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New Year, New Rules!

The ‘rule’ of the rules is to make them not scary and to avoid creating rules that you’re going to dislike putting in place. They need to be rules that you can enjoy enforcing. There may be some rules that are less easy to enforce than others. For example, if I’ve decided as I have in the past that I’m going to go to the gym X amount of times per week. Then I know that that’s a rule that I’m going to have challenges with because that’s a rule that I’ve had challenges with in the past!

However, if I phrase that rule slightly differently then all of a sudden it becomes a lot more attractive, a lot more appealing, and certainly much more realistic of my expectations and my ability. For example, instead of saying ‘I will go to the gym three times a week’, instead, my rule is: You are going to enjoy taking care of yourself and having a physically fit body.

That rule seems much more appealing to me and I think the reason is that I don’t feel like I’m tying myself into a contract where I have to go three times a week and beat myself up if I don’t.

The mental image I make when I say to myself that I’m going to take care of myself and have a physically fit body is a much more serene-looking image. It’s me looking fit, looking like I’m enjoying myself, moving my body in a way that really appeals to me. NLP can help motivate you to exercise and hypnotherapy from a specialist in Hertfordshire, North London can help too.

So simply by rephrasing the rule, I’ve given it much more appeal and it means that in my imagination I get a different sense of it. The sense is that it’s going to be much more consistent and much more enjoyable to me.

Here are some rules that you might like to use that I’ve already reframed for you so that they’re set up in the best possible way:

If you ever had a rule about your health in the past that you did not stick to, it may just be a case of reframing or restating that rule in a way to makes it more appealing to your unconscious mind. As an example: I will stop eating junk food and stick to a healthy diet.

Notice what mental imagery you create, what picture springs to mind when I say to you: ‘I will stop eating junk food and stick to a healthy diet’. The image I get is me sitting at the kitchen table with a stick of celery looking unimpressed.

So, a better rule could be: I’m going to get my body to the healthiest possible state by having a balanced varied diet.

Doesn’t that sound so much better? It doesn’t sound as painful. It doesn’t sound as if you’re missing out and this is an important thing with diets guys I’m just going to say this quickly is one of the challenges with diets is that firstly, it presupposes that you’re going to be missing out on certain things.

Visit an NLP therapist in North London or Hertfordshire for a free consultation to discover how they can help motivate you to exercise and live a healthier life.

If you’ve ever had the experience in the past of being told that you can’t have something, doesn’t it make you want to even more?

A challenge with dieting is that you are stopping an old way of eating in favour of going for a new way of eating and then once you’ve lost the weight, probably stopping that way of eating and trying then to go through the transition of having a normal balanced diet so you go through at least two transitions. You go from where you are now into diet mode and then from diet mode back into normal mode once you’ve lost the weight.

How about you just have a healthy life instead? That’s only one transition. You only have to do that once. You have to change once, so if you can say to yourself that you’re going to have a varied and balanced diet, getting your body into the healthiest possible state, then you’ve only got one thing that you need to change and one thing that you need to stick to and you do that for the rest of your life.

Now when I say it’s the rest of your life you don’t have to freak out about that because remember it’s a balanced and varied diet, which means that you can still have a takeaway. You can have chocolate. You can have those foods that you enjoy for all the wrong reasons. You just need to do it in a balanced way.

Hypnotherapy can provide you with the commitment and willpower to be able to stick to a diet in the future. Speak to the Hypnotherapy and NLP clinic for more information.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Defusing Anger in Relationships

Anger happens when, in some perceived way, we get a sense of a violation. A boundary that is crossed or a misalignment between someone else values compared to our own.

Sometimes these violations may be known to us – we may be aware of what angered us. At other times, the cause of the angry response may be outside of our conscious awareness. This is usually because the value that has been violated is a much deeper value. We tend to be aware of our surface values (such as trust for example) which makes it easy to spot why, when someone behaves in an untrustworthy way, we would take issue with it.

However, other values (for example significance) may be less conscious or may be values that we do not necessarily want to admit to having at such a high priority that should they be violated we would react with anger.

