Happy minds...make happy people

Having the life you deserve

2012-02-03T10:19:00.000-08:00

Do you deserve the life you once dreamed of ?

Sometimes in life you take stock of things and start to notice all the things that are missing, maybe you compare it to the life you had dreamed of living and realise that there are a few things lacking, that maybe it just does not feel right.
For whatever reason you never quite got to the place that deep down you still believe you deserve to be, maybe it was circumstances that got in your way or lives inevitable hurts and misshapes that knocked you of your path.
Now you could be one of those people, who decide that things are just never going to be attainable and life isn't quite as wonderful as you once hoped it was going to be. Or you could begin to realise that there is more beyond these thoughts, that in fact just because you lost your path or stumbled a few times its OK to begin to believe that there is more everywhere. Sometimes its enough to look inside and ask your self what is it you truly want in life, what can make you happy because we spend so much of our time thinking about what could of been and not enough imagining what can be.
Dream about who you can be
How would it be different if you began to forget about who you could of been and start allowing yourself to dream about who you can be and how you can make your life better everywhere, in lots of little ways.
If you where to imagine all the little ways you can begin to make your life better, pretty soon you will realise that your life can almost instantaneously begin to appear brighter and better and will grow with a staggering rate towards the life you deserve it to be.
Sometimes we need to see beyond the problems and old limitations of the past towards the bright and more fulfilling life each and every person deserves to have.
Sometimes the single thing that stops people moving forward is old anxieties about the past or there situation. Learning to cope and dissolve anxiety can have a life transforming effect beyond what most people can even imagine. Anxiety and negative emotions hold people back, removing these tiny feeling that you yourself are creating can unlock a new dream and a new life beyond what you have up until now allowed yourself to dream about.
Anxiety is easier to overcome than most people think and the rewards for doing so goes beyond just freedom to feel anyway you want to and to experience the life you truly deserve to have.
Remember this is your life and you should be able to see you deserve to enjoy it the way you want to live it.
I believe every person deserves to enjoy living life free from anxiety/fear/stress or any other negative emotion I hope you understand that its never too late to go for it, to reevaluate an old dream or to create new goals and ambitions and believe you do deserve it. Raise your expectations and you will begin to create a ripple within your unconscious that tells you now is the time to go for it and let yourself enjoy thinking about the life you deserve to have.

Andrew Milne
tranceformation coach
www.happy-minds.co.uk

Serendipity - I love it - part 1

2012-01-11T01:26:00.000-08:00

The other day while perusing through my facebook threads I came across a book recommendation. The person who recommended the book does not recommend books often so i thought "this is interesting" mainly because it was on a topic I have been thinking about a lot for the past few months. Not having much on that day I decided to go into town (although i live in a city and not sure this is the correct term, maybe i went into the city(that sounds wrong). Any way i went shopping).

The closest bookstore to me is Waterstones. I actually checked on line prices first and deciding that I could save myself a pound buying on line, there is something lovely and wholesome about going to a book store. The rows of book, the smell that you only get in a book store, have you ever noticed the smell in a new book store is similar but different to the smell you get in a second hand book store. Less musty i guess, the smell of fresh knowledge waiting to be absorbed, is different to the second hand smell of books that have already given themselves to someone. We recently bought a Kindle, it does make me sad to think that books are departing from my life but I am also exceptionally excited about the Kindle its a lovely little device. So here I am in Watterstones, wondering if they employ people who look bookish, or if people employed in bookshops become bookish over time, as the invisible radiation of knowledge seeps into there very core changing and altering the very fabric of who they are.

I go up to the floor where i suspect i am most likely to find my book but i dont have time to browse so i go over to the very first 'bookish' assistant i can find, and simply ask him if he could check if the book is in stock. As i am telling the assistant the authors name, he completes it "Jonah Leher" now i could of just shrugged this of as a coincidence, but i was feeling a bit more enquiring so ask

"do you know every book, or is this a particularly important book ?"

It turns out my new bookish friend is quiet a big fan of the author in question and he goes to some length to explain the authors theories, his life and importantly that there is a talk on TED by the author. Wonderful ! I thank him for his time, pay for my book and head out the door.

As I wander home, I wonder to myself just whats the chance of this happening ? i dont really care to work them out, but i do believe i would be a fool not to watch the said talk, to not pay attention to this serendipitous moment, lets believe for a minute that this is serendipity in action a chance coincidence that will lead me to discover something wonderful maybe about myself maybe about where I am going in life. It may even lead me to making better decisions (the book and talk is on the science of good decisions.

So if by chance random or design something crops up in your life and you think "funny, i was just talking/thinking about that" why not follow the rabbit for a bit and see where it takes you, who knows it might be a message from some higher plane prodding you along in the direction you are meant to be going in. Its the flow of life leading you to your own personal destiny, its serendipity in action. Or at the very least its a random happening that you unconscious mind thinks important enough to mark out for you. Pay attention its happening all the time.

and if you have stumbled across this and your reading thinking I know the name Jonah Lehrer, here is the first part of said talk, If your reading this and your suffering anxiey/scocial or other wise you will find more out about me and my work at

www.happy-minds.co.uk

One of my favorite things....

2011-12-14T13:22:00.000-08:00

This is just one of those things that makes me feel good inside when ever I watch it. Its a short lecture by Alan Watts, the purpose and point of life eludes many and I think this is as good a point on the subject as any, so I thought would share it.

If you would like to find out about Alan Watts, his Wiki pages are a good place to start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts

Happy Minds - Reframing Emotions

2011-12-13T10:13:00.000-08:00

Happy Minds - Reframing Emotions

I really wanted to give you some information that you could instantly put into practice. Something that when i am working with clients with emotional issues really helps them and quickly. This is a very simple emotional reframing, its very effective and is the beginning of

Ownership and transmutation of feelings and emotions through language (c) Happy Minds

The purpose of this is to enable you to find away out of negative emotions and begin to reframe your emotional state, through the use of 'bridging states' ( a bridging state is a state that opens up possibilities of change feeling manageable is one of these, there are others)

First of all it is important to understand the following :

Mary : How are you ?
John : I feel sad

When a person states how they feel they lock that state in, so in the above example when John tells Mary he feels sad, it reinforces the feeling and John is left feeling sad. Now we do this to ourselves all the time

I feel depressed : Locks in the negative feeling of depression
I feel bored : Locks in the feeing of boredom

Locking in emotional states : This process locks in the state by reinforcing it within the mind, what we want to do is open up the mind to the possibilities of change.

