A head funk, it’s not like being sad as I can deal with sad. A head funk is more like moody anger but there’s some frustration in it and it’s almost like I don’t care about anything. That’s what a head funk is to me. I knew it was especially about today because when I woke up this morning and I did the body scan like are we still here, is everything in working order and when that happened I realized I’m in a funk and then I was like okay we should get up and do some exercise and then the response to that was no just no, go back to sleep and I did, I went back to sleep for a while so it could have been that I was tired but I’m not going to excuse this because the fact is, is that even after the little bit of extra sleep that I had I woke up and the funk was still there. And it was bad now here are the dangerous things for me on a personal level when I am in that kind of headspace it may mean that I do not make as much effort in all of the things that I should be doing that day. For example, looking fairly decent because I’m going to be filming that day or talking to the people I need to talk to that day or doing the things off my to-do list that need doing. That way it’s almost like if I’m not careful, it will actually get in the way of me taking those sorts of positive actions and the bottom line is is that those things needed doing so the heavy funk needed to go so I want to share with you today how it was that I shifted it.
Now I can’t guarantee that these are actual you know solid NLP techniques because as we know my NLP techniques are not necessarily solid! I’ll be sharing some of this with you today and I hope that you get some borrowing benefits from the source of things that I did to shift my head funk. So that in the future, if you have a head funk too or indeed you are stuck in a trunk you can employ these strategies to be able to get yourself out of it. Let me do a little recap on my day and I will tell you bit by bit what I did and what helped and then what things seriously shifted it afterwards. So the very first thing that I think started to make a difference to the head funk was not letting myself get away with taking shortcuts this morning, it would have been very easy to go screw making the bed it doesn’t matter what I look like today and I can eat whatever I’d like for breakfast. I actually still held myself accountable for hitting some reasonably high standards and although I didn’t appreciate that at the time I think it made a difference and it did help.
The second thing was that I got a bit more realistic with my time frames today than I might ordinarily do and I did that partly because I didn’t want to rush myself. What I wanted to avoid doing was creating an unachievable goal, so I’d worked very late last night and I knew that getting to the office for nine o’clock was probably going to be a stretch so instead in my mind, I said half-past ten because that kind of made up for the hours the extra hours I had done yesterday so it felt justified and also it just meant then that half-past ten was doable. When I did it I was really happy. So I didn’t set myself a goal that was deliberately unachievable and was just going to annoy me when I wasn’t able to achieve it. Another thing that I think was important today was I stopped thinking about myself and did a little bit of self-evaluation and self talk around what’s causing you to feel this way what would have to happen for you to feel differently. (I do all of this stuff that I would do with my clients inside my own head / so that things were running but it wasn’t shifting it). This was actually getting quite annoying so instead, I stopped being in my head and I started getting interested in some campaigns and things they were talking about on the radio this morning and tying that in with some of the work that I’m doing here with superheroes, Nlp4kids and people building, so that then I could start getting creative in my head and whenever I get into a bit more of a creative mode and I start getting excited, that’s always for me a really good way of shifting a feeling of nonchalance or just you know outright aggravation that I have at the world at that point in time because it makes me feel like I have the power to be able to make a difference and even if at that moment in time I can’t make a difference to my own life personally, if I feel like I can make a difference to somebody else’s that tends to kind of perk me up and lift me up in the right direction. That I think was probably one of the key things that happen this morning that got me to turn my mood around and to get myself back into a good working headspace.
Another important thing that happened today was I did something that, let’s say that this point here is the moment of now and then stretched out to the left of me is the future and stretched out to the right of me is the past so imagine if you are listening in the audio format of this podcast today and you cannot see what I’m doing with my arms right now they’re on my right-hand side is the past where I’m standing is for now and on my left is the future. So I’ve got a line representing time here in front of me, something that I did today that I think was shifting the funk is that I took some hope. I had an idea that filled me with hope and I planted it into the future, what that did for me is it made me feel that the future is somewhere worth going to. It made me feel as if I want to be in that place and it gave me a sense of wanting to move up and out and forward toward what it is that the future has to offer me. So going back and identifying what caused the funk, I think it was a lack of hope, somewhere between yesterday and this morning. I got into a sense of frustration at a computer program called Adobe Illustrator which I’m learning at the moment, I got frustrated with that. I’m doing some stuff around graphic design at the moment and I also was uncertain of a plan for raising money and my not-for-profit company and I think those two things combined yesterday made me feel a little down. Because they were the two things I was focused on the most yesterday they felt quite all-encompassing I kind of forgot to notice all of the other great things that I have as opportunities for myself in life because those two things were my focus yesterday and both of those things felt a little ugh, because of that I lost a sense of hope that I would ordinarily feel in doing those sorts of projects because I lost the sense of hope I woke up this morning and I was in a head funk.
How did I get my head funk gone via those different roots that I have just shared with you like: still making an effort getting out of my head, installing hope into my future and generally just making sure I took care of myself and didn’t let myself slip any further down the slippery slope that I’d perhaps already gone down. I am sharing this with you because I hope that some of what I have just said for you may be useful or important for you in the future if you experience a head funk, but also because I want you to know that when you’re work in mental health. It doesn’t mean that you don’t still have challenges with mental health it’s a bit like saying because you’re a doctor you should never catch a cold, that’s not how it works, so if you are someone who is a practitioner like me and you at times feel anxious or stressed or depressed, don’t think that you are not employing your skills effectively. You are just suffering from life that’s just what happens. Being good at resolving other people’s mental health challenges doesn’t necessarily mean that you never experience your own but what’s important is that you identify when you do and you do your hardest to try and rectify the situation like I did this morning. I hope that has been useful for me to have shared that with you today. Please give if you can to superheroes, this is an urgent appeal from superheroes, a not-for-profit organization that provides mental and emotional support to children and families throughout the UK. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, our qualified practitioners have been helping children with the hardest hit of grief and bereavement, a sense of isolation as they’re separated from friends and family and anxieties about their parent’s future financial security. There are still many more children who need our help right now so please give if you can and join superheroes in making a difference today Thank You.
