Thriving isn’t luck.
It’s a skill.
Emetophobia-Free is one version of The Thrive Programme.
This is the programme it comes from.
What is The Thrive Programme?
The Thrive Programme is a psychological training course that teaches you how your own mind creates your experience — and how to change it. It was created by Rob Kelly and launched in 2009, after nearly thirty years of working one to one with people.
It is training rather than therapy. There is no couch, no analysing your childhood and no open-ended course of appointments. You work through a manual, you learn how your thinking works, and you apply it. Most people take six to eight weeks.
The same programme is now written in six versions, each one shaped around a particular struggle. Emetophobia-Free is the version for a fear of being sick. There is also Fly Happy for a fear of flying, Thrive as a Non-Smoker, and Vaginismus-Free, among others. The psychology underneath them is identical; only the examples and the exercises change.
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Explore
A step-by-step manual, with explainer videos, showing you how your mind builds the experience you are having. Most people describe this as the first time any of it has made sense.
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Reflect
You measure where you are with the TQ Quiz, and find the thinking styles and beliefs that have been quietly running things. Learned patterns, and learned patterns can be changed.
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Apply
You change the patterns a step at a time, and bank every bit of progress. You cannot fail at learning a skill. You can only keep going.
How it works
Every version of the programme runs the same way: explore how your mind is working, reflect on what you find, then apply it until the new way of thinking is simply how you think.
It is self-study by design. You are the one making the changes, which is precisely why they hold — nobody has done it to you or for you. You can work through it alone, or with a licensed coach alongside you.
Who wrote it?
Rob Kelly has spent nearly forty years working with individuals, groups and organisations as a therapist and a coach. He wrote The Thrive Programme to put what he was teaching one to one into a form anyone could work through themselves.
Nearly 40 years
Four decades of clinical work, one to one, with people of all ages and from all over the world.
Six programmes
One psychology, written six ways — including Emetophobia-Free, Fly Happy, Thrive as a Non-Smoker and Vaginismus-Free.
In the media
Regularly on television and radio, including the BBC and Channel 4, and lecturing on the programme worldwide.
What the programme teaches you.
Whichever version you work through, these are the skills underneath it.
Where your beliefs came from.
Not your genes and not your character. The thinking styles and beliefs running underneath, which you picked up somewhere along the way.
How much control you actually have.
Most people vastly underestimate it. The programme shows you where your influence genuinely lies, and where it does not.
What your imagination is doing.
The same imagination that creates the fear can be turned to work for you. It is a skill, and it is teachable.
How to handle what other people think.
Social anxiety sits underneath an enormous amount of what people struggle with. It shifts once you understand it.
How to build self-esteem that holds.
Not affirmations and not positive thinking. A steadier sense of yourself, built on evidence you gather as you go.
How to keep it, once you have it.
The skills do not expire. People finish the programme and go on applying them for years, to things that have nothing to do with what brought them in.
Where Emetophobia-Free fits
Emetophobia-Free came out in 2012, written specifically for the fear of being sick. It teaches the same skills, with every example, exercise and video built around emetophobia rather than around anything else.
So if the fear of being sick is what you are dealing with, Emetophobia-Free is the one to do — you will get there faster with a programme written for it. The wider Thrive Programme is for everything else, and for parents who want to learn the same skills themselves while their child works through the children’s workbook.
Read more about The Thrive Programme
The programme has a site of its own, with the full picture: the manual, the research behind it, the coaches, and the other versions.