Tag Archives: NLP

Overcome Allergies in Hertfordshire

How often do we accept a label and fully live up to it? The answer may be many more times than we should. The challenge that we have as human beings is that we have used words to identify things, but the words are never fully reflective of the true experience.

For example, let’s say you go to the doctor one summer’s day because your eyes are sore and your nose is runny. The likely hood is that your doctor, whom you respect and trust will apply a label to your symptoms, in an effort to provide an explanation of your experience so that it can then be treated.

So your doctor tells you, have hay fever. From that Summer onwards you grow to expect your hay fever visitor. You know how you will feel, what your symptoms will be when they will start when they will stop. You even compare your suffering with other sufferers, to compete against who suffers the most!

When do you know to stop being a hay fever sufferer- how do you know that you haven’t grown out of it? Could your expectation of it be the sole reason that it is continually re-created?

How about stress? Is that a factor for allergy sufferers? For many asthmatics eczema and psoriasis sufferers it is a deciding factor in the severity of the condition.

So how can NLP and hypnosis in Hertfordshire help?

Well as we know one of the major frames of NLP is the cause-and-effect frame. This moves the client out of “I suffer” and into “I create.” This in itself may not be enough to stop the allergic reaction but does at least get the client away from relying on a treatment for the problem and looking more towards how they continue to cause it. Perhaps they can begin to notice how their diet affects their level of resistance or look for homoeopathic and natural remedies to counteract the symptoms.

For those whose Symptoms are aggravated by stress, Hypnosis is especially beneficial for creating relaxation and relieving tension and suggestions for healing can be given to the patient.

“I think it is unconscious changes that have made the impact.”

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Dealing with Compulsive Disorders

A definition of what compulsion means is usually worded in the following kind of way: A psychological and usually irrational force that makes somebody do something, often unwillingly.

These “irrational forces” are, in the case of compulsive disorders, caused by repetitive thoughts, or mental activity. This is an important factor in understanding and beginning to alter the way that the person with the compulsion represents the problem to themselves. By understanding that the irrational force is caused by the person’s own thoughts and activities, we begin to move the problem away from some outside force that is making them do something, and towards understanding that the problem is something that is caused by themselves.

They may not yet feel as if they are in control of their own thoughts because they have gotten into such an automatic pattern with their thinking that it is occurring as if they have no control over it. And it absolutely will feel that way. After all, whose thoughts are they? In whose head? Whose mind is that? Who is the only one listening to those thoughts? If there is no one else in your head, they must be your own thoughts! This is a great thing to acknowledge because it means that accepting responsibility for those thoughts puts the “thinker” back in control so that they have a much greater potential to create changes.

The first thing I would explore with a compulsive client, in my hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, is what Complex Equivalence exists in their mind about this problem. What does this problem mean? What is it trying to achieve? What does it allow them to do? What do they believe would happen if they stopped this behaviour?

Quite often fear is a big driver of compulsive behaviour, and frequently the fear exists to keep the person safe. When you know what this problem means, its truth and validity can be explored. Quite often there is no logical link between the behaviour/thoughts and the “reasons” why it is occurring. For example, one lady I met felt compelled to check the locks on her car (to the degree that she had to have new ones fitted every 6 months) and her greatest fear was linked to the safety of her father after he had nearly died. The was no obvious link between her father’s incident and the repeated behaviour of locking her car. Knowing this didn’t make the problem stop, but it did encourage her to question the validity of the problem which had felt like a very solid problem before she had thought about it in this way.

The next step can be taken if you believe that the client’s problem may be related to a significant emotional event. A values elicitation can be very worthwhile for discovering what “away from” values exist in their values hierarchy and can help uncover SEEs that the client might not have consciously realised were still having a negative impact.

As well as, or instead of this, I would use the fast phobia technique. The fast phobia technique doesn’t have to be restricted to phobias only. It is a process which is very useful at desensitising the negative emotions that occur when triggered by stimuli so that the person can be around the stimuli without feeling negative emotions. This means there is the opportunity to be around things that used to make them feel a compulsion and no longer feel it.

The compulsion blowout method can be used to demolish the submodalities associated with the stimuli. Submodalities are the codes that we use to make meaning of our experiences and memories. When these are adjusted, the memory/experience will no longer work in the same way as it did in the past.

