Tag Archives: emotional issues

Juggling Work and Life: Finding the Right Balance

Striking a work-life balance means not letting work consume you to the point where you forget to enjoy life’s precious moments. It’s about creating memories and having fun that truly enriches your life. (For further mental health-funded support in this area, please book a free consultation here: https://peoplebuilding.co.uk/landing-page/ )

Just as our emotions offer us a spectrum of light and shade, work, whilst often being considered the last place we want to be, offers us structure, challenges and learning opportunities that we might not get if we were on a permanent holiday.

Ultimately, the work-life balance has to be tailored to meet individuals. If you have a very stressful job, getting the right amount of time away is important to maintain your well-being. However, very monotonous jobs can create stress of a different kind.

Developing a routine can be helpful to create a pattern so that at least that way your body will learn to tolerate the stresses until the relaxation time comes. The challenge with this is if you go from high stress to total relaxation it can at times put your body into a kind of shock.

Have you ever had the experience of working hard, then taking a holiday where within a few days you become ill? You spend the whole holiday feeling rough and recovering. Then by the time you are better, it’s time to return to work!

This happens when you’re body isn’t used to the opportunity of unwinding. Instead of unwinding you crash, beyond ruining your holiday. It’s also a message that you need to have more downtime more often. The question is “Can you make that a priority with the way you currently live your life?”. Exercising your relaxation “muscles” will mean that when you next come to do it, you won’t have a health breakdown.

Taking a holiday may not be financially or practically viable, but you can still start to give yourself an escape from the rat race in your normal life once you learn how to do it.

Meditation or yoga can be great ways to take time out and put your focus inward, instead of outward on all of the tasks you need to complete at work and in life.

A session of hypnosis at The Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire could help kick start the learning you need to focus on skills such as hypnotherapy and meditation.

In addition, If you’re seeking guidance to better navigate your situation, thoughts, or feelings, we can arrange for 10 coaching sessions tailored just for you. In many cases, this support comes at no expense to you. Schedule a consultation to learn more at https://www.peoplebuilding.co.uk/landing-page

By regularly taking focused time to relax, even from the most stressful jobs, you increase your chances of having “stress spikes” in your well-being. Meaning that when you are active you are energised with a clear mind and working dynamically rather than freaking out. Then when you are relaxing you are at peace and calm without having a health crash from the fall of a stress spike.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Dealing with Lemons

I remember when I first started to learn about NLP and Hypnotherapy. There seemed to be a type of person that would often be attracted to these subjects. I might be wrong, but I don’t think I was one of them. I (like to) think I came at it (the subjects of NLP and Hypnotherapy) in a part academic way and a part business-minded way. But some were from the school of positive thinking.

Now don’t get me wrong. Thinking positively is a good thing. But I’m talking about the über, unnaturally positive thinkers. The people who seemed to have almost lost empathy for real challenges that people faced because they were so quick to “re-frame” someone’s tragic experience in a positive way.

So when I talk below, about how to deal with lemons, I don’t mean to the detriment of empathy and being realistic about your circumstances. I also do not mean that the people who are über positive positive thinkers are lemons! The lemons are the challenging situation that life throws at us, unexpectedly at a point in time when the last thing we needed was a sodding lemon.

What we’re going to establish is how to take those lemons and make lemon drizzle cake from the rind, lemonade from the juice and grow the seeds into lemon trees that become the biggest income generator on our lemon farm. Such that within a short period of time, you switch from thinking “those sodding lemons” to thank goodness that life came along with that lemon once upon a time.

The Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic which is based in Hertfordshire uses many different methodologies from NLP, Hypnotherapy, CBT and even EFT to help clients to be able to see difficult or stressful circumstances from a more positive perspective, without forgetting to listen to why the problem is a problem for you first.

This is a form of re-framing that you can apply to any kind of problem or challenge without dismissing the difficulty of ‘the lemon’.

