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Stop Evening Drinking Habits

For some people, the ultimate downtime after a long day’s work is a glass of wine. It helps unravel those tightened muscles, softens the thoughts in the mind and eases any prickly emotions from the day. It’s an accessible and legal way to unwind. More than that, it creates finality between the day you had just had and the fact that it is over. That you are in a different space, mentally emotionally and physically.

However, sometimes, the need to drink alcohol after a long day’s work becomes a habitual process that can quickly spiral out of control, or into some form of dependency.

Drinking Habits and Alcohol.

Of course, many people manage to have just a glass or two of wine or a small beer and they may choose to have alcohol one day and not the next. Some people find the same sense of release in meditation, yoga or hypnotherapy.

If it is manageable and within a healthy level then there appears to be little risk or concern. The point, at which someone might consider getting help, is the point at which they begin to feel that they no longer have a choice in the matter.

Of course, there is always a choice, because you are always in command of your own thoughts and your own actions. But when someone has a craving, the sensation and emotions related to that come from deep within the unconscious mind. Your unconscious is the domain of your emotions and unless you have amazing willpower, it can be a tricky business to do battle with your unconscious. It’s incredibly powerful and it’s also where the changes to habits, cravings and emotions need to take place.

Hypnotherapy and NLP in Hertfordshire.

Access to the unconscious to make these changes (such as to drinking habits) isn’t something that many can do instantly just by deciding to. The reason is that your conscious mind is often “in the way” of your unconscious mind. It is there to stand guard to make sure that you do not process any old suggestion and take it on board. This is why having a trustworthy hypnotherapist, such as a practitioner from the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, who is trained to access those guarded areas of your mind is so important and beneficial.

If you had a conversation with someone and they said “Well just stop doing it” that conscious logical part of your mind that has already decided that drinking every night is a bad idea, responds by thinking “Well if it were that easy I’d have sorted it out myself already!”

Deciding it, knowing what is right and wanting to do something better for your health and your life are all well and good, but it might not be enough to actually make you stop.

The first step is remembering you have a choice. No one makes you go to the fridge, pull back the ring pull, unleash the cork or any of those things. Only you decide that, and you can decide something else. Distraction can work incredibly well sometimes. When you really engage your brain in other things you lose time and you lose awareness of all the other things that you could have been doing instead (such as drinking). You only need to repeat this process a few times to break the habit completely.

It’s worth remembering that if you do stop completely at doing some habitual thing, that thing, no matter what it is – even if it appears to be totally destructive, was meeting a need. Here’s an idea of some of the needs we have (these are emotional needs, not physical ones like food and water).

Significance
Certainty
Uncertainty
Love
Contribution
Growth

So although drinking alcohol has many negative effects, we can evaluate the emotional needs it may be meeting and recognise the reliability with which alcohol relaxes gives a sense of certainty. That the vulnerability and volatility that alcohol can provide might also simultaneously provide a sense of uncertainty. Some people can only connect with others after drinking and it may be their route to feeling significance and love.

Any drinking habit that fulfils 3 or more of the above-mentioned needs is addictive. It’s easy for people to become addicted to alcohol; not just because the substance in itself is addictive but so are the emotional needs that it meets.

If you are someone who needs to break their evening drinking habits, contact the hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire about how we can help.

By Gemma Bailey

www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

I’m Not an Alcoholic

Defining addiction can be a tricky business. After all, we all have addictions that we allow to go unnoticed. Plenty of people are addicted to coffee, falling in love, and sugar and other random things have just been accepted as part of life.

We seem to have accepted too, that a glass of wine after a day’s work is perfectly alright too. Maybe for some that is two or three glasses, for others, it’s a bottle.

So at what point is that habit a problem?
At what stage of regular drinking do you have a drinking problem?
When does the label “alcoholic” apply?

For some, being an alcoholic means being drunk, almost daily, at unreasonable times of the day. But drinking a bottle of wine or two on a weekday evening is just the done thing. It has no bearing on alcoholism. Could they stop if they wanted to? Possibly, but perhaps only if there was a shake-up of their circumstance that changed their drinking routine.

