I have decommissioned the practitioneroftrance.com website, updated this site’s meta and title to be less hypnosis based and even changed my twitter name to @B_E_N_White rather than @ProffTrance

That’s not to say that I am going to remove all my previous stuff! It just means that I’m de-focussing: Acknowledging all my hypnosis and therapy interests and now integrating that knowledge and experience into my life going forward into new and interesting hobbies and experiences.

I will be keeping this site and updating it with thoughts and ideas and sharing any great or useful advice and learnings along the way.

If you want to check out my current project: kidmunication.com where I’m talking about communicating with children, it’d be great to see you there.

I’m not sure if you saw my previous post asking for a donation towards a charity called Catch22 so I thought I’d write again and maybe remind you that I’m doing this to raise £1000 to provide dedicated attention and education for a young person for a whole year through the Catch22 organisation.

I’m sure you get asked to give money to charity for all sorts of good causes by all sorts of people all the time, so I appreciate that you might not be overwhelmed by yet another call to give to charity. In my defence this is the first time I’ve done anything for charity and as you can see I’ve set myself a fairly steep target for a first go, but I have an actual aim and I know exactly where the money is going and exactly what it is going to do.

I too don’t really like the idea of simply filling the generic coffers of a “good cause” which is why I was so psyched to find Catch22 and actually go down and meet the people running the Gravesend branch where the money is going to go and actually see with my own eyes what they do and achieve there.

Below is a video about Auto22 which is a social enterprise and how I found Catch22. Watch the section about Boo: a graduate of the programme whom I have been to meet personally. Boo is exactly the kind of person whom the money raised will be helping: taking a young “hoodie”, with no prospects other than a life of crime, intimidation and benefits and giving them the time and attention to put them back on the path to a productive future as a fully signed up member of the local community.

If you, like me, want to actually see tangible changes as a result of your donation, then please support me in this and have a look at my Just Giving page and watch my video and see a bit more about why I’m doing this and the kind of results Catch22 give.

www.justgiving.com/Ben-WhiteCatch22

Thank you so much,

Ben

P.S. I’m jumping from 10,000 feet on the 28th August over an airfield near Maidstone, Kent.

P.P.S All the money raised is going to Catch22. None of this “sponsored” jumping nonsense: I’ve paid for the jump myself, so your contribution (plus Gift Aid if you’re a UK tax payer) is going to be used to help someone like Boo.

I write a lot about how the stuff we believe or don’t believe influences the way we think and the way we act and its about time I shared something with you that I believe in.

I believe in our ability to change: it’s why my blog is called “Believe in…” and my strap line is “constant change”. I believe in our abilities to make decisions based on the information that we have at our disposal at the time. I believe that, given different information and a different time and place, what we believe can and does change.

I remember starting A-level chemistry and one of the first things the lecturer said was “everything you learned at GCSE is not actually true.” And he proceeded to demonstrate just how our beliefs (based on three years of education) in how and why the world of chemistry worked were indeed inaccurate. Science has other examples with the classic “world is flat” scenario.

I’d like explain to you about another recent change in belief that I’ve had about how we can actually make a tangible difference to someone’s life. In the video below I talk about this and the lengths I will go to to demonstrate just what it is worth to me by putting my life in danger for the sake of someone else’s

I know that we all believe that we can make a difference to the world no matter how insignificant we might be and this is your chance to make a real difference to someone’s life. I’ve never done any kind of fund raising before, so please support me and show me you too believe people can change for the better by clicking here and donating something, anything; as I know that not everyone has £83 spare but even just £10 will make a difference.

www.justgiving.com/Ben-WhiteCatch22

Thank You!

Wreck diving is the best kind of diving in the UK and there are lots of reasons why I love it. On the well preserved ones, its like flying around the actual wreck and you have complete control of where you go and swimming around in the holds and cabins is other worldly. You feel kind of ghostly, like you’re from another dimension, one that is partly in the same place, but the normal rules simply don’t apply. Having said that, the experience starts right at the beginning when you’re swimming down through the green murk, feeling the anchor rope slip through your hands, not seeing anything apart from greeny blackness below. But then you start to see a change in the gloom and slowly up out of the depths, you start to see encrusted bits of metal with soft corals and as it comes towards you and you start to piece it all together and you suddenly realise that you’re looking at the wheelhouse! And as you look about, you can suddenly recognise the rest of the hulk and spot likely entrance ways into the hull. If you’re not paying attention, you might have to find another entrance because there’s a 12ft conga slinking in and out of the holes. Like a lace being pulled through a corset.

Everything is quiet and you feel stilled, relaxed and acutely aware of your breathing. When I was a member of the Southampton club, I used to lie on the floor of the diving pool on club night, just breathing in and breathing out: floating up a little with each in breath and sinking down again with each out breath. The most meditative and relaxing state I’ve ever been in.

