Changeability Podcast: Manage Your Mind - Change Your Life

The Changeability Podcast past and future We celebrate 100 episodes as we take a look at the Changeability Podcast past and future. Here’s some of the top 3s from the past 99 episodes followed by a look at the next episode in the Changeability Podcast story.  Audience top 3 episodes The 3 favourite episodes of our audience to date. These are the shows with the highest number of downloads so far. The longer the episode’s been on iTunes or our BrilliantLivingHQ.com website or Stitcher or TuneIn the longer people have had to listen to it, so we would expect the older shows to have more downloads than newer ones and that’s reflected in these results. Third most popular episode - ‘What is Mind Management’ Episode 6 In episode 6 of the Changeability Podcast we were thinking about our strap line phrase – ‘Mind Management’. What is mind management and what’s in it for you? In episode 6 you found out about: Kathryn and Julian’s acting skills (you’ve been warned) How many thoughts you have in a day Why sports people l

“Habits are formed by the repetition of particular acts. They are strengthened by an increase in the number of repeated acts. Habits are also weakened or broken, and contrary habits are formed by the repetition of contrary acts.” ― Mortimer J. Adler Habits are an intrinsic part of who we are and how we function.  Habits are fundamental to how we think and behave, which makes them key to how we live our lives and make our decisions. The achievement of our goals and success are more the product of our daily habits than any one off transformative situation or action on our part. Habits are a key part of mind management because; your mind use habits like a shortcut or brain power saving device or mechanism if you manage your mind in a helpful way you can utilise the power of habits. Rather than viewing habits in a negative light as something we need to control and overcome, they become an empowering tool to enhance our lives, help us make changes and be happier. To do this we need to know which habits are goo

What are habits and why they matter Your habits are key to who you are and the change you want. Habits underpin what we do at Brilliant Living HQ.com and on the Changeability Podcast – mind management for your best life and business and how to make changes. Lasting change, i.e. achieving your goals – is not the result of a one off transformation but a product of daily habits. What do you want to achieve? What do you want to change?  Whatever it is, getting it is the result of your habits.  Habits play a role in what you look and feel like, in your success and relationships. All of which makes it slightly surprising we’ve got to episode 98 of the Changeability Podcast before dedicating and episode to habits – but here we are and this is it. So what are habits? Habits are the things we do, but also and maybe as importantly, the way we think and what we believe.  They include the self-beliefs that influence what we do, our behaviour and the actions we take. A habit is the repeated thinking and behaviours that be

Healthy happy eating with The Merrymaker Sisters Kathryn and I first met Emma and Carla when we were attending a business entrepreneurs’ event in the Philippines. Meeting these two vivacious and fun loving entrepreneurs made a mark on both of us. Their joy of life was infectious, and we wanted to know more about them, their journey and what they did. Emma and Carla Papas, known as ‘The Merrymaker Sisters’ are real life sisters who went from being communication professionals to health and happiness advocates and health coaches! They're the founders of themerrymakersisters.com where they inspire hundreds of thousands of Merrymakers around the world with real food recipes and ways to find and follow your bliss! “If we hear ourselves say ‘we want this to happen’, we have to focus some energy on it.” - The Merrymaker Sisters So, what better than to invite them onto episode 97 of The Changeability Podcast laugh and chat healthy happy eating with The Merrymaker Sisters. Packed into this week’s Changeability Podcas

Change your brain, revitalise your body – really? Sound too good to be true? We’ve been talking over the last few weeks about how to use the power of your brain to reach your ideal body weight, look younger and boost your energy. And let’s face it, who couldn’t do with a bit of that! As part of our wellness and wellbeing series we’ve explored Dr Daniel Amen’s book, Change your Brain, Change your Body, including 10 brain principles for the body you want and four ways to use your brain to change your weight. Today we conclude our exploration in change your brain, revitalise your body. How your brain can help beautify your body and improve your overall health and well-being. Dr Amen puts forward 6 solutions:  1 - The Skin solution Your skin is directly tied to the health of your brain. People spend a lot of money on skin care products and more. It’s a huge multi-million pound business. From skin-care products to laser treatment, to the plastic surgeon, but Dr Amen argues these are only temporary fixes and the re

