The Art of Brilliance Blog

Dan had completed his apprenticeship as a locksmith. But ‘fully trained’ doesn’t mean he was quick. Dan was the new boy, so he’d turn up at a job, keen as mustard, but would fumble. He’d explain that he was new to the trade and most customers understood, huffing, puffing and checking their phones as he unpicked their locks. One particular customer got quite irate as she hung around for an hour while Dan attempted to get her back into the front door she’d locked herself out of. He presented the lady with the bill. “£60 for that!” she huffed, rummaging in her purse.

Five years down the line and Dan was the man. He’d gotten so much better – he was a locksmith extraordinaire. Dan could pick any lock, any place, in double quick time.

You guessed it, the same lady rings him again with the same problem. “It’s my stupid door,” she sighed. “I’m locked out again. And it’s freezing!”

Double-quick Dan was there in a jiffy. He knew his trade, which tool would be best for her particular lock, and hey presto, she was in within 90 seconds. Dan grinned a master craftsman’s grin as he opened the door and let the lady into her warm house. He presented her with the bill. “£60, for two minutes?” she grumbled, rummaging in her purse.

Look folks, there are so many messages buried in Dan’s story that I don’t know where to start. So I won’t. Only bright people subscribe to our blog, so I’m going to let you work out the lessons for yourself.

Thanks for reading.

Check out our fabulous range of workshops and keynotes, short sharp reminders, delivered by our master craftsmen and woman

Suicide is never Painless, trust me I know, I have been on every end of it. It’s never over and definitely not the way to go about life. I am living proof there is life after those thoughts, after those feelings. The best thing I did was speak to someone, some professional service that deals with those thoughts.

If you feel or are having thoughts of suicide please talk to the Samaritans

The first 14 years of my life were ‘normal’. I had a good upbringing. I had it a lot easier than a lot of children had then and have now – I had a roof over my head, food, clean clothes and a cosy bed. I did all the things that a normal (I use that word loosely) child would do, I got up to mischief, I hung out with friends and played football.

I am not telling you this to boast or brag, I am telling you this because I want you to know that at any time the course of anyone’s path in life can change for better or for worse.

The course of my life took an unfortunate turn for the worse at the age of 14. This is when I had my first ever panic attack – I can still remember it clear to this day. I was in school in the PE hall sitting a test and I had an overwhelming anxiety dump and started to hyperventilate very quickly.

From then on, I had anything between eight and 10 panic attacks a day and with the nighttime ones being worse I found it very hard to sleep.

Things got progressively worse over the coming months with panic attacks coming thick and fast, each one more intense and long-lasting. This is when I started to drink (alcohol) and I quickly realised that with drink I could sleep a lot quicker. It was just at weekends or whenever I could gather up some money or find someone to get it for me. By the age of 16, I had left school to work, and with that, I had access to money and had started to drink every day.

Over the next two years, I fell deeper and deeper into depression. Where I live, I had the mountains on one side and the sea on the other, what should have been natural beauty was suffocating to me, my world was closing in around me and all I could see, hear and feel was the darkness, cold chills, and death around me. My depression went from grey to pitch black and I noticed an epidemic of suicides around me. Suddenly death made perfect sense. It was all I had left so I had my first botched attempt. I came around in hospital the following day, the ultimate failure. I couldn’t even kill myself properly!

The conversation I had with a so-called ‘professional’ was disturbing, to say the least. Firstly, they had two other people to see for the same reason as me that day. And secondly, I was told there was nothing they could do about my problems. I was a lost cause – beyond saving.

I planned my second attempt, this time more carefully. I timed it to coincide with a big family night out so I’d have the opportunity to say goodbye to everyone. Luckily my brother found me this time.

What followed was two years of therapy. Year one was a struggle to stay alive and year two was spent building my coping mechanisms to deal with the world as it is (not the world I needed it to be) Cut to today. I’m more than steady. Textbooks call it ‘adversarial growth’. I call it living proof that you can experience adversity and come out the other side better and stronger. I concluded that I must have experienced all that for a reason – I must be the one that has come through this to help others, why else would I still be alive?

