Milton Erickson, the father of modern hypnotherapy, often used the story of how he learned to walk again, at the age of 18 after severe bout of Polio, by watching his baby sister learning to walk. He describes it in his book The February Man.

“When she first learns to walk, she picks up her right foot and moves it one step ahead. And then after that she has had the experience of moving her right foot so she moves the right foot again and takes another step ahead. She doesn’t learn to walk all at once, by putting one foot up and then the other, so she learns to walk this way and then she tumbles. But the baby has to learn to do it one foot after another. She makes mistakes in learning to walk, and she learns how with the fewest possible tumbles and without trying to hurry too much.”

He goes on to describe how, when we are very young, we seem to be programmed for this trial and error style of learning and we gradually piece together our experience of what works. That way we come up with our own personal method of doing things. That’s probably how you learned to walk, to tie your shoes, to ride a bike and to drive a car. Hopefully with more trial than error with that last example!

Erickson often used this story as a metaphor for a wide range of learning situations and it applies equally well to our lifetime learning of the wonderful game of golf.

So every time you make a mistake on the golf shot and maybe hit a bad shot, learn from it then release it to the graveyard of all the bad shots anyone ever hit. You’ve taken your learnings from it and discarded it. It will never bother you again, unless you dwell on it. You can also use the same technique to learn from other people’s successes and failures whether they be your playing partners or the players you’re watching in a tournament.

Maybe Tiger’s learning from and then rapidly releasing his bad shots when he rants, raves and cusses after a bad shot. I’d rather he didn’t, but it seems to work for him. And he seldom follows one bad shot with another – unlike a lot of people I know – not you or me, of course!

So what do I mean by Golf Hypnosis Homework

Well don’t worry; it’s not like going back to school. This homework is often just a task that changes your routine or increases your awareness of something you do. I often use tasks to help interrupt habitual patterns of behaviour or thinking. Sometimes I may give a task to directly intervene in a pattern of behaviour and other times the task may appear to my client as completely unrelated to their problem. Despite seeming unrelated, carrying out the task usually brings about a new understanding or allows the client to look at his or her problem in a new light.

The father of modern hypnosis, Milton Erickson, used to give people the most extraordinary tasks. My favourite was when he gave a rather depressed man the task of counting the chimneys on the buildings on his walk to work each day and to note anything unusual he saw up there. Erickson knew that when we in a positive happy state, we tend to hold our heads with our shoulders back. It’s difficult to feel down when you’re looking up.

Dr Karl Morris, one of Europe’s leading sports psychologists recommends that you keep your eyes above the flag while walking between shots for the same reason. As Karl says, “change your body and you will change your mind.”

Homework Task for Your Own Virtual Caddy

If you’ve signed up for my Golf Hypnotist Ezine, then you already have the free 25-minute “Your Own Virtual Caddy” golf hypnosis mp3. If you haven’t, then you can get it now by completing the form on the right sidebar of any page of my website. Just fill in your name and email address and click on the “Subscribe Now” button.

Listen regularly to the audio recording and complete the “Caddying” Homework Task. The purpose of this task is to give you the experience of thinking about and planning every shot rather than just walking up and hitting it. As a caddy, you don’t get to hit the shot yourself and have to hand over that task to someone else – like their unconscious ability.

So all you have to do is to caddy for someone else for a few holes or ideally a full round. Alternatively get somebody to caddy for you. If you’re not sure what caddying involves, then go to a tournament or watch one on TV and focus on the interaction between player and caddy.

Once you know roughly what to do then here’s a few different approaches, in descending order of effectiveness.

1. Caddy for a golf professional – may be difficult to arrange
2. Caddy for a good amateur golfer – 4 handicap or lower
3. Caddy for a friend – the better the player, the better the results and there may be mutual benefit from the exercise
4. Watch Tiger Woods in a tournament on TV and imagine being his caddy
5. Imagine a round of golf with you as your own caddy.

If you work at it, you may suddenly surprise and delight yourself by finding your golf improving dramatically with the unconscious help of your own virtual caddy.

Now one of the beneficial side effects of almost every hypnotherapy session is that the client reports sleeping better afterwards. What’s more, my clients also tell me that they wake up on time, feeling refreshed and eager for the day ahead. This seems to happen whatever we’re working on. And that includes golf hypnosis.