How to use your brain to change your weight This week we’ve gone from consuming 5 course dinners every night in a lovely hotel on holiday in Wales, to thinking about weight and the brain. It’s sweetly ironic and rather timely. As part of our mini series on health and wellbeing, this week we think about weight and if we can use our brains to help us lose weight. Today’s featured author certainly thinks so as Dr Daniel G. Amen devotes the second section of his book, Change your Brain, Change your Body, to the subject. Last week we looked at 10 brain principles for the body you’ve always wanted. Continuing with our exploration of the link between your brain and body and how having a healthy body and making healthy decisions all starts with your brain, we turn to the subject of weight. Weight is an aspect of our bodies that many of us want to do something about.  We might want to change our weight upwards or more commonly downwards, for our health and because we think it will make us feel better about ourselves.

10 brain principles for the body you want Is it possible to utilise the power of your brain, to reach your ideal body weight, to look younger and boost your energy? That’s the question we’re asking today. And it’s the bold claim Dr Daniel G Amen makes in his New York Times bestseller, Change your Brain, Change your Body - the subject of this week’s blog and Changeability Podcast.  What’s the idea behind Change your Brain, Change your Body? In his introduction, Dr Amen tells us “Fifty percent of the brain is dedicated to vision. How you look plays a large role in how you feel. To look and feel your best, you must first think about and optimize your brain.” Let’s unpick this a bit. We’re visually orientated, with our brain devoting half of its processing power to sight. Being visual creatures – how we look, or how we perceive we look, plays a large part in how we feel about ourselves and that can often determine our ultimate success. For our own underlying health – and not just for vanity sake – we should the

Nicole Keating is on a mission to live a life of Epic Wellness, and to inspire and help others in their quest for The Art of Epic Wellness – a life of physical, spiritual and emotional vitality. Nicole maintains: “If you treat your body as a temple, then your body is going to treat you with beautiful energy and epic vitality” And who doesn’t want more energy and vitality? We know we certainly do. Behind the concept of epic wellness is the belief you have the right to know what’s going into the temple that is your body, and the responsibility to share what you know with the people you love. “It’s all about becoming involved with your food”, Nicole tells us. And this carries on from ideas we explored on last week’s Changeability Podcast where we were talking about wellness and wellbeing. Nicole’s website, theartofepicwellness.com and her podcast of the same name seeks to do just that, to explore, uncover, question, unburden and uplevel your wellness journey. After all… “When you invest in clean food going

What the heck is wellbeing? Here at Brilliant Living HQ and our Changeability Podcast we’re all about helping you and us manage our minds to make changes and have more success and our best life and business.  As well as looking at mind management techniques and processes to do this, we thought it would be fun and hopefully helpful to look at some of the key areas of life that many of us want to do something about.  Earlier this year we did a series of podcasts and posts about relationships and today we start thinking about wellness and wellbeing. “Everything that brings us well being is achieved through allowing ourselves to flow with life and be in harmony. Pain happens, it is our attachment to the pain and our resistance to change that causes suffering.” Alaric Hutchinson Today is a beautiful day. It’s the first week of May and spring has sprung here in our little corner of England. The evenings are light and the days getting longer every day. The sunshine is making us feel better and it’s amazing the dif

A new measure of success How do you quantify success? What is it you actually measure? Should it be statistics, figures, numbers? Or how about the effort put in to achieving it? Maybe it could be a combination of these, rather like those school reports where you get a grade for achievement and a score for effort. Or should we more concerned with experiences rather than numbers? Statistics are certainly the easiest and most obvious way to measure success. With money wealth, income being one of most popular ways for people to measure their own or others’ success. But it’s all relative. What constitutes a measure of success in monetary terms fluctuates according to age, the circles you move in, geographical location and your time in history. Money can be measure in it’s own right or as an indication or measure of success. It’s not necessarily the money per se that’s important to measure, but it’s rather the way some people choose to quantify their success. The success is what drives them, not the money, but inco