So I quit my factory job and threw myself headlong into personal development. I took suicide prevention courses, as well as counselling and NLP. While studying to be a practitioner I came across the Art of Brilliance team and took the opportunity of sitting in on their school workshops. Just one word – WOWZA! I attended day one, intending to sit at the back and observe but within 10 minutes I was getting involved! Everything fell into place. Delivering positive psychology and wellbeing to adults is all well and good, but delivering for kids is where it’s at – for me at least. If I can save one child from the horrors that I’ve been through, that’ll do for me.

So here I am. My name is Paddy (the team calls me ‘Wee Paddy’) and I’m from Belfast. My journey has only just begun with the Art of Brill team but I’m trained up, revved up and looking forward to helping change lives from the ground up.

Wee P x

“I will never, ever, ever, ever do a PhD! Ever!”

There, I’ve said it, and it’s in writing on the internet. Four ‘evers’. You can’t get more ‘forever’ than that.

Now, those of you who are full blooded positivity geeks, will instinctively know that this IS NOT the behaviour we’d normally expect. Isn’t my defiant attitude a bit defeatist?

Well, I can state it for two reasons:

1. Andy C has already done a PhD and it acts as the foundation of all that we do. It took him 12 years and, somewhat ironically, his PhD in Happiness ended up making him unhappy.
2. Plus, I’ve recently completed a two-year MSc in Positive Psychology. I like to think of it as ‘PhD-lite’? It gave me a good grounding in academia and challenged me but without ruining my life.

At ‘Art of Brill’ we do get that academia is a good thing. We firmly believe that it gives our keynotes and workshops a degree of credibility. Our workshops on positivity, happiness, strengths, purpose and resilience are not based on a whim, they’re backed by a dozen years of research. But we do have a gripe when academia becomes big words for the sake of big words. The boffins have become very clever at disguising their findings in a special language that’s impenetrable to me and thee.

Two examples. First, Andy was asked to reword his simple academic finding that happy people ‘choose to be positive’, to the more heavyweight ‘conscious affirmative affective bias’. He declined.

Example two. Last week I got chatting to a lovely lady about Random Acts of Kindness (RAKs). She passionately shared stories with me of how she actively goes through her week, looking for opportunities to do them, and has done for the past year. She was properly excited, you could see it in her eyes.

I asked her,* “How often do you do them?”*

She replied, “Oh, I have no idea. I just do them when I see them… there’s no formula to it.”

This immediately sent me back to a few weeks of my MSc life, when, guess what, I had to write a critical paper on ‘Random Acts of Kindness’. Yes, I had to critique research into RAKs!

I remember reading two papers which were having an academic ding-dong about the best way to carry out RAKs. One paper claimed that doing one a day for five days led to optimal well-being, whereas the other paper challenged it, by claiming it was best to save five up and do them in one day.

I did what academia requires, and submitted a 3,000 word assignment while all the time thinking, who cares? People just need to actively do them and enjoy the benefit from it.

I guess this is why our sessions, while grounded in academia, resonate with people. We just share what we have learnt, in a simple way, and it’s down to the individual to give it a go and see what works for them.

The good news is that we won’t be asking you to indulge in conscious affirmative affective bias, but we might suggest some techniques that will improve your odds of choosing to be positive. We can share a few decent ideas and then, just like the lady who is doing RAKs, you can crack on with experimenting what works best for you.

If it works, keep doing it. If it doesn’t, try something else.

Now that’s clever!

Darrell x

I’ve been reading James Kerr’s fabulous book, ‘Legacy’ about the all-conquering All-Backs. Kerr’s introduced me to the southern African word, ‘Ubuntu’: ‘What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.’

And I suddenly twigged that for the last 10 years The Art of Being Brilliant has been talking about Ubuntu, our version of which says, you’ve got 4,000 weeks to make a dent in the universe.

But there’s a bit of the wider world of positive psychology that is missing. It’s the spark plug bit – small but highly significant.

