And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you

can be. I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols, and this is episode 209.

It's titled Life Changes.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

It's another January again.

Yay!

There's one every year, isn't there?

Some things just don't change, even though everything else does.

If we're honest, life is pretty much in flux. We don't stand still for very long, never have, really.

Even Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, is quoted as once saying,

Everything changes and nothing remains still. You cannot step into the same stream. There's nothing new under the sun, so I think he probably got the idea from Heraclitus, who said the only constant in

life is change. So even two and a half thousand years ago, we knew what we were up against.

That change is normal and needs to be

accepted, but that doesn't make it any easier when big things happen, does it? Because sometimes

life does come with big changes. We can lose a family member or we can gain one. We can lose a job

or we can move jobs. We can move house, move

country. We can move in with a new partner. We can get married, get divorced, change gender.

Our pet can die. Our child suddenly isn't a child anymore and moves out and it can all feel

very scary because change doesn't always come with a gain.

We have to dig quite deep sometimes to find that there are more than just losses.

But try telling that to someone who's just been diagnosed with terminal cancer that they're gaining something.

...