Its important to understand this, whatever we believe to be true our minds will work towards making true for us. We are going to work through an example below on how to simply reframe your emotional state and open you up to changing how you feel

I feel depressed : this is a statement that locks in the emotional state of depression
now try adding this
I feel manageably depressed : What is it like to feel manageably depressed ? it already feel like change can be made
I feel manageable : this is a small leap from feeling manageably depressed and open up the emotions to feeling something new
I feel manageably happy : Again the leap from being manageable to being manageably happy is easy to make.
I feel happy : now we are starting to lock in the new state 'happy' so we have reframed the original state 'depressed' to the state of 'happy', we can go further and add possibilities
I feel increasingly happy : Now you open yourself up to the possibilities of feeling even more than happy.

I hope this has been easy to follow, we are taking control of our emotional state through language. It would be difficult to go from depressed to happy in one go but we use the 'bridging' state of 'manageable' to get there.

Exercise (written)

Ask yourself how do you feel ?
Write it down : I feel ------- (we will use the example anxious)
now write out : I feel manageably ------- (anxious)
Now write out : I feel manageable
then write : I feel manageably happy (you could pick any state you wish to feel not just happy)
Then write : I feel happy
Then write : I feel increasingly happy (increasingly is a great piece of language it opens up brighter opportunities)

Its good to write things down, writing things down locks in thoughts and emotions with actions but we can equally do this as a thought experiment.

So the steps are

1) Name and shame the emotion you wish to change
2) Add in the bridging state of 'manageably' to the negative emotion
3) state I feel manageable
4) I feel manageably happy (or new empowering/positive state)
5) I feel increasingly happy

You could also add in : i feel increasingly happy about ------ whatever it is you want.

Fun example for my benefit and to show flexibility in process

I feel confused by this blog
I feel manageably confused by this blog
I feel manageably good about this blog (bad english yes, but it works)
I feel good when i think about this blog
I feel increasingly good when i think about this blog.

This is one of the many tools you can employ to gain Emotional mastery, its brilliant because it takes ownership of your feelings and empowers you towards change.

THIS IS NOT AN INTELLECTUAL EXERCISE, IT WILL ONLY BE UNDERSTOOD WHEN FOLLOWED

For more information please go to www.happy-minds.co.uk to find out how you can begin to overcome your emotional issues and feel good about who you are.

Andrew Milne

I know because I must know... it is my purpose

2011-12-12T09:29:00.000-08:00

Like most people I know. I know I am internet addicted. The increasing time I spend in the virtual world makes up more and more of the 'person' I am. My photos are stored in a virtual cloud space, i connect to the majority of my friend in the virtual world. Recently I have re connected with extended family members over facebook. This coming year I plan to move more of my business activity on line and continue to contemplate the effectiveness of training people over the internet.

A recent client was telling me about how you can look back on your search history and even create a google trends analysis of what you have searched for and when. It sounds fun and for many a dark night of the soul and for others a skip down a virtual memory lane.

Google knows more about me than George Orwell's the Ministry of Information could ever of known about Winston (George Orwell 1984). We all willingly plug google with as much personal information as we can, it knows about my health fears, it knows about my hobbies, where I eat, my plans for the future, the darker desires of my mind and any other thing I have typed into it over the years. Google knows more about me over the past ten years than I can even remember. Like Orwell's vision we all have miss information boxes and even cameras feeding us and feeding them with a growing amount of disinformation.

In the film the Matrix, a vision of the human race enslaved to the machines, connected via a computer terminal plugged into there mind via a socket on the back of the head, its a scary vision. The fact remains tho, we do not need machines or a totalitarian state to 'plug us into the machine' we are willingly doing it ourselves.

I saw the 'zeitgeist' films recently one of the visions they say the so called evil powers that be are working on is a chip, implanted into our wrist, that tracks our movement, controls our financial status, contains all our personal data will be forced upon us in the name of freedom. How does this differ from my smartphone, which i willingly cary around with me, that stores who I am, what I think, knows where I am going and even tells me how to get there. Th truth is we need no chip to give up who we are, we are already doing it.

I have no belief in a all powerful evil group that controls our destiny, that is shaping to remove my freedom from me. Its much more simple than all of that, its human nature that is shaping this new world, we are willingly becoming enslaved to the machines, to systems of control, we give up our information gladly so that we can live a more convenient and technologically entwined life.

One day we will work in this virtual world, we already spend money and our leisure time there, and if someone invented a human implant where we could just connect ourselves up to the net via a USB port or something similar, we would gladly stick it into the back of our heads and live forever in a virtual world, experiencing virtual success, virtual fitness, virtual sex and if it was as real or better than the world we live in would it matter ?

I have no idea. Are all things not just an illusion ? So would it matter if we created a virtual existence that could feel more real.
Where in the virtual world are we heading ?

Its all about the posture ...

2011-12-04T03:21:00.000-08:00

It is said that in order to create an emotional state three factors come into play. Mental focus, Breathing and posture

Mental focus

Where is your mental focus at ? What are you thinking about and how are you thinking it ? When we talk about the how, in NLP terms we are thinking in terms of modalities (Visual, Audio, Kinesthetic), what pictures do we make in our minds, what sounds (voices) do we hear, and what feelings do these thoughts generate ?

Breathing

How we breath is so very important, breath takes oxygen into out lungs to enrich the blood suply and to fuel the mind and body. SO many people have terrible breathing, it is one of the things i see most in my work with people with social anxiety. Bad breathing causes bad states of mind.

Posture

How we stand how we sit, not only conveys a message to others but also helps create a physical and mental state of being. Think about the times you look at someone and say "they look down" or "hes standing tall and proud". The posture we adopt has a massive impact on the way we feel. Think about the times you have felt sad and compare your posture with the times you felt strong and confident.

To think about this in a slightly mathematical way

Posture + Breathing + Mental focus = Emotional State

Typically with a person suffering anxiety the posture will be rounded around there chest (where they feel the anxiety) there breathing will be short and fast and there mental focus will be fast and panicky (maybe making picture of people looking at them, with a little scared voice rattling away inside).

