Your usual, sir? Morning coffee, afternoon tea, a latte or a camomile... the choice of beverage is endless but, generally speaking, we'll have the same drink today as we had yesterday, we'll sit in the same place for lunch as usual, take the same bus or train, drive the same way to work, buy the same newspaper. We'll keep doing all the same things in the hope that something different will result! You know what today's Quick Tip is!

They say that travel broadens the mind. Certainly, it provides you with abundant opportunity to observe homo erectus in his or her weaker moments - ordinary people doing ordinary things that no ordinary person, in their right state of mind, would do.

On a flight from Bruxelles recently, I sat next to a middle-aged couple heading to the Alps for what one could only expect to be a romantic weekend. A lifetime together had, obviously, immunized them to the regard of others or, for that matter, the regard they had for each other. They spoke to each other like dogs... openly and publicly.

The immaculately turned-out gent, in pressed corduroys, kept calling his wife a "stupid woman" - at the top of his voice. She gave as good as she got - "I'm not one of your minnions that you can boss around like some impotent sad little man!"

I'm not making this up. Indeed, this isn't even out of the ordinary. Next time you travel, open your eyes and ears - you'll have no need for any other inflight entertainment.

At an Advanced Client Workshop recently, we got to chatting about all the small changes that you can deliberately make in your life that conspire to bring about great change. All the usual suspects were on the table - that we need to start our day with a few minutes meditation; that we need to stop ourselves in our tracks during the day to check up on ourselves; that we need to pepper our daily lives with small routine things done differently. During the course of this discussion, I suggested that, if our goal is to develop mindfulness - or, more to the point, purposeful mindfulness - then alcohol has no place in that endeavour.

Suggesting that one should avoid alcohol, to an average European is always bound to raise an eyebrow - or, in this case, a whole rooom of eyebrows! The first and obvious question I was asked was what I do in this regard. After all, having moved to France more than a decade ago and having got to know particular small producers of really very tasty red wines, you might wonder why I raise the issue. I raise it because it is an issue. A single glass of alcohol clouds the mind. Alcohol is a depressant. Alcohol affects the neural system long after that apparent physical effects have worn off. Alcohol helps us in our ordinary everyday "quest" for mindlessness - not mindfulness.

Both myself and my wife gave up drink for a couple of weeks early in 2012 - a regular "detox". After a fortnight, we slept so well, felt so clear, did what we were doing so thoroughly that we decided we'd give it another few weeks. Now, as we approach the end of 2013, I cannot imagine why I would deliberately impede my own progress.

Unfortunately, when you tell someone that you've stopped drinking, they assume that you had to! The quizzical looks you get are comical. I'm not sure that we drank too much on any occasion in the last twenty years and, having moved to France, we had become very French in our habits - two people unable to finish one bottle of wine between them on a weekend night! The point I'm making is that we made a small change - one of the multitude of small changes that I've made in my life since I started studying psychology over twenty years ago. And, as I said at the beginning of this piece, it's small changes that make big differences.

Am I a committed tee-totaller? I'm committed to purposeful mindfulness in the here and now. I cannot see into the future. It's a little like the question I'm often asked about whether or not I believe in reincarnation: it doesn't matter, what matters is what I do now... because that is when the future is created.