Tag Archives: Hypnotherapy

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,

www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

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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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

The Pursuit of Change

Today I’m going to be discussing how it is that change is possible even when you think it isn’t my behavior and communications

It’s interesting because in my work I have people who come to see me, at my Hertfordshire therapy clinic, because they want to change and they obviously believe that change is possible, otherwise they probably wouldn’t bother coming to see me. There are other people that I work with, who are not clients and there are the people that I know socially, for example where I have noticed that some people develop an idea that the things that they dislike about themselves are not changeable.

Imagine being in a situation where you have resigned yourself to being stuck with the things that you dislike about yourself, you’ve decided that these things cannot be changed, that you cannot change them and that there is no point really finding another way of doing things, you’re just stuck with what you’ve got and that’s the end of it. Then imagine that those things about yourself actually really impact upon your relationships with other people, how well you are perceived to the rest of the world, how well you are able to form other relationships moving forward, imagine believing that those things about yourself, those qualities that you need to improve that there’s no point even trying because you’re just stuck with them doesn’t that sound a little bit crazy.

To not want to bother improving and changing the things that you can change and improve about yourself but actually just living with it instead, that’s nuts! why would anybody ever do that? Here’s the thing, sometimes change is not seen, sometimes the tools that we need to be able to make those changes are not easy to come by and perhaps in the past you have given it your best, like a lot a lot of other times before, you’ve really gone at it all guns blazing, thinking that this thing, this new way of being, this methodology, this strategy, this therapeutic intervention, this is going to be the one that finally makes things change for you and then it doesn’t work.

It happens that sometimes the route that we want to take to create the changes that we wish to make are not the right ones for us, for our individual psychology, for our way of being, for our environment, for our way of life, sometimes you don’t hit upon the right route to take you to where you want to be first time around or second or third or a hundredth time. Sometimes change doesn’t come fast, sometimes it doesn’t come easy and sometimes it doesn’t come via the route that you think you need to take. Does that mean that you should just back off and you know just make do with what you’ve got in life?

Is it at all possible that this thing that you want to change about yourself is actually quite important? It could actually make a really big difference. Is it not even more important to continue? The pursuit of that change, in spite of the knocks and failures and errors that you’re going to make a long way, I believe and I’m not a particularly spiritual person, but I believe that even when we have these situations where it seems like we’d invested too much hope in finding the right source to help us to become the person that we want to be, even if that doesn’t work out and it turns out you have been completely going the wrong way forward. that there is still going to be a time in the future when you gain something from that experience and that thing might be wisdom, later that thing might just be a funny story about how once upon a time you tried rebirthing or age regression or some other new-age methodology to help you to overcome those anxieties that you had and it didn’t work and you felt like a woolly nose lady bashing cymbals in the background.

Even if all you get from it is a funny story that you end up telling somewhere and  for some people it works. Even if that’s all you’ll get, you’ll still get something out of it, there is still some reward to be had by keeping going and looking for a way that will work for you, to help you become the person that you want to be. We know that the human brain has the ability to rewire itself, things can change in there and you can change them but sometimes it’s as if our ego has got cemented into place and that ego says this is who I am and everyone else is gonna have to live with it and in fact, therefore, I have to live with it too, I have to stay this way.

Don’t let your ego in the way of you being able to recognise that past you doesn’t know everything, that perhaps other people have solutions that you haven’t discovered yet, that perhaps other people might have some quirky alternative ways that really work for helping you to be able to change who you are and how you are in life that would wreak, for you, very positive rewards and benefits. Don’t let your ego get in the way of you exploring another way of changing yourself, your habits by convincing yourself that you are the one person on the planet whose psychology is set in stone and doesn’t work on the same brain wavelength that every other human being does, don’t do that to yourself, that’s silly and it prevents you from moving forward and from having the life that you might like to have.

Sometimes we need to put aside our current thinking and get a bit curious all over again so that we can figure out, we can begin to take, to move in a different direction in life, maybe there are some learnings that you have yet to experience that will take me to where I need to be. Don’t be fooled into thinking that you’ve already learnt it all, that if it existed you would have already found it, that’s not going to wash around here, around here we keep searching, we’re curious, part of what we learn in NLP is an attitude of curiosity, we’re looking at developing within ourselves a way of being using our creative brain to find alternative ways forward when we are in stuck situations and when we cannot find them we accept that we haven’t got all the answers here but this doesn’t mean that they don’t exist, it just means that you haven’t found them for yourself yet.

If you cannot find them alone then find someone who’s a good researcher, who has a good brain for being able to find a way forward when they seem to be stuck in times of trouble because those people exist. I would like to think that on the most part, always for my own problems but certainly for other people’s, I am one of those people. we’re going to suck up the potential for disappointment because we know there is highly likely to be a lot of it around but we’re also not going to give up on ourselves quite so easily moving forward, we’re going to accept that we might not know how that change will occur but we’re also going to accept that change can occur and if it can then there is a way for us to evolve ourselves with that, there is a way for us to bring that forward into our awareness. The skills and knowledge of other people who might be able to look at things from a different angle to what we can could helps us to evolve, to achieve  that change. That may require that we reach out for and ask for help because sometimes we need to reach out to others in order to be able to cultivate that opportunity to find whatever it is we need to find in order to open up the possibility of change to ourselves and that’s the pursuit of change is what I want you to focus on.