A Year to Change Your Mind Quotes

“We might have left school, but we haven’t left the chance to learn behind. Life has a clever way of presenting us again and again with similar challenges in different situations and allowing us to try different ways of managing them. Looking back and feeling like we’ve learnt, and grown and changed, at least a little, can only be a good thing, however painful that learning might sometimes be at the time.”
― Lucy Maddox, A Year to Change Your Mind: Ideas from the Therapy Room to Help You Live Better

“Celebrating those moments when we have made a difference in our work, whether it is in a caring profession or in something totally different, can boost our sense of purpose and our sense of efficacy. Yet how often do we do this, either on an individual or a team level? When teams learn from previous experiences it tends to be learning from mistakes. When we think back over our performance at work it is often to reflect on how we can do better. Yet we can also purposefully take the time to print out emails where people have thanked us, to look over cards from people who have acknowledged something meaningful we have done for them and to notice moments in our day where we’ve had a really nice time, or at least felt like we’ve done our job well. Even a small amount of this can make a really big difference.”
― Lucy Maddox, A Year to Change Your Mind: Ideas from the Therapy Room to Help You Live Better

“Every job has something like this, though: something which can stay with you outside of hours and make it hard to ‘switch off’. This is often the flip side of doing a job you care about – you’re probably more likely to care about it all the time, not just in work hours.”
― Lucy Maddox, A Year to Change Your Mind: Ideas from the Therapy Room to Help You Live Better

“The work was never really finished – there was always something more that could be done. And worries about whether people were going to be OK was something which I found hard to leave at the door when I went home. Every job has something like this, though: something which can stay with you outside of hours and make it hard to ‘switch off’. This is often the flip side of doing a job you care about – you’re probably more likely to care about it all the time, not just in work hours.”
― Lucy Maddox, A Year to Change Your Mind: Ideas from the Therapy Room to Help You Live Better

“A neat experiment from the early 2000s by a researcher called Brad Bushman compared people’s reactions after either thinking about the person they were angry with as they punched a punchbag, or thinking about getting fit as they punched a punchbag.6 The research team also had a control group of people who didn’t do anything: no punching and no thinking about anything specific. They found that distraction, by thinking about getting fit while punching the bag, worked better at reducing anger than ruminating over what they were angry about while punching the punchbag, but doing nothing at all was the best thing for reducing anger.”
― Lucy Maddox, A Year to Change Your Mind: Ideas from the Therapy Room to Help You Live Better

“I want it to be a useful hour that someone comes away from feeling like it’s been worthwhile. If I let them use up all the time with something that isn’t moving them towards where they want to be, then I’m not doing my job. Repeating back what someone has said not only helps me to check I’ve understood it correctly, but also can help to get my voice in, and then move from hearing what someone has said to building on it and offering new ideas.”
― Lucy Maddox, A Year to Change Your Mind: Ideas from the Therapy Room to Help You Live Better

“I write notes in sessions (and often ask the person I am seeing to write or draw things out on pieces of paper as well). This helps me to remember what has been said, and helps me in the moment also to think about some of the most important things that are being told to me. Other schools of therapy wouldn’t write notes like this, preferring to direct all their attention towards the person in the moment and write notes afterwards. Either way, we’re all still trying to really hear what the person is coming with, both what they are saying and also in some respects what they are not saying.”
― Lucy Maddox, A Year to Change Your Mind: Ideas from the Therapy Room to Help You Live Better

“Being able to understand what someone else needs or wants, and to express what you need or want, is no small skill. In some ways, communication with each other is all we have. All of us are here trying to make ourselves heard and understood, and hopefully trying to hear and understand each other.”
― Lucy Maddox, A Year to Change Your Mind: Ideas from the Therapy Room to Help You Live Better