Bipolar

I’m struck with bipolar diagnostic. I currently have a client who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The sad fact about this kind of diagnostic is that it puts a label on someone with the permanence and the scar of an illness that is viewed by modem medicine as something you can’t recover from.

Those kind of diagnostics, similar as the ones I used to see a lot when working with chronic illnesses such as ME – are devastating for the patient as they are given a life sentence of being ill. The impact on their mental health is horrendous, and it’s no surprise so many sufferers develop some aspects of depression.

When you consider that impact on issues such as bipolar it makes me wonder. Bipolar disorders – previously known as manic- depression are defined as episodes of mania followed by episode of depression. And I’m wondering how a life sentence type of diagnostic can help relieving the depression…

Anyhow what struck me with my client is the treatment given to her. She’s taking mood tranquillisers, anti-psychotic drugs and of course anti-depressant. Darian Leader, author of strictly bipolar highlights how the conventional treatments for bipolar disorder is reduced to a cocktail of drugs supposed to counteract the side effects of each drug.

I am often weary of the modern medicine drugs that targets very specific symptoms without taking on board the whole body. Meaning that whilst helping with one symptom, a medicine will at the same time disturb the balance of other body functions – thus create what we call side effects. Therefore you then need to take another drug that will target the side effects of the first one, whilst itself create other side effects. So you then have to take a third drug and so on.

I’ve discovered that herbal medicine, or traditional medicine, actually does target symptoms whist taking into consideration the whole body balance. Which means no nasty side effects. But of course, this is much less beneficial financially to the big pharmaceutical companies out there…but that’s a discussion for another time.

Coming back to bipolar disorder, I was distraught to hear that apart from that cocktail of drugs prescribed to my client, and a couple of counselling sessions to help her deal with her “illness”, she hadn’t been offered whatsoever any in depth treatment to address the underlying cause of the bipolar.

And my logical first question to her was “so what caused it in the first place”? To which she had no idea, considering no medical professional actually took the time to explore the psychological aspect of it.

I believe the symptoms of the manic episode are simply a coping mechanism to the underlying depression. Typically the client displays strong empathy, feeling the pain of others, a desire to fix things and people, to make the world a better place and to connect. I see those traits as a way to cope with their own suffering, as most people with bipolar disorder are actually highly sensitive and are more exposed to emotional pain.

So if the manic episodes are – even partly – a way to cope with pain, of course the next question is what’s the underlying pain? and if we could find that pain and heal it, would there need to be any coping mechanism? What would then happen with the manic episode of there was no need to cope with the pain, if the pain wasn’t there in the first place?

Of course you can argue that bipolar disorder is actually caused by a chemical unbalance in the brain. To which I’m asking but what creates that chemical unbalance in the first place?

If meditation has been proven to alter the brain and body chemicals, could pain and depression alter those chemicals as well rather than this chemical unbalance creating depression? Therefore what would happen if we started to treat the depression?

Past life regression

 I had a very interesting experience in one of my sessions yesterday.

I’m working with a client who suffers from panic attacks, and we’ve made incredible progress in the past few weeks, to the point where their panic whilst being on the tube has now completely disappeared.

However after having used NLP, Hypnotherapy and EFT during our sessions, I noticed there was still something remaining, we hadn’t cleared it all as they mentioned they were still anxious at the idea of being on a plane.

When I started to do my “detective work” and explore what specifically made them anxious in that environment, we managed to nail it down to the fear of being surrounded by people in a dark place and not be able to escape.

One of the hypnosis technique mostly used in those situations is called age regression, where you guide the unconscious mind to travel back in time to identify the first time that emotion has been felt.

In most negative experiences, the brain will recognise the source of the danger and rationalise it to prevent further damage. For example if once you’ve been scared by a spider, most of the time your brain will rationalise it and process that temporary fear so that you don’t freak out every time you see a spider. Or to take it further, not everyone that has been in an accident develop a trauma out of it.