There are probably many other questions you can ask to make lemonade from a lemon, but these are some that come to mind for me.

What is something good to come from this that we have not thought about yet?
What can you learn from this experience? What is a more balanced viewpoint?
How will this scenario make you stronger?
You don’t know what the silver lining is, but trust that one day you will look back at this situation and will realise why this event was important. How can this situation help you?
How could this situation be helpful to others?
What, more negative situations, could this scenario potentially have prevented?
How can you see this negative scenario as an opportunity?

If you chose to use these questions with someone other than yourself, make sure first to make that assessment of how much ‘tea and sympathy’ they might need first, before you jump in with the questions above. Be sensitive to their current emotions by letting them know that they are heard. Give them enough time to say what they want to say if indeed they want to say something. Acknowledge their pain, struggle and their difficulty so you start on the page they are currently on. Then once you have got that rapport, you can start making lemonade.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Boost Your Creativity

The Encarta dictionary defines creativity as “the ability to use the imagination to develop new and original ideas or things, especially in an artistic context.”

Creativity and imagination are largely linked with right brain functions, whereas analytic and rationalised thinking is more associated with the left brain.

As individuals, we may tend to be more inclined to naturally use one side of the brain more than the other, which would define the ability we have to tap into our creative talents. Of course, there are influences in our lives as we grow up, that are responsible for either nurturing or stifling our creativity. For example, most of our schooling tends to focus much more on learning via the left brain, encouraging logical and objective learning, as opposed to holistic experiential learning which is related to the right brain.

Creating can lead to a deep sense of satisfaction and there are many different ways that people can express creativity. The common factors tend to be that a great feeling of compulsion to do something. Then throughout the process of doing it, a connection with oneself, or even a feeling of motivation or trance-like experience. If the person remains motivated to continue their project until completion, they will feel a great sense of pride once the process is successfully completed. Just imagine if it was a requirement of your job to feel this good every day! In fact, those who set up their own business often do so as an extension of a hobby or creative process that they already enjoy.

If you are not a natural creator, how can you develop this skill to create more wholeness and inspiration?

Here are some tips:

1. Have a few sessions of Life Coaching to help uncover the things you value most in your life and begin shaping your dreams. Motivational techniques can also be applied if a sense of uncertainty prevents you from taking the steps you need to make.

2. Listen to music that makes you feel good and switch off the news! Often the news is depressing and can put you in a bad state.

3. Make lots of notes. You never know when those good ideas will sneak up on you and if you don’t jot them down, they may be forgotten.

4. Get inspired. Look at other people’s creative work, either in the field you are interested in, or just in the natural environment around you.

5. Do some brainstorming around your chosen idea. This will move it from pie in the sky to the specific steps you will need to make.

6. Read books. Books are great for expanding ideas and are “healthier” for your brain than watching the telly all the darn time!

7. Keep your brain fit by doing crosswords, and quizzes and participating in creative and intelligent conversations.

8. Be healthy in your body. Your mind and your body are linked so you need to look after both. Feed them healthy food and exercise them both.

9. Write a list of how you will feel and how your life will be affected by expressing your creativity. What will it mean to you?

10. When you get an idea, do something about it, before someone else beats you to it!

“Thank you all so much, this has made a positive change in my life.”

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

How to Raise Mental Health Concerns

I’m going to be talking to you about how to express if indeed you should express to someone else that you think they’ve got a problem with their mental health. When I say ‘if indeed you should’ there are some things that we don’t flag up with other people and there are some things that we don’t raise the issue with them. For example, even if you are clinically qualified to do so you don’t tell your friend that you think that they’re autistic. We don’t go there, that’s something that somebody needs to find out as a result of deciding to go on a journey themselves. This is not your place to just kind of randomly throw into the conversation even if you think it’s for their benefit.

Here’s the very first thing that is super important before we even consider sitting down with someone and having a bit of a chat with them. Firstly, has something changed? I don’t mean do we know something in their life has changed. I mean in terms of these new behaviours, reactions and emotions that they’re displaying; these things that are troubling us about this person – is it different to how they used to be before?

If it’s not, then actually we might not have a problem they might just be a bit quirky and a bit odd because those people do exist. If you notice that the person you’re concerned about has changed that there has been a notable change in how they are thinking, how they are behaving or how they are feeling then we’ve got grounds to proceed.

If it’s not those things maybe they’re not the one with the problem maybe it’s you, you know, maybe it’s your thinking that has changed about them but not necessarily them that’s changed and sometimes that happens in life. Sometimes we have a relationship with someone and the stuff that never used to bother us about them suddenly starts really annoying us and then it suddenly seems like they’re annoying us on purpose but they’re not they’ve always been that way but your tolerance levels have changed so if it’s that we don’t need to talk to them about it we need to work on our own problems, with our own tolerance levels and decide whether or not we still want this person in our life that’s a different thing but when the change has happened in the other person and it is having a significant impact on how they are thinking, behaving or feeling then we need to start thinking about sitting down with them, having a conversation and saying ‘I think there might be a problem here’ and having a look at it together.

From establishing that ‘yes, something has changed’ only then can we start thinking about how do we actually approach this interaction with them and have this further conversation with them. My first suggestion is that no matter whether this is an employee or a family member you start by keeping notes. You’re going to have to start keeping some evidence because if this is a relative that you’re concerned about and you maybe are going to end up being the person who accompanies them to the doctors at some stage and so to be able to have some history around when this has started and what’s been happening, what sorts of incidents you’ve noticed is going to serve you really well.

You need to be keeping records of what’s going on with this person that you care about so that in an attempt to get them the right treatment you’ve got as much information as possible. One of the things that are really difficult with mental illness is describing your symptoms because you only see life from your own perspective and particularly when people get frightened about their mental health they’ll really downplay what their symptoms are or brush things off to one side or if they’re suffering from something up that higher end of the mental illness spectrum they might actually forget stuff that they’ve ever done.

Where possible I would suggest using the softening phrases when approaching another person: ‘I feel like that’s not the way you used to behave,’ ‘I feel like it’s not okay to treat people like that’ or ‘I feel like you’re not looking after yourself very well at the moment. In using such phrases, it’s like you’re taking responsibility for what you’re seeing and experiencing and not just being blaming and putting it all on them. I feel softening frame can work really well and generally just think about your language and the softening frames that you might be using.

The other thing that is really useful to do which the police do all the time where they interview a suspect. The police tell the suspect that the questioning is just to rule you out from our enquiries so that phrasing around this is to rule out anything else is something that I have learned to use a lot both with my mom and with the clients that I see where I suspect that the mental health issue or illness that they are experiencing is beyond the realms of my reach and I want them to get treatment but it’s not going to be with me.

One of the frames that you can use here is to say I’d recommend going to the doctor just to rule out anything else and then I’ll often suggest something quite low level that’s not particularly terrifying or treatable but would also help to put the like to kind of get them into the system and to get whoever it is that they end up engaging with exploring other things. For example, if you have someone with anxiety then you could recommend that they go to see their GP just to rule out. If someone has a long-term sleep problem then you could say to them, you know, it’s probably worth talking it through with your GP or a counsellor just to rule out the fact that there’s something else playing on your mind, that’s interfering with your sleep patterns. If someone is showing some signs of some more mental health illnesses it’s worth going to your doctor to get a urine check because sometimes with certain urine infections it can cause your brain to start tripping out and working in a different way.

I can suggest for you as the carer, as the employer or as the facilitator of getting the ball rolling on having this issue explored, for whoever it is in your life, that currently has a problem is that you are really brave about it because it can be a thankless task to undertake. It can also be incredibly stressful because you might see what is best for them but they may not see it for themselves. It might feel as if you’re kind of like going at it alone in some ways but when you do get them on the right track when they do get access to the help or the treatment that they need then you can give yourself a pat on the back and know that you did the best that you could.