Now if we only change one of these things it can have a massive impact not only on the resulting state but also the other two components.

At happy-minds.co.uk I train people mostly in the ways of taking control of the mental focus, and i enjoy watching the impact it has on the posture and breathing. However I would recommend for those interested in complete control of there emotional state to learn a discipline that focuses on breathing and posture as well as mental focus. There are of course many out there tai chi, hatha yoga, any martial art.

One of my very dear friends a year or so ago started to learn Kundalini yogo, and has now moved on to becoming a Kundalini teacher. It has been a joy to watch her strengthen both emotionally and physically and her passion for what she does more than matches my own passion for what I do.

"Kundalini yoga is a physical, mental and spiritual discipline for developing strength, awareness, character, and consciousness" while this is all true, i would recommend Kundalini for anyone who wishes to learn more about breathing and posture and lives around the Glasgow area you should check out her website (contact her for more details)

http://blisslightyoga.com/

What is social anxiety.

2011-06-29T06:39:00.000-07:00

I was asked this the other day by a reported "what is social anxiety ?"
I replied "social phobia, a fear of social events/people"
Still she looked blankly at me, at first i thought it was strange that someone would have no concept of what social anxiety was, since my life has been guided or even dominated by social anxiety for over 12 years. but i guess some people are lucky enough to have never needed to know.

The reason of course my life and now my work has been guided by social anxiety is that my long term partner has been a social anxiety sufferer all her life. It was her that got me started in my quest to cure social anxiety, by the time the quest had stated I was suffering various other anxieties and emotional issues. So it was a quest worth taking and along the way i have become quiet the expert on social anxiety and have discovered we all suffer it from time to time.

So what is social anxiety ?

In its simplest form its having anxiety when faced with social situations/people. People feel anxiety differently sometimes they feel a tightness in there chest, sometimes butterflies in there stomach. These can lead to shaking of hands, sweating, it can be an uncomfortable feeling around people. it Can be characterized by feelings of low self worth as well. Social anxiety suffers believe themselves to be almost telepathic mind readers, reading negative thought into whoever may be around.

Nervous are one thing but what I feel the worst thing about social anxiety is that the suffer misses out on one of the biggest parts of life, being social, human being are social animals we are at our happiest when we are together. It is very difficult for a social anxiety suffer to go to a bar and not imagine every person is about to start to laugh at them.

This of course makes work life very hard. Sometimes social anxiety surfers just have the negative feelings, at other times they suffer low self esteem and crippling self doubt making working or socializing almost impossible.

You generally find the negative feelings bread negative thoughts, which in turn lead to an increase in negative feelings. So someone on a night out, starting to feel a bit anxious has the thought "every one hates me" increases the anxious feeling which then increases the thoughts its a viscous circle !

Over the years I have had suffers tell me about how they feel overwhelmed by things, big characters intimidate them. This is something that bothers me greatly, believe any one has the right to be whoever they want to be, but this should not be at the cost of others. So i teach social anxiety sufferers how to effectively deal with these situations in there minds, because its there minds that are interpreting things wrong. That is for another blog post.

So in short social phobia, social anxiety is in fact a fear of social situations(some times large some time one to ones, sometimes just going to the shops, peoples, events). Its a terrible anxiety which cripples and paralysis a persons life and holds them back from being part of the tribe.

Andrew Milne runs www.happy-minds.co.uk they treat all anxiety related issues effectively and quickly, we are based n Glasgow but will travel around the UK. Relief comes quickly and effectively.
www.happy-minds.co.uk

Why is it that Doctors know little about social anxiety.

2011-06-08T03:51:00.000-07:00

I have been working directly with people with social anxiety in the Glasgow area for sometime now, because my aim is to help them not only deal with there anxiety but get them to the place where they want to be and often further, I hear about there experience with Doctors and how little they seem to know about social anxiety or even anxiety in general.
At Happy-minds our aim is always to help any one suffering anxiety to get through there problem, we arm them with powerful tools and mind technologies that enable them to not only control there anxiety but also to banish it completely. We get results quickly, so why is it that Doctors no very little about social anxiety?
Well as far as I can consider a Doctor is in the fortunate position of not having ever experienced anxiety at least to the point where it is detrimental or crippling to them. Anxiety seems to be outwith there model, and in fact if you consider how difficult it would be to be a doctor if suffering from social anxiety.

For someone who does suffer Social anxiety, you will know what its like to feel anything from uncomfortable to panic when faced with social situations. The tight uncomfortable feelings you get and the crippling anxiety that can lead to tension, sweats and shaking when you are around people or even at the thought of being around people.
At happy happy minds we deal directly with these negative feeling we aim to teach you how to overcome the negative feelings (the anxiety, the nervous, the panic) and to empower you so you never need to worry about experiencing these things again.
And this leads me nicely to the topic of worry, anxiety breads worry, people suffering anxiety worry constantly about different things in there life.
"What is that person thinking about me, they dont like me"
"what if i make a fool of myself"
"What if they laugh at me"
"what if she hates me"
What if, what if, what if, is a difficult cycle to brake, the what if mind set is dangerous and is fed by the anxiety but it in turn feeds the anxiety catching you in a viscious circle. Unfortunately people with anxiety never worry about good things happening
"what if things go well"
"What if i have too many friends"
"what if i have a brilliant time."
Doctors don have any idea what this is like, and i again guess that if they suffered from a case of the what ifs we would all be in trouble, i dont want a surgeon worrying about what ifs if they are about to slice me up.
So could it be that Doctors and to a large extent psychiatrist just dont understand the model of social anxiety (i once treated a psychiatrist for anxiety, i honestly think she learned more about how anxiety works in the mind in the two hours spent with me than she ever knew before.)
At Happy-minds we teach your mind how to stop the what ifs and how to think more positively about yourself and your life.
There is a very important saying, what the mind expects the mind gets. Think about the implications if indeed you could just for a moment accept that as true, what the mind expects the mind gets. People with social anxiety expect the worse to happen in social situations, they expect to feel uncomfortable, they expect people to dislike them, and because there mind is focused on these things that is what they will PERCEIVE, notice i say perceive because it is only there perception, there perception could if trained right notice all the wonderful things about people, notice all the times people actually like them.
So why is it Doctors know little about social anxiety ? well i would have to conclude that its outside there experience and of course they cant be expected to know everything, if you want your social anxiety dealt with, if you want to be comfortable in any situation then seek out someone who has specialized knowledge and i would say more importantly has overcome similar situation.

