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Overcoming a relationship break up

Have a think about the experiences that you’ve had with that person. You’re probably doing a lot of this already, but remember that every time you replay an experience that you had with someone you delete, distort and generalise on the experience that you had which could mean that if you’re replaying all the good times that will no longer have together and that you’re deleting what maybe wasn’t quite so good about those times, distorting what was good about them to make them seem even better than they really are perhaps even generalizing that this was the best relationship you’ve ever had. When you think about stuff too much it really becomes quite different to the truth of what the situation was.

There are certain people that I can recall and when I think about them, I make it seem as if it was a really great relationship and that we had a really great time. Actually, if I look at the bigger picture I can see that the reasons why things ended were good reasons because there were definitely issues there at the same time. Remember that being dumped, being left or having to end a relationship does lead to some negative feelings but those temporary feelings are better than being treated very badly in the future. At the very least you wouldn’t want to be with someone who didn’t really want to be with you because you like yourself more than that, don’t you?

Get busy. Have fun with life, have more fun do more fun stuff. Remember that we only ever really learn through experience and later on there will come a time when you look back and go ‘ah that’s why I needed to have that happen.’

It might not make sense right now but just know it’s okay to feel bad when a relationship ends for a period of time and that over time you will automatically and quite naturally start to feel better. They’ll be in your thoughts less and you’ll start to pick yourself up and move on. And the when you do you’ll look back on the experience and it will all make perfect sense as to why things had to end the way that they did.

Ask yourself this question: How much more pain would you have had to have had before you knew it was time to move on?

I don’t think you would really want to have to do that to yourself, would you? So, be pleased that you have much more control over yourself than being run like a big bag of chemicals. Know that those chemicals do play a vital and important role in your life in determining how you feel in any given situation.

But then once you’ve recognised those chemical feelings exist it is wholly and completely possible for you to take greater responsibility and greater control over the way that you are feeling. You don’t have to be run by your emotions and that you can choose to be feeling exactly how you want to feel in any given moment.

You don’t have to depend on other people to be feeling a certain way. All of those feelings exist within you. They are your feelings and that you can have them whenever you choose to do so.

A good hypnotherapist will have the skills to help you overcome the pain of a relationship breakup and hypnotherapy can be incredibly helpful in this area. Contact the Hypnotherapy and NLP clinic to arrange a free consultation.

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

No More Resentment or Eating Burnt Chop

Not eating burnt chop is a metaphor about getting rid of resentment. It’s a type of martyrdom where we put what others want ahead of what we want. Often not even voicing what it is that we want so the other person doesn’t even know that they’re putting us out. It’s a combination of a conflict avoidance technique, self-talk that tells us we don’t deserve to get what we want and a belief that asking for what you want is rude.

One of the by-products of ‘eating the burnt chop’ is that we resent the person who we are constantly giving in to. Mostly this is a partner or close friend or family. This can make us snappy for no apparent reason (as far as they’re concerned) and unhappy. In addition it doesn’t have a good impact on our health. Although I am learning to eat less burnt chop going forward, I still have built up resentment towards people from past burnt chops!

There are times when you do stuff for other people, that you don’t necessarily want to do and for some strange reason you forget to say ‘no’ and then you do it and then you’re miffed, because you’ve ended up putting your time and effort doing something for somebody else, that you didn’t actually want to do in the first place. A good hypnotherapist and NLP Practitioner can help you to understand and move beyond resentment. Find a practitioner in Hertfordshire or North London to help you move forward.

I figure that you’ve got two options. When somebody says to you “Can you do X for me and in your head?” and you think ‘I really don’t want to’.

Option number one is to help them anyway and love yourself for the fact that you are doing it.

Option two is that you say ‘no’. What stops you from saying no when somebody asks you to do something for them or somebody leans on you in in a particular way? Is it avoiding conflict? That could be part of it but I think if we pick this apart even more, maybe it’s more to do with a fear of being unloved. If we were to chunk this up to a higher level, we would go above and beyond avoiding conflict and if we were to think of it in a more positive sense, I think it has more to do with wanting to be loved or a fear that you’ll be unloved if you don’t do the things that other people want you to do.

So, the question you have to ask yourself is: is that really true? Is it really true that by doing this thing for somebody else you are going to avoid conflict? You’re creating a conflict within yourself and in the long term if it makes you feel grotty around them, then you’re probably going to end up with conflict with them too. Is it really true that if you don’t do this thing for this person that you will be unloved? Ultimately not doing something for someone might leave them a bit miffed for a while but in the long run they’re going to respect you much more for having the self-respect to be able to set yourself some boundaries.

They might even start to consider your thoughts and feelings more too. Maybe you need to stop being so selfish by always helping other people and give them a chance to learn to be capable for themselves or to even help you. What if saying ‘no’ to them means that they’ll love you more? If that’s the case then you can say no, without having to experience the guilt whilst you say it.

But if you say yes and you’re miserable about it, you only have the right to be miserable with yourself, not really with the other people, because you decided it, you decided to do it so you have to own it. You have to take responsibility for it. Who said yes? You did. Who took the action? You did. Who’s miserable? You are. Whose fault is it? It’s yours.

Consider more about what you are giving and not so much about what you’re not getting as a result of doing this thing for these other people.

When you work with a professional NLP practitioner and Hypnotherapist in North London, Hertfordshire you’ll begin to develop the skills to challenge your thinking in new and empowering ways.

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Making a Good First Impression


Make sure you’re on time. For many people, lateness is a real annoyance. If somebody shows up late for particularly something like an interview, then it causes a question about how badly they want to be there. It plants a seed of doubt about whether they’re going to be motivated enough to bother showing up to work on time.

You must be at ease with yourself. You need to come across as confident within yourself but not a smart arse with it. You don’t want to come across as being arrogant in any way but you do want to come across as somebody who is comfortable within your own skin.

If you are somebody who comes across as being not happy within your own skin, then that could be seen as a negative quality and that perhaps you might have some underlying issues that could get in the way of the relationship that you’re trying to create.

Remember to smile and show off your skillset. The reason why you’ve been asked there is because they think that your qualified to do something that they want you to do or that they need someone to do. You have to really present yourself as somebody who can fill that gap that they have. You have to be completely at ease with showing off a little bit.

Be presentable. It relates to your self-worth. Make sure you iron your shirt. Somebody once told me to make sure that your shoes are always clean and shiny. You can’t make a good first impression with muddy manky old shoes.

So be confident and chatty and have some kind of uniqueness about you. It could be something that you wear that is slightly unusual that will help to stick in their mind. It could be something to do with a special hobby that you have that’s a bit unusual that you managed to bring up into the conversation. Something that will help you stand out in making that first impression.

There are lots of people that make good first impressions but are still forgettable and you don’t want to be forgettable. You want to be memorable. So, remember to be positive and have a good attitude. Now when you do that you have to know if you’re going to be funny that a). it’s in the right context for you to be funny and that b). it really is funny.

If you say something that doesn’t quite fit in with the other person’s humour then you could end up just really miffing them off a bit. So, if you’re going to make an effort to be jovial in some way, make sure that it’s the right context for you to do that and be very certain that the other person is going to find humour in it.

You can work with an NLP coach to get yourself interview and dating ready. We have practitioners based in Hertfordshire and North London who are highly specialised in this area of work and will help you to always make a good first impression.

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.peoplebuilding.co.uk

Anxiety and Panic, Panic, Panic

Excessive anxiety is often associated with other mental problems such as depression and anxiety is only considered to be a mental health problem when it’s long lasting, severe and is interfering with everyday activities.

Anxiety attacks usually last for only five or ten minutes. Now if you’re someone who has ever had anxiety (and I think we all have at some stage) you’ll remember then the feeling passed but anyone who’s had any kind of prolonged issues with anxiety, whose had a period of anxiety attacks or anything like that, would probably say that it starts to envelop all of their world. It forms the basis for their day and I think what that tells us is that the feeling is so strong and so intense that even though it’s just a tiny, tiny fraction a tiny fragment of what might be going on in any twenty-four-hour period that the intensity of the feeling is so strong, even those five or ten minutes seem like an absolute lifetime.

If you ever have or you know anyone who has experienced the feeling of being anxious and it’s causing them a problem, ask them to make it worse. Now that sounds a little bit evil and twisted but if you can make the feeling worse, then you can also make the feeling better. If you can intensify that feeling and make yourself feel worse is that you are controlling that feeling. You are doing it. You have control over it if you can make it worse and we can also then presuppose that if you can make it worse that you can make it better, just by doing the opposite to what you’re doing already.

So, if with that anxious feeling that’s inside, you can make it worse by spinning it faster and making it seem bigger and more intense or tightening your muscles up further collapsing your lungs down and shrinking down your breathing so you’re getting less oxygen into your body, if you can do those things to make it worse, then you just have to do the opposite to start getting the feeling under control and making yourself feel better.

So instead of spinning the feeling fast you see what happens if you slow it down and spin it back the other way. Instead of shrinking down into your body and collapsing those lungs down so they don’t get much oxygen in, instead you sit yourself up and have them open and lots of air going in. If you notice that you can imagine in your mind making the feeling bigger and it makes it worse, then imagine in your mind making it smaller to make it better.

You brain doesn’t forget memories and experiences. Unlike a computer where you can delete files that you don’t want, you can’t do that in your brain. They’re always stored in there somewhere so in order for us to be able to go through life without continuously referring back to negative memories and negative experiences we need to know how to program our mind in such a way that it always refers back to positive memories and experiences.

If we’re having an experience where every day there is a negative thought that’s being replayed then actually what we want to start training our brain to do is to refer back to positive experiences and memories instead. If you have a negative memory that you consistently referring back to, be it any kind of negative thing or be it related directly to anxiety. If you’ve got something like that all you have to do is create for yourself a new memory to put on top of the one that you don’t want to keep referring back to.

An NLP therapist and hypnotherapy are both useful ways for you to be able to get rid of anxiety and stop having anxiety attacks. Speak to one of our qualified therapists in Hertfordshire or North London.

And here’s something else. How much fun are you having? Do an evaluation of how much fun you consciously make an effort to go out and have and the chances are it’s not nearly where it needs to be. If you don’t do what you like in your life you can expect that you’re going to end up feeling bad about it.

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Using NLP to Get rid of Anger

The best thing about NLP is the way in which one can covertly weave it to an everyday focus and conversation and spin it into something more resourceful. You can talk to people and be NLPing them, without them even knowing it is happening.

I was out with a friend of mine in Hertfordshire, North London who had recently separated from her boyfriend. We knew that on this particular evening out, there was the possibility of bumping in to the ex-boyfriend so she was in a bit of a wound-up state. As we sat with our bottle of wine in the pub, a song came on in the background as my friend began to tune into it aware of the familiarity of it, she started to cry. Through the blubs and wales she explained that it had been their song – her and the ex-boyfriend’s and that she still loved him so much. It’s a good job I’m an NLP therapist and not a counsellor because sympathy just isn’t my thing. I reached over and touched her on the shoulder and said “It’s all going to be fine and I am sure he was an idiot anyway.”

This was closely followed by a snot-filled rage in which she exclaimed how she couldn’t believe how he had treated her, how could he do this etc and how much she hated him.

When this stage kicked in I quickly withdrew my comforting hand. Those of you who know NLP would have identified that I had accidentally anchored her melancholy state to her shoulder. You might think this was a bad thing. The truth is it would have been if I had not utilised it resourcefully later on. Really, I should skip the part where I tell you that this all happened by accident, and make out this entire event happened completely on purpose as a result of my marvellous skill set, but that wouldn’t be totally true!

Later on, we went to a Hertfordshire night club and guess who showed up? At this moment in time, there were several reactions she could have gone for and I thought she might go for blubbering wreck but to my surprise and his she launched into straight into snot-filled rage.

As she catapulted herself towards him, I spotted an expression in his face. In NLP we like to be very clear about the difference between a sensory observation and a hallucination. A hallucination is when you think you know what you have seen in the other person. The sensory based observation of the ex-boyfriend was this: His eyes widened. His jaw lowered. His skin tone became more pale. His forehead began to sweat. He became short of breath. The hallucination of what I saw, I will call ‘man having fear of ex-girlfriend’.

At this moment I grabbed her shoulder, yes, the same one as earlier and said something like: “I know that this isn’t the real feeling you are feeling towards him, isn’t it?” The snot-filled rage fizzled and vanished and the melancholy of earlier returned, though without the crying.

They had a conversation about staying friends and it was all okay. When she popped to the loo a little later he came over and spoke to me. He said: “I have no idea what strange therapy you did to her but you did something. She was ready to kill me and you diffused her somehow. How did you do that?”

At that point I realised what I had done. I realised I really could help others using NLP.