Don’t underestimate the impact that things like stress, anxiety and depression can have on a person. Some things that might seem to be much more severe mental health issues actually just boil down to either stress, anxiety or depression or a combination of the three of them in some way and these can really change a person’s personality and they are recoverable so where you can support people in accessing the treatment that they need getting on the right path so that they can begin to live a healthier, happier life going forward with your assistance there by their side.

I hope that this was a useful and interesting one I know it’s the stuff that might not be relevant to you at this exact moment in your life but trust me if you ever interact with another human being at some point in the new or distant future you’re going to need this stuff because of everybody has a mental health issue at some point in their life and with the ageing population that we have, we’ve got more and more people that are going to be prone to mental illnesses and neurological issues later on in life so we need to know how to have these conversations knowing that they probably won’t be comfortable but facing up to them anyway.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

How to deal with Stress and Anxiety

Would you like to reduce the severity of distress and discomfort that comes with negative experiences by making some simple little shifts in language and how we communicate?

There are two things to mention here: 1) We shrink down what we are communicating because we want to communicate more quickly, swiftly and easily. We talk about using generalisations. We make assumptions that the other person that we are communicating to is going to have an idea about what we’re talking about. That is not always the case and that’s when it can lead to problems. An NLP Practitioner can help you to understand the different ways to ask questions that will uncover hidden generalisations.

Imagine I asked my colleague to go to the shops and get a bag of sugar because we have guests coming this afternoon and they may want tea or coffee but my colleague is from a family of bakers and they bake beautiful cakes. There is always icing sugar knocking about in their house so instead of buying granulated sugar, she buys icing sugar because that’s what sugar means in her world. If comment that she has bought the wrong kind of sugar it’s my communication that is at fault. I did not express my instruction in a level of detail and specificity that would fit in with the way that she thinks. That’s on me as the communicator. It’s a challenging thing to take responsibility for because we don’t always know what other people are thinking and how other people think. Often we just assume that they think in the same way that we do; it turns out that they don’t.

When one person has one idea and the other person understands it in a completely different way there is a misunderstanding because of it. There are definitely times when detail more emphasis more information are particularly helpful to us. A Hertfordshire NLP therapist can help with communication in this instance.

However, when someone is in a negative state or a state of anxiety, I propose to you that in those instances to minimise communication – not just the amount and degree of what we say but within the terminology too. The terms and statements that we use should be shrunk, dissolved and reduced to reduce the problems that we are experiencing.

For example, if you have a tendency to be a little bit dramatic when things are starting to go horribly wrong and you do that in the quiet of your own mind, if you have a tendency to go worst-case scenario or to just over amplify stuff and make things have more significance than they needed to be then this tactic is going to be really important for you.

The reason why it’s so important is that we need our brains to see the problems and anxieties that we experience as being simple and solvable so that it feels super motivated to find the solutions for us. If we represent problems to ourselves as being big scary complicated and overwhelming then quite frankly your brain just wants to go hide under the duvet. We want to think about it in as logical and small wording as we possibly can!

A few weeks back I had come home from work. I was really tired. it was late and I still needed to cook dinner and there was a lot of ‘I still need to do’ is happening in my head which was causing me a certain level of stress and anxiety but first I needed to do the washing up so I resentfully did the washing up and having done it I then turned around and had the experience of seeing a plate that I’d missed.

By this point, I’d already emptied the bowl out of the water and so it was quite frustrating for me to see that there was something I’d forgotten and that whilst I had psychologically checked washing the dishes off of my list, actually, the job was not finished yet and what I caught myself saying to myself inside my head was “damn it, there’s a whole other plate that needs washing up and now. I’m going to have to fill up the entire bowl all over again”.