There is, of course, a lot of room for manoeuvre, as a therapist, I am flexible in my approach and will adjust techniques that I already know if I think there is a way of having them work in a more appropriate way for that specific client. Other techniques I have used have included advising the client that they can do as much as they like of one compulsion, but have to trade off another. This works really well for multiple compulsions as the list slowly whittles down until there is just one compulsion to deal with. By this time they have also built up confidence in their own abilities.

“I’m more confident to deal with the feelings.”

By Gemma Bailey
www.GemmaBailey.com

New Year, New Rules!

The ‘rule’ of the rules is to make them not scary and to avoid creating rules that you’re going to dislike putting in place. They need to be rules that you can enjoy enforcing. There may be some rules that are less easy to enforce than others. For example, if I’ve decided as I have in the past that I’m going to go to the gym X amount of times per week. Then I know that that’s a rule that I’m going to have challenges with because that’s a rule that I’ve had challenges with in the past!

However, if I phrase that rule slightly differently then all of a sudden it becomes a lot more attractive, a lot more appealing, and certainly much more realistic of my expectations and my ability. For example, instead of saying ‘I will go to the gym three times a week’, instead, my rule is: You are going to enjoy taking care of yourself and having a physically fit body.

That rule seems much more appealing to me and I think the reason is that I don’t feel like I’m tying myself into a contract where I have to go three times a week and beat myself up if I don’t.

The mental image I make when I say to myself that I’m going to take care of myself and have a physically fit body is a much more serene-looking image. It’s me looking fit, looking like I’m enjoying myself, moving my body in a way that really appeals to me. NLP can help motivate you to exercise and hypnotherapy from a specialist in Hertfordshire, North London can help too.

So simply by rephrasing the rule, I’ve given it much more appeal and it means that in my imagination I get a different sense of it. The sense is that it’s going to be much more consistent and much more enjoyable to me.

Here are some rules that you might like to use that I’ve already reframed for you so that they’re set up in the best possible way:

If you ever had a rule about your health in the past that you did not stick to, it may just be a case of reframing or restating that rule in a way to makes it more appealing to your unconscious mind. As an example: I will stop eating junk food and stick to a healthy diet.

Notice what mental imagery you create, what picture springs to mind when I say to you: ‘I will stop eating junk food and stick to a healthy diet’. The image I get is me sitting at the kitchen table with a stick of celery looking unimpressed.

So, a better rule could be: I’m going to get my body to the healthiest possible state by having a balanced varied diet.

Doesn’t that sound so much better? It doesn’t sound as painful. It doesn’t sound as if you’re missing out and this is an important thing with diets guys I’m just going to say this quickly is one of the challenges with diets is that firstly, it presupposes that you’re going to be missing out on certain things.

Visit an NLP therapist in North London or Hertfordshire for a free consultation to discover how they can help motivate you to exercise and live a healthier life.

If you’ve ever had the experience in the past of being told that you can’t have something, doesn’t it make you want to even more?

A challenge with dieting is that you are stopping an old way of eating in favour of going for a new way of eating and then once you’ve lost the weight, probably stopping that way of eating and trying then to go through the transition of having a normal balanced diet so you go through at least two transitions. You go from where you are now into diet mode and then from diet mode back into normal mode once you’ve lost the weight.

How about you just have a healthy life instead? That’s only one transition. You only have to do that once. You have to change once, so if you can say to yourself that you’re going to have a varied and balanced diet, getting your body into the healthiest possible state, then you’ve only got one thing that you need to change and one thing that you need to stick to and you do that for the rest of your life.

Now when I say it’s the rest of your life you don’t have to freak out about that because remember it’s a balanced and varied diet, which means that you can still have a takeaway. You can have chocolate. You can have those foods that you enjoy for all the wrong reasons. You just need to do it in a balanced way.

Hypnotherapy can provide you with the commitment and willpower to be able to stick to a diet in the future. Speak to the Hypnotherapy and NLP clinic for more information.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Defusing Anger in Relationships

Anger happens when, in some perceived way, we get a sense of a violation. A boundary that is crossed or a misalignment between someone else values compared to our own.

