I haven’t blogged in about a month because I have been busy finishing my latest two books.

The first of these books is my 30th book which is a milestone I’m proud to have reached.

As readers of my blog will know, my main focus is as an autism advocate sharing my experiences as an autistic individual and as someone who has spent much of my working life supporting other autistic people, their families, friends and other involved professionals.

One thing I am always keen to point out is that although being autistic has many challenges, we also have many strengths and being autistic isn’t a barrier to success.

Some people need support or guidance, or perhaps education around learning certain skills or learning to use skills they have and perhaps traits they didn’t think of as skills, but autistic people are as capable as anyone else at achieving things.

I remember about 20 years ago I had quit a job because of changes they were making to the workplace. A few months later they asked me to return. I went and met with the manager to talk to them about their proposal for me returning. I shared about what I wanted to achieve in the future – I was about 20 at the time. The manager told me that I should forget those dreams, I’m the type of person who will only ever be a member of staff, not someone who can achieve anything with my life – so I left and never took their proposal for returning to the job.

This wasn’t the only time I had this kind of reaction. I had many people tell me to forget these ideas of achieving things, especially when I would repeatedly fail. Something about me is that I rarely give up when I am trying to achieve something. If something fails I analyse what I could do differently and try again. If I decide I want to do something I do it, and often over-do it. My wife has regularly commented on how I could have set an easier target and everyone else would still be happy. An example of this was deciding to do 40 bedtime story videos on my YouTube channel across 40 days for my 40th birthday. This was a lot of work, it had a negative impact on my channel (I lost subscribers, rates of new subscribers halved, video views dropped by about a third), but I committed to doing this, it took me hundreds of hours to make the videos and upload them etc., to YouTube, but I had made a commitment and wasn’t going to break the commitment. One year I entered National Novel Writing Month. Because I worried that I would lose interest in the novel I was writing across the month I decided to write the 50,000 word novel in a week.

Anyway, I went off topic a bit there! But, what I was just trying to emphasise is that being autistic doesn’t mean you can’t do things and be successful. You may struggle with somethings, for example, I would love to be more successful as an author, I would love to have a talent agent who could support me and represent me, I would love to have a more successful YouTube channel to raise awareness of autism and mental health, but I really struggle with making phone calls, with being social enough to engage with others. I’ve been to official YouTube networking events (even whole day events) and come away annoyed with myself for failing to manage to talk to anyone. I have never managed to interest people in collaborations etc, but I then attend the next YouTube event, I approach the next talent agency and I continue trying whatever I can to push towards what I would like to achieve and continue to work hard everyday despite the continued presence of the urge to sit alone in the woods…

These two books are part of a new ten volume series of books I’m writing called Hypnotherapy Revealed Book one is Introduction to Hypnotherapy (http://smarturl.it/22y8sl) Book two is The Ericksonian Approach (http://smarturl.it/4oakl9)

Both are available in paperback and kindle ebook from the Amazon websites. You can find details for them on my Hypnotherapy Books page here on my website.

I have also recently contributed to friend and colleague Dr David Lewis’s book (we run The Mind Changers together) Triumph of the Will? (out this week on Amazon in paperback and Kindle) Which is about the impact of two men who used hypnosis with Hitler, one treated him for hysterical blindness and his hypnotic approach accidentally set Hitler on a new path, and the other taught Hitler hypnosis influence skills. I have written a blog post for Dr David Lewis which is on the books website.

Although I have finished working on these two latest books just two months after I finished working on my Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups book (you can learn more about that book on my Storytelling Books page) I still have much more I am working on…

Books I am currently working on are:

• Volume three of my ‘Hypnotherapy Revealed’ series ‘Hypnotherapy Trance Scripts’
• ‘Wellbeing for YouTuber’s and Digital Entrepreneurs’
• Third book in my series of stories to help children relax and sleep (11 stories in each book) ‘Sleepy Rhyming Tales’
• A book with Dr David Lewis (working title) ‘There Are No Problems, Only Solutions’ which is a self-help book

Until next time…

All the best

Dan