Andrew Milne
Happy Minds. Andrew has set up happy minds in his quest to empower as many people in there fight to overcome anxiety and emotional issues, having previously suffered anxiety, depression, anger and general emotional turmoil. It is Andrews goal to help as many people be comfortable and confident with who they are, it is Andrews belief that ever person has the right to be happy in there own skin.
To find out more about how our social anxiety course here Happy-minds, Social anxiety.

Fear of flying - How we cure phobia

2011-06-03T10:17:00.000-07:00

A month or so ago, i was asked to help local radio star Cat Harvey get over her fear of flying, you can find out more about it here Real Radio Breakfast show, there is even a nice video which features me !

Cat had a real phobia of flying, and when i say she had a real phobia, i mean it. Fears can fall into many categories but lets take two here

1) A Phobia
2) Anxiety around the situation

A phobia is when faced with a situation (or stimulus) the person has such a strong reaction they just feel they have to get away from the situation (or stimulus) as quickly as possible, if they cant they can have all sorts of terrible symptoms (shaking, trembling, crying, violent behavior, etc).

Wikipedia defines a phobia

a phobia is defined as a persistent fear of an object or situation in which the sufferer commits to great lengths in avoiding despite the fear, typically disproportional to the actual danger posed, often being recognized as irrational. You can read more at the wiki page here

Now Cat had a real fear of flying, a real phobia of flying. When I arrived at the airport I was told that Cat had been to the airport earlier in the week and had a real emotional teary moment just sitting in the plane. When I met her she was looking like a woman who was doomed to the gallows. She looked like she was ready to run for the door.

I have been curing phobia for several years now, and since we have started Happy-minds we have helped many people over various fears, anxiety and general emotional issues. So I knew that i could help Cat, and the good thing about it was she looked like she wanted to be helped. Often people will avoid getting treatment for there phobia, or fear and just avoid the situation as much as possible, since Cat was at the airport and was faced with getting on the plane and she had the expectant weight of her radio audience she had no choice but to receive treatment.

Now I have always considered a fear of flying to be a more rational phobia. Unlike maybe a phobia or fear of spiders, flying can cause serious injury (all be it very unlikely). However all phobias are completely unnecessary and emotionally damaging. If a phobia is getting in the way of life, fun or even causing you one moment of panic a year you need to get it treated, the unconscious relief a person feels after being treated leads to a massive knock on effect.

Most people probably have a small amount of anxiety when it comes to flying, and they can deal with it and go on holidays etc, but when like Cat, your fear of flying causes you real terror things have gone to far.

So what caused Cats fear of flying ? well she could trace it back to a couple of bad flights she experienced. This can be typical of how phobias are installed, one bad experience or even an unexpected association in a split second can lead someone to experience a phobic reaction.

How I treated Cat

Well fist as with all phobia we had to establish what was happening in Cats mind, I do this by asking a serious of questions. Since Cat had mentioned the bad flights as being the cause of the phobia, I used some very quick and effective techniques to remove the impact of the initial cause. Then we continued by removing the intense negative emotion (feeling) that was causing the fear of flying. All of this was achieved very quickly, what was particularly good about treating Cat was the fact that because she was so incredibly scared it was easy to get rid of the negative feelings. Before we ended the session I quickly used some powerful techniques to anchor confidence to flying. So in the end Cat went from having a fear of flying to actually feeling confident about flying and looking forward to the experience. It does not always end like that, quiet often i leave the client disliking the thing they were afraid of, spiders are a good example, I have yet to have a spider phobia client come to me and say "i want you to cure my phobia and i want to love spiders", now that would be a thing.

What to do if you suffer from a fear of flying (or any phobia)

Well first and foremost I would recommend contacting Happy-minds we have been successfully treating phobia for several years, we are based in Glasgow but can travel throughout scotland. You can get your phobia treated in as little as two sessions, guaranteed. If you are too far away I recommend you search out a good NLP practitioner.

About Happy Minds

Happy Minds is run by Andrew Milne, who knows an awful lot about emotions, particularly fears and anxiety. Single handily Andrew has set out to help as many people overcome there fears and anxieties. Andrew started treating phobias over 5 years ago, he has successfully treated many different types of phobias from fear of flying to one lady who was scared to be touched. Happy minds is based in Glasgow. Since the real radio experience Andrew has teamed up with leading edge flight school to offer a flight package, where you can get your fear of flying cured and then enjoy a lovely flight in a light aircraft. Andrew specializes in social anxiety and is currently working on ways to increase positive emotions to enable people to live happy and fulfilling lives.

The price of traditional talk therapy

2011-03-24T16:08:00.000-07:00

So I had a client recently, lovely young guy, lets call him Sam. So Sam came to see me with some emotional issues, nothing i would consider to serious (Although Sam did, he felt he had a terrible experience and his emotions were out of control, he was plagued by worry and self doubt), but they were getting in the way of him enjoying his life, and well life enjoying him. Over time he had attached negative emotions to certain situations.
I liked Sam instantly, he was ready to overcome his situation and was ready to let go of those things that had been troubling him.
Since he was traveling a fair distance we agreed that we would try and deliver the training over two days, as apposed to the usual 4 sessions, we agreed a price, which Sam considered fair, and I promised him the same thing as a I promise each and every client "I will work tirelessly on your issue, until we reach the goals we have set." the price for the two days training (4 hours per day) we set at £600.00. Now maybe some people would consider that high, i dont know if you do or not but considering i promised him he would leave with

1) His issues resolved
2) The ability to resolve any future issues
3) Access to my library of exercises, trance experiences and hypnotic installations
4) A grater understanding of himself, and how his mind works
5) The ability to recognise, release and restore his emotional flow
6) Freedom and control

What cam up during the first session is that he had been seen a counselor for the past three years, each and every week at £50.00 a week. Now this shocked me, i know i am good at what i do, thats why i GET results quickly but I thought even the worst therapist/councilor would be able to get results over three years ! apparently not, so lets just think about this for a moment, £50,00 every week for three years

thats 52 weeks in year times £50 = £2600 A YEAR !

times that by three years £2600*3 = £7800 !!