But in some instances, the brain doesn’t process traumatic events in that way. It’s as if the fear or unpleasant emotion gets frozen in time and stays alive as if the trauma keeps re-occurring. That’s what creates phobia, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and in some instances panic attacks.

To come back to age regression, that technique helps identify the root cause behind the trauma and with a combination of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and EFT (emotional freedom technique) for example we can release the anxiety and begin the healing process.

So I decided to use age regression yesterday with my client to identify the root cause of her panics related to planes and confined busy dark places, and what came up was quite unexpected. The image that popped into her mind was one of being in a gas chamber surrounded by other people during the second world war…it felt really real to her, it was as if she was actually in that situation. I dissociated her immediately of course, as the emotion was overwhelming, which gave us the opportunity to explore in depth what was going on for her and subside the panic.

Now you may feel puzzled and it’s understandable. Was it a past life memory? or a construction of her unconscious mind? Perhaps that memory was simply a metaphor created by her unconscious mind to symbolise another trauma? In any case, I don’t think it matters. After all, it depends on everyone’s belief system, doesn’t it? And whatever your belief system is, there is an explanation that will feel more comfortable for you.

Whenever I’m asked if I do past life regression, I always answer the same: if you believe in past life, I do. If you don’t, I don’t 🙂 Whether it’s real or simply a symbolic way to represent something else unconsciously, what really matters is the result you get, isn’t it?! If my client’s panic attacks disappear thanks to that experience, I’m quite happy to label it whatever you want 🙂

Have you experienced past life regression yourself? Do you believe in it?

Clients are mirrors

One of the very interesting observation I’ve made over the years in working with clients, was how often I could relate to their issues. Especially when I first started to practice, I seemed to attract people who had similar issues to mine and that always puzzled me. Call it coincidence or universal law, I started to take it seriously when a few of my colleagues reported similar events.

I believe actually that we are on a life path, and we all have our nemesis, a few recurrent themes in our lives that we have to conquer. And perhaps somehow, when we work as a therapist or a coach, our clients are part of that path, they are here to remind us to continue to work on ourselves.

As a result, I’ve always told my students when training them in becoming Person-Centred NLP therapists and hypnotherapists, to work on their issues first, as they will also certainly attract clients that will resonate with them: what I call “mirrors”. And for some reasons, it is especially true with issues that we are reluctant to address! As if we were consistently reminded to look at ourselves first before helping others. A little bit like when you’re on a plane, they tell you to put on the oxygen mask on yourself first before putting it on others.

It is therefore important to work on ourselves first when we want to become a coach and/or a therapist, to make sure our deep core issues don’t get triggered in the middle of a session. I had a friend who hadn’t worked through their sexual abuse, and once with a client also presenting that issue, they had a very strong emotional reaction and had to stop the session

It doesn’t mean at all that we have to resolve all our issues before working with clients – nor that we’ll ever resolve all of them – but at least we work on them and continue to grow and develop.

And it is also important to do that step in order to be congruent with our work. In other words, congruence means being authentic and having integrity. If you are a smoker but treat people to stop smoking, despite not having done it yourself, you are absolutely not congruent. And the chances are that the client will pick up on it unconsciously, which is likely to undermine their beliefs that it’s possible to quit and their trust in you. Not a good start, is it?!

For many years I thought of people being “mirrors” in that way. However recently I also discovered that people can be mirrors in a different way. In a more covert way. You may know that quote by Cynthia Occelli “When people undermine your dreams, predict your doom or criticize you, remember they’re telling you their story, not yours“. It’s one of my favourite quote.

What I find interesting is the idea that when we criticise someone, or even respond negatively to their behaviours or words, it means we have stepped into our stories: that a button has been pushed within us, an insecurity, or perhaps a wound. And this is another kind of mirror: Instead of criticising them, or attacking them or even get defensive, what would you learn about yourself if you wondered what is being triggered in you that makes you feel this way? What button has been pushed?