My PhD has ended up being about ‘flourishing’ – when an individual feels happy and this positivity is transmitted to their work colleagues. In such instances, this so-called ‘multiplier effect’ could be felt within the organisation’s suppliers, business partners, work colleagues and customers. But, of course, the multiplier effect is so much bigger than that. Tisdale & Pitt-Catsuphes found that a child’s sense of well-being is affected less by the long working hours of their parents and more by their mood on returning home. Their conclusion is that working long hours in a job you love is better for family relations than working shorter hours and coming home unhappy. You might have to re-read that for it to sink in? It’s not about work, it’s about how you come through the door.

My research about engagement in the workplace excites me. It has the power to transform individuals, teams and entire organizations. But it doesn’t excite me nearly as much as the transferability of the ‘multiplier effect’ to your home.

Back to ‘Legacy’ where Kerr sums it up better than I ever can, ‘Our first responsibility is to be a good ancestor’.

‘Over the moon’ is one of those irritating football clichés up there with ‘sick as a parrot’ and ‘it’s a game of two halves’.

For years, my personal bug-bear was ‘giving 120%’. I’m an educated man so I’d curse at the radio, ‘You cannot give more than 100%!’

But of course, the footballers are absolutely correct. You can give 120% if the end result is that you have surprised yourself and achieved beyond what you thought was possible.

And this is why our keynotes, workshops and books are so powerful, they’re about enabling you and those around you to go beyond what you thought you were capable of.

The only catch is that you have to go first.

The principles of positive psychology are simple, but not always easy. And of course, for true authenticity, we don’t just talk about them, we live them.

We’ve spent 10 years extoling the virtues of choosing a positive attitude and setting huge unbelievable great goals. That means we end up saying ‘yes’ to projects that terrify us.

So here’s the scariest one so far. Andy is running a musical version of The Art of Being Brilliant at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham. It’s not the sumptuous 2,500 capacity venue that’s scary. It’s the ‘musical’ bit because, you see, Andy ain’t no singer or dancer.

So, in true ‘Art of Brill’ fashion, he’s playing to his strengths and allowing others to play to theirs. The lyricist will write the songs. The orchestra will do the musical bits. The children’s choirs will do the singing bits.

That just leaves Andy to do the easy bit – the talkie stuff. In his own inimitable way, he’ll share the best bits of 12 years research into the science of happiness and positivity, to inspire, entertain and, fingers crossed, make a bit of a difference to the wellbeing of whomever attends.

Speaking of which, he does need an audience. The messages are aimed at children in Key Stage 2 (anyone from age seven to 11) so if you know a school that needs an injection or positivity or a reminder that life is the ultimate special occasion, please help us make a song and dance about it.

If this one goes well, he’s promised to take the plunge and put one on for teenagers!

Unless you’re incredibly enlightened (and as a follower of this blog, there’s a fair chance you may be), you have been fooled into thinking that this measly 4,000 weeks average lifespan statistic is a hindrance. You end up thinking, ‘I am me, in this body, in this time called life.’

In which case you’ll be cramming a lot in. You’re driven by thinking, I’d better score as many points, sleep with as many people, get promoted as fast as I can, and accumulate as much stuff as possible before I die.

I often start my school sessions with a show of hands: who wants to be happier? (a few) followed by who wants to be rich? (all of them, plus enthusiastic gasps and nodding). The modern world is programming us to mistake the trappings of materialism for signs of accomplishment. The mantra, insidiously seeping, is this: you have succeeded, so long as you have loads of stuff.

Yet we don’t often see a tombstone along the lines of, ‘Here lies Andy. Boy, did he have loads of stuff’. Invariably the engravings are more about your qualities and what your life meant to those left behind.

I appreciate that it can be very hard to take your foot off the accelerator of materialism. Rather than foot to the floor, why not accumulate some new thinking, via Andy’s new book. The strapline says it all; how to flourish in a crazy world. If you don’t need it, I’m sure you know someone who does?

Breaking news from an Art of Being Brilliant delegate (in her own words)…

“You may recall asking us all to go home and tidy out our knickers drawer at the weekend. Coincidently, it was on my “to do” list anyway and so I did just that.

