Thinking of life as a sport comes naturally to many. As the new year begins, thoughts turn to “racking up points”, “the big score”, and “winning”. But unless you stop to figure out what kind of game you’re playing, winning may turn out to be losing. The good news is that whatever “game” you’ve decided to play, you can often change the rules.

In the process of starting a business, building a career, or some other large, audacious goal, you could do worse than to tap into the voices of experience around you. And yet even if you listen to the collected wisdom of your elders, their sage advice may fail to produce results. Here’s how “the experts” can steer you wrong.

Being an ethical practitioner of counselling requires us as therapists to take care of our own needs for nourishment so that we are able to offer a nourishing therapeutic relationship to clients. The risks of not doing so are potentially damaging to all of us.

A time to slow down and recharge, or a dark nightmare of miserable tension? A lot depends on whether we have to keep going with our usual hectic lives…and on our attitude. Here are some things I have learned from winter in Poland.

Boredom is not something that’s exclusively experienced by youngsters on long car journeys or on rainy days during school holidays. It can also afflict us as adults, when we begin to feel a sense that life has lost some of its variety and flavour. Tackling a feeling of ‘life-boredom’ gives us the chance to draw on some of the life skills we began to develop as children.

Pressured from all sides, from the Government to the pupils, teachers are increasingly suffering burnout. The problems may seem insurmountable, but the most important point in protecting yourself from burnout turns out to be a very simple one: treat yourself as if you were actually very important.

Feeling that your freedom of choice has been taken away can be deeply frustrating, but even in very restrictive circumstances, we can still choose how to respond to what is going on in our lives — by recognising the limitations of our ability to exercise control and then making our choices within them.