So i asked him what they did, he said she would get him to talk about his week and tell her how he felt, and so i asked him how did that make you feel ? "ANGRY" he replied, and no wonder I would be furious if i had spent that much and got no results.

Would you put your car to a garage every week, be charged £50.00 a time and then get it back week in for three years only for it to still be broke ? No so why should this be the case with counseling or therapy.

In my sessions we set out an agreed amount of sessions to deal with the problem, and we deal with the problem, guaranteed !

So if you consider the £600 I charged Sam and compare it to the £7800 he spent on traditional therapy, he has found himself a bargain.

And did Sam leave my office feeling better ? Of course he did, because i promised him i would work with him tirelessly until he did, was he happy to have payed me the money, yes in fact he said he thought it was cheap for the results. I am still in touch with him, as i am most my clients, i like to know what i do works and stays working.

You can find out more about me and my work at www.happy-minds.co.uk

Who we are and how it affects those around us (part 1)

2011-03-14T02:18:00.000-07:00

A Little story

One of my favorite stories i heard when i started my NLP training went a little like this :

One morning a friend of mine was walking along a beach, it was a beautiful morning, the sun illuminating the golden sand, the temperature was just right, the tide was going out and the waves barely made a sound. He walked barefoot along the beach, enjoying the cool sand beneath his feet. In the distance he noticed a man walking along the beach, every so often the man would bend down and pick something up and toss it into a large bucket, he watched the man bending down, picking something up and then tossing it into the bucket. my friend thought to himself 'wow this is interesting' and walked upto the bucket to see what was going on, inside the bucket there were hundreds of crabs, clawing at the the air and each other. As he looked into the bucket another crab flew through the air and joined the growing pile of clawing crabs, the bucket was half full. My friend went up to the man who was pitching crabs into this bucket and asked 'what you doing ?'
'collecting crabs, its my job'
'I see, but what i am wondering is this, you have no lid on your bucket, are you not worried the crabs will escape ?'
'No dont need to worry about that at all' said the man
'why not ?' exclaimed my friend, his interest growing
'well its like this, if there was only one crab in the bucket, sure it would escape, but as soon as there are a few crabs in the bucket, if one crab tries to escape, the others when they see this will reach up and pull him back down !"

Significance

One of the great human needs is the need for significance, Tony Robbins defines it as one of the 6 human needs, but wait a minute do i hear you say 'i am not significant', I hear this a lot when working with clients. Well consider this if every person needs to establish some form of significance in life then the person who believes they have no significance is surely defining themselves as someone who who is insignificant, they approach each person in there life with this attitude and they soon gather significance by being the person who claims to have no significance, interesting uh ? We are effectively defined by how we establish significance, of course our relationships give us a tremendous amount of significance, you could be son/daughter, mother/father, lover/friend, road sweep/doctor all these linguistic labels which we attach to ourselves add to the overall umbrella of who we are an in turn add to our significance in life.

Everyone is significant

Of course they are even if they dont know a single soul they are at least significant to themselves. Of course the people I have the wonderful opportunity to work with usually have the labels of anxiety or depression attached to them. DO people find significance with these labels ? Of course they do ! Some of course wear the label with more pride than others, and by the time they decide to come see me they have made the choice to begin the journey to removing the labels. Back when i used to suffer from anxiety and depression I gained a lot of significance from being the person who could point out the bleak, miserable aspects of even the brightest carnival, and like many depressives I was a secretly happy depressive, i enjoyed bringing people down and i was very good at it, of course at the time i would never of admitted this. Its hard to imagine "yes i enjoy bringing people down to my level and pointing out the darker gloomier aspects of life." I gained a lot of significance from it. It shaped my character and it shaped my actions, it defined my relationships and my interactions. Of course now I am the polar opposite, I agin significance from helping others in there quest to be something other than a depressive or someone who suffers from anxiety, i gain significance from helping people live happy extra ordinary lives.

How we affect others

So how do we affect others ? First we need to establish how we get our individual significance and the labels we place upon our selves. Do we see ourselves as a great motivational speaker ? Or as a bleak realist pointing out the terrible times and the terrible situation we live in ? When i work with clients, especially the younger ones, I like to give them some control, everyone wants to have control, not just of themselves but of other people, i teach them how to do this, how to control others mood in a positive way.
How do they do i do it ? I teach them the power of politeness, how to hold a door open for someone, how to pay them a compliment, and they learn that they can have control by others by positively affecting them. What a feeling it is to be able to affect someone in a positive way, after all so many people are used to doing the exact opposite, many people have attributed to themselves the role of keeping people down, I am sure there is a belief that they are only helping others to be more realistic, "oh we dont want him to be too big for his boots" or "we are just being realistic", if a child says to you 'i am going to be president when i grow up' do we reply back 'well no REALISTICALLY speaking your probably only going to achieve a lowly middle management position in a company your going to hate, and have a family who resent you', no of course not so why do we do that to our friends, colleagues partners ? Someone once said "the quickest way to success, is to help others to there's", imagine for a moment you are someone who gains significance by helping others achieve self belief and hope. What is the worst thing that could happen ? Imagine that just for a day you took the role of only being positive in your actions and words, what would happen to those around you ? For me back in the day if I was to take on this role, my friends and family would of being a bit suspicious at first (in fact i believe they still are ;) but the wonderful thing is you start to become significant for a different reason, you start to become important because you are someone who is a positive force to be around. Trust me, because this is coming from someone who used to be able to bring a party down if i wanted to, being someone who builds people up is much more fun, and they are more fun to be around.

dont be a crab in a bucket pulling others down, instead give them a helping push in the right direction, because you know what ? they might just reach back down to pull you out too. You can find out more about me and my work at
www.happy-minds.co.uk

How we treat Social Anxiety

2011-02-15T02:02:00.000-08:00

How we treat Social Anxiety (Part 1)

We have been treating social anxiety now for 3 years and we do it very successfully at happy-minds. Before you can treat something as complex as social anxiety you have to understand what social anxiety is. Social anxiety is a form of generalized anxiety, for whatever reason a persons mind has attached anxiety to social situations. It differs from a phobia in that the response is generally less extreme, so instead of a complete flight or fight response the body and mind is faced with fear that it attaches to social situations instead.

Symptoms of social anxiety

The symptoms of social anxiety can be varied and do differ from person to person, however thee are some common symptoms.

