People Building

At People Building we teach NLP to those is leadership and management positions and work with teams to improve sales skills. We also offer Neuro-linguistic programming training online and offer courses that answer the question: “Does hypnosis work?”

Facebook banter reliably provides me with article based material and this month was no exception!

This month, I discovered that sometimes, people use self development to shrink their world instead of to grow it. Which I personally feel is completely the opposite point of developing one’s self.

It makes me shudder to think that as a result of finding peace within one’s mind, they would only from that point onwards allow themselves the privilege of only experiencing happiness or the typically perceived positive emotions.

And who decided which emotions were positive or not anyway? I thought they were context dependent?!

It’s a bit like having someone else dictate which jokes are funny, or which music is really good music. Of course there might be a general consensus but it will always be part of individual preference too.  As it should be!

So this month, I had a rotten old chest infection and posted on Facebook that I felt so ill I wanted to cut off my own head. Obviously I do not have a genuine desire to cut off my own head, and as a friend pointed out, the trouble in doing so is I could only ever get halfway through doing the job.

One person however responded drawing my attention to my apparent self hated which (it was implied) should not be the case for a motivational speaker.

I’ve had stuff like this said to me before. And I think it’s loony. It’s crazy to think that from this sentence:

“I feel so ill I want to cut off my own head.”

the following assumptions were made:

1. I hate myself
2. Motivational speakers shouldn’t hate themselves
3. There is a correlation between my ability to motivate others, feeling ill and removing my own head. (Ok this one might be accurate).

My response was disagreeable to the assumptions for the following reasons:

1. I don’t hate myself and never said I did.
2. I felt unwell but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have a sense of humour. It was a joke that I should cut my head off.

I definitely do not subscribe to the idea that I should only ever experience “positive” emotions in order to be a speaker. In fact I’ve made a commitment to let myself experience the vast spectrum of human emotions whilst I’m on this planet and that includes being ok about the fact sometimes I’m grumpy, grieving or ill. And I can do that illness knowing full well that tomorrow I’ll be a bit better and a bit happier and I’ll appreciate it all the more when I do.

I think that feeling obliged to always be happy in difficult situations is actually like putting on a happy mask. It’s just a mask and inside the feelings are still the same. I’d rather be honest with myself and the outside world and say “It looks like this inside today!”

Of course there is great value in noticing the silver lining on the clouds and taking goodness from bad situations. It’s helpful to help yourself feel better when you feel less than great but there’s nothing wrong in feeling bad. You have every right to stay there for as long as you like!

In my work, I tell clients not to disregard bad feeling, not to ignore them or act happy when they are clearly not. Instead I say it’s about reducing time energy and frequency of negative emotions.

• Reduce the amount of time that you spend feeling bad so that you do not live there as long.
• Reduce the energy you put into feeling bad, so it’s not as bad as it used to be.
• Reduce the frequency you return to bad feelings so that you only go back there on “special” occasions and not for any old reason.

Since I’m allowed to enjoy the contrast of being ok and not ok and am probably a better and more authentic speaker because of it.

Click here to download as a free PDF.

By Gemma Bailey
www.GemmaBailey.co.uk

Gemma Bailey is the director of People Building, an NLP and hypnotherapy training company offering free NLP resources such as free NLP PDF’s, NLP podcasts and hypnotherapy courses that answer the question: “Does hypnosis work?!” We also provide corporate NLP training for those in leadership and management teams and NLP in business courses to increase sales skills for those who wish to improve communication and conversation techniques.

Call 0203 6677294 or email info@PeopleBuilding.co.uk or find out more at www.PeopleBuilding.co.uk