I caught myself in the flow of this internal dialogue and interrupted myself by saying “It’s just washing up a plate though isn’t it?” and then I made myself giggle because I realised that I was doing something that I always forewarn my clients against doing in my hypnotherapy clinic, particularly those with stress and anxiety which is to over amplify the severity of the issue at hand. I was really going for it and it made me chuckle because, you know, even when you know this stuff you can still get caught out by it. The most important thing, however, is that you catch it and when you do you correct it.

Over the coming weeks and months, I am challenging you to identify where you blow up and over amplify problematic things that are occurring and to reframe them by which I mean rephrase them to yourself. State them in more simplistic terms or at least more realistic ones and do the same with those around you too because very often when you start practising with these skills it’s easier to identify them in other people than it is to identify that you do it to yourself. So if they say ‘this is horrendous, it’s an absolute disaster’ then you say ‘you’re right, it’s pretty bad isn’t it’, so you’re not disagreeing but at the same time you are not going up at that high level that they’re going in with. You’re going to take it down.

You’re going to bring it down a notch and you can even start paying attention to your intonation. The tone of voice that you use as you say it because if they’re throwing around a ton of emphasis like this then you can just take a breath and restate what you want to say in a slightly slower more pause filled and more considerate way so that again you start to drain the drama away from what’s going on! There are times when we want to add in more detail so that we are super clear in what we’re saying and helping others to understand our communication as thoroughly as possible but when those times relate to high drama, high anxiety, high pressure were adding in even more is not going to be favourable in those instances.

We want to be shrinking minimising and reducing the level of that we add into what we are saying by using language which is reducing the impact of the severity of the thing that we’re talking about!

By Gemma Bailey

www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Developing Pride in Yourself

What is the value of having pride in yourself?

We all have days where we just can’t be bothered and that’s fine every now and again. It becomes a problem though if you have weeks or maybe even months where you have that sense of not really being bothered either with yourself or the rest of the world.

For me, I know that this is happening when I perhaps do not take as much pride in my appearance. I’m a highly visual person, so you can tell what’s going on for me by how well I’m dressed that day and if I have bothered to put any makeup on. (This excludes when I am going to the gym. I look terrible when I go to the gym but that’s allowed.)

With some people, being able to iron their shirt that day and maybe take a little more time in their appearance will be enough for them to get back into their stride, boost their confidence and to have that sense of pride in their self worth, return. But, for other people it doesn’t work like that, so what I’m going to suggest that you do, is that you find other ways to develop a sense of pride.

Now just last week, we had a very special event happening here at People Building HQ Hemel Hempstead. The town granted passage to the RAF, which meant that there was a big parade and celebration. The RAF band was here and there was also a triple fly over by a spitfire. It was very exciting.

As I run the Facebook page for the Hemel Hempstead old town association, I was there taking photos for the Facebook page. I hadn’t really gone along to that event for myself, I was doing it more because I just wanted to be nosey and I to see what was going on. However it was actually a day full of pride, everyone was there, dressed really smart, cheering when the spitfire was flying over.

I was able to develop a sense of pride and self-worth by what was going on in the world around me. So, if you are in a situation where you want to bump up your feeling of pride but can’t find it within yourself, start looking in the outside world. Maybe go to an event, or if have got family or relatives that you can be really proud of, tune into that feeling. When you develop that sense of pride in other people or in the world around you, it becomes much easier to be able to access the feeling and start applying it to yourself.

By Gemma Bailey

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Laughter is the best Medicine

There are challenges every day and if not every day, at least from time to time in life. Knowing what tickles your funny bone is a great way to reset your emotions and to receive tension.

Today I have been writing a short biography, about my early history in preparation for a breakthrough session that I’m having. You might be thinking, ‘Hang on, Gemma knows all that NLP stuff why does she need a breakthrough session?’ Well the truth is life still shows up, and towards the end of last year, I had some significant challenges and I want to make sure that I have addressed those properly before go out there and spend my time training and coaching other people. The truth is, is that as much as I use my NLP on myself on a day to day basis, sometimes, when the issues are a bit bigger, it’s easier to work with someone else because they can be more objective about what’s going on for you.

