Archive for the 'Anxiety and Stress' Category

Make yourself uncomfortable with NLP

Published in Anxiety and Stress, Conscious Leadership Training and NLP. 0 Comments Tags: communication, emotional intelligence, NLP.

Eleven day Training Intensive

Condoning or Condemning?

Keeping things simple can be a comfort. But sometimes comfort does nothing to move you forward. It doesn’t challenge you, or help you to learn new perspectives, and create new possibilities for yourself.

I am talking about the assessments we make of others.

You ask yourself, “Do I agree with you? Do I accept you? Am I safe around you?”

If you conclude, “I disagree. I don’t trust you.” You might also inadvertently add “I don’t understand you,” “I don’t like you,” or even “Because your belief system and values are different from my own there may be something wrong with you.”

Sometimes the most interesting thing can be to spend time with someone who is completely different from you. It may challenge you. It may be uncomfortable and edgy. But it may teach you something new about yourself and your own presuppositions and assumptions.

If you always need others to agree with, it may be because you lack confidence in your own perspectives; or it maybe that you’re just taking yourself too seriously.

If you have only two options:

Agreeing, condoning, liking, approving, trusting, or
Disagreeing, condemning, disliking, disapproving, mistrusting.

then you may be missing a range of other possibilities:

challenging your assumptions and strategies
refining your communication skills
deepening your empathy
getting over yourself
having more fun
learning to be more flexible
deepening your perspectives

In the world of NLP it is axiomatic that to help other effect genuine change it’s essential to respect their model of reality. Otherwise, how do you imagine you can genuinely communicate with them, let alone influencing them? Beyond that, it’s also to your benefit to do so.

Respecting others’ model of reality doesn’t mean condoning that model; but it does save you the aggravation of having to oppose it, condemn it, or persuade them they are wrong.

What sort of anxiety would lead you to spend all your time only with those who agree with you anyway?

Stretch a little. Spend a little time with people who make you uncomfortable and notice some of your patterns which, once noticed, you can change – if you choose.

You don’t need to know anything about Neurolinguistics, or NLP, to do this. It may just be an expression of you own evolving emotional intelligence.

Eleven day NLP and Hypnosis Training Intensive at Manzanita Village

Published on February 11, 2010

Anxiety and Stress

Published in Anxiety and Stress and NLP. 0 Comments Tags: anxiety, caitriona, Hypnosis, los angeles, NLP, solutions, stress.

I live in Los Angeles. I used to experience anxiety of one sort or another much of the time. It felt like a part of who I was. As I look back it seems strange. Most of my anxiety was about things that never happened, worst case scenarios, projections of my own insecurity and paranoia. I owe this change in my mindset to hypnosis, and all that I learned about the power of my imagination in a series of hypnotherapy sessions I did with Caitriona last year. M.E.E.

Anxiety is a misuse of your time. It’s something that comes about through choices you made about where you should focus your attention.

The Dark Clouds of Anxiety

This might be hard to accept when you’re in the middle of an anxiety attack, or when you’ve been officially diagnosed with anxiety disorder, or when your anxiety is complicated by depression.

Even so, anxiety comes about because of how you have learned to focus your attention, and how you choose to give certain meaning and weight to particular experience. This may indeed sound harsh if you have been trying in vain to find an effective treatment for anxiety, or have been given the run around by health-care professionals who are better at prescribing medications for anxiety than at helping you find lasting solutions.

But what you once learned you can unlearn. For example, although you may have learned long ago to process similar experiences in the same old ways, with the same old emotions — in this case stress and anxiety, how would it be if you learned new associations; so that when the pressure was on, instead of anxiety, you felt calm, focused, determined, and excited?

It is possible to learn to do this; and it’s easier than you think

The best solutions are often the simplest. Rather than complicated diagnoses and a lifetime of being condemned to live under a cloud called anxiety. This doesn’t mean you don’t have to a little bit of work to do.

But that work involves simply applying the mind-skills and mindset you will learn through hypnosis and NLP. Much of that learning is through the power of your unconscious mind. So it’s about as hard as learning to ride a bicycle. After a day or two you may wobble from time to time. Within a week you’ll be amazed, delighted, and thrilled that what once seemed almost impossible has become a natural skill.

Published on November 28, 2009

Anxiety, Stress, and Hypnosis

Published in Anxiety and Stress. 0 Comments Tags: anxiety disorder, Hypnosis, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, social anxiety.

Anxiety has taken on epidemic proportions and supports the thriving pharmaceutical industry. It has become a central theme in the work of many mental health care professionals. Chronic anxiety is more than a mental health issue, it is also potential killer.

Anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, social anxiety – are all variations on a theme.

Anxiety occurs as a natural response to an unfamiliar or potentially dangerous situation. As human beings we are wired to experience some degree of tension in extreme situations. Anxiety disorders come about when that natural response becomes habitual and chronic. Hypnosis will help you learn new patterns of response, easily and quickly.

In fact, relaxation is one of the first things that people think of when they think of hypnosis, and in the presence of relaxation (as opposed to temporary sedation) anxiety fades away.

Using skills to develop mindfulness, focus in everyday situations so that you can recognize cues that would otherwise cause stress, and learn to trigger your own hypnotic response, is even more valuable.

Hypnosis is not intended to be a substitute for drugs prescribed for anxiety by a physician. With the collaboration of their physician I have helped many clients in my Los Angeles hypnotherapy practice to reduce and then to eliminate completely medications they had been using for anxiety disorders of different kinds.

Published on November 22, 2009

Stress, anxiety, anger, and depression

Published in Anxiety and Stress. 2 Comments Tags: anxiety, change emotion, Depression, NLP, personal change, state of mind, stress.

Ribbonwood

Stress, anxiety, and depression are the order of the day for many. I always make a point of checking my own state of mind. Denial is not an option (it never was) nor is anxiety, despair, anger, or fear. These are not places to live. They are emergency emotions. If you spend any significant time in any of them I have to ask you to consider how you manage to do so? I mean, doesn’t it take an awful lot of energy!?

The fact is, such emotions don’t leave you in a state to be very creative or resourceful!

Of course, people do live in negative states, especially with all the current talk about the economy, not to mention the environment … as though we’ve collectively woken up to the fact we have a global environmental emergency on our hands. H-E-L-L-O … where have we been for the last several decades?

And people do live in negative emotional states like anxiety and helplessness because they’ve learned to do so.

Are they real? Of course. It’s always real. But whose reality does it represent? Where did you learn to be in that state and who or what has been reinforcing the idea that it’s a useful thing to be stresses out, bummed out, freaked out?

My point … and the reason I’m even writing this is that you have a whole lot more options than you may have imagined and it begins with your own ability to manage you own internal states, to change the words and pictures in you own mind. Because you can do that you know. It’s a whole lot easier than you think too!
http://www.manzanitavillage.org/retreats/nlp/

Published on March 17, 2009