How would you like to change or enhance your personal mindset and change your life situation? Many people get stuck in a rut and let’s face it, there are plenty of ruts to get stuck in. Societal, work, political, relationship, aesthetic and sometimes in many ways, worst of all, our own way of thinking.
All of these can be stressful. It can seem as if we have no way out or that our responsibilities preclude the possibility of changing our circumstances. I firmly believe it is never too late to change. It may take some rearranging and serious planning but it can be done if you really want to.
Bear with me for a while. I promise to come back to the main focus of this article, but I have to set the scene so you know where I’m coming from.
In my mid twenties, I was at a loss about what to do with my life. My dreams of becoming a fashion photographer had been shattered ( see the link below to What is Mindset Initiation). I had done a few jobs that I didn’t really enjoy and was looking for something more challenging. Looking back on it now, I can see I could probably have set off on my own and developed a freelance business doing just what I wanted. I think, though, that I was pretty angry and depressed about what had happened and just wanted to get away from it completely. A few years later, I did run quite a successful photography business for a couple of years.
Back to where I was. I had caught up with a friend from high-school and I was telling him how frustrated I was and that I was looking for an interesting job. My friend had become a psychiatric nurse and he suggested that I might be successful in doing that. It piqued my interest and I applied almost immediately.
The interview was pretty interesting. Questions were asked about how I felt I would deal with a variety of quite shocking situations. One of the questions was literally put like this. “ How do you think you would deal with a situation where there was an actual shit-fight going on? Where people were throwing faeces at each other and probably at you? My friend had forewarned me that I would probably get asked questions like this and I must have handled it OK because, they hired me.
In those days, the mid to late 70’s, large public psychiatric hospitals still existed. There were about 1500 patients in a variety of wards, from admissions to geriatric and approximately 1500 nurses. There were a variety of shifts in the various wards so it averaged out to about one nurse to three patients most of the time. Depending on which ward you were in, that could make for some pretty interesting situations.
I found I really enjoyed being a nurse. My first stint was in a Repatriation ward with about 40 old soldiers from various wars. We even had an old fellow who had been in the Boer War. Sadly, he had been in this same hospital nearly as long as he had been back from that war. In those days, most of these patients were diagnosed primarily with “War Neurosis”. They often had many other issues including institutionalisation, as well as physical issues. War neurosis had previously been called shell-shock. Today we call it PTSD. It is the way the body and mind often react to extreme stress situations. The labels change but the problem remains.
Towards the end of my career at the hospital, I had spent several months working with the criminally insane. This was an immensely interesting and stressful period. Child, molesters, multiple murderers, serial rapists, arsonists, psychopaths and patients that were just too dangerous to keep in the general admission wards were all to be found here.
I loved it. I used to work a seven day night shift. This meant I had 7 days on, 6:30pm to 6:30am, then 7 days off. It was great. I worked a week and then would often drive up the coast, where I had several friends living. I’d head up there for surfing and to clear my head. It was a great lifestyle. Life was good.
My posting in the hospital was to the locked ward dormitory where the most dangerous patients slept. They were usually pretty dosed-up with their night meds, but we still had some interesting situations. The nurses station was a small cubicle, centrally located so that we could see all the patients in their beds from where we sat. The cubicle had a lockable door and chicken wire embedded in the windows to make it hard to smash through. It was open at the top, about six foot high.
I was the junior nurse to a “Charge Nurse” who was fully registered and theoretically able to deal with most nursing situations. I had been posted with a very pleasant fellow who was also studying to be a doctor. We got on very well and we both believed in dealing with situations as calmly as we possibly could. Only resorting to physical force when absolutely necessary. This might be a situation where one patient was threatening another in some way, for example or if a patient was just ‘going off’. We were as fair as we could be with the patients and did our best to treat them with respect, even though several of them really were vile individuals. Several were really only dangerous to themselves.
We had been working together for nearly six months. It was unusual to spend this amount of time in the same ward as the bureaucracy liked to move trainee nurses around pretty regularly. They were having difficulty getting nurses to work in this ward and these shifts, so I volunteered to stay longer, as I found it really interesting.
Everything had been going smoothly for months. We would spend our week in the ward, The charge nurse would fill in the nightly/weekly reports, mostly uneventful and then we would head off and innocently do our own thing for a week.