So I write my biography, got to the end of it and kind of went “Urgh!” Sometimes when you look back on the challenging stuff, it can feel a bit emotionally draining. What you have to do then, is to get yourself back on track by making sure that you have plenty of LOL moments to reference back to pick yourself up – or at least to know where to go out and find them if your memories do not work effectively for you.

One of the places that go to to find LOL moments is something called DYAC which is “Damn You AutoCorrect.”

I would love to share some with you but they are a bit too rude very often. You know that thing when you are texting and then your phone autocorrects one of the words and changes it to something else and then the message has a whole different meaning. Well, I make a lot of those myself but other people who have made them too, upload them to this website, which is www.DYAC.com. I find it hilarious to sit there and read through them. So for me, if I spend a few minutes scanning through those after I’ve just done something which is emotionally exhausting, or draining, I’ll get a sense of re-energising from that and I’ll also have good a giggle at the same time.

There was another one that I saw recently, that particularly appeals to me because of having worked with children. Children that have said spooky stuff to their parents and, but they’re quite funny spooky things or kids that have done really silly stuff. So, you can go google that one to if you need a pick me up. But, the key thing is it that you need to be creating LOL moments in your life.

I’m really lucky, I’ve got some very good friends, we’ve got a very tight-knit group. And, we’ve got a load of case references, case studies of funny things that have happened in the past. And, I’ve shared one of them previously on the people building podcast, but I’ll share it again here with you today.

I went to Vegas with a couple of friends and there were 4 of us in total, and what happened was, we were going to a shopping mall one day. We’d got about 3/4 of the way to the mall and my friend Chris suddenly got up out of his seat, with all this certainty, as we approached a bus stop and he said ‘This is our stop.’

And we all said ‘OK Chris.’

We all got up and we followed him without hesitation or question, and actually it wasn’t our stop at all.

In fact, we were in the middle of the desert and we were probably half a mile away from the nearest building and it was a government building, so it was nothing like our stop whatsoever. We then had to stand in the desert for another half an hour waiting for the next bus to come.

I do like a quiz night once a month and every now again Chris will say an answer to a question. If we’re maybe not too sure that it’s the right answer and we just have to double-check that we’re not having another ‘following Chris off the bus’ moment. It’s just an in-joke within us and it’s probably not all that funny for anyone else but it’s always funny for me when I reflect on it.

So you want to make sure that what you’re doing in life is creating lots of LOL moments so that when there is a bit of a down day or an emotionally zapping moment, you’ve got some case studies to fall back to. Or, you at least have some reference points for yourself. Where do you go when you need to laugh out loud? It could be somewhere like DYAC or it could be something completely different. Whatever floats your boat. But, the key thing is, is that you must laugh out loud.

By Gemma Bailey

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Self-Hypnosis for Healing

Around 10 years ago I fractured my ankle. I was very fortunate to have already qualified as a hypnotherapist when this incident happened because it came in helpful many times throughout the process of my recovery.

Firstly, when I was taken to the hospital to have the injury set into plaster. The doctor explained that he would need to move the foot back into the correct position to give the bone the best chance of re-aligning and healing correctly. It would then be plastered into that position. He explained that this would be very painful and told me he would prepare a morphine injection.

I asked him not to. Not because I wanted to see if I could use self-hypnosis to manage or even totally block the pain, but because I am allergic to morphine. He explained that the only other option was to give me some Neurofen. I told him not to bother with the neurofen and that I’d use the hypnosis instead. I did it and whilst I’d have to say that there were moments where I thought “Awww” I re-focused and was almost having an out-of-body experience as they plastered me up.