Uncomfortable feelings or fear in any or all social situations
Tightness of chest
Tight throat
Intense feeling of being closed in
Fear at the thought of speaking in social situations
Unpleasant feelings, including sweating, dry mouth.
Fear of social failure, or even social success
Avoidance of social situations
Fear of looking stupid, silly.
Out of control feelings eg Anger, fear, sadness
Negative voices telling you negative things.
Scary images in your mind.
Bad feelings.

How we treat social anxiety quickly

First and foremost in our training we eliminate all the fears you have. We remove the negative feelings you experience, removing the negative feelings has a dramatic effect. What exactly is a socially anxious person avoiding ? Its not the situation, its the body sensation that they create themselves, they are avoiding a feeling that they them selves are creating. So we quickly and very effectively remove all negative feelings from social situations. Removing fears has a dramatic effect on the person, being able to recognise the fear and then release it has a major impact upon someone.

How does a person know to be social anxious ?

Over time a person has learnt from experiences to attach fear to social situations, so that when they are faced with a social situation they feel the fear. A simple learned response, so if we remove the learned response the person is then able to re learn how to feel in a social situation.

Fear paralysis

I think this is obvious but how can a person ever be socially confident if they feel fear in a social situation. Fear paralysis, in fact when we are in a state of fear the body and mind prepares for one of two things, either to fight or flee. Neither of which is appropriate in a social gathering. In fact it has being proven that if you see the world through a filter of fear, all you will see if fear full situations. So removing the fear will enable you to experience things in a different way. Think about it this way if you wake up in a really good mood, all you notice are the good things in life, this is because you are viewing the world through a different filter.

Imagine feeling something new !

Imagine if you can going into a social situation feeling really confident ? How would that be different ? You would be seeing the situation through the filter of confidence and this would enable you to really take part in social situations. After we remove fear we teach you how to feel confident in any situation. Confidence is a state of possibility. Just like you got very good at feeling anxiety or fear, because at some point you learned how to feel anxiety or fear. We teach you how to feel confident when eve you need. Imagine the possibilities of being able to feel confident an time you want !

How do we achieve all this ?

We achieve this by examining what it is you do in your mind at this moment, how the fear is generated, how it is triggered and we teach you simple mind exercises to rid yourself of this fear altogether, these exercises are incredibly powerful and we have developed them after years of research into what really works. So we remove the fears, we remove the negative voices and then we begin to teach you how to really feel confident. Again using very simple but very powerful exercises we teach you how your mind works, how it thinks and how it can think better and more in your favor. You will be amazed at the results and how quickly we can achieve them.

We treat social anxiety

At happy minds we treat and eliminate all kinds of fear. We have years of experience and we all ways get results. This is just a short article on the basics of how we treat social anxiety, depending on the person, or the situation we treat it differently but we always get results .

The role of posture on emotional well being.

2011-01-08T06:40:00.000-08:00

Happy minds has being running now for two years, I have being treating various anxieties in people for nearly 5 years. When I first started, it was and still is my goal to create the ultimate treatment for for the major causes of an unbalanced and unhappy mind, Stress, Anxiety and depression which all leads to the mind being ill at ease.

What has become a major part of my training is posture awareness. In all the people I have helped recover I have yet to meet a single person that I could not tell exactly what they were suffering from by observing there posture and there posture alone. The way they hold themselves, or protect various parts of there torso with there arms.

We are all body language experts, I have studied many learning resources on body language but in all honesty if you just stop and observe you can become very quickly aware of what is going on in the inside of someone by observing what is going on the outside. The low hung head of someone who is suffering from depression, the hands across the stomach and slight twist of the spin for someone with anxiety. this is not an article on the various posture but rather an article on the importance of body posture and awareness.

Think of someone you consider to be full of confidence and notice there body posture, the position of there feet, there hips, how they hold there shoulders, the position of the head and now contrast that with someone who is suffering anxiety, notice the difference almost instantly.

Or compare someone who is full of happiness with someone who is in the pits of despair. You will always find clear differences with there body language. You could throw into this the way they are breathing and you will really start to notice something rather special.

So what does it all mean ? Just yesterday I asked a client to become anxious to get a good feeling of anxiety going. From an upright position in the chair, they leaned forward, crossed there hands at there stomach and hung there head, after a couple of minutes they achieved the anxiety I had asked them to create. Try it yourself notice your posture and then think about something that makes you feel anxious and notice how your posture starts to change, for some it may be subtle but for a lot of people it will be a dramatic shift.

So what does this all mean ? That when we feel something our body posture changes, well what if we change our posture ? What would we then feel ?

Dr Paul Ekman observed when developing facial acuity that when we are happy we smile, but also that the reverse is true, when we smile we feel happy. So what would happen if you place someone with anxiety into the posture of someone who is confident ? Well I can tell you that almost instantly they would feel better.

Although it is only one piece of the puzzle, and it is hard to maintain without the additional work we do, but I instruct each of my clients to become more aware of there posture, to notice there body posture when they are feeling in a negative way and to take steps to change it. As I write this blog I have become 'stuck' several times, and each time I have I slump my shoulders a little and I lean forward (hardly the posture of a confident blogger) and so I correct my posture, head up, shoulders down and back, straight spine and tummy held at the core and as I transform into the posture of a confident blogger my flow starts to return.

Someone once said that what ever skill you want, be it confidence or a joyful approach to the world, fake it till you have it. Have some fun with your posture, adopt the most confident posture you can imagine and strut around the house for a bit. Be outlandish and silly with it in your own time, begin to become aware of what works for you. Or if you cant be bothered and feel too lazy to play, notice the posture your in and smile to yourself as you realize you are all ready becoming more and more body aware.

Andrew Milne
(c)2011 happy-minds.co.uk

Why is self help a dirty term ?

2010-12-11T05:15:00.000-08:00

I would say I work within the self help world. At happy minds I provide clients with powerful techniques, so they can learn how to help themselves, In fact I would say without a doubt the most popwerful thing we do at www.happy-minds.co.uk is equip clients with the ability to solve the issues that plague them. I like to give value to my clients and I believe this is achieved through equipping them with the techniques and tools to in effect become there own therapist. For me on my own personal journey this was the most empowering thing. If you have the tools for example to over come any anxiety then you can truly help yourself.

