The Holistic Coach

The Holistic Coach: Time Management and Healing

Nikki Mansergh is a qualified ABNLP (American Board of Hypnotherapy and American Board of Neuro-linguistic programming), Recovery Coach and EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) Practitioner, who has been coaching since 1998.

Many new challenges this week;  I would most like to discuss a relocations specialist who runs her own company. Her name is Suzanna.

Suzanna wrote to me to say she lives in a permanent state of overwhelm; high anxiety and high adrenaline. This is based more on her not prioritising everything she has to do rather than genuine problems finding properties for incoming executives.

She is single with no children and finds herself spending more and more time working. When we went deeper into it, this not prioritising (a sign of poor time management) has dictated a lot in her life. She feels she is absolutely not in charge of her life and lives on a ‘tsunami of panic’ (her words).

I did some Emotional Freedom Technique with her; this is also known as tapping and is based on the ancient art of acupressure and meridian points. We tap together on the nine meridian points, while bringing to mind what she would like to get rid of – in other words we tap while focusing on the negative of her situation. This seems counter-intuitive, but is actually necessary so that later on we can tap whilst bringing to mind the positive and let go of the negative.

This has worked for PTSD with soldiers coming back from war, people with stress headaches at work who have been permanently cured, and thousands of people with emotional issues – EFT simply breaks the legacy of lifelong difficulties in, comparatively speaking, record quick time.

Suzanna’s panic stemmed from generally feeling she took too long and was too slow as a child; racing to keep up with family activities, her peers at school; painstakingly labouring over her homework whilst others whizzed through it willy nilly and generally taking more time than ‘the others’. EFT works to relieve us of physical and emotional pain, shame, guilt and many of the feelings we use to torture ourselves. Suzanna was also carrying a common feeling for women: ‘if I am not racing around achieving something, I have no value’. We tapped while focusing on that too, along with multiple other issues that would take too long to discuss here. Realising that it is okay to ‘underachieve’ for the day; to do less than you actually think you can do, is a gift, but feels at odds with our mad Western way of thinking.

We looked at Suzanna’s time-management, which is so bad it has even lost her friends over the years. She said friends can’t stand that she is late for everything; theatre, movies, dinners, the list goes on. A simple way to address this (but the hardest part) is to make The List. Make a list every day, and rearrange it to accommodate what you have to do that day, and that day only. Then take out absolutely everything that isn’t essential that day. Then keep rearranging. Try it for a week; allowing much more time to do the things that are absolutely necessary, such as time spent travelling to meetings. Always put business and friend meetings a little earlier into the diary than they really are. You won’t always have to do that, but it is a start! And remember to respect other people’s time.

Please email nikki@thecouragetochangecoaching.com with your problems (we will keep your identity anonymous).

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