Sometimes these violations may be known to us – we may be aware of what angered us. At other times, the cause of the angry response may be outside of our conscious awareness. This is usually because the value that has been violated is a much deeper value. We tend to be aware of our surface values (such as trust for example) which makes it easy to spot why, when someone behaves in an untrustworthy way, we would take issue with it.

However, other values (for example significance) may be less conscious or may be values that we do not necessarily want to admit to having at such a high priority that should they be violated we would react with anger.

Some time ago, I was working with a woman who had come to see me at the NLP and Hypnotherapy Clinic in Hertfordshire. She had initially enquired about sessions of hypnotherapy, but as is often the case, we were able to resolve many of the challenges with anger in her relationship by way of NLP and CBT techniques instead.

The woman was frequently angry with her husband. They had at the start of their relationship been very loving towards each other but over the years she had come to resent him in some way and would fly off the handle very easily.

The husband would tolerate the snappy comments but every now and again, if she had been particularly provocative he would bite back and then a huge argument would begin.

Initially, I asked the woman about how her relationship was before the anger had crept in. Back then, she described her husband as a man who was always on the go. He seemed particularly energetic and had aspirations to start his own business. She felt that he was keen to impress her and that was where a great deal of his every had come from.

However, his plans to start his own business had gone out of the window, when they became pregnant with their first child. It seemed more sensible that he would take a promotion in his work instead.

Very soon their lives had transformed from an uncertain but adventurous future of starting their own business and carving out their lives together, to him going to work each day whilst she stayed at home looking after their child.

She became more dynamic as she ran the home and raised the child. He became exhausted by doing a job he did not enjoy. She began picking up the slack and doing more to make up for his lack of lust for life.

As this happened, unconsciously she began to think that his feeling toward her had changed. He no longer felt free and excited about the future and it appeared that the energised behaviour that he had previously had (which she had taken to mean he wanted to impress her) was gone. When she became more active and enthusiastic in her life he began to feel redundant in the dynamics of their relationship – as if he were no longer needed.

His response was to withdraw and hers was to attempt to jolt him into action with shocks of spikiness. Neither technique worked and this is why they both ended up getting so angry with each other.

Finding new and effective ways to respond to each other, change the balance in the relationship, show respect and appreciation and re-motivate each other was just one of the strategies we explore at the hypnotherapy Clinic. Finding out what you value most in your relationship and how those values may be getting violated is often the best way to diagnose the cause of anger in relationships and an NLP Practitioner would be able to help you to do this.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Stop Evening Drinking Habits

For some people, the ultimate downtime after a long day’s work is a glass of wine. It helps unravel those tightened muscles, softens the thoughts in the mind and eases any prickly emotions from the day. It’s an accessible and legal way to unwind. More than that, it creates finality between the day you had just had and the fact that it is over. That you are in a different space, mentally emotionally and physically.

However, sometimes, the need to drink alcohol after a long day’s work becomes a habitual process that can quickly spiral out of control, or into some form of dependency.

Drinking Habits and Alcohol.

Of course, many people manage to have just a glass or two of wine or a small beer and they may choose to have alcohol one day and not the next. Some people find the same sense of release in meditation, yoga or hypnotherapy.

If it is manageable and within a healthy level then there appears to be little risk or concern. The point, at which someone might consider getting help, is the point at which they begin to feel that they no longer have a choice in the matter.

Of course, there is always a choice, because you are always in command of your own thoughts and your own actions. But when someone has a craving, the sensation and emotions related to that come from deep within the unconscious mind. Your unconscious is the domain of your emotions and unless you have amazing willpower, it can be a tricky business to do battle with your unconscious. It’s incredibly powerful and it’s also where the changes to habits, cravings and emotions need to take place.

Hypnotherapy and NLP in Hertfordshire.

Access to the unconscious to make these changes (such as to drinking habits) isn’t something that many can do instantly just by deciding to. The reason is that your conscious mind is often “in the way” of your unconscious mind. It is there to stand guard to make sure that you do not process any old suggestion and take it on board. This is why having a trustworthy hypnotherapist, such as a practitioner from the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, who is trained to access those guarded areas of your mind is so important and beneficial.

If you had a conversation with someone and they said “Well just stop doing it” that conscious logical part of your mind that has already decided that drinking every night is a bad idea, responds by thinking “Well if it were that easy I’d have sorted it out myself already!”