So why is that? Well, according to a recent article in New Scientist, medical experts have long associated bad sleep patterns with psychological problems ranging from depression to full blown mental illness. It’s only recently that these same experts are beginning to realise that the psychological problems are often caused or aggravated by the bad sleeping patterns and not the other way around. To quote the article,

“Take anyone with a psychiatric disorder and the chances are they don’t sleep well. The result of their illness, you might think. Now this long-standing assumption is being turned on its head, with the radical suggestion that poor sleep might actually cause some psychiatric illnesses or lead people to behave in ways that doctors mistake for mental problems.”

What does this mean for golf improvement from better sleep?

I can well remember times in my past, before I discovered the world of NLP and Hypnosis, when I was really worked up the night before the Club Championships or some other important game. I’d wake up many times throughout the night and struggle to sleep at all after about 4am. These days, I just use self-hypnosis to relax myself and I wake up in the morning feeling relaxed and positive. More importantly, I played better golf and enjoy my golf more.

Did you notice how relaxed Retief Goosen looked at the start of his round last Sunday before winning the Transitions Championship on the PGA Tour? Despite the pressure of almost 4 years without a win, he didn’t look like he’d missed a wink of sleep the night before.

How different from Rory McIlroy before his first win at the Dubai Desert Classic a month or so ago. He looked completely out of sorts all day, despite starting the final day 6 shots ahead, and really gritted his teeth on that last hole to win – it was magnificent. He certainly didn’t look like he’d had a restful night’s sleep.

The brain translates these sensory inputs into the corresponding sensory representations or maps that create a likeness or a synthesis of our original perceptions. As such, they create our own personal map of reality that we store in our brain in the same way that a mapmaker creates a simplified representation of the physical territory described. As Richard Bandler says, “the map is not the territory” – one of the precepts of NLP.

In encoding this information in our brains we don’t just use the five sensory modalities or representational systems. We also break them down into smaller discreet units Bandler refers to as submodalities and we store our experiences at this more detailed level. For example, when we hear a sound, we can identify and store by the submodalities of volume, tone, tempo, pitch, pace, direction, intensity, duration, etc. Our unconscious mind uses similar submodalities for images, feelings, tastes and smells. These submodalities are very useful in many other areas of NLP, outside the scope of this document.

As we go through life, we use all our representational systems, all the time. However we do tend to have individual preferred system or modality. You will notice that some people when they talk more often use visual terms, when they are describing things, like “to see her”, “I examined it” or “I can’t quite see what you’re talking about.” Other people will prefer auditory terms like “I hear what you say” or “that sounds about right.” Others again may use kinaesthetic or feeling terms like “well I feel what you’re saying is right” or “I have a hunch that you are correct.” Less often you will find people who prefer to use terminology relating to smell and taste.

There are some other clues to representational system preference available from a person’s manner and physiology. Visual people often speak quickly and in a higher than average pitched voice. They also seem to think more quickly. They will appear neat and tidy and sit or stand erect with their eyes pointing slightly upward – see Eye Accessing Cues below. They tend to take shallow breaths from the top of their lungs.

Auditory people speak in more resonant tones at a medium pitch and their voice may sound more rhythmic or musical. They often like talking and listening to music and are easily distracted by noise. Sometimes, they will hold their head on one side in conversation, as if on the phone. They tend to move their eyes sideways when accessing their thoughts and they breathe from their diaphragm or middle of their chest.

Kinaesthetic people tend to look down to their right when accessing memories and breathe from the stomach. They often have a deep voice and talk fairly slowly with deliberate phrasing of their words. They seem to think more slowly than other people and they respond more to touch and feeling.

If you communicate with people using their preferred representational system and predicates, you will much more rapidly develop understanding with them and build rapport than if you cross communicate. Indeed, when communicating with a large group of people, such as in a presentation or report, it is better to mix up your own representational systems so as to make sure that you hit the button for all the people in your audience, rather than just the ones that are on the same wavelength as you.

It is very easy, with practice, to identify somebody’s preferred or lead representational system. Just get them talking about something that really matters to them and you’ll soon pick up the representational system predicates they use.

Eye Accessing Cues

According to Terrence McLendon, in his book The Wild Days – NLP 1972-1981, eye accessing patterns were discovered during an “open chair” Gestalt Therapy session run by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the originators of NLP. They noticed that someone was looking up when using visual predicates and then looking down to the right when using kinaesthetic ones. John and Richard explored the possibility that the person was seeing pictures in their mind in the first case and experiencing feelings in the second.

The conclusion of their further research was that when we access and process information internally, we do it in any one or more of the 5 representational systems. More importantly when we access a particular system, our eyes move automatically and systematically, if only for a fraction of a second sometimes, in a pre-determined direction according to the system used. They even found that for visual and auditory systems, we also look to one side or the other, depending on whether we are remembering or imagining a particular picture or sound.

