Tag Archives: Hertfordshire

Using Matching and Mirroring When Meeting New People

From an NLP perspective, when you meet someone new, think about the matching and mirroring of your body language. If you want to create a good first impression, rapport is absolutely essential. Now rapport is all about us liking people that are like ourselves. We connect with them much more easily and more naturally and because you don’t necessarily know this person’s history, you don’t know about their hobbies and interests, there’s a better way of being able to get rapport with them. On the basis that the majority of our communication, fifty five percent comes through our body language, our body language is the best way to gain that rapport and the way we do this in NLP is using a tool called matching and mirroring.

What this means is that you copy some of the gestures and some of the physical observations that you make about the person you’re communicating with. So, if you notice, for example, that they tap their finger gently on their knee whilst they’re talking and then pause when it’s your turn to talk, you could perhaps be tapping your finger or tapping your foot whilst you’re talking and then pause when it’s their turn to talk. If you notice that they, for example, lean over on one side then you too can move yourself into a posture where you are leaning over to one side.

Remember you need to be subtle about this. You don’t want to come across as weird and just outright copying them but it is a great way to be able to get rapport. The more subtle you can be the better, so if you can match and mirror things like breathing and blinking rates, that’s much more effective than some of the bigger gestures.

However most of us perhaps cross our legs when we sit down so if you notice that their legs crossed then you do the same. If they uncross legs, you can leave a few seconds and then you can uncross legs too. So, the difference between matching and mirroring isn’t all that great. Mirroring simply means that you are copying as if you were looking in the mirror so if they are right hand raised then if you are facing them you would be left hand raised, because that would be like a mirror image.

Matching means if they were sitting opposite you and they had their right hand raised, you would have your right hand raised, so you would be opposites to each other as you were looking at each other. However, they both appear to be just as effective as each other.

These skills are taught at our Hertfordshire and North London Clinic by our trained therapists.

I remember when I was working as a Nursery Manager for a large private day nursery corporation and I interviewed a nursery nurse. It makes me laugh thinking about it now – I interviewed a nursery nurse who wanted to work in our baby room. One of the things that we did in the baby room was something called ‘floor play’ which is when you have lots of different activities, but they’re all set out on the floor because they are for babies.

And this nursery nurse that came to see me was very keen on making a good first impression. She was neat and tidy. She had revised her C.V. really well she knew all about the technical stuff in terms of looking after babies and she was coming across as very confident. In fact, if I remember correctly she was coming for a supervisor’s job so I think she was trying extra hard.

Now this was one of those situations where I really had to kind of bite my lip for the rest of the interview because I was very close to laughing my head off. The question I asked her was “which particular activity do you most like to do with the babies in the baby room” and her answer was “I really like to do foreplay”. Instead of floor play.

So, she went bright red and I just bit my lip and pretended that I hadn’t noticed. Here’s the thing if you get your words in a muddle, apologise and carry on. If it’s something like that then I think as long as the person that you are trying to make a good impression with has got a sense of humour, it would be okay to have a giggle about it, but watch out for their reaction before you decide how to address it.

The Hypnotherapy and NLP clinic in Hertfordshire and North London can help you to learn the skills of effective rapport building just a few sessions. Just give us a call to find out more.

 

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Getting a Good Night Sleep – Part 3

One of Milton Erickson’s remedies for sleep was that if they laid in bed for more than fifteen minutes and they hadn’t gone to sleep within that fifteen-minute time period, they were to get up out of bed and go and polish the kitchen floor for the whole night.

They would spend the entire night polishing the kitchen floor and go to work the next day and then come home and if they, by any chance they happened to go to bed that night and still be awake fifteen minutes after getting into their bed, they would have to get up and clean the kitchen floor for the whole night again. After that first night of having absolutely no sleep whatsoever they was so exhausted that of course they got into bed and very quickly went off to sleep.

It started a new pattern and once it happened to that particular client maybe three maybe four times that he’d had to get up and polish the kitchen floor all night his brain very quickly caught on to the fact that when it got to bed, it had to go straight to sleep because otherwise there was a punishment for him.