I believe this is a very effective way to learn to know yourself, to develop your self-awareness but also to improve your communication with others: as whilst you engage in that introspection, you also allow the other person to fully express themselves without being castigated, which is bound to encourage understanding and respect. A win-win situation!

Your thoughts?

How do you change your ego states with NLP?

In Transactional Analysis, we often talk about ego states. In a nutshell, that means that at any moment you behave either from the place of the child, which represents the emotions and behaviours you use to have when you were a child, the parent, where you impersonate behaviours and responses your parents used to have with you, or the adult, where you’re in a position of responding appropriately to the current situation. Often the adult is misrepresented as the one without emotions, which is incorrect (that’s more denial!), it’s the position where your emotions are actually appropriate to the situation you are in.

We call those three positions ego states in transactional analysis jargon, and what is often observed is that issues, communication problems and conflicts come a lot of the time from being in an ego states that is not the best one to solve that challenge.

I’m sure you’ve been in that situation, where you disagree with someone and instead of both behaving calmly like adults, one of you starts to sulk, give the other one the silent treatment, or gets angry and calls them names. Sounds familiar?! Now would you say that those reactions are appropriate and useful in that context? Apart from some rare exceptions, most often they’re not. Which means we are not operating from the adult ego-states.

Parents are a very good example of that. Have you noticed how quickly we step back into behaving like children around them? Or how often they actually treat us as a child again? Even though we have been adults for a long time? Because it is our natural ego state around each other, so we’re bound to slip back into it.

It is actually quite difficult to not regress, as with people who have been around your life for a long time – such as our parents – a relationship dynamic has been strongly engrained. When you meet someone new, it only takes a few months for a dynamic to be installed, and what I mean by dynamic, is how you relate and behave with each other.

One of my friend always tends to humorously criticise me when she comes around, as if I was a helpless child who doesn’t know what she’s doing. Our dynamic is simply that she steps into the parent ego state and me into the child ego state. That’s how we relate and how we have related for many years now. And trust me, that’s very difficult to change!

When I went to the NLP conference back in November, I asked TA experts how to shift ego states. And they suggested to be extra vigilant and as soon as you spot it, to step back into the adult ego state by disassociating for example. And I’ve tried it over the holidays around my family, and it works, but it requires constant awareness and a lot of work!

And last weekend as I was training my Person Centred NLP/Hypnotherapy course, one of my student suggested a much more effective way to shift those states using Timelines. And I had been so caught up in dealing with it using TA that I didn’t even think of that tool I had taught them only a month ago!

Zoe suggested to float above your timeline, check at which age position you find yourself when you’re interacting with that person, and gently move yourself forward into the present again to handle that situation in a more resourceful way. I think this is one of the best way to permanently shift a well-established dynamic, especially if you make sure to future pace the new interaction in a detailed way.

People are anchors, especially if they’ve been in your life for long, meaning they will trigger in you old automatic responses, whether emotional or behavioural ones. If you recognise that this is no longer useful for you to respond in this way, you need to start changing it.

The first step is self-awareness, as in the capacity to know at any given moment how you feel, what’s going on for you, what ego state you’re in and what’s being triggered for you. And then you can either change your state using anchoring processes, or come back into the adult ego state using timelines.

What about you? How are you shifting your ego states? Any other ideas?

3 Tips to Build a Successful Holistic Therapeutic Practice

My latest blog as a guest post on the great Socially Holistic page!

Sexual abuse

One in three girls will be abused by the age of eighteen.

One in seven children has already been abused.

How many do you know? How many of your friends, relatives and colleague have come public with it? How many are still ruled by shame and guilt? And how can you, as a friend, a partner or a therapist, help them cope with it and eventually overcome the trauma it created? Here are a few things to know and a few tips to help handling it:

1. The Social Stigma

Unfortunately in our society, there are still a lot of stigma attached to sexual abuse. There are still a lot of limiting beliefs around rape for example such as “If she was raped it’s because of how she dressed” or “He must have provoked him sexually”. Those stigma unfortunately creates shame in the victims of sexual abuse, who then prefer to hide what happened to them by fear of being verbally and emotionally attacked. And by doing so, they end up feeling ostracised, different and isolated in their pain. 

