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Dealing with Annoying People

At the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, I provide some practical steps to my clients in how they can best deal with selfish and annoying people. I would like to share these steps with you today.

Firstly, if this annoying person is annoying you on social media, a simple solution: unfollow them. You are not obliged to keep following people on social media. You can also “take a break” on Facebook for a number of days. It doesn’t mean that you unfriended or unfollowed but it just gives you a little bit of respite and distance from them.

If we’re in a workplace environment, pop some headphones in and listen to a podcast and take your attention away from the annoyance. In my hypnotherapy and NLP clinic in Hertfordshire, and like other therapy clinics around the world, there is something that all therapists are very conscious of doing and I am going to explain it to you now because I want you to do the opposite with that annoying or selfish person.

In the Hypnotherapy and NLP clinic in Hertfordshire, when we are working with a client we are conscious of making sure that we stay on the topic, that they have raised because if part way through communicating with them you suddenly change the subject, it can make the client feel as if you’re not really invested or you’re not really listening to them.

Now that is different to times when in NLP we might use something called a pattern interrupt to deliberately throw them off-topic because what they were talking about was really harmful to them and it was getting them into a really bad state.

In a consultation stage where they’re telling us more about what the problem is; we are very clear about staying on point and not saying anything that’s going to kind of take them off of the subject matter or distract them in some way.

Let me give you a working example of when this didn’t happen for me in a personal exchange. I went round to see a friend of mine and I was explaining to my friend about my mother’s behaviour which I was quite upset about. In speaking with my friend, I was trying to wrap my head around how to sort out some practical issues which included some beefy topics such as her debts and selling her house and getting her into a care home.

I was feeling really overwhelmed and in the middle of what at that moment in time felt to me quite intense, my friend exclaimed “huh look! A squirrel!”

It made me want to not talk to her about it anymore because it felt in that moment like my subject and my emotions about that subject were not important and it really threw me off . When people come to therapy and we’re exploring the problem so that they don’t get that sense that we’re not interested in them.

But, we’re going do the opposite to that with our annoying people. With the annoying people we want to throw them off of whatever that behaviour is because we want to interrupt their pattern. We want to do the emotional equivalent of saying “ah squirrel” and pointing in another direction.

Let’s say that you’ve got someone in your office who chews chewing gum really loudly – then you might burst a balloon at the back of the room.

We want something that’s going to break that interruption and if you break that interruption enough times they’re going to want to stop doing that thing around you and that is a slightly less delicate way of dealing with the problem than having that warm fuzzy conversation.

I hope this helps now that most of you are back to normality in working in an office environment.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLPClinic.co.uk

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 insomnia, 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

How Honest Can You Be?

One of the main strategies I give to my clients at the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire in dealing with annoying people, is to just tell them when they’re being really annoying. This is not always an easy thing to do because we’re worried about hurting people’s feelings. I’m going to give you an example of a time in the past when I did this and I did not do it in the right way because I didn’t manage my own emotional state as I delivered the message.

The best time for you to let someone know that they’re being annoying is not when they’re being annoying in that moment. Your state of annoyance is going to be high and that may come out in your inflexion and your intonation. Here’s my example: I used to work with a lady who who wore ugg boots.

This lady wore the boots whilst we were in Kuwait. Kuwait is the desert – it literally is never cold there but anyway that’s a different thing so she had these ugg boots and they were obviously very, very comfy and very well-loved which is a good thing. The heel of these ugg boots had been like squashed down – there was a crease there.

I used to work in a shoe shop which is maybe why this overly irritated me! The even more annoying thing (probably caused by her foot not being all the way down in the boot) was that she was a shuffler. She really shuffled in these boots. Everywhere in Kuwait was marble and air-conditioned because it’s so hot out there. You go to a shopping mall, It’s like marble flooring air-conditioned. You go to the hotel, marble flooring and air-conditioned like there are no carpets anywhere because it’s too hot.

I think we’re in a shopping centre and all I can tell you is I don’t think I handled this situation as diplomatically as I could have done but I did reach a point where I just abruptly said “Will you pick your feet up?” I snapped and she replied

“oh yeah, yeah these boots always slip off but I am lifting my foot up properly it just sounds like I’m shuffling them”.

I knew that was because her foot wasn’t properly in the boot and that’s why it was slipping off. They were never on in the first place so I kind of got it out of my system which was a good thing and for a little while she made an effort to pick those feet up a little better. The moral of the story is telling the person that they’re being annoying is the right thing to do but don’t do it when you’re feeling annoyed!! NLP therapy Hemel Hempstead can help you with this!

If you’ve got someone in your office who chews gum really loudly then you can tell them whilst they’re chewing the chewing gum but you’re going to have to really watch yourself to make sure that you don’t sound like a rude spiky person like I did when you come to raise the issue with them. Instead what you might choose to do is pick a moment when they’re not chewing, the chewing gum and say

“I love you really deeply and I think that you’re an amazing person and I just have to tell you that when you chew chewing gum with your mouth open and it makes that chompy noise. It makes me want to kill you and I just thought that you should know that.”

It might be a good idea not to pick these exact words unless you are close friends, but otherwise, you can think of a more diplomatic way in which to get the message across but telling them is definitely a good suggestion. CBT Hemel Hempstead can give you the strategies you need.

by Gemma Bailey

www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Finding Motivation in 2021: Part One

I want to share with you today some tips on how to get yourselves re-motivated. Whether you are someone who has been enjoying the government’s furloughed scheme, whether you are someone who has had the luxury of working from home in your pyjamas, or whether you have something that you want to start doing or need to get done and you need that extra kick up the backside, that is, what I’m going to do for you today.

When it comes to tapping into that feeling of motivation what is most important, is that you have a very clear reason ‘why’. When we think about what it is, that drives people to do the things, that they do, in their lives, they’re either going to be someone who is motivated by the reason ‘why’ they should do something or they are motivated by ‘what it is’ that they’re actually going to be doing, the ‘how it is’ that they can actually go on and do it or doing some exploring and figuring out how to do things in a completely different way to what the normal logical person would do. Within that quadrant of those four different types of people, (why, what, how and ‘what if?’) the area that most people fall into that has the highest percentage of people is the ‘why’ context meaning that you need to know why you are doing something in order to get motivated enough to be able to do it.

I would suggest that those reasons ‘why you do the thing that it is that you want to be able to do’ is going to have both positive and negative connotations associated with it. The reason why I think you need both is that I am NOT just a zen-like self-development guru who is going to tell you that everything needs to be based around moving towards the positives. If that worked then, you know, we don’t be driven by a carrot rather than a stick but the reality is a good number of people are more motivated by what it is that they should be avoided rather than what it is that they’re moving towards.

Let me give you a little bit of extra framing around what it is that I am saying here. First of all, in this need to know ‘why’ in regards to what you’re doing. You need to get the balance right between “I’m doing it for all of these good reasons and all of the positive things that are going to come out of it” – we want bags of that stuff! However, for some people, there’s also going to be a little bit of ‘oomph’ that comes from “I’m also doing it because I don’t want this to happen, I don’t want these bad things to happen.” For example, let’s imagine that you’ve been furloughed for a considerable period of time and you’re completely out of whack with the world of work and having to get up at a decent hour in the morning and you’ve got made redundant that is going to be the circumstances for quite a few people these days and now you’ve not only got to get motivated to go to work but maybe you’ve got to get motivated to go to a new workplace or to find a job in the first place.

People who are in that kind of situation, here is what some of the ‘why’s could look like – it could be “this will be good for me because I’m going to earn money and I’m going to have a better routine. I’ve got to be more sociable again. It could also be for getting away from having late nights and actually spending the day feeling a bit fuzzy because I didn’t get enough sleep and feeling like I’ve wasted a day although I haven’t been very productive”. Those would be your kind of things that you want to get away from that’s your stick stuff.

Therefore, we’ve got to get that balance right and that might mean tapping into your own motivation source to find that balance, specifically for you. As an individual, between what it is that you are moving towards and what it is you want to be moving away from; I wouldn’t say wholly base it around away from stuff. You could probably base it around all of the good stuff that you want to move towards but I would avoid making it wholly around what you want to get away from; let me explain why!

On the shelf behind me as I write, there is my teddy bear who is called Bailey. If Bailey Bear is not the thing I want, as in, he represents the late nights, bad routines and wasted days, all of those things as I am writing this article, I have turned to Bailey bear and have made this clear to him. I was literally turned around focused on him, pointing at him. When I’m physically looking in the direction of Bailey bear, what I’m not doing is looking in the direction of where it is I want to go instead. So what can start to happen is you end up getting more of what you focus on and I end up seeing more examples of what I don’t want than what it is that I do.

This is why I would say to motivate yourself, get the balance right and have this kind of pushing you from the background to move forward and have your eyes set on where it is you want to go towards so that you don’t fall potentially into that trap of just kind of getting tangled up in the thing that you want to avoid. We need to know why and we’ve got to find our own personal drivers.

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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Take Control of Bad Habits and Magical Hypnosis

The topic today is all about stopping those compulsions and taking control of feeling better, about giving up those bad habits and this is in response to an e-mail from someone who sent in a great big list of things and so this is one of those things off of that list.

So, I am not going to cover any specific N.L.P. techniques with this today or any specific hypnosis techniques but I am going to give you a brief idea of what those could be and also some more general stuff and kind of low-level stuff for actually sorting these sorts of problems out. The thing with stuff like habits and compulsions is that if you view this as a problem that is bigger than you, are more powerful than you, then it probably will be. But if you know that this is just something that is going to get sorted and you’re going to be able to sort it easily, then guess what you’re going to have a whole different ride.

Now here’s a suggestion for you if you are having some problems with these habits and compulsions and you’re on the verge of doing the thing that you don’t want to do. You’re on the verge of reaching for that cigarette. You’re on the verge of putting that fingernail in your mouth or whatever it might be, I want you to give yourself some time out. So, you know like you do with your kids when the kids are misbehaving and you need to separate them and you say right timeout. Go sit yourself on the naughty step. I want you to stay there for five minutes and I want you to have a think about the way that you’re behaving and when you’ve come to the right conclusions about your behaviour and you’ve decided how you’re going to behave better, I want you to come back and tell me that you’re sorry and tell me what you’re going to do even better next time. Stay there until you’ve made your mind up. So, we do this for our kids right. Now here’s the thing sometimes you need to do that for yourself.

Sometimes you need to give yourself a bit of time out before you go and do something silly. So that silly thing could be smoking the cigarette but you really, really you don’t want to smoke because you don’t want to smoke anymore. Now I’m not saying you have to go and sit yourself on the naughty step and give yourself a telling off, but you can have a word with yourself every now and again. You can sit there and think to yourself: okay, so how am I behaving. What do I really want and how can I now make the right decision about the right way to behave better? You can do that to yourself and when you’ve given yourself that little bit of a talking to, you’ll probably find that you come up with a much better reaction than the automatic one of just going ahead and doing it anyway. Give yourself some time out sometimes.

Now Tony Robbins says that in order to give ourselves leverage to move away from a problem we need to apply massive immediate pain to that problem and something like power and pleasure to the solution.

So, I want you to think about what pain you can add to the thing that you don’t want, to that habit or compulsion that you don’t want to have. It could be ‘this thing makes me unhealthy, it’s making me unattractive. I don’t actually like it. It’s slowing me down. It’s making me feel old’.

All of those things are going to be applying pain to the thing that you no longer want to do. Now when we look at pleasure you can be thinking: ‘well when I’ve done this or now that I am doing it, I am in control of my life. I’m feeling like more of an achiever. I’m feeling fitter and I’m going to look better’. So, think about the language that you’re using in implying pain to this problem and also then applying pleasure to the fact that you’ve moved on from it and that you’re going to do something different in the future.

So, if we look at particular N.L.P. techniques. Things like the swish pattern can be useful here. Things like Belief change. Compulsion blowouts, a horrible exercise that usually results in somebody throwing up and hypnosis is also particularly useful. It depends on what the problem is and who you’re working with as to which one of those techniques you might feel is most appropriate.

The most important thing I personally feel, the thing that can really create the tipping point on this is your own internal dialogue. Your own language, so depending on where you are at in terms of making the change, might depend on how you’re using your language. Now affirmations are very, very useful and very, very effective. It’s important though to use these affirmations correctly. So let me give you some ideas of the sorts of things that people might be affirming to themselves and how this might be useful or not so useful for them. So, let’s go with our smoking person. If they’re saying to themselves, I’m going to give up smoking. I’m going to give up smoking. What that statement tells us is that it’s something that’s going to happen in the future so they have not yet done it. And that also there’s this element of necessity. Okay, so it’s kind of essential that they do it, but they still haven’t done it yet.

Now, remember as well, every time we say the words smoking, even if it’s stop smoking, quit smoking, refrain from smoking, where is the focus going to be? Focus is going to be on smoking, isn’t it? So, it’s worthwhile remembering that. It’s probably not the best thing to affirm to yourself because if you’re doing that, you’re still bringing your attention back to smoking, even if you’re talking about not doing it.

So how about this one ‘I want to stop smoking’. Now this one again is in the future. They still haven’t done it yet and it’s more possibility than that necessity. It doesn’t have that sort of commitment sound to it does it? If we compare ‘I’m going to stop smoking’, there’s an element of certainty there, whereas if we have ‘I want to stop smoking’. It’s a bit like I want to but I might not. How about this one: ‘I will stop smoking’. Again, this one is in the future, it’s more essential, there’s more necessary to it, but the fact is they might stop smoking one day but that one day might be when they’re dead.

‘I will stop smoking’ – well when? Today, next week, next month, next year? So, it’s not as committal as we would really want to hear. ‘I’m trying to stop smoking’. That’s just the worst one, isn’t it. It’s in the present, which I guess is good, but the word ‘try’ don’t even get me started. If you want to know about the word ‘try’, listen to the previous podcast. Listen to the experiment on there and see if it works on you. Try is not essential. It’s definitely not committed. Okay how about this one: ‘I have stopped smoking’. Again, so this one is in the present ‘I have stopped smoking’. It implies that smoking did occur in the past but the word have has an element of possibility about it. So we could say there is still that option to smoke again in the future but I would say it’s certainly better than any of the others that we’ve said so far.

