The Creativity Track Record

My own personal journey outside of work highlights and showcases my creativity and how I’ve used it as a valuable skill in my personal life alongside my curiosity and compassion both for myself and others. I’ve helped myself many times to overcome my own obstacles by asking myself these same 3 questions that I’ve been using for the last 25 years to help hundreds of other people overcome theirs:

• Q1: What is it that I really want to achieve (results)?
• Q2: What is it that’s really stopping me (obstacles both internal and external)?
• Q3: What are all the options available to me (curiosity)?

And like most people, I’ve been changed by trauma and affected by significant difficulties and obstacles many times in my own life and in the lives of people I love. I’ve chosen just three of these as examples below to highlight how I developed and used my creativity alongside my curiosity and compassion to help overcome them.

Three examples highlighting how I developed and used my creativity in my personal life

Example #1: I used my creativity alongside my curiosity and compassion many times by asking myself the 3 questions to help my Dad to overcome obstacles he faced with his health later in his life.

One of these times was when he had surgery on his neck that had been declared successful. And then he suddenly and unexpectedly the following day had a relapse that left him bedbound and unable to walk and talk properly. The medical staff didn’t know what had happened and so needed to do further tests. So in the meantime my husband and I cancelled our week’s holiday and I took it upon myself to ask my Dad if he wanted me to see if I could get him back to talking properly as it was clear that he had experienced a post-surgery traumatic event of some kind. My Dad also knew that I’d helped a family member overcome her selective mutism which was the result of a traumatic experience. Most important was that my Dad trusted me to do the right thing by him.

And so my Dad and I got the agreement of the hospital consultant and staff and I went in every day and spent hours with my Dad using every potentially useful therapeutic tool in my toolkit to apply the principles and practices of neuroplasticity to slowly but surely get his speech back.

To say that I was relieved was an understatement because my Dad hated thinking he was being a burden. And it meant that because he could now talk he could then be discharged from hospital and get his physiotherapy done at home so that he could get walking properly again.

The next time my Dad was in hospital (it was for an infection this time) he lost his ability to distinguish between the external world (reality) and his internal world of thoughts and imagination. I had to retrain him using therapeutic neuroplasticity so that he got it back as he was hallucinating big rats at the bottom of his bed. This meant that he then could distinguish between the external world (real rats) and his internal thoughts (imagined rats) and because he understood what had happened he stopped being traumatised by his hallucinations. I had to do this to rescue my Dad from hospital when he’d been reported to be assessed by a psychiatrist for hallucinating these big rats. Lucky for my Dad that I could fix him myself and get him assessed as having capacity to make the decision to be discharged.

I was happy to have been able to ask myself the 3 questions to help my Dad using my creativity and applying it alongside my curiosity and compassion in this unique situation that neither my Dad nor I had experienced before. He was happy and relieved as well!

PS Since this event a groundbreaking study has finally cracked the ‘neural code’ behind visual imagination. By recording the electrical activity of individual neurons in patients with implanted electrodes, researchers discovered that imagining an object activates the exact same brain cells used to see it. This shared biological mechanism explains why our mental internal theatre feels so real and it provides us with new science to explain why we use the different therapies for successfully treating disorders like PTSD and OCD, where intrusive, vivid imagery can become a source of distress.

Example #2: This is my own personal journey from being a lifelong yo-yo dieter to being permanently slim since New Years Day 2011 after losing 2 stone in 2 months after discovering a piece of science in an article in The Sunday Times magazine on Sunday November 7th 2010 that was new to me.

This piece of science made me really curious and ask myself the question “is this a new option that’s now available to me to help me to stop yo-yo dieting and become permanently slim?”. I had no idea if it would work. But I asked myself “what if I used my creativity to apply The 3M Method™ together with this new piece of science to my yo-yo dieting habit to test if it would work?”. So that's what I did.

First, I changed my mindset and creatively thought of myself as being an apprentice at becoming permanently slim (because I’d never been able to do it before). But I wanted to be able to master it. I was definitely motivated! And so I took the second step to apply The 3M Method™ together with this new piece of science and started the following day, on the Monday. And whilst it was really uncomfortable and really difficult for me at first trying to change a lifelong habit, by using my natural curiosity and developing compassion for myself every single day, I creatively integrated this new piece of science into The 3M Method™ to create for myself The 3M Method™ to ‘Get Slim’. It worked slowly but surely even though some days it felt like it wasn’t. Which meant that I eventually lost 2 stone in 2 months.

But I still didn’t have the whole answer. Because I still didn’t know how to ‘Stay Slim’. I’d lost weight before and then after the end of the weight loss part of the diet I’d just pile the weight back on and more. Which is the reason why I’d been a lifelong yo-yo dieter ever since I was a teenager. Yo-yo'ing between being overweight, obese and normal weight. So I kept following The 3M Method™ to ‘Get Slim’ making a few critical adjustments as I went along to stop all the weight from piling back on. And so when this worked and kept on working I realised that I’d inadvertently created The 3M Method™ to ‘Stay Slim’. And I’ve been following it ever since New Years Day 2011, enabling me to move past the emotional, physical and psychological barriers that had stopped me from getting slim and staying slim all of my adult life. And to be able to move forward in my life with a normal BMI and HbA1c that I've had ever since.

Example #3: The time in my personal life that I needed and valued my creativity the most alongside my curiosity and compassion was when I was diagnosed with idiopathic tinnitus and was told that there was no cure, that I’d just have to learn to live with this life-changing condition for the rest of my life. Which made me feel helpless and hopeless. Because it affected every corner of my life. And stopped me from doing the things that I most enjoyed.

This took me on a personal 8-year journey from being a severely depressed tinnitus sufferer to being a very relieved tinnitus survivor. I do have to say that this was by far and away the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Because I didn’t know when I started that it would become an 8-year journey. A journey that took me from feeling helpless and hopeless and worthless, after being abandoned by the medical world and facing the prospect of being a lifelong tinnitus sufferer, to being a hopeful tinnitus survivor. And this was only made possible because I had the creativity, curiosity and compassion to help myself when medical professionals couldn’t.

However in the process, having tinnitus destroyed my ability to sleep and to focus and to read for pleasure and leisure. Which meant that it affected every part of my life and stopped me from doing many of the things that I most enjoyed. Like sitting quietly for hours reading the weekend newspapers. Like walking for hours in the peace and quiet of the countryside listening to nature. And so as well as helping myself to discover how to habituate to my tinnitus I had to research and discover how to relearn how to sleep and to focus and to read for pleasure and leisure.

And this meant working with two of my professional trauma therapist colleagues to get relief and recover from all traces of my childhood and adulthood emotional, psychological and physical trauma to make sure this wasn’t the cause of my tinnitus or stopping me from learning how to habituate to my tinnitus.

And it meant me learning brand new science and implementing new science-backed protocols in my daily life. Thankfully this all means that I’m now back to 95% of my pre-tinnitus sleep quality and quantity. And because of my changed mindset and motivation, and my new daily practices, my focus is probably better than my pre-tinnitus focus quality and quantity. All of which means that I can now read for pleasure and leisure once more. I took sleep and focus and reading for pleasure and leisure for granted pre-tinnitus but I don’t now!

And that’s the reason why I now use my research and my experience to help others:

• How to ‘Get Asleep’ and ‘Stay Asleep’
• How to ‘Get Focussed’ and ‘Stay Focussed’
• How to get relief and recover from a traumatic medical diagnosis
• How to get relief and recover from your childhood and adulthood emotional, psychological, physical trauma experiences