My next visit to the hospital was to see how things were healing. I met a different doctor there, who hadn’t fully grasped the power of suggestion. You see, doctors are classed somewhat as Gods in white coats. They are perceived to be more knowing than the rest of us and we have this unconscious acceptance that our fate is in their hands. This is why it is so very important for them to be conscious of what they say and the impact it will have.

The doctor I met took a look at my x-rays. I was keen to know whether I would be healed within the next 6 weeks because in 7 weeks I was due to start an NLP Practitioner training! I’d read that the healing time would likely be 6-8 weeks and I was hoping to meet the 6-week mark.

The doctor responded by telling me that the fracture was very bad. He said there was every chance I would need an operation to put pins in to support the bone. He told me that even if it was healed in 6 weeks, there was a possibility I’d put my weight on it and it would break again straight away. He told me that there was a change the ankle would look deformed and that I’d never be able to wear high heels again.

I was at first shocked, then I was angry. How dare he dictate my healing process to me! It made me frightened for the little old lady I’d seen sitting in the waiting room with her wrist in plaster. What suggestions was he going to give her about her recovery? I was lucky that I had Bupa cover in place so that I was able to see a doctor there instead.

The next doctor told me I would be healed in good time. He told me to put weight on it right away to help the bones fuse back together. He told me I would be fine. With my new optimism, I went home to play Tetris and practice self-hypnosis with suggestions for healing. Why Tetris? Because the game is about fitting shapes together. I wanted to hypnotise my mind into fitting the bones back together as quickly as possible.

Seven weeks later the plaster came off without a hitch.

Of course, hypnosis can help your body to heal, but my point is to look at the other forms of hypnosis that are going on around you. The suggestions you accept from well-wishers, the things you can do to promote a positive attitude and even the games you can play to give your mind the programming it needs to be able to put you into a healing state.

By Gemma Bailey

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Tuning into your ‘Funny’ Feeling

If you’re someone who is new to (for example) NLP, it takes a while to begin trusting your gut feeling; or to tune into it, or to realise that you even have one.

It takes time because you need to let your confidence in yourself and your methods develop, but most of all you need the experience of dealing with young people and to start noticing the patterns in the behaviour and what the clues they give you mean. Some people would say that the funny feeling you get (when you get it) comes from picking up on somebody’s energy or aura. Some believe it comes to them through telepathy or from being a little psychic.

I don’t believe it’s any of those. I think that actually people give off clues, usually via their words, tone or physiology that are almost under the radar, but not quite. Consciously we may have no idea what the clue was. But our unconscious mind does spot the clue and transmits to us an internal message that some would call their gut feeling or instinct. Or in my case, I just say “I feel funny.”

Over the years, I’ve started to pay more attention to what gave me a funny feeling. Obviously depending on the situation, there may be different things.

The very first time I trusted my gut it wasn’t with a client, it was in a safe environment. With my friends in the pub. I was with my two good friends Chris and Matthew. Matthew was going to the bar to buy the drinks (this in itself is an event and a bit like the chances of seeing an albino stag) and he asked Chris and I what we wanted to drink. To be honest, asking the question was a little redundant as he already knew what the answer would be, as we always drank the same thing. However, it was a good thing he did as despite Chris always requesting a vodka-Redbull, this day he paused. It was a tiny pause followed by an “Umm”.

This was enough for my funny feeling to kick in and for me to jump in and say, “He wants pear cider today.”

Poor Chris nearly fell off his chair. He started exclaiming. “How did you know?! How did you know? You’re doing your weird mind ninja tricks on me!”

Then I had to ask myself the question, “How did I know?” The fact I felt a very strong feeling wasn’t really explanation enough. So I rewound the event and considered what clues might have shone out of Chris to give me a strong enough funny feeling that I felt confident to order his drink for him.

