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Paddy McGuinness: Money isn’t the be-all and end-all in life

Paddy McGuinness took years to realise that money isn’t the "be-all and end-all" in life.
The 46-year-old TV star has admitted his outlook on life was transformed after he attended therapy to combat a fear of flying, saying he finally came to the realisation that material possessions aren’t important to him.
Paddy – who presents ‘Top Gear’ alongside Andrew Flintoff and Chris Harris – shared: "I didn’t like flying and I thought, ‘There’s no two ways about it, this job involves a lot of travel.’
"So I went to The Priory up near me and it amazed me because I always thought you went there if you had an addiction, because that’s all I’ve ever heard about it.
"I went in for one thing, but over the sessions all this other stuff that tied into that anxiety about flying came out, which he tapped into.
"I’d never thought about it and would never think in a million years it would have come up. It wasn’t a quick fix, it went on for a few months actually, but it was amazing."
Paddy revealed that during the early years of his career, he obsessed about acquiring material possessions.
But spending time in therapy has led the ‘Phoenix Nights’ star to have a change of heart.
He told the Sunday Mirror newspaper: "I’m from a working-class area, everyone I knew didn’t have a pot to p*** in, but they’d always make you laugh and they always saw the funny side of everything.
"So before I’d seen this therapist, if you’d said, ‘You need therapy’, I’d have been like, ‘Please, I’ve got a nice house, I’ve got a nice life’, because that’s how you judge everything.
"Especially from a background where you’ve got nothing, you feel, ‘I’d like a nice car, I’d like a nice house and I’d like nice clothes’, that’s what you think when you’re younger.
"And you get all those things and you think to yourself, ‘Oh right, life’s great’. But it’s only when you see someone who taps into other stuff you realise, actually, that’s not the be-all and end-all."