So what are you if you are not a drunk-all-day-every-day alcoholic but you are a habitual drinker and it’s got a little out of hand?

You are an addict. At our hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, we help people with all kinds of addiction to regain control.

Unless you can make a conscious decision to not drink any alcohol that day and stick to it, then you are addicted. If it would cause you problems, distress or discomfort to go without it, you are addicted and it’s important to break that cycle. Hypnotherapy works with the unconscious part of your mind which is much more powerful than the conscious and to achieve success in breaking a habit or addiction, you need to have an agreement in both parts of your mind.

Not only is alcohol damaging to your body when you have large quantities over long periods, but after a time the effects start to wear off, and you need more to get the same level of relaxation or whatever other escapism it allowed you to have.

In preparing to stop drinking, it’s important from a dependency perspective that you wean yourself off gradually rather than stopping altogether one day. People who participate in “Dry January” after a spell of drinking through the festive season often have some uncomfortable side effects because they are experiencing a come down too rapidly. It’s better to formulate a plan of phasing the alcohol out of your life gradually and in a realistic way than to knock it on the head overnight.

Think about what would happen when you give it up. It’s likely that you will sleep better, be sharper and brighter throughout the day and save your liver and kidneys in the future.

Then consider what would happen if you didn’t give it up. What the day-to-day implications would be and the long-term effects on your health.

Go back to the positive results of having achieved it and notice how much better that feels.

If you feel that you are influenced, either by your own tendency to sabotage your efforts or by others who will continue drinking, you may benefit from some help in stopping drinking alcohol. Hypnotherapy is both safe and effective for those who wish to stop drinking, whether you are an alcoholic or just have an unhealthy relationship with it.

By Gemma Bailey www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Addictions

There once were many myths and misconceptions surrounding the reasons why addictions occur. Some believed that substances in themselves were not addictive, that it was the body’s chemical reaction to the substance to which the individual is addicted. This claim could certainly seem plausible when considering gambling or shopping addictions. There are no foreign chemicals entering the body, rather than the body is creating its own chemical reaction (dopamine/adrenalin) in response to the external stimulus of gambling or shopping, and it is the feeling that the individual is addicted to, not the actual act itself.

It is also understandable that when one introduces chemicals to the body, chemical reactions occur. Some of these reactions stimulate reward centres within the brain which are triggered when a person exercises, falls in love or is praised or acknowledged.

Sometimes an addiction occurs when a person uses drugs, cigarettes, alcohol or even food, to alleviate stress and worry. In order to successfully treat these types of addictions, the person must focus on increasing their levels of self-esteem so that they are able to create good feelings about themselves without any need to have the feelings triggered by an external stimulus.

It is difficult to predict if one person is more likely to suffer from addiction than the next. Again, claims have been made that some suffer from an addictive personality. It is also wise to consider the social circumstances of addicts. For example, if your parents smoked, you are more likely to be a smoker – this may be because you see the behaviour as socially acceptable or because you have a genetic predisposition or both. If your friend takes drugs, you are likely to be influenced by them. There are of course other factors. If a person is lacking in a structured life or has experienced an over-structured life, drugs can be a form of escape and detachment from a life which is perhaps, not entirely fulfilling.

Often, an addiction will increase in severity over time. This is because the body becomes regulated and used to the addictive chemical being in the body. To achieve the same level of stimulation, more of the addictive chemical is needed in the body. Many addictions can cause serious health, social, physical and mental problems and when addictive substances are increased in a non-regulated environment, the consequences can be devastating.

Fortunately, changes can be made. Addicts do not necessarily need to be addicts for the rest of their lives. If the addict is willing and motivated to change, there are ways of easing and in some cases removing completely, the side effects when withdrawing from an addictive substance.

NLP can be used to help the client understand new perspectives about how the addiction has impacted on their lives. Techniques can be used to desensitise any negative associations from the past, and positive triggers can be installed for use when the cravings would normally occur.

Hypnosis can be used to remove habits and create changes in the subconscious, the part of the mind responsible for creating and maintaining habits. Post hypnotic suggestions can be used to associate powerful negative feelings to the addictive act or substance so that these powerful negative feelings are experienced in the future if ever the patient considers interacting with the addictive substance or acting again.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

The Power of A Great Motivational Video!

If you’re like everyone else, then you’re probably suffering in silence.

Everyone gets them bad days where nothing goes right from the moment you jump out of bed and sometimes bad days continue from one day to the next then eventually a week passes, then a month.

When nothing is going right or your way and you’re feeling a bit down in the mouth about it – Go to Youtube on your phone, tablet or computer and type in ‘Motivational videos’. I have included an incredible Motivational video for you below but there are loads more online and you might find one or two which really reach out to you and relates to you!

If you’re not happy with your life, do something about it!

Learn a new skill
Share a joke or a new fact with the person next to you
Seek out someone who inspires you
Set some goals for yourself
Change your career or take up an evening course
Start a journal to note down your thoughts and find the right path

Remember: Never Give Up After A Bad Day!

NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is all about confidence, self-esteem and how to deal with emotional issues. The Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic offers a free consultation, we can share with you some NLP techniques that you can use to motivate yourself, and give yourself confidence and we can give you access to these positive thoughts on a daily basis.

The Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic is a team of therapists who specialise in hypnotherapy, NLP, CBT and coaching in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and North London. We provide therapy sessions for adults and children wishing to overcome anxiety, stress and depression and for those who wish to overcome phobias or stop bad habits such as smoking. We specialise in working with NHS Staff and the Police. Call 0203 6677294 or email clinic@HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Find out more about Hypnotherapy, NLP & CBT in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire or North London here: www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Resilience

I think a lot of people think resilience is your ability to stay strong in the face of uncertainty or in difficult circumstances. For me, resilience is how quickly and easily you get back up once you’ve been pushed down. When I think about resilience in the context of my own experiences in life, resilience had come about from having some quite negative things happening in my life previously. I have learnt how to survive and come out the other end and I have learnt how to cope with certain situations through developing methods and coping strategies. When things get tough I now know how to deal with it better through previous hardships and how I proceed in a more positive direction.

Therefore, speaking of things that may contribute towards becoming a resilient person here’s what I think you need: I think you need confidence because if you lack confidence then you’re going to find it very difficult to put into action and employ any sorts of strategies. You might feel like hiding under the duvet and that is not going to be the ideal solution. You need to have enough confidence to get out there and face the world. You’ve got to have the confidence there in the first place to be able to push through difficulty. You also need hope! Hope is super important. You need to believe that you have something worth fighting for so that you don’t get completely overwhelmed by the negative experiences that happen in life. You’ve got to hope that you’ll be okay and you’ve got to have hope that things will turn out all right in the end.

Overall, I would say you’ve got to just have a quite positive state of mind because the more positive you are the easier it is for you to be creative and resourceful and to think about alternative ways of reframing your circumstances. The more easier it is for you to problem-solve your way through a situation.

What’s important in developing resilience is not being shy about putting yourself in situations where you might get knocked down and not holding back from situations where you might get knocked back because those knockbacks are you developing a thick skin which will help you to become more resilient and emotionally more tougher.

While I worked as a manager in a large private day nursery, there was a staff member called Charlotte. Charlotte’s social status was different from mine, I grew up on a council estate, I worked hard to get my diploma to be able to work with children. Charlotte came from a wealthy family and had been given some of the finer things in life which I had to work hard towards i.e first car was a new car and a deposit was put down on her house. I was her manager and I was grafting away to be able to afford my monthly car payments just to get myself to work. I felt resentful not just because of her social status but also because she had a good relationship with her parents.

