Book synopsis

Changing your life isn’t that complicated when you know how, and when you know how
You Don’t Need Therapy
According to the World Health Organisation, there is a suicide every 40 seconds and in the UK alone, 16 people choose to end their lives every day. We have a chronic mental health problem. More and more people report they are struggling, yet therapy and medication, the conventional default solutions, are expensive and don’t seem to be working. You Don’t Need Therapy presents an alternative solution: The
SYSO System ®

• an easily digestible and cost efficient one stop system that can be applied by anyone
  wherever they are on their journey.
  Resources available for self-improvement are plentiful, but can be overwhelming and confusing. There are over 160 recognised types of psychotherapy, endless counselling styles, coaching methods, healing techniques, retreats, seminars and book offerings, yet many people simply don’t know where to start or what to do next. You Don’t Need Therapy introduces a one stop solution, the SYSO System®, with 7 simple steps and 70 practical exercises so you can DO the changing, rather than just read about it.
  By following the steps, you will change how you think, which will change how you feel, which will change what you do, all as quickly as you choose. You will create a new filter through which you experience life and by changing the filter, everything will look different.
  You don’t need therapy; you can sort your self out when you know how.

About the Author

Alan Lucas was born and raised in Belfast during the troubles and from a young age wondered why people would choose to kill others just because they had developed different beliefs.
After university, he worked as a ski instructor in the U.S, New Zealand, Australia, and Europe. He had a corporate career as a marketing boss at global sportswear brands Nike and Adidas and has founded various businesses.
An entrepreneur, coach and motivational speaker, Alan is passionate about self- improvement and helping people have more fun and fulfilling lives. He created the Sort Your Self Out system, and the EGO HERE® brand which donates its profits to the SYSO Foundation, providing personal development resources for young people to help them become the best versions of themselves.
You Don’t Need Therapy is his debut book. Alan can be found at http:/:www.youdontneedtherapy.com and is available for interview and writing feature articles.

Excerpt from the book

We understand about training our bodies for health, but we seldom talk about training, or programming, our minds for health, yet mind health will determine the quality of our life. For most people, mental health still has negative connotations; implying there’s a physical problem in someone’s head, or that something is broken. People are described as ‘having’ a mental illness or ‘having’ mental problems. Of course, people can ‘have’ physical problems in all parts of their bodies and some people do have a physical or technical hardware problem in their heads through injury or structural defect, but the vast majority of us haven’t got a mental ‘illness’. We just haven’t learnt how to ‘do’ the process of thinking more effectively in a way which makes us feel great and empowered to make the most of our lives. 

Our brain is a processor, and it is running processes. We need to work on the processes and how we are doing them, because when we change these, we change our feelings and we change our life. If we are doing a process, we can do it differently when we know how to. We might have a virus, some ‘wiring’ ineffectiveness or a chemical imbalance in our brains and bodies, but we can recondition our thinking to create new processes, or patterns, which will change the ‘wiring’ and the chemical mix, which will change our feelings. We can upgrade our software to upgrade our life. 

Most people aren’t aware of their thinking processes, or believe it’s just ‘not that easy’ to make changes to their thinking. People who are struggling to change some behaviour, such as smoking or overeating, often say things like “I just can’t help it,” or “I have an addiction.” When we assign blame to something outside of our control for something we want to change, or don’t like about ourselves, we can then say “It’s not my fault” or “I’m an addict” and this can take away our responsibility and our ability, or the power we have, to make the changes. Taking 100% responsibility for what we do and how we feel is the foundation of creating the life we want. We can’t control things outside ourselves but we can control our inner world and we can take responsibility for how we think and how we feel. We have the power over our thinking, so all that we have to do is use this power, and not give it up. 

The brain is designed to work for us, and it’s our unconscious (we’ll learn more about this later), which runs most of our behaviour like an autopilot. We just need to give directions and tell the brain to do the processes that will cause the thoughts, feelings and behaviour we want. These forces for thinking, feeling and behaving are all inside us. Everything we need is within us right here, right now. 

When we take charge of our thinking, we can train our minds to take action that will get the results we want in any area of our life. What we don’t change, we are actively choosing. And we need to train our brains to focus on the solutions, and not waste time overanalysing the problems.

Disclaimer – Thank you to Midas for my gifted copy of this book