medium, (and occasionally high), level stress. And it’s been going on in the open for 7 years and for many years before that when we weren’t even aware of it.

Most of the time I’ve been functioning ‘normally’, so that mind-body connection must have been building up a mass of wonderfully toxic crap in my system for years. No wonder it’s taking more than a couple of days of detox to flush it out. The worse the headaches are now, the better I’ll feel by the end.

See what I mean? If I wasn’t detoxing, I’d more than likely have taken to my bed feeling really ill and wondering what the hell I’d caught. On the other hand, maybe it’s got nothing to do with the diet and there’s a manic virus running riot in my system. Time will tell.

in the end, I suppose this post is really about those people who haven’t reached the point, mentally or physically, of having to down-tools because of their stress or health.  Sometimes the answer may be as simple, if unpleasant, as a detox. A change of lifestyle. Out with the old and in with the new.

Sometimes though, even that is too big a step to take. There simply isn’t enough left in the tank to consider it. It just doesn’t fit, doesn’t feel right. Yet you know something must be done. Over the years, toxic thought-habits and reality tunnels build up unnoticed and start to take over. Perhaps what’s really needed is a detox of the mind.

Guess who can help with that one? Feel free to get in touch if that sounds useful. One of the benefits of this particular blog is that it gives you viewpoints from several different schools of potential help. Mine happens to be Cognitive Hypnotherapy because that suits my skills and outlook on the world. There are others. Find the one that feels as though it might suit you. Help is out there.

And what of the missing juice loop? The part I don’t get is that juicing fresh fruits and vegetables leaves an awful lot of ‘waste’ behind. But isn’t this ‘waste’ that self-same fibre these self-same dietitians promote in their other, non-juicing, diet books. The stuff that gives fresh food it’s crunch?

Whatever happened to a salad and a nice bowl of fruit?

Juice that!
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013

This post was first published on Posts of Hypnotic Suggestion

 

 

Standing Fate on it’s Head

So there I was, complimenting a work colleague as you do, (or perhaps don’t depending on where you work I suppose), as part of the feedback I was giving and encouraging him to think about where he could use similar verbal communication techniques to maximum effect.

Obviously, in an effort to ensure that all relevant future-scuppering spirits were appropriately warded off by my apparent blasphemy at actually telling him he was good at something, (which he really was by the way), he spake unto me thusly: ‘Oh now you’re tempting fate! It’ll never go like that again’. He paused for a moment. ‘Mind you, if I pretend you never said it, maybe I’ll get away with it. Touch wood.’

Now I could ramble on here about the origins of wood touching and fate tempting but that’s not really the point. Habits are habits and depend an insanely large amount on cultural heritage. Being from the UK, my cultural heritage includes seeking safety from the vagaries of the eternal Fates by hugging trees, although these days that’s been diluted into finger tip contact most typically with dead trees which have been turned into furniture thereby saying little for the fate avoiding ability of the tree sprites and spirits of dead ancestors whose power we’re trying to evoke, seeing as the particular tree in question couldn’t. Avoid its fate, that is.

I’m not entirely certain how well touching wood travels in terms of its warding off meaning. It’s entirely possible that in some places touching wood carried other connotations entirely, given that getting wood doesn’t always entail stocking up your fireside fuel store. At this point I find the teenage boy in me smirking. Never mind. Maybe I’ll grow up one day.

I find myself wondering, (and as you already know, in Cog-Hyp Land, it’s good to wonder), why we are so bent on trying to avoid or control fate in whatever manner is appropriate to your heritage, although personally I draw the line at pretending my own head is the wooden object in question unlike some I know. It’s one of the relatively few things which really bug me. Trust me. It’s not endearing. Your head is not made of wood. Please cease and desist. I know the confidence leaching power of self-deprecation even when it’s supposedly humorous.  (I apologise if I seem to be talking about you. I really ought to find out why it bugs me. It could be quite enlightening. Maybe I should get some therapy).

What’s actually going on, now that I’ve stepped off the mini soap-box, is a couple of making-sense-of-the-world tactics. We humans love patterns, event sequences which make sense of our lives. Cause and effect. Complex equivalence. Our brains are designed to seek them out. Without them we’d be lost. Even when they don’t exist we see them. They’re everywhere. If you’re late for work, its red lights and traffic-jams tail-backs all the way; if you take a chance on the weather, it’s sure to rain; I’m British, I have to talk about the weather; successful people are always lucky; bad things always come in threes; I always find a parking space, even though I’ve repeatedly tempted fate by telling you.