Deciding it, knowing what is right and wanting to do something better for your health and your life are all well and good, but it might not be enough to actually make you stop.

The first step is remembering you have a choice. No one makes you go to the fridge, pull back the ring pull, unleash the cork or any of those things. Only you decide that, and you can decide something else. Distraction can work incredibly well sometimes. When you really engage your brain in other things you lose time and you lose awareness of all the other things that you could have been doing instead (such as drinking). You only need to repeat this process a few times to break the habit completely.

It’s worth remembering that if you do stop completely at doing some habitual thing, that thing, no matter what it is – even if it appears to be totally destructive, was meeting a need. Here’s an idea of some of the needs we have (these are emotional needs, not physical ones like food and water).

Significance
Certainty
Uncertainty
Love
Contribution
Growth

So although drinking alcohol has many negative effects, we can evaluate the emotional needs it may be meeting and recognise the reliability with which alcohol relaxes gives a sense of certainty. That the vulnerability and volatility that alcohol can provide might also simultaneously provide a sense of uncertainty. Some people can only connect with others after drinking and it may be their route to feeling significance and love.

Any drinking habit that fulfils 3 or more of the above-mentioned needs is addictive. It’s easy for people to become addicted to alcohol; not just because the substance in itself is addictive but so are the emotional needs that it meets.

If you are someone who needs to break their evening drinking habits, contact the hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire about how we can help.

By Gemma Bailey

www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Addictions

There once were many myths and misconceptions surrounding the reasons why addictions occur. Some believed that substances in themselves were not addictive, that it was the body’s chemical reaction to the substance to which the individual is addicted. This claim could certainly seem plausible when considering gambling or shopping addictions. There are no foreign chemicals entering the body, rather than the body is creating its own chemical reaction (dopamine/adrenalin) in response to the external stimulus of gambling or shopping, and it is the feeling that the individual is addicted to, not the actual act itself.

It is also understandable that when one introduces chemicals to the body, chemical reactions occur. Some of these reactions stimulate reward centres within the brain which are triggered when a person exercises, falls in love or is praised or acknowledged.

Sometimes an addiction occurs when a person uses drugs, cigarettes, alcohol or even food, to alleviate stress and worry. In order to successfully treat these types of addictions, the person must focus on increasing their levels of self-esteem so that they are able to create good feelings about themselves without any need to have the feelings triggered by an external stimulus.

It is difficult to predict if one person is more likely to suffer from addiction than the next. Again, claims have been made that some suffer from an addictive personality. It is also wise to consider the social circumstances of addicts. For example, if your parents smoked, you are more likely to be a smoker – this may be because you see the behaviour as socially acceptable or because you have a genetic predisposition or both. If your friend takes drugs, you are likely to be influenced by them. There are of course other factors. If a person is lacking in a structured life or has experienced an over-structured life, drugs can be a form of escape and detachment from a life which is perhaps, not entirely fulfilling.

Often, an addiction will increase in severity over time. This is because the body becomes regulated and used to the addictive chemical being in the body. To achieve the same level of stimulation, more of the addictive chemical is needed in the body. Many addictions can cause serious health, social, physical and mental problems and when addictive substances are increased in a non-regulated environment, the consequences can be devastating.

Fortunately, changes can be made. Addicts do not necessarily need to be addicts for the rest of their lives. If the addict is willing and motivated to change, there are ways of easing and in some cases removing completely, the side effects when withdrawing from an addictive substance.

NLP can be used to help the client understand new perspectives about how the addiction has impacted on their lives. Techniques can be used to desensitise any negative associations from the past, and positive triggers can be installed for use when the cravings would normally occur.

Hypnosis can be used to remove habits and create changes in the subconscious, the part of the mind responsible for creating and maintaining habits. Post hypnotic suggestions can be used to associate powerful negative feelings to the addictive act or substance so that these powerful negative feelings are experienced in the future if ever the patient considers interacting with the addictive substance or acting again.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

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

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

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

The Question ‘Why’ in Dealing with Annoying People

At the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, I help clients to control their emotions and language in dealing with annoying people. Since the pandemic, lots of you have been working in a different way. Some of you may have noticed that the people within the office have been acting a bit differently because of the circumstances and effect of the covid the past year. You’ve perhaps got a partner a home now that you weren’t used to having around and you now notice how annoying that can be to have them around the house every day! Some of you have had your kids there, maybe, you’ve discovered that your children are actually quite annoying.

