Helping remove the fear factor

BEFORE he addresses a putt, golfer Greg Norman wipes the back of his trouser leg with his club several times.

He is not cleaning it, but using one of the mental techniques that psychotherapist John Edington has put into practice to help businesses from as far away as Australia.

Mr Edington, who has run a practice in North Yorkshire for more than 20 years, believed that many employees had the skills to push on in their career and undertake a more high-profile job, but mentally they were telling themselves they didn’t.

He said: “Part of my job is to help senior managers get the best out of their staff.

“I remove that imaginary glass ceiling. It is not that they don’t have the ability, it is that image of themselves as being successful, which they can lack.”

Having been brought in by some leading companies, he provides his clients’ staff with techniques they can use to make them see situations positively, which brings us back to Greg Norman’s putting.

Mr Edington said: “The first thing I would want to know is what someone’s body is doing.

The body can lead the mind, and if you look at sports people in particular, they go through a mental preparation.

“When he is lining a putt up, Greg Norman looks at it, decides where it is going to go, how he is going to hit it, then wipes the putter on the bottom of his trouser leg two or three times.

“When he addresses the ball, he has by conscious choice, put his mind into a positive focus, and has the belief the ball is going to go into the cup.

“Snooker players also do it, they have a little twitch. I have worked with sports professionals and a lot of them do it unconsciously.”

Mr Edington said they were using an “anchor”, an action that immediately took their mind back to an incident when they had played a fantastic shot in similar circumstances.

He said: “For example, if you have been on a really great holiday to New York and I show you a picture of New York, your mind would immediately shoot back there.

“These little twitches sportsmen use create that same picture.

“That is muscle memory, setting up a pathway between your brain and your body.

“In their mind they have already seen the outcome. To them it is like playing the shot in reverse.”

Of course, somebody sitting in a job interview or giving a speech would not be in a position to wipe the back of their trouser leg, but the same principle of positive thought combined with what the body is doing applies.

Mr Edington said: “I saw a lady in one company who was applying for a senior position and was very good at her job, but every time she went into an interview she couldn’t speak.

“I sat with her through a practice run and noted what she was saying and doing.

“What happened was when she was talking about herself, her body sort of crumpled in her chair.

“I got her to change her body image, by sitting confidently in an assertive position, and to view herself having a lot of confidence about how good at her job she was.

“The following morning she had her interview and the general manager told me afterwards, out of the five candidates, they would have expected her to come fifth, but she made it into the final two.

“They were asking me what I had done to her. It is getting people to tap into their confidence.

“Imagine if you could break that cycle, have a good performance and take that into your next interview.

“It is showing you how you can control these situations and control them in a way so that nobody knows what you are doing.

“If in your unconscious mind, you have a picture of a situation going wrong, or not going how you want, the situation to go your brain stores it and thinks about all the other times a similar situation went wrong.

“Learning how to control your thoughts allows you to say, ‘hang on a second, I can choose what I want to tune into’, a bit like changing the TV channels.

“On the other channel, there is a picture of you doing really well.”

The reason people don’t do that automatically, Mr Edington believes, is because we are almost naturally programmed to focus on our failure.

He said: “Everybody has successes in their life, but don’t always class them as such. They can be pretty basic things, but they are successes.

“However, as human beings, we will tend to focus on our failures.

“If you took a group of 20 people and asked them to write down what they are good at, some would probably struggle.

“If on the other hand, if you asked them what they were useless at, they would probably need extra sheets of paper.”

Thinking positively therefore did not involve blanking out what could go wrong, but controlling the situation instead.

Mr Edington said: “If I had a meeting in a place I had never been to before, I might think I may not be able to find the building or a parking space.

“So what I would do is leave earlier to give myself plenty of time to find both.

“I have taken action. Instead of listening to my mind telling me what could go wrong, I took action to make it go right.

“It is learning you don’t have to accept something will go wrong. You are the driver, not the passenger in your life.”

He often does not have session after session to work with staff, with some companies giving Mr Edington as little as two hours with each employee.

But he believed that was ample time to do something positive.

He said: “What I do is to spend 15 or 20 minutes chatting to the individual, and in that first 15 to 20 minutes you can very quickly identify their needs.

“It is about looking at ways people feel they are underachieving and giving them the tools to bridge that gap.

“In some cases it is confidence. I asked one manager, ‘what do you think is holding you back’, and he flicked his hair back and said, ‘I have two hearing aids. All of my adult life I have never used a phone and the next level up I would have to use one.’ “It was a lack of confidence, and we worked on that to get him past that fear factor.”

Based near Leyburn, in North Yorkshire, unlike many business psychology experts, Mr Edington has the advantage of having originally come into the corporate world following years of private practice as a psychotherapist.

He said: “I come from a psychology background and I was asked if I did it in a corporate setting.

“So I put my skills for psychology and psychotherapy into both corporate and private practice.”

Small businesses employing between five and 250 people are able to access government funding of between £500 and £1,000, if they are willing to put in £500 themselves to take it to £1,500, for leadership and management training such as that offered by Mr Edington.

■ Further details on his services are available at johnedington.co.uk or by calling 01677-450728.