The role of peace and hope in happiness

There are so many factors that contribute to happiness, many of which depend upon how you think and act NOW in the present. But this post is about the past and the future.
Can you be happy now if you are haunted by events from the past? If you are traumatised by stressful events from your childhood - or even last month? Or if you have unresolved issues or relationships that impact on your current actions and relationships.
Can you imagine being happy now if you are worried about what will happen in the future? This includes events that you know will happen and you are worried about how you will cope with them, for example, or events that you fear may happen.

Happiness now depends upon being at peace with past - including forgiving yourself and others.
Happiness now depends upon having hope for the future.

Don't shut the skeletons of anger, sadness, fear, guilt, regret and hurt in your emotional closet. The effort of keeping them under lock and key is draining and stressful. Re-frame the negative emotions and events, or work out a way of seeing them from a more positive perspective. The negativity isn't helpful to you now. The negative stuff from the past weighs you down and the negative way you are viewing the future is holding you back. Doing this is not always straightforward so I will address reframing and belief change in future posts.

Negative emotions can always be overrided by positive ones, and here is one way of accessing authentic happiness from your memories. A more involved version of this process is used to permanently remove negative emotions from events. For now, though, let's focus on savouring a happy memory.

Think of a specific happy memory in the past. Close your eyes and imagine yourself floating up above yourself, up above your present self. Imagine all your memories are arranged along a line - like a railway - going into the past in one direction and your future stretched out in the other. Your line could be straight, V-shaped, curved and at any angle. Now, still high above your time line, float back to the memory you have identitfied. Float there as long as like, view the scene through your own eyes, soak up all you could see, hear and feel, enjoy the positive emotions and float back to now along your time line.

Outcome focused therapy and coaching

I had an interesting discussion with someone who has been on an introduction to counselling course and is now regularly seeing a counsellor. He sees a counsellor every month to deal with issues relating to his childhood which he believes is holding him back now. He said that they quite often revisit the same themes or events - which was good, he thought. And 'it was helping' but would take along time.
I asked if there was any objective or purpose set out either at the beginning of the counselling process or at each session, there isn't. I asked what he was hoping to get out of the process - the answer was understanding, but that was vague (understanding who, what, why?) , he thought if he understood, he could move forward, but there appears to be no strategy for dealing with the future, or any idea when that would happen.

How can you tell if it 'is helping' if you don't have a stated outcome?

Which of these scenarios is a better strategy for planning a holiday?
1 - Would you decide to go on holiday and book a taxi without a destination in mind?
2 - Would you ask a travel agent to recommend a holiday detination and take their advice that first you should go back to all the holidays you had been on that were not enjoyable and come back after each one to see how you feel about them.
3 - Would you ask a travel agent to recommend a holiday destination and take their advice that you should look at what you have enjoyed in the past, what you enjoy doing now, what you want to achieve from you holiday and what resources you have to get there. And set a plan for a holiday with that information.

I prefer to work with people by looking at why and how their emotional needs are not being met NOW. This can be due to negative emotions attached to events of the past weighing them down; limiting beliefs and limiting decisions based on emotional reactions to events or experiences in the past or internal conflicts.
Using NLP, Time Line Therapy and EFT negative emotions can be removed from the past, removing all the effort your mind uses to keep them under wraps and letting you use that energy in a positive way.
We can't change events that have happened but we can change how we feel about them NOW - and without spending years or months analysing those events.
Having removed negative emotions and beliefs we are now in a position to look to the future, remove anxiety and set positive, compelling goals and then work back from the future, to 'now', to see how those goals can be achieved.

With NLP the point is, there are strategies and tools we can use to create big results, quickly. It doesn't have to take years, and it doesn't have to hurt to work!
A journey to Cornwall on the M4-M5 in a modern family car, with SAT_NAV, takes about 5 hours from London. If you were to have taken that journey by pushbike, without a map, in 1907 it would take considerably longer, you may have got lost along the way and would have been much more uncomfortable.

You get more of what you focus on - if you are constantly looking for problems and obstacles you will find them. If you are loooking at what results you want and how you can get them - you will find a way!

About me

Welcome to my blog!

In my blog you can follow my path in my world of NLP, Time Line Therapy (TM) Hypnosis and EFT.

You can also see my creative endeavours, I draw, paint and take photos.
I also intend to show how I follow my own advice and you will see examples of 'homework' I have done that I set my clients.

My company is called Positive Change Now, I set it up to help people make positive changes to their lives and work.

Everyone changes all the time, often people want to change and don't know how, that's where I come in.

My therapy and coaching work is light hearted, fun, creative and positive - positive emotions are known to counteract negative emotions - and always highly focused on specific outcomes and goals.

Serious results!

When someone makes a change they get a buzz - and that what drives me, because I share that buzz everytime!

my website is www.positivechangenow.co.uk
email me at katharine@positivechangenow.co.uk
find out more about EFT at http://www.emofree.com/a/?3460