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

7 Things That Will Stop You

Thing Number One – you tell yourself you do not have enough of something, fill in the gap with whatever the something may be. Now that gap could be time, money – it could be support or intellect or skill. A very talented speaker said to an audience of six thousand people if you suddenly had to find an extra 10,000 pounds in the next two weeks, could you do it? Most of the audience said no or didn’t really respond. Then he asked “could you find it if not getting that money meant that you would die, or one of your children would die?” and of course the response was suddenly very different from that audience. So, it’s not the thing that fits in the gap of why you can’t do it, it’s the fact that you believe the excuse is true, so stop telling yourself this rubbish. A good NLP Coach will help you to get your mindset int he right place to that you can do this. We have NLP coaches located throughout Hertfordshire and North London who can assist you with this.

Your real truth is that you can do and be better than that. That same person once told me the difference between successful people and failures, is that successful people do not believe their own excuses. It’s not that they don’t have them, they just choose not to believe them.

So, thing Number Two that will stop you – you do not focus for long enough. You flip from one idea to the next without giving them enough time to grow and develop. In fact, in the movie The Secret there is a scene where there’s a little seed that’s just about to burst through the soil and they say something along the lines of “You give up right at the point where it’s about to come up through that soil”. This is a good metaphor. If you give up on your hopes and dreams because they didn’t reward you quickly enough you will find yourself consistently looking for the next best thing. I know people who do this but if you want it badly enough it is worth nurturing and waiting for.

A key skill from NLP coaching in Hertfordshire and north London is our ability to help you create well formed goals.

Number Three of the ‘7 things that stop you’ – you give your power to others. It surprises me that there are so many smart intelligent people in life who seem to have everything sorted but in one area of their life which is not causing them the happiness that they desire. For example, they may have a successful job, but be totally unfulfilled in their relationship and be reluctant to do anything about it in the hope that the other person will instead, hence giving your power to others. Giving your power to others and having them make decisions for you will ultimately prevent you from stretching and growing yourself. Failure to grow will hold you back from having what you really want. You are a powerful beautiful thing. Embrace that and start taking control of your life. All of it.

NLP is a great tool for self empowerment. Our coaches in Hertfordshire can help you realise that power.

Number Four of the ‘7 things that will stop you’ – you blame others. Again, we have something outside of yourself as the cause of what is stopping you from doing what you should, could and want to do with your life. It’s easy to justify other people as the reason why we are prevented from doing what we want to do. Be it parents from childhood, bank managers who won’t give us overdrafts or bosses that don’t listen. We can easily believe that they have some sort of magical influence on our lives that holds us back but you and I know the real truth is that we are here for just a fraction of time on this beautiful planet and your life is your own to do as you please with it. Now is the time to fully begin to live your life without letting others get in the way. Our Hertfordshire and North London NLP Coaches can help you develop the resilience needed to say ‘No’ whenever you feel others are diluting your will.

Number Five of the 7 things that will prevent you and stop you from living the life you want – you don’t believe it should be easy. You operate from the philosophy that life is hard, as such, that is the experience you have repeatedly create. There may be problems that stop you from getting what you want or from going where you want to go. These problems may appear to be very real but of course they are all made up. They’re totally fictional and they are made up of your perception of them and your fear of them is the thing that gives them energy and keeps them alive. When you say ‘whatever’ or ‘bring it on’ to your problems it causes those problems to begin to behave differently. If you can continuously do something differently, eventually it becomes easy. Perhaps you could continuously live your life differently until your perception shows you that life can be easy. It really can.

It begins to get easier with support too, which is why an NLP coach can be so valuable to you.

Number Six of our ‘7 things that will stop you’ – you lost your faith. This doesn’t mean religious faith, though it could, but knowing that you are loved cared for and that something greater than yourself is watching over you and guiding you in the right direction can make all the set backs a little easier to take and the rainy days a little easier to tolerate. You absolutely should believe in, if nothing else, your own ability to do in life what ever it is you want to do.

And last of all Number 7 you just don’t want it badly enough because if you did you would never give up.

There is a more detailed version of this article that has been previously published on www.peoplebuilding.co.uk. Go to the article section and you will be able to find it there.

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Releasing Disappointment

Disappointment is one of those feeling that we all experience but fail to discuss as much as other more (seemingly) significant emotions such as anger, stress and anxiety.
It may be because emotions like humiliation and disappointment tend not to be crippling. Life still goes on in spite of them, but they cast a bit of a cloud over what might be a perfectly happy human.

