Who Motivates The Motivator?

But who’s there when that person needs some support, some advice, a smile? Who helps you when your energy for empathy drains?

Who does motivate the motivator?

I thought about this the other day at a memorial service for a childhood friend who passed away suddenly just after New Year.

Graeme was an empath, a leader, an inspiration. People of all ages gravitated towards him, he had time and a smile and a word of encouragement for them all.

After years as an engineer, he’d realised that while he was good at making things, he was better still at making others happy and switched to working with troubled youngsters. 

At the same time, he was becoming a key figure in his local church, giving up countless hours to help create a stronger sense of community in the area where he, his wife and their son lived. They’d regularly welcome friends to their home for lunch or dinner or just to chat. And when he wasn’t doing all of this, he’d either be driving his boy around the country to play football or the pair of them would be off watching their favourite team together. 

At which point I have to admit that all of this passed me by, because after growing up a couple of hundred yards from each other, going to school together and playing in the same football team, Graeme and I had lost touch. 

Then, back in November, he sent me a message. He’d seen that I was helping people with their mental health and it reminded him of how long it had been since we’d seen each other. It then turned out that two regulars in one of my spin classes were friends of his through the church, which gave us a fresh connection.

When my book The Reason Everything Happens was released soon after, Graeme got in touch to say he’d ordered a copy.

Then, he began to open up.

See, in a job like Graeme’s, it doesn’t only become easy to normalise traumatic situations, it can be an essential defence against burning out. He’d see young people self-harm. He’d see them try to take their own lives. Worst of all, sometimes one of them would succeed.

When someone tells us stuff like this about their job or their private life, it freaks us out. We can’t believe they’re able to deal with it. Yet, so often, they themselves feel like there’s no option but to deal with it, to convince themselves that it’s just part of what they signed up for, just part of being who they are.

This is manageable for a while, just as shoving all our rubbish in a cupboard is manageable until the day the doors refuse to close and it all comes tumbling back out.

It didn’t feel quite like Graeme was at that point, but his cupboard was definitely getting full. Even for someone with his levels of empathy, someone programmed to absorb the feelings and emotions others are experiencing, things were started to nip at him.

The last message he sent me suggested we got together for coffee and a chat once Christmas and New Year were out of the way. It was a catch-up I looked forward to very much, partly because it been way too long, but also because if felt like he had things to unburden himself of to someone he saw as detached from the circles he spent his life in – family, church, work.

Sadly, that catch-up was never to happen. No sooner had 2024 arrived than Graeme gone, his death through natural causes leaving a gigantic hole in the lives of his family and of so many others who loved and respected him. 

The turnout at a service to celebrate his life said everything about the man he was, a wonderfully upbeat occasion in so many ways, yet one laden with sadness and regret. His son Andrew spoke beautifully, church members eulogised him, the room  prayed and sang and often rang with laughter at tales from his life.

It was said more than once that Graeme himself would have loved to be there to see and hear how much others appreciated him, even if logic told you that he himself would rather the whole shebang hadn’t been happening, because then he’d still have been with us.

But you got what people meant when they said it. They meant that what a day like this really needed was Graeme to be there playing the part he’d always played so well – saying the right thing, setting the right tone, making everyone feel better about themselves.

Thing is, we all know a Graeme. We all have someone in our family, in our circle of friends, at work or somewhere else in our lives who understands us better than most, who really does get us. The one who just seems to know the right thing to do and say, who always seems to pop up when a little slice of wisdom and warmth is needed. 

Hopefully, we truly appreciate every moment we get to spend with these amazing people. Just as importantly, though, here’s hoping we learn to recognise when they need that coffee and a chat, when it’s their turn to unload life’s stresses and strains.

They might resist the offer, because that’s the empath’s way; chances are, they’ll flip the request right round and start asking how you are – and maybe the harder you try, the more they’ll back away. Persist with it, though. Let them know you’re always there.

Make them an open offer to sit down for coffee and a natter. Follow up with a message telling them that you mean it, that you care about them.

At very least, it will remind the kind of person whose gifts can often be taken for granted that they truly are appreciated, it will let them see how much their wonderful qualities have rubbed off on others.

At best?

An hour later, a day, a week, a month, they’ll message or they’ll take you aside and they’ll ask if your offer still stands.

Because trust me, even the Duracell Bunny of empaths eventually needs their batteries recharged.

So many of us have that ‘thing’ messing with our heads.

It can be a bad memory that haunts us, a trauma that changed the way we see the world – but usually, it’s just a story we tell ourselves that we struggle to let go of.
I’m not good enough. I’m not smart enough. I don’t deserve love, happiness, a better job.

It’s just the way I am.
That song, Liontamer, gets it bang on. The longer we hang on to these stories, the more they can poison us, even destroy us.

That’s what my new book, The Reason Everything Happens, wants us to fight against. It encourages us to questions our internal stories, to revisit bad memories and traumas and see them for what they all are: Nothing more than thoughts.
Strip away all the bull***t and that’s all any of these poisonous things are; thoughts, not facts.

Politics, religion, the class system, football rivalries, so many external influences which we’re told divide us, yet none of them are real, just one person’s thoughts pitted against another’s.

The teacher who told us we’d never amount to anything wasn’t telling the truth, just projecting their own prejudice. The parent who gave in to the belief that we had to know our place was only repeating the story their parents passed down.

In The Reason Everything Happens, I invite us to question these thoughts with two little words:

WHO SAYS?
Who says we’re not good enough? Who says we don’t deserve the things we yearn for? Who says how we vote or pray or which team we support has to divide us?
From experience, both personal and from working with others on their mental health, these stories don’t often stand up to much scrutiny from these two little words. And deep down, I think most of us know they won’t.

We’re maybe just a little bit scared to say them.

As the song says, though, the truth lies within us. Until we accept and embrace that truth about ourselves, it’s so much more difficult for us to understand the world around us. And until we’re able to understand the world around us, it’s so much more difficult to become the person we’re capable of being.

When I coach stronger mental health, which I’ve been doing for the past three years after a lot of DIY work on my own mind, I don’t promise answers. My job is to lead you towards your own answers, because only you know what those answers are – and often, we DO know, we either just don’t know we know or don’t want to admit it.

In the same way, this book doesn’t have all the answers, but it pokes us to ask the questions that lead towards them. It questions the difference between social media’s idea of what happiness looks like and what it actually is. It questions the current fads of self-labelling – yes, including labelling ourselves with mental health issues – of being triggered and of feigning offence.

It looks at practical ways of quietening our minds when we feel overwhelmed, it urges us to only try and control what’s controllable, it reminds us that we don’t always need a docto or a therapist to make us feel better.
It even tells us very bluntly at one point not to be a dick.

So, why is it called what it’s called? Simply because of my belief that rather than us being at the mercy of some huge, universal plan, The Reason Everything Happens is that we make it happen through everything we say and do and believe.
It’s up to us to take responsibility for these words and actions, which means working to let go of the past, of bad memories, of traumas, of our stories.
Or, to quote the recently-departed actor Matthew Perry, it’s about realising that:
“I am enough, I was always enough.

I was just the only one who couldn’t see it”.

Let’s start realising the same about ourselves.
Not tomorrow, but today. Right now.