As I read this on the train from Gravesend to Durham the other day, I had to   re-read this sentence several times. Was it saying that the character was beset by dust and as a result considered it his enemy or was it that his enemy had been destroyed and was now dust and that he didn’t need to worry about them any more?

Putting aside the fact that there could well be some poor punctuation in the sentence, much like the classic description of a Panda “Panda: Eats, shoots and leaves”, it got me thinking about the importance of emphasis on our words and how that emphasis can   completely change the meaning of what we’re communicating.

In hypnosis and NLP, this is called “marking” where we deliberately embed suggestions in what we say and write by using things like pauses, punctuation and putting emphasis on specific words of phrases within an otherwise normal piece of speach or text.

In IEMT (see the glossary), one of the sentences I use regularly to help a client elicit a certain feeling is “When is the first time you can remember that feeling?” What I do is “mark” some of the words with emphasis in order to embed a command and what I actually end up saying looks more like “When is the first time you can remember that feeling?”.

Can you   see the difference? In asking a question, I am actually delivering a suggestion or embedded command that the client’s unconscious mind will pick up and act on (in order to make it truly effective I combine this with other subtle communications but that’s the art and science of psychology and one of the reasons I love it).

Returning to my example at the start of the post: “his enemy was dust.”

Now say the sentence out loud with the emphasis on each word in turn:
- HIS enemy was dust
- His ENEMY was dust
- His enemy WAS dust
- His enemy was DUST

Doesn’t the emphasis on the different words completely change the meaning of the sentence!

How much does the emphasis, be it pronunciation, punctuation, tempo, pitch, spelling, font etc. make on the interpretation of YOUR communication? Next time you’re in a public place and you can overhear people talking, why not listen out for those markers and see how you could have changed the meaning of the communication simply by stressing the same words in a different way or in a different place.

Andrew T Austin (with whom I studied Integral Eye Movement Therapy) is running a very exciting training course in London this month specifically on the metaphors of movement and how we represent stuck states and other problems or barriers in our personal and professional lives through the use of metaphors. As a therapist and business consultant I listen out for these metaphors and use my client’s own metaphors to help them make progress (metaphor of movement intended).

The videos here are by Andy and really got me excited about the course which is running in London on the 29th and 30th this month.

I believe there are a few spaces left, so if you are interested, drop me an email.

Now of course it’s easy for me, as an outside observer, to help my friend discover the problem and allow him to come up with a solution (phone them up and ask!), but I know we all have things in our lives that we want to do but don’t purely because we don’t know what’s involved.

“Hypnosis in Gravesend”

I’d always wanted to learn hypnosis but had never done anything about it because I’d no idea what was involved. One day I just happened to be in the right frame of mind and I casually Googled hypnosis training in Gravesend and guess what: There was a course running not far away and at a price and time I could afford. It didn’t take much thinking to sign up after that.

Fear holds us back from so many things, but so seldom do we realize that the “fear” is not in the doing or becoming whatever it is: it is the fear of the unknown process of getting there!

Think of something that you really want to do but haven’t. Get a new job? Go on a trans-European holiday? Learn a new language?

Now ask yourself what is it that is holding you back from that and what you would like to have happen.

Could it be that you don’t know what is available, how to organize it, where to go that is the problem? In other words; could be the mystery, the lack of knowledge, which is what you’re afraid of? It’s not the holiday or the job or the language that is scary is it, so it must be the organising of the holiday, the “finding” of the job and the fact that you don’t even know if there is somewhere nearby that even teaches languages.

Diminish the power of the unknown with knowledge

This year, why not choose one of those things that you always promise yourself you’d do and rather than promise yourself that you’ll do it, simply find out what is involved. Choose a starting point and go from there. I bet you’ll find it’s not as difficult as you imagine.

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.

Helping a client in London with preparing for their upcoming appraisal, I was able to use clean language and the NLP Meta model to enable them to make discoveries about how the appraisal process could work for them rather than it being an hour where their manager gets to tell them stuff. Interestingly, my client also picked up on some of the clean language and NLP Meta model questioning methods and discovered that they would be able to use it to their advantage at the upcoming appraisal.

I thought I’d write some of the really interesting and productive bits up here to give you an idea of how it works and how you can use it yourself.

 A typical annual appraisal consists of (generally speaking) the following four elements:

• Previous appraisal objectives
• Assessment of performance against company values
• Training requirements
• Goals for coming 12 months

With these in mind, you could have a conversation with yourself:

What would I like to have happen?

I would like to receive praise from my manager.

And what kind of praise is that?

Acknowledgement of where I’ve done well, delivered above expectations, been part of the team etc.

And when acknowledgement and delivered above expectations, been part of the team, is there anything else about praise?

I would like some kind of reward.

And what kind of reward is that?

