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Dr Tom Mulholland
When Tom decided to apply healthy thinking to his own life on a consistent basis, his opportunities opened up. He is an adventurer, businessman and a doctor, and conducts talks around the globe on how to develop “healthy thinking.” It has not been plain sailing for the Attitude Doctor. He has learned how to cope while losing everything including, his business, his wife (throughdivorce), and his mental health, but has set about systematically reclaiming his life, and his wife who came back four years after the divorce. After a very public admission to depression he appears to be having some big wins. He shares with us some of his personal experiences and insights.
One of the real low points in my life was when I phoned my wife in New Zealand while at a medical conference in Australia and she said you know, your mate, me and the kids are busy having a ball – where are you?
We ended up divorcing at a time when everything was up in the air for me. From that low moment onwards, all the way to now it has been one step at a time.
The first step was saying just because my wife has left, though it affected me badly, I am not going to let that ruin the rest of my life. So that was a choice, that was a decision and I thought -no it has happened and I have to learn to deal with it. I guess the light came on in my head when I figured out it was my thought creating my emotions and then I figured that was the key to my life.
After going through this really rough patch – I started learning how to apply this “healthy thinking” in my own life. I started using healthy thinking on my patients and they started getting better in general practice and then I started using it in the emergency department and on a few business colleagues. Then their businesses started getting better so I thought this is a good way to spread the message and get paid at the same time because I had two weeks on with my children and two weeks off.
So I would go on the road and I made the decision then that I wanted to be a motivational speaker. I set that as my goal. I had my business plan and I needed to do three things - write a book, do some stand up comedy.and get some corporate clients.
I wanted to prove to myself that I could go from being totally miserable to doing stand up within six weeks.I came up to Auckland and enrolled in the comedy club here at the classic comedy bar and did some gigs there. Mike King was on.
I am not really qualified to tell jokes – but learned that I could do it while at that lowest point. When I was in Australia and made “that phone call” to my wife and family –afterwards I went down to where I was chairing a session at a conference on e-medicine and e-health. I was the chairman of the afternoon session and I had gone out surfing with a friend of mine in the morning. Because my mood was so low and had made some bad decisions, I got smashed against the rocks and nearly broke my hip. In fact I still have lump there from it. I was staggering and I had to sit there in so much pain and I was morbidly depressed and I went up and rang my wife and she said “so and so’s” here playing with the kids.
All of a sudden I was thinking that’s it. He is going to take over my family. I went back downstairs and I was that depressed and I had to stand up and introduce all of the speakers and everyone was laughing when I was introducing the speakers and I was adding comment about stuff. That was when my hardware was at its absolute lowest and that is when I thought if I can make people laugh when I am miserable, imagine what I can do when I am well.
Getting corporate clients in the beginning was difficult. The initial response when I rang them up was “we are going with Tony Christensen and with Mark Inglis and the third company said we are going for the guys that were badly burnt in a chemical fire and started thinking do I need a major disability to get a job as a motivational speaker because they all have really severe disabilities. Coincidently I became aware that my disability was that I had been acutely depressed. I thought that I could talk about my depression and really that is how I got started into it. Then it just really snowballed as people could relate to my story.
It is difficult to make a full time career out of it. That is probably the hardest part in New Zealand and then doing lots of travelling. If you are passionate about it you pull though.
I still work as a doctor as a GP occasionally and in Auckland City Hospital in the emergency department. I still believe that it is a necessity to have that service but I help more people when I do an hour on stage or an afternoon workshop. I create more long term change than I do working eight hours at the hospital. I prefer to doing preventative medicine but it is still rewarding being the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, just not everyday!
My first book is in 12 countries. It is on the best seller list in India or as my son says “was dad”. He corrects me when I talk. We get feedback from Croatia and Brazil saying this really helped and it saved my life. That is what keeps me going and when people listen I enjoy it.
My wife came back to me after four years. This was a major development in my life which helped me beyond words. It is better than it has ever been. Touch wood. The third book is coming out; the manuscript is due out very soon. It’s called Healthy Thinking for Relationships. You guessed it. It is all about relationships. I‘ve had some experience in them, of course, both personally and in my medical practice.
We have collected data over the years. We have data on at least 2000 people.
I believe in the scientific approach. Everyone that came to my workshop had to do an online survey and we noticed that there were triggers that annoy people like dealing with traffic, small children, relationships at work. But what I started noticing was that there was common patterns of thinking about these triggers.
I invented a concept called a cogniceutical Instead of a pharmaceutical, a cogniceutical is a therapeutic thought. We are developing a whole system for rolling that out .It’s not a placebo. It is more powerful than a placebo. How powerful would it be if we could replace some of these drugs with natural systems.