The diagram below illustrates eye-access cues as you will see them when looking at a client. The diagram may be reversed horizontally (remembered or imagined) in a few rare cases, but it is easy to calibrate if you are unsure. Just see which way someone’s eyes move when you ask them to think of something like a cow with blue spots, assuming they have never seen one, or to remember a piano concerto played on a saxophone!

You can use eye accessing cues very effectively to determine how someone is thinking and you can use this knowledge very effectively in matching to develop understanding and rapport. You can also use them to elicit strategies when modelling how people do things. As someone talks through or thinks through the way they do something, you can see the sequence of brain processes they use by watching their eye movements. You can then ask them what they were thinking about when the accessed a particular representational system.

NLP Eye Accessing Cues

• Visual Constructed – seeing images of things never seen before or seeing things in a different way
• Visual Remembered – seeing images of things seen before, in the same way
• Auditory Constructed – hearing sounds not heard before or hearing sounds differently
• Auditory Remembered – hearing sounds as they were heard before
• Kinaesthetic – mentally experiencing feelings, emotions, touch, muscle movement, temperature, texture, etc.
• Auditory Digital – simply talking to oneself internally

As a therapist she developed process-oriented systems to lead people to tap into their internal resources to create external changes. She believed that people’s internal view of themselves, their sense of self-worth and self-esteem, was the underlying root of their problems. She based her techniques and processes around looking clearly and congruently inward at oneself to view how we originally learned to cope with our world. She believed that the problem was not the problem but how one coped with the problem was the problem. Satir developed and named four stances for viewing how one copes or originally learned to survive.

Virginia Satir was also one of the three world-renowned therapists modelled by Richard Bandler in the creation and development of NLP.

She summed up her philosophy as the Five Freedoms:

1. The freedom to see and hear what is here instead of what should be, was, or will be.
2. The freedom to say what one feels and thinks, instead of what one should.
3. The freedom to feel what one feels, instead of what one ought.
4. The freedom to ask for what one wants, instead of always waiting for permission.
5. The freedom to take risks in one’s own behalf, instead of choosing to be only “secure” and not rocking the boat.

The Satir Survival Stances

Virginia Satir developed what she called survival stances to demonstrate how people cope with problems. The four survival stances are placating, blaming, being super-reasonable, and being irrelevant. She thought that these stances developed through people’s lives from childhood from a state of low self-worth, low self-esteem and imbalance, in which people give their power to someone or something else. People adopt survival stances to protect their self-worth against verbal and nonverbal, perceived and presumed threats.

She illustrated each of the stances in terms of their respect or disrespect of “context”, “self” and “others.” She also identified body positions to illustrate each of the stances and associated physiological effects resulting from the stances.

Placating
A person who has a placating stance views others and context to hold more value than their own true feelings. They are nice when they do not feel nice, they take the blame when things go wrong, they try to alleviate others problems and pain. Physiological effects that placators typically experience are digestive tract disorders, migraines and constipation. The placator respects the context and the others, while disrespecting themselves.

Blaming
A person who has a blaming stance discounts others and counts only the self and context. They hold the belief that they must not be weak, they harass and accuse others for continually making things go wrong. They say things to themselves like “If it wasn’t for …, I wouldn’t be in this mess” and “I’ll beat the…out of you!” A typical physiological complaint of a blamer is chronic stiffness due to rapid and shallow breathing. The blamer respects the context and themselves, while disrespecting others.

Being Super-Reasonable
A super-reasonable person discounts himself and others and respects context only. He frequently knows lots of information and works solely from a logical or objective perspective. He says to himself things like “Everything is just a matter of logic, emotions are a waste of time” and “I must be more intelligent and show how intelligent I am.” Physiologically this stance is rather dry! The super reasonable person only respects the context, while disrespecting themselves and others.

Being Irrelevant
A person that is irrelevant discounts self, others and context. An irrelevant person is often seen as amusing or a clown. They can distract attention away from any stressful situation. Their internal dialogue will be about anything other than the matter in hand. They are physically active and inattentive by whistling, singing, blinking or fidgeting. They may appear unbalanced. The irrelevant person has no respect for themselves, others and the context.

The Congruent Survival Stance

The ultimate goal of the Satir growth model is congruence. Satir held that high self-worth, self-esteem and congruence are the main “indicators of more fully functioning human beings.” The congruent person holds equal balance in terms of self, others, and context. “When we decide to respond congruently, it is not because we want to win, to control another person or a situation, to defend ourselves, or to ignore other people. Choosing congruence means choosing to be ourselves, to relate and contact others, and to connect with people directly.”

