Well this weekend I’ve been doing some research in to NLP approaches to helping people quit smoking. It seems that there are many approaches, tools and techniques to doing so. So far I’ve found interesting approaches from Tad James, Terence Watts as well as tonne of Hypnotherapy scripts and courses, but as far as I can see there is no universal approach. I’m not looking for a solution, just strategies and some feedback or ideas from those that are regularly using NLP to do so.
The most useful information I have found so far is in the form of the work of Richard Bandler. In Using your brain for a change, he discusses the power of the swish technique in helping people quit smoking, and in The Bandler Effect he works with a client on a staggering number of levels to give her the choice back in situations where previously she would light a cigarette automatically.
It seems to me that a good way forward is to concentrate on returning that choice to the client and helping them eliminate that “automatic” response in situations where they would normally smoke. These automatic responses have become coded or programmed in to our minds, as a result of our incredibly efficient unconscious making our lives easier for us my taking control of routine actions from our conscious mind.
My concern as a newbie to this is being able to capture and deal with all of the triggers that a person has - they might have twenty or more triggers to smoking, and dealing with all of them in one setting is probably impractical. There is also the underlying process that results in smoking. In The Bandler Effect, Richard Bandler talks about the use of smoking as an opportunity to relax, that due to people’s busy lifestyles, often smokers have an anchor of relaxation to the cigarette, and that it is important that if this is the case, that people can find something else to satisfy that need for relaxation. Taking that up a level, it is important when helping someone to become a non-smoker that I understand what smoking gives them. After all we do things for positive intent so I need to understand what positives smoking gives them and find a way for that positive to be anchored to something else, otherwise they could get “stuck” in a stressed state with no way to relax.
And the other thing I need to do is detach from the outcome. It would be easy to get hung up about having someone walk out of the 1st session as a non-smoker, whereas success would be a reduction in the number of triggers, and someone keen to come back and reduce them even further.
