CHAPTER 14

NO GOING BACK

After a summer trying to come to terms with my heartache, I returned to England to the news that (a) there was to be a second season of Strictly Come Dancing and I had been invited back and (b) … Brendan had also been asked to return.

Not only that. So had she! His celebrity partner was going to stand in for Tess Daley who was to be on maternity leave for the first few shows.

Say yes and not only would I have to work alongside Brendan again, but I’d also have to face his celeb partner who’d be interviewing me live on air week after week. I couldn’t imagine a more cringe-worthy situation to be in. I felt as if I was being asked to act in a farce starring my work and my love life. But, say no, and I’d have to throw away this fantastic job on TV, doing the thing I felt like I’d been put on earth to do.

The words ‘emotional’ and ‘turmoil’ don’t come within a mile of describing how I felt as I tried to reach a decision.

Even though I’d been in Denmark and missed a lot of the stuff in the papers, I knew there’d been all that gossip and that most other people had read it. If I came back, I’d have to be so cautious with the press. I knew that interviews around the show would be inevitable, they’re part of the job, and I knew that some reporters would try to lure me into talking about the Brendan situation. The very thought of that made me feel sick.

Should I stay or should I go?

Half of me wished I could just walk away from my break-up the way most people do: close the door on it and not open it again until my heart was whole again. But the other half wanted to carry on. Strictly is the most wonderful journey and with the words of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in mind – ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ – I decided it was a journey I had to make again.

I’d been in it since the beginning and seen it grow from an idea floated at Blackpool to a top-of-the-ratings, Saturday night success. Despite what had happened, I still felt a part of the Strictly family. To say it was a difficult decision is something of an understatement, but after a lot of heart-searching I agreed to go back, and out came my brave, smiling face as I pretended that all was right in my world, when only I knew that, inside, it definitely wasn’t. But I was certain about one thing: I was not going to bring ‘poor me’ to work.

‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

DO YOU EVER BRING ‘POOR ME’ TO WORK? TRY THIS …

1. Ask yourself now if feeling sorry for yourself is going to help you move forward or could you now consider that there may be another way.

2. Decide now to refuse to let that ‘poor me’ state of mind take over and you’ll notice you start seeing, feeling and hearing things differently, putting them in a new perspective.

3. With that in mind, now finish this sentence: ‘I feel sorry for myself because …’ writing down your answer helps put the situation into perspective. Realising what we don’t want helps us realise what we do want.

4. Now shift your focus from a place of lack of love, which the ‘poor me’ attitude is, to a new one with an abundance of ‘happy me’. Finish the sentence: ‘I feel good about myself when I …’ again writing down your answer.

5. Notice what you’ve written, see what makes you happy, and start focusing on all the positive things in your life by finishing this sentence: ‘In my life I am grateful for …’ writing as many things as you can think of, and you will find that the ‘poor me’ place will start to disappear and will no longer seem so attractive to you. When you have reached this stage you will start to focus on what makes you happy.

Emotional roller coaster

Now, I am by no means saying that we shouldn’t acknowledge how we are feeling if we are angry, hurt or sad. What I am saying is that we should not dwell on them. I refused to let my personal feelings get in the way of my work. Having grown up in show business, I knew all too well the meaning of the words, ‘the show must go on’ and I had no choice but to make them my mantra for the second season.

When I was shattered after Brendan, I could have spent years feeling sorry for my broken heart and myself. I could have blamed the world and not taken any responsibility for what had happened. But doing that would have made me feel like I was being tossed around in a giant emotional roller coaster. Instead, I decided to take control of the one thing I could control: my own thoughts. I could be in charge of how I felt, where I put my focus and what I thought about. I could also control the words I used to describe my situation and how I was going to heal and learn from this experience in order to grow. I kept on reading those feel-good books I’d got into when I was in Denmark staying with Jeanet, and listening to positive-thinking and, as I said earlier, even hypnotherapy CDs. I know there are people who scoff at things like that. All I can say is they helped me to take charge of my own life and put me in a place where I’m happy to be.

There are times in all our lives when we try to control situations that are outside of ourselves. This is a complete waste of energy as there is no way we can change how others feel, act and behave. But what we can control is how we react to them.

Not long after I broke up with Brendan, someone told me it would probably take me three years to heal fully. I’d like to say they were wrong, but in fact they were right. It was a big old journey of inward discovery and healing that I embarked on, but embark on it I did.

And while I was on the journey, I kept thinking of what had become one of my favourite quotes: ‘People of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.’ –Leonardo da Vinci

Maybe what I’ve just said is making you think that this would be a good time to stop and ask yourself whether you are taking responsibility for your journey: whether you are in charge and are truly the designated driver of the car taking you through your life.

Cause and effect

If you are making yourself the victim, constantly banging on about how bad things happen to you, and how you didn’t do this, that and the next thing because of something someone else did or said … if you are doing all this then, in neurolinguistic programming (NLP), you are on the effect side rather than the cause side of things.

Let me explain the simple principle of what is described in NLP as being on the cause and effect side of a situation. Take your work. Would you say that you are in control of your actions there? Do you take responsibility for them? Or do you blame other people for the things that happen to you and pull a ‘poor me’?

If you want to do better at something at work, do you make it happen – or do you let people around you determine how you are doing and let them decide whether it’s going to happen or not?

If I ask you to imagine you’re in a car, what is your first thought? Are you the driver, or the passenger? If you are the driver then you have put yourself on the cause side of things and you are in control of your own destiny. If you are the passenger you have put someone else in charge and you’re on the effect side.

TRY THIS …

Start by writing down a situation that is bothering you right now, and then consider this statement: ‘We are the authors of our own life stories.’ In other words, the thoughts that we think, and the words that we speak, have an impact on how our lives pan out.

• If you agree with that, then you are on the cause side, you’re on the right track. If you disagree, then this exercise may help you to think about things in a new and positive way.

• Look back at the situation you wrote down and now describe next to it why it’s bothering you. Use as few or many words as you like.

• When you’ve done that, take a look at how you have described the situation, and especially the words you used. Were you blaming everyone else or did you take responsibility, too?

• An example of blaming, which means you being the victim, the ‘poor me’, could be that your boss never listens to you when you speak to her. She expects too much of you at work and you simply haven’t got enough hours in the day to complete your workload. She makes you feel like you’re slow and not up to the job and that’s what makes you sad.

• Or it could be something in your private life. Maybe your boyfriend (or girlfriend) is making you feel low and not good enough about yourself. It could be that when he suggests you go out for a run or go to the gym you immediately think he is saying you are not good enough as you are.

• Now, here’s the thing. No one can make you feel like that if you don’t want them to. You are in charge of your own emotions and how you feel depends on you and only you. If you truly don’t already love yourself and feel good enough all the time, I urge you to start now. We are all fabulous, beautiful human beings who can choose to love or not to love ourselves. So knowing that and believing it, why not choose to love yourself? Please give it a go. Everything looks so much brighter when we start loving ourselves.

Let’s look at the office situation again but this time putting ourselves on the cause side, taking charge of our own situation, looking at what we can do if we take responsibility.

• So if your boss isn’t listening to you, ask yourself how you can make him give you his attention. This is a pro-active approach to the issue that puts you in charge. Find out if he prefers to communicate via email, phone calls or in face-to-face meetings. Maybe you could ask if he has five minutes to talk through a couple of things you would like his opinion on? Most of our problems are based on a lack of communication and once we actually talk an issue through with the person we think we have an issue with, then it’s usually easily clarified. Doing this is putting yourself in charge, showing that you’re willing to work on improving a situation, and that’s far more productive than spending your energy sitting feeling sorry for yourself and telling everyone else about your ‘problem’, which usually just seems to magnify it anyway. Putting yourself on the cause side could, of course, also lead you to another conclusion where you come to realize that your values and the values of the business you are working for don’t match and you can then make plans accordingly, now that you have taken charge.

• Now let’s look at that boyfriend (or girlfriend) problem. Could it be that in fact it’s not him who’s making you feel like that, maybe it’s you who’s feeling guilty about not exercising as much as you would like? Could it even be that you are not yet loving yourself enough and that’s what’s making you feel low? The only way you can fix this is by taking charge. Very often when someone speaks to us, we don’t really hear what they’re saying; we hear what we think they are saying. And if you’re not feeling good about yourself, when he says, ‘Do you want to go for a run?’ you hear, ‘You are unfit, not good enough and need to go for a run.’ So sit down and plan how you can put more exercise into your schedule and next time he suggests a run you’ll hear them for what they really mean: ‘Want to hang out and exercise together?’

If he really meant it as you heard it first time round and you already love and value yourself, then, putting yourself on the cause side, think about reconsidering your relationship; and if you decide not to end it, then at least ask him to respect and love you exactly how you are.

Breaking up is hard to do

After a break-up it’s easy to lose your confidence and start querying whether you are ‘good enough’. Often, when you’re getting over a broken relationship you feel sad and depressed at work and rather than blame what’s happened, you think it’s your boss or colleagues who are making you feel like that. This is something you have to address sooner or later if you want to fully heal. If you ever find yourself in that situation you may want to try this – it helped me a lot. Ask yourself now what needs to happen for you to feel good enough all the time and to not be a ‘victim’. It could be a simple thing like learning to set boundaries in your life, learning to say, ‘No!’ Most of us realize that it often starts with learning how to love ourselves and how to feel good enough inside and out all the time. It could be a situation long ago, maybe when we were children, that made us feel this way.

Whatever it is, you need to work out why you are not feeling good enough all the time or why you feel sad or disappointed with yourself constantly. What’s extraordinary is that we almost always know the answers in our hearts and minds, if we just take the time to actually listen to the messages our bodies and minds send us we’d know that. Feeling good enough in ourselves is the foundation on which we can build everything else in our lives. Once you’ve learned that, happiness will flood into every aspect of your life, including your place of work.

This feeling of only feeling good enough sometimes or even never can appear in even the most successful of people at any time in their lives, as I have seen in many of my clients. It is a very common issue that we all have to work through at some stage or other and is often the root cause of most problems.

WRITE THIS DOWN

What needs to happen for me to start feeling good enough all the time?

Write down whatever answer comes to mind first and keep on writing until you have your solution in front of you. Writing it down will really help you to clear it from your mind and put it into perspective.