Earlier this year I watched Paul McKenna on GMTV, doing a phobia cure for the nation. It appeared to be very successful so I decided that we should come up with a similar idea to publicise our NLP and Hypnotherapy trainings. Unfortunately, I couldn't think of anything, so I decided to steal his idea instead. However, we thought we'd do the right thing and donate any money that we made from the event, to charity. We decided upon Comic Relief.

The team and I got our thinking caps on about the best way we could market and manage the event. It was clear that we would have to pull out all the stops on as low a budget as possible. We began by letting people know via our newsletter and on the People Building website, before contacting the

local media. After several weeks the local rag and the radio stations had not been in touch, and although the event was still a few weeks away, it wasn't a good sign. Then one day, I got a call from BBC Three Counties Radio, asking if they could interview me over the phone about phobias. It was the first time I'd ever been on the radio, and whilst I was excited, I was a bit disappointed that I wasn't going to the station to record it. However it went pretty well, and I expected the responses to come flooding in, but they didn't. Then another station got in touch (Passion for the Planet). They also wanted to do an interview which I gladly accepted. This time I also got an invite to record it in the studios. Forty miles away in Wimbledon. It was a bad day from the start, I was cursing the train fare, for the train which was 40 minutes late and as I marched my way through Vauxhall train station, failed to see some split coffee on the buffed vinyl flooring, slipped backwards, and landed with an almighty thud on my backside. As expected, the busy commuters stepped over the top of me, as I sat negotiating with my legs to start working again. I eventually scrapped myself off the ground, made a complaint and now running incredibly late, continued on my way to the radio station. The entire interview lasted 5 minutes and I wasn't allowed to mention the phobia cure. Great!

You need Spiderman, I got you Spiderman

By this stage, I was starting to get the message that we needed to do something really extreme to publicise the phobia cure event and raise any money for Comic Relief. Someone, (not me I'm sure) came up with the idea of handing out information about the event whilst dressed as giant spiders, as arachnophobia is one of the more common phobias. Though when we put "Spider suits" into Ebay, we just ended up with a load of Spiderman outfits from China. Knowing that it was going to be a choice between a handmade spider outfit, consisting of two pairs of tights stuffed with newspaper sewn to my jacket or a proper spandex Spiderman suit, well the long and short of it is we all decided on Spiderman suits. So that's where Ebay China came in. I don't know if you've ever used an online translater, but I'm sure I was dealing with one of those instead of a real human being. Ebay China had the cheapest suits, but I had to try and negotiate a deal for 3 of them. This is the message I received to my request:

"You need Spiderman, I got you Spiderman you want. So I do you Spiderman 50 GBP Sterling for 3 at 50 GBP Sterling of them and Ipost them to you= 3xSpiderman+EMS=50 GBP Sterling. So you pay 50GBP Sterling and that gives you 3xSpiderman thank you."

The day the parcel arrived, I put my suit on and realised that not only was there zero visibility, but no ventilation. In fact, the boots, trousers, torso, arms, gloves and full head mask were all in one. The next day Karen and Adeline arrived and I opened the door dressed as Spiderman. I think they both screamed, but I'm not sure it might have come from people in the street, I don't know, I couldn't see a thing. However, I did see those two in their suits and it was just the funniest thing. I don't know what it was that was so funny, but the suits were very realistic and to hear familiar voices inside saying "Is there a zip in the crutch cos I think I need a wee..." just isn't what you expect to hear from a superhero.

Are you a stripper?

Armed with our bucket and a banner made from 2 dado rails and a big piece of card waterproofed with cling film, we set off to become hero's. Lucky for us it was a busy day in Hemel Hempstead town centre. We shook our bucket and shouted loudly, and eventually people started to drop in a few coins. There was a wobbly moment when we were approached by a policeman who asked if we had a permit, but Adeline managed to defuse the situation by asking him if he was a stripper, and somehow we managed to talk ourselves out of being awarded ASBO's.

The pensioners and kids were the best. We'd made pom-poms out of wool that were supposed to resemble spiders, but started giving them out to the children instead. The fire brigade went past and gave us a wave and a lot of men asked to take our picture on their camera phones- I can't think why! At lunch we went home and were pleasantly surprised to discover that the Hemel Hempstead donation came to about £65.00.

Saggy crutches, spit and chaffing

It was at this point whilst removing our suits so that we could eat lunch, that we discovered that a zip up the back of your head, isn't ideal when you have hair. Also that the colour was coming out of the suits and everything that came into contact with them, including our skin, was covered in red dye. But the show went on. We next went to St Albans where the novality of being Spiderman began to wear off. For a start it was freezing, our suits were beginning to frey at the feet. Adeline was becoming increasingly anxious about her saggy crutch, and Karen about the wet patch from where she was breathing. I found that the spandex was not only dying the colour of my skin, but also chaffing the end of my nose. To top it off, St Albans just didn't cough up the cash (although one lady did give us £5.00). Mostly they just smiled and walked past. So as a town, St Albans contributed the least (shame on them!) From there we went to Borehamwood where we helped a man who'd been mugged (part of superhero duties) who, incidentally still made a contribution with the small change that the muggers hadn't taken. When talking to the police about the incident, we even managed to get a donation out of them. Borehamwood made a decent contribution of £35.00 in half and hour, but we were really only there because the BBC is around the corner and we were hoping to get on the telly.

The next day we sewed up our feet and went to Watford. Again it was freezing and again the pensioners and children were the best contributors. We found that getting money in the bucket was easier than advertising the phobia cure. Particularly when we approached people and asked "Do you have a phobia?" and they replied "No thank you" as if we were trying to give them one!

Chronic Release

After Watford, we went to a local school to pick up Adeline's daughter. The school kids flocked around us, some even gave money, but trying to explain why Spiderman's choice of vehicle is a Ford Focus...!

We rounded up the day by going back to Hemel with Adeline's daughter who felt she was missing out on the action. However we didn't have a suit for her and had to improvise slightly. She was dressed as a cat, with no ears, no tail and shoe polish on her face. She did a good job of helping us and was able to get away with chasing people up the street which we'd have probably got beaten up for. She did struggle with the name of the charity though and kept shouting out to people that we needed money for "Chronic Release."

In total we raised £175.00 from going out in our Spiderman suits.

The Big Phobia Cure

The BIG day came and although we had an agenda, we hadn't rehearsed, we'd had enquiries, but were not definite on the numbers. We knew we wanted it to be fun and full of energy so we used the following 5 techniques, interspersed with massages, dancing and other general silliness. We began by testing how intense each persons fear was out of 10 (10/10 being the most intense fear) and then tested at various intervals throughout the 2 hours.

The techniques we used were:

Communication Model (to gain understanding of the mind) and Submodalities exercise.

NLP Fast Phobia Cure

EFT

Swish Pattern

Hypnosis

Everyone there, experienced a decrease in their level of fear and those who really got into the techniques had the best results from them. One lady who was arachnophobic, even manged to handle a bird eating spider in a display case at the end.

Thank you to all of the participants for their good spirit throughput the event.

In total we raised £60.00 from the phobia cure event but our grand total raised was £295.00 and you can still make a donation now by clicking this link

All of the money we raise will be donated to "Chronic Release."

We would of course, like to thank all of you who have made a donation so far and all of those who attended the event. On behalf of Comic Relief, People Building would like to extend a special thank you to the Express Holiday Inn at Apsley Lock for providing the perfect venue. I would like to also personally thank all of the People Building team for their hard work and assistance.

By Gemma Bailey.

Comic Relief is a registered charity no. 326568 www.comicrelief.com