watch tHe skies

The other night at the practice group we talked hypnosis - at a previous session (which I couldn’t attend due to vomiting family members), Dave Rose, a local hypnotherapist, came in a did some apparently excellent work with the guys. So they told me all about what they got up to whilst I was knee-high in baby sick.

Anyhow it got me thinking once again about hypnosis and what it is. There are of course many books on the subject - if you are interested in understanding a little more then I suggest reading Derren Brown’s “Trick of the mind”, as he covers his views in one of the chapters. The trouble is, no matter how much time people spend discussing or researching hypnosis, as it stands, it’s just opinion because we still don’t know enough about the way the brain and mind work (assuming that they are different). Sure they can talk about brain wave patterns, but that is still analysing the output of the brain, not the internal processes to any great extent.

So it’s interesting… what is hypnosis?

It amazes me how many people tell me that they aren’t hypnotisable… “I’m just not susceptible to things like that”. “Like that?” what other things are like hypnosis? Firstly in my experience the best hypnotic subjects are intelligent and creative, creativity itself is often sourced from altered states, so people who have high creativity, emotional intelligence and \ or vivid imaginations make great hypnotic subjects. And by subjects I mean that they are receptive to being shown how to hypnotise themselves… (more…)

I’m currently reading a book called “Timeline Therapy and the basis of personality”, by Tad James and Wyatt Woodsmall. It’s a practical how-to book to support the very useful NLP skill called timelines. Timeline therapy, something I have used very successfully to help people improve motivation and breaking habits, particularly smoking, is based on an understanding of how people code time, and how past experiences effect our personality today.

As the past is no longer true, that is we haven’t captured and retained the raw data, only our experience of the raw data, our personality today can actually based on false interpretations, and even if we did interpret the situation correctly we don’t have to be that person if we don’t want to, because the past isn’t happening now, and we can remember whatever we want to. (more…)

Thanks to Giles who sent me this link to an interesting article on the BBC asking just that question. He knew that this would get me going on one of my favourite subjects so I thought I’d post it here.

Leadership is a fascinating subject and I can talk about it for hours. For me the question they ask is daft because what they are asking is thus:

Are Leaders (and by that I mean the feelings and behaviours I have anchored to that word) made or born?

I guess at the heart of it Leadership for me is the ability to take someone somewhere. You could use a geographical, experiential, emotional, financial or any other metaphor for this, though the outcome is the same. If you have taken someone from one state to another you have led them. For some people this is done inadvertently (we are led in many directions everyday, and often by inanimate objects; i saw someone canoeing down a river whilst on the train yesterday and that led me to text one of my friends who is an avid canoeist), and for others it is deliberate; your boss, your coach, an opinion expressed on a website.

Leadership to me is a direction away from where you are or a reinforcement to stay in the same spot.

So what is a leader? I think that a leader has a belief in a direction, and the conviction and drive to get there. Motivation to act. And we all have motivation to act; I may not be Richard Branson yet put me in a flaming building and see my motivation. So we all have the capacity to lead others in directions that motivate us. A good leader combines this with the ability to communicate this direction and motivate others to move in the same direction. What motivates me may not motivate you, yet a good leader manages to motivate everyone in the same direction, and that comes down to a combination of empathy, good communication and the ability to gain trust from his followers, and it is this trust that bridges the gap between what motivates the leader and what motivates the followers.

So in answer to the original question. Can leaders be made. Yes we all have the skills necessary to lead, and we do all lead in one way or another. Some people attribute those skills to “classical” leader roles more readily than others. Yet we all have the ability to be leaders in those roles too. Good leaders? I don’t know, it would depend on your intrinsic motivations to be so.

Told you I could go on.

Way back when, in a former life, I spent nearly a year of it living in Windsor. A very nice place by all accounts except that for that time I was working nightshift. So my days were nights and my nights days, and the only time I got to spend in Windsor was mid-afternoon, where I would go for a walk, grab something for “breakfast” and relax before I started my shift.

One sunny afternoon I noticed that my hair was looking a bit tatty (it was usually hidden under a safety helmet) so I headed to the town centre to look for a barber. No barber to be found with a free spot, I headed in to a posh salon on spec, and was surprised to find they could do me then and there. Even more to my surprise was my hairdresser, a six foot amazonian woman in what could only be described as a belt and boob tube. Marvellous, I thought, as being on nightshift my exposure to pretty woman was mostly limited to whatever papers the contractors had bought that day.

What followed was one of the best hours of my life, as I had my hair washed and head massaged by this lovely lady, who then cut my hair precisely whilst I gawped at her in the mirror. I don’t remember whether the hair cut was any good, though I do remember paying £40 for the priviledge and being satisfied that I did indeed get value for money.

Now that was more than ten years ago, and yet that experience still stays with me, and each and every time I go in to get my hair cut, I base the experience against that memory. Indeed as I walk in, I hope to see my amazonian waiting for me in boob tube and belt, and I’m then hopelessly disappointed when reality doesn’t live up to my ideal, despite the fact that my current hairdresser is indeed very pretty. And of course yesterday I grumbled at the £30 I spent on getting my hair trimmed. Sure the hairdresser was nice to talk to, and I did indeed get a very relaxing head massage, and yet I came away thinking that £30 was expensive. I wonder whether I am setting my sights too high, and indeed whether the story I told you ever really happened like that? Still one day I hope to find another amazonian hairdresser, if indeed there ever was one.

Nightshifts do funny things to reality, you know.

You’ve read me harping on about it enough, so why don’t you do a training?

Mark Harris over at http://www.livingawake.co.uk is running practitioner training, some of the details are below, or head over to the website to find out more and make a booking, it will certainly be worth your time to do so.:

What You Will Learn On The Programme:

• What is NLP?

• Who discovered it?

• How does it work?

• How people with life long phobias really can get free in one session?

• How to control your emotions that feel automatic

• How to get into and maintain rapport with anyone

• How to generate in yourself motivation to do those things you have been putting off

• How to communicate you ideas in ways that others will love to hear

• How to fall in love with yourself in such a way that habits dissolve

• How to cope when life seems to be ‘on top of you’

• How to assist others to choose not to be phobic

• Stop smoking

• Cope with stress, anger, procrastination

• Have more choices regarding having depression

• In short, how they can run their own brains for a change!

When and how long is it?

This 12-day programme will equip you with the skills to be an effective practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming. You will experience NLP first hand; the techniques will be used to help you learn.

2007: November 3-4th December 8-9th
2008: January 5-6th February 9-10th March 1-2nd April 5-6th

So I’m particularly looking forward to this weekend, and attending a Self-Hypnosis training run by Adam Eason.

Adam is a foremost authority on Self-Hypnosis, and as such, it looks like we are going to be doing some interesting stuff, such as pain relief, personal reprogramming and lots more.

I usually try to set an outcome for myself before I do something. After all we are goal-seeking organisms, and as such we are much more likely to achieve our goal if we set one in the first place. And my goal for this weekend is fairly simple, to improve my communication with my unconscious mind, to be able to increase the dialogue in both directions so I can make personal changes to my habits, beliefs and values without needing tapes and CDs. After all, surely your unconscious will listen more readily to your own voice than someone else’s.

This should also help me to get in to state for photoreading quicker and more efficiently, as the initial moments of the photoreading process are effectively getting in to an accelerated learning trance with affirmations (self-spoken hypnotic commands)

And it should also help me with my own trancework with others. The easiest way to get someone in to trance is to go in to trance yourself, and this is of course self-hypnosis in one way or the other.

And so who knows next week I might be able to bend steel bars, turn invisible and fly (or at least hover), any of which are surely worth the course fee…!

I was reading an interesting article yesterday about baby talk. That is some of the theories around how you talk to your children and how that affects them. There’s a lot of views on whether people’s “inner voice” in adulthood is very much moulded by the way parents talk to them as children.

Now I make a point of only giving positive encouragement to little Ben. Right from when he was wee, to the strapping 16month old now who seems to understand everything we say to him. And going back to when he first started to react to me, giving some feedback, I would be encouraging, tell him how clever and funny he was and how much Mummy and Daddy love him.

And its interesting because it would get a reaction, it would, despite me knowing better, seem as if he understood the words even from a few months old, and would react accordingly.

And then it dawned on me. Something that babies are really, really good at, is watching and listening. He was responding to something, but it clearly wasn’t the words I was saying.

He was watching me and listening to me. He was reacting to how the things I was saying were affecting me. Because everything we say and do affects everyone in the system. And at a time where Ben didn’t know what words meant, he was able to detect all of the subtle unconscious signals my body was sending out to let him know that these were good messages, messages of encouragement and happiness and love.

And I think we all have that skill to greater or lesser extent even as adults, that empathic ability to pick up on the unspoken emotions of people. And of course we can affect them. Affirmations aren’t things we say to ourselves only, the words we use to others not only affects them, but us too.

So I wonder how different your next interaction could be if you tell them how great it is to see them, heck if they ignore the words they’ll still be affected by how you feel…!

I feel all warm now, come on it’s time for a group hug…..

One of the universally useful things I have learnt in my NLP studies is the power of language, both in the sending and receiving of information, that is:

•  How people tell you about their problems is a metaphor for how they keep their problems in place
• How you ask questions can directly affect those problems and help them remove them

Which is an amazing revelation given that previously I was absolutely ignorant to the importance of what I say. That is I, knew that there were certain words that would trigger adverse reactions from my missus, but that’s about it.

So to discover the rich vein of information embedded in the process of communicating has hugely affected every chat I’ve had ever since. This hidden communication means that there’s so much more information available with which to understand people. Some of the things people give away unconsciously:

•   Words that mean something really important to them personally, words that when repeated to them will literally have them jump out of their seat and say “YES! You totally understand me!”
• How they actually process reality - which senses they use to build up their understanding of the world, and hence how their limiting beliefs work
• How they have managed to make a little problem become a massive hurdle

See, most people miss the interesting stuff because the person they are listening to has hypnotised them. That’s right, you see we are all hypnotists, because content is hypnotic. If I tell you how I feel, I might use words like confident, excited, happy, nervous, all of which are content words that reflect something I am feeling inside, and for you to make sense of them you have to go inside and access your interpretation of that feeling, so to greater or lesser extent depending on your state of mind compared to mine, my words affect your state, ie I hypnotise you.

And this hypnosis draws you further and further in, away from the process and in to more content and deeper trance.

That’s right.

And that’s why the average career span of a psychiatrist is about 8 years… imagine being hypnotised by depressed people for 8 years? More than enough for most, and 8 years too long for me.

And yet whilst you are listening to the why you miss the how which means you can’t ask questions that dislodge those problems, you can’t get enough perspective on the problem to bring the person outside of their reality.

So the challenge of any coach is to resist hypnosis and yet take in enough information to be able to ask useful questions.

And that is where the real skill comes in, something I am improving at all the time and yet still feel like an apprentice when I hear the real masters at work, where every question is rich with deliberately designed questions and commands to help the coachee make really quick and powerful changes to beliefs. It’s fantastic to listen to, and if you would like an insight in to how, I recommend that you pick up a copy of Jamie Smart’s Coaching with NLP (www.saladltd.co.uk), it’s a fabulous example of what I’m talking about, his linguistic skill is superb, I’m still noticing things in his language that amaze me, and I trained with him for 5 months. I still say to yourself “you must learn how to be a skillful communicator“.

And Jamie of course didn’t learn to do this overnight, by all accounts he spent hours practicing and writing out examples and applications of language patterns until the questions came naturally. Something I am doing now, and yet find incredibly hard, firstly trying to think of suitable applications, and secondly thinking of a hundred permutations so that the pattern gets wired in.

So that gives you an insight in to what I do with my spare time. Lines, hundreds of them. Seems like a chore and yet I’ve already seen the benefit of it, when one well phrased question can make such a difference to the person sat in front of me. And for the knowing amongst you, I wonder how many NLP language patterns you can find embedded in this post?

I get a lot of people emailing me because the link from this post about handshake interrupts has been taken down.

So it’s great that there is a new one available from Jamie Smart, that not only demonstrates how easy it is to put someone in to a trance, it also shows how easy it is to make someone feel good and how hypnosis isn’t all Derren Brown and dancing around like a chicken on a stage.

There’s no need for me to describe the video or even go on about the idea of pattern interrupts because it is all explained nicely in the video by someone who knows far more about the subject than I. Enjoy!

Another gem from Brian Tracy’s Success Mastery Academy is the use of affirmations. That is, using your self-talk to make behaviour changes. It works like this, a little guide that is a combination of the wisdom from Brian Tracy and Jamie Smart:

1) Identify a limiting belief you’d like to change.

We all have them, a belief, or a rule about the universe we live in that stops us doing something we really want to do, such as:

- I can’t start my own business
- I’ll always be overweight
- I don’t ever have enough money
- I can’t be happy because I’m manic depressive

The problem with these beliefs is that everytime we say them to ourselves, our unconscious mind hears them and does everything to help it be true. Your unconscious is incredibly helpful and trusts that what you say is what you want.. it can’t filter good from bad affirmations. (more…)