Some time ago, I was working with a woman who had come to see me at the NLP and Hypnotherapy Clinic in Hertfordshire. She had initially enquired about sessions of hypnotherapy, but as is often the case, we were able to resolve many of the challenges with anger in her relationship by way of NLP and CBT techniques instead.

The woman was frequently angry with her husband. They had at the start of their relationship been very loving towards each other but over the years she had come to resent him in some way and would fly off the handle very easily.

The husband would tolerate the snappy comments but every now and again, if she had been particularly provocative he would bite back and then a huge argument would begin.

Initially, I asked the woman about how her relationship was before the anger had crept in. Back then, she described her husband as a man who was always on the go. He seemed particularly energetic and had aspirations to start his own business. She felt that he was keen to impress her and that was where a great deal of his every had come from.

However, his plans to start his own business had gone out of the window, when they became pregnant with their first child. It seemed more sensible that he would take a promotion in his work instead.

Very soon their lives had transformed from an uncertain but adventurous future of starting their own business and carving out their lives together, to him going to work each day whilst she stayed at home looking after their child.

She became more dynamic as she ran the home and raised the child. He became exhausted by doing a job he did not enjoy. She began picking up the slack and doing more to make up for his lack of lust for life.

As this happened, unconsciously she began to think that his feeling toward her had changed. He no longer felt free and excited about the future and it appeared that the energised behaviour that he had previously had (which she had taken to mean he wanted to impress her) was gone. When she became more active and enthusiastic in her life he began to feel redundant in the dynamics of their relationship – as if he were no longer needed.

His response was to withdraw and hers was to attempt to jolt him into action with shocks of spikiness. Neither technique worked and this is why they both ended up getting so angry with each other.

Finding new and effective ways to respond to each other, change the balance in the relationship, show respect and appreciation and re-motivate each other was just one of the strategies we explore at the hypnotherapy Clinic. Finding out what you value most in your relationship and how those values may be getting violated is often the best way to diagnose the cause of anger in relationships and an NLP Practitioner would be able to help you to do this.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Knowing Your Limit!

One of the biggest challenges that can occur with those who take cocaine whilst drinking alcohol is having the willpower to stop, instead of ending up on a “bender” which ultimately results in a horrible hangover the next day.

The challenge with deciding to call it a night before things get out of hand, is that one is probably not in a state to make a sensible, rational decision about what happens next due to the substances already consumed.

Further challenges around knowing when to stop include:

Being with others who are in the party spirit adds pressure to continue
Knowing that you still have money in the bank and have the funds to continue
Not pausing to think for a moment about the implications of continuing
A caring host who keeps topping up your glass/offering you other party options.

If you’re aware that you incline to start drinking and continue onto cocaine, you must learn how to plan your evening out in advance of going. You will likely be unsuccessful at relying upon your judgement later.

The planning required will involve hypnotherapy, NLP and some practical steps to ensure that you can continue to involve yourself socially with alcohol, but to a limit, you decide upon whilst sober.

How the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire can help:

Hypnotherapy accesses the unconscious part of your mind where your habits and behaviours are installed. Your hypnotherapist will give suggestions to you whilst in a relaxed trance-like state to help build your resilience and confidence to stop drinking when you instinctively know you have had enough.

Remember, these substances are poisons. Your body and unconscious serve to protect you from harm and you, therefore, have a built-in system which knows when you’ve had enough. However, for many, that system is overridden or ignored because of the effects of the substances. Your hypnotherapist will be able to “reset the system” to allow you to become more finely tuned to the “that’s enough, time to go home” signal so that you begin to adhere to your natural tolerance levels.

NLP can help build motivation and commitment to your new decision and enable you to set realistic parameters for your behaviour. For example, if you know that peer pressure is an issue for you, NLP can help you to build a strong sense of reliance and the ability to “stick to your guns” about your decision.

