Imagine it’s the first Saturday in September…

Imagine it’s the first Saturday in September.

The summer holidays are over, the washing machine has already done one load before nine o’clock, you’ve got a coffee beside you, and for the next couple of hours nobody’s asking you for anything.

You’ve signed up for my group coaching for overthinking course, It’s Not Just Me, and you’re just about to join the first session.

There’s always that little wobble before you do anything new. A tiny part of your brain is probably already wondering whether everyone else will be far more self-aware than you, have read all the right books, and generally have their life together in a way that you’ve somehow missed. (Spoiler: they won’t.)

You click “Join Meeting.”

People start appearing on the screen one by one. Someone’s camera isn’t working, somebody else is apologising because their dog has decided to join in too, and there’s that slightly awkward bit where everyone smiles politely because nobody knows each other yet.

It never takes very long, though, before someone says something they’ve never really admitted out loud before.

Maybe they tell us they can still remember something slightly awkward they said in a meeting years ago. Or that if a friend takes longer than usual to reply to a message, they immediately start wondering what they’ve done wrong. Or that they feel guilty every time they sit down to do absolutely nothing. Or that they hear themselves saying, “Of course I can do that,” while another part of them is quietly wondering why it didn’t just say, “Actually… no.”

Then somebody else nods. And somebody else. Before long, people start laughing, not because any of it’s particularly funny, but because they’ve just realised they aren’t the only person whose brain does these things.

That’s my favourite part.

Not because we’ve uncovered some great psychological truth twenty minutes into the course, but because you can almost feel everyone breathe out. There’s something incredibly reassuring about looking around the screen and realising that eight other people have been carrying around exactly the same kind of thoughts.

One of the things people often tell me after the first call is how quickly the nerves disappeared. That’s important to me. I want everyone to feel comfortable enough to be themselves, whether that means talking lots, listening quietly, or taking a session or two before saying very much at all.

Over the following six weeks, we start making sense of it all. We look at why your brain does what it does, where those habits came from, and how to stop letting them quietly run so much of your life. We don’t spend six weeks blaming your parents for everything. (Tempting though that might occasionally be.) And I won’t be asking you to visualise yourself floating down a river while panpipe music plays in the background.

Now imagine it’s six Saturdays later.

You close your laptop, make another coffee and get on with the rest of your weekend.

You’re not a completely different person. Life hasn’t magically become easier. You still have moments where you overthink, or say yes when you wish you’d said no, or wonder whether that email sounded a bit abrupt.

But something has really shifted.

You understand yourself better. You notice your patterns sooner. You have a bit more choice about what you do next instead of feeling swept along by the same old reactions.

And perhaps most importantly, you’ve stopped beating yourself up quite so much.

For me, that’s a pretty wonderful outcome.

If you’d like to join us in September for the next group coaching for overthinking course, I’d love to have you there. Places have already started to get filled, and I keep the group small so everyone actually gets a chance to speak and connect.

You can find all the details and reserve your spot here.