How can you help?  If you suspect someone close to you has been abused at any point in their past, casually let them know you would never judge or condemn a victim of sexual abuse ; that you empathise with them and you know it must be difficult to handle that on their own. That will allow them to relax as they hear a different opinion than the one they are scared of. That may even encourage them to share with someone what happened to them, which is the first step to healing.

2. Guilt

The most common thoughts that trigger guilt in abuse victims are along the line of “what did I do to trigger it?”, “I must have sent a vibe that made him think it was ok” ; “I didn’t stop it so I’m accomplice of the abuse” ; “I didn’t talk about it, I didn’t denounce them” ; “I allowed it to happen”. Especially when the victim was abused as a child, those thoughts are very likely to poison their life. Because as an adult they revisit the event from the point of view of an adult, with the resources and knowledge they have now, judging the child as if she had those resources back then. And naturally that leads them to start to question and blame themselves as to why they didn’t do something about it.

How can you help? 

Remind them that as a child, they didn’t have the knowledge or resources they have now as an adult. And as a result, they might not even have known that what was going on wasn’t normal ; Or that they were scared to rebel against an adult’s authority ; or they didn’t have the ability to run away and thus survive on their own without the care and support of those adults ; or that they were manipulated by knowledgeable adults who used their child’s naivety and innocence. In any case, it is very important to remind them that back then they were only a child, and couldn’t have done anything different. And that their guilt comes from their judgement as an adult on themselves as a child.

If you’re working therapeutically with someone, I would suggest an approach like re-parenting to start with, for your client to begin to forgive themselves for something they were absolutely not responsible for. You could also work with that specific aspect using EFT to eliminate the guilt.

3. Shame

In some cases, the abuse was linked with physical or emotional pleasure. Physical, as in their erogenous zones were stimulated, and emotional as in it might have created a bond between the victim and the abuser. A young child wouldn’t necessarily yet have the tools to distinguish what is healthy to what is not in terms of sexuality. The abuse is likely to be their first ever encounter with sexuality, and as such they wouldn’t know yet what are the rules around it. They might have felt some pleasure as a result, simply because it wouldn’t yet have been censured in their mind – especially if that would have been presented to them as a game.

Another type of shame comes from emotional pleasure. The abuser could have used sex as a bargaining tool, giving the child a message like “I love you if you do that for me”. Children are very vulnerable and in their early years absolutely need to be loved in order to develop properly. 

How can you help?

To start with, remind them that our bodies are designed to respond mechanically to sexual excitement, and pleasure would have simply meant that their body physiology and biology worked very well. Not that they enjoyed being abused. Remind them also that young children would be driven by the need of survival, and as a result would have complied to the abuse unconsciously in order to receive the love and care they needed to survive. Asking the question to an abuse survivor “If you hadn’t complied as a child, what would have happened to you” generally helps to understand that their unconscious choice was made to guarantee their survival and safety.

Therapeutically I would also recommend EFT and re-parenting to work on those specific aspects, as well as NLP processes such as Reimprinting or Core Transformation.

4. Feeling worthless and self-esteem issues

Sadly most of the time the child will have been manipulated and made to believe that what happened was their fault ; They have probably been given the message that they were a bad person, or worthless as a way for the abuser to justify themselves in that behaviour. 

Unfortunately the child would have been too young to understand that twisted psychological manipulation and would have likely believed the abuser and absorbed that belief at a deep unconscious level. Which would have then stayed with them and created in their adult life a lot of self-esteem and self-image issues.

How can you help? 

Explain to them or lead them to understand the root of that belief and how it is completely mistaken. 

Therapeutically I would do a lot of work on rebuilding self esteem, self confidence and self love, once the root cause of the belief has been identified and cleared. 