When we had initially started the very first shifts in the dormitory we had told the patients that if they were reasonable with us we would be reasonable with them. However, we were not going to take any nonsense. If they made things difficult for us we would do what we had to do for our and the other patient’s safety. This had worked pretty well, most of the time.
One week we came back from our break and several of the other nurses were very tense. As I mentioned, we put in our weekly report each week. The other nurses who did the alternate week to us also submitted their reports. They were very different.
Back then, and dare I say still in certain parts of the world, particularly in gaols, there was what we used to call “Thump Therapy”. If a patient was sufficiently unruly and particularly if they threatened or injured a nurse, they would potentially receive a dose of thump therapy along with their meds on their way to an isolation room. This aspect of the incident didn’t make it to the daily ward report of course and was not something I took part in.
The hospital had been very solidly built out of sandstone in the late 1800’s. These isolation cells, were small concrete walled boxes. with a window very high up that let a little light in, a vinyl covered rubber mattress and, that’s it. The door to these rooms was your standard metal door with a small peep-hole. The patient would be placed into these rooms in no uncertain terms, until they calmed down.
Unfortunately, some nurses, if you could call them that, resorted to thump therapy at other times. And it seems that on the week that I wasn’t there, our colleagues had a very unruly bunch of patients. There were apparently many fights, patient on patient rape attempts and other unpleasantries occurring, pretty much the opposite of our experience. This “required” intervention by the nursing staff and their reports were, shall we say, much more dramatic and action-filled than ours tended to be.
As some wise person once said. “You can’t beat bad luck”.
The people who read the reports were concerned about the discrepancies in the alternating weeks reports. Relatively speaking our reports were considered “out of character” considering the patients we had. The number of “incidents” on the alternating weeks was a red flag. The comeuppance was that my charge nurse and indirectly I, were accused of lying in our reports. This was quite a shock. We stood up for ourselves, even though as the senior nurse, my charge nurse took a lot more of the flak than I did. The bureaucracy indicated that he might like to transfer to a different ward, which he reluctantly did.
I still had about half of my three month block to work through. As this whole thing had upset the rostering system, I found myself with a different charge nurse as my boss each alternate week I worked. The first couple of guys I worked with were good, fair and reasonable nurses but the third one was of the old-skool thump therapy ilk. He would taunt the patients. Rile them up and generally be a pain in the arse. We had many more “incidents” when he was there. It became very unpleasant to work with him because our views were diametrically opposed but he was my superior, so I pretty much had to do what he asked of me. I didn’t get into any really unpleasant situations but it was not fun. It is interesting, how different approaches to the same situation can have a very different outcome.
One day in the midst of this frustrating chaos, I was speaking with a colleague of mine who had started nursing at the same time as me and we had spent time together during the regular training sessions we did off-ward. I was telling him about my situation and how I thought that I was going to have to quit nursing because the whole affair had really tainted how I felt about the job. The observant reader will quickly notice the thread of disappointment I have encountered with authority.
So now, as promised, back to the original concept of this article.
While speaking with my colleague I was struck by his closed-minded way of looking at things. Even though he could completely understand my frustration and the urge to leave, he had a big block in his mind. Indeed, he had suffered through a somewhat similar series of events in the ward he was in.
He was thirty years old. I was about twenty seven. He was supportive of my idea to leave nursing and pursue other opportunities but he said he couldn’t do it because now that he was thirty and he had had numerous jobs which had been unsatisfying in the past, he saw nursing as his last chance. He actually said to me. “ Well you are lucky, you can go and do something else, but nursing is my last chance. I’m too old to start something new. This is my last chance!” Even as he said this it shocked me. He was only thirty but in many ways he had given up and decided to just grin and bear it. I felt truly sorry for him. I loved nursing but I wasn’t going to be broken by the system that easily.
What is my point?
It is that it is never too late to change. If you don’t like the way things are going, you have to change the circumstances somehow. If you keep doing what you have always done, you’ll keep getting what you have always gotten. There is always a choice. There is always a different way of looking at things. These are not purely binary situations. In fact there is nearly always a third or even fourth option if you look outside the box. Yes, certainly these cliches are overused but there is an inherent truth in them. For thousands of years we have been living in a world primarily based on a binary system . Good-bad, hot-cold, right-left, black-white.
Many of us now live in a world where we have many more options. We can learn new skills, explore different interests. You can use YouTube to learn just about any skill or hobby you can imagine. This offers tremendous opportunities.
