Tag Archives: Hertfordshire

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

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

A Good Day!

This article is all about finding power in the ordinary. This is something I’ve said before but I’m going to quote it again:

“Lower your expectations of a good day if you can, reduce what you expect a good day to be what the criteria is of a good day in order for you to feel that sense of goodness fulfilled in your system. If you can reduce those criteria and shrink it and make it smaller, it makes it much easier for you to achieve it.”

Let me give you an example, if you were to say “in order for me to have a good day – I need to wake up on time, get ready for work without any hitches or interruptions that would cause me to be late. I need to get everything done on my to-do list and feel like I have completed all of my work for the day and I need to eat a healthy meal and get to bed on time and have a really decent night’s sleep. There is my definition of a good day.”

I’d be sat there, as your NLP therapist thinking “Well, in reality, how likely is it that going to happen?” If that’s possible for you then you go right ahead but I know for me in the context of the way that my life is structured and the likelihood of me being able to fulfil all of those things is slim to none! Therefore I need to reduce my level of expectation.

If you can find good in seeing a butterfly that day, if that can tick a good psychological box for you then it’s easy to make today a good day – because you saw a butterfly. If you can feel a sense of fascination and wonder in the dog that comes to greet you when you’re walking through the park (who isn’t your dog but is acting like you guys have been friends for years). If that, can give you a sense of loveliness inside and you can use that as your criteria for a good day. For the rest of that day achieving a good day is so much easier.

The real purpose of this article is to talk about the ordinary, not just having good days but actually the value in the ordinary. Sometimes in the work that I do in North London as an NLP practitioner as someone who is working in the world of personal development. I find that there is this sense of obligation or an expectation of how I should have complete and absolute positivity in my daily life. It’s kind of a big ask! I think that to have an expectation of complete positivity in all given situations is unrealistic. It’s almost like you put too much pressure on yourself. I put too much pressure on myself to be able to achieve that level in that sort of consistent form of positivity and I would like to suggest to you that having just normal mundane boring ordinary stuff is actually alright. In fact, it’s pretty good. NLP therapy has taught me to appreciate the ordinary.

In fact, I was talking to a client about this the other day, he attends sessions at my hypnotherapy and NLP clinic in Hertfordshire. This client experiences high levels of anxiety. I mean really high levels of anxiety such that it is not only affecting his psychological state but it’s having a very strong physiological impact on him and it is now causing his health to be at risk. In the past, I may have been inclined to suggest that in stressful situations the client should be aiming for confidence, he should be aiming for happiness, he should be aiming for peace and these are all beautiful big abstract ideas and sensations. To go from where he was to where I may have in the past suggested he should be is a huge jump and actually, to get out of anxiety-like crippling fear would it be okay to just be a bit bored.

I mean if you are used to or if you become accustomed to crippling fear; boredom is probably quite a nice option! It’s a relatively safe option.

It isn’t as good as, you know beaming confidence. but it also gives us the message that movement is possible, that change is possible on this basis we can get from crippling fear to boredom.

My challenge to you is for you to show gratitude and appreciation and a sense of comfortable acceptance of the boring mundane dullness that life has to offer you because in those moments we can in all of its beauty take a moment to be really mindful and present in that state. To take a moment perhaps to just organise some boring thoughts and know that we’ve got that done off of our to-do list, enjoy the ordinary, make the most of it and appreciate those moments when they’re there but for now, that is everything I wanted to share with you for today. If you need some help, visit me for a therapy session using NLP in North London.

Arrange a FREE, NO OBLIGATION Consultation Session with a Fully Qualified Hypnotherapist, NLP Trainer or CBT Therapist.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Finding Motivation in 2021: Part Three

At the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, a useful thing I do to help clients find their motivation is to recall times in the past when they have felt that feeling of achieving a goal, that happy and proud feeling or where they completed tasks that had had sitting in the back of their mind for months. It’s just that those memories may not be particularly fresh or they might not even be associated with positive things. Sometimes we get the feeling of being super motivated not because we want to do something but because we wanted to get away from something.

If you can remember a time when you felt like you just needed to get up and move even if it was just because you’ve got fed up and boldly frustrated with yourself that still is a sense of motivation. Remember that the word motivation has the word ‘move’ in it. It says ‘move’ so to touch back in with what motivation feels like you need to tune back into a time when you felt like you wanted to move, you felt like you wanted to get up and get something done and that’s not necessarily going to have been a positive time it could be associated with something like frustration. Hypnotherapy and NLP can help you achieve this.

The word ‘frustration’ sounds negative but the good thing about it is there is movement in it. No one is frustrated and kind of lethargic. If you’re frustrated, there’s some energy in there and we may be able to use it for a positive benefit. If you cannot immediately get yourself into a sense of motivation think of what other emotions there are that might lead you there and they’re going to be emotions that have ‘move’ within them.

The feeling of irritation, it’s itchy, it’s got movement in it. Therefore, it could lead you into the sense of being motivated all over again but if you can remember a time of pure motivation, a time from the past use that memory to sort of get yourself locked back into those feelings because if you can remember them you’ll start to get the feeling back and then you can utilize that and sort of applying it to the idea of doing the things that you want to go ahead and do. Therefore, get into the feeling and then think of the thing you want to do so you start to mesh the two together and start to create that association between them. At the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, we can teach you how.

Another thing that’s important to do is to prepare. For example, a Sunday night is when I am NOT feeling particularly motivated to come back to work on Monday. I know that Monday morning might be a bit of a struggle. One of the things that I might do if I’m feeling particularly demotivated about coming back to work on a Monday morning is to make sure that I’ve got things as prepared as possible for when Monday morning comes around and that might even be like a child laying out my clothes for the next day making sure that I’ve got the washing up done the night before and I don’t leave it for myself on Monday morning. I want to make that Monday morning as smooth and seamless as possible.