So why is it that the term self help, is met with a derisory sneer by so many ? Self help book are one of the biggest selling book genres, but there hidden away, mostly lying unread. I am proud to say as well as studying formally, I have plowed through many self help books, gleaming little pieces of knowledge from each, of course there is little substitute for learning from someone in the business, but what could be more empowering than discovering something yourself ?

Is it because to admit you are learning 'self help' or 'self improvement' is to admit you have a problem an issue that needs to be dealt with. Is that such a bad thing ? I certainly feel stronger for saying that in my life there has being problems both mental and physical, sometimes I needed to ask others for help, sometimes I found ways to help myself, I have studied NLP, Hypnosis, I use self hypnosis on a daily basis, the techniques I have developed and use with my clients I have used upon myself and will continue to.

I say to each client that I have, that the journey they are on and there desire to tackle there own problems and issues mark them as a much braver and stronger person. Nearly every person has at some time or other had an emotional issue or 'mental health' issue to deal with. Most unfortunately bottle there emotions, or disregard there issues. It is the strong and bold that tackle the issue, by seeking help be it in a 'self help' book or coming to see a specialist.

If we look at the term 'self help' what does it mean to help self ? Is it a bit of DIY for the mind ? The great therapist Milton Erickson pointed out that the client has the answers, so why not equip the client with the tools to help themselves. Is it a substitute for psychotherapy ? I would say no, its more powerful than that. It breaks the chain of reliance upon the therapist. Psychotherapy creates reliance and even Freud himself said a brake though would take 6 years. My gosh if I took that long my clients would be sick of me, it would however be good for the bank balance ! .... makes you wonder uh !

If you take time to study the most successful people of our time, you will find that they have empowered themselves with knowledge, techniques, rituals that must surely be described as self help.

I am reminded of the Chinese proverb "If you give a man a fish, he will have a single meal. If you teach him how to fish, he will eat all his life" I like to think this is what we do at happy minds, and every person who embarks on a quest to discover the joys of 'self help' should feel proud that they are teaching themselves to fish, fish the problems and limitations of there mind.

Andrew Milne
www.happy-minds.co.uk

Quest for Emotional Mastery (part 2)

2010-12-10T05:03:00.000-08:00

and so.... the quest for Emotional Mastery began. Happy Minds was already taking clients by this time, I was already helping people over come there emotional issues, what i noticed was that some would heal quicker than others, some people some techniques would work and others would struggle for the results that they wanted, of course permission and acceptance are big factors, if a person does not feel deserving or ready then it is difficult to help them remove there emotions. I think this is missed a lot with people who work with in the field of self help, or change. The main point is i had clients to work with, so i had the opportunity to find things that would work, first with my clients and then adapt it to work with myself. It did not always work out that way, sometimes i would try things on myself first, making up crude recordings, strange mixes of languages, crossing modalities, playing about with synesthesia, some of them proved effective, some made me feel bad and on a couple of rare occasions just made me feel sick. I can see why NLP and hypnosis is often referred to as magic, because with the utterance of a few well placed words you can truly have an impact upon someone's world, is it not words that create or destroy and that is magic. Someone once said "things are only magic until the process is understood"
My first stage of this quest was freedom from negative emotions, i have heard it said that all negative emotions are just anxiety, I disagree emotions are more complex than that, emotions are energy attached to a concept, even classically 'good' concepts can have negative energy attached to them, i have had clients that feel bad when you mention the word 'confidence' or clients that when you talk of 'love' experience as a pain a discomfort. I used to say that we were dominated by five negative emotions Anger, Fear, Sadness, Guilt, Jealousy now i would say that we have positive emotional energy and negative emotional energy and we go about attaching this energy to concepts inside us. However as I started my quest to rid my self of the negative emotions of my past I started with the five negative emotions of Anger, Fear, Sadness, Guilt and Jealousy. Now i never wanted to stop myself from experiencing these emotions, i just wanted to remove them from my past experiences. I know now of course I was not the first person to identify this as being a worth while thing to do and what delights me is in the last year I have met many people who have undertaken this quest and have come up with systems and mean to do so, of course for me my system is the one that works, and for any client I have I make sure that my system works.
So for the first few months I extensively went through my past experiences, systematically removing the negative energy, the negative emotions from each and every event I could think of, I used various forms of self hypnosis, wonderful techniques that would come to me in dreams or unexpected inspirational moments, knowledge is indeed all around us, if only we stop for a moment and to consider the lesson that is being presented to us.
That is an important point, something I had not considered to be a factor in removing these negative emotions, these negative energies. Lessons! at the time of starting this quest i would of being quiet happy to erase my hurtful and negative memories, I am not saying my life was a terrible thing, full of misery but there is a lot of truth in the line 'every mans burden is the heaviest' and there were some burdens i just wanted to rid myself of completely. I am very pleased to say this never happened, instead what happened when i removed the negative energy from these events, be they sadness, guilt or fear, anger in each of them i learned a lesson, you see with no negative pain associated with the event, I could look at it and absorb the learning that was presented, often i could see the event from the third perspective not being the 'hurt' party any more i cold understand the roles of others, i gained a grater understanding of people, myself included. I have since being informed that this is true karma, whatever that may be, that I have slowly striped away my negative karma and being able to grasp hole of the lesson that life is presenting me.
Its nice to be able to look back upon my life and see the events, some of them incredibly happy events, that were once clouded and blocked negative emotions. That was another thing that was unlocked the happy events, the experiences that were hidden. I consider it now that the negative events stood out because they needed to be dealt with and learned from.

So what is Emotional Mastery ?

