Breaking up doesn't have to be hard to do. A Happy Hour Conversation with Piers Thurston

This week's show is with Piers has been a personal and professional development coach since 2001, and coached 100s clients for 1000s of hours; ranging from national newspaper editors, to Sheiks in Riyadh, to international sports people. He first discovered the principles in 2009, but it wasn’t until participating in SuperCoach 2011 that he realise this was going to be a huge turning point in his life and work. Previously he had based my change work around NLP (he was a NLP trainer) Clean Language, Appreciative Inquiry, and range of others approaches and techniques. Now he is having a wonderful time exploring the Principles with his clients, both in the corporate and private client worlds.

Piers is currently in the final stages of divorce and has generously agreed to share what he's learned from going through the experience. So in this show we explore whether it's possible to go through a relationship break-up and divorce without it being a long battle of bitterness and anger.

I’d love to know what YOU think about this week's show. Let’s carry on the conversation…  please leave a comment below.

What you'll learn from this episode:

• We all have our own narrative about what a relationship should be like. Recognising that that that narrative is just something we've made up (via thought) allows us to 'loosen our narrative' and be open to moving onto a different relationship with the other person, whether that's as friends, amicable exes or something else.
• Some thinking can be particularly seductive - Piers likened it to being sucked in by the Dementors from Harry Potter! That kind of thinking can be very hard to notice that it's just thought. But it can be so helpful to notice that even the most seductive, Dementor-like thinking isn't us (just like our dreams aren't us), it doesn't last 24/7 and when we're not thinking about something, we're not feeling it.
• We often build stories around people in our life and then continually see that person through that lens. But we can look afresh from a neutral space ('mind neutral' as Piers described it) and see the person how they actually are in this moment, without all the thinking around justification, traditional, commitment, beliefs, history and fairness. From that neutrality we have the opportunity to create a whole different relationship with them. Even knowing this neutrality exists, makes it possible for us.
• You don't have to stick at difficult conversations if either of you are in a low state of mind. Piers gave the example of he and his ex-wife having a conversation about money and having an awareness of their state of mind. When the feeling dropped, they agreed to pause and then waited until they were in a higher state of mind before restarting the conversation. 
• I loved the point that Piers made at the end: if you're going through a difficult break-up right now, there's probably aspects such as money or custody which don't look like they're 'just thought', but it is all made of the same stuff as everything else. You always have the opportunity to have a liberation from the way you're thinking and feeling about it at the moment.