Emotions are a reaction to your beliefs, and those beliefs were not chosen. They were constructed and shaped over years by your experiences, your culture, your parents, your role models, and in some cases by shock and trauma in childhood. That early imprinting forms your sense of identity, your values, your attitude to life, and your understanding of what the world around you means.

As you read this, it is worth asking: which expectations from your upbringing are still with you today? Are they helping you or holding you back?

Through working with clients over many years, one conclusion stands out clearly: beliefs are essentially habits. Through a habitual system of thinking and living, you create a picture of what you can and cannot do. And once that picture is fixed, your mind works hard to keep it in place.

Here is a figure worth sitting with. We are only consciously aware and in control of our thinking around 5% of the time. The other 95% is being run by the subconscious mind, quietly, automatically, and largely out of reach.

That may explain a great deal. Why someone keeps ending up in the same type of relationship. Why the weight goes back on. Why the same destructive patterns repeat, despite every conscious effort to change them.

You may even know someone like this. They go through a painful break-up, struggle for a while, and then before long find themselves in an almost identical situation with a different person. From the outside it is baffling. From the inside it feels like bad luck. But what is actually happening is the subconscious mind favouring the familiar, even when the familiar is harmful.

The barrier between where you are and where you want to be is not circumstances. It is the 95% running in the background.

Alongside breathwork, the other powerful lever is self talk, the running commentary most of us have learned to ignore.

Self talk is going on all of the time. Ranging from fleeting thoughts to full daydreams, most of it sits below the level of conscious awareness. And most of it is negative, quietly shaping your attitudes towards your relationships, your work, your body, and your sense of what is possible.

Your unconscious mind does not distinguish between a real threat and an imagined one. If you spend your days telling yourself you are not good enough, that things always go wrong, that you cannot cope, your nervous system responds accordingly. It treats those thoughts as instructions.

The results can be striking. Clients who have spent years telling themselves they cannot lose weight, cannot be confident, cannot sustain a good relationship, have seen dress sizes drop, self-confidence soar, and relationships transform, simply by changing their self talk and reprogramming the subconscious mind. Not through willpower. Through rewiring.

Positive self talk, practised consistently, is not wishful thinking. It is a trainable skill with measurable effects on mood, focus, resilience, and physical health. Pioneers like Emile Coue and modern neuroscientists including Dr Joe Dispenza and Dr Bruce Lipton have spent careers demonstrating just how powerful this shift can be.

Research shows that around 77% of the average person's internal dialogue is negative. And 80% of it is a repeat of the day before. That means most of us are running the same anxious script, day in and day out, without even realising it. The mind is powerful and habitual by nature. A thought, repeated often enough, leads to a stronger feeling. That feeling becomes an emotion, energy in motion. That emotion drives behaviour. And behaviour, repeated, becomes a habit. Eventually it becomes a belief about yourself or the situation you are in.

That constant mental noise keeps your nervous system in a state of high alert, what scientists call survival mode. And survival mode has a physical cost. When your body believes it is under threat, it prioritises immediate protection over everything else. Your heart rate increases. Blood pressure rises. Digestion slows. Your immune system, the very thing that keeps you healthy, takes a back seat.

Over time, chronic worry does not just exhaust you mentally. It makes you physically vulnerable too. More colds. More tension. More unexplained aches. A body that never quite gets the chance to recover.

Here is something most people do not know: the way you breathe is making this worse. The majority of people breathe from their chest, shallow, rapid breaths that keep the nervous system firing. This pattern signals danger to your brain, even when there is no danger present. It is a loop that feeds itself: worry triggers chest breathing, chest breathing amplifies the stress response, and the stress response deepens the worry.

Breaking that loop starts with something as simple as how you inhale.

Breathing from the diaphragm, low, slow, and controlled, activates the vagus nerve and shifts your body into rest and recovery mode. Anxiety reduces. Focus improves. Your body finally gets the signal that it is safe to stand down. This is not alternative medicine. It is neuroscience. And it is one of the first things addressed in every positive change programme.

The brain is not fixed. It is adaptable, constantly rewiring itself based on input and experience. That capacity for change is called neuroplasticity, and it means that no matter how long you have been running a negative internal script, a different pattern is always possible. Clients who work through Dominic's positive change programmes consistently report that the combination of breathwork and self-talk techniques continues to benefit them years after their programme ends. Not because they have to think about it, but because it becomes the way they naturally operate.