Sarah had a spider phobia since 5 years old…
…and it didn’t help that she lives in a rural area with an outdoor postbox for mail… or that firewood is stored in a cellar.
First, what are phobias — really?
They are “conditioned neuro-physical responses” to bad experiences from the past that trigger a negative emotional reaction in the present.
That is: They are habits that we’ve picked up along the course of life.
And if you believe that people can learn new skills, adapt to change or even change the course of their life… then you’ll understand that resolving a phobia is simply a change of habit.
That’s not to say changing habits are ‘easy’… but results can in fact come very, very fast.
Like they did for Sarah:
Perhaps you’ve heard of NLP or ‘timeline therapy’?
As a certified Master NLP Practitioner I was able to use a collection of techniques during two therapy sessions with Sarah that shifted her neuro-physical response to spiders.
She was highly skeptical of course… who wouldn’t be? — A phobia since 5 solvable in a couple of sessions?
None the less, Sarah followed along with my mentoring, and the next day reported ‘feeling a little better’ when she saw a spider…
Then she wrote to me several weeks later with this!
Phobia, gone 🙂
Skepticism, solved! 🙂
What’s cool about resolving phobias is how obvious the change is for the person’s life.
And what about resilience in our work life?
There are many ‘triggers’ that zap our energy at work. Things like:
Technology glitches, Overload and deadlines, Unexpected change, Emails, Making decisions, Time pressures, Workplace drama, Financial issues/budget cuts, Dealing with others’ mistakes, Challenging co-workers or clients, Balancing work and family, Sleep disruption, Inefficient processes, Traffic, Long meetings, Health challenges…
When it comes to mental and emotional health and resilience, we often tend to neglect ourselves, or take a ‘do it yourself’ approach… or people simply give up and resign themselves to phobias, fears, anxieties, etc.
We might say things like:
‘get over it, it’s just in your head’.
But if we sprain our ankle… we don’t say:
‘get over it, it’s just in your ankle’.
We get it seen to.
Photos like the one above demonstrate a change in life experience that a fellow phobia sufferer can easily relate to — if only they could believe change is possible for them too.
Don’t necessarily ‘expect miracles’ from only a couple of sessions of resilience mentoring.
That’s kind of unfair on both the mentor and yourself…
But lets just say ‘small miracles can happen’.
I’ll end with this question:
What area of personal or professional resilience would you most like to work on?