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What's Reboot & Rise all about? Mindset change, habits & understanding our brains!

If this is the first article of mine you’re reading, then I want to say hello and to welcome you to my little corner of Substack! 👋

This is a slightly different article than the others I’ve published, as I want to use this space to introduce myself and to talk about what it is I’m trying to do here. To set out my stall, to create a manifesto, if you like, so you know where I’m coming from and what you can hope to gain from reading my writing.

Who I am

Let’s get this out of the way, first - I’m not a doctor or a psychologist. I’m also not a neuroscientist. My background is in computing, and I fly my geek/nerd flag with pride. 🤓

What I am, though, is someone who’s struggled with their own issues, someone with a childhood which left me with scars, a human being with a brain which sometimes has felt very broken.

I’m also someone who’s read widely around the topics of psychology, self-help and neuroscience.

I’ve used myself as a human Guinea Pig, if you like, trying out each idea I’ve gleaned from the books I’ve read and the podcasts and audiobooks I’ve listened to, then assessing how it’s worked.

Some ideas have stuck with me for a long time, others have either fallen by the wayside or have morphed into something else as they’ve combined with other ideas.

In my efforts to help myself, I found myself bursting with ideas for how I can help other people, and that synthesis of other peoples’ writing led me to come up with the idea for my system (and book) The Bad Habit Kicker in 2019.

I now spend my time coaching people, focusing on bad habits, and I also publish articles in this Substack - The Mindset Hacker - all on the topic of mindset and behaviour modification.

So, that’s who I am and what I do. But what do I believe?

As a nerd, I’m going to go with a bullet point list here:

• You are not weird

• The best thing we can all do is to build up a self-help toolkit to help us to get through this crazy life

Let me expand on those ideas.

You are not weird

Sure, you may be neurodivergent (or, as one of my coaching clients said recently, neurospicy 🌶️) or more neurotypical, you may be different than your friends and your family, and you may well feel like the odd one out, but rest assured, and hear me when I say YOU ARE NOT WEIRD.

Every single one of us struggles with things that many thousands, hundred of thousands if not millions of other human beings currently walking this planet also struggles with.

That’s one of the best things about the internet. It allows us to find our tribes. If you hop onto any social media platform and search for ADHD or Autism or anything else, you can find those other people who battle with the same things as you do. So, take heart, you’re not broken, you’re a human being, living in the twenty-first century, and it’s damned hard.

Our brains haven’t evolved all that much since prehistoric times, when our ancestors were living in caves, while the world around us would be utterly alien to them. The things we have to cope with in this modern age are literally mind-boggling, sometimes.

So, we all need a little help, and we should all forgive ourselves for being utterly and beautifully human.

Building a self-help toolkit

As I said, I’ve picked up plenty of strategies through the years. Some have stuck, and some haven’t.

One of the most enduring habits, and the one which I think made the most impact in my life, has been The Miracle Morning, which I’ve been doing since April 2016, every single day. I heartily recommend you pick up a copy, listen to Hal’s podcast or watch the movie here:

But, each problem we face, each battle is different. We’re different, every time we have a struggle on our hands. And so I believe that we need as many little tricks, tips or tactics as we can gather.

I believe it’s like cooking. We’re not always starving hungry, but sometimes we’re ravenous. We don’t always have the same ingredients in the house. We might be on a diet. And so, we choose different recipes from our own experience to use to satisfy our hunger.

As I mentioned, I’ve created my own tactic, The Bad Habit Kicker, and that works very well for some bad habits. But it doesn’t work for everything.

No tactic will. So, I believe that the more you know, the more tools in your toolbox, the more chance you’ll have of being able to work with (or around) our wonderful and yet befuddled brains, and to be able to deal with each issue you face, so that you can build the life of your dreams, for yourselves and for those you love, one baby step at a time!

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So, that’s me!

I hope you’ll connect with me and enjoy my writing, but most importantly I hope that you’ll pick up some really easy to implement tactics which you can use to help you to improve your life and to get the things you really want out of it!