The technical diving stuff didn’t really appeal to me, so I left the club when they all started doing seriously deep stuff with hours of deco. Not that I’ve done serious cave diving with string and specially mounted tanks, but I have been into various caves and of course inside wrecks and there’s always interesting stuff to sea or treasure to find. I remember swimming into a really massive cave in Lanzarote and looking back out towards the light and seeing the walls of the cave move out of the corner of my eye. On closer inspection with my torch, the walls of the cave were entirely covered in shrimp! I could hardly see the rock there were that many. Or the drift dives off Lulworth cove over the scallop beds where we’re drifting along in the tidal current at 5 or 6 knots and all the scallops are leaping up off the bottom and we’re simply picking them out of the water and stuffing them in our bags to have for supper. Can’t beat fresh, diver caught scallops wrapped in bacon on the bbq. There are always incredible and yet unexpected surprises like that and I’ve got a small collection of bits of treasure I’ve collected from various wrecks and other sites I’ve dived on around the world.

Well I think I’ve waxed lyrical about diving quite enough now so I’ll sign off for now.

Phoning the nearest garage resulted in me having to deal with a grumpy and reluctant mechanic who clearly didn’t really want my business or know anything about customer service. honestly, it amazes me that they can get away with the sort of surly and unpleasant demeanour and still be in business!

So widening the search slightly, I selected a company called Auto22 who had their company logo and web site address on their Google maps presence (always a good sign in my book). Despite being after closing, they took my call and were very helpful and understanding about the situation I found myself in and arranged for someone to come out first thing to collect the offending vehicle.

All fixed, they came and collected me and en-route to their garage I got chatting to the service advisor (Mark) who explained that they are actually a social enterprise, able to invest all their profits in supporting young people in gaining work experience opportunities, work placements, apprenticeships and eventually getting their first job.

Catch22: a charity for young people

The parent charity is: Catch22 and their website says:

“Catch22 is a national charity that works with young people who find themselves in difficult situations. Whatever the reason for their situation, we help them out. We work with their families and their communities wherever and whenever young people need us most; in schools, on the streets, in the home, at community centres, shopping centres, in police stations, and in custody”

Auto22: a social enterprise

It turns out that Auto22 is one of the mechanisms that the charity use to enable young people to gain education (they have a classroom in the next door Catch22 building where they are taught maths, English and more practical things) and provide hands on mechanics training with the aim of placing their graduates into apprenticeships and actual work placements.

I could not have been happier to be handing over money for the work on my car and the whole experience was easy and honest and I feel good that I’ve been able to contribute to a charity that directly benefits the local Gravesend community. Plus I’ve got a working car to get to my sister’s wedding AND a reliable garage to get the car serviced and MOT’d later in the year so I am more than happy to recommend their services here, plus its such an unusual and yet fantastic idea that its worth reading about anyway.

Doing something to support Catch22 and Auto22

I’m jumping out of a plane on the 28th of August, so please read my post about it and then contribute a little something to help. Thanks:

http://www.benwhite.me/2010/07/going-crazy-for-what-you-believe-in/

Recommended: happy, smart, efficient and good for the community

Auto22 offers: servicing and repair on all makes of cars and light vans, MOTs, and tyre and exhaust replacements.   All work is carried out by professionally qualified and experienced technicians using the latest diagnostic equipment, and they offer a free customer drop off and pick up service within a three mile radius.

Website: www.Auto22.co.uk

Call them: 01474 362 413

Whenever we learn or are taught something new, we often try it out and indeed most any form of training will have you do exercises to practice the new skill. What I find interesting is that, as someone who does a lot of self-learning, I am often testing out things I learn or theories I concoct in real life and I have to be extremely careful when I consider something a success or something a failure.

Most of us, at one time or another, have tried something new and we’ve fallen at the first hurdle, thrown our hands in the air and scoffed at the so-called experts who were clearly wrong as it demonstrably doesn’t work! I watch my daughter do this regularly and it is both challenging to encourage her to have another go and delightful to watch her eventially achieve it (normally after walking off and only coming back when she thinks I’m not watching). 

As adults while we are aware of the concept of perseverance and not judging a book by its cover, I still regularly see both clients and myself making these same mistakes. What is also fascinating is that we also do this in reverse:

We give something a go and when it works first time: pronounce it incredible success and champion whatever it is to any and all who will listen.

So when we fail at something, we have learnt by now that we should give it a few more goes before writing it off, but do we do the same when we succeed?

I wonder how many times we have succeeded the first time we tried something new, pronounced success and then had a series of failures and rather than criticise the new thing, we assume that we are doing something else wrong and embark upon some detailed analysis of everything except the new thing? After all: you clearly demonstrated that it works… didn’t you?

Food for thought and it certainly made my conversation companion go “hmmmm” yesterday.