Disappointment tends to bring with it feelings of sadness and failing. It can have undertones of anger and bitterness and has the potential therefore to be a very complex emotion.

Often, though not always, disappointment brings with it a continual whirring or ‘what if’s’. If only things had been different. Returning to what might have been is what creates the stuck-ness that disappointment has and it cannot really be overcome until someone is ready to put a greater degree of energy and focus into what will happen next than they are currently putting into what might have been.

Living in the past rarely serves us unless it is to learn from the mistake we made and to make contingency plans for how we will be better prepared in a similar situation in the future.

Essentially, once the driving process of what might have/should have been has passed, the only way to really move on is by asking (and answering) the question:

“What are you going to do about it? How can you be ready for what happens next?”

Some of you reading may be old enough to remember the old BT adverts with Maureen Lipman in the late 80’s. In one such advert she calls her grandson to find out about his exam results. They are not as good as his grandmother would have wanted. You see the disappointment flash across her face and you can hear it in his voice too as he recites each subject he took and each one a failed exam.

Finally she says “You didn’t pass anything?”

“Pottery” he replies with a sigh.

It would have been a fleeting “What can he do about it?” thought that causes her to respond with: “Pottery? Very useful! People will always need plates. Anything else?”

“And sociology.” He responds glumly.

“An Ology? He gets an Ology and he thinks he’s failed! You get an Ology and you’re a scientist!”

As she continues to reassure him you see his eyebrows lift as he begins to consider that his grandmother might have a fair point in what she is saying.

Releasing disappointment doesn’t just come from finding ways to make the best of what you have or what you are left with. It also comes from being honest about what you’ve got and creative about what you chose to do with it next. It might also be a case of forgiving and deciding to set the bar in a different place to where your prior expectations had previously thought it could go.

Recover first, then make a plan for moving forward and make that plan have multiple prongs that can safeguard you from having the same sort of disappointment again in the future.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Find Your Happy

Some might say happiness is the absence of fear, stress or anxiety. For me it is more than that. Happiness helps us to access confidence more easily and is responsible for generating your overall feeling of positivity and contentment.

Since happiness is an emotion, it means we have full-time access to it, after all, we are the generators of our emotions. Of course, our circumstances might cause us to feel other emotions too. Ones that interfere with out ability to access happiness in that moment. Although it is estimated that only 10% of our overall happiness comes from your environment.

This means that whilst we could take a universal tragedy, that depending on how someone perceived that situation, there could still be people who would consider themselves happy in spite of it. This can only be caused by how they chose to think about the life rather than what life actually presents them with.

Learning to find happiness (especially if you have grown up with or work in an environment with particularly negative people) can be a real challenge. How can you condition yourself to have more happiness more of the time?

Comparative thinking is just one of the ways that we teach clients at the hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire. Comparative thinking is when, if you’re in a bad place and you notice someone who’s in a worse position than you, it starts to make you feel better as a result of comparing your situation to that of somebody who is, in some way, worse off. Comparative thinking comes from the school of positive psychology and is a way that people can effectively begin to change how they feel about their present circumstances.

Another way to increase your levels of happiness is to stop only rewarding yourself with happiness when you have achieved a goal. You’ve probably heard about the dangers in seeing yourself as successful once you have completed something. The problem this creates is you only have a very short moment of feeling successful before you have to create another goal post somewhere further away. If you do this with happiness too, it’s something you will constantly seek and never find. Avoid telling yourself things like “I’ll be happy when I’m with my perfect partner” or “I’ll be happy when I’ve bought a new car.” Find happiness in the now.

If happiness for what you have right now seems like to big an undertaking, then a smaller step can be to begin to find happiness in the every day things that you have learned to take for granted. For example, seeing a butterfly or a moment of warm sunshine on your face before the clouds blow over. When you have these experiences remark out loud or in your mind how lovely they are, or how grate fun you are. This will start to reprogram your mind to seek out more experiences like this. Plus it increases your positive memory references so that you have good memories you can return to for a top-up or ‘happy’ when you need it.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Bringing Down the Barriers – Dealing With Someone Who is Defensive

“Have you thought about getting a part time job?” I asked
“What are you trying to say?” Was barked back at me. |
“Errrm, literally just that. Have you thought about getting a part time job?” “Oh for God-sake!”

