The Growing Worldwide Quit Smoking Team – England

We are so fortunate to have so many hugely motivated, highly dedicated, and extremely capable people within Allen Carr’s Easyway organisation across the world.

Those people who find it hard to imagine finding it easy to quit smoking or feel that quitting smoking as opposed to being released from it isn’t possible for them can often be inspired to hear how our team around the world has been brought together. This is another in the series of features that look at the journeys undertaken by members of Allen Carr’s Easyway To Quit Smoking Facilitator team; from being some of the most accomplished and active smokers on the planet to becoming happy non-smokers and world-leaders in the field of stopping smoking.

Mark Keen, Allen Carr’s Easyway Quit Smoking clinics in Lancashire, Liverpool, Cumbria, and Newcastle writes:

Nowadays when I talk to my Allen Carr Easyway to Quit Smoking clients I hear a myriad of reasons given for why someone wants to quit smoking. So many, in fact, that I am now beginning to understand what Allen meant when he said that he learned something new about smoking every single day. I started smoking because of a girl. Fiona O’Shea was a beautiful redhead who lured me into the smoking trap with promises of being in her gang and looking cool. I didn’t stand a chance. Even though as a youngster I was firmly anti-smoking. This Celtic siren captured me hook, line and sinker and delivered me safely into the hands of the government and tobacco companies who then proceeded to rake off my hard earned cash for years to come.

I tried to quit smoking on many occasions. As a radio presenter I always thought is was a cool look as I was presenting my late night talk shows. Indeed, as I look over my photos from over the years I am surprised how many actually show me to be puffing away.

It wasn’t just at work – there are photographs of me standing striking a pose at a wedding, one of me apparently able to answer the call of nature whilst smoking at the same time, another taken in Kansas where I was apparently celebrating all my vices with a burger in one hand, a drink in the other and a packet of 20 American Honey Bees proudly in position. There is another showing me smoking in a tent! As the years progressed I sometimes tried to kid myself that I didn’t smoke. I would consider myself to be a ‘social smoker’ – only smoking other people’s cigarettes, but eventually compulsion to make late night trips to the gas station for cigarettes was too strong.

After many attempts to quit smoking using sheer willpower (usually at New Year) it was becoming harder to smoke, particularly at work as I could now (because of smoking bans) no longer broadcast from a studio filled with smoke. And one day the feeling of guilt washed over me as I stood outside watching my youngest child playing on his own inside my apartment. I was putting another cigarette in my mouth, but why? I hated the whole process of smoking. I greeted Allen Carr’s book, recommended by a friend, with some scepticism. I wasn’t scared to read it, I just believed it was another quack cure peddled by a chancer.

However, the logic of Allen’s quit smoking method cannot be challenged and I found myself, much to my surprise, warming to his simple, no nonsense, sensible guidance out of the smoking maze. It WAS easy to quit smoking. Needless to say, it changed my life.

A couple of years later I met a lady who mentioned that she had been to an Allen Carr quit smoking center recently and had been offered a training course as a facilitator. Although I had not been involved with Allen Carr’s Easyway since quitting, I knew that this was my next challenge. My new non-smoking friend could not take up the training offer, but I could. And I did. Spending my life helping smokers become happy non-smokers is amazing.

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