Have you ever been crazy busy?  I mean, like “pulling your hair out” kind of busy?  It seems like more and more of us suffer from crazy busy (watch out because a pharmaceutical company will come up with a pill for it soon – but I digress).

I remember a time when I started a new company where I was crazy busy.  I was researching my market, doing the finances, answering calls, booking venues for sales events, traveling to the manufacturer, doing quality control, managing the database of customers – you know the entrepreneur stuff.  I was overwhelmed.  There was too much to do and not enough time to do it.

I hadn’t seen my friends in months.  I hadn’t gone to the gym or out for a run either.  I was letting myself go as well as everyone around me.  In fact, being around other people actually started stressing me out.  I became less tolerant of others’ personalities and quirky behaviors and a lot more prone to say something mean or rude or offensive to people.

Everything was falling apart!

#9 Self-Hypnosis

When I went to the NLP Practitioner Certification training, I learned about hypnotherapy.  I learned how just a few changes in the style of your voice and the tempo of how you speak as well as the language you used could put someone into a state of complete calm.  And more importantly, I learned how to do it on myself.   Self-hypnosis, is a way for me to access a calming state of mind any time I want.

This is one area of NLP I use quite often and most of the time I use it to avoid some anxiety or stress that is upcoming.  Take an MRI machine as an example.  Have you ever had an MRI?  I guess for some people who aren’t claustrophobic and who like really loud noises (like the machine is about to break, crumble down on top of your and crush you with magnets), an MRI machine is harmless.  For me it’s like being invited to Hell.  I don’t like enclosed spaces so much and I certainly don’t like the noise.  So, I decided to try using self-hypnosis during a session at the imaging center.

I first asked the technician how long I was meant to stay in the chamber without moving.  He indicated it would take about 20 minutes.  I decided I could do that and declined the earpieces they normally provide so you can listen to music.  While I lye in the machine, I started my internal hypnotherapy.  I used my inner voice in a gentle and calming way to relax my nerves.  Then I utilized the sound of the machine to help me create different ways of relaxing.  “With every pulsing sound, you’re getting more and more relaxed.”  “As the sound increases so does your level of deep sleep.”

It worked like magic!  In twenty minutes, my brain naturally brought me back to waking consciousness and I heard the technician outside of the machine preparing to extract me from the chamber.

Ever since that day, I utilize these funny and sometimes scary machines to help heal using self-hypnosis.  It has worked every time.

In next tip on NLP, I want to share with you the time when I banned my husband’s boss from my house and what I learned from my NLP Course.

Here are some other posts in the same series you may want to explore:  Tip #1 Chunk Size, Tip #2 Submodalities , Tip #3 Metamodel, Tip #4 Presuppositions,  Tip #5 Frame of Reference,  Tip #6 Complex Equivalents, Tip #7 Outcomes, Tip #8 Re-program

NLP Tip 10