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 today you'll learn all about toxic masculinity.

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

Hey there, happy fans. How are you all doing? I do hope you've been able to handle the news this month.

It's not been good, as it? I do hope that my

podcast episodes can help dilute things down a bit for you. I know that I can be annoyingly cheerful,

and that might sometimes feel a bit incongruent when compared to what's going on everywhere else.

And I'm not going to apologise for that. If you follow me on social media,

you'll know that every Friday I post a little video of someone dancing. It could be a Muppet,

it could be a clip from a madness video. But every Friday, without fail, there's something happy

shortly after 7am plopping onto your social feed. And I remember once someone replied to my little dance video with,

Hey, just wondering what your thoughts on the war on Palestine is,

as you don't seem to have posted about it.

And I thought, no, I don't need to.

And it wasn't the first time either a couple of years ago.

Somebody replied to a happy dance

video with unfollowed, hashtag Ukraine, as if to suggest we can't possibly try and be happy

when horrible things are happening. And sadly, they're wrong. And I say sadly because horrible

things always happen. And although I want to be able

to do something about it, we can only do what we can. And I'm equally as sad for Ukraine, Iran and

Palestine as I am for Israel, Syria and Yemen. War is awful. Humans can be both gloriously beautiful and frighteningly cruel.

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