Tag Archives: nlp

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 clockwork. 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 it happens every seven years. In any case, it means the cells of 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 manage 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.

5 steps to avoid being overwhelmed

The reason why you haven’t seen many of my blogs recently – and apologies for that – is because in the past few weeks I was working between France and England. In France, I was running seminars and coaching sessions for people suffering from chronic illnesses. Back in UK, I was working with my NLP/hypnotherapy clients, training my Person Centred NLP/H courses and performing music concerts at the weekend. I must say that I’m often asked “How do you cope with so many things to do?” And I’ve realized I’ve developed a strategy to avoid being overwhelmed.

To start with, I go back to the basics and make sure I sleep enough, I eat healthily and get enough exercise. I’ve used the NLP spatial anchoring technique to motivate myself to exercise, submodality change work and the Swish to alter my food taste in order to have more healthy ones. I also make appointments with myself in my diary to go swimming and meditate, as that gives my unconscious mind the message that I am, and my health is as important as the other areas of my life.

And finally I make my “to-do” lists. The first list I make is a monthly one. At the beginning of each month, I write down what my goals are for the next 30 days, whether is preparing my new NLP course, or the next Smart School exiting transformational future workshop, doing my tax return, reading that book I meant to read for ages, or writing my blog.

Then I chunk down this monthly list into a weekly one. For each task, looking at all the steps I need to take to complete the task. I schedule them in the week looking at my wall calendar, deciding realistically how long each task will take and when is the best time to do it during the week. I then write it down in my diary.

Finally I chunk that list down into daily tasks, reviewing it each night to fine tune it according to what is left to do. So I’m going to sleep having written down my to-do list for the following day, which takes it off my mind and allows me to go peacefully to sleep, avoiding insomnia based on the worry of so many things to do.

The following morning, after having had a healthy breakfast and meditated, I look at my to-do list and get ready to start work. Now, I don’t know about you, but I am brilliant at finding excuses to delay starting work. Social media, needing a break, having to check this important thing on internet, feeding the cat…so I’ve created a great way to avoid falling into this trap: I do the NLP perceptual positions on myself. The first position, is me being my own boss. That’s when I decide which tasks need to be accomplished and by when. The second position, that I take every morning, is me being the employee who’s been asked to perform a task. Because in reality, the main reason that prevents us to do what we are supposed to do, is because we give ourselves the choice, don’t we? So I simply step into the shoes of someone who doesn’t have the choice. An employee whose boss requested a task.

So here are a few tips to cope with being overwhelmed:

1. Write down every thing that needs to be done

2. Write down all the necessary steps for each task

3. Looking at your diary, decide when you can realistically start working on it making sure you stay balanced as much as possible

4. When working on one task, only focus in that one thing, knowing you’ve concretely planned already for the rest of it to be dealt with later. Meditation does help to stay focused in the here and now rather than worrying about what’s next to do.

5. Regularly take some deep breath to relax your body and oxygenate your brain making sure your keeping your concentration levels at their peak.

Hope that helps! Please let me know your strategies to handle too many things to do by dropping a comment below!

 

When the NLP fast phobia cure doesn’t work

Richard Bandler put together his fast phobia cure a few years ago and supposedly in 10 minutes manages to free people from their phobia. In my experience however – and the one of a few of my NLP colleagues, it’s rarely that straight forward.

The brain learns and change very quickly, therefore it’s indeed essential to do some processes in a high-speed as it’s the key to destabilize old running patterns. A lot of clients get rid of their phobia with a basic NLP approach, however sometimes a client might need a few different processes to completely overcome the complexity of their phobia.

Today I saw a client with a spider phobia, and on our first session I mentioned I had a plastic spider in my bag. She panicked and was on the verge of tears at the thought of it. Considering the extent of her phobia, I chose to do first a part integration process in order to address her secondary gain – protection – that appeared to be very strong. If you don’t address the secondary gain before doing the phobia cure, it’s likely not going to work or last.

After the first session, she felt more comfortable but still was quite terrified. On the second session, when I mentioned getting my plastic spider out of my bag, her unconscious communication clearly signalled that she wasn’t ready for it. So I did the phobia cure on her – the normal version, not the fast one, and at the end of it she felt better but I could tell she wasn’t totally sorted.