Some other practical things could eat well, sleep well and exercise. Do some of those fundamental basic things that we need as human beings to help us maintain our energy levels. We know that motivation is coming from energy so think about the things that you do. They either build you up or zap your energy. Get that back with Hypnotherapy and NLP in Hertfordshire.

Call 0203 6677294 or email clinic@HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk
Find out more about Hypnotherapy, NLP & CBT in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire or North London here: www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

By Gemma Bailey

www.hynotherapyandnlp.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

Quick Tips to Improve Your Mindset

If you find yourself in that head funk where you are unable to move past the ‘I can’t do it’. Here are three simple things to do!

Number one: Change your language

Start to remove the ‘can’t’ and turn it into something that’s going to propel you in the right direction.

Number two: Is to remind yourself of all the things that you have achieved that you couldn’t once do so that you give yourself back that little sense of ‘yeah, you know what actually I can make things happen’.

Number Three: The third thing for you to do is to change your physiology so that you get your brain into a state of having the best possible chance of powering up and giving you the solutions that you need to do, the thing that you actually want to do.

Sometimes you might be deliberately bypassing emotional content because it feels tough because it feels sad and that might also cause you then to stay in that habit and not go into the experience of having the good stuff. If what I have just said to you has annoyed you in some way or wrong a bit of a bell for you or caused you to see something in your own life that you think might be relevant to explore then I would like to invite you to join me on the upcoming NLP Practitioner training which is taking place in February in Hertfordshire. This will enable you to become an NLP Therapist. This is a seven day accredited training course that runs from a Saturday until a Friday and we run this course twice per year. This course is delivered through my other organisation called ‘People Building’ which is directed towards people who want to either gain more of an understanding of their own personal development or for people who would like to become an NLP Practitioner (an NLP therapist) and learn more about others.

There is a whole suite of home-study materials that we provide you with that is inclusive of your costs as well as including three months membership to the association of NLP where you will be able to join them as a professional member so you will have professional-level membership as a result of taking on this training. The course is going to blow your mind because it’s an awful lot of the stuff that I’ve just said but on an even deeper level and you learn bags of stuff not just about yourself but about the people around you, who may be, have very different processing styles to what you do.

This is a great course for personal development but it’s also an amazing course if you are thinking about coaching or working using therapy with others, if you are working in communication or if you are working in some way in leadership and management. You have to know how to resonate with other people and this course teaches you how to do just that!

On the course, we go through all of the basics around communication and rapport as well as teaching you what I would refer to as ‘the big guns’. These are the therapy processes that get people away from those head funks that they get caught in when they have gone through a traumatic experience.

This is an intense training course and it is one of my favourite courses to teach. I really hope that you can make it and that I will see you there. if this is something that is of interest to you, you can find out more by visiting my other website here: https://peoplebuilding.co.uk/nlp-practitioner-training/

I really hope that this is something that even if you are not interested in becoming a practitioner, you would like to improve your own personal development. It will help you to find out more about who you really are, how you process information, about the world around you and how you might be able to open yourself up to better experiences in life and give yourself a greater chance of being successful.

By Gemma Bailey
https://www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk/

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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How to Increase Self-Belief

I want you to imagine in your mind, that you have got a circle and within the outer edge of the circle there are four different labels. The 4 labels are linked together by the circle. In the first label, it says ‘potential’, on the right-hand side add a label that says ‘action’, at the bottom of the circle add a label that says ‘results’ and finally on the left, there is another label that says ‘belief’.

So, going around in a circle we have potential linking to action, linking to results, linking to belief and then linking back to potential. For anyone to learn, the potential to achieve it must exist. How much potential they have will determine then how much action they take.

That action will then dictate what kind of a result they get (or how they perceive their result), so depending on what kind of action you take and how much action you take will determine the result that you get. The result will then determine how much belief you have about how easy it is for you to continue to learn this new skill. The more belief you have the greater the potential you have to go on and take further (or better) actions.

When someone is operating from the belief of ‘I can learn’, they will have a certain degree of potential already. If they believe that they can learn it’s likely that they are going to take some positive action towards this. Which will lead them to a more positive result (or a way to view their results positively).

Let’s take someone who’s operating from the belief of ‘I can’t do this’ or ‘this is difficult’. This person still has potential but because they are operating of the belief of ‘I can’t do this, this is difficult’ they’re likely to find it less easy to access their potential or to take less, or reduced quality actions, leading to lower quality results. They will then see and experience those results which will affect the belief they have. If they have got poor results it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy with thoughts like ‘I knew I couldn’t do it, now look, it’s gone as wrong just as I thought it would’. There is less belief in their ability to be able to do this thing and that will lead to a reduction in potential and poor action, or no action at all will be taken.

Everything you can and can’t do is shaped by your beliefs and what you are telling yourself.

Changing beliefs that have been ingrained for years or from significantly emotional experiences can be daunting, but it is not by any means impossible to do. In fact on the NLP Practitioner training there are plenty of exercises and interventions you learn that help to change your beliefs rapidly. Sometimes though, it’s possible to begin reshaping your beliefs simply by challenging the negative ones that get in the way. If you slow down your thinking to notice the negative self-talk which tells you what these self-imposed limitations are, you can begin to come up with your own counter-examples of when you have been able to do the things (perhaps even in moderation) that you believe you cannot do.

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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