Video courtesy of Bedtime Chapters

I sat at my friend’s dining table, drinking her coffee, and spilled out my goals for my new story.  I knew it was a mish-mash of ideas and problems that I wanted to solve, so that’s why I had decided to discuss it with a friend who was both an NLP Expert and a Hypnotherapist. She listened with patience and took it all in her stride.

“An intuitive person has told me my next book is called “The Dancing Santa”” I said. This meant that I had to work backwards…discovering what it was my story was to heal and relating that, in some way, to Santa.

For me, a story I write must heal something that may be going wrong in society. Something that causes emotional or physical distress in others. My first book “Daphne and the Smiley Shells” was written to help break the cycle of creating negative self-talk through the generations (and ended up teaching so much more). I wanted “The Dancing Santa” to have the same kind of impact, in a different way.

So I did what I had done before, and began to listen. While I was out networking or co-working, I listened to what people’s problems were in their lives that they were talking about when they weren’t talking about their business. And of course, I had my coaching client’s lives to listen into as well. The Universe knew I was listening, and guided me.

Several times I heard people talking about how drained they had been at certain times in their lives. Perhaps they had M.E, fibromyalgia or were just plain exhausted. I picked up how on many occasions, at the time of exhaustion they were doing something that others wanted them to do, instead of following what they really wanted to do. Finishing a Uni course they had tired of, taking a job they didn’t really want, and many other things.

I also thought about Christmas itself. How we often feel pressurised to buy things we can’t afford because the children expect it, or entertain distant relatives in our homes to the point of our own exhaustion, year after year. For some, Christmas can become a year-long event as they repay their debts, remember family member’s misdemeanours and dread the following year.

Eventually my friend took me through a hypnotherapy session, encouraging my subconscious to come up with the answers I needed to solve these issues (and adding in a little expertise herself). I took the recording home and listened to it some more, and came up with even more answers.

The YouTube video above is a draft of that story. Kindly illustrated and turned into a video by the lovely Emma from “Bedtime Chapters”, she has enabled me to share a little of the power of NLP Coaching as well as the importance of self care and sustainable gifting.

At 30 minutes the story is long, and in a book would be broken into chapters. However it’s calming and happy ending will, I hope, help you and your children to relax, calm down, and maybe even go to sleep…who knows? Do send me any feedback you have about the story, and who knows, one day it might even become a printed book if you all like it enough…

For further videos, visit the Bedtime Chapters YouTube channel