Transcript
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Speaker: Hello and welcome to The Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box. about how work works, with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
Speaker: I'm your host, Michael Millward. Today, I'm going to be learning about the role an employer plays in managing employee stress from solution-focused hypnotherapist, Kira Smith.
Speaker: Kira is based in Birmingham in the West Midlands. When I visit Birmingham University to deliver a guest lecturer, I make my travel arrangements at the Ultimate Travel Club, because at the Ultimate Travel Club I can access trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, holidays and so many other travel related purchases.
Speaker: You can also access trade prices on travel by joining the Ultimate Travel Club. There is a link with a discount in the description. Now that I have paid some bills, it is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
Speaker: As with every episode of The Independent Minds, we won't be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think. Hello, Ciara. Hi, Michael. Really great to be here. Great to have you. I know this is not your first time talking to me. You've also been a guest on Fit For My Age as well.
Speaker: I have, and it's really wonderful to come back and talk to you again. We had a really interesting conversation in that episode, and I know we're going to do it again. So let's start for people who haven't listened to the Fit for My Age episode and explain a little bit about what solution-focused hypnotherapy is.
Speaker: Yeah, solution-focused hypnotherapy is a fairly new form of therapy. It's only around 20 years old. It blends talk therapy, solution-focused brief therapy and what we traditionally think of when we think of hypnotherapy, which is deep relaxation. So our sessions are made up of one half talk therapy and one half deep relaxation.
Speaker: And the key difference between what we do and what other talk therapists do is that we don't take people back to talk about the past. We meet them where they are now and we take them forward using up-to-date neuroscience which has shown us that actually if we keep taking people back they keep reliving those past traumas and it keeps needing to be reprocessed therefore stopping them from moving forward again and obviously when people come to a therapist that's their main goal is they want to move forward and they want to get better
Speaker: It's interesting. i know that in the Fit for My Age episode, I said that the past is like a holiday destination that we've been to already. We don't need to go back again. Yeah, absolutely. and And I've had quite a few clients who, when they've been told by me, we're not going to go back, we're not going to tell that story all over again, have burst into tears of joy, literally, because they've had to do that so many times in other forms of therapy. And it's been so distressing. that it's like a weight off their shoulders, it really is.
Speaker: How did you get involved? Yeah, so I used to be a personal trainer and a yoga teacher. I got to the point where I desperately wanted a career change. I still wanted to be in wellness, but I wanted to do something that actually...
Speaker: helped people improve and also helped them gain the power to keep themselves well because I was seeing the same people week after week as a personal trainer. do You kind of feel like you're scraping the top off a little bit and you're also taking on a lot of their mental stress as well. kind of started to do a little bit of research, started to try and think about what I'd want to do next. I knew nothing about hypnotherapy. It just so happened that the local training school to me was a solution-focused hypnotherapy training school. The chap who ran the course, once he'd kind of talked about what it was doing, was just completely sure, 100%, yes, this is the right thing to do. Because my own mental health was in a terrible place due to a lifetime of pretty serious trauma.
Speaker: This ticked the box for me that not only does it help my clients get well, and learn how to keep themselves well, it does the same for me. So it really is a double benefit of me continuing to learn and stay well whilst my clients also get that benefit.
Speaker: I've got images of that television commercial, but the bloke who liked it so much that he bought the company. I feel like that with you. That is exactly it, Michael. I live and breathe this because it's not just a form of therapy. It's a lifestyle. So I think once my clients have been with me for a couple of sessions,
Speaker: they start to really click into that. It's a short-term therapy as well. So they might see me for six to 12 sessions. But once they've finished with that, they've kind of gone through that we liked it so much, we bought the company as well, in that they have a lot of stuff to take away with them and continue. So that good momentum continues going forward for them. It's like they have bought into it and continue to get the benefit out of it over and over every single day.
Speaker: Just to clarify, me there are lots of therapies which focus on, well, you've never talked about it before. It's in a bottle. You've got to come out and and and speak your truth, so to speak. You've got yeah to get everything out there. And it's only once you've wiped the slate clean, so to speak, that you can move forward. Yes. They're retrospective. They're thinking about the past. Yes.
Speaker: All the time. With this solution focused, what you're doing is focusing on the future. How you can be the person you want to be despite the past. Not because of it. Because once you are, or whilst you are worried about the past and using the past to define you, you can never reach your full potential. That is exactly it, Michael, because our brain doesn't know the difference between imagination and reality.
Speaker: So if we keep thinking about events that have happened in the past, obviously some of them incredibly distressing, our brain thinks that's happening and it will produce the correct chemicals to deal with that situation, stressed chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline, which then keep us in that primitive part of our brain where all we can do is react and survive rather than thrive. And touching on what you've just said about got lots of stuff kind of locked up from the past, like you were mentioning, kind of in a bottle and we need to release it.
Speaker: What we educate our clients on is that, yes, there is that stuff packed in what we call a stress bucket, But we can process all those memories and clear that stress bucket through REM sleep.
Speaker: So we don't need to talk about it. It's not that we're not going to get rid of it. We're just going to get rid of it in a different way by improving your REM sleep.
Speaker: So that can all get emptied out overnight. And also by retraining your brain to think differently so therefore it stops adding stuff into that bucket. The main focus of the solution focus therapy is on educating, equipping people with the tools that enable them to manage their stress and their mental health in a more proactive, positive manner.
Speaker: That's it, Michael. You've put it in a really beautiful nutshell. We want to go on and get on with doing the things we want to do. We don't just want to keep surviving and staying in those same patterns. So that is exactly suspecting as well, when we are as individuals labelling ourselves with the past internally, yes there is going to be something that comes out externally, which also enables other people, unconsciously perhaps, to label us in the same way. Absolutely. Patterns of behavior, survival behavior, old patterns of behavior, lack of confidence, anger, fear, all of these things where we've learned to behave in those particular ways in the past to deal with previous situations. And now we don't need those patterns of behavior anymore. So that is exactly right, Michael. And like you say, other people notice that they pick up on it. It affects us
Speaker: For instance, in an employment situation, you know, at work, people may be passing us over for opportunities because we're not confident enough or we're not showing leadership to skills. We're not thinking strategically because the place our brain is in will not allow us to do that.
Speaker: lot of this comes down to stress and how we manage it. yeah What is stress? So the main cause of our stress is our thoughts. So negative thoughts are converted into anxiety and they go into that stress bucket.
Speaker: So negative thoughts can come in the form of negatively introspecting, so negatively thinking about the past, negatively forecasting and thinking about the future. With those two things in operation, we cause ourselves stress. So it's not to say that events aren't stressful.
Speaker: But it is very much the way we perceive them and think about them that causes the stress. Once we start to think differently and behave differently and we become more solution focused, stressful events cause us less stress. We're able to deal with them differently. So we put less into that stress bucket. All right.
Speaker: Once the thoughts change, the behaviour change. Once the behaviour changes, of course, our thoughts continue to change and a better loop begins from the previous negative loop, which is just adding more and more stress all of the time. I think for some people, well, many people, they don't realise that they're in a stressful situation. or they're experiencing stress until they look back. And and the the ultimate sign of stress is something like a heart attack or a stroke. Your your body just says, enough, stop. Yes, absolutely. What are the signs that we might be experiencing stress, but thinking that, oh, this is just this just goes with the job? That's a really good point, Michael. The world today can really send that message out to a lot of people of this is just what you have to put up with. This is life.
Speaker: This is just how it feels. But stress can come out in all sorts of really interesting and strange ways. There's kind of the more obvious ones, things like IBS, where they're getting very bad digestive problems. Again, people can sometimes gloss over that and think this is just my body.
Speaker: hair falling out, alopecia, but skin problems, so eczema, psoriasis. Really some very strange ones in that things like just clasping your hands continually was one that I had a lady come and say, oh everything's fine, but I just can't stop clenching my fists.
Speaker: Or i'm blin like they've noticed that they blink too much, like as in their eyes close for longer than they want to. Small things like this, that somebody else might pick up on. And they might say, are you okay? Because I've noticed you keep picking your left arm up and putting it back down again. Really niche little things that you might not necessarily acknowledge. But once you sort of step back a little bit from them and think, actually, I'm doing that all the time. And I don't really know why I'm doing it So there's something that neuroscientists have discovered called functional neurological disorder.
Speaker: So when people suddenly lose the use of their legs or they have ah a fit, a seizure, or something where the medical professionals can't find out why it's happening, they've now discovered that it is simply your body is so stressed that it's trying to kind of throw a tantrum to prevent you from going into us into any more stressful situations.
Speaker: And that's the same with a lot of behaviors or symptoms people come to me with. For instance, migraines. So migraines, again, your body is trying to keep you still and keep you safe.
Speaker: So the way we talk about it to people is these are safety behaviors. Your body is trying to keep you safe. So IBS, it's trying to keep you in one place.
Speaker: Migraines, tingling, excessively tingling limbs or hands. Things like that, where your body will be giving you a physical message that it needs help.
Speaker: There's so many thoughts that come out of that. But essentially what you're saying is like if you need to use the toilet before you do a presentation. Yes. That is that's the nerves, the stress of doing the presentation. Yeah, absolutely. So that's the anxiety. So when we're in our primitive part of our brain, our survival part of our brain, which is where we go when we're stressed to deal with emergencies.
Speaker: um We can only experience anger, anxiety and depression, those survival emotions. And anxiety is literally empty your body out, increase your heart rate, get all the blood to the limbs, get rid of any food because we don't want to have to be doing any digesting whilst we're dealing with this emergency. And now you're ready to run. You're ready to run away now. So that's where the IBS comes in.
Speaker: Wow, very interesting.
Speaker: We have a plan. We're going to stick to the plan. We're not going to be going off on tangents. going to stick to the plan. It's very easy, isn't it? It is, because one of the reasons why set up Fit for My Age, for example, was because we don't know these sorts of things. And yet when we do know them, we're able to learn from them and manage ourselves in such a ah much more productive and proactive way. We're thinking about this situation of stress in the workplace and how employers can help their employees to manage the stress that comes with the jobs that they are doing. Yes. and every job, regardless of how sophisticated or how mundane people may think they are, every job comes with targets and objectives and standards.
Speaker: Anything that creates measurement or involves measurement... creates an element of stress. Absolutely. Have you reached the target? Have you done it the right way? All those sorts of things. So it is one of things that we need to really be very careful to think about. yeah What do we know about work-related stress? Workplace stress has actually become a huge focus recently, particularly for my supervisor and mentor Gary Johannes, who runs a big programme all to do with workplace stress, and because it's become such a huge subject recently. And he actually conducted a study which was published in 2024. It was conducted with the North Humberland Police.
Speaker: total of 42 police officers took part in this study and 20 solution-focused hypnotherapists and those the therapists some of them were newly qualified so they weren't massively ingrained in the therapy you know they weren't really experienced the 42 people who took part in it did a course of sessions which we typically say is six to twelve sessions with solution-focused hypnotherapy now the rate the police had noticed of improvement with Other types of therapy, so things like CBT and counselling, had been an improvement rate of between 37% and 47% on previous um use of of therapy. But with solution-focused hypnotherapy, by the end, 97.2% of participants achieved a significant improvement in wellness throughout the study, and 78% said they were completely free
Speaker: said they were completely free of any symptoms of anxiety or depression or related symptoms that they had suffered previously to the study.
Speaker: So that gives us a really nice indication of obviously some people working within the emergency services, which is very reactive based, stress based. of the effect this type of therapy can have. And those sessions were administered online as well. So that's another real positive that it doesn't need to be done faceto- face to face.
Speaker: No, but you've doubled the the level of success achieved by using the solution focused therapy. Yes. The massive thing that's down to Michael is that those people went away with education and tools which allowed them to carry on their wellness journey and maintaining that.
Speaker: When people have got the tools, yeah what sort of things do they then do with those tools to maintain this low level of stress? The really big foundation of what we do is education.
Speaker: So it's educating them about their intellectual brain, their helpful brain, and their primitive brain, their emergency brain, and noticing what happens when we're in one, And what happens when we're in the other? So they start to become aware of when they're moving into their emergency brain and when they're in their helpful brain and feeling good and able to problem solve and plan, etc.
Speaker: So the first takeaway they have is that education about their brain and about their stress bucket and all the things that can go in that stress bucket that aren't necessarily huge things, their unhelpful daily habits, other people's behavior, sort of death by a thousand paper cuts, if you like, lots of little things constantly going in there.
Speaker: All solution-focused clients get that on their first initial consultation. So that initially starts to help pennies to drop of, okay, I'm starting to notice what is adding to my stress bucket.
Speaker: And also I'm starting to notice how I behave when I'm stressed and what's showing me that I'm stressed. The second thing that we give them is a hypnosis response.
Speaker: relaxation or trance as we call it to take away so that is for them to listen to daily ah more than daily if they need to but that as one of my clients recently described it is sort of like an off switch for the brain so the more they listen to it the more the brain becomes practiced at relaxing it starts to understand that it's safe and that it can relax and particularly when they put that relaxation on after they've heard it a few times, the brain goes, ah, when we hear Kira's voice or whoever your therapist's voice is, we relax. That's our sign to relax.
Speaker: So that's one really easy, quick tool that they can go away with and start using immediately and continue to use for the rest of their life if they so wish.
Speaker: The issue for many people really, I suppose, is that we don't understand how our brain works. Yeah. And what you're saying is we don't understand and can't identify as we're moving between the different types of brain that we have. And we only have one brain, but it has different departments. Absolutely.
Speaker: The primitive brain is the the brain that deals with the fight or flight. That's it, yeah. And that's the part of the brain that gives us the signal to say it's okay to feel stressed because you need stress to either fight or flight. That's it, like if a fire alarm goes off, we do need that part of the brain.
Speaker: You know, that's very that's a very important part. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. But despite being sophisticated 21st century human beings, yes we are still back in that fight or flight caveman type brain.
Speaker: Yeah. Probably more often than is helpful for our mental health in the 21st century. Taking a work situation, Michael, like you were saying, you know, we've got targets to reach.
Speaker: we've got people to keep happy. It's very, very hard for our brain now to distinguish the difference between a genuine emergency and sending a difficult email or having a difficult meeting because the primitive brain is very black and white. So it doesn't distinguish between small and large stresses.
Speaker: So it's now reacting the same way it would have done to a predator coming towards us in those primitive times. It's reacting the same way it would have reacted to that, to your boss asking you to ah deliver something by a certain date or giving you ah a last minute task to do. And we're experiencing that same situation.
Speaker: level of stress. And the brain, the primitive brain stores these patterns. So if it's reacted in one particular way to one particular situation, the next time a situation happens, it will pattern match and it will go, oh we've had something like this similar situation to this before. This is how we reacted in the past.
Speaker: Do this again. i think And that's why with my trainer HR professionals hat on, I'm thinking training You did a study with Northumberland Police and these are people, you know, the blue light services, the ambulance people, the fire engines, the Coast Guard, the police. These are people who go towards the things that the rest of us run away from because our primitive brain, fight or flight brain is telling us, you know, this is not ah right the right place to be.
Speaker: But the difference between us and those people with the blue lights is that they're very special to begin with. Let's not get that right. They're very special to be able to say, I am going to run towards the danger that everybody else is running away from.
Speaker: But the key thing is that they've been trained. And when you talk about the patterning, It's the training that means that they can see that dangerous situation and as a result of the training, that patterns in the behaviours and the actions that they are going to step down to apply within that dangerous situation in order to make them safe, make other people safe and resolve that situation. Absolutely, you're bang on. They have absolutely the right, they have been equipped. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Speaker: So the key thing for an employer to think about is the well the key thing for an employer to think about when they think about reducing stress in their workforce, reducing stress-related mistakes or stress-related absence, is to put the training and You're absolutely right, Michael. it Like you said, it equips us and puts the right patterns. And once we have that education and training, of course, we can start to build different patterns. Once we're
Speaker: aware of being in the right part of our brain. You know, something I say to clients often is you're trying to change from the wrong part of the brain. So when employers, like you say, equip their employees with the skills to be in the right part of their brain, they can start to build different behavior patterns and have different coping mechanisms. Yeah, absolutely. So part of a skills training program should also involve this type of mental health management or stress management so that if something does go wrong, instead of panicking, someone has the the ability
Speaker: to go, yep, something's gone wrong. No need to panic. Yes. Let's control our primitive brain, stick with the logical brain and go through the processes that we have learnt that gets us to the resolution of the problem rather than throwing a wobbly, trying to find someone else to blame, trying to cover up the mistake. It's like, let's keep calm, stay in the logical brain, fight off thee the fight or flight brain and keep going.
Speaker: That's exactly it. And just like with training your your physical muscles, you know, with a personal trainer or going to the gym, it's exactly the same with the brain. So the more we practice that, Michael, the better we get at it and the easier we can, like you say, ward off the primitive brain and stay in that logical brain. Absolutely.
Speaker: Brilliant. Thank you very much, Kira. It's been really very interesting. I do appreciate your time today. Thank you very much. It's pleasure, Michael. Thank you for having me. pleasure I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abacida, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Keira Smith, a solution-focused hypnotherapist. You can find out more about both of us at abacida.co.uk.
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Speaker: Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye. Yeah.
