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 197.

It's titled Worrying and Acceptance.

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

Hey, pod fans, it's me again.

If you're new to the show, welcome aboard.

I hope my cheeriness isn't too exhausting to listen to.

I do switch on my shiny persona whilst the mic's live. And some people, according to some online reviews, can find it a bit too much if their mood is the literal opposite of the shiny persona that I put out there.

But if you stick with me, maybe you'll develop a shiny persona as well.

I say persona, but to you, that might not be quite the right word for it.

Outside of psychotherapy, people might think that having a persona

makes it sound like we're being a bit fake.

But we all have a persona that we show the world.

We don't show the world every single part of us.

We tend to keep the dark part, the angry part, the part that would push people away to ourselves on the whole.

But our cruel side, our shadow side, is still a part of us.

Carl Jung once said, everyone carries a shadow,

and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.

It's a fair point. So I embrace my shadow. I'm aware of it. I understand it and I accept it. That way I don't worry about it.

And it means that the shiny self that I pull out when it's appropriate, like now, is still real to me, no less real than my shadow self.

It's just the part of me that comes out when I have an audience. Long-time listeners will have probably got used to me by now, and you can too. If you're new to the podcast, feel free to go back, listen to some

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