by Dave Marshall of www.nlpman.eu
I don't know whether I would have been classed as socially distressed when I was young. I was certainly very, very, very, shy and this shyness affected me all throughout my teenage years and through my twenties and into my thirties. And then I had an idea, I was working for a large corporation that had an education department and I thought " if I could get it job as an instructor, the company would train me and if I could talk to a classroom full of students then I wouldn't be shy”. Simple eh! Well no, as I discovered. Even though I had trained as an instructor and I spoke to a classroom full of students I was still shy. Not as shy as before but still very shy. I also paid the price of living in fear every time I had to give a lecture because I knew I was only one page ahead of the students in the Manual, and they were far better qualified than me anyway. And so life went on, I improved as an instructor in the classroom and my shyness reduced a little bit.
Then I discovered psychology! I attended lots of courses on various aspects of practical psychology applied to business. I discovered many things about myself, one in particular was that I was an introvert, surprise surprise. Another was that other people would view me as being an eccentric person, and I thought everyone was as mad as me, apparently not. This did teach me a valuable lesson and that was only 2% of the population were like me! And the other 98% didn't much like the people who were like me. Now this may sound a very simple discovery that it was a real eye opener to me. What I learnt was, in public at least, I had to back off from some of my wild ideas and behave like the “normal” people. I also learnt that something in my past had caused my introversion and so I continued to pursue the dream of becoming normal.
Many years past and I didn't become less introverted, but I did became involved in counselling and therapy, and discovered this new thing called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). I then proceeded to learn everything I could about NLP. In particular one of the many methods available was called time line and, using this approach, you could go back in your memory to a particular time that caused your problem. And as you looked back at this event you could correct the way you saw it and the problem would go away! Well, could that really be true? Yes, it is for most things that cause most people trouble.
Another method is to pretend that you can see the unwanted feeling in front of you (I know it sounds weird, but give it a go) and now notice what colour it is(really weird!) And its shape (even more weird) and now as you pretend that this coloured shape that is in front of you starts to spin, notice what happens as you make it spin faster and faster. And faster and faster and faster and faster. Keep doing this until it changes colour and shape and when this happens slow it down until it stops. Notice what the feeling is like now. It should have changed into something that feels quite comfortable. Put your arms around it and pull it into your body. Now think about the time when you would expect to get the old feeling in the future, meeting new people next week or something, and notice how you feel when you imagine that you are there, seeing new people, hearing them ask who you are, saying “how are you” and feel them shaking your hand. Pay attention to the new feeling that you will now have. You can use this technique for any negative or stressful feeling that you may have. Even if you were on your way to a meeting and start to feel uncomfortable just stop for couple of minutes and spin the feeling.
There are many many techniques in NLP that you can use that are beyond the scope of this article. Have a look at my website www.nlpman.eu and freeiq.com/nlpman, which are both free to use, and contain lots more things you can do to overcome life's problems.
By the way, I would not say I am socially distressed any more, but I am still considered to be eccentric HO HO !!!
Good luck,
Dave Marshall
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