‘I do not smoke now and I will not smoke again’. Now this one is in the present. It implies permanence for the future even though there is a reference that smoking did occur in the past. This one sounds very definite doesn’t it? ‘I do not smoke now and I will not smoke again’. If somebody said that to you would be much more likely to believe them than any of the others that we’ve spoken about before.

So how about this one. ‘I’m going for a jog’. Now you’re probably wondering why that has nothing to do with it. Well really that’s my point because for this person smoking is not even in their focus. It’s not on their radar. It doesn’t exist in their universe. Their focus is nowhere near smoking so really who stands the best possible chance? Definitely the jogger and the fact that there jogging probably tells us that there are a whole lot fitter than the smokers are anyway.

Right so I hope that helps you out with regards to the compulsions and habits. There’s so much within that particular niche. There’s so many different ways of dealing with those problems but that’s a good thing because it means there’s lots and lots of different ways to move forward and there’s certainly something for everyone.

By Gemma Bailey

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Dealing with Loss

How do we deal with loss? And what are the best ways to process it? This is a massive topic that will affect us at some point or another and is something that I’ve dealt with both personally and with a few clients that I’ve worked with recently. I think that there are some key things that we can perhaps draw upon, not from an NLP perspective, that could be helpful in allowing us to move on as swiftly and comfortably as possible.

The first thing that happens is, of course, that really annoying thing of just having to wait. Time is a healer – it’s just that sometimes you’d like the time to pass by a little bit faster so that you can get to healing a little bit quicker. And that is, in some respects, possible – but what you have to accept is that your progress from one day to the next may feel very very minimal! What you have to get good at doing is not just thinking about how you were today compared to how you were yesterday; you also have to get good at backtracking a little bit further. Obviously the closer to the time of the loss happening it’s going to be less easy to do, but as the days and weeks pass by you will be able to begin to make those positive comparisons between how things were at the very beginning and how you are now. You will start to notice that progress over time and, although it’s uneven progress you will start to get better at recognising it.

When I talk about uneven progress what I mean is that it peaks and troughs from one day to the next. There’s gonna be an ‘oh I feel so much better today’ day and then the next day or in the next moment there will be a ‘no, no I’m still not there yet’ – but overall the progress is happening. Nothing travels in a straight line; nothing is on a directly upward trajectory. It may look that way from a distance – you might look at other people and go ‘huh, they seem to be doing really well’, but actually they’re not! There is still peaking and troughing going on but only they will know about it, and only they are experiencing it.

Another way in which we can manage loss a little better is to compare what we’ve been through. Have you ever had a really weird dream that, when you woke up the next morning, it’s slightly disturbed you or it maybe left you feeling really sad? I’ve had dreams before where I’ve cried in my sleep and woke myself up with the crying. You wake up it felt like it was so real and your maybe even upset for the rest of the day, but ultimately you reach a point where you go ‘it’s okay, it was just a dream’. Now, I’m not saying that we want to move on and forget things that have happened, or people that have been part of our lives that we’ve lost, but it can be a useful frame for when you just need to get yourself out of the funk! Feeling that sadness and discomfort will affect your productivity and your ability to connect. What can be helpful is to put that sadness and discomfort into a ‘really bad dream’ frame, because if your brain can learn to accept that it was just something that happened and it wasn’t actually as real as I’m making it out to be, then it can lessen some of the discomfort that you’re experiencing at that moment.

Another way of lessening your discomfort is with distraction – good old-fashioned distraction! Keeping yourself busy by doing stuff that you really like can help you to move on quickly within a decent period of time; especially if it involves some sort of reinvention or creation. Even things like clearing out your wardrobe of all of your old clothes and donating them to a charity shop can help shake that sadness and stagnant misery. Small positive changes can promote bigger positive changes! This doesn’t take away the sadness, but it helps you to move through and past that sadness so that you can start to live in a healthy and happy way all over again.

Part of loss is change and part of change is also evolution. Things evolve; who you are now is not the same you that you will be in a few years time – your ideas, your values and all of the things that make you you will have slightly shifted, or they’ll just have an extra layer of something else. For that reason, loss isn’t always as bad as it seems at the time. Sometimes loss gives us an opportunity to go through a change – an evolution – and to come out the other side of it as an even better person.

If you are experiencing a sense of loss in your life at the moment my thoughts and my love are with you and know that you won’t always felt this way. You are going to get better every day and in every way!

By Gemma Bailey

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