Blood and near death to positive psych... does that work as an intro?

Hello Steemians, I’d like say hello, that I’m excited to be here and let you know who I am and the kinda stuff I’ll be posting. Let’s make it easy…

I’m Alan, English but live in NZ, a Doctor of Clinical Hypnosis and an NLP and Neuro-Semantics Master Trainer. OK, that’s not very easy, is it? Well, you’ve probably heard of hypnosis; NLP and Neuro-Semantics is basically really cool positive psychology stuff turned into easy to use techniques. Is that better?

But how did I get here? Well, good question, because I didn’t always do this… So a heads up here, the rest of this post tells my personal story. It’s my personal journey of going through near death and a lot of struggles. Feel free to skip it if you’re not interested, but please keep in touch.

Ok, from the mid 90’s up until 2001 I was, well... a complete shit in many ways. You see, in the mid 90’s my life spun out of control… I was just an average bloke in my 20’s working at my trade as a glass cutter/glazier. But on 21st Aug 1995 I had an accident at work that almost killed me, and left me technically ‘disabled’ (although I refuse that term)….

A 1.22x2.14 metre piece of glass I was carrying broke on me. It almost severed my left arm at the elbow, I suffered 45% blood loss and had to be evacuated by helicopter to hospital where I needed emergency surgery just to save my life.

The medics on the scene were incredible. They put plasma lines in both my feet and my good arm to stop my veins and arteries collapsing – that would have killed me. The surgeons, doctors and nurses all did an amazing job and even saved my arm from total amputation; it was touch-and-go… it still doesn’t work properly, never will. But I’m alive and that’s thanks to those amazing men and women who literally saved my life.

But that accident and the subsequent recovery was a hard adjustment to make. I hit a low point in my life that lasted years and brought with it all kinds of trouble; …booze, violence… lots of very bad things!
Then around 2000 I said to myself “C’mon Alan, you gotta sort your life out, if you carry on like this, …it’s not gonna end good!”

But could I turn my life around from such a major low point? Well, I did have one natural talent; I’ve always been able to understand people, y’know, what makes ‘em tick. I’d notice themes and patterns in people and their behaviours that seemed pretty obvious to me, but almost everybody else seemed to miss.

Here’s an example, when I was working as a nightclub doorman it was like I could ‘just tell’ who was going to cause trouble, and so I could easily diffuse bad situations before they ever got started. One of my bosses once commented when I was moving on, “I’ll be sorry to see you leave, Al, there’s hardly ever any trouble when you’re working the door”. I even used to be able to throw people out/get people to leave – and have them shake my hand and say thanks… for me throwing them out!
I just had a way with influencing people, and making them happy, no matter what the situation. I’ve even taught this professionally to door staff and bar workers.

So I decided to build on this natural strength, to leverage it. I devoted myself to learning all about PRACTICAL positive psychology; how to control my mind, how to think better, how to change my life ‘from the inside, out’. You know, not just all theory and research but real-world techniques that anyone with a brain can use to make a huge difference in their lives. So that’ll be the stuff I Steem about by the way.

Since that decision, I’ve just kept learning. And things have gotten better and better… with the occasional exception like the major earthquakes that devastated my beautiful home town of Christchurch here in NZ throughout, 2010-11, that was tough, on everyone.

But even those events taught me real ways how to face adversity and overcome pretty much anything; loss, death, stress, anxiety… and I was even able to help countless other people to do that too, I’ve even written a book on it.

So that’s my initial post… if you’ve read this far – well done! I’m looking forward to getting to know others in this community, so leave a comment, say hi, and let’s start some chats going.

Cheers,
Alan