Well it doesn’t have to be a pay rise, but perhaps some kind of commitment to helping me further my career. An investment in me.

So you can see how you can really get to the bottom of what you want (which in the example above is not necessarily more money) using clean language questioning.

I’m going to skip ahead to the last part of the appraisal when your manager asks what you would like to achieve in the next 12 months. I know that a lot of people will go “umm” and “er” at this point as they genuinely aren’t sure where they want to get to or do.

Ask yourself

What would you like to have happen?

And be honest with yourself and take a note of what comes out no matter how strange or impossible it might seem. Once you have what you would like to have happen, you can then ask yourself the “what kind of..” and “is there anything else about…” questions that we started with.

Here’s some from the session I had with my client:

What would you like to have happen?

I would like to move out of technical and into sales

And what kind of move is that?

A successful one.

[Pause: Once you get into the flow of asking and answering the “what kind of...” questions, you’ll find that you’ll automatically start elaborating and expanding your answers]

I will be bringing in £200k or more and taking home 10% of that.

And what needs to happen for a successful move?

I need to be given a chance to prove that I can do it.

And is there anything else about chance?

I need an honest opportunity to show that I can do it.

And is there anything else about honest

Yes. They need to have the same belief in me that I can do it.

And when given a chance, an honest opportunity, having the same belief, is there anything else about prove?

I’ll show that I can do it.

[pause]

I’ll beat the targets set for me and bring home the bacon!

And can move happen?

Yes!

Of course there was loads more exploration about the how’s and when’s and in what order etc. but I hope this gives you an idea of how using some clean language can really help get the most out of your appraisals. And if you don’t have appraisals, why not give yourself one…

What you would like to have happen?

Book a clean session with me by calling 07818 005 123.

Read more about Clean Language use in business at X-Ray Listening.

I’m finding the whole thing incredibly powerful and I suspect I’ll be blogging about it again.

Coming from the NLP world with the meta model and such, Clean Language seems to simplify the processes even further and what I’ve seen and used is actually a much better method of questioning someone on their beliefs and frames than the Meta Model used in NLP [gasp!].

If you’ve not read it or don’t have time/intend to, then checkout the next two questions and, just as an experiment, use them in a few conversations with friends or colleagues and see what happens:

• What kind of X (is that X)?
• Is there anything else about X?

They are incredibly simple but a fantastic way of encouraging the speaker to elaborate and explain further what they mean.

The “X” represents the EXACT same words the person spoke repeated in the EXACTLY the same way with intonation, inflection, power etc.

The bit in brackets is optional and will apply in some contexts and not in others. I would trust your unconscious to provide you with it at the right time.

Take for example:

“I love Aston Villa” (I don’t btw, I’m just using it as an example)

You ask:

“What kind of ‘love’?“

The person will likely explain what they mean by “love”.

What is cool is that you can then use the same question again and again as they explain why they feel the way they do about their chosen team. Who knows: you might even discover a secret Spurs fan! (I’m not one of those either).

Lets have another example conversation:

“I’m really stressed!“

“What kind of ‘stressed’?“

“I can’t sleep properly and my eating is a mess!“

“And is there anything else about ‘stressed’?“

“Yeah, my boss keeps piling stuff onto me and I feel like I’m drowning in it!“

This initial conversation has elicited the speaker’s symptoms and perceived cause as well as their metaphor for representing how they feel about the situation. Using further clean language questioning you can properly explore all of those and allow the speaker to discover for themselves the solution to the problem even though they may not at first have been able to see (or swim for) a way out of it.

Have a listen to conversations around you and even your own words and listen out for the metaphors that we all use constantly. It is fascinating to do this because we all make assumptions about what “drowning in it” might be like, but you can pretty much guarantee that your image of that scenario will be quite different from mine. That’s where clean questioning can enable all parties in a conversation to understand each other’s metaphors and avoid making potentially incorrect assumptions about what the other person is saying.

If you are interested in reading a brief overview of Clean Language, checkout Wikipedia.

So I was thinking about how mirrors and photos may perhaps impact how we feel and it occurred to me that where they are positioned may also influence our feelings as well.

Sticking with the eye accessing cues theme that I started in the last blog, I reasoned that most of the photos that I have of my and my family’s past are on dressers, side tables and generally below eye level.

Perhaps the physical height of my photos has some influence on how I remember them…

As discussed previously, looking down and to the left is the typical accessing cue for most (but by no means all) right handed people for internal discussion and down to the right is where we (typically) access “feelings”.

So when looking at photos that are resting below eye level, are we accidentally influencing the way we access the memories associated with the photo?

I do have a handful of photos on walls at or above eye level (in fact I have one hanging over the computer as I type this) and I’ve always thought that they looked more sunny and happy than the ones that are on the side board and dresser.