“I’m quite old fashioned and still line my drawers with paper and when the draw was empty apart from the lining paper, I hesitated and thought, shall I change the lining paper as well or not? I decided that I would, and on lifting the paper, I saw something in the corner of the drawer – on closer inspection I found it was my very expensive diamond eternity ring that I had lost over two years ago – I had given up on ever finding this ring a long time ago. I must have hidden the ring in my knicker drawer before I went on holiday (I think many people do this sort of thing so it is probably the first place a burglar would look!)

“Therefore, not only did I wear my best knickers to work on the following Monday (as advised by you!); I was also able to wear my long lost ring again!”

Putting aside the weirdness of our knicker advice, our aim at Art of Brilliance is to transform lives. Our mission is to go where other companies fear to tread. Indeed, we are not really a ‘business’ we see ourselves as a movement, one in which we help people to wake up to the magnificence of life.

We can’t guarantee diamond rings, but we can guarantee that happiness crops up in the most unlikely of places. Our job is to show you where and how to look.

Wishing you a peaceful and glittering 2017

Andy x

I’d love to get fit or go on a safari, or to see Metallica or the Royal Phil’ in concert. Boy, at this time of the year, don’t we all hear people telling us of their New Year resolutions – study / lose weight / get fit / less alcohol / new job / quit smoking…

I think Nike’s strapline ‘Just Do It’ has it just about right. A couple of years ago, one of my team sent me another of his many emails proposing that we should ‘do something’. I emailed him back with four letters, adding an ‘F’ to Nike’s phrase; my reply simple read, ‘JFDI’.

A few seconds later he emailed me to ask what ‘JFDI’ meant? And when I told him, he emailed me again to express his surprise at ‘my tone’.

My tone?

My tone was ‘go for it!’

I have a bag full of (mostly old) sayings. My favourite in this context is “fortune favours the brave”. I’ve noticed over 30-odd years working in and managing companies that ‘lucky’ people – in terms of salary, promotion and in being the ‘boss’ favourite’ – have been those that propose, launch and implement initiatives that make their customers go ‘wow!’ Sometimes, they don’t even ask permission. They know it’s the right thing to do so they JFDI.

I’ve noticed that the ’emailers’, the ‘wishers’ and ‘wanters’ are not half-so-lucky. Waiting for something to be signed off in triplicate kind of kills it stone dead?

Paulo Coello’s pithy quote goes something like, “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It’s lethal”. At Art of Brill, we’re not about ‘reinventing’, that’s far too much effort. We’re all about ‘reminding’. Our message is that you are already brilliant. In fact, you are amazing – a miracle even! When you’re at your best, that is. And the ‘you at your best’ will say ‘yes’ to a whole load of things that the ‘average you’ would shun.

So for an adventure-filled 2017, your commitment needs to be ‘to be your best self more of the time’. There will be slippage but with a few reminders and a following wind, you will shine at work and home.

Be a 2%er. Be lucky, and I’ll see you at the Metallica gig.

Stephen Asbury, our health, safety and environment expert

Here’s a happiness strategy for anyone of any age, and yes, it is rather ‘fashionable’. There’s a Danish word, ‘hygee’ (pronounced ‘hoo-ga’) for which there is no direct English translation.

The best approximation might be ‘comfort’ or ‘coziness’? Coming in on a winter’s morning to a steaming mug of hot chocolate – that’s ‘hygge’ (especially if there’s a storm outside). Warming my feet in front of a roaring fire, family get-togethers at my mum’s, picking wild blackberries in the autumn, hugging my daughter when she comes home from uni, the smell of baking – they’re all hygge too. For me, that is. Your hygee will be different.

Happiness comes in all sorts of varieties – from the quiet contentment of ‘hygee’ to full blown ‘dancing around the house naked’ – and from an assortment of sources. If we dare to explore the upper end of the spectrum, you will find ‘joy’. This is a real biggy. First up, it’s not easy to experience joy on your own. If you think of your top 10 most joyous moments they will almost certainly have been a shared experience (and, at a guess, most probably without wi-fi?).