5. Anger

Naturally the abuse would have created a lot of anger in the victim, and until the abuse has been worked through therapeutically, that anger might still be very present in their life. Whether it’s anger towards the abuser, a parent that didn’t believe or protect them or even anger towards themselves, at some point this hatred and anger could begin destroying them ; by making their lives miserable or even worst, by turning into an illness. 

The body is very good at physically manifesting destructive emotions. And anger is one of the strongest emotion and often at the root of many illnesses. 

How can you help? 

Encourage the victim in expressing out loud their anger towards the abuser or the parent who wasn’t there for them at the time of the trauma, either in a Gestalt stair exercise or through Reimprinting ; or perhaps through writing them a letter they may or may not want to send them. Anger needs to be expressed in order to disappear. If it’s kept inside, it will fester and manifest itself in another way.

In terms of self anger, the victim needs to understand rationally that they were not at fault and are not to blame. Once that understanding exists, there’s a lot of work to do around self-forgiveness and self-acceptance.

6. Sexual dysfuncions

It is logically quite common in victim of abuse to develop sexual dysfunctions. From promiscuous behaviours to fear of intimacy, a lot of issues can stem from the trauma. To name a few, fear of men (if the abuser was a man), frigidity, erectile dysfunctions, difficulty to orgasm and sometimes sexual diseases or discomfort.

How can you help?

Sex therapy is a good place to start. As a partner of a sexual abuse victim, a very open communication on what emotions or memories are triggered for them during intimacy will help create trust and relaxation that could be the beginning of healing. Let your partner know that they are welcome to share at any point any time if they feel discomfort and something is triggered for them, so they can start interrupting the unconscious associations between current sexual intimacy and the past abuse.

7. Trust issues

It is understandable that after having been manipulated, deceived and betrayed, the child learns not to trust. The default nature of a child is to trust adults, and an adult taking advantage of that innocence will teach the child at the unconscious level that trusting is dangerous all together with anyone at any time.

How can you help?

Start with understanding that the lack of trust isn’t personal and allow yourself to disassociate from it in order to understand where that person comes from. Work together using patience and understanding to help them rebuild their trust, and learn to know who and when to trust.

I would always strongly recommend to work with a qualified therapist on sexual abuse and other type of trauma, as it lives in the unconscious mind and always has a ripple effect in the person’s life. That can vary from depression, to anger issues and sexual dysfunction, but because of the seriousness of the trauma, it is important to feel safe in the hands of a responsible experienced therapist that will be able to hold the space and keep you safe as you work your way through the abuse.

I hope this blog was helpful, it came about after having many discussions with clients having suffered abuse and feeling abnormal and isolated. My goal was to remove the taboo so if you’ve been abused, you know it’s ok to feel the way you feel, and that it’s much more common than you think.

If you have questions about the subject, please feel free to post them below or contact me directly, I’d be more than happy to have a conversation with you.

NLP is just a tool

I’ve recently completed my AAMET EFT training level 1&2 and as I was training, it confirmed something really important that became the root of my Person-Centred NLP approach.

When you work with clients, the most important thing is not the repertoire of processes you have under your sleeves; nor is the amount of academic degrees or diploma you hold. The most important thing is to treat your client as a human being. This is someone who, when they come to see you for the first time, is likely to be quite nervous, understandably, as they don't know you yet: they need to feel they can trust you, open up to you and feel at ease with confiding their most intimate issues. After all, they put their well being and mental health in your hands!

Over the years I moved away from the quick fix mentality of the typical NLP world into developing my Person-Centred approach. I stopped taking a magnifying glass to focus solely on the issue my clients presented on the first session to begin to look at them in a holistic way. My goal stopped being to get them fixed in the shortest possible time, and instead get to know them, what is going on for them in the rest of their lives, not just on that specific issue. And as a result I learnt to listen much more and use NLP/hypnotherapy much less. And interestingly I got better and more lasting results.

