This week I’m sharing a blog post from my good friend Nicola Bird, who is a fellow student on SuperCoach Academy.

It made me laugh out loud – and gives a light-hearted take on the idea that we don’t have to believe, listen or act on ALL our thoughts.  Some of them are just not worth taking seriously.  And there will always be another thought along in a minute.

No offence is meant to anybody called Bob!

This post is a mix of inspirations from Michael Neill and Dr Aaron Turner and my personal interpretation of them (apologies if I’ve stretched this metaphor into something neither of them originally intended!).

Imagine there’s a board of directors in your head.

Claire’s well turned out.  She’s a control freak, but you can tell she loves you, and she’s the chairwoman of the board.

Mary is the pessimistic one. She’s always got a ‘yeah but’ and she’ll point out the downside of any plan you might have. Usually around ‘there’s not enough time’

Stuart is the funny one, and can see the humour in any situation.

Lyn’s the crazy one. Only she thinks it’s everyone else that’s crazy so she spends most the time alternating between shaking her head at how crazy everyone else’s ideas are, and swearing a lot.

Kirsty’s the ‘buzzy one’ – you can hear the energy and passion in her voice.  She’s the ‘go get ‘em’ girl.  She’s the cheerleader at the table  – she always says ‘yes, of course you can’ for any discussion you’ve brought to the table.

Silvio is the wise one. He doesn’t say a lot, but when he does, it’s normally profound.

And then you’ve got Bob.

Bob is the guy who shows up at the board of directors meeting from time to time. He’s normally a bit drunk too, so when he turns up, he tends to rant.

“What a load of nonsense! You’re too fat to try/do/wear that! Eat tinfoil! Why can’t you make more money? Then you could buy me more tinfoil! Why can everyone else do this thing you’re trying to do and you make it look so hard! Perhaps you should eat more tinfoil.” and similar crazy rantings.

Only some of the rants seem to sound true to you.

You can’t kick him off the board.  Claire’s his aunt.

You’ve tried to influence him to leave of his own accord, and used thousands of NLP techniques.  But to no avail.

In fact the more you try to get rid of him the larger he appears and the louder he gets.

It’s the Special Brew.

We’ve all got a Bob. He shows up and rants.

Today he says to me: ‘You’re taking your daughter to Disney Land, are you mad? In fact, did you forget you’re mad? You’ve had anxiety about leaving the HOUSE before and now you think you can go all the way to France on your own with her? What if you get a migraine? Who’s going to help you? Not enough tinfoil there to save you.’ And so on and so on.

The question is how seriously you take him.

Six years ago, I didn’t know Bob existed.

Two years ago, I learned about ‘gremlins’ which sound far scarier and more important to be got rid of than Bob.

Now I know it’s Bob, and I really don’t care if he turns up or not.

‘Oh, hi Bob, I see you. Thanks for the advice.’

And I just let him continue to mutter into his beer can in the corner.

In fact you don’t need to take ANY of your board of directors seriously.  You’ve got access to something far better than that.

But that’s for the next post….

So homework from this post: Just notice when Bob turns up. What rubbish has he got for you this week?