If you are somebody who’s got into the habit of waking up in the middle of the night, instead of laying there tossing and turning get up and get out of bed. If you find that you’re laying there awake for more than fifteen minutes, get up and go into another room. Remove yourself from the bed-place which should be linked to sleeping and go and do something that is not at all relaxing – go and do some work or reading. I would suggest to you, keep doing that thing until it’s time for you to get up and do your normal morning routine.

You of course have to remember from a safety element that you do require a certain number of hours sleep in order for you to drive and function the next day so only do that extreme Erikson measure if it’s going to be safe for you to do so and to be able to get through the next day effectively and safely. So, if you can’t do the Erickson technique and go all the way through till the next morning, then keep going at least for ninety minutes.

I’m not too sure how true this is, but I did hear that a sleep cycle lasts for ninety minutes so if you’ve woken up and you don’t get back to sleep straight away you might have to wait ninety minutes until the next kind of sleep cycle starts again. So, if you find that you’re awake and you’ve had to get up and go and do something else, do that something else for about ninety minutes. Let’s say eighty to be on the safe side, then get yourself back to bed and hopefully you’ll be into that next cycle of sleep and will be able to get back off to sleep again.

So, the other useful thing in terms of getting yourself to sleep and having a good sleep routine is anchoring. Usually in NLP when we’re creating anchors we traditionally, for the most part we’re using kinesthetics anchors so an anchor which is activated by some form of touch and it could be you touching the client in a particular location or it could be the client is touching their own handle, their own fingers or something like that. Some kind of kinesthetics anchor for them.

The anchor I’m going to suggest to you, in order for you to use this in helping you get to sleep better at night, is actually an olfactory anchor and those of you in the know, will know that olfactory is to do with smells.

Lavender very good for relaxing you. There’s all sorts of aromatherapy that is used for relaxation and for calming people down. There’s a whole market of sleep sprays that you can buy. Spray it around your pillow or around your bed and where you sleep, every night when you go to bed and eventually your brain will start to associate that smell with the winding down, relaxing and going to sleep and there you have your anchor.

External stimulus, being the smell creates an internal state of relaxing into a deep sleep.

If you are suffering from insomnia, book a free consultation with the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic to work with a qualified hypnotherapist in Hertfordshire or North London.

 

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Getting a good night sleep – Part 2

Remember that when you are eating you are giving your body the fuel it needs to survive and that fuel could be really good quality and exactly what your body needs or it might be filled up with crappy chemicals. And if you’re filling your body with crappy chemicals, you are going to create some kind of chemical reaction within your body. That chemical reaction could be adrenaline. That’s the one thing that’s really going to interfere with you trying to get to sleep at night.

Using your bed as the place that you sleep and make love and nothing else. Ideally not reading in bed, not laying in bed playing on your iPad, not sitting in bed with your laptop on your lap. All those things can interfere with your perception of what ‘bed’ means. Bed should mean sleep and so if you’re doing other stuff in bed, it kind of loses its bed value. It loses its relaxation value. Make sure that you really like your bed and that you like your bedroom because if you don’t want to be in there, it’s going to be difficult for you to relax in there.

Like your bed sheets the colours in your room, the furniture. When I think about my bed I think: ‘I love my bed I love it’. If your bed doesn’t do that for you, you perhaps need to think about switching some things around in your bedroom. Changing the decoration, be it the colours, be it the fabrics, be it you know the main thing the actual bed itself. You need to like bed in order to want to go there and have a good night’s sleep.

Making sure that your day is finished properly so get the lists ticked, get jobs done. If you’ve got stuff that you know it’s hanging over your head that you’re going to have to deal with the next day that could prevent your brain from switching off. Where possible get things done during the day and use some positive visualisations about the day ahead – what you’re going to be doing the next day. Make sure that visualisation is not too stimulating, not too exciting. If you’re going to be doing a bungee jump the next day, probably not a good idea to lay there visualising doing that because it’s just going to get the adrenaline kicking in and getting you a bit too excited.

Don’t try to go to sleep because if you try then you’re forcing it and then it’s just not going to happen. It will feel unnatural and whilst you’re laying there, remember the feeling of letting go. When you have gone to sleep in the past and just on the cusp of that sleep, there’s been times when you’ve thought to yourself ‘Here I go!’ and you know that that sleep is about to occur and it is a really lovely sinking feeling. That’s the feeling that for me summarises what hypnosis is. Usually when you’ve had that thought, it’s maybe brought you around a little bit and then you have to get back into it in order to go properly off to sleep. But if you can remember that sensation and lay there having the memory of how that feels that will help to induce it and help to get you off to sleep.