One day I noticed that she had developed a skin condition called dermatitis. It was on both of our hands and it looked like her skin was falling off and it looked look pretty uncomfortable, to be honest and it was stress related. It took me a while to reframe the beliefs that I was carrying around “she’s got it easier than I have and it’s not fair and I wish I had it that easy”. What I realised was something that for me might be by comparison to all the other stuff quite a low-level problem, for her, it was really significant because it seemed like she’d missed out on the benefits of having tough stuff happen in life. From having tough things happen in your life, you can learn so much and build up your resilience through time and experiences.

When going through tough times, you might feel that the best thing in the world is if you had no problems but if you are a person who can see a silver lining then you can really start to enjoy life a lot more and get a lot more benefits from living it even when it’s really difficult.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Doing the Right Thing for Others!

My sister has special needs and doesn’t have any form of communication. Doing the right thing for her relies on me thinking of my sister’s needs, wants and preferences and making a decision. Like my sister’s situation, we can all be put in a situation where we are winging it a little bit by making decisions for others and then finding we need to justify it. It can get a little bit daunting when you are thinking about what is the right thing to do for someone else.

In my work at NLP4Kids, we quite often work with safeguarding issues. In a safeguarding situation, we have to take the best interests of the child into account primarily. It’s challenging at times to not get tangled up in the story of what’s happening with the parents or the story of their history or where they are now or where they might be going too. It makes it really difficult at times to know what doing the right thing looks like in a safeguarding case. One of the things that are used as a benchmark for considering how someone might behave in the future is to look at their past behaviours. The best indicator of how someone might behave and react in the future is to think about how they behaved and reacted in the past.

For example, in criminal psychology, the best indicators for how someone might behave once they leave prison is going to be based on what they did before they went to prison or how they were behaving whilst they were in prison. This will give us an idea of what’s going to happen when they get back out there in society. This helps to put the safeguards in place to hopefully help them to avoid doing the thing that got them into prison in the first place. When it comes to doing the right thing and knowing what’s right for somebody else, we’re trying to predict the future and think about the effect that it will have on them and the people around them.

If a hundred years from now there is another global pandemic, you’re going to be looking back at the C-19 pandemic to see how might people react and how we need to manage the situation. In addition, we might find that years from now, society has changed so significantly that actually what’s happening now isn’t the best indicator of what to do at that time. There might be other more recent events that would give a better indication as to how the population will react to being quarantined and locked down and all of those different experiences that we went through recently.

If I want to know how someone’s going to react towards restrictions or solutions I make for them in order to know, how they’re going to react to that I need to look at their past behaviour. This doesn’t just apply to an individual it applies to entire populations – if you want to know how a group or a community is going to respond to certain sanctions that are put in place or even rewards that are put in place look back on their reactions and responses to previous sanctions and rewards that were put in place in the past and then you can decide ‘am I really doing the right thing for them or might this actually have quite a detrimental effect on them?’ Sometimes doing the right thing isn’t just about ecology it’s also about economics and what offers a wider or greater number of positive outcomes.

If you are making choices and decisions that affect other people they’re always going to do what they’re going to do and that’s not me saying that they can’t change, that’s me saying that you have limited control over the outcomes that exist for other people and that at times in doing the right thing, the only thing we can really do is to prepare for the worst while simultaneously hoping for the best possible outcome.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Doing the Right Thing for you!

Ecology is the study of consequences on the wider system. If you imagine that there is a circle and you are inside the circle. Surrounding your circle is a wider circle that contains ‘others’ and surrounding both your circle and the ‘other’s’ circle is a third circle which contains the greater good. When we talk about ecology, we’re looking at those three different circles (you, others and the greater good). If we are thinking about doing the right thing to do, the question we would be asking is, is this good for me, is it good for others and does it serve the greater good? If the answer to any of those questions is ‘No’ then it’s likely there may be trouble ahead.

It may be that the thing that you want to do, isn’t going to be right for others around you. Sometimes doing the right thing might be right for everybody else but not yourself! This is something I can help you to understand and work through at my therapy practice in Hemel Hempstead.