When I replayed it in my mind, this was the series of events:

He paused a millisecond. When Chris is sure he just goes for it. One time on a bus in Las Vegas we ended up in the middle of the Nevada desert because he was so quick and assertive at saying “This is our stop!” that we all followed him off of the bus. It wasn’t our stop at all and I’ve no idea why none of us twigged.

2. He said “Umm” which meant he was considering something.

3. His eyes flicked away from Matthew for a minuscule moment and towards an advert on the inside of the door of the pub. It was an advert for pear cider.

When it comes to working with clients, you’ll start to get funny feelings about why they might be thinking or feeling. But a funny feeling on its own is not enough. Start getting tuned into what’s behind you getting that funny feeling. Is it the way someone said something? Is it how they looked when they said it?

The more you can begin to corroborate your funny feeling with real evidence the more you can begin to trust it.

By Gemma Bailey

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Team Work

There’s that saying that ‘there’s no ‘I’ in team’ There is, however, a ‘me’ in team and that’s relevant because it’s important that you’re thinking about everyone and not just about yourself.

Consider how you show up within your team – when you do you’ll actually make that teamwork a lot better. Knowing your role, your contribution and your motivations within your team is incredibly important. NLP can be very valuable to companies to create cohesion within your working teams.

As a team, you can make stuff happen faster, more powerfully and more magically than you can on your own. Most people are aware of the cheesy team acronym: Together Everyone Achieves More. Well, it’s true. Think about the speed at which a simple task can be completed if there are more hands-on-deck suddenly putting IKEA furniture together isn’t as daunting as it was when you had to do it on your own. Your team could be the people you work with. It could be a group of friends or even your family. The challenge though is getting your team to understand exactly what functions, behaviours and acts you want them to do that fits in with the goal you have in mind.

The problem is exactly as the sentence states. The ideas are in your mind and somehow you need to transfer them into the minds of your team members without losing any of the details as you do it. People have different preferences for what might otherwise be thought of as the same experience as yours.

For example, if I say to you ‘red’ you might think of a deep red, like the one from your old school uniform, perhaps. If I said it to someone else they might think of a pinky red because that’s their favourite shade of that colour. Other people might imagine a rainbow and see a multitude of different colours as well as the red.

In addition, people’s state affects the way in which they hear directions. If you’ve ever been in a rush to get somewhere and got lost at the same time, you know what I mean, you can ask for all the clues in the world about where you’re going but if you’re in a panic, you’ll miss the signs that show you the way. It’s the same when you’re directing a team. If someone’s in a bad state because of a misunderstanding with you with another team member or simply because they stubbed their toe that morning, you may find that they hear information differently to the way that you intended them to.

If someone has spent the day thinking “My partner is too demanding and expects me to do all the chores” and then you innocently ask them if they’d mind making you a cup of coffee whilst you are busy on the phone, they made categorise your behaviour as the same as the behaviour of their partner that upset them earlier.

It’s important to know and understand your team so that you can ensure you have a clear insight into the certain behaviours that they do, which are giving you clues about their emotional state.

It is important to understand the motivations of your team. Let’s say for example that you have a report that needs completing by 6 pm on Thursday and that you’ve given it to a team member who is more than capable of being able to achieve that. Let’s also say that the team member has overspent on their credit card a little bit and they need some overtime. In an ideal world, the team member is very aware of the importance of that document being needed by 6 pm on Thursday and has spoken to the boss about being able to get some overtime at some stage to raise the extra cash they need.

In an ideal world, the boss has been very clear about the document deadline and is considering other tasks that could be worked on as a way to give that over time that’s needed. Without this communication though, the boss and the team member might have motivations that are not in alignment with each other. The team member could slow down their production with a plan to complete the report during the overtime they’ve been given.

Understanding the motivations of your team and making your motivations clear to your team can ensure that you’re all working towards the same common goal and that what you all value from one mission to the next is in alignment with each other. Using NLP training for your staff is a great way to get everyone working in a synchronised way and to elevate the productivity of your employees.

By Gemma Bailey

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