If you are experiencing difficulties with sleep a hypnotherapist from the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire and North London can help. Consultations are free and non obligatory. You will also learn more in the 3rd and final part of this article series which will be available to you next month.

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Overcoming Personality Disorders from Childhood Events

It is always recommend to work with a qualified NLP practitioner or hypnotherapist. All therapists from the Hypnotherapy and NLP clinic based in Hertfordshire and North London are trained to undertake the processes mentioned below.

An NLP change personal history technique can be useful when someone with a personality disorder has experienced a traumatic incidents in their past or during childhood. It’s a technique for eliminating traumas so that those events are no longer viewed as traumatic or perceived as being traumatic in the moment of now.

The client remembers a time in the past when they experienced some kind of traumatic event and then we use ‘leverage’ which is calling to mind the pain and pleasure related to this. For example, that the pain would continue if they held on to this problem and the pleasure that would be experienced if they got rid of it. Then you break their state – so change their thinking or subject to ‘reset’ their mind.

Ask them for a list of positive resource states which they could to utilise now and if they’d had those at the time when the old event happened then the event wouldn’t have been a problem in the first place. Now using that list of resources they’ve given you, you create a stacked resource anchor.

With the build-up of all of those positive resources you test it and make sure that the anchor is way more intense, much stronger than any of the negative feelings that are associated with the old events. Then you have the client remember and relive the event in their mind but they do it fully associated so they kind of relive it through their own eyes whilst you (the practitioner) fire off the resource anchor so that you get all the good feelings coming back as they relive the old event. And what that does is it means that they re-experience the old event but with all of those good resources there now.

In doing so, they have a different experience of the old event.

Another thing we can do, is a parts integration. We chunking up on both elements of their personality where we have the incongruence.

For example, if the issue is ‘I want to connect with people and I also want to be alone’. There’s an incongruence there, we know that that person is trying to seek two completely opposite things both at the same time and it’s causing them some distress because they’re always unable to do it. When we say ‘chunk up’ we would ask questions on each of the statements that are incongruent with each other such as “For what purpose? What does that do for you? What’s your highest intention in doing that?”

Those questions take us up to a greater overall need that they’re trying to meet – for example connection. Then we also look at the flip side opposing portion of what they stated and ask the same questions. Once you found that there is some similarity between actually what those two needs are trying to meet, then you can give the unconscious mind and the nervous system the opportunity to process that actually these two polar opposites are alternately trying to seek the same aim and the same goal and then we can reintegrate, which is where we use our parts integration.

So, one of the final things we can do to assist someone with a personality disorder is to teach them what in NLP we call, second position.

So, when we use the perceptual positions technique we basically have a client in first position being themselves and in second position they’re seeing their situation and their behaviour from another person’s perspective, so they get an outside perspective on what’s going on. And this can be really useful for these people with personality disorders who are trapped and caught up in their own unhelpful thinking in their heads.

In the same way that when they perhaps had a traumatic event as a child, quite often the reason why that event is recorded as a trauma is because children haven’t developed the ability necessarily to dissociate from what’s going on, so to take a kind of objective view of it and to have that experience of stepping outside of themselves and to view it from an outside perspective. As we get older, we develop more of an ability to dissociate from bad things that happen but sometimes adults have not developed that skill either so it’s a very useful thing to teach.

There will always be challenges in the future and if instead of getting caught up in those challenges, you’re able to step back from them and view your own behaviour and reactions and notice how your thinking and feeling, then that can be an incredibly insightful thing.

It can definitely offer some room for reacting differently and getting some better results. To find a hypnotherapy specialist or NLP coach in Hertfordshire or North London, contact the Hypnotherapy and NLP clinic.

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Overcoming a relationship break up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

No More Resentment or Eating Burnt Chop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Anxiety and Panic, Panic, Panic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Using NLP to Get rid of Anger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Find Your Happy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Bringing Down the Barriers – Dealing With Someone Who is Defensive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk