You probably already know that our damaging or destructive habits (for example in how we treat our bodies, in how we communicate with others) are linked with deep fears, which developed in the early years of our lives.

A few examples:

1) If a child is made to feel they are not good enough, they often stop making any effort to please and then in adulthood this might show up as lacking in motivation. Alternatively, it may develop into a need to over-achieve in their career to the detriment of other areas in life.

2) If as a child, we have been told that life is difficult, then we start filtering for examples of this and as adults we expect life to be difficult and so everything becomes an overwhelming challenge.

3) Often people who have been emotionally abused as children, then over-eat to protect themselves as adults.

Powerful techniques are often required to break limiting beliefs & destructive habits, which most of us have about ourselves, but which express themselves in a whole range of ways.

Erika Brodnock, is here again to share how she conquered her challenge in forming new habits…

Erika: I was determined not to give up on my quest to see the pictures in my mind, in order to visualise the version of me I wanted to exist. I asked everyone I could what to do to see more clearly and refused to pretend I could see when I couldn’t (to the despair of many a trainer)!

Two things worked for me. Firstly, I was advised to use EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) and ‘tap’ on the fact that I couldn’t see and all of the frustration that accompanied that. EFT is like acupuncture without needles and involves tapping on the same meridian points needles are inserted into for acupuncture. The results are similar to those of acupuncture too. Energy blockages clear and energy is once again able to flow, providing relief from aches, pains, long-term ailments, stress and much more.

The work I did with EFT was profound and lead to an understanding that as a child I had witnessed something dangerous, but I had not seen it. I then unconsciously blamed myself for not seeing and had carried this anger and fear in to adulthood . While I carried that anger with myself I shut down my capacity to see. My eyesight quickly physically deteriorated and while I believe I managed to fix that by having laser eye surgery in my early twenties, my ability to ‘see’ was still impaired.

Letting go of the associated anger saw me become able to picture a small white box in the pitch black I saw every time I closed my eyes.

The second step was the process of using my strongest sense (sound for me) to talk myself through the picture that I wanted to create. So I would say ‘I can see the sea’ and the sea would appear. I would then say ‘I can see me’, describe what I was wearing, how I looked inside my head until the picture appeared exactly as I wished it to be.

If your strongest sense is feeling, then feeling your way to the picture with various sensations has worked effectively for clients of mine too.

As with every learned skill, practice made perfect, and the more I spoke the pictures into my mind’s eye, the quicker they began to appear. After a few months I was able to close my eyes and see a picture as I wanted it to appear. without needing to spend 10 minutes talking to myself to get it there. Now I’m proud to say at the coaching and  staff training courses I deliver that I can visualise with ease, and have the tools to help anyone who needs to see what’s right before their very eyes.

For more information on EFT, you can visit www.karismakidz.co.uk where I’ve taken to teaching these essential skills to children at the earliest possible age.

Imagine if you could implement this type of teaching into staff training, regardless of the topic being covered and get everyone to commit to this every day with reference to the habit they are trying to change or the new thing they are learning in the staff training. Imagine the speed of progress? These are just examples of one small technique we now teach individuals and groups we work with at adaptas™ to speed up the neural connections for real and long-lasting change.

Erika Brodnock is one of our associates at adaptas™. Erika is an energy psychologist, specialising in cutting-edge techniques that embrace Quantum Physics, Epigenetics, Noetic Science and Energy.  She is qualifed as an EFT Master Practitioner and Trainer (AAMET), NLP Master Practitioner and Coach (ABNLP), Matrix Reimprinting Practitioner, Psych –K advanced facilitator and is an accredited Heartmath provider of workshops and training. She is also the CEO and Founder of The Centre for Positive Children Ltd. 

In past blogs, we’ve been talking about the power of visualising in order to learn new skills and habits (and replace old ones), and how many successful people are now using techniques that successful athletes have been using for years to improve performance, motivation and focus!. Nevertheless, not all of us are good at visualising, and therefore making real enduring change in life and in the workplace, can be more challenging for some more than for others.

As far back as 1932, Bartlett (One of the 1st psychologists to relate memory performance to peoples learning strategies) found that he could classify his research participants on the basis of their informal comments as ‘visualisers’ who claimed to rely mainly upon visual imagery in remembering, or as ‘vocalisers’, who claimed to rely mainly upon language cues rather than mental images. Vocalisers tended to be less confident in their recall. Bartlett regarded this distinction between ‘visualisers’ and ‘vocalisers’ to reflect a relatively stable characteristic of individuals or in other words a dimension of cognitive style.

One of our associates, Erika Brodnock, is here to share the challenges she had in making the changes she wanted because of this distinction that Bartlett noticed so long ago…

Erika: Our conscious, subconscious and super conscious minds are constantly working together to keep us acting in a way we know to be true to ourselves. This understanding is the first step toward lasting change – getting an awareness of who we are, what we do, our needs, triggers and the person we want to become will enable us to make even the changes we believed were impossible.

The awareness of who we are now, what we do, our needs and our triggers are important, as with this awareness we can self correct and make more conscious decisions to think, do and be ‘better’. But these elements collectively are only 1 tenth as important as the ability to see the person we want to become.

According to Dr Steve Peters, author of ‘The Chimp Paradox’ and trainer to top Olympic athletes; the unconscious mind is at least 5 times the strength of the conscious mind. Peters also asserts that the unconscious does not process things logically with words and numbers. The language of our unconscious mind is sight, smell, sound, taste and feeling. Being completely sensory, the most effective mode of communication is seeing you as the person you wish to become and the things you will think do and be at that time. Hearing the sounds you will hear, feeling the way you will feel and tasting what you will taste will strengthen this communication further…

But what if you’re like I was, and whenever you close your eyes all you see is darkness (with a hint of red if there is a light source in the room)… I remember sitting in many a coaching, training and staff training course, as others described all the wonderful things they could see in their minds eye and feeling a familiar block of envy sinking from my chest to the pit of my stomach. I could see nothing, it didn’t matter how many times someone told me “We can all see, your pictures are just moving too fast” or whatever else it was they decided to say to console me. I still couldn’t see anything and the more I tried the less I saw…

Join me in coming weeks for the step-by-step account of what I did to access my visualisation skills.

Erika Brodnock is one of our associates at adaptas™. Erika is an energy psychologist, specialising in cutting-edge techniques that embrace Quantum Physics, Epigenetics, Noetic Science and Energy.  She qualifed as an EFT Master Practitioner and Trainer (AAMET), NLP Master Practitioner and Coach (ABNLP), Matrix Reimprinting Practitioner, Psych –K advanced facilitator and is an accredited Heartmath provider of workshops and training. She is also the CEO and Founder of The Centre for Positive Children Ltd. 

We were working with approximately one hundred middle managers recently on the topic of employee engagement and performance management, and it hit me, how the very basics, the building blocks of optimising people’s potential are often ignored, even in the most high functioning of organisations (this is a multinational organisation).

There is a very nice vibe amongst individuals working in the organisation in question. It is a great example of an organisation which although, like every other organisation, is focused on targets and bottom line, holds on to values of integrity and family.

As an aside, did you know that interactions with coworkers and supervisors are the most potent source of emotion in the workplace? The positive emotional connection between co-workers may be the single most important thing to keep people healthy at work, with many people saying that the only people that understand what they go through every day in their job is the people they work with, rather than their families.

Did you also know that the effects of the things we often don’t like doing in the workplace, can be mitigated by feelings of solidarity in the workplace (Karabanow, 1999). This solidarity includes respect for others, feelings of belonging and family (all working towards a common goal) and an element of fun.

Anyway, back to the point…whilst working with this particular group, we realised that even in this highly functioning (e.g. positive relationships, family feel) organisation, there were signs that many opportunities for growth were being missed, solely because individuals were not prioritising substantial time for performance appraisals and were not conducting them optimally. Other tasks and meetings, leading to repetitive diary changes meant that often appraisals were months and months apart, and often when they actually happened, were being rushed, and managers were not engaging. These managers were not asking powerful questions, or truly listening to responses. All in all, they were not taking the time to practice good coaching skills at the level necessary.

In conversation with the managers during our sessions together, most agreed that realistically they just have not been in the habit of prioritising these meetings, and that they could in reality make time to do so.

I estimated that each of these managers have 3-4 people on their immediate team. Approximately 75% of them admitted that they were not prioritising appraisals with the individuals on their team, meaning new skills development in many cases were getting pushed out by approximately one year. This organisation had a revenue of almost 500 million in 2011, a profit increase of approximately 10% on 2010…pretty impressive for the times we are in, don’t you think?

My question is, how much greater could this impressive profit increase have been if managers at every level really engaged their colleagues and hence made them feel even more valued, motivated and moving forward, (and kept the organisation thriving well into the future, guaranteeing everyone’s jobs remain intact) to the extent they could be?

If you can do the maths, let me know, it’s not my strongest point

In previous blogs, I have been promising we would look more at how to speed up learning new habits. We have been talking about how we can actually visualise the neuronal connections happening, in order to actually speed up the process of changing our habits!

 One of the best ways to do this is to follow the steps below:

1) Decide what your new habit is going to be.

2) Sit back or lie down, making sure you are comfortable.

3) Close your eyes

4) Take 5 nice big deep breaths, breathing in through your nose, and out through your mouth. As you breath in, focus on your belly expanding and your lungs filling with air. As you breath out, feel the body softening and letting go of tension.

5) Let your breath return to its natural rhythm, in and out through your nose.

6) Scan your body from the top of your head down to your feet. Feel the contact between your body and the chair or the floor. Does it feel heavy? Where is the heaviest point of contact? Feel your hands and your feet on the floor. Allow everything to relax into the chair or floor as you scan down.

7) Get a picture in your mind of you doing the new habit. Will you be placing vegetables in to a pot as you cook a healthy meal? Will you pumping sweat and feeling energised at a gym, an exercise class, a dance class, or a climbing wall?! Will you be having comfortable warm conversations with clients that leave you and your client feeling good afterwards? Will you be asking more questions and listening more to the responses in a meeting with a colleague, because you have realised that telling people what to do is not coaching them effectively?

8) As you get that image really clear in your mind, hear the sounds you are hearing, feel the feelings you are feeling (happy, strong, enthralled, excited etc), see everything around you that would be there; the people, the weather, the building, whatever and whomever you are surrounded by.

9) As you see, hear and feel everything that goes with performing this new habit (making the image and the actions as vivid as possible), as if you are really in the situation (i.e. not watching the situation!), take as long to do the new habit in your mind as it would if you were doing it in real life.

10) Now, once you are vividly experiencing that experience, start to run it faster and faster until you feel your whole body feeling the emotions that come with having that new habit.

11) Now, as you run through the experience, imagine the neurons throughout your brain firing and connecting, just like in the image above. Imagine the neurons passing their electrical charge along to each other and see pathways being formed that represent the new habit. You could even imagine them speaking to each other as they pass the electrical charge along.

Take a look at a few seconds of this video clip to get a clearer picture of neurons communicating and to help you to imagine this happening in your own brain.

Do this exercise every day for a week, repeating the visualisation and the imagining of the experience of the event, with the neurons firing and creating pathways throughout your brain. Imagine that experience and the pathways being created 10, 15, 20 times in one sitting.

Please remember, that you have to also practice the new behaviour for real!! You have to physically cook that healthy meal, ask more questions of your colleagues or clients, or do the physical exercise!!! You need to do both the real and the imagined. Physically performing the new skill, visualising yourself performing the skill or behaviour and imagining the neural connections will work quicker and more effectively than just performing the behaviour or just thinking about it, in forming the new habit. If you want to feel healthier or have effective communication, training yourself and practicing repetitively for a few weeks will make it all stick.

Read back on previous blogs if you would like to learn more about how and why this exercise will help you to speed up a change in your habits.

If you have ever wondered how to manage stress and boost creativity, have a read of this article in the Irish Independent Newspaper.

Dr. Celine Mullins, and others, were interviewed during October 2012, for their thoughts on the benefits of meditation:

Click Here To See Cover Of Irish Independent Health & Living Supplement

Click Here To Read Article Part 1

Click Here To Read Article Part 2