Using the Satir Survival Stances in Therapy

In the first instance, the therapist can use the Satir stances and their associated characteristics as a tool for recognising and calibrating incongruence in their clients. They can also respond to their clients areas of disrespect of self, others and context in determining desired outcomes.

We can also use Virginia Satir’s techniques for helping clients to transform their survival stances to congruence. This can be achieved by adding awareness, knowledge, manifestation and experience to the client’s outcomes. We can develop outcomes for our clients that add a sense of

• self awareness to the placator
• awareness of the other person to a blamer
• self awareness and awareness of the other person to the super-reasonable
• context followed by self-awareness and awareness to the irrelevant.

Finally, as therapists we can become better by building this sense of congruence in ourselves and in our communication.

A good example of Anchors in my own life comes from my late teenage years, when I went through a sad, lonely and confused phase. The feelings were strongest when I regularly walked along a sea wall on the East Coast quietly humming the latest Beatles record – Hey Jude. The whole repeated experience strongly anchored those memories to the song, the location, the feelings, the smell of the sea, the plants along the walk, the sounds of the boats, etc. Now 40 year’s later, the whole scene, the emotional feelings, all the smells, sounds, images and my state return whenever I experience one or more of those sensations. Sometimes it’s a mixed feeling, when one of the stimuli fires of another memory. If I hear the Hey Jude song, I get those sad feelings mixed with the pleasure of growing up in the 60’s and all those wonderful Beatles songs.

If these anchors can be set up automatically, as in the example above, I can set up anchors deliberately to trigger physiological and emotional states and behaviours – in myself and in others. All I have to do is to elicit the state and or behaviour that I want, amplify it and then anchor it clearly and precisely in as many representational systems as possible. Visual, Auditory and internal Kinaesthetic ones are best. Conversationally it’s unlikely that I can use olfactory and gustatory externally, unless it’s a wine or food tasting event.

Conversationally, whether in a one-on-one or group situation, I can use more or less any combination of clearly marked gesture, facial expression, word, phrase, tonality change, etc. to anchor my audience’s current state. Paul McKenna uses the word “Now!” spoken in a clear tonality with an exaggerated snap of the fingers of his left hand, out to his left side and level with his elbow, and combine with a noticeable dip of his knees. With physical gestures and actions, the location of the gesture is as important as the gesture itself.

At Paul’s training courses, each presenter has their own specific theme tune that booms out as they walk out to the stage at the beginning of their session. At the end of their session, they boost the audience crowd up to a crescendo and then anchor it by with the theme tune as the leave the stage. At the end of every lunch or coffee break, there is the usual hubbub of chatter and movement, but as soon as the theme tune starts, everybody changes state back to the crescendo and rushes back to their seat.

You may have noticed that stand-up comedians use different parts of the stage to anchor and later elicit specific reactions from the audience. If they move to a specific place and make the right gestures, the audience will laugh at whatever they say. They can move from slapstick to pathos simply by moving around the stage.

We don’t need to move around to anchor well conversationally; we just make the gesture parts of our anchors in consistent spatial locations around ourselves.

So what might I want to anchor conversationally? I might want anchors to let people know when I am being serious, sad, relaxed, focussed or elated. I might want to bring back a specific learning experience, such as a metaphor or story. I could use an anchor to stop an unhelpful action. There’s a story of John Grinder In fact, more or less any memory, behaviour or state that might help me to communicate better.

You can use anchors to stop unhelpful behaviours and states as well. There’s a story of John Grinder utilising a woman’s mild fear of snakes to control her repeated disruptive behaviour in a training course. He conversationally anchored her more focussed and interested states to a set of his eye movements, where he watched an imaginary snake wriggle its way across the floor towards her. Every time she looked distracted, he looked pointedly at her and then followed the imaginary snake.

Milton Erickson uses a conversational anchor for resourceful emotions of an old memory in the Monde case study in the book Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton Erickson Volume II – Transcript I. Erickson asks Monde to find a happy experience and she remembers when she was 2 years old and splashing in the water. Erickson this verbally and whenever he needs that state in therapy, he says with a particular tonality “2 year old Monde … splashing in the water.”

My “Control Panel”

In conversation and when presenting, it is useful to have a consistent personal set of anchors to set and trigger to elicit particular memories and states in the people I talk with. If I use the same ones for every situation, they will be easier to remember. Whenever I am in conversation with someone new, I can then look out for or elicit a desired state in the other person or people and anchor it in my normal way for that response.

My initial control panel of conversational anchors are for when I want people to be

• Amused – gently throwing my head up and back, while bringing my elbows in, back and up, smiling exaggeratedly with my lips closed and quietly chuckling to myself
• Focussed – moving the top of my body and head slightly up and forward, while bring my hands up and slightly clenching my fists with the palms vertical and markedly focussing my eyes on the audience and saying “Now!” gently
• Relaxed – slowly breathing out deeply, while bringing in a relaxed smile and saying/sighing “OK”
• Excited – lightly clenching my fists as I lift my hands upwards in front of me from the elbows, while slightly smiling, widening my eyes and saying “Yes!”
• Sad – slowly shrugging my shoulders in and down, dipping my head to my lift (their right), partially closing my eyes and dipping my forehead forwards while sighing quietly and saying a downwardly inflected “Huh!”
• Quick – bringing my elbows in to my side with my lower arms pointing forward and level, while gesturing up with my fingers/hands, nodding my head slightly and a bit quickly and saying “Right!”
• Slow – bringing my elbows in to my side with my lower arms pointing forward and level, while gesturing down with my fingers/hands, nodding my head slightly and a bit slowly and saying “Slow…” quietly and fading out
• Visual – looking upwards a few times while quietly saying “see!”
• Auditory – looking from side to side a few times while quietly saying “hear” or “here”
• Kinaesthetic – looking down to my left (their right) while rocking my stomach slightly from side to side once or twice while saying “mmm…” quietly and inflexed upward for good feelings and downward for less good ones

Identifying Frank’s Strategies
As the therapist, stay alert and in an externally focussed state throughout the process.

Establish rapport with Frank and confirm the purpose for the session – to identify his strategy for doing his fear of flying behaviour – the limiting behaviour.

Identify the precise circumstance in which Frank has his fear of flying. Many strategies apply in different circumstances and parts of life. Some only occur is certain situations such as work, family, relationship or hobby. In Frank’s situation, it is more limiting in a social context.

Ask Frank to remember the earliest and or worst time he can remember experiencing his fear of flying. Confirm the specific date and time before asking him to visualise the experience, making sure that he is associated in the experience. If he isn’t, get him to imagine stepping inside himself in the remembered experience, seeing what he is seeing, hearing what he is hearing, feeling what he is feeling and listening to his remembered internal dialogue.

1. When I sense from Frank’s physiological appearance that he is nearing the peak of his experience, anchor his state. I might need to trigger it again, while eliciting his strategy and the associated submodalities.
   a. Ask Frank questions about his experience, in the present tense to help him remain associated, about his experience. Look for the representational system he is using when reliving and describing the experience by watching for eye-accessing and other physiological cues and listening for linguistic ones.
   b. Use unspecified predicates, such as “How do you think about…” to elicit which representational systems Frank is using during specific steps in his strategy.
   c. Use multiple-choice content non-specific questions such as do you see a picture?”, “hear something?”, “have a feeling about it?” and “do you say something to yourself?” Eliciting all the major representational modalities – V, A, K and Ad – of Frank’s strategies
2. Continue exploring Frank’s strategies using who, what, where and questions such as:
   a. How do you know you are experiencing your fear of flying?
   b. What happens first?
   c. What happens next?
   d. What happens just before?
   e. How do you know that you have finished?
3. During the elicitation process:
   a. Maintain awareness of non-verbal signals including tonality, hesitation, emphasis, emotion, confidence, uncertainty, etc.
   b. Watch out for loops in Frank’s strategies, as well as the overall TOTE one, both through his language and his unconscious physiology. I won’t gain any great benefit from iterating these smaller loops.
   c. Make sure I have the main functional pieces or chunks of his strategy. Part of strategy elicitation involves my identifying where a strategy starts and ends. I must also decide on relevant chunks that I may want to chunk down at this stage.
4. Move forward with these techniques through the main and associated parts of Frank’s overall strategy for his fear of flying. When he reaches the exit phase of the strategy, fire the anchor to get him to relive the experience or take him back to step 5 and repeat the process until all possible strategies are elicited.
5. If necessary and/or appropriate, get Frank to go back and relive his fear of flying experience in another context – perhaps flying with the family or with work colleagues. Ensure that I have the main functional steps or chunks of Frank’s strategy including where they start, end and
6. Feed the sequence back to Frank, calibrating his response and checking for congruence and confusion. If it’s not right, go back to step 5 recheck the strategy.
7. Now go through each step in Frank’s key strategies and elicit as much information as I need to achieve his desired outcome. Look for the key submodalities and the internal or external aspect of each VAK modality.
   a. Carefully and cautiously test the strategy and see if I can experience the same fear of flying as Frank. Test again with a similar fear or in another context to experience how the strategy works independently.
   b. Test whether the strategy fails if Frank the person omits or changes one or two steps in his strategy.
   c. Seek to the key elements and submodalities needed for his strategy to succeed.

Make yourself comfortable now; with both feet flat on the ground and just separate your hands, hands apart left and right. And let them lie loosely on your legs or on the arms of your chair. It’s better if your legs are uncrossed, but it doesn’t matter if you feel the need to move slightly, now and again. You don’t have to be absolutely still. You’re feeling comfortable now.

Now take a deep breath in and hold it for a moment, before releasing it slowly. That’s good.

Now focus your concentration on a real or imaginary point on the wall in front of you and, I don’t know if you will close your eyes now or in a few moments, but when you do, just keep listening quietly to my voice and continue to imagine that point on the wall. You’ll be aware of other sounds too; the sounds inside the building, sounds from outside the building, maybe passing traffic, but those won’t disturb you, because, in fact, they will help you to relax more now. You may even find that your mind wanders from time to time and that’s fine, and wherever it wanders, my voice will go with you and travel along with you.

Now imagine that imaginary point on the wall as the centre of a large Catherine Wheel. It’s spinning faster and faster and showering out multi-coloured sparks in all directions, safely and well away from you. In your mind, hear the crackling and whooshing sounds of the Catherine Wheel and even imagine smell of the firework, a smell that probably takes you back to bonfire night in your childhood. And remember all the good feelings from that experience. That’s good.

Now in a moment, imagine the Catherine Wheel slowing down, slower and slower, as you get more and more absorbed in the moment and deeper and deeper into a wonderful relaxed state. The slower it spins, the deeper you relax. As the sparks from the Catherine Wheel diminish, you will feel more and more relaxed, calm and happy, while the firework just spins silently now, now silently.

And as the light from the Catherine Wheel disappears you feel more and more contented, calm, relaxed and comfortable, because when the wheel finally stops, now, you will relax into the deepest most wonderful feeling of deep hypnosis, as the memory of the Catherine Wheel spins slowly in the back of your mind, you are as relaxed as you’ve ever been.

That’s good…

One very common idea that people have is that being in hypnosis is the same as being unconscious, but that wouldn’t work, even I it was acceptable, as I need to communicate with your subconscious or unconscious mind to help you achieve anything from hypnosis. That wouldn’t be possible if you were out cold!

My own first experience of hypnosis was one of being extremely relaxed and calm, but aware of what was going on round me. It was a large training course run by Paul McKenna with over 400 people in the room and we split into pairs or groups of three to practise hypnosis. The room was very crowded with assistants rushing about the room helping people when one of them nearly knocked me of my chair. Despite being in hypnosis with my eyes closed, I did not react in any way and just thought “that was odd” and continued to focus on what the hypnotist was saying to me. My normal reaction would have been rather more aggressive.

Two Different Levels of Mind

The human mind operates on two levels, the conscious and the unconscious or subconscious mind. The conscious mind is where we spend most of our waking life. It’s where we make everyday decisions and analyse things. The unconscious mind operates just below our level of consciousness and generally manages the things we do automatically, like breathing and digesting our food.

We may consciously decide to put on our shoes, but our unconscious ties the shoelaces – assuming it knows how to. Do you remember how difficult that was for a while when you were very young? That was when you were doing it consciously and thinking a lot about how to do it. You may remember the same problem learning to ride a bike or drive a car.

The Conscious Mind

Your conscious mind basically does four things; Firstly, your conscious mind analyses. What is that? Well that is the part of us that looks at problems, analyses them and tries to create solutions to those problems. It is that part of us that makes decisions all day every day: “shall I open the door”, “Shall I have something to eat”, “what shall I worry about”. Even though they seem to be automatic behaviours, we make a conscious decision about whether or not to do these things.

The second thing our conscious mind does is to rationalize. This is the part of us that, especially in western cultures, always has to understand why – why things happen and why did I just do that. This can cause us so many problems as we give any problems more and more credence and power. More conventional and traditional methods of counselling or psychotherapy are often very much concerned with looking at causes of our problems and it is I feel that all this does is to teach us “why” they happen as opposed to giving us the skills required to change unwanted habits and behaviours. The more we think about “why” we do things, the more we seem to embed the unwanted behaviour into our lives.