Now as you read that previous sentence you may or may not have noticed that it seemed to have a rhythm and flow in the words and statements because I was employing the use of the words of power which means that after a while of listening or reading these words, the conscious mind starts to just allow the words to flow through from one side to the other without getting the full scruitiny enjoyed by a normal sentence which doesn’t employ these words in this way because the natural and continuous flow of the language and words in this way is much easier to allow the unconscious mind to process them because  our short term memories which is of course a function of the conscious mind can be commanded by your unconscious mind to change and as the words continue to flow from conscious to unconsious because your unconscious is capapble of processing an amazing amount of information without needing the imput of the conscious mind and I wonder if your conscious mind is starting to wonder which words in this text are the power words and perhaps what happened to all the punctuation.

The hmuan brian is aslo albe to udsenrtnda colmpex pasasges of txet lkie tihs.

And because we are able to process this kind of language where the letters are not necessarily in the right place it means that we are also capable of understanding and processing the meanings and understandings from entire paragraphs and literature where words are missing and in the wrong order and the wonderful thing about your unconscious is that you’re able to process both the surface meaning and the subsurface or unconscious meaning and whether you choose to consciously or unconsciously allow that flow from conscious to unconsious can happen because we are programmed this way to benefit the most from being able to do things consciously and unconsciously.

Now we’ve all heard of the four stages of learning from unconsciously incompetent, to unconsciously competent which means that if we are able to learn new things and make changes on an unconscious level because we evolved this incredible ability I wonder just how limitless our power really is.

Just a few conscious and unconscious thoughts. Enjoy.

Ben

Having recently attended JP Morgan’s awesome talk on fearlessness and how to live outside of your comfort zone, one the most interesting things was the concept that in procrastination hides fear. As an extension of that I discovered that I procrastinate about writing to-do lists and completing the items on it (if writing a new blog post wasn’t on my to-do list, I could even argue that writing this very post was a way of avoiding my to-do list ).

So this post is a short piece summarising some of my research into how to write a good to-do list that you can manage and complete.

Some of the bullet point items that help make a good to-do list:

Keep a single list

It seems like a stupid thing to say, however I have a whiteboard in my office that I write my to-dos on, but I can’t take it with me, so I also have a to-do list in my iPhone. I used to have a little notebook that I carried around as well, so I have to be extremely careful to ensure that the I match up my whiteboard and iPhone task lists. Ideally I want to be able to just use my iPhone task list or find a decent iPhone app, but there’s something I really like about writing a to-do list big on a whiteboard.

Why not find yourself a tool (either electronic or other) that you can keep one single list up-to-date and with you at all time so that you can add to it whenever and wherever you are. If you’re into mind maps, checkout this mind map on www.mindmeister.com which has a good list of online task management tools as well as online collaboration tools.

Categorise your tasks

This is one of those areas where people traditionally keep different lists based on different task categories or projects. I for example had a “music to listen to” list where I jotted down new artists and tracks as I heard them as a remind to find the on Spotify or Last.fm at a later point. Ideally, these type lists should all be on your one to-do list and its where technology and a decent task management tool can help because you can shrink the full list of tasks to only show certain categories or only certain projects so that the whole list seems manageable.

Plan ahead, schedule and prioritise

Always schedule your to-dos (see below). Set a time and date and a duration. This way you know when and how long each item will take. Also, by scheduling, you will get in the habit of checking that your scheduled to-do is not accidentally (or on purpose) scheduled to conflict with a pre-existing appointment.

Some of the advice I read about to-do lists talked about prioritising your tasks and it is a good point, however if you’re scheduling your tasks, then you are already prioritising aren’t you? Of course you may choose not to schedule every task, so perhaps prioritising those that are not timed is a happy medium.

Be factual

Only add those items you know will be coming up.

Adding imaginary or just-in-case items is you adding fears onto your list which will inevitably make your to-do list scarier and therefore less likely to be looked at, so why waste your time and effort creating a to-do if you’re not going to complete it?

Write in pencil

If you’re keeping a manual list, write it in pencil. That way you can re-order and edit your list without making it all ugly with loads of crossing outs and words straying onto other lines fouling up the layout of the list. If you’re list is ugly, you’re less likely to want to look at it.

Review

Put time aside (is that a task by any chance?) to review your to-do list and look at the items that you’ve completed and those that you’ve not. Ask yourself what it is that keeps preventing you from completing those tasks that habitually get postponed again and again and again.

There are two reasons that you might be postponing these items:

• You have an underlying fear of doing the task.
• The task listed contains several sub tasks and seems to big or difficult to complete now.

These are easily dealt with:

• Schedule yourself a dedicated time to complete scary tasks. Steel yourself and visualise yourself successfully completing each one before doing it.
• Turn the larger or difficult seeming tasks into projects each with their own sub-tasks. Now you can approach each sub-task as you would any other each one taking you a step closer to completing the overall project.

I hope you find some of the above useful and interesting and the writing of this has solidified several ideas and tasks in my mind as well, so I’m off to update my to-do list

I have added a page with my YouTube channel embedded in it so you can now watch the videos that I’ve recorded. You will see the page link at the top of the site next to the link to www.PractitionerOfTrance.com

If you want to find me directly in YouTube, search for “nedbloggs” and you’ll find my videos.

Have a good one.

Ben