Joy is a difficult state to describe – somewhere beyond the ordinary swell of happiness into a feeling of unbridled pleasure that is often momentary. Joy is super-special because of its rarity. Anthony Seldon elucidates on the quantum leap from happiness to joy, describing joy as being immersed in love to a point where nothing can impregnate the moment and, somewhat prosaically, as a sense of coming home after a holiday, to the place and people you love the most. The point about joy is that it tends to be less about ‘me me me’ and more about being spiritually connected.

Please don’t fall into the trap of confusing ‘spirituality’ with ‘’religion. Spirituality, for me at least, means feeling connected. Which brings me onto Christmas, the perfect season for hoo-ga spotting and being connected to family and friends.

If you relax and observe, joy is all around.

Thank you for engaging with our simple messages. Happy Christmas from all at Art of Brilliance.

A x

The backstory to my greatest ever moment. August 1976. I was nine. In an era before Wi-Fi, when kids had to make their own entertainment, me and my mates spent the entire summer holidays swimming in the river Trent (yes, really), and practising holding our breath. By the end of the holidays I could do 1min 47sec. It was before hashtags had been invented but I have to say, in modern parlance, it was #impressive.

September 1976, Moorways Swimming Pool, Derby. Still age nine. Our class had been taken to the big swimming pool in Derby. It was a one-off. Our teacher had an hour to teach us to swim but, guess what, I already could. She split the ‘ones who could’ from the ‘ones who couldn’t’, and we took the deep end.

We all hung onto the side, awaiting our instructions. “Before we start,” she said, “we’re going to see who can stay underwater the longest.”

Luckily I’d already weed in the pool, otherwise I’d have wet myself with excitement. I’d been practising all summer. This was my moment. She counted backwards from three and we all bobbed under. I let out a smidgeon of breath, just enough to expertly sink to the bottom, where I sat, Zen-like. Goggles hadn’t been invented back then but my bleary vision picked out some kicking legs above. I was counting in my head and was at ‘37 elephants’ and feeling fine. I got to ‘60 elephants’ and started again. Could I actually beat 1min 47sec?

One and a half minutes was hurting but it would be worth the pain. “45 elephants, 46 elephants, 47 elephants,” I counted in my head. By now my face wasn’t very Zen. It was more etched in oxygen-depleted agony and I shot to the surface on 1 min and 49 elephants, punching the very air I was gasping for. A new record!

I looked around. My classmates were doggy paddling to the other side of the pool. Nobody even knew I was underwater. In fact, I’d been underwater for so long that the lesson had continued without me. I joined in, sheepishly.

The point? My greatest triumph was never noticed by anyone else. Nobody applauded. Nobody even knew. And the same goes with my greatest failures. And yours to. So while we all have terribly embarrassing moments from way-back, faux pas that can still redden our faces all these years later, the good news is that everyone else has forgotten or, even better, they don’t actually care. They’re busy being absorbed in their own moments of minor horror.

Please don’t let my attempt at light-heartedness deflect you from the true message. Anyone over the age of 30 has collected enough reasons to be miserable for the rest of their life. Let go! The biggest thing holding you back is you.

Step aside. Get out of your own way!

Andy C

Andy’s new book, The Little Book of Emotional Intelligence is riding high in the charts. If you haven’t read it yet, you can get your copy from our online shop.

A family used to be mum, dad, 2.4 kids and a Labrador. As we know, the modern world isn’t really like that. I’d like to introduce you to one of the most amazing people I’ve ever had the privilege to have in my life, my daughter, Rachel, who I first met in the pub when she was three.

I’d better explain. I was ‘dating’ her mum (now my wife) at the time, and Rachel was part of the package. A ‘special’ part as it happens and on our first meeting she spent half the lunchtime having a tantrum under the table because vinegar had been applied to her chips and that day was not a vinegar day. The rest of the time she spent investigating the pub, dragging a stool with her which she stood on when her height got in the way of seeing stuff.

