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 184. It's titled Mental Narratives.

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

Hello people. It's me again. If you missed last week's episode, then you might be surprised to find that there's another one so soon.

And that's because a few weeks ago, I streamed a live, extra long podcast episode, all about our inner dialogue.

And throughout June, I'm going to be editing it down into four specific episodes for you.

So if you missed last

weeks, go and have a listen first and then come back here as this one picks up immediately after

that one ended. So I shall press play and I'll speak to you afterwards. See you later. I put

something on social media once and it still makes me smile a bit when I see that it's been shared.

It was a little cartoon where one smiling character said to this miserable-looking one,

Don't worry, the mental illness is just in your head.

And the next panel is of this first character now drowning, whilst the

miserable guy who's now smiling is shouting, don't worry, the drowning is all in your chest. And it made

me smile, mostly because I was imagining that the depressed character was just pushing the other guy

into the water in the first place and drowning him. Because it's

not that easy, is it? Yeah, to a degree, mental illness might be in our head, but what our

head, our brain, our mind does is not so easy to control. It's unconscious. And when we can have

some influence, we can take some control. Now, we can have some influence,

otherwise I'd have a different job. Our head is in many ways responsible for whether we succeed or

fail. And certainly whether we perceive setbacks as failures or just part of the progress. Because we can

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