6 ways to measure success Have you thought about what success looks like to you? If so, how do you measure your success?  Actually the first question is – do you need to to measure success? We say yes.   One, because when you measure your success it makes you think about it.  What is success and what does it mean to you? It makes you aware of what you want in life or business, rather than wandering aimlessly. Two, it gives you something to aim for, and we know that as humans we thrive and are generally happier and more fulfilled when we have a sense of purpose. Three, what gets measured gets done. It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.” ~ Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents So how do you measure success? That depends on the sort of success it is. Here’s 6 ways to measure success – or 6 different

What does success mean to you? We start every episode of the Changeability Podcast with the words ‘brought to you by Brilliant Living HQ .com’ because that’s our online home.  That’s where you find us, our products, the 89 podcast episodes we’ve published to date, and hundreds of blog posts.  But this week we asked you if you’re experiencing ‘brilliant living’. If you take the dictionary definitions of the two words and put them together it brilliant living means something like ‘living life in a way that is excellent, bright and marvelous, pursuing a lifestyle that feels very good to you.’ We define ‘brilliant living’ as living life on your own terms. Ok, so its not always 100% possible, but it is definitely more possible than most people think. Sure there are physical and social parameters, but we can push those boundaries and look at what are the real boundaries and which are those created by the cultural norms and social expectations we go along with. What brought all this on you might ask. Well this week

WHY do you need mind management? What do you want to change in your life? Do you want more or less of something or to learn a new skill or experience different things? Or do you want to change something about your relationships or body or work or finances? It doesn’t have to mean you hate your life or work now – but you just want it to be better in some way.   Yes, we all want changes but WHY do we need mind management to do it. ‘Life management begins with mind management. The quality of your life is influenced by the quality of your thoughts.’ Robin Sharma  Your marvellous mind Your brain is amazing and has enormous power. Its big job is to keep you alive and it does that by keeping you safe which tends to mean maintaining the status quo – because that’s what’s worked so far. This is fabulous for keeping you alive – but it’s not always so fabulous when you want to make changes – in other words you want to move away from the status quo in some way. It’s important to know that although you think you make yo

At a recent business event I had 30 seconds to introduce myself and what I did. This is the so-called elevator pitch and it’s not as easy as you might think.  Having seen how some people were struggling to get their description done in 5 minutes let alone 30 seconds it was suggested we use the quick little formula – I help …. To …. By….   I was the next one up so I sat there and said: “I help people make changes in their life or business by managing their minds”. It worked because everyone went ‘oooohhh’ and wanted to know what does that actually mean and how do you that. And it got me thinking that it's a long time since we've actually talked about what it is we actually do or rather the idea behind what we actually do. So today we're going to put that right because we’re going back to basics and thinking about what fundamentally underpins everything we talk about at Brilliant Living HQ.  It’s also the subject matter of my Changeability book and underpins the whole Changeability process and practice and Br

Last week we gave you the ultimate guide to recognising toxic people and relationships. Now it’s all very well recognising toxic people and the characteristic behaviours of these relationships, but it’s not much good if you can’t deal with them. So this week we thought we’d look at those emotionally draining vampires and the process of dealing with toxic relationships. “You let go of a toxic and unhealthy relationship not because you are weak, not because you no longer love the other person, but because you are strong enough to understand that there are times when two people will be a lot happier if they go separate ways than if they stay together.” Dealing with toxic relationships and people So how do you deal with toxic relationships, toxic people and their behaviour? By literally detoxifying! Or as the dictionary would define it: “a process or period of time in which one abstains from or rids the body of toxic or unhealthy substances.” And we like that definition of ‘detox’ for that is sort of what you

