Help Me! by Marianne Power

Author:Marianne Power
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

Day Three – dubbed Transformation Day – was the big one. Tony explained that there are two reasons we make changes in life: either because we are in so much pain we have no choice or because the potential rewards are so great we can’t say no. In order to make changes we needed to focus on the benefits we’d get from the change and also scare ourselves witless with the thought of what would happen if we didn’t change.

First we were asked to identify our limiting beliefs, the beliefs that shaped our world and stopped us from getting what we wanted. As sad music played, I wrote down my two most persistent and limiting of beliefs: men don’t like me and I’m crap with money.

Tony asked us to close our eyes and imagine what would happen if we held on to these beliefs in five, ten, fifteen years from now? An image came to me instantly: I was standing by a bathroom mirror. My skin looked ashen. My hair was grey and limp. I opened the bathroom cabinet to take pills, antidepressants, and I closed it again. I was wearing a white shapeless nightdress. I was a spinster in my fifties but I looked much older. The bathroom was in a rented flat I could hardly afford. I was broke and alone. I pictured myself putting on make-up and plastering on a smile as I went to visit my friends in their family homes, alive with love and noise and people. I fake-smiled as I sat at their kitchen table and told them that I was fine before asking about them and listening for hours. Then I returned to my flat, alone, irrelevant, invisible.

The vision was so real it was a shock. This was what my life would be if I carried on the way I had until now. I started to cry and so did everyone around me.

A woman to my right was wailing as if she’d just lost her child. A man behind me was sobbing. Edvard Munch’s The Scream was being reenacted by seven thousand people in a conference hall in London’s Docklands. It went on for an eternity as Tony urged us to feel the horror. We did.

Then the music changed. Something lighter came on, something that sounded like fairy dust being sprinkled on the stadium. This was our cue to change our emotions.

We were then asked to identify the opposite of our limiting beliefs and shout them at the top of our voice. ‘I am great with money!’ I bellowed. ‘Men love me!’ I yelled less loudly, in case the (good-looking) man two seats down thought I was weird. We were then to visualize what life would be like if we lived according to these new beliefs.

I closed my eyes. I was in the bathroom again, looking at the mirror. But it was a different mirror and a different bathroom. This time I was smiling and humming to myself as I put my make-up on; I was wearing slim black trousers and a cream blouse.

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