Robin Ferrier - One Small Step

Robin Ferrier - One Small Step As a former airline pilot, now hypnotherapist, I blend aviation discipline with deep psychological insight. Let's unlock your potential and soar together

With many years of experience, I help you conquer fears and anxieties, guiding you to lasting change. My specialisms are:

The support and therapy of those who have been oppressed, bullied or abused. Fear of Flying. Phobias. However hypnotherapy and Rapid Transformational Therapy in particular has powerful properties. Let me guide you to a better way of living. Contact me now.

Tiny bottles are out, freedom is in! Heathrow’s new scanners mean you can pack all your favorite liquids without limits....
26/01/2026

Tiny bottles are out, freedom is in! Heathrow’s new scanners mean you can pack all your favorite liquids without limits. And a big shout out to Edinburgh Bristol Gatwick and Teesside airports who led the way long before, thus making travel just that little bit easier. Lets see who follows next. I hear London City are planning for new machines that will facilitate this change there.

If you could bring any luxury item on your next trip, what would it be? 👜💖

Most people who fear flying underestimate the cost of their fear.Not the ticket price ... the cognitive load.Trying to c...
23/01/2026

Most people who fear flying underestimate the cost of their fear.
Not the ticket price ... the cognitive load.
Trying to control things that are outside of their control.

High achievers turn into accidental analysts at 35,000ft: monitoring weather systems, scanning crew behaviour, tracking turbulence, decoding engine pitch, memorising exits, running scenarios. It’s impressive… and completely futile.

None of these behaviours alters the engineering, the training, the redundancies, or the data that make modern aviation one of the safest activities on earth. They only drain bandwidth.

The amygdala assigns you a job you never asked for: “keep the plane in the sky.” It feels rational, until you realise how much executive function is being spent managing a risk that has already been engineered out.

Here’s the irony: the people who pride themselves on logic and scientific thinking often spend the most energy trying to out-think the amygdala… and call that control.

Meanwhile, the elegant solution has been available for decades:
not more data, but direct access to the part of your brain setting off the alarm.

That’s hypnotherapy, not theatrics, but precision nervous system training.
A leveraged intervention.

For people used to optimising portfolio performance, health, and time… it’s surprising how many still outsource their flying experience to adrenaline.

The Apostle Paul once wrote that we see “through a glass, darkly.” We see but we do not always understand truly what it ...
22/01/2026

The Apostle Paul once wrote that we see “through a glass, darkly.” We see but we do not always understand truly what it is that we see. Today that feels less like scripture and more like daily life. We are surrounded by screens, headlines, and AI-generated images that look real enough to hijack our emotions. We generally believe what we see, even when we have no idea if any of it is real.

The result is anxiety. Who do we trust? How do we know what’s true? How do I even know what is right to feel? And what happens when lying becomes normal, not just in politics, but in corporations, media, and even ordinary conversation? Truth starts to depend on which side of the fence you’re standing on.

So how do we avoid being dragged into fear?

Start with active awareness. Question what you see and hear, even from people you trust. Not because they’re bad, but because everyone filters reality to make it acceptable or understandable. Intentions don’t guarantee accuracy.

Next, drop the obsession with certainty. We aren’t meant to have perfect clarity. Trying to control the world through “information” only makes us more anxious.

And finally, pay attention to your own mind. The only thing you actually control is your thinking. Notice what you’re letting in, what you’re believing, and how it shapes your mood. You watch the news because you think to be informed is to be prepared. I would question that my friends.

If we can do that and coolly accept that what we see and hear may not be the full story, we might worry less about the chaos “out there” and focus more on what we can internalize, question, and let go of. Certainty is optional, despite your addiction. Awareness however is essential. Be vigilant and ask questions. You will sleep better when you do.

Look at a glacier. It moves slowly, relentlessly, carving valleys, scraping stone, leaving scars on the world long after...
21/01/2026

Look at a glacier. It moves slowly, relentlessly, carving valleys, scraping stone, leaving scars on the world long after it has passed. And yet, those scars are not weakness. They are proof of force, of endurance, of transformation.

We, too, carry scars. Some are visible, some hidden deep within our hearts and minds. And too often, we look at them and feel shame, as if our struggles make us less than, as if our wounds are flaws.

But here is the truth: what is healed is beautiful. Every scar is a testament to survival, to courage, to the fact that we faced life and kept moving. Scar tissue is stronger than the flesh around it, and so it is with us. Our healed scars are stronger, wiser, more alive than anything untouched.

Your scars are not marks of failure. They are proof of life. They are the lines that trace your journey, the places where you were broken and became whole again. And that ... truly ... that is beautiful.

Stress. Fear. Anxiety. That constant hum in your chest that feels like it’s your fault. Like you somehow deserve to carr...
20/01/2026

Stress. Fear. Anxiety. That constant hum in your chest that feels like it’s your fault. Like you somehow deserve to carry it everywhere, like it’s your permanent luggage.

Here’s the secret: it’s not yours to keep. And no, hypnotherapy is not clucking chickens on stage. It’s a doorway. A way to step out of your own head long enough to realise ... you don’t have to live in this storm.

And when it works… oh, you feel it. The weight lifts. Breath comes back. Life suddenly tastes sweeter. Like James Baldwin said, “You think your pain is yours alone, but then you discover it can be laid down.” And isn’t that the point? To lay it down. To walk lighter. To remember freedom exists, just waiting for you to take it.

You don’t have to earn relief. You just have to reach for it.

The "Other" We Desire Is Often the Person We Could Become The great psychotherapist Esther Perel once said something str...
19/01/2026

The "Other" We Desire Is Often the Person We Could Become

The great psychotherapist Esther Perel once said something striking:
"When we lock eyes with someone across a room, it’s rarely about leaving the person we’re with. It’s about the person we imagine we could become in the presence of that other."

That landed for me.

Because so often our desires, whether for people, careers, houses or Ferraris, aren’t really about the thing itself. They’re about the self we imagine we could become because of it.

No one truly wants just the car.
They want status, confidence, validation, escape, admiration.
The car is merely the portal.

No one truly wants the affair.
They want aliveness, possibility, eroticism, youth, boldness.
The other person is simply the mirror.

And dissatisfaction isn’t always a rejection of what we have.
Sometimes it’s simply a longing for a version of ourselves we haven’t met yet.

Here’s the twist:

What if we didn’t need the external object to access the internal state?

What if the confidence, the status, the aliveness, the freedom,
were available now, without switching partners, buying the car, or starting over?

This is why modalities like hypnotherapy are so powerful.
Not because they change our circumstances,
but because they expand our identity from the inside out.

And when we feel abundant, confident, desirable, capable,
two things happen:

We stop needing external upgrades to validate our worth.

We begin to enjoy what we already have.

Perhaps happiness isn’t about acquiring a new life,
but about becoming the person who can actually inhabit the current one.

And from that place, anything we choose next is a bonus, not a rescue.

There have been moments in my life when a simple mouthful of food has brought me to tears. Not because I’m a “foodie”, I...
17/01/2026

There have been moments in my life when a simple mouthful of food has brought me to tears. Not because I’m a “foodie”, I’m really not, but because I love quality. I love tasting the very best a culture or a chef can offer. After living in Italy for a long time, I’ve experienced both the sublime and the ridiculous. And on certain occasions I’ve found myself sitting back in silence, eyes closed, savouring something that can only be described as a mouthgasm.

What fascinates me is not the food itself, but the contrast: someone at the next table might have eaten that same dish while talking about their day, barely registering the taste at all. The food would have been an afterthought, a background noise rather than a symphony.

And I think life works like that too.

When we’re living under stress, we fail to notice the beauty, the grace, the poetry and unfiltered joy woven into ordinary moments. We become lost in our minds while the world continues around us… but the reality of it barely enters the room.

We get wrapped up in endless imagination:

predicting the future

planning the unplannable

analysing the unfathomable

trying to control the uncontrollable

This month, like everyone else, I’m facing my own challenges. But I’m choosing something different. I’m choosing to have more faith in the benign nature of things. Determined to experience the reality of life rather than add meaning and implications to events that lead me then to feel negative unnecessarily. This is despite the fact that my past experiences have trained me to believe that life is a battle to be fought and a war to be won.

