Tag Archives: HNC Clinic

Developing Pride in Yourself

What is the value of having pride in yourself?

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey

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Laughter is the best Medicine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we all said ‘OK Chris.’

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey

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Self-Hypnosis for Healing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven weeks later the plaster came off without a hitch.

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

By Gemma Bailey

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Tuning into your ‘Funny’ Feeling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey

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Team Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey

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Take Control of Bad Habits and Magical Hypnosis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey

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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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How Important is Reality?

Just how important is reality or perhaps isn’t?

The reason why this question has come up on my agenda recently is that I recently went to see, in my humble opinion, a fantastic film – The Greatest Showman. A year or so ago I watched a film called ‘LaLa Land’, some of you may have seen it, it had loads of positive reviews that critics loved it, it won a ton of Oscars and when I watched it I was so bored. If you haven’t seen it let me give you the storyline because seriously I’m not ruining anything for you, two people meet, they fall in love, they break up, they meet other people after they’ve broken up, they see each other again across a crowded bar and that’s it, that’s the whole story.

LaLa Land kind of ruined musical films for me for a good long while however this week I was brave and I watched The Greatest Showman and I loved it as in I want to watch it again and again. It was so, so, so, so good and the music in it is, in my humble opinion, phenomenal so I posted on my facebook to share the joy with everybody else and probably nine out of ten people who had seen it also loved it, there were a couple of people who were less enthusiastic shall we say. One fellow hypnotherapist made some comments which I found really rather interesting and this is not a direct quote but it was something along the lines of:

“It was a good film and the music was good however the storyline was a million miles away from the truth of the story about PT Barnum”

The person that made the comment seemed a little bit aggravated by this it’s just something I picked up in the tone of how it was written obviously that may not be the case because there is no tonality in reading people’s words. I started to wonder well who cares, you know, it’s a great movie and it made me feel good and apparently it’s made quite a lot of other people feel good as well so does it really matter if the story that’s told later is different to this story that actually happened in reality?

From an NLP perspective and on on a moral level, I have a huge subscription to the idea of telling the truth as much as I possibly can even to the extent that sometimes it might be detrimental to some of my relationships but for the sake of a clear conscience and getting a good night’s sleep I really like the idea of being upfront and honest with people because it keeps my conscience clean but in the NLP world it seems like that is not necessarily the case and here’s why.

There are certain processes within NLP that we use which deliberately get people to think about old events in very different ways to the way in which they happened in real life, let me give you an example. If somebody has had a traumatic experience in their past and they’re still having problems with their old event years and years later then one of the processes that we could use with them could be a sub-modality intervention or fast phobia cure. When we do those interventions we

explicitly ask the client to begin to see the old event in a different way, perhaps we take the colour out of it or we shrink it down maybe even put some comedy voices in there, some overlaying of baby giggling, all sorts of different things in order to change the impact that that memory had. But now the memory isn’t true anymore, it’s not an accurate reflection of the real-life situation.

So is it really important that we subscribe so heavily to reality in our lives? For me, the things I’ve been able to achieve in my life have definitely come about as a result of a slightly bonkers imagination but I wouldn’t be without that because I wouldn’t have got to where I am now if I hadn’t have had the creativeness and ability to distort my situation in positive ways. in order to move it on to better things later on. From my perspective, if we are able to take something and make it better then why not! Why not almost like divorce ourselves from reality a little bit, I also tend to think that the human brain isn’t necessarily geared up for dealing with reality anyway.

As you know when we take information in through our brains we’re being bombarded with stuff which we cannot effectively process because there is quite simply too much of it, so some of the information just gets outright deleted and we never knew that it was there in the first place, not on a conscious level anyway. Some of it is distorted, so it gets changed in some ways, it might get over-exaggerated or minimised and some of it is generalised upon to link it up with a ton of other stuff that maybe it didn’t realistically link up with but that enables us to be able to process all of that information that’s coming in through our senses so that we can begin to make some form of sense of the world.

Often in NLP when we refer to that processing of information we talk about it in chunks of information or bits, which does make it sound like computers and actually that’s completely inaccurate because human beings are really nothing like computers, in fact, computers are dealing way more effectively with reality than human beings are.  If you complete a word document on your computer and then save it later on, when you go back to it, maybe six months later, a year later, three years later you’re still gonna get the same word document that you had created in the first place, unless you have some kind of fault with your computer but on the whole, your computer is going to stick up on the screen the exact piece of work that you had created way back in time.

The human brain doesn’t work like that, not only are we deleting, distorting and generalising on the information that we take in from one moment to the next but we also repeat that process each time we recall a memory or an experience that we’ve had in the past. Why? Well because our state gets in the way depending on what we’re doing at that moment and how we’re thinking and feeling at that moment of recalling, we could then end up having a very different experience of the memory.

I’ll give you another example, I have to confess I have seen The Greatest Showman twice so far and I’m planning a third watch. The first time around that I watched the film, I was in a bit more of a stress state and it was after work, I was running late and It was just a stressful situation. There was a scene in the film where the main character was speaking with his family having just got the sack from his job and I’m not spoiling anything here, by the way, his daughters were asking him about making wishes. Now there was a way in which I interpreted that particular portion of the storyline which made me think that he had forgotten his daughter’s birthday, the very first time I watched the film and heard that portion of the story. I was operating from the belief that he had forgotten his daughter’s birthday and this was accounting for the things that he said and how he was reacting but when I watched the film the second time around, it was a lot more chilled out and when I watched the film for a second time around, I realised that I’d completely got the wrong end of the stick the first time because he was actually toying with his daughter, he was messing about with her and pretending to have forgotten her birthday.

I like to think that I’m a fairly astute character, that I’m quite good at tuning into these things but apparently state affects even me! So this is why when we have a recall of a memory or experience from the past we might end up changing that memory or experience as we recall it based on our present state. This means that we could end up deleting, distorting and generalising upon our memories in different ways every single time we remember them. Computers are going to be much more reliable in terms of representing accurate information compared to a human being, human beings are not quite so accurate when doing that process.

I like to think that if you’re creative and you have a good imagination then good for you, just make sure you do find things with it. Very often people use their imaginations to trip themselves up in unhelpful ways, for example, people who have phobias have great imaginations, they’re really good at imagining worst-case scenarios but it’s not the best way for them to be able to use their imagination, it could be put to much better use however instead they use it for the purposes of

seeing man eating spiders sitting on their face and things like that. If you’re using your imagination for positive purposes and you know really who cares about the fact that it’s different to the reality of what’s really going on in life. Sometimes what’s going on in life, you might want some time out from there, ultimately it’s all about your intention if you have an imagination which you are using to harm yourself or

to mislead others then maybe being away from reality isn’t such a good thing but if your intentions are good, if you’re using your imagination to be creative, to help change the world in wonderful, powerful, meaningful ways or maybe just to change your own world in wonderful and powerful and meaningful ways then that is, in my humble opinion, a very good thing.

Imagination is an art form, so being able to utilise it and escape from reality for a little while can be a truly wonderful thing and if you can use it for the purposes of making yourself and/or others happy then that indeed is an even better thing to be using your imagination for. In the words of PT Barnum:

‘The noblest art is that of making others happy’.

By Gemma Bailey

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Lower your Expectations

The topic for today is all about lowering your expectations. I know that’s not very NLP of me because you know a lot of NLP is focus on the positives and it’s just really unrealistic because life does not serve us in that way.

Sometimes it’s helpful to be a bit more realistic about the serving that you’re going to get in this thing called life but in addition, it can actually be really helpful if you lower your expectations completely because when you do, you actually start to get impressed by everyday stuff, like a butterfly. If you have lowered your expectations of what a good day should be and you see a butterfly, it’s already a good day, happy times granted.

I went to my mum’s house and she lives in a council house in quite a suburban area right next to the main road and a massive pheasant showed up in the garden, she named him Fred the pheasant and he stayed in the garden for a good couple of hours and was absolutely beautiful, the chances of seeing a bird like that in her garden are slim to none and it’s never happened before.

We’ve got a hypnotherapy diploma training coming up in the next few weeks and the training is going to be taking place at a hotel that I used to use years and years ago and haven’t used in a very long time. The reason why we switched was because they kept putting their prices up but because they came to know me quite well and they knew that I knew my way around the place they became a little bit lazy in their service, so they would maybe neglected to refresh the halfway through the day and then as the trainer I was also empty in the bins and going off to fetch more teas and coffees for people.

However every year they still put the prices up even though the service was decreasing so we switched to a different venue but unfortunately we’ve got to go back to the old venue for just one week as our new venue is currently booked up for the week where we have training taking place. We were going to be going back to the Holiday Inn instead of using The Boxmore trust where we usually use their facilities for training.

Going back to the Holiday Inn reminded me of an incident that happened there one day which, now I look back on and laugh but at the time left me somewhat perplexed. I had gone into the room that morning and discovered that whilst we had teas and coffees available for the delegates, we didn’t have any milk! So I went upstairs to the reception desk and there was a guy on reception who, you know how it is when your mind is really busy, perhaps doing something completely different and then somebody drops you out of that moment with a question, which you were not expecting. I think in hindsight that’s probably what happened to him that day, I approached the desk and said “Morning, would it be okay if we could have some milk?” and he looked up at me and said “what do you mean milk?” and then I was confused, I mean when I’ve asked for milk before no one has said what do you mean milk, so I said “like the kind from a cow” and he then looked a little bit irritated by this. He then said for “what purpose do you need the milk?” and I said for the tea.

At this point in time, I’m thinking to myself, this is fairly obvious no? so then he responds with “what do you want me to put it in?” and “I said I don’t know? a jug or the little plastic cups, something like that?” At which point he stormed off and he went and got the milk, so you know I got the job done but it was just a very bizarre conversation and it was just the perfect embodiment of what my experience of using that venue was actually like. The reason why I’m sharing this with you is because I had an expectation that we’re paying quite a lot of money for this venue now, therefore, I expect the service to be pristine, like on the money but that was not the experience that happened. In reality, what happened was that I was often dealing with confused people who didn’t really know what was going on and who was sometimes quite rude to us and now I have to go back to this venue again.

The point is that I’m not going in with an expectation of perfection because if I do then I will spend a week being disappointed instead I’m going in with an expectation of having a great time on the training and having some fun with my delegates and probably just kind of making our way through and making do with the venue that we have. If you can make your expectations of other people or life in general not just realistic but actually a little bit lower then you give yourself more opportunities for pleasant surprises and for discovering ways in which you can become satisfied that you didn’t even know that you could.

It can be helpful to be satisfied with the little things in life and although in NLP we encourage you to dream big, set big goals for yourself, to keep yourself occupied, I personally feel that sometimes that can take some of the smaller and actually quite fundamentally important things in life away from our attention. If you can be inspired or feel happy because you went outside in nature and you saw the first daffodil of spring or because you saw a bird that is quite rare and you haven’t seen it for a while or something like that if you can do those sorts of things and still

get a sense of satisfaction then that is a successful accomplishment, that means

that you’ve been able to find appreciation in the smaller things in life and have perhaps lowered your expectations of what having a good day looks like