And I want to do my bit too. So here’s how I’m going to start the ball rolling!

I’m looking for city centre businesses and other organisations that value their staff and want to help local charities too.

As a local Liverpool hypnotist and personal change specialist, I’m making a tempting offer to city centre workers and I need a small favour to make it work.

I plan to run a series of ‘A Taste of Hypnosis’ sessions to introduce as many people as possible to the mental, emotional and physical ways in which hypnosis can help us all lead a healthier, less stressed and more balanced life at work and at play.

To do this I need training, meeting or conference rooms around the city centre that can seat 20 or more people. If you have one of those and are willing to donate it for an hour at lunchtime or after work, in return you’ll get the following:

• The seats at the event will be charged a small fee, usually £5 or so – you, the donator of the venue, choose which charity gets this money – I will be not making any profit from this! If your business or organisation has a ‘charity of the year’ or has links with a charity, they get all the fees from the event.
• However, as the donator of the venue, you will get up to half the available seats FREE of charge for your own employees. You can, if you want, charge a nominal fee for these seats too, to add to the charity donation you’ll be building.
• You’ll also get publicity on all the promotional material for the event, including my articles and emails, website, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter feeds.

All I ask is that you use your internal and external contacts to publicise the event too so that you, your organisation and your chosen charity benefit as much as possible from this offer by filling your venue, and we’d like to collect feedback and contact details from everyone who attends so we can tailor future taster sessions, and our corporate and personal workshops and seminars, to best meet everyone’s needs.

If you’d like to do your bit for the year of Health and Wellbeing, get in touch – email me directly at steve@iceandlemon.com use the contact page on this website, or link with me via Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, or Skype Me and we’ll take the next step to making Liverpool the most mentally and emotionally balanced city in the UK!

Researchers at Stanford and Wisconsin Universities have discovered through a series of experiments that sleep affects more than how tired we feel – it has a profound yet unconscious effect on our appetite.

Sleep affects the body’s production of two hormones that affect how hungry (or not) that we feel, and the less sleep we get, the more out of balance these two hormones get. What they found was that people who get around 5 hours sleep a night have significantly lower levels of the hormone that suppresses appetite (leptin), and significantly higher levels of another hormone that stimulates appetite (grehlin).

So, the more out of balance they get, the more our appetite increases, and the more likely we are to graze, i.e. nibble on stuff we can find in the kitchen cupboards or fridge. And we all know that we’re more likely to graze on snacky foods like biscuits, crisps and chocolate than on anything remotely healthy like fruit.

For people who only sleep around 5 hours a night, these hormones are out of balance by about 15% each – it might not sound like a lot but as far as your body is concerned, it makes a BIG difference. So much so that the researchers found that people who regularly sleep only 5 hours a night are significantly heavier than those who regularly make sure they get 8 hours sleep.

The researchers have pointed out that obesity tends to occur in societies where pressure to work long hours and socialise in the evenings is high. This, coupled with the relative ease with which we can find food, either at home or while we’re out, makes it even more imperative that we give our bodies as much of what they REALLY need as we can.

In this case, that’s sleep, and it’s up to each one of us as individuals to seek to do whatever we can to make sure that happens – and the more we do, the easier it gets.

I wish you pleasant dreams!

I was speaking to a legal boffin at a local networking group last week about presenting and public speaking and came up with a metaphor for one of the powerful techniques derived from hypnosis of creating speeches that really, truly work.

It’s a bit like filling an empty cupboard with stuff.

You can, if you want, just try to cram it all in there, and it may well fit too. However, you might not be able to get at the stuff you need to use most often, you may not be able to find that really important thing when you’re most in need of it, and you won’t be able to find what you need quickly either. You may not even be able to open the door without it all falling out all over you.

No. What most sensible people do is sort through all the stuff they want to store and then work out some system for putting it all in there so the most useful or vital things are easily accessible, and so that the order in which things are stored makes sense and makes it easy to find what you need when you need it. And they also DON’T put anything in there that isn’t of use any more, is irrelevant or broken or might’ve been interesting at the time but has no real practical use.

For a presentation or speech to work properly we need to go through the same process – create the right mental space in the audience to receive what we’re about to talk about, put all the things we offer them in the best places in the best order for them to access and use it and make it easy to sort through it afterwards, and just as importantly, we DON’T say anything that isn’t vital to the goal for our presentation.

However, if you want to know exactly HOW you do that, drop me a line at steve@iceandlemon.com and we can talk some more…