I am doing research with the university in the area of “heart attack prevention” through phone intervention. We are researching the premise that if you receive text messages with healthy thoughts – what affect does this have on your blood pressure and risk of heart attack. We are fascinated with that mind-body link.
I wanted to know how effective my healthy thinking techniques were. So we employed a company called opra.co.nz .They are organisational psychologists. I employed them to go into an analysis and evaluation of my program and wanting to know if I should be working in the hospital, or give it up and go fishing, or do something else because I don’t want to be doing something that is not working right.
I was pleasantly surprised. Ninety two percent of people said that the company sent them on the course. It wasn’t like they had a choice. 92% of people also said that healthy thinking had been very effective or effective at home. No one thought it hadn’t been effective and what was more impressive and almost surprising to me was that 75% of people said that healthy thinking had created long term behavioural change at work and 100% of them thought the change would be permanent. In the organisation, their KPIs went up, sales, customer satisfaction and staff surveys all went up. That is when I thought that this stuff really does work so I have an obligation to keep it going.
That is what you always wonder as a motivational speaker. What is working and what is not. My medical curiosity kicks in here. I have seen people that have come in and they have not taken their pills and I would say your blood pressure is back up. I think a lot of doctors forget to ask are you still taking them because when you ask them they say well no I took two weeks of those pills. They think healthy thinking is like an anti high blood pressure medication is a two week course. It’s not like that.
I use the word healthy thinking like anti-virus software for the mind but if you don’t run your Norton or your virus checker, you are going to get stressed. It’s a set of tools. It is an emotional algebra that you keep running.
We are creating a healthy thinking school in Waitara. It’s a decile two school in Taranaki and they are trying (and succeeding) to become a healthy thinking school. We have been in there for the last year. What they have found is that their NCEA results had a 28% pass rate and they have gone up by 48% in a year. That is due to the attitude of the teachers and the staff. Not due to us of course, because we have only just gone in there. I’m not claiming credit for that but the students haven’t just become 48% more intelligent and the teachers haven’t become 48% better teachers. What they have changed is their attitude. Initially when we went in there I said well your NCEA results are at a 28% pass rate, what is up with that? Some said this is Waitara, what do you expect? That was the attitude we were trying to change.
Because I travel a lot I have adapted and take my family with me when I can. I was in Christchurch the other day to do a talk. I took my son down. He is learning entrepreneurial skills. He is learning healthy thinking but he has the eftpos machine going and it is a business that we run. We did a day snowboarding at Mt Hutt and played some golf. We had a father and son trip away.
When my wife and I spilt up and I threw away the company- I had to step up and out of it. If you look at it in perspective, I knew I could start again. It cost me hundreds and thousands of dollars of my own money in the end because I had a chance where I could of brought the whole company down or forgiven the money it owed me. I could go and make myself another job or I could go back to becoming a doctor but the 20 people I employed all were relying on it to pay their mortgages. So I walked away from it because the company needed more money and I could not borrow any more personally. Venture capitalists have deeper pockets so I got diluted to homeopathic quantities
I don’t think about it now. I just think it was a great learning experience and I have learned to start again. Still I am not wealthy but I make a living doing what I am doing and I help as many people as I can on a daily basis. It is tough. There are days, it is like anyone that is self employed knows. We know exactly. I sometimes think I should be a CEO of a company and every week I have the money come in but there are days when no one rings and there are days when you have more bills than income. It is like anyone; you have to get up and get out there and do it again. It is persistence that pays off.
I think if you look at the common theme of everyone that has made it. They haven’t made it over night. It has been a five, ten, or 15 year process and I think that is where a lot of people fail in their goals. They give up too early.
There is a shortage of doctors so there is a big reason why I do that. I think I have a social responsibility to keep turning up because I have 20 years experience. When people email me through, I have to go and help out.
Now I am trying to set up a foundation with a few partners so we can use some of the research in other ways where we can also offer healthy thinking to interest groups like prisons, refugees and schools without great cost. We have the corporate side going. We have the e-side going and then we start to work on families.
For example the kids had made some wonderful videos at Waitara school. These kids have gone in and done these video scenes like mums at home with a kid. The kid will come out and say, why have you not done the dishes? You’re useless. I wish you had never been born. The kid goes to school. These 12-13 year old kids write these scripts themselves. They go to school and the teacher says, you are no good at maths. You are hopeless. Because it is trigger, thought, emotion, parents, behaviour in which creates a benefit or consequence depending on what you are thinking. They will go out and have a fight in the school playground.
