I have many male friends, colleagues and clients. I feel a deep empathy for men as they don’t seem to have their own space in the world anymore. There’s no room for their masculinity to be seen positively. Masculinity seems to have been tied to physical strength which gets tied to violence, or if you are into the gym, you are a himbo. If a women goes to the gym, she is empowering and enabling herself, getting in the feminine strength zone, taking me time, it’s all very positive. Men in the gym are preening, over confident and physically - slightly threatening. I’ve never heard anyone say to a man, well done for taking time out and empowering yourself.

We need to take responsibility for our own actions, but understanding how your own brain is busy tripping you up can be useful. Throughout my life, I have had many things that I didn’t like about myself, but my anger was the main one. I used to get so angry, full-blown tantrum. It took quite a lot to trigger me but then, as a friend described it, I could go ‘naught to nuclear’ in a split second.

Ever have a day where everything goes wrong, or nothing goes wrong, but you are just in a foul mood? That's today for me. Don't show me positive quotes, don't tell me to re-frame or any other helpful techniques I teach clients, it won't work, not today. And you know what? That's just fine.

Whether it's hormones, relationships, lack of sleep or, well, anything else I can blame that means I can pretend to have no responsibility, it actually doesn't matter. It will pass.

I’m off on holiday soon, but before I go I’m spending this weekend, completely alone. Something I would have avoided a few years ago. So how did I move from hating being alone, to loving it?

I learnt to like myself.

Being alone is a big problem for a lot of people. They feel lost. Many create a world where noise is constant and use music or TV to get to sleep. Why? So they don’t have to listen to that voice in their heads filled with self-doubt.

Are you stressed out, rushing from one thing to another, feeling the pressure but feeling you can’t stop because something will fail or not get done or someone else is relying on you?

Most of us spend our time rushing from one thing to the next. Life seems to be a continuous to-do list and we never get most of it done. The problem is, you’re wasting your own time living like this…

You’re already skim-reading this article, aren’t you?

Fear is such an emotive word and we apply it to so many different situations and yet, we never lose context. Fear of threat - terrorism for example, fear of failure, fear of crime, fear of challenge, fear of change, fear of the future. We can place the word fear in front of almost anything and make it a ‘thing’ to fear. My ex-husband has a fear of clowns – in other words, a phobia, the word phobia is derived from the word fear.

In the trailer for ‘Spiderman: Homecoming’, ‘Spider Boy’ – You can tell I wasn’t paying attention in the beginning because I have no idea what his name is… messes something up, millions of people could have been killed, but aren’t. You know, the usual superhero learning lesson scenario. The result is that Tony Stark aka Iron Man takes away, *gasp*, his spider suit... 

Do you remember the year the, ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ sign came out? We all chuckled about how and where it was used. It was everywhere: mugs, posters, and even on a pair of knickers – that’s where ‘keep calm and carry on’ changed its meaning! Unless you have been living in a time capsule, you will have noticed the bombardment of the ‘mindful’ culture: books, toys, apps, classes and even our beloved Ladybird books doing a satirist take of mindful books – which is brilliant I might add...

Do you often say you make decisions from your gut? If so, that’s a problem. Your gut instinct is actually your subconscious mind making a series of interpretations based on your emotional baggage until it feels it has gathered enough evidence to label it as a feeling and create a chemical response - in your gut. Hey presto! Based on that feeling, you make a decision. I’d like to say this has worked for me and I’ve led a faultless life, but unfortunately, it hasn’t...

Last night I stood poking holes through my living room ceiling with a roasting fork, while water poured on my head and into a series of bowls and buckets. I realised that flooding my bathroom was entirely my own fault. The fact is that so many of us spend most of our days, NOT calm and under A LOT of pressure and we make poor decisions, sometimes these decisions don’t matter too much and sometimes they rain a deluge of consequences upon us.

To keep me present in all areas of my life I have a slightly macabre mantra. ‘If I died to tonight, would I be happy with what I did today?’ …