Could it be coincidence that the photos that I have to look up at (entering the visual accessing area) always look more happy and sunny? Having realised this I’m not sure I can be objective enough to say, but I’d be very grateful if you wanted to have a think about where your photos are and how they make you feel or how they look and tell me what you think.

Its not just about eye accessing cues though: what about the concept and symbolism of something being higher or above us? or the reverse: lower than or below us? Might the symbolism of this have an impact on how we perceive or remember our history or present self?

We often find that people who find stuff daunting or scary often describe them as “big” and “close”. Using NLP techniques, we encourage the client to make them “smaller” and “further away”. Could this same ability of our minds to represent these things, actually play against us when we’re so carefully choosing the right photo to fit the space on the wall above the bed? What about the ones next to the plant by the tv?

This is where I started thinking about the mirrors again: what would the impact of seeing yourself slightly higher than you on a regular basis? I guess it would probably depend on how you see things that are higher than you. Would you see yourself taller and higher (better) than you are now, or would you see yourself looking down at yourself? What about all those cheap mirrors that we buy which ever-so-slightly distort our image: sometimes thinner, sometimes fatter, sometimes shorter, sometimes taller…

Back to the photos again, wondering whether having photos of your past “staring down at you” is going to have a positive or negative or indeed any kind of effect on you. Or do you see them as sentinels of excellence showing you how wonderful you are and how exciting you can be?

Feng Shui and mirrors

Distoriting Mirrors can distort your self image

As JP pointed out on my last post: Feng Shui practitioners have great faith in mirrors and they hold the kind of “cure all” power that diamond does for crystal healers. I found an interesting article on the use of mirrors in Feng Shui and I’ve extracted some of the suggestions for you here:

• Keep your mirrors clean (could a dusty mirror have any effect on how you see yourself?)
• Make sure that they don’t distort your image (I mentioned this one above and I agree whole heartedly)
• Use plain mirrors not crazy mirror tiles (Could they produce a distorted image of yourself?)

It could be a case of glass half full or half empty… Or I could be talking utter codswallop… Who knows, but whatever it does, I hope that next time you catch yourself idly looking at one of you photos or in a mirror, you consider what might happen if you changed its position or angle. Just to see what changes, and if you feel any different.

What got me started thinking about this was more of the eye accessing cues that I’ve mentioned before. I was finding that I was spending a lot of time internalising thoughts and deconstructing stuff which is all internal discussion (down to the left in my eye accessing cues diagram). Now I’m sure that most of us have, at one time or another, experienced times when we are far too internally focussed and over-think stuff.

I hit upon the idea of making a conscious effort to spend more time looking up and around. By doing this, it immediately reduced my ability to access the internal dialogue area and increased the time I spent accessing the visual and auditory areas.

I found a complete shift in the way I was thinking!

Suddenly I was externally focused and where I was looking up I found visual memories or fantasies (calm yourselves not those kind of fantasies) popping into my head. Of course initially, I found that my eyes kept wandering downwards as my thoughts turned inwards but as soon as I realised I was looking down (and thinking too much about stuff), I forced myself to look up. It didn’t take long to turn this into an automatic response to look up instead of down (incidentally this has all sorts of additional benefits and I thoroughly recommend that you start looking up more).

What has this to do with mirrors and pictures?

I’ll tell you.

There are two parts to this: Mirrors and pictures, and positioning. I will talk about mirrors and pictures in this post and positioning in the next.

Mirrors and Pictures

It is often said that people with lots of mirrors in their houses have a tendency to be slightly vain or self obsessed.

I’m not sure I agree here as there is a counter argument that people who like to see images of themselves are happy with the way they look and that they are therefore happy in themselves. Of course the images here are present “live” images displayed in a mirror whenever they happen to look in one. For those who like NLP, you could say that they are in rapport with themselves through use of mirroring…

What about people who have a lot of pictures of themselves? Well my thinking on this as an idea, is that this is very similar to having a lot of mirrors around the place: the person gets to walk around and see pictures of themselves. Invariably these pictures are of happy or exciting times that they have experienced in the past.

Can you see where I’m going with this yet?

If a person who lives with a lot of mirrors is happy with the way they are now then is a person with lots of photos of themselves happy with themselves in their past?

My thoughts were this: if a person is feeling depressed because they feel their life isn’t going anywhere and they can’t see themselves having fun/excitement in the future, perhaps if they started placing mirrors around the house, they might start to mirror themselves and find that actually they aren’t so bad after all…

Its just a thought that I had.

So what about positioning?

You’ll just have to wait for the next post!

IEMT: A structured approach to change

IEMT or Integral Eye Movement Therapy is the brain child of Andrew T Austin (author of The Rainbow Machine) and earlier this year I had to privilege to attend his London course and become certified as an IEMT practitioner.