You can also work with your therapist to establish any practical steps you can take. Perhaps you can change your drink of choice or alternate between a soft drink and an alcoholic one, or use a Revolut card (Join me and over 18 million users who love Revolut. Sign up with my link below: https://revolut.com/referral/gemma3qa2!JUL2-22-AR) instead of your bank card so that you stop when the money on the account runs out. (If the issue occurs when you’re drinking at home, it might help to have a glass of water with an alcoholic beverage.)

Even simple exercises such as remembering how bad a hangover felt before you allow yourself to become fully indulged in the party spirit can be helpful.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Break Your Bad Habits

Having just looked at a list of bad habits posted on the internet, I can honestly say that whilst they are habitual repetitive behaviours, many of them are also disgusting. One site listed nail biting, throat clearing, lying, interrupting, chewing the end of a pen, smoking and swearing in its top 20 list of bad habits. And that’s not to mention knuckle-cracking and thumb-sucking.

Habits are formed when behaviour is consistently repeated. Eventually, it becomes an unconscious behaviour, that is, you can do it without thinking about it. In just the way your unconscious controls your blinking, breathing and walking without you having to remember to make it happen, it also takes over responsibility for activating the habit.

In a sense, the levels of competency go some way to explaining how this unconscious activity is created:

Unconscious Incompetence- Not knowing about it and not doing it. (Ignorant)
Conscious Incompetence- Knowing what needs to be done but unable to do it, lack of skill required.
Conscious Competence- Knowing what needs to be done and having to think about how to do it, in order to do it.
Unconscious Competence- Knowing what you need to do, and being able to do it without consciously thinking about how it is done.

We can see by looking at the levels of competency process, how a positive behaviour such as learning to drive, for example, is taken through the above stages so that it shifts from conscious activity, into an unconscious one. The problem with this process is that the unconscious mind will not distinguish between a good habit and a bad one. When learning to drive, this is generally a beneficial habit to master, and biting your nails for example is not.

However, the unconscious simply responds to the programming it is given. It does make a distinction about whether it is right for you or not. The more times you repeat the behaviour, the more hard-wired the behaviour becomes, good or bad.

This means that in order to break a bad habit, its automatic function of it needs to be bought back into the awareness of the conscious mind, in order to give the conscious a choice about whether to continue with the action. This could be enough for some to break their pattern, yet for others, even though when they are conscious of the habit, may continue to pursue it. For example, many people who smoke and know that they should give up, are aware of the cigarettes they light up and inhale. Worse than that, they are even conscious of what they are doing to their depleting immune system as they do it- and still they continue- why?!

The answer is that they get some sort of a payoff. An opportunity to be destructive and release some tension by biting your nails, or a moment to drift off and take a break from the busyness of work when having a fag. In the great scheme of things, it’s important to note that these payoffs are of course only temporary. They only alleviate pressures for a short amount of time and usually come with a downside, such as ultimately damaging your health, the way you look, the way you feel, or the way people respond to you.

NLP techniques are great for helping to get “leverage” for applying pain to the unwanted problem and pleasure to the solution. Anchoring techniques can provide an instant desired state to relieve tension for example so that it is no longer achieved by performing the habit. Hypnosis can be used to reprogram the unconscious part of the mind, linking unsavoury feelings to unwanted behaviour (for example feeling sick if you go to put your fingers in your mouth to bite your nails) and forming new habits to deal with stressful/ boredom situations in a new empowering way.

To book a free initial consultation with a licensed Practitioner in NLP, Hypnotherapy and Hypnosis, Please contact us at 0203 6677294.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Stop Evening Drinking Habits

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

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

Drinking Habits and Alcohol.

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

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

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

Hypnotherapy and NLP in Hertfordshire.

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

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

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

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

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

Significance
Certainty
Uncertainty
Love
Contribution
Growth

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey

www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Addictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Take My Advice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope that has been amusing and useful for you!

Gemma Bailey
www.hypntherapyandnlp.co.uk

The 5 Factor Model & Hexaco

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

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

Openness
Conscientiousness
Extroversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

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

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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