Ask Leo a question and he will respond to you to bring insight and inspiration to any problem, difficulty or situation you may want him to shed light on. You will receive a response directly to your email. Read on below to see past Questions and Answers.

Leo Lourdes Biography

Leo 'on the couch' - Questions and Answers

Dear Leo, I'm a 24 yr old male and I've suffered from depression for most of my life.  I've had conventional counselling 3 times and have been on antidepressants for two years.

I cannot articulate to you what my problems are.  I feel like I am looking for something...like a light switch in a dark room. I don't know who I am, or what I want or how to get it.  Please help me, life feels like such a burden it always has and I don't know how to shed it apart from the obvious which I won't mention.
Anonymous, United Kingdom

Hello, well firstly thank you for writing. The act of writing is a useful one as the moment you begin to articulate your feelings into words, in this way, you are making those feelings have an outlet that you can begin to understand and observe. This is the beginning step.

In your words, you have been suffering from depression for a number of years and whilst counselling is useful to many, sometimes ‘talking cures' appear to just make you more conceptually understand the experiences of what is going on in your life that you do not want. Also if you are on prescriptive drugs like Seroxat, Valium, Prozac etc whilst they can be ‘quick fixes' they certainly do not shed any light in terms of your feelings and how to fully change them in the long term. Although we live in a modern world of ‘fast' everything, it does not mean taking prescriptive drugs are the best way to heal past hurt or generate present happiness.

Depression is an interesting term. What is the opposite of depression? When anything is depressed, it is in definition to ‘press down, or to cause to sink'. And that is what depression could feel like, a sense of being overwhelmed, a lack of purpose, lethargy or apathy for life. Yet the most useful word in the definition of depression is the word ‘cause'. On some level you cause yourself to keep feeling this way.

You are a young man, with potentially a great future ahead of you. A future that does not have to be filled with many more sad emotions or an endless spiral of prescriptive drugs. This is not the only option for you. Some say depression is the best thing that can happen to a person, because it lets you know that every thing is not alright, which then causes you to create exactly what you want in your life. So in this sense, depression is an invite for you to change your life. The invite is concealed in an envelope that is not particularly attractive, yet the gift is in opening the envelope and growing forward with it.

You feel the way you do because of where your attention and focus has been. Whatever you focus on expands. So if you focus on the lack of love, or lack of happiness or lack of contentment then what will expand in your experience are those very aspects of ‘lack' that you do not want.

Think of your emotions as a palette of colours. In your palette you have an array of emotions. Some colours you may like, some colours you might not. Some hurt more and some really light you and those around you. You must observe your value in true perspective by looking at the grander picture of 'you' and not just by some of the colours. You must rise to the artist within you who takes fuller responsibility for all the emotions in the scenes of your life and create a picture of your life that you truly want and genuinely deserve.

I want you to spend the next few weeks really consciously engaging into more sensory experiences. So a lot less thinking inside, a lot less feeling inside. For example when you eat food I want you to really savour the experience, notice the smells and the tastes and notice how it makes you feel. When you walk down the street notice the beginning of autumn leaves and notice how the wind feels against your skin. I want you to notice the sunrise, even if it means waking up earlier to see it or staying up a bit later to see the sunset. Take yourself to places in nature, and you will understand you have many rhythms like the world you are in , and eventually you will stop judging the rhythms and labelling them or making excuses into reasons. You will simply be fully aware of your rhythms and you will know how to influence them to lead you to what you really want in your life. You can really re-energise. Break the pattern and open up not just to life, yet to really living. I sincerely wish you all the best in your unfolding future.

Dear Leo, what is the average amount of sessions one would need for sports NLP? and over what time span - once a week? or sessions all in one go?
Liz, United Kingdom

With Sports Performance Excellence any form coaching or therapy falls into two categories- problem solving and skills refinement.

When I have seen sports people for problem solving it could be across a wide range of areas like apathy, loss of confidence, certain fears they have built up from experiences related to the sport. At times I have seen clients who's anxieties over time have developed into phobias or neurosis. With these types of sessions, we work with the premise that once the core of the problem is identified, understood and released, the sportsperson can begin to see any setback or problem as part of their larger personal evolution in their sport. This could be for 3-5 sessions, sometimes more depending on what issues they want to work on. I would recommend that these sessions are done not to far from each other so there is a fluid, continuity between each session. In these sessions, there is a real intimate understanding of a clients inner environment to help them restore belief in themselves and in their sport.

The other area is skills refinement, and this is a very exciting area as we are working very much on edge of a sportsperson's skill, taking their old average and making it their new brilliant. It is amazing how powerful the mind is with the right focus, any sportsperson with the right guidance can develop impressively with mental coaching and visualisation. With skills refinement it's really a question of how long a piece of string is. These sessions can be spaced out with longer gaps in between sessions.

The great thing about NLP is it is one of the most speediest forms of coaching methodologies that exist. For example, in traditional psychotherapy, phobias could many take years to resolve, yet NLP can actually assist a phobic client to a much better way of responding with 1 to 2 sessions. In fact many books out there with improving Golf, Tennis, Football etc all stem from Neuro Linguistic Programming.  I smile to myself when I see Johnny Wilkinson perform his ritualistic moves in the rugby pitch. Many in the crowd are stunned by his consistent performance and unusual moves.What Johnny is doing is a set of mental and spatial calibration exercises that enable him to link his state directly to his performance on the field. We are on the tip of the iceberg with what is possible in sports performance, and its a great feeling being at the frontier of this -especially with the imminent Olympics in 2012!