The course was organised by my friend Alan Whitton of www.WestEssexHypnotherapy.com and run out of Regent’s Park collage in central London and taught by its creator: Andrew (and I will admit to getting my copy of the Rainbow Machine signed at the start of the course).

The course was awesome and Andrew really knows how to deliver training and keep control of the class – NLP practitioners, of which there were lots, have a tendency to start “helping” each other on courses like this: Andrew told us we’d be poked in the face if we started doing this He also said that we could poke our partner in the face if they went beyond the elements of the practical exercises that he was giving us. It was a fun way of making sure we got the point: Stick to the course!

One of the things that really struck me about the course was that Andrew’s years of experience in neurosurgery and clinical neurology means that he really knows what he’s talking about and when he pulled out a model brain and started pointing at parts of the brain and explaining physically what they did and how they worked, I was very impressed. Why don’t more therapy courses include understanding the parts of the brain as a minimum? I had no idea that our olfactory bulbs have such a large and important part to play in memory.

What is Integral Eye Movement Therapy?

Essentially, it a structured interview approach to a complete therapy session (or sessions) involving several techniques, so I will discuss the main technique used here:

When we remember something, whether it be a visual memory, a sound or feeling or even when we have an inner conversation with ourselves, we tend to move our eyes off centre in one of 6 major directions. These are called eye accessing queues and the diagram below (and I apologise for this) shows the typical association for each of these for a typical right handed person (there are exceptions of course and as a general rule, left handed people should switch the sides).

Look up the the left and you're probably remembering something visual. And: Yes that is my mug shot

What you probably aren’t aware of is that the eye accessing stuff isn’t as straight forward as looking diagonally up and to the left when you remember the colour of your front door. How far left do you look? How far “upwards” do you look? How about your focus: is it close or far away? Have a go at it now and choose a couple of different things to recall: If you’ve been to the bottom of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, can you remember what it looked like when you stood at its base? Can you remember what your parents look like? Do you remember your desk at school? Have a go at these and notice how you will probably look up to the left (or right if left handed), but now are you aware of just how differently located these visual memories are in that “up” and “left” quadrant of your vision?

What IEMT is really powerful at is changing the way we feel about something (or in fact many things) and one element of the technique is to re-program the way in which you access a state of mind. For example, when you feel guilty or distressed about something, it is probably associated to a particular memory or series of memories. When you recall the memory, you recall the state and therefore feel bad.

I find this fascinating and by using IEMT, we can change the way in which you access the memories and feelings by changing the locations of your accessing cues.

IEMT is a therapy system

IEMT isn’t all about eye accessing cues – its much much more than that, but I hope it gives you something to think about. As Andrew T Austin says: “This is not the grand unified theory of therapy.” It is however one tool in my toolbox of therapy techniques and it is a very impressive technique for fast and thorough change. I’ve helped alcoholism, depression and even agoraphobia with this technique just to give you a sample of what I can use it with.

Ben White is a certified and insured practitioner of Integral Eye Movement Therapy

You can find me and other practitioners listed on the official IEMT web site, so if you’re not nearby London or Kent and think that it might help you, check out the site and see if one of the other practitioners lives anywhere near you. If you’re thinking of seeing me about some IEMT, you’ll be glad to know that my liability insurance specifically includes IEMT along with Hypnotherapy and NLP.

If you would like to read some more about IEMT, please checkout the page on my website dedicated to it: http://practitioneroftrance.com/Integral_Eye_Movement_Therapy.php

It is usually the case that your body language is a result of your state of mind thus waving the subtle flag that you’ve trodden in a well placed dog poo, lost your best tie to the shredder and had an ear full for killing the peace lilly in the hall when someone caught you emptying the dregs of your coffee into the base. And all since half past nine and you’ve got an appraisal meeting with the boss this afternoon…

All that is quite enough to get one worked up and in a state right when you want to be calm and efficient-looking.

In my mind, there are two main elements that I would want to address here:

• Mood
• Anxiety

The bad mood is easy to cure: Smile

Smiling will put you in a good mood

It sounds simple and it really is! Force a big smile on your face even though you really don’t feel like it and after a few minutes, you’ll forget all about forcing it and discover that you’ve somehow managed to give your bad mood the slip (you may even find yourself having a water cooler moment with the office hottie!).

The next step is also an easy one: Steeple your fingers

A classic confidence gesture

Just like the smile technique, steepling your fingers when you want to feel confident will help make you feel confident! Combine the two and you’ll be well away (not counting the chewed up tie of course).

The key is to notice your gestures and body language when you are in a resourceful (good) state and when you want to recall that state: simply recall the gestures and hey presto – resourceful state resumes!

I think it was at this point that I realised that I’d been staring at the person sat opposite me on the train and quickly had to bury myself back in the book before they started to wonder about my mental acuity.