So I saw her today for the third time. She had managed to stay in the same room as a spider during the past week and her reactions were much less dramatic. So we looked into her unconscious strategy to create the phobia and more specifically her internal visual representation of a spider. And as I suspected, it was completely distorted and exaggerated. The spider was oversized, very close up and out of context, i.e there wasn’t any background in the picture. So we installed a new strategy based on the one she unconsciously uses with insects she’s fine being around, whilst using anchoring and pattern breaking. At the end of the session, she asked for my plastic spider and spent 20mn playing around with it!

Every client is different, all patterns are different, and processes are only crutches to help you help your clients. And the key – and the principle behind NLP – is to first understand the structure of your client’s internal patterns before knowing how to start changing them.

 

Feeling safe

When I trained to be an NLP practitioner, I’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for clients wanting to be safe, secure or protected; those outcomes are ill-formed in the sense that they unconsciously trigger the question “safe/secure/protected from what?” therefore drive the client to access the very negative thing they’re actually trying to run away from. I think that’s a very important point when you’re gathering information during your case history.

 

So for many years when I was doing a part integration or a core transformation process, when my client came up with those outcomes in the positive intention chain, I made sure I moved them towards a more positive outcome.

 

Until Jane came into my practice. Jane’s history is one of physical and sexual abuse in her childhood, and she had been understandably deeply affected by that all her life. I spent a few months working with her until we could even begin addressing the abuse issues, and one day we were doing a core transformation process and during the elicitation of the intention chain, Jane kept looping between safety, security and protection. I didn’t manage to bring her to a higher level and that’s when it hit me.

 

For survivors of abuse, actually, safety is one of the key outcome. Because as a child, safety is one of the first fundamental need, and when you’re a victim of that kind of trauma,  it’s taken away from you. And no matter if it’s an ill-formed outcome for some NLP practitioner, I’ve learnt with Jane that even before you can aim for higher or more positive core state, you need to help your clients to fulfil this essential need that wasn’t met as a child.

 

This realisation helped me to change my approach. I still agree that safety, security and protection are what some people call sometimes “away-from” and I do challenge them in my coaching sessions or whilst eliciting the well-formed outcomes.

 

However it’s a completely different matter when addressing trauma and abuse, and I do stress the importance once again in focusing on your client needs when appropriate, over following some rules you’ve learnt during your training. As sometimes, like in my experience, you could miss out on the key element that could make all the difference.

 

So when working on those issues now, I tend to first start with fulfilling those unmet needs with some re-parenting using a transactional analysis approach for example, and a lot of timeline work or rewriting the past before moving my client to higher outcomes using some more traditional NLP and Hypnotherapy techniques. I found that it is much more effective in creating deeper and significant changes. Have you had similar experiences? let me know your thoughts!

 

Quick fix or temporary fix?

One of the common theme I find when looking at the NLP world is the quick fix approach. I was reading today a blog by one of the most respected NLP pioneer, Steve Andreas, on resolving hate and anger. And his first case study got me thinking, once again, about the danger of the quick fix NLP approach.

Through changing submodalities, Steve Andreas helps his client to change the unwanted submodalities of the angry image and voice to the most resourceful ones. And get a pretty good result in a very short period of time. However, when he checks on his client a few weeks later, Fred reports that he hasn’t been able to maintain the changes in relation to his father. And Andreas to conclude that sometimes the sessions reveals “some other aspects of the problem that need to be addressed.” I totally agree with that conclusion.

The problem being that a lot of the time, clients won’t get back to you if the process hasn’t worked, or won’t have the courage to admit it didn’t work if you’re thorough in your following up with them. And most practitioners anyway don’t follow up on their clients. So they’re left believing they did a wonderful job with their clients during the session when actually, they only witnessed a temporary shift.

In the person centred approach and in my own practice, I insist in taking the time to get to know my clients well, to build rapport, to take quite a deep and profound case history before even moving on to the processes. Not only do I do this to gather more information, but also to get a sense of who my client is. To learn to read their non verbal communication. To build the trust, so that if the processes don’t work on them, they’ll feel confident enough to let me know so we can improve their situations.