When I was doing my EFT training what stroke me the most was the parallel with NLP. In the sense that what makes the most difference in a therapeutic encounter, is not the tools you use but rather understanding what is really going on for the client. As most of the time the issues clients come to therapy with in the first place are only the tip of the iceberg. Often do I see a flying phobia that actually stems from severe childhood abuse ; or fear of public speaking stemming from verbal abuse coming from a teacher in first grade. But most of the time the client won’t disclose sensitive information if they don’t feel comfortable with their therapist. Yes I’m talking here about rapport, but not the artificial rapport you build by matching your client’s body language and predicates. I’m talking about genuine rapport, the one that comes from being heard, understood and respected. The kind of rapport that takes time to build.

Coming back to my EFT training, one of the trainer said something that really resonated with my working style. She said “I’m doing some detective work“. Meaning that even before using EFT or NLP, we explore the issue inside out, where it comes from, what’s underneath it, what are the core limiting beliefs hidden behind it, what needs are not met, what fears are at play etc. In order to know exactly what to work on. I find it’s always more useful to work directly on the root cause of an issue rather than on the symptoms that are presented. A little bit like finding the deep physical dysfunction of an illness instead of just taking paracetamol.

Do you know the story of that very expensive plumber? A big ship’s engine was broken and the ship’s owners had tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure out how to fix it. Finally they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a youngster; He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.

Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed! A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars.

“What?!” the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything!”

So they wrote the old man a note saying, “Please send us an itemized bill.”

The man sent a bill that read:

Tapping with a hammer ……………………. $ 2.00
Knowing where to tap ………………………. $ 9,998.00

I believe the most important thing in therapy is knowing where to tap. The core of the issue. And once you found it, then choose which tool you’re going to use to heal it, NLP, EFT or CBT etc. according to your client’s needs and learning style, using your experience and intuition. But that also means that learning those tools are not enough. Like if you want to build a house you need a little bit more than having a spade, a drill or a shovel. You need to actually need to know how to build the house!

And in therapy that means knowing how the mind works ; what are the limitations people are running when they’re stuck. What limiting beliefs and common patterns are the most often at play. And only then can you dig in your tool box to work on them. The more I work in this field the more concerned I become about the fast track trainings that exclude experience, deep learning and understanding of the human mind. And how that can potentially endanger clients. I feel I was lucky to have read so many books and articles on psychology prior to my own NLP/Hypnotherapy training back then. But what happens to practitioners who have no psychology background and qualify after two weeks of training? How qualified are they to work on mental health? Would you go and see a surgeon who only had a few weeks training? Would you trust them with your health?

5 tips to better manage your time

How often do you find yourself complaining that you don’t have enough time? Or that you’re swamped with tasks you don’t manage to fit into the day?

In our busy lives it is essential to learn to manage our time properly to avoid procrastination and feeling overwhelmed. Here are a few simple tips that can help:

1. The alarm clock struggle: are you fighting every morning with your alarm clock, hitting the snooze button up to the last minute and then rushing to try to get to work in time? Do you end up being late to work or arriving there all sweaty and out of breathe ready for another shower?!

The first change that you need to make is to evaluate accurately how much time you need to get ready in the morning. Realistically. And from there set your alarm at the correct time. Now if you’re waking up style is to snooze a few times whilst you progressively wake up, simply evaluate how much time you need for your snooze routine and set your alarm clock accordingly. Meaning that if you need 15mn snoozing time and 1h to get ready, set your alarm clock 1.15mn before you’re due to leave the house.

However in reality, the snooze element ends up being a time trap as we are rarely awake enough at that time to consciously make the choice to stop snoozing and get up with enough time on our hands. And that’s how we end up rushing and spilling the coffee on that bright white shirt right before crossing the door step.

