One day, while having a beer at a bar, I overheard someone talking about surfing (actual waves in the ocean). I have no idea why, but everything inside me screamed: what a great idea! So, with a rental car and a freshly acquired driver's licence, off I went to Hossegor in the south of France. In a surf shop, a saleswoman stuffed a trendy Quiksilver boardshort, a rash guard (a shirt you wear in the water), and a surfboard into my hands. Ready to head into the ocean! Help! Within a few steps, the water was already too deep to stand in. Waves were breaking right on top of my head. The ocean is terrifying! Evacuate! Within seconds, my bum was safely back on the white sand. Time for a new plan: an easier beach where the water didn't get deep so quickly. That turned out to be Hendaye, Europe's beginner surf beach. But I still didn't dare go into the water. Fortunately (or unfortunately), I'm better at thinking than at sports. How do you learn to surf when you're afraid of the sea? There were

What changes first: your feelings or your behaviour? The answer is: it can be either. When your feelings about something change, your behaviour often changes naturally. For example, if you watch footage of animals being slaughtered, there's a good chance you'll feel upset. Suddenly, eating a vegan meal might sound a lot more appealing. But what if your feelings form a serious problem? What if they are making your life harder instead of better? Let's explore that. Many of the people I work with struggle with Pure OCD. This means they experience intrusive thoughts, while most of the compulsions happen mentally rather than physically. People with Retroactive Jealousy, one form of Pure OCD, can spend hours analysing their partner's past. Some even experience vivid mental movies that replay over and over in their minds. If you struggle with retroactive jealousy, you probably try to get rid of your feelings by analysing them. You look for evidence that your jealousy is justified, or evidence

I was a teenager in the 90s, the era of R&B. One of my favourite songs from that time is Back in One Piece by Aaliyah and DMX. R&B songs are often about love. This song is about DMX needing his freedom, while always coming back to Aaliyah at the end of the day. And even though they never explicitly talk about it, the exact same thing naturally applies to Aaliyah. Giving each other freedom in a relationship can feel very scary because you never really know what the other person is doing when you're not around. To reduce those fears, it can be very tempting to create rules and boundaries for one another. It may seem as if that gives you more certainty and safety. But does it really? For the other person, these kinds of agreements can quickly start to feel suffocating. An unintended reaction may be that they begin fighting harder for their freedom and perhaps even start doing the very things you've forbidden them to do. But the opposite can happen as well. You may try so hard to meet all

You have to get things wrong in order to get better. That may sound contradictory, but it really isn't. Take weightlifting, for example. You have to train to failure to become stronger. If you always stay within the limits of what comes easily to you, you will never learn anything new. When I was a teacher, I was always happy when my students made mistakes (and they obediently did). Because then they realized: I’m missing some knowledge here, and that’s why I’m getting stuck. And that made them much more interested in my explanation. In my twenties I had to apply for the Russian State Circus. During my Philosophy studies, I took a course called Expanding the Mind. Every week, we had to do uncomfortable and challenging exercises to learn how to think more freely and step outside our comfort zones. For the Russian circus assignment, we had to complete an obstacle course: crawl under a chair, climb over a table… the sort of things you would expect to do in a circus job interview. And ther

Trusting your partner can feel scary and uncertain, as if you are skating on a thin layer of ice that could break at any moment, sending you into freezing cold water. So you spend your entire day monitoring your feelings, your thoughts and your partner, trying to prevent the ice from breaking. What do you do with that? How do you solve it? Let's explore that. What is happening is this: you are trying to trust the strength of the ice by examining it with a magnifying glass. You look for tiny cracks, thin spots or maybe even a hole in the ice. And if you stand still long enough, you will find all of those. You can even measure how thick the ice is around the hole if you want to. So now you know: there are indeed risks. You have carefully identified and mapped them all out. But do you actually feel safer standing on the ice? Or has it only become more frightening now that you know about all the cracks? What if you simply started skating? What if you moved across the ice so quickly that yo