Tag Archives: Hypnotherapist Hertfordshire

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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Getting A Good Night Sleep – Part 1


People Building produce Hypnosis MP3s which you can purchase from their website or from iTunes. There are Hypnotherapy audios available for those who want to get better at getting to sleep at night.

Here are some other useful things for you to think about: You must have some sort of bedtime routine. This is important because it gets your body into a habit of knowing what to expect next, so if you have a bath before you go to bed that’s a great way to relax and that lets your body know it’s wind-down time and of course in order for your brain to switch off and allow you to go to sleep, first of all your body has to relax. It’s kind of the same in hypnosis – in that your body relaxes first and then the mind can follow.

And let’s face it, the two things are not that dissimilar. We know for example that the word hypnosis comes from the Greek word Hypnos which means sleep. It’s a great misconception to think that hypnosis is sleep, they’re not the same. There’s different levels of brain activity that occurs between sleep and being in hypnosis.

Hypnosis would be a lighter version of sleep, even though they’re on the same kind of sliding scale. When we do professional hypnotherapy training for those who wish to become a hypnotherapist, we have what we call a sleep curve to demonstrate this. The top of that sleep curve is ‘Beta’, which is your usual awakened bright and lovely state. Then there’s ‘Alpha’ state. Now a lot of us spend most of our time there as well because we’re floating in and out of daydreaming and imagining and watching TV and being in a light trance when doing things like that.

And then we move into ‘Theta’ and this is where we start to move into the sleep side of things. This is when we drift into a light to medium level of sleep. At the very lower level is ‘Delta’ and Delta is your deep, dreamless relaxing sleep.

Delta is the kind of sleep that you have when you get into bed and go to sleep then wake up and it feels like only three minutes has passed by, even though you might have been there for hours. Your body is in exactly the same position and you had not moved at all. In theta state it would tend to be are more of a rapid eye movement kind of a sleep – so a dream sleep. A sleep where you’re asleep but your mind is still busy filing things and sorting information out and if anyone were to watch you they might see you moving around a little bit in that sleep. Your eyes moving under your lids and your body being perhaps a little bit twitchy.

It’s no good coming home from a busy day and trying to jump straight into bed. You need to have that little bit of wind down time first.

There are obvious considerations such as not eating too late, not drinking too late, avoiding caffeine and avoiding alcohol. All those things will affect your sleep quality. So, if you’re having issues with sleep at the moment whether it’s ‘I can’t get to sleep at night’ or whether it’s ‘I get to sleep at night but I wake up a couple of hours later and can’t get back to sleep’, really have to think about those things and what it is you know the quality of the stuff that you’re eating during the day.

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Making a Good First Impression


Make sure you’re on time. For many people, lateness is a real annoyance. If somebody shows up late for particularly something like an interview, then it causes a question about how badly they want to be there. It plants a seed of doubt about whether they’re going to be motivated enough to bother showing up to work on time.

You must be at ease with yourself. You need to come across as confident within yourself but not a smart arse with it. You don’t want to come across as being arrogant in any way but you do want to come across as somebody who is comfortable within your own skin.

If you are somebody who comes across as being not happy within your own skin, then that could be seen as a negative quality and that perhaps you might have some underlying issues that could get in the way of the relationship that you’re trying to create.

Remember to smile and show off your skillset. The reason why you’ve been asked there is because they think that your qualified to do something that they want you to do or that they need someone to do. You have to really present yourself as somebody who can fill that gap that they have. You have to be completely at ease with showing off a little bit.

Be presentable. It relates to your self-worth. Make sure you iron your shirt. Somebody once told me to make sure that your shoes are always clean and shiny. You can’t make a good first impression with muddy manky old shoes.

So be confident and chatty and have some kind of uniqueness about you. It could be something that you wear that is slightly unusual that will help to stick in their mind. It could be something to do with a special hobby that you have that’s a bit unusual that you managed to bring up into the conversation. Something that will help you stand out in making that first impression.

There are lots of people that make good first impressions but are still forgettable and you don’t want to be forgettable. You want to be memorable. So, remember to be positive and have a good attitude. Now when you do that you have to know if you’re going to be funny that a). it’s in the right context for you to be funny and that b). it really is funny.

If you say something that doesn’t quite fit in with the other person’s humour then you could end up just really miffing them off a bit. So, if you’re going to make an effort to be jovial in some way, make sure that it’s the right context for you to do that and be very certain that the other person is going to find humour in it.

You can work with an NLP coach to get yourself interview and dating ready. We have practitioners based in Hertfordshire and North London who are highly specialised in this area of work and will help you to always make a good first impression.

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.peoplebuilding.co.uk