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.

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.

What I like is how, by changing the shape, colour and dosage of a placebo you make it more effective. Of course any kind of change work will be affected in the same way by things like experience of the therapist, certifications, professional membership, insurance etc. whatever the patient believes is important.

One of the things that I’ve noticed that contributes heavily to the effectiveness of a session is the discussion on how the technique works before and after the actual change works. If the client understands logically how it will work, then it is more effective. I just shows that actually it is possible to make unconscious changes through conscious, logical discussion.

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.

I can’t not take advantage of having a blog to write a Christmas note to everyone who visits now can I!?

So have a good (and sensible) Christmas and New Year and lets get together in 2010.

Enjoy,

Ben

Ben White Boulevard in 1977

Of course I’m not having $15 million dollar bridges built (although they’re delayed at the moment) built over me – I’m really not that big!

Anyway, I thought I’d acknowledge the fact that there will always be someone (or in this case something) bigger, better, faster and stronger than you. Of course that also means that somewhere (and I admit: I’m not going to go looking for them) there’s a Ben White who is smaller, less-good, slower and weaker than me

I’ve used this as a good way of feeling better on those occasions that you feel slightly inadequate.
View Larger Map

If you want to know what happens on Ben White Boulevard, check out impact news and if you’re in the area, why not stop by and purchase some flowers from www.benwhiteflorist.com who are not actually on Ben White Blvd, but are close by.

So you may or may not have guessed that there was more to my word test than simply the time it took and making you think about your favourite car. What the post was actually about is a phenomena called “priming”. I was hoping that I could prime you to be feeling loquacious and inclined to take part in the discussion and inform us of your favourite car and why rather than merely put “Audi R8″.  If you worked out what I was attempting to do (thinly disguised though it was) then you probably didn’t leave me any comments. If you didn’t, then I hope that you either left comments or found yourself in a debate or providing feedback to someone else later on.

There is a great deal of well documented evidence for the phenomena of priming so I am not going to write a thesis in this post. Instead, I will include some links to outside sites and books for your follow up work.

If you’re interested in any kind of psychological manipulation, be it in sales, job interviews, conversational hypnosis or even dating, then this is something that I recommend that you get your head round. While you won’t need to become a master, it pays to be aware of it. When you understand it, your subconscious mind will start to actively use it for you and you may from time to time become consciously aware of it. You may even already be using it without realising it!

What is Priming?

In essence, Priming is about subconsciously persuading your thought processes to lean a particular way so that when you are asked to respond to something else later, your response to the later request will already be biased in a particular direction.

This is not indirect suggestion such that might be given in a hypnosis pre-talk, but rather the pre-talk itself: priming the subject to accept hypnosis and hypnotic phenomena.

Having written this over a number of days, my word test was in fact extremely weak and contained more suggestion than priming. Priming is much more subtle than thinly disguised direct suggestions:

If I were to ask you whether you would prefer turquoise or teal as a colour (and wanted you to answer turquoise), I might prime your responses using my word test by including words like “sky”, “sea”, “stone” or “rock” as they are typically more likely to be associated with turquoise. This would have been a much better experiment, but I’m sure you get the idea.

Of course the danger of priming is that if you become aware of self-priming, it can actually have the reverse of the desired effect and even more so when others become aware of being primed (which is probably where my initial post failed).

Want to find out more about priming?

• If you want to take part in some ongoing research into our conscious vs unconscious preferences, checkout www.implicit.harvard.edu. You can try out the demo tests or actually take part in the research. You can take this as many times as you like.  While this is not immediately anything to do with priming, take a demo test and find out your automatic preference, then think about the positive examples of the one you didn’t favour and re-take the test. You may well find that you’ve changed your automatic preference!
• “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell – An excellent book about making decisions in the blink of an eye. He dedicates an entire chapter to priming.
• “Semantic Priming” by Timothy McNamara – If you want a “proper” text book on the subject…
• “The impact of subliminal priming and brand choice (pdf)” Karremans, Stroebe & Claus (2005)
• Here is another interesting study

Personally, I am happy with my little experiment with more comments on the initial post and several new registered members immediately following its publication: Well above the norm for my little site .

I have a little test for you. Please have a go at it and I’ll post what/why in my next blog

Rearrange the following jumbled sentences into the correct orders as quickly as you can (you can time yourself if you like):

• she it edit must
• they new typewriter had a brand
• jangling keys sounded the good
• big mouth he had a
• were comment they to asked
• into he action jumped
• length at responded they
• size and pleasant colour font a
• held it his interest well
• creative displayed his side he

OK well done, that wasn’t so hard was it.

Now answer for me the following question:

What is your favourite car?

The cool thing is that using some funky CSS controls, its actually all real text and you can highlight it and do all the usual things you can do with text! Hopefully, this’ll mean more hits from search engines