There will be situations where doing the right thing for yourself instead of doing the right thing for others is okay. This is where it starts to get a bit more complex, it comes down to what happens if you don’t take care of yourself. If you’re on an aircraft and the oxygen mask comes down, you should put your own on before you put on other people’s masks. Because if you’re not going to be in a good place then do you continue to bring value to others? Doing the right thing for yourself first and putting yourself ahead of others might actually be the right thing to do because it may mean that in the future you serve or save others more because you first took care of yourself.

What that means is that sometimes doing the right thing might feel wrong because it may feel as if you are being mean and it might feel as if you are exercising tough love. What I think is really important here is thinking about the longer-term ramifications of the decisions that you take when you are doing or thinking of what the right thing is going to be for you to do. It’s not just about what will this do right now and tomorrow and next week but beyond that and sometimes in doing the right thing, it’s also about taking a risk because we don’t know what the future is going to look like, we can’t plan for that and we can’t think about the implications. A good NLP coach will be able to help you think through the consequences of your decision.

For example, in my other company, we became very successful at writing applications for funding, both for ourselves as a company and also for the other organisations who wanted to apply for funding in order that they could work with us. The downside of doing that whilst I felt very encouraged to do so as it helps low-income families and children, we were breaking the rules. Each organisation should be writing their own application. They shouldn’t have been using an outside bid writer i.e me in order to do it. However, a part of me knows we were serving the greater good and therefore we did the right thing.

The difference between the right thing and the wrong thing is not always as clear as black and white it’s very often in that weird grey area too.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Take My Advice

Here is a format for giving good advice. I found this advice on a friend’s Facebook feed and I want to share some of it with you because it’s clever, creative and funny advice. When you give advice to somebody, use modal verbs or in NLP terms, we refer to those as modal operators. These are words such as can, can’t, should, shouldn’t, would, wouldn’t, have and/or haven’t.

Some modal verbs carry more influence than others. For example, ‘should’ sounds quite flexible, doesn’t it? Whereas, the words ‘have to’ is more forceful ‘you have to do this’. I would suggest with modal verbs whilst that’s good advice to use those because they do give flexibility, actually be cautious about which ones you choose because some of them really imply kind of like ‘here’s something you might want to consider’ whereas others are much more directive and ‘you need to do this’.

In my experience of giving advice, there are times when being forceful is appropriate but it’s probably not where you want to start because if you start by giving people forceful advice and the rapport isn’t there, you’re likely to get some resistance. Whereas if you are putting the idea out there with a softer approach, you’re less likely to get resistance but you’re also potentially more likely for them to not follow through because they’re not taking the suggestion as seriously. I would start with a light approach in dealing with them and if they don’t follow through you can then go in all guns blazing!

Making your advice into a question displaces resistance because the person listening to the advice (the receiver of the advice) has an opportunity to either respond or not because it’s a question.

When we give advice at the hypnotherapy and NLP clinic in Hertfordshire, there may be times when the instruction is more like a command and this needs to be delivered very carefully. If we are being forceful it’s possible to get resistance and lose our rapport and then we don’t have the leverage thereafter. If we start with a question then it’s softer, the person who is receiving the advice feels like they have an opportunity to either take it or not take it but if they don’t take it then we may want to repeat the suggestion with more of a command around the advice that we’re giving and with a more commanding tonality.

When we are advising people we can use questions, statements or commands. The difference between the three lies in your tone of voice. When we ask a question our intonation at the end of the sentence tends to pitch up. Whereas if we’re making a statement then our tone tends to stay on the same melody – our tone doesn’t tend to go up or down at the end our tone stays on the same path. When our pitch goes down at the end of the sentence, this implies that we are being more commanding. One of the best syntaxes that you can use is to combine a question with a commanding tonality. The conscious mind knows not to get offended because it was structured as a question whereas on an unconscious level the command intonation is what’s picked up on recognised and reacted too.

Next ‘put yourself in the other person’s position’. If someone is asking for your advice it’s useful to imagine yourself being in that person’s position. This is a good way to explain your advice.

In NLP, we have a process called the ‘perceptual positions process’ which does precisely that. You associate into the perspective of somebody else. It’s kind of a role-play exercise and it’s really beneficial for being able to see a problematic situation through the eyes of the person that you’re in the problematic situation with, sometimes when we give advice we do it from our own perspective because that’s easy to do. We know what it’s like to be in our skin and how we might feel or react to a certain situation but it’s less easy to think about it from someone else’s perspective because they’ve got all of their values, their history and their own considerations so just throwing the advice at them actually it might not resonate with them.

Sometimes when we give advice that they may take or leave you can deliver it as ‘I recommend, I would suggest’. This gives them the opportunity to react in the right way – the way that I want them to! If they don’t then the feedback becomes stronger and more commanding and I then take the opportunity to switch it from ‘you could/I would suggest’ to ‘this needs to happen this way’.

Before I leave you some funny and creative advice I also found on my friend’s Facebook:

Don’t date anyone whose personality you have to explain to others.
Never date someone if they don’t have many friends there’s probably a good reason.
When taking the rubbish out use that time to eat your secret sweets or chocolate that you hide away from your kids!
If you have teens listen more than you talk.
Always put the toilet seat down when finished.
When you’re scrubbing the toilet keep your mouth closed.

I hope that has been amusing and useful for you!

Gemma Bailey
www.hypntherapyandnlp.co.uk

The 5 Factor Model & Hexaco

The five-factor model is a commonly used model within psychotherapy and psychology in order to assess people’s personalities. It has also evolved into another assessment tool for personalities which is called HEXACO.

This article examines the original 5-factor model which has the acronym OCEAN:

Openness
Conscientiousness
Extroversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism

The HEXACO model has changed this slightly – the X now stands for extroversion, the E is for emotionality and the H is for honesty and humility.

Openness relates to how imaginative you are and how much of a daydreamer you are and how much you might have artistic interests.

Conscientiousness could mean you are someone who likes to complete tasks successfully or if you tend to misjudge situations. Whether you like things in order or if you can work in a mess, whether you like to break or follow the rules, whether you are someone who does enough to get by or if you really like hard work.

Extraversion relates to whether you are warm and friendly easy to get to know or whether, you know, maybe you’ve got a little bit of a cold shoulder and a bit more difficult to get to know. If you are gregarious and love large gatherings or if you prefer to be alone. If you’re assertive and take charge or if you hang back and wait for others to take the lead.

Agreeableness relates to whether you are trusting or distrusting whether you comply or not, whether you make people feel welcome or if you tend to look down on others. If you are straightforward or cooperative. If you are modest or you like being the centre of attention and if you sympathise with others.

Neuroticism – whether you get anxious and worry about things or if you tend to be quite relaxed most of the time. If you’re hostile or get easily irritated depressed or comfortable with yourself self-conscious so whether you’re easily intimidated or embarrassed.

What you will have noticed with those different elements that I’ve just shared with you is that they’re not all on a ‘this’ or ‘that’ kind of scale. For example, we could say with openness, that you are an open person and open to new experiences or maybe you’re more closed off so that’s kind of a ‘this’ or ‘that’ choice. Whereas, with conscientiousness, you are not completely conscientious or not at all. You can be partially so. What I found really interesting from going through the five-factor model for myself today is that it’s relatively accurate in representing my personality. It’s got me thinking to about my new employees who are going to be coming through as to how I might profile them to make sure that they are suitable for my company.

Something like ‘openness to new experience’ is really important in my organisation because we switch things up a lot. Whilst I want someone who can do the job I also want someone who is open to completely changing what they’re doing too.

If someone is looking for a romantic partner and you want someone who is open to new experiences and a bit of an adventurer versus someone who is happy to do the same thing day in and day out and has a more routine behind them. This is a really useful tool for both work and relationship purposes.