The third part of our conscious mind is will power that teeth gritted determination that so many of us are proud to demonstrate. How many times have we used our will power alone to make changes and found that our will power weakens and that change is temporary or nonexistent? We have will power to overcome immediate problems, not long term ones.

The final part of our conscious mind is our short-term memory. By that I am referring to the things that you need to remember to function on a day-to-day basis, so that when your phone rings you know to answer it rather than stare at it wondering it is, or ensuring that you cross the road without someone running you over.

Put it all together and our conscious mind is logical, rational, analytical and focussed on the short-term, a bit like Mr Spock from Star Trek. Unfortunately, our conscious mind often over analyses things and sometimes ends up with the wrong answer. I remember in my childhood that my first answer to an exam question was usually right – before I changed it after further thought!

Your conscious mind is wherever you happen to be focussed on at the current time, but your unconscious mind is noting and recording on everything it can hear, see, smell, taste or feel – all the time or see. As an example, each of our eyes has something like 6 million direct connections to the brain with about 40 of them – the ones for the fovea – connected to the conscious mind, covering what were are currently focussing on. The remaining 5,990,960 are connected to the unconscious mind, covering your full peripheral vision.

The same goes for our other senses. I am sure you have been in a busy, noisy environment, such as a restaurant or a bar, and have been engaged in a conversation with someone and individual, and all the sounds going on around you just seem to blend into the background. Then suddenly someone else ten metres away can punctuate their sentence with your name and you pick it out as if it was being spoken to you.

If you take that conscious awareness and point it inside of yourself instead of outside into the world, you begin to become aware of your inner self, your unconscious mind, which is the part of you that we work with in hypnosis.

Your Deeper Inner Self: Your Unconscious Mind

Your unconscious mind is tremendously powerful and automates as much behaviour as it possibly can, so that we do not have to consciously think about it.

We are amazing learning machines and we learn behaviours and habits consciously and then our unconscious mind automates them and does them on autopilot so that we do not have to think about doing them.

Your unconscious mind has within it all your long-term memory. Just about every blade of grass that you have seen in your entire lifetime is stored away in your long-term memory ready for instant access given the right cue. As an example, if you have ever seen a live stand up comedy show. You watch the comedian and hopefully laugh heartily as you listen to lots and lots of jokes. Then when you leave the venue, you can remember none of them, or one or two at best! Then, a week later, a friend that you were with can just start to tell one of the jokes and you instantly remember the whole joke. The joke was stored away in your unconscious mind, just needing the trigger to find it.

You may experience the same thing listening to one of your old music albums that you haven’t played for a long time. I often can’t remember he words until the track starts, but then I can sing along happily, even f you turned the music off. I also start singing the next track before the previous one has finished!

If that sounds confusing, just think, you are currently breathing, your heart is beating, you are digesting your last meal, and your mind/body is regulating your body temperature and many other things. Your unconscious mind is managing a whole range of wonderful things without you having to consciously think about it. You are not sitting around thinking “I really must remember to breathe”.

Your unconscious mind is where you get your gut feelings, your instincts and intuition that communicate with you sporadically from time to time. Like when someone is saying all the right words to you, but you get a different feeling about them.

Your unconscious mind is a bit like a computer. Throughout your entire lifetime it has programmed itself with every skill you have ever gained, all your experiences, relationships, interpretations of the world, influences and beliefs. All this has culminated in your computer functioning with that programming. Hypnosis is simply a way of accessing that computer and understanding and updating that programming so that it becomes instinctive and intuitive for you to make the changes that please you. Your unconscious mind is the seat of your emotions and where your behaviours exist and it is the part of you that we work with in hypnosis. Hypnosis is a way of us stepping over your conscious mind and accessing the unconscious mind to make powerful and profound changes.
Naturally Occurring Hypnosis:

You may be surprised to hear that hypnosis is not new to you. I am sure that you have experienced natural trance states many times before, in fact I know it. For example, when you have been driving in a car and thought to yourself “how did I get here?” or when you have been reading a thrilling book or watching an exciting film and found yourself completely absorbed and with your heart pounding. Have you ever watched someone watching a physical sport and starting to move with the action – they are in a hypnotic trance. The only difference between these naturally occurring states and those that we use in hypnotherapy is that with the hypnosis, you intend to enter the state, you are in control of it and it is just like a slightly amplified, deeper version of the state. That is it. Sometimes it is simply like sitting in a chair with your eyes closed, not the magical mystical or unusual experience that some people are led to believe it is. And you are always in control.

