Fears and Anxieties Workshop

I’ve just finished running a two day event with Steve Crabb teaching Practitioners how to be more effective when working with clients with fears and anxieties. So my thoughts currently, have been directed towards this subject and how best to help your clients achieve their goals. The feelings that people have when phobic or anxious are so similar that many people get confused as to whether they have a phobia or anxiety, and they seem to be unaware at how easily these responses are learnt and how quickly the brain can generalise a response.

As we go through life we learn a great many things by experience, things we are not even aware of. An unconscious learning, fear is one of these experiences. A phobia is a demonstration of how quickly we learn an automatic response and each time the response is felt the fear is re-enforced. Your brain works faster than you think so that before you know it you may have gained a phobia.

For years Dr Richard Bandler was told the most difficult thing to get rid off was a phobia. Whilst the psychologists at that time were trying to help people with phobias, usually by giving them drugs occasionally using flooding or desensitisation techniques which weren’t very effective. He thought it would be far better to speak to people who had overcome their fears to see how they did this. He advertised for people who had got rid of their phobias and got their strategies; he found as with most human behaviour that there was a pattern – they all came to a point when they decided they had had enough and then they saw themselves over there and it all seemed so stupid and…………… from these studies the NLP phobia cure was born. I suppose this should now be called the first NLP phobia cure as we are now teaching and experiencing other ways to help people overcome their fears.

Over the years I have been asked many times how I work with people with fears and anxieties, what techniques do I use and so this workshop was designed to answer those questions and give the participants an opportunity to practice.

Over the weekend all the participants were able to review their NLP tool box and how to utilise these techniques; as well as learn some new skills like EMDR and TFT to help increase their success rates with their clients. EMDR got a huge thumbs up from the group, something I will definately teach more of in the future.

On Sunday Glenn and Maureen from Snakes Alive came along with some creatures, so everyone was able to test their work and we all got to meet Glenn’s newest creature and when the group were asked to name her they decided on Tina the Tarantula ......................