Some are so deeply ingrained that they’ve become folklore. Broken mirrors, black cats, Friday 13th. They all help us make sense of the purely random. They help us feels as though we can predict the future. And here’s the strange thing. They’re almost always negative. A reason for something to go wrong. Why is that? Weird isn’t it? Why haven’t we developed a folklore for making everything go right?

Well there are potentially loads of future posts wrapped up in that one so suffice it to say that for now, I’ll go along with the notion that from an evolutionary point of view, most of us are better off if we can be in control when things go wrong. If you feel prepared for the worst, because lets face it according to old wives tales most everything you do or say could herald some negative potential, then you are more likely to survive and pass those genes on to the next generation. If you’re only ever prepared for the good times then you’ll die at the first sign of frost, or the appearance those not-so-cuddly toothed beasties of yore.

And in this light perhaps it makes some sense. If we seek out patterns, cause and effect sequences, then even if a lot of them are red herrings and totally unreal, some of them will turn out to be absolutely for real.

It’s far better to take avoiding action many times for things that turn out to be irrelevant and totally uncontrollable, (if you were going to live or die, you’d have done so anyway, whatever you did), so that you actually do take avoiding action for the one thing that could be controlled. In this one vital case, you live. Onwards with those genes.

Interestingly, our protagonistic chappie at the beginning of this post was covering both cheeks so-to-speak, so that whatever happened he would prove himself right all along. If he tried his smooth-talking verbals out and it all went wrong then of course that was entirely my fault for tempting fate, wasn’t it?

But if he tried it and it did work, well hey, he’d touched-wood hadn’t he? (Stop smirking). So of course it was going to work!

In a way, this double-control tactic actually let’s him try the techniques out again without taking any personal responsibility for its success or failure. If it works it’s all down to calling in the tree spirits and if it fails it was all my fault. And therein lies the rub, to coin that somewhat Elizabethan phraseology once more.

Whilst evolution gave us a cognitive ability which ensures we seek out patterns to over-sensitise us to taking avoiding action in order to ensure that the one time we really need to we actually do, it has also dropped us neatly into our relatively secure, (for most of us with access to WordPress blog-posts anyway), present with the propensity to see doom laden options all around us. Maybe this is why newspapers are so much more interesting when they’re full of bad news. Maybe this is why governments somehow ensure that whilst there is always a fundamental threat to our way of life, they somehow seem to be able to ration them out to having only one enemy at a time. Maybe this is why most of us feel as though the world is happening to us. It absolves us of responsibility for what goes on, for how we decide to deal with our lives. It quite simply isn’t my fault. It’s nothing to do with me.

External Locus of Control.

For most of us, if we’re stuck in a job we don’t like, we feel we have to keep it because let’s face it, we need the money. If your partner does that weird thing they do of ‘looking at you in a funny way’ it can ruin your day, make you angry, insecure, worried. You walk into a room and people stop talking and look at you, you know they’ve been talking about you. If you’re ill, it’s up to the medical profession to fix you except they can’t because you’ve got a chronic illness which just isn’t going to go away. The world decides how we feel, how we live our lives. It’s just not fair. Really.

As always, there’s another way. A paradigm shift if you will.

In a very real sense, (sense being a very appropriate word), the world is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. (Well Morpheus hasn’t said much for quite a few posts and needed to get in again). Emotions are the interpretation your body gives to the ebb and flow of multi-peptides slooshing their fundamental communication between every single cell you own, each letting all the others know what’s going on. It’s how your entire body knows whether it’s living in a healthy, growing, secure environment or is hunkered down in protection, focussed on getting past the next threat that’s on its way. Each and every cell reacts to the environment it’s living in and behaves accordingly, letting every other cell know how it’s behaving so that they can do the same. Majority rules in this complex flow.

There are peptide receptors everywhere. Organs, intestines, brain, blood, muscle and bone. Each cell sends and receives. It’s thought to be the most fundamental communication method of living creatures. The brain controls most of the relatively recent electrical signalling but everything controls the peptide flow. Your body affects your brain because of how it feels. You know this to be true. You think differently when you’re angry or scared or sad or happy, hungry or full.

Here’s an interesting thing. How you think affects how you feel. If you try to deliberately relax, a conscious process, you can with practice or guidance not just relax your muscles but your mind and vice versa. You can take an anger or a fear and sooth it. Change the peptides flows within your body. With practice and guidance you can take some fundamental beliefs which have guided how you react to life and change them. These fundamental beliefs, if they’re negative, tend to keep your body in protection mode, vulnerable, constantly on the lookout for threats. And that pattern hunting skill will seek out everything it can to confirm that it’s view of the world is right. And trust me, it will find whatever proof it can.

If you could find a way of turning it on its head. Realising that if the world is how you interpret signals, then perhaps there’s a way of choosing what reaction is best for you and your future. Consider the options and discard the ones that work against you. Move from protection into growth. After all, most of our threats are emotional rather than life threatening. Give your mind and body a chance to reconnect and start deciding your own future rather than leaving it to the profound negativity that exists out there in digital communication land.

Even if there’s a real problem, an illness that won’t go away, perhaps there’s a way of deciding how you live with it. Defining your world by how well you are, rather than how ill. With practice and guidance, you can change which parts of your life get your full attention, so that by the end of the day looking back, the snapshot memories of your internal photo-album are mostly of the things that went your way and the ones of the times that were less than good are fewer and stored as faded images that carry less power.

Even chronic pain can respond. Pain is your body’s way of warning you that you are in danger. It’s a vital signal. It keeps you alive. Pain is your friend in a very real way. It keeps you alive.

Here’s a thing though. If you can let your body know that you know that it’s been in danger. If you can let your body know that the danger has either passed by or is under control, let it know that you know and that there’s nothing to be afraid of, then that pain begins to understand that it has done its vital job. It isn’t necessary to alert you because you already know. The signals can reduce, returning only when the situation changes and you need to be alerted again. It can take time because by its nature chronic pain has been around for some time. It may take time to set up something that convinces a process that’s become embedded that it has done its work. But it can be done.

Where does all this lead? Internal Locus of Control.

Whilst you can only influence your surroundings and what happens to you to a limited extent, you absolutely can decide every single time how you choose to react to it. In a very real way, no-one can make you angry, sad or happy. You really can choose. This doesn’t mean that you will live the rest of your life in some blissfully ignorant nirvana, rather sometimes it will be absolutely the best thing for you to decide to become angry or sad. Or happy.

The point is, you really can choose instead of letting everyone else determine how you feel about your life.

It might take some practice or guidance. It’s one of the key changes that I look for in clients. It’s a key indicator that the work is almost done. Once you take your life into your own hands, your destiny becomes your own. Once that happens, therapy has done its job.

Your world becomes exactly what you choose it to be.

If you like, I could show you how.

Choosing where to look
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013

Oxygen. Without exception.

I’ve come quite a long way over the last few years. In common with many, Life has lobbed one or two, (or three or four), entertaining situations my way of the kind that personal development gurus like to tell you are opportunities not barriers. You know. ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. ‘There’s no such thing as a problem, only opportunities’. Of course. Yeah.

The implication here is that if you fail to become stronger, grow, develop into a better person, then you have wasted your chance. You’ve ignored your one and only call from the Fates to fulfil your destiny in true Hollywood style. Bookshelves, lecture halls, theatres and sales team award ceremonies are filled with tales of those special people who did make the grade. Who rose higher than the brick walls that surrounded their life and became better people, richer in self fulfilment and bank balance. These are the ones who really did find their way to streak skywards above the mess and make sometimes truly astounding recoveries and reversals of fortune.

We’re not all like that. We can’t all astound. We can’t all take on life’s adversities and achieve the spectacular. Think it through. If we did, it wouldn’t be astounding, would it? It would cease to be a spectacle. It would simply be something normal and everyday. Unworthy of comment.

My point is, there’s a massive difference between achieving the absolutely stunning, sufficient to make a career out of telling others how to achieve their own version of that very same stunning in the ‘if I can do it anybody can’ style. It’s the whole unwritten premise of that industry. If everybody could do it, it wouldn’t be stunning and sure as hell wouldn’t sell books or fill theatres.

Almost everybody out there is, well, normal and whilst exceptional circumstances absolutely can produce exceptional people, that potentiality for exception must pre-exist. Most of the time, the exceptional person rises from the overall population of everybody else. After all, we only need one heroic leader at a time. Let’s face it, what happens when you get two heroic leaders? Conflict and war, that’s what.

So if like me you find yourself, not on the margins of life, feeling that exceptional potentiality throbbing away whilst it waits for its own particular spark to set an unexpected train of events into motion ending in a pre-destined fulfilment of itself but rather in the mix with the bulk of humanity, wending your own way through life’s trials and tribulations, what then is the more usual result of being thrown up against the rocks of life’s more mundane coastline?

Personal experience leads me to believe that there’s all manner of anxiety, stress and pain that can result. The modern world, ill designed as it is to fit our evolutionary profile, keeps battering our psyche with problems that our instinctive reactions can no longer solve. Emergency protection mode is not a healthy place to live and yet we keep being thrown into it because our instincts tell us to fight it or run away. Much of the time we would be better off pondering quietly over an issue and think up, devise or just create a suitable solution.

The difficulty is of course, that when instinct kicks in we are driven by emotion and hormones, not conscious thought process. High emotion makes us stupid, deliberately so, so that we do actually run or fight rather than cogitate a possible solution whilst disaster roars it’s blood-stained teeth in our general direction. Given that most of us are not living in life or death situations, (depending on personal geography or neighbourhood), we’d be much better off if we could just lower the emotional content of our automatic reactions.

Much of what ails us is based around behaviours learned whilst young enough not to know better and so long ago that we no longer question it’s validity. Here’s a few typical ones; It’s just how it is; Stress is just part of modern life; You mustn’t say no because you can’t be seen as weak; Pain doesn’t go away, it’s there for life; No matter how hard you try, you can’t get pregnant; It’s all going wrong, why doesn’t someone fix it; It’s just how it is; Don’t have a go at me, it’s not my fault.

It’s just how it is.

Isn’t it?

The thought that came and slapped me round the face this week was that through all the difficulties of the last few years, I’ve (usually) been the one best equipped to carry the load, although when I couldn’t, Gill stepped up and took over even though it cost her. (Thank you, by the way). So as in my opinion, I could carry the load, I did. And although I can’t put my finger on when it happened I was brought up in the big boys don’t cry tradition, so I manfully suppressed all emotional reaction to what was being lobbed at us and held everything together. With the benefit of hindsight, that was exactly the wrong thing to do. It’s like keeping the lid down tight on the pressure cooker and reacting to too much heat by strapping the safety valve firmly shut and wondering why it exploded.

Anyway, the thought that floated past me was this. I did it, not because I thought I was stronger or more heroic than everyone else but because everyone else around me was more important than me. So there I was, manfully (big boys don’t cry, remember) holding up everyone else, keeping the lid on until the explosion. And then what? I had to get held up until someone else fell down. At which point, I dragged myself back to my feet to hold them up etc. spinning one of those vicious circles around and around until we all got too dizzy to think. Until life lobbed something at us that I couldn’t fix by being stronger than everyone around me.

So my journey over the past few years has taught me to gradually let the pressure off and find out what it all looks like when it’s stabilised and everyone around was allowed to deal with their own issues in their own way. Yes, we all still helped each other. Provided support where and when it was and still is needed. But like saplings, unless you’re allowed to deal with the buffeting of life, you never develop your strength and have to remain supported your whole live.

There I was, sitting at the kitchen table in mid late-night conversation with Gill, realising that I was mistakenly giving importance to those I love by the time-honoured method of devaluing my own importance. Classic. Put yourself at risk because you don’t deserve help and you don’t want to let them down.

Here’s the deal. If you give value to others by devaluing yourself, you haven’t actually given them anything. They aren’t better off. You’re just worse off. It really is important to tackle life from a standpoint of strength, with a sense of your own well-being and self-worth. That way, whenever help is needed, you are more ready and able to stand up and be counted.

Of course, given that we’re evolutionarily ill-equipped for our current lives, very often the person who needs the help turns out to be you. One of the key developmental stages in any therapeutic advance is a move from a fundamental lack of self-worth, to a point where you truly value your own identity, embracing your right to have a seat at the table.

Along with that comes responsibility. A move away from an external locus of control, whereby life’s problems should be fixed by someone else because let’ face it, it’s not your fault. A move towards an internal locus of control which simply tells you that  whatever happens, however it happened, the responsibility for dealing with your life is entirely yours. Absolutely, you may need help. You may be offered or seek assistance. But the task falls to you.

You really can make it better, even if that turns out to be fixing things that can be fixed and learning to be content with the things that can’t, no matter how bad they might be.

And when you’ve leant that strength, that focussed source of being responsible for you, able and willing to make your own decisions, you’ll find that you’ve developed a centred power that enables you to help others reach their own place of certainty.

Selfish though it may seem at first, embrace that well-worn in-flight safety message: If you have to help someone put their oxygen mask on, make sure you have yours in place first.

After all, if you pass out from a lack of life’s oxygen, so will they. And then you’ve really let them down.

And if you find that you’re metaphorically gasping for air and struggling to get oxygen to those around you, Cognitive Hypnotherapy might just turn out to be the life-line you need. Just pull it down sharply and breathe normally.

Now that I’ve got my oxygen mask on, do you need help with yours?

_______________________________________________________

*This post originally appeared in Posts of Hypnotic Suggestion in April 2013

that’ll wake you up
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013

Related articles

• Standing Fate on its Head (postsofhypnoticsuggestion.wordpress.com)
• Locus of Control: Stop Making Excuses and Start Taking Responsibility (workplacepsychology.net)