I’ve been inspired by Brianna Wiest who has written an article called ‘ways to deal with people who annoy the crap out of you’. I particularly like that title and this is from the thought catalogue they do have an app. I’m going to kind of use some of those points that have been mentioned in the thought catalogue.

First of all, I am going to make a recommendation to you that you start to just slightly change your focus now. Very often, what can happen when we’re dealing with annoying people is that we focus an awful lot on the ‘what it is about them that’s so freaking annoying’ instead of the actual things that they do and we get down into the sort of nitty-gritty detail about the specific ways in which they do it, like the ways in which they do that annoying thing. You are putting your time and your energy and like just your thinking energy which is really valuable. You’re putting it into that annoying problem and it solves absolutely nothing.

In the past, you may have heard of me mention the reticular activating system. This is something in your brain and it works like a radar so that whatever you’re thinking about and focusing on it draws more of that into your consciousness.

Something that I do in sessions with clients at the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire is I’ll get them looking around the room saying the word ‘red’ to themselves. We call it the ‘Red Test’ at NLP4Kids. This works with adults and children. You get them looking around going red, red, red, red, and their brain gets tuned in to all the red stuff that they can see in the room or the red that’s here is just like bolder than everything else and then you say to them. If you ask them to tell you about all the blue stuff in the room, their minds are ‘blank’ because they hadn’t been looking for blue. Here’s the thing – if that thing that annoys you about someone is like the red stuff, in that, you are constantly talking to yourself about it and like seeing it. If they’re doing it again and getting tuned into it then you’re going to end up seeing it everywhere. It’s going to feel like, it is, if not more consistent in the regularity at which it shows up.

One of the things that you can do is notice the blue stuff. Pick something that you can tune into and it doesn’t have to be something about that person, that annoying person but it could be so that it starts to divert your focus away from the annoying aspects onto something else and you get that reticular activating system working in a way that gets you to tune into more helpful stuff instead.

I’m going to share with you how I utilize the strategy I’ve just given you of going from red to blue with someone in a real-life scenario. We are going to stop focusing on the ‘why’ why do they do it, why do they do this annoying thing and why would they choose to do that. Here’s the thing when we think about anything in the format of a ‘why’ it doesn’t help you to come up with helpful answers. Let me give you an example, when we ask the question ‘why do they do that freaking annoying thing?’ or anything else that starts with a why it often gets us looking backwards into the past and negatively.

If you ask yourself ‘why do they have to chew so loudly’? or something like that what that’s going to force your brain to do is to look back into the past to your memories, experiences and interactions with that person when they were doing that annoying thing. and if anything, if you’re going to come up with answers to that question like the answers typically speaking probably, won’t be all that favourable to them. They’re not going to be all that positive.

These actions are going to cause you to into a negative emotional state of annoyance all over again. One because you started reflecting back on times in the past where they’ve been doing that annoying thing and then you’ve gone and got yourself like when we recall stuff. When we recall certain memories they will trigger us back into the emotional state that we were feeling back at that time. If you think back to a time in the past when someone annoyed you; you can expect that your body is going to get a little tensed up or that your breathing is going to go a little bit squiffy or that you just start noticing negative emotions that you did not want to have again.

Therefore, asking ‘why’ is bad for that reason but the other thing as I say is not just that it causes you to sort of reflect but it causes us to come up with answers to that why question which is most likely to be negative so unless you’re really checking yourself, like unless you’re being really conscious of the responses to that question if you just kind of like flippantly like go ‘oh I don’t have to be so annoying’ then your brain has a tendency to go well because they’ve never been taught good manners and to chew their food with their mouth shut because they like sitting close to you and seeing the look on your face when they make those chomping noises and it will come up like your own mind will come up with a list of really unhelpful reasons to answer that ‘why’ question so that’s why you shouldn’t ask why either of yourself or with anybody else.

In next month’s article, we will continue to focus on some tips and guidance in dealing with annoying people in your lives.

By Gemma Bailey