Tag: Inner critic

Lewis Capaldi showed that mental health issues can and do affect anyone

Last Saturday, I witnessed one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen. I sat down to watch Lewis Capaldi deliver yet another amazing Pyramid Stage performance at Glastonbury. He knocked it out of the park during his previous appearance at the festival and I fully expected him to do that again. Sadly, that wasn’t …

Why I perform better when I’m up against the clock – time on my hands isn’t good for me

This is a classic example of a problem I have that I believe should be easy to resolve though the reality is quite different. It’s an issue which dates to my secondary school days (a period when I completed something like 6 or 7 English essays in the week before my GCSE deadline, rather than …

Get up and start again

I’ve lost my way with the blog over recent months. Since starting in May 2019, I averaged close to a new post each week for the first two years. However, since August 2021, I’ve written just 25 posts (including this one) – an average of one per fortnight. It is easy to come up with …

What would happen if you looked at your story and wrote it from another person’s point of view?

I recently watched a snippet of a TED talk which really hit home. The talk is titled How Changing Your Story Can Change Your Life, by Lori Gottlieb. The general theme is that what we tell ourselves shapes how we live our lives – Gottlieb summarises this by saying “The way we narrate our lives …

Don’t ever say you’re not good enough

I’ve made a last-minute change to the theme of this week’s blog. Last night, we had a long overdue catch-up with some good friends. At one point, they were asking their son to perform a couple of magic tricks he has been working on lately, though he was reluctant to do so, saying he didn’t …

Me? A procrastinator? I’ll prove you wrong someday. Just you wait and see.

As referred to in last week’s blog, a post on good old procrastination. My number 1 enemy. When thinking about what I need to include in this post, I looked up some definitions of the word and found the following: Cambridge Dictionary: To keep delaying something that must be done, often because it is unpleasant …

The good outweighs the bad more often than not

A couple of weeks ago, Lux Bay played our first gig in 22 months. We’d been practicing for a couple of months beforehand, revisiting every song in our sets to ensure everything would be perfect. Not for us a nice easy lead back into the world of gigging, such as a relatively stress-free pub gig. …

Please don’t become a slave to the scales – a weight-loss update

I’ve written previously about my relationship with food and a need to lose weight, primarily in the posts Why my relationship with food is the most complex in my life and needs to change (Feb 2021 – link here), Using food & alcohol as a comfort blanket (Jul 2019 – link here), Time to change …

Please don’t use the phrase ‘It may be a stupid question but…’. You really don’t need to.

I try not to use the word ‘hate’ too often but it is warranted every now and again. With that in mind, I really do hate the phrase ‘It may be a stupid question but…’. This is despite me having uttered these words numerous times in the past, both in personal and work life, though …

6 ways to build your confidence

If I find articles or images I like, I tend to share them on an ad-hoc basis via the YYCDI Facebook page. I rarely copy the text from articles directly into blog posts, though every now and again I’ll find something that resonates to such a degree with me, I just have to include the …