It doesn’t matter if it is a relationship or a job, some people escalate situations and some people de-escalate. How often do we block ourselves? I’m too old, too young, too poor. We always have a choice. Sometimes it takes some work but that is OK. The effort you put into planning a new outcome is all part of the experience.
One more personal anecdote.
In 1981 my father, Leslie, bought an Apple II Europlus computer for his business. At this time he was incredibly busy with his Hypnotherapy business and wanted to use the computer to maintain a database of his clients and also to help him manage one of his new ventures. He had recently begun travelling into country New South Wales doing group sessions helping people quit smoking. In those times he would conduct smoking cessation sessions with from about 10 to sometimes more than 30 people at a time. We travelled thousands of miles to small towns all over the state. He had a fantastic system that I still use to this day in my practice. I wasn’t doing hypnotherapy at this time so I was basically his roadie, setting up his audio equipment, making sure we had enough chairs and etc.
Leslie didn’t really have time to learn all the idiosyncrasies about the computer and even though I wasn’t at all interested in it at first, I started helping him set it up. I set up a database system for him and used VisiCalc to do a simple spreadsheet to keep track of the business.
Over the next couple of years I did a lot of work with computers and eventually joined a software training company as a teacher of the database program DBase II, which was the program I was using to maintain my father’s database.
This was a tremendously programmable database and it set off my adventures in the IT business. To cut a very long story short, at least for now, I spent about six years in a variety of computer businesses from wholesale to retail to eventually helping create specialised turnkey systems for the animation industry.
These were very exciting times in the computer business. Personal computers were still relatively scarce until the late 80’s and Desktop Publishing was a thing.
The company I was now working for was growing at well over 35% per year and new staff and managers were always being hired. At one point my branch got a new general manager. He and I had a very different way of looking at business. Suffice to say that once again authority and I had a problem. After a relatively short period of having stand-up ‘debates’ with this guy about how to run my business sector, I came to the conclusion that my days were numbered in this organisation.
At the same time my father was encouraging me to join him in the Hypnotherapy business and now that I had a whole lot more life experience, dealing with people from all walks of life, I figured he was right. I had been doing a number of hypnosis associated training courses for years anyway. So overnight I changed from getting to the office at 7am each day and leaving at 7pm, to straight 9-5, which is all I was actually getting paid for anyway. I used the saved time to study Hypnotherapy more comprehensively with the plan that I would start seeing clients in the evenings after work. I gave myself a year and said if the IT business is still a pain I’ll go full-time Hypnotherapy. Within six months I realised that Hypnotherapy was a much better fit for me, I gave my notice and now over thirty years later I am happily self-employed doing something I get an enormous amount of pleasure from. At the same time, I know, that if I had to, even at 67 years of age, I could change and begin a completely new profession if I really wanted too. I don’t, but I could.
Congratulations if you have gotten this far. I trust you can see that it really never is too late to change. You always have a choice. Maybe not all choices work the way you would like them to but then you have the opportunity to make another choice, and so on.
Life is too short to waste doing something you don’t like. I’m sure you don’t want to look back at your life 10 or 20 years from now and say, “Gee I wish I had tried doing ???”
If you don’t like how your life is now or hate the job you are in, look into creative ways to expand or change so that you can move forward and achieve your highest potential. Is there something you wanted to be when you were a kid? Does it still appeal? It could be a hobby, a skill or a profession. Do some research and study. Maybe you can incorporate it into what you are already doing. Have you just heard about some new thing or technology? Maybe you could get involved in that.
Mindsets are made to be changed, updated, focused and enhanced. Your life experience offers you opportunities of understanding that no-one else on the planet can ever really match and this unique differentiation means you have things to offer that no-one else does. Use it to your advantage.
All you have to do is find a creative way to change your mind.
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If you haven’t already, now might be a good time to refer to my earlier articles, particularly
which includes a simple relaxation exercise,
and
which explores some avenues for configuring your personal mindset.
William Bulllock has been a Clinical Hypnotherapist and Stress Management Consultant in Australia for over thirty years. His father and two of his siblings were also Hypnotherapists. He is the Past President of the Professional Clinical Hypnotherapists of Australia, a member of the IHF and a photomedia artist. William is available for consultation or questions via his website.
All images in this article are by William.
It's never too late to change!