You’ve probably heard of the phrase toxic person, and are aware at least of the importance of not surrounding yourself with this type of person. Particularly, if you consider: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” ~ Jim Rohn And one of those five is either someone you’re living or work closely with and has a toxic personality.  So what is a toxic person? The dictionary definition of toxic is a poisonous substance with the synonyms: dangerous, unsafe, harmful, destructive and even malignant (with connotations of evil, or hateful). If we apply this to the term toxic person we might consider this to be a person who is dangerous, harmful or destructive to us as an individual. The Urban Dictionary gives a rather nice definition of a Toxic Person as being: “Used to describe a person who is tainted by a subconscious malevolence or psychosis that affects the lives of those who come into contact with them.” But we’d probably put it less strongly than subconscious malevolence or psy

The heady heights of a budding relationship can quickly fall into the treadmill of something more humdrum and yet it doesn’t have to be that way. So, what makes better relationships in both life and business? Well who better to ask than a relationship coach. Susie Miller, known internationally as The Better Relationship Coach is an Author, Speaker and Coach. She is dedicated to helping people create better relationships and is the bestselling author of Listen, Learn, Love: How to Dramatically Improve Your Relationships in 30 Days or Less! She teaches us that by being willing to listen, open to learn and therefore ready to love – truly, deeply and kindly – any and all relationships can be reignited beyond our imagination. Over the last few weeks of the Changeability Podcast we’ve been exploring the many facets of love and relationships:  In episode 80 – Celebrate Love, we took a light-hearted look at love in all its many forms in today’s world. Episode 81 – turned our attention to self-love. What is self-love

Love yourself if you want to be a happy, fulfilled, confident, effective person, able to give and receive love, have self-esteem and a good sense of your self-worth. But it’s one thing to understand this intellectually and quite another to really know and believe it. One of the best ways to accelerate a self-love habit is through using self-love rituals. Practicing self-love rituals is an easy enjoyable way to implant and build your self-love habit and behaviour until it becomes natural. Today we look at 11 self-love rituals to get you started, but first what’s so special about rituals? What are rituals and why are they so powerful? A ritual involves a series of actions, sometimes in a prescribed order – which are a type of behaviour regularly and invariably followed by someone – in this case you! Because that’s what we’re after isn’t it – a way of behaving you do regularly and invariably, habitually and consistently.  That’s why developing rituals is powerful, because rather than leaving it to randomness and

It’s all very well knowing we should love ourselves but how do we do it?  Find out how with these 10 ways to build the self-love habit. ‘To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.’ Oscar Wilde What a lovely quote from the unique and fantastically brilliant Oscar Wilde but what did you think when you read it? Did you think that’s a clever little quip, or it’s a bit over the top or fanciful? Maybe you think it’s narcissistic or you haven’t thought of loving yourself as a romance with yourself. Whatever thoughts came to mind are an indication of your view towards you and self-love. Self-love is an inner love and acceptance of who we are and how we are. Last week we talked about what self-love is and why we all need it, in our blog posts and on the Changeability Podcast (episode 81). We looked at 6 ways or clues that show us we’re not being loving towards our self.  We understand what self-love is and why it’s good for us, we’re looking out for those times we’re not being self-loving, but how do w

‘Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.’ William Shakespeare, Henry V Last week we were celebrating love and Valentines, which inevitably led to thoughts of romance and different types of love. But despite a lot of talk of love everywhere – from card shops to films to books and the media – we see evidence of a lack of love all around us.  That lack of love is not only evident in the terrible things we hear on the news, but also in something closer to home.  And that’s the love we have for ourselves – or self-love. What is self-love? What are we talking about when we talk about self-love or loving yourself? A good place to start is by saying what it’s not. It’s not about being selfish or self-centred – even though it’s easy to jump to this conclusion when we talk about loving ourselves. And it’s not about showing off or having an over-inflated ego or sense of self. Nor is self-love about being narcissistic. In fact narcissism is the opposite of self-love because we’re seeking approval