In addition, there’s something else that I feel is worth reflecting on. I know that NLP is a solution-focused approach and not a problem-focused approach like other traditional therapies. However, when someone comes in with deep anger issues, and in the pure NLP style you only focus on changing this anger with submodalities or parts integration, you might miss out on the core of the problem.

I believe feelings are here for a reason. I believe they’re here to tell us about boundaries violation or unmet needs, for example in the case of anger. And wanting to cure the anger too quickly might prevent you to work on the real issues, which would be deeply rooted in the past. And in my experience, at the end of the day, you’ll eventually have to come to work on those roots otherwise the changes won’t last anyway.

So rather than running away from the root causes and quickly move on to finding solution, why not actually taking the time to learn about what happened? Not in too much details, of course, as we don’t want to reactivate the neuro-pathways linked to the problem. But enough so we can work directly on the core issues and by doing so perhaps sorting out the issues quicker than spending weeks trying to work on changing the behaviour rather than healing the wounds…

Which means that instead of only working with submodalities, you might need to explore deeper processes, like reimprinting, core transformation or time line therapy. Whilst combining if needed Gestalt chair work with re-parenting the inner child using a TA approach. And that’s the bit of therapy I’m so interested about. All those brilliant processes you can integrate to the existing NLP approach to go into the depth of the human complexity, into deep root causes and start to help create amazing lasting changes.

5 tips to boost your self-esteem

Having explored the difference between confidence and arrogance in my previous post, and hopefully having helped you to accept the idea that’s is ok to become more confident, let’s look today into how you can increase your self-esteem and self-confidence.

1. Make a list of your qualities and achievements. For example, writing down that you are kind, funny or creative. And recognising achievements such as graduating from school or passing your driving test. Even though those qualities and achievements might seem to you as trivial, they still represent what you are good at. No matter if they are common skills or attributes. When you look at your flaws, you probably don’t dismiss them because others have it too; do you?! So why would you do that for your qualities?!

2. Ask people you love and trust to give you a list of the qualities they think you have. You might be surprised on how much more positively people who love you see you than you see yourself…

3. Look into the negative beliefs you have about yourself, such as “I’m not good enough”, “I’m not loveable”, “I don’t deserve being (successful, happy etc…)”. Where do those beliefs come from? What negative messages have you received as a child and from whom? Start to look for counter evidences for those beliefs in your everyday life, such as for example what you’ve already achieved that show you are indeed good enough. Or how many people love you that prove that you are indeed loveable…

4. Take one of this limiting beliefs and ask yourself: what would it take for this belief to be false? For example, taking the belief “I’m not loveable”. What would it take for anyone to be loveable according to your criteria? How can you then relate this to yourself?

5. Finally if those beliefs are deeply engrained, ask an NLP master practitioner to help you sorting them out. There are many brilliant processes that can help you re-program your mind to get some more positive and useful beliefs.

I hope that helps, looking forward to reading your feedbacks!

Confidence vs. Arrogance

One of the most common issues people bring in therapy is lack of confidence. Whether it’s confidence in themselves or confidence in doing something. And that is generally closely linked with a lack of self-esteem.

What’s the difference between self-esteem and self- confidence? My interpretation of it is that self-esteem is the ability to recognise one’s qualities, and self confidence is the ability to recognise one’s skills and abilities in doing something.

I often encourage my clients to first work on their self-esteem as I see it as the door to having more confidence. When I ask my clients how confident they feel on a scale 0 to 10, at first they rarely reach further than a 6 or 7 at the best. And when we explore what stops them from being confident up to a 9 or a 10, one of the first answer I get is “If I’m too confident I’m scared of becoming arrogant.” sounds familiar?

Therefore it’s quite important to explore the differences between arrogance and confidence. How would you describe the difference?

After having asked that question to many clients and to my NLP course students over the years, I noticed that the difference can be summed up in a simple statement: Being arrogant is stating your strength and qualities whilst putting down the interlocutor, whilst being confident is simply acknowledging your strength and qualities. Hence the main difference between being arrogant and confident is the intention behind the statement you make.

In my next post I’ll share some tips on how to boost your self-esteem and your self-confidence, but in the mean time, I’m interested to hear your thoughts on that topic; Do you have another way to explain the difference between the two? I’m looking forward to engage in a fascinating discussion with you, so please drop me a line in the comment section!

It’s not you, it’s me

My client this morning brought an interesting dilemma. He was at work last week and one of his customer asked his opinion on other traders in the field. Having a nice rapport already with that regular customer, my client allowed himself to share his thoughts on that subject, which actually weren’t very positive…

On his way home, he got a bit worried, wondering if he had done the right thing in being so honest on that topic with a customer. He asked his girlfriend her opinion and she got very wound up and angry with him, criticising the fact that “he always talks too much”. My client was puzzled as her reaction seemed overly strong and felt very guilty about it all. He immediately asked me to schedule an appointment.

When John went into details about the story, it seemed he couldn’t find any controversy in what he had shared with his customer, as he was very careful in not mentioning any names and only giving a general opinion. Through some coaching, we quickly realised that John didn’t think there was an issue in him talking too much actually, he had simply adopted his girlfriend’s beliefs that he did something wrong.

Digging deeper it appeared that a few months ago, John had shared with his best friend that his girlfriend had previously suffered from depression. Justine got very upset as she understandably felt quite protective of this aspect of her life ; she probably felt betrayed in being exposed to a third party without her permission. And since that incident, she had been very sensitive every time John was openly sharing some information.

That was quite a breakthrough for John as he actually realised that her criticism had actually not much to do with him, but simply was showing the fact that his girlfriend had some issues – that can be very legitimate – around her depression and him sharing some private information. It is therefore important to recognise the difference between what others believe are right or wrong and what we stand for.

I’ve read a wonderful quote recently that sums up very well the dynamic of this pattern: “When people predict your doom, undermine your dreams or criticise you, remember they’re telling you their stories, not yours.”

We all have a different model of the world and our reactions to external events are bound to be influenced by our subjective perceptions. Our beliefs and values, our past experience and much more will shape how we interpret events and how we respond to them. So most of the time our reactions are merely the mirror of what’s going on in our internal experience rather than a detached response to what’s presented to us.

But too often we mistake the map for the reality and try to impose our beliefs on others by criticising them when they don’t behave according to our standards. Sometimes we may simply forget that they follow their values which are simply different from ours, but as valid…

Have you ever been in such a situation? I’m interested to hear your thoughts!

 

Do you want to play the Unconscious mind game?

There’s a challenge I’ve been facing quite often when working with the unconscious mind using NLP and hypnotherapy. As I mentioned before, I use hypnosis as a door to the unconscious mind, because I’ve found that engaging that part of our mind in making changes is much more effective than just working at the conscious level.

Coming back to the 81 years old client I was telling you about last time, I learnt something very important whilst working with her recently. One of the very powerful processes of NLP-hypnosis is the Part integration process. It addresses the unconscious mind to find the positive intention behind an unwanted behaviour and helps to solve the internal conflict the person is experiencing, between the part of them that’s creating the unwanted behaviour, and the part of them that doesn’t want to have this behaviour any more.

Unlike some NLP practitioners, I like to perform this process under trance, as it allows a deeper connection with the unconscious mind thus deeper changes. So the first time I applied this process with my client, I faced an issue that is quite common. Instead of allowing her unconscious mind to communicate with me, she was only giving me conscious responses. Which can undermine the success of the treatment as we’re not treating the issue at its source. I applied my usual tricks but nothing seemed to work. It can be helpful to get conscious replies, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem, especially when like in this case, the issue is deeply rooted in the unconscious mind.

As a result, my client improved, but either the changes didn’t last nor were they significant. At first, I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong, but quickly I realized that being from an older generation and a different culture she didn’t really grasp the concept of the unconscious mind. I then decided to use some more “rational” processes such as submodalities shift or changing her strategies and we then got some brilliant results. However there was always a little part of her that she couldn’t control and that would escape from the brilliant set of NLP tools I was using.

I then asked myself “how can I get her to get familiar with unconscious verbal communication”? It’s quite a tricky one as it is, in essence, unconscious…So I made her do this funny exercise inspired from a game I saw in a famous TV series…I asked her simple questions and she had to answer with the first thing that came to her mind. That way she got familiar with how it feels to let the unconscious mind speak first and since then we’ve managed to do some deep part and core transformation processes!!