So I suggest dropping the snooze routine and put your alarm clock out of hand reach so when it rings, you actually have to get up to switch it off. If you’re still struggling, I would suggest placing it out of your bedroom door and set an unpleasant sound so it makes it more difficult to go back to bed after getting up to switch it off 🙂

2. Getting out of the house: so you’ve now succeeded to get up with enough time on your hand to get ready, have breakfast, listen to the news and get dressed, however you still end up rushing out of the door. Could you be distracted by your electronic devices? We tend to be oblivious to the amount of time we spend on our phones: how long do you think you spend on your smart phone per day? Would you be surprised to know that on average we spend more time on our phones than with our partners?

A lot of the time we plan time to get ready before leaving the house, but we don’t include the time we spent checking and replying to the texts or emails we’ve just received. That takes up time and contributes to take us off track and delay us even more.

I suggest to put your devices in your bag or coat pocket whilst you’re getting ready and only check it once you’re out of the house. You might be surprised on how easier it becomes to be on time!

3. The social media trap: once you’ve hopefully managed to get up on time and enjoy a relaxing beginning of the day, you may find yourself panicking at the sight of your ever growing to-do list. And decide to take a break by checking Facebook or Twitter “just for a minute” and before you know it, 2h have passed and you’re even more behind on your schedule. Social media can be very addictive and seriously hinder your productivity. However we all need some down time during the day to recharge our batteries.

In my daily schedule, I actually plan my social media time and internet surfing in my diary and stick to it as if it was an appointment. In my busiest day when I have to commute a lot for example, I choose to do the social media part or even my emails during my commuting time. Hence meeting both my need for entertainment and breaks from work and the one about using my time in the most productive way.

4. The diary secret: I hear a lot of people complaining they don’t have the time to go to the gym, read or go shopping or do something that is not purely work. If it is important enough for you, the best way to make sure you actually allow time for that activity is to schedule it in your diary as if it was a work appointment. I generally sort out my diary once a week and schedule everything in for that week to make sure I keep a good work-life balance and allocate myself some me-time. In this way when I am asked to do something extra that isn’t in my diary, it allows me to first check if that will take over my personal time and make a conscious decision about it.

Watch out however to be realistic in the planning and commuting, making sure you allow time to shift from one activity to the other. If you are scheduling 1h to the gym, make sure you take on board how long it will take you to get there, get changed etc. and include it in your diary.

5. The Giant to-do list: my current to do list has got 24 items and if I look at it my first instinct is to run away and go on Facebook instead 🙂 so I’ve decided to prioritise it and chunk it down. I choose what is urgent with a deadline that has to be dealt with today and that goes on the top of my list. Then further down is what is less urgent and doesn’t have a deadline. I then decide by when I want or need them to be sorted, look at my diary and assign a due date to them. I am using a very useful app called wunderlist that syncs with all my devices and reminds me when the task is due.

Now your turn! What do you do to optimise your time?

Russian Dolls

I was reading a blog this morning on NLP and they mentioned how a lot of practitioners don’t know what process or technique to use with their clients. Because they are focused on the processes rather than being focused on the person’s needs.

When I train my Person Centred NLP/Hypnotherapy course, I remind my students that I’m only teaching them those NLP processes so they can later on draw on them or even more importantly use only part of them to match the needs that their clients bring into the session.

This morning my client came in requesting my help to deal with her recent break up. She was still hanged onto the guy, felt angry with him and didn’t feel she could manage alone to move on. So I thought of doing a couple of grieving processes, such as the De-cording one (invented I believe by Connirae Andreas) as well as a lovely process I call The Cloud that involves identifying what the person got from the relationship and access those resources in a more direct way.

In the middle of the decording process, my client got stuck in her anger for her ex, and decided she needed to let go of that feeling before being able to move further. So I drew part of Dilts’s reimprinting process, giving her inner representation of her ex-boyfriend the resources he was missing in order to be able to symbolically handle the break up the way my client needed.

But as soon as that part was dealt with, she got in touch with the remnant of a limiting belief we’ve addressed last week, that she is not worthy of love. We had performed a lovely reimprinting process on that belief in our last session, got some amazing shifts, and she just needed to recall the new empowering words of her Dad that we had created during that process.

We then went back to the decording process and she felt she couldn’t fully let go of her ex. Because this time she needed the grieving Cloud process, even though I had planned to do it after the decording. So off we went into the Cloud, in order to finish the decording, using bits of reimprinting here and there.

I finished the session future pacing my client, and that’s when we realised she needed to do the re-cording bit of her decording process with the symbolic future man of her life. So we worked on her future timeline, linking her with her new potential partner whilst finishing the future pacing.

I felt I was playing with Russian dolls all along integrating one process in another, and my clients concluded the session feeling much better and able to let go of her past relationship. I don’t believe she would have been able to go there so quickly if I had only used a standard process the way I had been taught. It’s a little bit like juggling; you need different balls in order to make it work.

Let me know your thoughts on which processes you find useful to combine for the good of your clients!

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Cellular Healing

I was recently reading Deepak Chopra’s book Quantum healing that gives a lot of food for thoughts, especially regarding the cellular healing work I do combining integrative NLP and Hypnotherapy.

There’s an inner intelligence in our body, which makes it so structurally perfect. It’s that intelligence that knows when to produce the hormones and chemicals we need when we need them. Take the flight or fight response. How does the body know how to produce adrenaline and cortisol in the exact amount you need to respond optimally to a threat? When you’ve got a virus, how does your immune system know to send T-cells to identify and destroy the intruder, and furthermore to flag it to recognize it in case of future attacks to protect you better? When you look at the complexity of our bodies and yet the perfect mechanism that keeps it functioning, it is very hard to believe it’s all happening “by chance”, isn’t it? There must be an inner program that makes sure all of it runs like clock work. That’s what Chopra describes as our inner intelligence, and that’s what NLP calls the unconscious mind. When you look at the primes directives of the unconscious mind, you will find the one that reminds us that it is in charge of running and preserving the body.

Based on the study of our physiology Chopra explains that our body regenerates itself completely every year. Some other sources claim that happens every seven years. In any case, it means the cells our our ENTIRE body get totally renewed at the worst

every seven years. Structurally, it simply means we are not the same body we were a few years ago. Which raises an interesting question, if our body gets totally replaced at the cellular level, how do people manage to carry non genetic illnesses and diseases for a longer period of time? According to Chopra, less than 5% of cancers are genetic. So how does the body manages to re-create cancer cells that are not programmed in our DNA when those ones have been totally wiped off by chemotherapy?

Chopra introduces the idea of phantom memory. Physicists often talk about muscle memory, where the body learns and remember repetitive tasks we perform. Walking, riding, playing a musical instrument or driving are a very good example of it. Not only do you remember how to do this at the neurological level, but your body also remembers the movements associated with the task, in order to make it easier to perform next time.

However there seems to be another type of memory in our mind and body. A kind of immaterial memory that contains information that gets transmitted to our cells and triggers old physiological responses even when all the cells that used to be deficient have long disappeared. I’m talking about cancer type of illnesses, or even chemical addictions. Where does this memory come from? Our past, our experience, of course. But how does all this chemically alters our body? How does the mental message gets translated into a chemical reaction? There aren’t yet any satisfactory scientific explanation for that.

However I strongly believe that the unconscious mind plays a major role into this process. It is where memories are stored, and it is what controls our body. Therefore it must be the missing link between thoughts, emotions and physical reactions. So if the unconscious mind has got the power to change the chemical structure of our body, what would happen if we reprogrammed the messages the unconscious mind follows? what would happen if we could instruct the unconscious mind to heal the body instead of creating illnesses?

That’s where hypnotherapy and NLP, among other techniques, come in. They allow a direct communication and reprogramming of the unconscious mind, therefore opens up the possibility for cellular healing. I’ve done major work on chronic illnesses, and so-called incurable diseases and observed some very promising results; whether curing an allergy, recovering much quicker from the flu or even working with cancer, M.E or Crohn’s disease. And I’m hoping to continue my exploration of this fascinating field and keep pushing the limits of the possibilities of cellular healing .