The 5-factor personality model can be found here: https://www.truity.com/test/big-five-personality-test-std

I’m interested to hear if your scores reflect who you think you are!

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

You Have Everything You Need

I am going to be revisiting a presupposition of NLP. I want to share one of those NLP presuppositions with you today but tie it into a real-life experience that I had last year. The presupposition in question ‘is all of the resources that you need to succeed are already within you’.

Let me begin by telling you my story, last year I had a plumbing incident. It was was my first weekend off since NLP4Kids training. I was looking forward to having a nice relaxing time but my washing machine decided that I needed to learn plumbing instead so here’s what happened I’d put the washing machine on the night before when I went to bed but I programmed it to come on early hours of the morning. A good tip for saving yourself a bit of money, your electricity is more expensive during peak hours. When I got up in the morning and the washing cycle had completed and the kitchen floor had a puddle on it because I have a very old building all the floors are a little bit sloped, you know, so I didn’t actually realise at the time the water had come from the washing machine because it was nowhere near the washing machine so I stuck on another wash cycle and then it became very clear that the water was coming from the washing machine.

I didn’t want to call out an emergency plumber on the weekend because that was going to get pricey and there is a little bit of me that thinks I can do DIY pretty well. I like to think I’m the man of this house, mainly because I’m the only one who lives here but the point was that I wanted to at least give it a shot so I did some you know googling and looked up videos on youtube. The very first thing that happened was that I tightened up some joints on the pipes and I ran the washing machine again. It leaked even worse so then I realised that the fact that one of the joints had been a bit loose was not the source of the problem then I did a bit more googling and this led me to realise maybe the issue is that my waste pipe is blocked.

I remove the U-bend and check that the blockage isn’t in there, it was not but this then left me with a further problem because then I know the U-bend is clear so it could be in the part where it starts to come across and go down into the proper drain but the problem with that is how do I get the drain on the blocker to pour horizontally? In my brain, I thought there’s going to be something in this house to help you solve this problem.

Here’s what happened I found a piece of old pipe then I was going to use that to kind of thread it through the pipe and pour the drain on the blocker like through the end of it. The problem was the pipe was so stiff and the drain unblocker was so thick that it was never going to pour through now. The only solution that I could come up with was to sit on the kitchen floor and have a little cry and that is what I did and then I realised ‘hang on a moment you are an educated, resourceful, human being and the presupposition came to me – everything you need to succeed is already inside of you. You have all of the resources that you need’.

Eventually, I realised that I could screw the U-bend on the other way up and a half-hour later my drain made a burp at which point I knew that my drain was unblocked. The moral of the story is that you do have everything you need to succeed, to be able to achieve your desired, outcomes in your life. The trick is to tell yourself with absolute certainty that that is the case and to get your brain looking for those particular solutions now I’ve said this before and I shall say it again – you need to ask yourself the right questions in these situations that you come up against!

We want to avoid ‘why’ questions ‘why can’t I do it?’ or ‘why isn’t it working?’ those questions will just direct your brain to look for all of the reasons why you can’t do it can’t solve it and can’t find the answer this is not helpful for us. The best questions to ask yourself is ‘how’ question. A good question always will start with ‘how’. For example, “how can I solve this?” “How can I find what I need?” and “how can I come up with a creative idea here?” When you ask yourself ‘how’ questions, it gets your brain looking into the outside world to find ideas, experiences, resources that you perhaps hadn’t tuned into yet. Those solutions, ideas and resources they were already out there. They already existed but what you have to do is to program your brain to go find them and bring them into your awareness and you do that by asking yourself good quality questions.

When you talk to yourself even though it’s only inside your head (I mean feel free to do it out loud) but assuming you’re going to do it inside your own head, tone of voice is still important in there. You need to ask the question in the right way so these are the things that I want to challenge you to utilise over the course of the next few months is to remind yourself whenever you may need to that all of the resources that you need to succeed are already inside of you and if you cannot find them and you really want to tap into them you’re going to do that by asking yourself a ‘how’ question.

By Gemma Bailey