Moral of the story? never underestimate the resources of TV series… ;-)

Motion sickness

A lady came to see me back a couple of years ago as she was suffering from travel sickness whenever she was in a car or a bus. We explored in details where this issue came from and it appeared that when she was a teenager, she got in a car accident with her boyfriend, who was a very unsafe driver. Since then she had started developing those uncomfortable reactions when being in a vehicle.

When taking her history, it seemed that we needed to work in depth with this part of her that was obviously generating those unpleasant reactions so I chose a part integration process.

Starting from the NLP presupposition that behind every behaviour there’s a positive intention, whilst in trance I facilitated my client understanding that she created this part a long time ago in a situation in which she needed some help from her unconscious mind. When asking that part how old it was when it was created, unsurprisingly the number 19 came up and related to the car accident we had previously elicited.

It turned out that the positive intention of this part was to protect my client from getting in physical danger, and as it was quite an emotional trauma her unconscious mind created this reaction simply to protect her from getting hurt.

The problem seemed to be that this part got stuck into this protection mechanism, and twenty odd years later didn’t serve its purpose any longer; instead of protecting my client, it was impairing her life now that she had to drive to work everyday. So we worked on actualizing this part and integrated it with the other part of her that wanted to be comfortable in the car, whilst calibrating the submodalities of each part as we moved along in the process.

My client reported happily a few days after that the symptoms had completely disappeared, but was also amazed that the ear infection that she had been having for the past few months also cleared up… That shows how the mind and the body are connected, and how surprisingly some symptoms that seem unrelated stem from the same source as other patterns.

This lady came back to see me few months later for some help with fertility issues, and confirmed happily that no longer suffered from those debilitating symptoms. And she felt pregnant after our second treatment, but I’ll tell you about that in another post!

 

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 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 let go fully 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!

7 ways to better communicate in relationships

As I was telling you in my previous post, personal journeys can affect relationships. I have witnessed a lot of people embarking on a deep meaningful path and soon after breaking up with their partner. Fortunately, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way, and NLP provides some great tools to improve your relationships.

Here are a few tips that can be useful for a better communication:

  1. When talking about the issues with her husband, the client I was telling you about in my previous post was complaining that he never asked how our sessions went. She said “I know he doesn’t ask how my session went because he doesn’t care”. Her husband actually never stated those words, and she simply projected her deepest fears onto him. I challenged her by asking if she thought it was possible that there was at least one other explanation to why he wouldn’t ask. And of course, she realised that he might simply want to give her privacy; or that he was forgetful; or he was scared to ask in case she wasn’t care on sharing… You get the picture :-) Mind reading can be deceitful and lead to conflicts. When you hear yourself talking in this way, make sure you’ve got hard evidences to support your statement. Or more likely, start to wonder what other explanation there could be for their behaviour… Continue reading →

Relationships change

One of my clients this week came into my practice and brought up an interesting issue. We have been working during the last few sessions on her self-confidence and self-esteem and as a result of that, she was pleased to notice that she manages to be much more herself in public. She is more assertive, lets others know of her opinions and takes the risk to disagree with her close ones.

However, she’s struggling in her marriage. One of the patterns I’ve often observed in people suffering from low self-esteem and codependency is what is called being a people-pleaser. That means that they tend to do what they believe others expect them to do, to gain their approval and their love, rather than focusing on what is best for themselves.

What is often seen in the early days of relationships is the emergence of a dynamic: that’s the way people relate to each other, or in TA terms, “the game they play”. The longest the relationship lasts, the strongest those patterns get engrained, and it becomes then very difficult to change them. Continue reading →

5 ways to make better decisions

Do you find it sometimes difficult to make decisions? Have you ever been thinking that on one hand you would like to do something…but on another hand, there might be a better option?

Today one of my clients looked very stressed when he arrived at our session; He was buying a flat and had to choose between two possible options. Lots of money was involved and naturally he found it very difficult to make the right decision.