Then they rewind it because they are shooting all of these videos themselves and it shows them at home with mum saying the same thing but then the kid can use healthy thinking. Mum doesn’t really wish that I had never been born. She just has had a really hard time. Dad hadn’t come home from the pub in a week. She can’t pay the rent. The kid goes and puts his arm round the mum and he says, are you all right mum? Then she burst into tears. It totally changes his day. He goes to school and the teacher yells at him and says the same thing. He says, I am not useless at maths. In fact miss look and he holds up the book. I passed six out of my last seven maths tests. It is just you need to help me a bit more. I need a bit of help on this one. The teacher goes, you’re right Johnny, and you have been great. These kids are righting this stuff and then they are filming it.
One of my written goals is to win the Nobel Peace Prize for reducing conflict in society. It’s a huge one for me and I take it very seriously.
If we can get as many people as we can to help us do that then that would be a pretty good thing. Imagine if George Bush had run Healthy Thinking through his thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Was that thought true? No. Does it help me achieve my goal? No. All conflict comes from unhealthy thinking. We are trying to reduce conflict at all sorts of levels. At community levels and work with disadvantaged groups and where it is needed most.
I know I need to squeeze as much into 24 hrs as I can. I don’t watch much TV. People say they don’t have time and you ask them how much TV do you watch a week? Some respond that they will watch 20 hours TV. The way people are going now with living longer. A lot of people would have watched more TV in their life then they would have actually gone to work. Because if you retire at 65 and you live to 85 and how much TV they watch a day. I think that is just a frightening thought. That people watch more television in their life time than they would of going to work.
I read a lot. I don’t find that too difficult. I live on Waiheke Island now and so I read on the ferry and I really enjoy reading. I think reading for relaxation is probably a little bit harder but it is the same as going to university and med school. I must admit when I was at med school I didn’t read many novels because you are in the library every other day but I went and spent half a day at the university in the library which is a luxury. I photocopied so many papers. I enjoy reading when I am on planes. I will go to bed and read for a couple of hours. I have been like this since I can remember. That was my thing when I was a kid. I would trek for half an hour through the bush to get to the library and would sit there till the library would close. That is a relaxation thing for me.
I have recently been to San Francisco to the Society of Industrial and Organisational Psychologists. There were four and a half thousand people at that. I went to the world congress of Neuropsychiatry. I get so excited to apply the scientific method to healthy thinking. I had dinner there with the professor of psychiatry and the professor of neurology at Harvard University. That was a real buzz.
Now working out at the local university, I share my office with the professor of psychiatry and the professor of health psychology. I am like the new kid in their room. I have developed a lot of these theories not so much on my own but from reading and things that I have done and life experiences and I was always a little worried that the profession were going to say, what are you doing? Now it is the opposite. They are asking me to come and join and share my research with them and they help out and point me in the right direction.
This is taking it into the realm of science and that is what is so nice about it because there is research and you are dealing with all of these different disciplines.
We talk about green and eco and everything sustainable but I talk about sustainability in terms of sustainability of reaching your goals and it is running that same software program and using those same behaviours.
If I am travelling I try and get a half day in to something, whether it is a game of golf, or go for a ski, or go to a museum. If I am overseas at a conference, I will go to a maritime museum or something for half a day. I try and do something different. Like if I am going somewhere I try to set aside some time to do something outside of the square because if you keep doing the same thing you don’t learn.
I have come to rely on the Chinese words wei ji Zhuan ji– crisis equals opportunity. So when it hits the fan, I keep saying, what is the opportunity out of this?
That is like a ritual that I use. It is running that software. To go ok crisis equals opportunity. That is the mantra that I use.
About Dr Tom Mulholland
- Began 7 successful start up companies
- Is a medical doctor with an honours degree in first class molecular genetics.
- Is a lecturer in psychological medicine at Auckland University and runs a lecture teaching healthy thinking to med students.
- Raised over $3million in venture capital for internet start-up Doctor Global
- Performed the first on-line patient consultation in the world via the Internet
- Was founding Medical Director of Taranaki’s first accident and medical clinic, White Cross
- Won four different Chamber of Commerce business awards
- Stand up comedian having toured with Mike King
- Is a successful author with his best selling book, Healthy Thinking™
- Is a full time speaker, facilitator and mentor known as 'The Attitude Doctor'
GoalGetting Tips For Today
- Cut back on watching TV and replace with a healthy habit
- When you travel for work – try to do something different while you away, try to integrate your family into the trip.
- If you can’t take the ferry to work and read on the way –invest in audiobooks and use the travel time wisely
- Choose a time that suits you to clear through e-mails- don’t let them build up.
- Try to find something to be grateful for today
- When crisis hits (as it often does), find the opportunity
- Find out how to run your brain with more healthy thinking.
What can you do today to get closer to achieving your goals?