This was a recent encounter with a relative who, unbeknownst to me at that time, had, having recently retired, been asked the same question by many of our other relatives.

I hadn’t anticipated that such a simple and innocent question could prompt such a defensive response. If I had, I would have avoided asking it.

But sometimes we need to ask questions or make suggestions that we know are going to be provocative, either because of who we are dealing with or what the subject matter is going to be.

It seems unreasonable that you should have to formulate strategies to avoid upsetting the apple cart and so assisting the other person in changing their behaviour may be a more desirable alternative.

At The Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, we subscribe to a set of NLP presuppositions. One of these is “You cannot change others. When you change yourself others change also.” So when I make the suggestion of changing the other persons defensive behaviour, this is a change that will occur as a result of your new way of managing them.

Firstly, you’ve got to start thinking about life from their perspective. What are these unjust that they are protecting themselves from? What are the ways that their perceive their value to be challenges or violated? When you have identified these consider their other motivators too. What do they like, what gets their interest?

If you can begin to communicate with them in a way that has them feel as if their needs are being met, as if you too have their best interests at heart they will not have the need to defend themselves as they felt they did before.

You need to create the sense that you are on their side or, that at the very least you understand there side, if you want to remove from them the feeling that they need to defend themselves from you.

In the example above, my relative was complaining about not getting enough pension. This told me that they were concerned about the finances. The rest of us were concerned about how much money she was spending due to boredom. But having recently gained the freedom of retirement, she was in no hurry to put herself in a position of employment as the above outburst had demonstrated.

I waited a while and had to pick the right moment to casually say “Wow, that’s a decent amount of money.” As I flicked through the newspaper.
“What? What’s that?” She asked.
“Huh? Oh nothing. It’s an advert for part time Christmas work at the post office. I didn’t realise they paid such a good hourly rate.”

The ‘planting of the seed’ proved to be a useful way to covertly work around what would have otherwise been a suggestion that was disregarded due to stubbornness and defensiveness.

When you begin to see the world as they do, you can change how you communicate to fit with them. As the trust between you develops the barriers of defensiveness will soften meaning that when you need to cut-to-the-chase with them, they will already regard what you say as being reasonable.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Learning to Make Connections After Overcoming Social Anxiety

The anxiety is gone (or at the very least is entirely manageable now) and you’re ready to start getting out there in the big wide world, making new friends and forging new relationships. But wait? How do you do that exactly?

I remember being about 7 years old and able to walk up to a child and say “Hi, I’m Gemma. Would you like to play with me?” It was a pretty cool strategy that worked almost all of the time. Except this one time when I was on holiday with my grandparents. We were in Spain and I was playing alone in a swimming pool. I saw a little girl just like me and thought it would be nice to play.

The challenge was that I hadn’t realised she was Spanish. So when I approached her to say hello, she looked at me and freaked out because I was speaking to her in the wrong language. I watched her swim away hurriedly to her father, talk to him in her own language and point at me as if I had threatened to kill her. It was a big wake up call. Making friends wasn’t always going to be as easy in the future as it had been in the past, and clearly there was a little more that I need to know when it came to making relationships. “Hello, do you want to be my friend?” wasn’t the fail safe that I thought it was.

There’s a rule when it comes to communications that ‘People like people who are like themselves’. Meaning that we prefer to connect with others who in some way appear to be like us. That could be something about their posture or how they use their body, the tone of their voice or even the sorts of words and language they use.

Therefore, a good first step in building up relationships with others after overcoming social anxiety, is to observe others first. Notice the communication styles they use. At the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, we teach people all of the different clues you can look out for to identify someone’s communication style; how to replicate it and communicate back to them in that style causing them to feel comfortable and at ease with you.

We’ll also teach you how to become comfortable with the uncomfortable. It goes without saying that we have all experienced an uncomfortable social encounter at some time, but when someone has had social anxiety, they have felt that feeling (or at the very least feared having that feeling) for a significant period of time. Taking that first bold steps to ‘get back out there’ and face up to whatever may come your way takes an honest acknowledgement that just because you feel better, it doesn’t mean that everyone you meet will be lovely, or that they’ll love you. Becoming comfortable with the idea that sometimes your conversations may be stilted or that people might not be as friendly as you would have liked; whilst still maintaining the knowledge that many people will be friendly and many other conversations will be wonderful, takes a kind of acceptance of the idea that that things may not be perfect every time and that this is perfectly natural and okay.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk