Category: Personal Development

“You can continue drinking for now”.

This is what I say to clients who turn to alcohol to cope with stress.

They look at me surprised!

“No, you probably didn’t understand. This is why I came to you. I need your help”.

“We will remove that habit but alcohol is not the real problem”, I say.

Alcohol is actually a solution—a temporary solution to your stress.

It’s a coping mechanism.

It helps you relax, switch off, and manage negative emotions.

Your life has become more stressful after Covid.

You’re struggling with the lack of structure in your working day.

You’re expected to be logged on 24/7.

Hitting the bottle is a coping mechanism.

You can continue to drink excessively until we have identified and you have tested alternative ways that do for you what excessive drinking does.

Step 1 is always more self-love and less guilt.

You can’t control what others say but at least you can stop beating yourself up.

It’s crazy but in my experience of working with people, that first step is often half the solution!

Then we can go deeper, look at unconscious beliefs and the deeper reasons for your negative emotions.

And replace a drinking habit with a better habit.

Until then, while enjoying your drink, ask yourself, “how am I feeling today?”

Write it down or say it out loud. Be specific.

That’s all for now. One step at a time.

Loving you, Angelos

You know the usual stuff: self-centered, entitled, etc.

Here are my favourite ways:

1) Look at how their subordinates respond to them. People give them what they want!

2) Ask them the question, “Is there anything you’d like to change about yourself?”.

They struggle with this one. They may joke about it—but you’ll never get an answer.

I initially wrote “improve about yourself” but I intentionally edited it to “change”.

You have to be confident you can handle their reaction to this one.

Don’t believe what they say—they are manipulative!

They’ll try to show they care about you—they don’t!

They don’t know what guilt or empathy means.

Make sure you protect yourself against this kind of person at work.

At the same time, understand that they didn’t choose to be the way they are.

They most probably have suffered a separation/attachment trauma in their childhood.

This trauma was devastating to the point it almost destroyed the child emotionally.

To survive, this child had to construct a protective barrier that insulates them from the external world.

All they need is love—but so do you.

Loving you, Angelos

🙂 I’m Greek

👶 Born in 1984

👨🏻‍🏫 Had my father as a teacher at school

🖥 Studied computer science and maths

🏊 Worked as a lifeguard and saved 3 lives

🇪🇨 Lived in Ecuador and South America

🇬🇧 Moved to London in 2009

🏦 My dream was to get into investment banking

📈 Was fired as a trader trainee (poor English + high heart rate)

🚫 Didn’t get the job at Tesco (still don’t know why?)

🎄 Worked as a Christmas tree seller

🎸 Worked as a musician

📊 Worked as a maths teacher

👨‍🔧 Worked as a network engineer

🎉 Got into banking!

🤓 Learned a lot got prof experience

😓 Suffered from chronic pain and anxiety

🏃‍♂️ Quit banking

🇪🇺 Travelled in Europe

💂 Moved back to London

🚀 Launched a fashion-tech startup with a friend

😥 Failed big time

🇷🇺 Learned Russian

🗣️ Gave a talk at University of Oxford on language learning

🇺🇦 Moved to Ukraine

📚 Wrote my first books

🇷🇺 Moved to Russia

👨‍🏫 Worked as a teacher of English in St. Petersburg 

💞 Fell in love with Katya

▶️ Grew a YouTube channel from 0 to 1.3m views

🙌 Launched a website for those who learn Russian

👨‍💻 Set up an online marketing agency

💪 Worked with leading financial planning firms in the UK and US

👔 An executive coach became my client

🥰 Fell in love with coaching

🚪 Closed my marketing agency

💼 Became a full-time coach

🇬🇷 Moved to Lefkada, Greece

👪 Son arrived in 2019

🦠 Bloody Corona vir… excuse me…

👋 And here we are in 2020

😎 Everything has made me who I am today

🙏 So I’m grateful for it all

———-

✍️ What’s your story, friend?

Angelos Georgakis

Being kind DOESN’T mean being available 24/7.

Don’t confuse generosity with selflessness.

Being an effective giver isn’t about dropping everything every time for every person. 

It’s about ensuring that the benefit of helping others outweighs the cost to you.

People who do this well are “self-protective givers”.

They are generous, but they know their limits. 

Instead of saying yes to every help request, they look for high-impact, low-cost ways of giving so that they can sustain their generosity—and enjoy it along the way.

In their Harvard Business Review article, Adam Grant and Reb Rebele forgot to mention the most important benefit of being a self-protective giver:

You don’t get physical pain—back pain, neck pain, chest pain, or any kind of pain.

Because putting everyone else’s needs before yours is what causes your pain.

Loving you, Angelos

We all have a built-in mechanism for stress recovery that is amazing and works perfectly! 

When we get stressed, the autonomic nervous system assesses the situation and activates recovery—unconsciously and automatically—when it perceives that we are safe.

We don’t have to do anything! 

That mechanism can bring us back to a state of calm. 

But when we are desperately trying not to be stressed, we mess with our own built-in mechanism. 

If that mechanism had a voice, it would shout, “For God’s sake, let me do my job. I’ll sort everything out for you, soon you’ll feel relaxed, go live your life for now”. 🙂 

We all have the perfect self-regulation system that comes with the package we’re born with. 

Stress is not the problem. The fear and shame of stress get in the way and create our suffering.

Loving you, Angelos

Osteopathy helps but doesn’t fix the root of your chronic pain.

That’s why you keep visiting your osteopath.

To be fair, I love osteopaths because they don’t fillet you.

Lance, my osteopath, used to say: “Medication and surgery treat the symptoms—not the cause. The cause of your back pain is the stiff joints and muscles that create inflammation which in turn causes the pain”.

He was 100% right and saved me from surgery a few times.

“But what causes the stiffness in the first place, Lance?”, I would ask.

“Sitting”, he replied. “We’re not made to sit—we’re made to move”.

“OK, I get that, but why isn’t everyone on my floor in pain then? Some sit for longer than I do”.

“Not everyone’s joints and muscles are the same”, he’d reply.

I lived with that explanation for years.

One day I freaked out, “What if Lance dies? Who will treat me then? He’s the only one who’s managed to relieve my back pain”.

Back pain haunted me.

It was a circuit that could randomly switch on and put my life on pause.

It took me over ten years to understand pain but I finally solved the mystery.

To learn more about Pain-Free and Thriving, click here.

With love, Angelos

You can’t think your way out of a stressful situation.

For those of us who rely heavily on our intellect as we move through the world, we have a habit of thinking our way through stress.

We rationalise, practice gratitude, or reframe the situation.

We may write a list of reasons why we shouldn’t be feeling how we feel.

These methods don’t help the mind and body to recover.

The thinking, logical brain is not responsible for stress recovery.

Recovery is the instinctive, survival brain’s job.

Recovery goes on at a subconscious level.

And the survival brain will not start the recovery process unless it’s absolutely certain that you are safe.

No matter how persuasive or intelligent you are, don’t try to convince your survival brain with logical arguments—it will not listen to you.

The survival brain will do its thing—collecting thousands of cues from inside and outside—and will begin recovery only when it perceives that you are safe.

When you rationalise to calm yourself down, you only slow down the recovery process.

So, next time you freak out, forget about gratitude and positive self-talk.

Have an ice-cream instead.

With love, Angelos