So last night I worked with someone on becoming a non-smoker. Smoking is a tough nut to crack because there is more going on than a simple habit. After all, for smokers, being a smoker is a habit, a belief and an identity, and you really need to work on all 3 to effect a change.
We did a whole bunch of work around the triggers for smoking, and worked to break the unconscious behaviours around those triggers. The idea here is to make the decision to smoke in certain situations and conscious one rather than unconscious. Once it is conscious then you have choice over whether to smoke or not. We didn’t have time to work on every single trigger, instead we focused on the most important ones. If you are interested in more detail of what I did, contact me and we’ll chat about it on email.
One of the coolest things we did was something that I haven’t tried before, and that is getting the client to make contact with their unconscious mind. You see, a lot of NLP seems just like fun on the surface, and it’s easy for a client to go away a little tranced, wondering what the point was and spending effort disbelieving that any change was made. In my experience I haven’t had anyone disbelieve all of the change, but they can affect the impact of the change if they disbelieve it strong enough.
So inspired by part of the reframing technique in my lovely new copy of Bandler & Grinder’s ‘Frogs Into Princes’, and similar to the technique used by Richard Bandler in ‘The Bandler Effect’, I decided to get the client to have a conversation with her unconscious. Tad James uses this in hypnotherapy to check that the information will be acted upon (see Hypnosis - A Comprehensive Guide), but you don’t need to be ‘in hypnosis’ (whatever that means) to have it work.
The idea was, to close the sesssion, that I would have her speak to her unconscious and ask it if it was ready to make the changes necessary to become a non-smoker. The intent was that she would experience something very unique that would serve as a convincer that deep-down, parts of her resonsible for unconscious behaviour had been listening and were invested in making the change that she wanted to make consciously.
So here’s how I did it. You can try this at home if you like…hey it’s a pretty cool thing to be able to do… to converse with the part of you that handles almost all of the operations required to keep you alive… it also happens to be much smarter than you and have a better memory, so getting in touch with your unconscious can have significant impacts on your life, career, performance, wellbeing and many other things.
So here’s how I did it.
The first step is to quiet the conscious mind. Your unconscious doesn’t necessary respond with words… in fact in my experience it doesn’t. So you need to pay attention to changes in your body..
Ask yourself internally “can my unconscious please communicate with me in consciousness”
Notice any changes - sensations, sounds or images that come to mind
Usually the unconscious responds with something that you can’t do voluntarily.. so if you find you can do it yourself, go quiet again and ask again, paying greater attention to changes
Once you have noticed the involuntary change, thank your unconscious and ask
“I would like very much to understand your communication. So that I understand, for the following questions could you please increase that sensation if the answer is ‘yes’ and diminish the sensation if the response is ‘no’”
Notice the response. Then begin to ask your questions and notice the responses. Be sure to thank your unconscious… after all for most people it is ignored for much of the time!
In my smoking case, the client was pretty gobsmacked by the response she got.. and we finished the session with her having experienced her unconscious telling her that it was ready to make the change to non-smoker. An interesting way to affect both her beliefs and identity about being a smoker don’t you think?
May 9th, 2007 at 7:36 am
[...] I spoke to my first smoke-free “victim”, who I helped about a month or so ago to stop smoking. She’s still going strong and is finding it easier every day. It seems that at the session [...]