Tag Archives: Hypnotherapy

Resilience

I think a lot of people think resilience is your ability to stay strong in the face of uncertainty or in difficult circumstances. For me, resilience is how quickly and easily you get back up once you’ve been pushed down. When I think about resilience in the context of my own experiences in life, resilience had come about from having some quite negative things happening in my life previously. I have learnt how to survive and come out the other end and I have learnt how to cope with certain situations through developing methods and coping strategies. When things get tough I now know how to deal with it better through previous hardships and how I proceed in a more positive direction.

Therefore, speaking of things that may contribute towards becoming a resilient person here’s what I think you need: I think you need confidence because if you lack confidence then you’re going to find it very difficult to put into action and employ any sorts of strategies. You might feel like hiding under the duvet and that is not going to be the ideal solution. You need to have enough confidence to get out there and face the world. You’ve got to have the confidence there in the first place to be able to push through difficulty. You also need hope! Hope is super important. You need to believe that you have something worth fighting for so that you don’t get completely overwhelmed by the negative experiences that happen in life. You’ve got to hope that you’ll be okay and you’ve got to have hope that things will turn out all right in the end.

Overall, I would say you’ve got to just have a quite positive state of mind because the more positive you are the easier it is for you to be creative and resourceful and to think about alternative ways of reframing your circumstances. The more easier it is for you to problem-solve your way through a situation.

What’s important in developing resilience is not being shy about putting yourself in situations where you might get knocked down and not holding back from situations where you might get knocked back because those knockbacks are you developing a thick skin which will help you to become more resilient and emotionally more tougher.

While I worked as a manager in a large private day nursery, there was a staff member called Charlotte. Charlotte’s social status was different from mine, I grew up on a council estate, I worked hard to get my diploma to be able to work with children. Charlotte came from a wealthy family and had been given some of the finer things in life which I had to work hard towards i.e first car was a new car and a deposit was put down on her house. I was her manager and I was grafting away to be able to afford my monthly car payments just to get myself to work. I felt resentful not just because of her social status but also because she had a good relationship with her parents.

One day I noticed that she had developed a skin condition called dermatitis. It was on both of our hands and it looked like her skin was falling off and it looked look pretty uncomfortable, to be honest and it was stress related. It took me a while to reframe the beliefs that I was carrying around “she’s got it easier than I have and it’s not fair and I wish I had it that easy”. What I realised was something that for me might be by comparison to all the other stuff quite a low-level problem, for her, it was really significant because it seemed like she’d missed out on the benefits of having tough stuff happen in life. From having tough things happen in your life, you can learn so much and build up your resilience through time and experiences.

When going through tough times, you might feel that the best thing in the world is if you had no problems but if you are a person who can see a silver lining then you can really start to enjoy life a lot more and get a lot more benefits from living it even when it’s really difficult.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Doing the Right Thing for Others!

My sister has special needs and doesn’t have any form of communication. Doing the right thing for her relies on me thinking of my sister’s needs, wants and preferences and making a decision. Like my sister’s situation, we can all be put in a situation where we are winging it a little bit by making decisions for others and then finding we need to justify it. It can get a little bit daunting when you are thinking about what is the right thing to do for someone else.

In my work at NLP4Kids, we quite often work with safeguarding issues. In a safeguarding situation, we have to take the best interests of the child into account primarily. It’s challenging at times to not get tangled up in the story of what’s happening with the parents or the story of their history or where they are now or where they might be going too. It makes it really difficult at times to know what doing the right thing looks like in a safeguarding case. One of the things that are used as a benchmark for considering how someone might behave in the future is to look at their past behaviours. The best indicator of how someone might behave and react in the future is to think about how they behaved and reacted in the past.

For example, in criminal psychology, the best indicators for how someone might behave once they leave prison is going to be based on what they did before they went to prison or how they were behaving whilst they were in prison. This will give us an idea of what’s going to happen when they get back out there in society. This helps to put the safeguards in place to hopefully help them to avoid doing the thing that got them into prison in the first place. When it comes to doing the right thing and knowing what’s right for somebody else, we’re trying to predict the future and think about the effect that it will have on them and the people around them.

If a hundred years from now there is another global pandemic, you’re going to be looking back at the C-19 pandemic to see how might people react and how we need to manage the situation. In addition, we might find that years from now, society has changed so significantly that actually what’s happening now isn’t the best indicator of what to do at that time. There might be other more recent events that would give a better indication as to how the population will react to being quarantined and locked down and all of those different experiences that we went through recently.

If I want to know how someone’s going to react towards restrictions or solutions I make for them in order to know, how they’re going to react to that I need to look at their past behaviour. This doesn’t just apply to an individual it applies to entire populations – if you want to know how a group or a community is going to respond to certain sanctions that are put in place or even rewards that are put in place look back on their reactions and responses to previous sanctions and rewards that were put in place in the past and then you can decide ‘am I really doing the right thing for them or might this actually have quite a detrimental effect on them?’ Sometimes doing the right thing isn’t just about ecology it’s also about economics and what offers a wider or greater number of positive outcomes.

If you are making choices and decisions that affect other people they’re always going to do what they’re going to do and that’s not me saying that they can’t change, that’s me saying that you have limited control over the outcomes that exist for other people and that at times in doing the right thing, the only thing we can really do is to prepare for the worst while simultaneously hoping for the best possible outcome.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Doing the Right Thing for you!

Ecology is the study of consequences on the wider system. If you imagine that there is a circle and you are inside the circle. Surrounding your circle is a wider circle that contains ‘others’ and surrounding both your circle and the ‘other’s’ circle is a third circle which contains the greater good. When we talk about ecology, we’re looking at those three different circles (you, others and the greater good). If we are thinking about doing the right thing to do, the question we would be asking is, is this good for me, is it good for others and does it serve the greater good? If the answer to any of those questions is ‘No’ then it’s likely there may be trouble ahead.

It may be that the thing that you want to do, isn’t going to be right for others around you. Sometimes doing the right thing might be right for everybody else but not yourself! This is something I can help you to understand and work through at my therapy practice in Hemel Hempstead.

There will be situations where doing the right thing for yourself instead of doing the right thing for others is okay. This is where it starts to get a bit more complex, it comes down to what happens if you don’t take care of yourself. If you’re on an aircraft and the oxygen mask comes down, you should put your own on before you put on other people’s masks. Because if you’re not going to be in a good place then do you continue to bring value to others? Doing the right thing for yourself first and putting yourself ahead of others might actually be the right thing to do because it may mean that in the future you serve or save others more because you first took care of yourself.

What that means is that sometimes doing the right thing might feel wrong because it may feel as if you are being mean and it might feel as if you are exercising tough love. What I think is really important here is thinking about the longer-term ramifications of the decisions that you take when you are doing or thinking of what the right thing is going to be for you to do. It’s not just about what will this do right now and tomorrow and next week but beyond that and sometimes in doing the right thing, it’s also about taking a risk because we don’t know what the future is going to look like, we can’t plan for that and we can’t think about the implications. A good NLP coach will be able to help you think through the consequences of your decision.

For example, in my other company, we became very successful at writing applications for funding, both for ourselves as a company and also for the other organisations who wanted to apply for funding in order that they could work with us. The downside of doing that whilst I felt very encouraged to do so as it helps low-income families and children, we were breaking the rules. Each organisation should be writing their own application. They shouldn’t have been using an outside bid writer i.e me in order to do it. However, a part of me knows we were serving the greater good and therefore we did the right thing.

The difference between the right thing and the wrong thing is not always as clear as black and white it’s very often in that weird grey area too.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Take My Advice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope that has been amusing and useful for you!

Gemma Bailey
www.hypntherapyandnlp.co.uk

The 5 Factor Model & Hexaco

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

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

Openness
Conscientiousness
Extroversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

How to Raise Mental Health Concerns

I’m going to be talking to you about how to express if indeed you should express to someone else that you think they’ve got a problem with their mental health. When I say ‘if indeed you should’ there are some things that we don’t flag up with other people and there are some things that we don’t raise the issue with them. For example, even if you are clinically qualified to do so you don’t tell your friend that you think that they’re autistic. We don’t go there, that’s something that somebody needs to find out as a result of deciding to go on a journey themselves. This is not your place to just kind of randomly throw into the conversation even if you think it’s for their benefit.

Here’s the very first thing that is super important before we even consider sitting down with someone and having a bit of a chat with them. Firstly, has something changed? I don’t mean do we know something in their life has changed. I mean in terms of these new behaviours, reactions and emotions that they’re displaying; these things that are troubling us about this person – is it different to how they used to be before?

If it’s not, then actually we might not have a problem they might just be a bit quirky and a bit odd because those people do exist. If you notice that the person you’re concerned about has changed that there has been a notable change in how they are thinking, how they are behaving or how they are feeling then we’ve got grounds to proceed.

If it’s not those things maybe they’re not the one with the problem maybe it’s you, you know, maybe it’s your thinking that has changed about them but not necessarily them that’s changed and sometimes that happens in life. Sometimes we have a relationship with someone and the stuff that never used to bother us about them suddenly starts really annoying us and then it suddenly seems like they’re annoying us on purpose but they’re not they’ve always been that way but your tolerance levels have changed so if it’s that we don’t need to talk to them about it we need to work on our own problems, with our own tolerance levels and decide whether or not we still want this person in our life that’s a different thing but when the change has happened in the other person and it is having a significant impact on how they are thinking, behaving or feeling then we need to start thinking about sitting down with them, having a conversation and saying ‘I think there might be a problem here’ and having a look at it together.

From establishing that ‘yes, something has changed’ only then can we start thinking about how do we actually approach this interaction with them and have this further conversation with them. My first suggestion is that no matter whether this is an employee or a family member you start by keeping notes. You’re going to have to start keeping some evidence because if this is a relative that you’re concerned about and you maybe are going to end up being the person who accompanies them to the doctors at some stage and so to be able to have some history around when this has started and what’s been happening, what sorts of incidents you’ve noticed is going to serve you really well.

You need to be keeping records of what’s going on with this person that you care about so that in an attempt to get them the right treatment you’ve got as much information as possible. One of the things that are really difficult with mental illness is describing your symptoms because you only see life from your own perspective and particularly when people get frightened about their mental health they’ll really downplay what their symptoms are or brush things off to one side or if they’re suffering from something up that higher end of the mental illness spectrum they might actually forget stuff that they’ve ever done.

Where possible I would suggest using the softening phrases when approaching another person: ‘I feel like that’s not the way you used to behave,’ ‘I feel like it’s not okay to treat people like that’ or ‘I feel like you’re not looking after yourself very well at the moment. In using such phrases, it’s like you’re taking responsibility for what you’re seeing and experiencing and not just being blaming and putting it all on them. I feel softening frame can work really well and generally just think about your language and the softening frames that you might be using.

The other thing that is really useful to do which the police do all the time where they interview a suspect. The police tell the suspect that the questioning is just to rule you out from our enquiries so that phrasing around this is to rule out anything else is something that I have learned to use a lot both with my mom and with the clients that I see where I suspect that the mental health issue or illness that they are experiencing is beyond the realms of my reach and I want them to get treatment but it’s not going to be with me.

One of the frames that you can use here is to say I’d recommend going to the doctor just to rule out anything else and then I’ll often suggest something quite low level that’s not particularly terrifying or treatable but would also help to put the like to kind of get them into the system and to get whoever it is that they end up engaging with exploring other things. For example, if you have someone with anxiety then you could recommend that they go to see their GP just to rule out. If someone has a long-term sleep problem then you could say to them, you know, it’s probably worth talking it through with your GP or a counsellor just to rule out the fact that there’s something else playing on your mind, that’s interfering with your sleep patterns. If someone is showing some signs of some more mental health illnesses it’s worth going to your doctor to get a urine check because sometimes with certain urine infections it can cause your brain to start tripping out and working in a different way.

I can suggest for you as the carer, as the employer or as the facilitator of getting the ball rolling on having this issue explored, for whoever it is in your life, that currently has a problem is that you are really brave about it because it can be a thankless task to undertake. It can also be incredibly stressful because you might see what is best for them but they may not see it for themselves. It might feel as if you’re kind of like going at it alone in some ways but when you do get them on the right track when they do get access to the help or the treatment that they need then you can give yourself a pat on the back and know that you did the best that you could.

Don’t underestimate the impact that things like stress, anxiety and depression can have on a person. Some things that might seem to be much more severe mental health issues actually just boil down to either stress, anxiety or depression or a combination of the three of them in some way and these can really change a person’s personality and they are recoverable so where you can support people in accessing the treatment that they need getting on the right path so that they can begin to live a healthier, happier life going forward with your assistance there by their side.

I hope that this was a useful and interesting one I know it’s the stuff that might not be relevant to you at this exact moment in your life but trust me if you ever interact with another human being at some point in the new or distant future you’re going to need this stuff because of everybody has a mental health issue at some point in their life and with the ageing population that we have, we’ve got more and more people that are going to be prone to mental illnesses and neurological issues later on in life so we need to know how to have these conversations knowing that they probably won’t be comfortable but facing up to them anyway.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

How Honest Can You Be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Gemma Bailey

www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Finding Motivation in 2021: Part 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.

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

By Gemma Bailey

www.hynotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Finding Motivation in 2021: Part Two

In last month’s article, we began discussing re-motivation and this is something we have all experience through the pandemic in 2020 and through 2021 presently. This has been the highlight of my work with my clients recently at the Hypnotherapy clinic in Hertfordshire. We confirm that some people need a reason ‘why’ to do things that they want to do and we also confirm a little bit about our own personal drivers in getting motivated. In this month’s article, we are thinking about our levels of motivation. Is whether what we’re doing; is it for ourselves if we’re doing it? Is it for other people or is it a combination of both?

When we talk about goal setting we talk about making sure that your goals are quite selfish, that you’re doing, what you’re doing for yourself only. However, very often, our motivation to actually do those goals may well come from a place of knowing that what we’re doing will actually make some kind of positive difference to others as well.

If you can feel motivated to do something because it gives you the buzz because it is going to pay off for you, in some particular way, then that is definitely going to be useful for you but failing that then definitely dig deep and start thinking about the ripple effect of what it is that you’re going to be doing on the wider world and we call that the study of ecology. That ‘digging deep’ is something we can explore together in our hypnotherapy and NLP sessions in my Hertfordshire clinic.

The study of ecology is when you think beyond yourself and say “is this good for me? Is it also going to be good for others? Does it serve the greater good in some way?” Potentially the answer could be ‘yes’ to all questions above. If we asked these questions in the context of getting a new job, a really hard job. For example, I have a funeral directors building across the street and something tells me that that, you know, it appears to not be a very good job to have to do. It might be a little bit depressing at times so imagine if that was going to be the new job that you were going into then you have to start thinking ‘well, how is this going to be good for others?’

Potentially, you’re going to be helping people in their time of need. You’re going to be making sure that you’re providing something that really honours and respects people that have passed on, that was loved by friends and families alike. This means you are considering the wider picture ‘how does what I’m doing actually help others in some way’ and normally you can find something.

I remember when I was doing a key-note speaker for Lloyds Bank which isn’t too far from the hypnotherapy clinic in Hertfordshire and it was at their education conference and so I had a room filled up with bankers. There were a bunch of bankers in the room and they were listening to me rambling on about this whole idea of ecology and how what you’re doing is in some way serving the greater good. I’ll be honest that when I was planning this particular presentation, I did have to dig deep to think about what good is it that these people are actually doing for the world. How are they contributing because obviously, they’re in quite a privileged position so what I ended up proposing is that actually, these guys are providing a service that enables other people to be able to maximise their money?

These bankers were specifically working with schools which made it relatively easy to make that connection because I was able to say:

“As a result of you going into a school and selling your product to them, you know, that you are either saving that school money or that you are helping them to be more productive with their finances in some way because you believe in the service that you are offering to them and as a result of doing that those schools are maybe financially free up. Perhaps they are just financially more robust or more financially competent. As a result of that, they’re going to be serving their children, families and communities in a much better way than they may have been able to do if they’d worked with the competition. In some way, you are helping those children and their families and their communities to be able to access more support from that school because you sold them the service that you offer now.”

It’s a little bit of a tenuous link to serving the greater good but if we want people to be able to tap into their motivation levels, to their optimum level, then we may need to do that extra bit of digging deep in order to, you know, really help you to see that what you’re doing actually has some positive ramifications beyond you and sometimes that’s where the real source of motivation is going to come from very often people will do more for others than they will be motivated to do for themselves.

By Gemma Bailey

www.Hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Finding Motivation in 2021: Part One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey,