Wellbeing Festivals at Lloyds in February

I'm a Wellbeing advocate at Lloyds Banking, and there was a call on teams one lunchtime. I attended and the Lloyds wellbeing team were talking about holding Wellbeing Festivals held at Lloyds in lots of different locations for their colleagues. It was exciting news, and they were asking for volunteers to help out in the different locations. I emailed the organiser while she was presenting, saying that I was happy to volunteer at Bristol. Then, at the end of the call, she asked, "Are there any skills that colleagues have outside your day jobs that you can bring in for the Wellbeing Festivals?" So I immediately sent another email saying I am a hypnotherapist and a Neurp linguistic programming (NLP) practitioner. The next thing I knew, I received a reply asking how many locations I could do and to arrange to meet up on teams. There were 10 internal Wellbeing Festivals in all. I spoke to my manager and he said I could do four of the locations - Edinburgh, London, Bristol, and Cardiff. They started at the end of February and this was end of January. It was agreed that I'd do sessions of 50 minutes for each session. I had one session of 50 people. It was just down to the team to find the rooms with the maximum capacity in the locations that were available. The Wellbeing Team organised all the bookings and delegate sign-ups. It was promoted as Group Hypnotherapy.

After two days of promotions and the Wellbeing Festivals registration had opened for colleagues to register for the group hypnotherapy session in Edinburgh, 76 people had signed up in just two days. The Wellbeing Team decided to close the registrations for the group hypnotherapy in Edinburgh as it was over-subscribed, and people were on the waiting list. I offered to put another session on in Edinburgh. I agreed I'd do one in the morning and one just after lunch. The Edinburgh morning session had 33 people out of 50 that turned up in the end. The attendees were really receptive, engaged and enjoyed the session from the feedback I received. For the afternoon session, there were 14 out of 20 people that had registered. All the feedback was really good, and they showed an improvement in their relaxation from the start of the session to post-hypnosis. During the second session, near the end, when I asked everybody to open their eyes after doing the Control Room hypnosis, there were a few ladies in front who said, "But I don't want to open my eyes and go back to work. This is so nice."

I received applauses in London and Bristol. In Cardiff they were very engaged and all the feedback was highly positive.