2010-12-09T02:29:00.000-08:00

Someone yesterday asked me "what is Emotional Mastery ?" so on providing them with there answer i thought I would write my thoughts on what emotional mastery is to me.
Emotional Mastery was borne from my desire to effectively be the master of my emotions. Long before i started happy-minds and before i started my quest to help and heal as many people as i possibly could. I was like many people at the mercy of my emotions, through out my life at various stages I had being at the mercy of some of the worst negative emotions (Fear, anger, sadness, guilt, jealousy). These led me to many places I guess I wold say now I should of avoided, although looking back free from emotional pain I can say that in each of these places I learned a valuable lesson.
Of course NLP promised me a way to control my emotions, to conquer them. It was one of the reason so long ago that i started to feverishly learn and absorb so many book, training courses (some of them so expensive and yet so very worthless), its the reason i started both my life coaching diploma and my NLP diploma. Now i love NLP, its a brilliant, brilliant tool, a wonderful metaphor sold by a most charismatic sales man, but what is NLP ? Its more than just a bunch of techniques, i believe NLP is in fact a modeling language, a way to explain the processes of the mind, many people seem to have missed this, many NLP practitioners or master practitioners even. One day ill write a blog on this but not yet....
Back to my quest to control my emotions, NLP offered techniques and certainly some of them seemed to work, some definitely worked. Some were just quick fixes but considering the place I was in that was a welcome thing. They certainly got me together well enough to start helping clients, but I knew deep down that there was still the fear, the anger, the sadness of the past. I have met many many NLP master pracs and even trainers and even train the trainers and you know what has struck me, there are a lot of them who are completely stuck emotionally ! So two years ago I started a quest and my quest was simple , my quest was this, I wanted to gain control over my emotions, I wanted to be free from the anger, sadness, jealousy, guilt and fear from the past. I wanted to be able to maintain a high level of good emotional energy, i envied people who were upbeat, full of good positive energy, i wanted ways of calling this positive energy to me and to radiate it from me. In short my quest was for Emotional Mastery.
The quest for emotional mastery.

My phobia day .... at Real Radio

2010-12-08T03:01:00.000-08:00

Dear people who for one reason or another will find themselves settling down as they read my words on there screen, dont be surprised if time begins to drift away and you find yourself deeply relaxing, as words have the power to do surprising things to people.
Now i have been meaning to start a blog for some time, the problem was i never knew where a good starting place was, well its here I guess so lets begin.
My name is Andrew Milne and i run a company called Happy Minds, we make happy people, mainly I concern myself with people who are somewhat less than happy, be it stress, anxiety, depression, or just a general malaise. I am trained in many of the darker arts of therapy, the shady modalities and sub modalities of NLP the hidden depth of hypnosis, formal and conversational, and as well as a few exotic things i have picked p along the way, I am a trained life coach and personal councilor.
For the past three years i have being developing what i call Emotional Mastery which is almost a fully functioning therapy, which i am extremely pleased to say has with me and clients i have used it with got the result other therapies say they will deliver on the tin, but very rarely do.
So as you continue to enjoy reading this message, ill get to the point ! My phobia day at real radio.
I have being curing phobias since before Happy Minds was conceived and not long after I completed the first stage of my NLP training. I find phobias fun and interesting, for a while... while i was still enjoying going to those types of parties i would cure a phobia at a party in as little time as possible, shortest being ten minutes, so i was delighted when Real Radio invited me along to 'Cure a phobia live on air' or at least in another room, while the show was live on air. On arriving at Real Radio i realised that this was really quiet a big test, I have a 100% record with phobias but certainly yes I have cured a phobia in ten minutes but sometimes they can take up to 2 hours, and well social phobia is so complex it can take a few session, so i guess you could say i started to have a little fear, which of course i took care of.
But lets put this into perspective, I have to meet a woman who is to my knowledge so terrified of spiders she cant be in a house with them, in less than an hour i have to have her at the stage of holding a tarantula ! and this is going to be live on Radio, i might of thought 'bugger' if it was not for the fact that to be honest i knew that i was focused and my intent was to get this woman over her problem, not because it was live on radio but for this simple reason.... I love the work i do because it gives me the opportunity to help people over there fears and truly realise there potential in life.
So I met Sharon, the lady with the spider phobia, and yes she confirmed that indeed she would need to leave the house if she thought there was a spider in the house. I used to think of spider phobia as being one of the less extreme phobias, but all phobias are horrible extreme experiences that need to be treated and cured. You can find out more about my phobia treatment here, but i seriously think any one with a phobia should get treatment ASAP, its quick painless and vital to a happy mind and life.
Back to Sharon, we met, we had a chat on air with the lovely Glasgow, breakfast show Real Radio presenters Kat and Micky, and they assured Sharon that she would only have to hold the spider if i got her over the phobia. There was lots of suggestions that i would 'try' to get her over her phobia, any hypnotists or linguistic types will bulk at the word 'try', we should never 'try' to do anything, to try is to not do something, either do something, or not do something.
So me and Sharon, tottered of to a back studio, to have our 'hour' except by now it was only 40 minutes, and after a wee chat to see what type of person Sharon was it was down to about 30 minutes. Sharon was lovely and a real star, and absolutely one of the strongest phobics i have met, i believed her when she said she would do anything to get away from spiders. So we began the 'treatment' I cant tell you details, but over the years i have developed many of my own techniques to get someone over a phobia, the standard memory rewind, NLP phobia cure is somewhat out dated and clumsy, like a lot of NLP techniques to be honest. so I looked at the clock and i had five minutes left. I asked Sharon how she felt about holding the spider and i saw a look of fear and terror in her eyes. This is where people doing what i do go wrong, they give up, they blame the client, they make excuses. Be tenacious ! get stuck in there, never give up ! its not your clients fault, you are the therapist you need to find away. So with five minutes left we found away.
Of back to the studio and the spider ! We sat down, Kat, Micky, myself were all very nervous ! Sharon was the calmest of us all. The Spider came in (with its handler) it never came in and pulled up a chair and chatted on mike, but let me tell you ! WOW this was one big spider, a Chilean rose tarantula aptly named "Chillie". Sharon said she wouldnt hold it, inside i was gutted. It was a great thing to have her in the same room as a spider but i wanted more, so i offered to hold it, and Chillie climbed onto my hands, notice the word 'hands' this spider took two hands to hold but would Sharon hold it ! Well we got her to shake hands with it, and she stroked it, there was a lot of pressure on Sharon and she said she would not hold it, then the breakfast show went to a song, and of air Sharon said 'i want to hold it now' !!!
Whoop and whoop again ! So we had Sharon, the lady who just 40 minutes ago could not even be in a house with a spider, holding a spider ! I was so happy for Sharon, because i know what a knock on effect this will have on her life. All in all the whole experience was fantastic ! I would like to thank all at Real Radio, Micky, Kat and particularly producer David for organizing it all.
But most of all a big thank you to Sharon, a true hero in my eyes, it took guts to face her fears, she knows now how easy it was to overcome and i recommend any one who is in a similar state to seek treatment.

Andrew Milne
www.happy-minds.co.uk