My first step in those situations is to find out what stops people from making a decision; to elicit some limiting beliefs or potential deep engrained patterns. And most of the time, as it was the case with this client, the reason they struggle is the fear of making a mistake and having to face the consequences.

So here are a few tips I use to help myself and my clients in those situations:

  1. Pros and Cons: The traditional approach of making two columns for each choice you’re contemplating: one for the pros and one for the cons. Writing it down might already help you getting some clarity about why you’re hesitating.
  2.  An opportunity to learn: Rather than worrying about making a mistake before and then worrying about having made a mistake after, you could choose a different approach: You could remember that mistakes are inevitably parts of our lives and also represent an opportunity to grow and learn. Perhaps the choice you’re about to make will turn out not to be the best one in the long run. But in the meantime and whilst you don’t know fully the outcome just yet, you will have learnt some valuable information that will allow you to make more informed choices in the future.
  3. Future pace: Sit comfortably and close your eyes. Take yourself into the future, having chosen your first option. What does that look like? How does it feel to have made this choice? What opportunities did that bring in your life? Now, come back to the present and do the same with your second option. Which one do you feel more comfortable with?
  4. Descartes quadrant: Being French and having studied mathematics, I can’t help using the wonderful NLP tool that Descartes quadrant is :-) It looks like this:

• In the first quadrant, ask yourself: what happens if I do it?
• In the second quadrant, ask: what doesn’t happen if I do it?
• In the third quadrant, ask: what happens if I don’t do it?
• In the fourth one, ask: what doesn’t happen if I don’t do it?

For example my client answered the following whilst contemplating buying the flat on the top floor:

• What happens if I do it? I get a wonderful view
• What doesn’t happen if I do it? I can’t save money as this one is more expensive than the other one
• What happens if I don’t do it? I have money to buy a car
• What doesn’t happen if I don’t do it? I’m not going to be able to have barbecues on the roof

And according to his hierarchy of criteria and values, he managed to decide what was the most important for him and make his choice congruently. Even though the process is simple, I’ve found that whilst writing down the answers people tend to get a strong sense of what they actually really want to do.

5. And finally, listen to your gut instinct Most of the time there’s a feeling deep down that guides you towards the right decision. Locate this feeling in your body, where do you feel it the most? What texture is it? What image or colour is associated with it? In which direction does it move? It can be very useful to learn to recognise it for the future to help you know what’s right for you. I must say I make almost all my decisions based on my gut instinct!

I hope this is useful, and feel free to drop me a comment with your thoughts and ideas on that topic!

I don’t want to see you anymore: I’m happy

I’m very pleased to say that this morning I saw one of my client for the last time. The reason being that this person first came to see me a few months ago because he was suffering from depression. We looked in depth of what was going on for him and discovered that his past was haunting him, leaving tracks of very limiting self-beliefs, low self-esteem and poor self- worth.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I started working with him asking what was depressing him, to pinpoint his issues concretely and find the right path of action. I also taught him how our language can have a strong impact on our inner world. For example, how saying “I don’t want to be depressed” can be detrimental. The unconscious mind doesn’t process negatives, so if I tell you “Don’t think of an apple” what did you just think about?! So when you keep saying “I don’t want to be depressed” your unconscious mind keeps hearing “I want to be depressed“. Scary, hey?!

As I talked about previously, our neuro-pathways are deeply engrained and depending on how we use them, they get reinforced or weakened. When you express what you want by actually stating what you don’t want, you’re actually involuntarily reinforcing what you’re trying to get away from. Continue reading →

What is depressing you?

One of my first step when working with depression is often reframing the issue and challenging the nominalization.

What is a nominalization? it’s a term developed by the creators of NLP, Bandler and Grinder that describes how an action has been transformed into a noun. Such as the action of failing, that became the noun “failure”. The ultimate way to figure this out is to use the wheel barrow test: If you can’t put it in a wheelbarrow it’s a nominalization!

What’s the point in spotting nominalizations? When you transform an action into a noun, it gives it permanence and a solid existence independently of you. And when you say “I’m a failure” It defines your identity rather than your behaviour (I failed at something). An action on another hand completely depends on you, as you’re the person performing it, therefore you’re the one who has got control over it. Continue reading →