As the pace of modern working life grows ever faster, companies are looking for new ways to ease stress, solve staff problems and boost performance. Business Editor Mike Parker met one man working magic for the mind.

THERE is no flowing black cape, no top hat, no wand and certainly no white rabbit, but Matt Hudson claims to be a magician.

Using his voice and the creativity of his mind, his particular brand of magic involves unlocking secrets safeguarded by the brain that lead people to suffer neuroses, phobias or make them susceptible to stress.

Wherever there is a whiff of magic, there is usually a rational explanation, and this behavioural consultant sums it up as Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP).

In a nutshell, it is the study of how successful people achieve results and how to recreate this in others.

Stress costs industry millions of pounds every year in absenteeism, physical problems, aggressiveness, tiredness, decreased performance levels, poor morale and high staff turnover - so much so that some of the top 100 companies are now adopting NLP techniques in their training.

Using the unorthodox delivery tool of laughter, Mr Hudson is achieving impressive results with many North-East organisations, including Business Link, the NHS, hospices and various schools with a host of laughter-inspired workshops.

"Neuro-Linguistic Programming was specifically created to allow us to do magic by creating new ways of understanding how verbal and non-verbal communication affect the human brain," said Mr Hudson, who is also a clinical hypnotherapist and university lecturer.

"By asking people what their perceptions are and making them laugh, my workshops demonstrate the logical patterns created in people's minds everyday which lead to stress - and you would be surprised how much emotion can be released around the office photocopier."

Using laughter as a stress remedy and models of the world's greatest performers as inspiration, Mr Hudson works to break the patterns of thought resulting, he says, in more empowered employees, enhanced performance levels, a healthier working environment and protection against litigation loss.

"I ask company bosses - just how much are they prepared to lose in litigation? A member of staff quits due to a stressful working environment and the employer has to pay a king's ransom to settle it," he said.

"Yet if you try to define stress it's difficult -- even the word itself makes you feel down. The universal of stress is people, it is not the job that is stressful - it is environment and the people you work around and for."

One of the organisations on board with NLP training is Business Link, in Sunderland, where managers wanted a fresh approach to their in-house customer service training programme.

"I believe most customer service training is void of emotion and robotic - this actually promotes anger and frustration in both the customer and the staff," said Mr Hudson, whose work has taken him around the UK and as far as Kuwait and Qatar in the Middle East.

"Only machines have no emotion and we need to come away from robot-like attitude - which for British businesses is a very scary thing because we are told to keep our work and emotions separate. And yet, whether we like it or not, we are constantly feeling something and that invariably leads to stress when it is not managed.

"The staff at Business Link couldn't breathe for laughing - and we were only talking about the different ways in which you can say "no" to a customer.

"The whole idea with the laughter workshop is that it is fun, therapeutic and it makes very profound lessons easy to learn."

Mr Hudson's workshops can range from corporate development with stress management and team building to healthcare working with people coping with cancer and personal development working with addictions and phobias.