Transforming the Impossible

Just a couple of weeks ago I was again invited to talk on BBC Radio. This time the subject was phobias. With the warm and spontaneous Mollie Green hosting the morning show, I was introduced to a lovely young news reporter called Louisa Lewis*.

With thousands of people listening, Louisa told us of her terrible fear, one that she had experienced for as long as she could remember.

Eyes welling up, and visibly upset, she bravely spoke of her awful, incapacitating phobia. It was one she had experienced for as long as she could remember. Louisa was terrified of stickers.

Before you laugh, consider this - who is not in some way or another afraid of something? Fear is fear. It does not need to be rational in order for us to feel it.

For Louisa, buying fruit, for example, was an absolute nightmare because so much produce came with a sticker on it. Going to a concert was a major ordeal since staff so often tried to stick a sticker on her as she entered. Stickers appeared to be everywhere from shops and concerts to the walls of the BBC where she worked!

Courageously, Louisa told us how, whenever she encountered a sticker, her heart would pound, nausea rising within, as an almost overwhelming fear gripped her, telling her to flee just as fast as her legs could carry her.

She could not even eat apple pie in a restaurant for fear that the apples used might once have touched stickers or had stickers on them!

You see, since Louisa was three years old, her mind had accepted the belief that she could not handle stickers of any kind, and from that moment on this belief had become part and parcel of the life she was forced to live.

She told herself that she could not, her subconscious mind had accepted this belief, and so this belief automatically became her reality.

Happily, Louisa accompanied me back to my office following the show, and with advanced hypnotherapy, we completely removed her terrible, incapacitating fear. She returned to the BBC absolutely beaming, an apple sticker stuck proudly and mischievously to her forehead. She is free to live her life without that fear now. She is free now to be her wonderful self.

Though Louisa's fear of stickers was somewhat rare, her case is far from unique.

So many of us have told ourselves that there are things we simply cannot do. So many of us settle for and live lives full of upset or fear, lives in which the possible feels impossible.

Pause for just a moment and ask yourself a simple question - What have you told yourself that you cannot do?

Whatever it is, it is not true: If it is humanly possible then you can do it. You can change your life!

Just what is necessary in order to transform the impossible into the possible? Well, all it takes is a change in your thinking. Every single doubt you have is kept alive by your own thoughts. And you were not born to be the victim of your own - or of anyone else's - thoughts or beliefs.

Yes, setting yourself free takes effort. If Louisa had not made the effort to enter into hypnotherapy then she would not have changed and her awful fear would have remained her reality.

Achievement takes effort, taking that first step isn't always easy, yet neither is poverty, or fear, or misery, or feeling terrible about yourself.

The truth is that you already have all that you need to change. It's right there inside you. It's not just there in some of us - it's there in each and every single one of us. And it's there in abundance.

Those positive opportunities really are there, they are already in your life, and they can overpower any limitations.

This is your life and there truly is no need to waste it.

Look deeply, something inside you already knows that it's possible.

It's up to you now to take that first step.

" Impossible is not a fact. It is an opinion. "
Muhammad Ali