I want people to truly understand that the strife they feel, the anxiety they carry, and the dark futures they imagine are not evidence of reality. They’re potentially the constructs of a mind that has experienced pain and is now programmed to avoid it at all costs.

It’s ironic, isn’t it?
Pain trying to protect us from imagined pain.

So here is my invitation ... to you and to myself:

Savour the moment.
Be present.
Allow your senses to reopen.

Life still offers gifts, even in difficult seasons:

a tiny leaf of basil on a pizza

the smile of a shopkeeper

a dreadful joke told by a child with heroic enthusiasm

Being present is one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves.

Hypnotherapy can lift the weight of many internal distractions, untangle anxious loops, and soften the mind’s protective mechanisms… but presence itself takes a conscious choice. A small moment of awareness. A quiet breath. A willingness to see what’s actually here.

Because life isn’t just meant to be survived ... it’s meant to be tasted.

I’ve learned something difficult about fear of flying, and it isn’t found in a manual or a checklist. My expertise isn’t...
16/01/2026

I’ve learned something difficult about fear of flying, and it isn’t found in a manual or a checklist. My expertise isn’t just that I’ve flown jets through weather and turbulence. It’s that I understand the inner weather of human beings. I’ve spent years studying emotion, memory, stress, and the strange logic of the subconscious. That is the airspace I operate in.

There are many pilots out there offering superb technical insights, some of them good friends, and truly excellent at what they do. They translate the machine into language, and they do it with skill and generosity. The aviation community is lucky to have them.

But what I’m stepping into is a different kind of cockpit, one most pilots avoid not out of indifference, but because it demands another discipline entirely. It requires you to walk into fear itself: its history, its wounds, its irrationality, its persistence. When you do that, you quickly learn that statistics don’t silence the subconscious and logic doesn’t cure the body’s revolt.

Some people raise an eyebrow at this work. They’re comfortable with data, with performance numbers, with engineering elegance, and that comfort makes sense. It’s clean. It’s ordered. What I’m talking about is not. The human mind does not run on circuits; it runs on meaning, memory, and feeling ... and those things rarely behave.

That’s why anxious flyers don’t simply need reassurance, they need understanding. They need a way to reorganize the memory that keeps ambushing them on approach. Information alone has never been the cure for fear. If it were, nobody would be afraid of flying.

That’s where my work begins.

I’m not here to replace the technical voices, they play a crucial role. I’m here to expand the conversation into the territory most of us were never trained to navigate: the mind under stress, the body in fear, the past whispering danger where none exists.

I’ve started making videos on this and initially I followed a traditional route. But now I intend to deal with the deeper less mechanical but nonetheless complicated psychological aspects of the fear of flying. I won’t pretend it’s comfortable or familiar. It’s not. It is new, challenging, and at times disruptive. But it’s necessary. Because people deserve more than data, they deserve transformation.

If this speaks to you, I’ll see you soon.

https://www.tiktok.com/

Can you remember one of the happiest days you had as a child?The kind where time didn’t exist, your hair did whatever it...
12/01/2026

Can you remember one of the happiest days you had as a child?
The kind where time didn’t exist, your hair did whatever it wanted, and your only responsibilities were “run,” “laugh,” and “don’t drop the ice cream.”

Back then, joy was not a prize ... it was the default setting.

And then!
Somewhere between algebra, tax returns, and learning the correct way to load a dishwasher (a topic still fiercely debated), we misplaced that glorious, ridiculous joy.

Now it’s January.
It’s dark, it’s cold, the trees are naked, and everyone’s pretending they love “fresh starts” while quietly googling cheap holidays in the sun.

But here’s the delightful plot twist:

✨ Your inner sparkly child is not dead. They are just waiting for better lighting.

And hypnosis?
Hypnosis is basically the backstage pass that lets that kid come skipping back into your life, wearing odd socks, probably holding a biscuit, absolutely thrilled to be here.

It has this gentle way of bypassing the Adult Committee in your brain, the one that insists everything must be serious and productive, and waking up the part of you that still thinks clouds look like dragons, puddles are invitations, and life is pretty wonderful when you’re paying attention.

And suddenly…
even in gloomy January…
Coffee tastes a bit like hope,
Birdsong sounds like optimism,
And you catch yourself smiling at nothing (which is when you know you’re winning).

We don’t need perfect circumstances to feel joy,
we just need access to the version of us that still knows how to delight in tiny things.

Hypnosis doesn’t only calm or heal,
it reopens the gate to delight.
It reminds us that beneath all the grown-up nonsense, life is absurd and beautiful and surprisingly fun.

And honestly?
Once you feel that spark again, even January can’t stop you. ✨

Fear of Flying Is Rarely About FlyingThere is a certain kind of person who struggles most with flying.They are intellige...
10/01/2026

Fear of Flying Is Rarely About Flying

There is a certain kind of person who struggles most with flying.

They are intelligent.
Capable.
Used to steering their own lives.

And suddenly, they are seated. Buckled. Dependent.
No controls. No feedback. No way to intervene.

Modern neuroscience tells us the brain is a prediction machine.
It is constantly forecasting what will happen next, and adjusting when it can correct errors.

Flying removes that ability.

You cannot do anything with your fear.
You cannot act it away.

And for a mind trained to equate control with safety, this is intolerable.

The irony is cruel but precise:
The safest form of transport demands the greatest surrender.

So the fear appears to be about altitude, or engines, or weather.
But beneath it lies something quieter and more human:

What happens when I cannot manage what comes next?

This is not weakness.
It is the cost of being competent in a world that occasionally asks you to let go.

And healing does not come from forcing trust.
It comes from teaching the nervous system that not acting is not the same as being unsafe.

Only then does the mind stop mistaking stillness for danger, and allow the body to travel in peace.

People call you “anxious” because you notice the world is falling apart ... burning. They say it’s in your head. But it ...
09/01/2026

People call you “anxious” because you notice the world is falling apart ... burning. They say it’s in your head. But it isn’t. It’s reality. War, corruption, climate collapse, social chaos, your nervous system is responding exactly as it should.

Most therapists, myself included, look backward, to childhood, to explain fear. But fear isn’t only learned in the nursery, it’s learned from the world you walk through every day. The lies, the cruelty, the indifference, they set your body on fire.

What we call “anxiety” is often moral injury: watching truth lose to lies, dignity lose to profit, and knowing you cannot fix it alone. It is not weakness. It is clarity.

Here’s the truth no one tells you: the world will never make sense. But you can reclaim your power. Hypnotherapy teaches the mind to choose its own response, to reclaim authorship of your inner life. The headlines don’t soften, but your posture does. The moment you stop outsourcing your sanity to chaos, anxiety loses its grip.

Why Fear Grows After a Safe FlightMost people believe fear lives in the moment of turbulence.It does not.Fear often grow...
08/01/2026

Why Fear Grows After a Safe Flight

Most people believe fear lives in the moment of turbulence.

It does not.

Fear often grows later, in the quiet hours after landing, when the body is safe but the mind begins its work.

Modern neuroscience has a word for this: memory reconsolidation.
Each time you remember an event, the brain does not retrieve it like a file. It rewrites it. And emotion is the editor.

So the flight that ended safely becomes, with repetition, a little rougher.
The turbulence a little longer.
The sense of danger a little more justified.

Not because it was true, but because fear was present when the memory was recalled.

This is one of life’s sharper ironies:
We survive the experience, yet the mind quietly makes it more dangerous than it ever was.

And so people say, “I don’t know why my fear is getting worse, nothing bad has ever happened.”

But something did happen.
The brain learned to associate flying with threat, not in the sky, but afterwards, in reflection.

This is why reassurance fails.
This is why statistics don’t touch the fear.
And this is why hypnotherapy, working with memory at the level of emotional meaning succeeds where logic cannot.

Fear does not ask to be argued with.
It asks to be understood.

Address

Eastbourne Town Centre

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 7pm
Tuesday 10:30am - 7pm
Wednesday 9am - 7pm
Thursday 9am - 7pm
Friday 9am - 7pm

Telephone

+447803083158

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Robin Ferrier - One Small Step posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Practice

Send a message to Robin Ferrier - One Small Step:

Shortcuts

Share

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on LinkedIn
Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share via Email
Share on WhatsApp Share on Instagram Share on Telegram

Category