Practical Wellbeing

When I did my first NLP Practitioner training, people asked me what I was doing and I told them as best I could. If they hadn’t heard of NLP they would have an air of puzzlement or disbelief. “What are you doing that for?” seemed to be the unspoken question. At that time I found it a very hard question to answer.

I’d first been introduced to NLP about 20 years earlier on a teacher training course and had been intrigued. It kept surfacing from time to time down the years but it took me until 1999 to attend my first NLP training. I attended a weekend introduction to NLP (a lot like the IntegrityNLP Introducing NLP course) in London to find out at first hand what it was all about.

I was astonished. Up until then I thought the furniture of my mind was fixed in place and I was stuck with it. After two days I realised that a lot of the limiting and negative thoughts I experienced were optional not obligatory. I had to find out more.

If you think all the thoughts, feelings, ideas, memories that rattle around in your body and mind are fixed this is probably difficult to imagine. If you have not attended an NLP training take a moment to imagine that you can quickly and easily change the way that you think and feel, that old hurts can be healed and old reactions dissolved. It’s a very different way of thinking about the world.

I think that contributed to my difficulty in explaining what the training was all about and what it meant to me. This experience prompted me to start the “So, what is it you are doing?” book project, where participants of past and present NLP Practitioner trainings share their thoughts on what it means to attend an IntegrityNLP NLP Practitioner Training.

Here are some of their thoughts about why they chose to do an NLP Practitioner Training

In my guise as trainer for IntegrityNLP here is the first of three clips about ‘The Fast Phobia Cure’ or V-K Dissociation process one of the most well known NLP therapeutic intervention processes filmed during a recent NLP Practitioner training.

On Saturday 11th July I will be running an EFT Level 1 training in The Teaching Centre, St Oswald’s Hospice, Gosforth,  Newcastle. This is the introductory level of EFT training and equips you with the skills to use EFT to work on your own issues and those of your family and friends.

It’s a hands-on training with lots of supervised practice, you’ll soon be using EFT for yourself, and you may be surprised at just how quick, effective and painless it can be for a wide variety of issues. The cost of the full day’s training (plus extensive manual) is just £60

Email andy@practicalwellbeing.co.uk for an application form.

If you don’t already know ChangeCamp is an un-conference for anyone interested in personal, professional or organisational change using psychological methods. It’s open to public and professionals alike.

With just over two weeks to go there is an impressive line up of presentations to suit all tastes.

• Quick Start EFT
• Creating Confidence with NLP
• Solution Focused Brief Therapy
• Practising Wellbeing
• Rapid Trauma Resolution for Clinicians and Professionals
• Gestalt Approach to Dreamwork
• Meet, Play and Communicate With Your Inner Child
• Taking the Woo Out of EFT
• The Desire and the Drive for Success
• Brief Grief Resolution
• EFT for Cancer Care
• The Magic of Laughter Yoga

There are still a few presentations in the pipeline so this list may get longer!

ChangeCamp is on June 27th as Gosforth High School, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne. It runs from 10am to 6pm and costs just £10 + £5 for the Magic of Laughter Yoga session.

You can find out more and book your place at www.changecamp.co.uk

Unfortunately I’ve decided to withdraw from this year’s Edinburgh Marathon which is scheduled for this coming Sunday. I really wanted to run this as a celebration (believe it or not) of my 50th birthday which has just passed but I’ve been able to do less preparation than I’ve needed to and had a series of mild infections which further set back my training. In the interests of my own self preservation I thought it best to withdraw.

However I am hoping to run it this time next year on behalf of Cancer Research UK.

EFT can be used to greatly relieve the emotional aspects of cancer from diagnosis through treatment and living beyond cancer. At ChangeCamp 2009 on June 27th I’ll be giving an hour long presentation where I will describe how EFT can be used to:

• Recover from difficult appointments and medical procedures so that you don’t lie awake at night reliving unpleasant news or experiences.
• Prepare for upcoming appointments so that you can be calm, collected and resourceful rather than a bag of nerves.
• Neutralising unhelpful beliefs about cancer and it’s treatment. Such as the often held belief that ‘cancer is a death sentence’
• Resolve problems about different aspects of medical treatments such as needle phobias, scanner claustrophobia and anxieties about difficult medical procedures.
• Benefit the carers and partners of cancer patients, helping manage their stress and anxiety and giving them some simple ways to help the patient through their cancer experience.

This session is appropriate for cancer sufferers, carers and for medical staff and other professionals who would like to ease the emotional burden of cancer.

To find out more visit www.changecamp.co.uk

Image courtesy of Wolfsoul

How often have you heard other people lamenting their inability to put things into perspective? If only we could step back and appreciate the bigger picture and put things into context. Fortunately NLP gives us some specific techniques to allow us to do just that.

In this week’s NLP Cafe I will take you through two processes for putting things into perspective. The Perspectives Pattern invented by NLP trainer John McWhirter and further developed by Steve Andreas. In this workshop we will learn to use this simple process to resolve troublesome images and unhelpful self talk. You will need to have had some experience of NLP to use these processes.

Join Nigel Hetherington and Andy Hunt at the NLP Cafe workshop on Wednesday 20th May at St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne at 7pm. The cost is just £10.

Photo ‘Tiree Perspective’ courtesy of MacJewell