Rachel grew up to be a prime example of nurture over nature and I struggle to understand the distinction some can make between a child who is yours by choice rather than birth. We had a very different relationship from the normal dad/daughter one. It was one of friendly rivalry as she had monopolised Vanessa’s time and I was a challenger. She also had a huge personal conflict; treating me like a father would be disrespectful to her father.

So we played a game and built a relationship around banter. Walking back from the shops one beautiful summer’s day up a back alley in Morecambe she says “teach me to spit properly Mike”. I tried to resist but it wasn’t really a request, so I taught her on the promise that she would not tell her mother. Needless to say as soon as we got back to the house we were staying in she beamed to Vanessa, “Guess what mum, Mike just taught me how to spit” and I was in the dog house…

When she was 13, Rachel was rushed into hospital and after a fraught weekend was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. If you had to have cancer as a young person it was the best one to have with a 95% success rate. Unfortunately, that percentage relies on one person in 20 not making it and as I said earlier, Rachel was special.

So as a family we entered a strange parallel universe, a twilight zone where your whole perspective of life is adjusted. Where every small win is valued and every major blow is taken, shaken off and you get back up and keep fighting. Luckily for us Rachel’s positivity and determination helped us all through.

She had cancer for three years and seven months but she was never ‘ill’. She got to school when she could and despite missing 60% of lessons passed her GCSEs and started to study for her A Levels. She had a blue badge, so took and passed her driving test when she was 16 (only a few months after I passed at 36!). She went to New York and had a fabulous time thanks to the wonderful staff at the hospital who managed to get her bloods up enough so she could fly.

She had some dark times too, we all did. But Rachel never lost sight of the important things: living for today; people; nice food; clothes. Even when she knew the cancer wasn’t going away she just accepted that she would live with it for the rest of her life and then she focused on living that life. She never once spoke of how long that life would be and neither did we. And as far as she was concerned she was a fit and well young woman who happened to have a cancer that wouldn’t go away. I remember a time she was having a check-up with a load of trainee doctors watching. Her liver was close to packing up, she was so pale she was translucent and when the doctor asked how she was she said “pretty good thanks, my back aches a bit but apart from that I’m fine”. I don’t think they had ever experienced someone with that much life in them.

In her last few months getting around was more challenging, so we got Rachel a wheelchair. It gave her the opportunity to make me push her around shopping centres and she would get up, have a browse of the clothes and come back out. The last time she drove was on her 17th birthday in January 2001, taking her childhood friend Amy out for the day. She had enough morphine in her to knock me out, but that wasn’t going to stop her.

She died on St Patrick’s day 2001. We knew that she wanted to be buried because one day when she was still in primary school she asked Vanessa “when I’m gone, you will put flowers on my grave Mum?”. Her best friend from school, Sam, wrote a poem to celebrate her life and she read it at the funeral without wavering. It wasn’t a day for crying, it was a day of celebration.

So you’ve probably worked out that this isn’t going to be one of the stories I tell at an Art of Brilliance workshop, which is a pity, as Rachel is my best example of how to be your best self, brilliantly. She was positive, determined and fearless to the end of her time with us. If you met her you wouldn’t forget her and your life was better for knowing her. She did not live a long life but, as Diane Ackerman would say, she more than lived its width and she taught me what love was about and how to live.

The key messages from the Art of Brilliance are so simple that it is easy to overlook and ignore them. We talk about ‘2%ers’, the small band of people who stand out for all the right reasons. I’m luckier than most as I had a young, beautiful, articulate, sometimes irritating person in my life for 14 years who demonstrated that life is not about what happens to you but is all about how you respond to those events.

She was and always will be my special 2%er and to use the words her best friend read out at the funeral – “I confess my admiration for a girl, I see a queen. The brave, courageous and most beautiful person I have ever known or seen.”

I can’t help thinking that Rachel’s life is a lesson to us all.

Mike x

Mike Martin is our new boy. Oh, and he just happens to be Welsh. He’s taken on the challenge of embedding happiness and positivity in schools and business across the world, with a particular emphasis on his homeland. If you’d like further details please drop him an email: mike@artofbrilliance.co.uk