It is important – very important – here to know that you cannot be made to do anything in hypnosis that you don’t want to do or wouldn’t normally do. If I ask you to stand up, you will probably do it. If I told you to go and rob a bank, you wouldn’t, unless that was your normal habit in life and you were comfortable to do it again on my say so!

What about Stage Hypnosis?

What about stage hypnosis you may ask, where the hypnotist asks people to do things that they would not normally do? Or would they? I have observed that many people who get up on stage “to be hypnotised” are extroverts who want to be the life and soul of the party. Typically a good stage hypnotist will select those people who want to be on the stage and then go through some sort of selection test to pick the ones that really want to perform. They also create an uninhibited atmosphere where everybody expects them to act silly anyway. I do not believe that the hypnotist makes the people on stage do anything they don’t want to. In fact, I have seen someone come out of hypnosis during a stage hypnosis performance and explain that he wasn’t ethically comfortable with a specific thing the hypnotist asked him to do. Up to that point he was participating fully in the show.

What if I don’t come out of hypnosis?

People are often concerned about what happens if I get stuck in a trance? The simple answer is that you can come out of trance any time you like, regardless of the hypnotist. It may be that you are so comfortable in trance that you may not want to come out immediately when the hypnotist asks you to. It’s your choice when you come out.

Anyone Can Go Into Hypnosis!

Anyone can be hypnotised as long as they want to be, even insomniacs, drug addicts, schizophrenics, people experiencing chemotherapy and people who are convinced that they cannot relax or be hypnotised. They all can and they all do.

All that is required is that you have an open mind, that you expect it to work and have progressive, motivated thoughts about the processes, follow the sessions and allow them to help you to help yourself to make the changes you want and deserve.

Final Thoughts

Finally, during an individual hypnosis session, I may ask you to do a number of different, seemingly contradictory, things with your mind. You could be forgiven for thinking “What exactly am I supposed to be listening to and doing?” The simple answer is that you listen to and follow as much or as little as you want to. Remember that is your conscious mind thinking those thoughts, and that is not the part of your mind that we are working with and making the change with. I am sure that there will also be times when you’ll be thinking “am I in hypnosis, what am I supposed to be thinking or feeling?” Again that is your conscious mind thinking that thought and it does not matter what it is thinking, just trust that your unconscious mind is absorbing all that you want it to.

There will be times in the sessions when I ask you to imagine things. Imagining things does not have to mean visualising. If I ask you to think of a favourite place, you can imagine what it would look, sound, feel, smell and taste like, you don’t have to be seeing a picture perfect cinema version of it in your mind. You can imagine, sense, think or just know it without seeing it or picturing it in every detail. If I asked you to imagine the sound your feet make when you walk across gravel, you know the sound I am talking about and you can imagine it, but you are not necessarily hearing it in your ears, you can imagine it. That is all I ask.

So, hypnosis is not like being unconscious, it is almost like having heightened awareness, it requires you to want the change, have an open, positive mind, as best as you can, and allow whatever happens to happen, without trying to grasp at what you think should happen, just let it happen…

Don’t allow any interruptions and turn off any phone in the room, including your and you client’s mobile, prior to any client session. Set up an appropriate signalling mechanism with the secretarial services.

Choose an adequately large room that’s reasonably soundproofed and maintain it at a comfortable temperature. Keep pictures to a minimum with generally comfortable images carrying little or no message that the client could pick up inadvertently. Display a small number of certificates and some relevant reference books in a bookcase or on a shelf, just to support your credibility as the hypnotherapist.

The two main items of furniture are the client’s chair and the therapist’s chair. Make sure that both are comfortable, but not overly reclining, as you’ll both spend a lot of time sitting in them. If at all possible, make sure that the client’s chair has some sort of unobtrusive head support so that they don’t readily slide or fall out of the chair when a deep trance. Ideally, both chairs comfortably allow the client to place both feet flat on the floor.

Set up the client’s chair so that they are above the level of the therapist’s eye-line – to make the therapists seem less imposing and authoritative. Ideally, when looking in the therapist’s direction, the client should not be able to see out of any window, particularly if it opens onto an active environment.

As a general rule, for a right-handed client, or for a client where you do not yet know if they are right-handed or left-handed, position the chairs at 90-135° to each other, so that the client is looking at you from their right hand side and you are looking at the client’s right eye. This allows you to unconsciously associate yourself with the emotions stored in the right side of the client’s brain. As a male therapist and on a case-by-case basis, review the option of sitting facing a female client rather than at 90-135°. In either case, position the chairs to separate the client and the therapist by at least 18 inches to avoid intruding into the client’s personal space.