A really interesting little story to illustrate how our tax system works here in the UK posted on facebook by a friend of mine:

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Suppose that once a month, ten men go out for beer (or ten women go shopping if you prefer) and the bill for all of them comes to £100.

If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes and claim State benefits, it would go something like this:

• The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
• The fifth would pay £1.
• The sixth would pay £3.
• The seventh would pay £7.
• The eighth would pay £12.
• The ninth would pay £18.
• And the tenth man (the richest) would pay £59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every month and seemed quite happy with the arrangement until, one day, the owner caused them a little problem.

“Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your weekly beer by £20.”

Drinks for the ten men would now cost just £80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes.

So the first four men were unaffected.

They would still drink for free but what about the other six men; the paying customers?

How could they divide the £20 windfall so that everyone would get his fair share?

They realised that £20 divided by six is £3.33 but if they subtracted that from everybody’s share then not only would the first four men still be drinking for free but the fifth and sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.

So the bar owner suggested a different system:

• The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing. (100% improvement)
• The sixth man paid £2 instead of £3 (33% better off)
• The seventh paid £5 instead of £7. (29% better off)
• The eighth paid £9 instead of £12. (25% better off)
• The ninth paid £14 instead of £18. (23% better off)
• And the tenth man now paid £49 instead of £59. (17% better off)

Each of the last six was better off than before with the first four continuing to drink for free.

But, once outside the bar, the men began to compare their savings.

“I only got £1 out of the £20 saving,” declared the sixth man.

He pointed to the tenth man, “but he got £10!”

“Yes, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man.

“I only saved a £1 too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more benefit than me!”

“That’s true!” shouted the seventh man.

“Why should he get £10 back, when I only got £2? The rich get all the breaks!”

“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison, “we didn’t get anything at all. This new tax system exploits the poor!”

So, the nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

Funnily enough, the next month the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had their beers without him.

But when it came to pay for their drinks, they discovered something important – they didn’t have enough money between all of them to pay for even half the bill.

That’s how the UK tax system works (Other tax systems are available – see foot of blog post).

The people who already pay the highest taxes do tend to get the most benefit from tax reliefs and reductions.

Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy and they just might not show up anymore.

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Interesting stats and figures on who contributes what to GDP

Check out the top 100 FTSE organisations in the UK and how much they contribute in tax to the country:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/interactive/2009/feb/02/tax-database

Read the following article on which earning brackets contribute what to the Gross Domestic Product in the UK (in 2009)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8417205.stm (I also recommend checking out the BBC’s selection of comments at the bottom for some thought provoking points)

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Other Tax Systems are Available

(although there are only 2 really workable/used ones)

• The tax system that the UK (and most of the Western world) uses is the Progressive Tax System where you are taxed depending on what you earn. The more you earn, the more you’re taxed.
• Russia and much of Eastern Europe (Greece is considering it and there is a growing movement in the US to implement a variation on it) have a Flat Tax System where everyone gets taxed the same amount regardless of how much they earn.

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I hate scaremongering, and I’m not an economist (nor, thank god, a trade unionist) so I’m not going to point you at any more stuff that might make you feel uncomfortable.

I do however like a fair argument and it seems to me that much of the country has far too high an opinion of itself as to how much it contributes (or does not) to the country’s economic status and what the country “owes” them as a result.

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.

To my delight, he’s also included a whole load of free audio, video and PDF resources to go with it, including his “Hypnosis Without Trance” audio book. Now, I’ve been dying to get my hands on this for some time, so, with a couple of longish train journey coming up, I was relishing the thought of plugging in and getting to grips with hypnotic loops, the hypnotic partnership and the whole HWT thing.

I’m writing this on one of the said train journey’s (thanks to WordPress for iOS) and I have paused the book after only a few chapters.

Why? Because a throw away comment has completely changed my thought and frame of hypnosis and I am brimming with excitement at what this new understanding might mean!

James says that with the idea of traditional hypnosis comes the requirement to have a trance state that you must “deepen” and that this idea limits what hypnotic phenomena you can achieve because certain phenomena require a certain “depth”.

I think that any hypnotist who has actually hypnotised anyone will agree with me that some people don’t need as much depth to achieve things like hallucination while others can’t achieve the relatively simple phenomena of arm levitation despite great depth of trance.

The thing that has got me all excited is the idea that maybe the trance itself is a hypnotic phenomena.

Let that sink in for a moment…

When I consider that as a possibility all sorts of doors that I didn’t know were even there open up!

If trance is a phenomenon, then when we achieve other phenomena, we are actually stacking them together? What if some people can’t stack like that?

What if achieving trance is a convincer for the subject that they’re hypnotised? Or how about the other way round: that because they’re not feeling “tranced” that it’s not working…

If we dispense with the idea of trance as being a required milestone on the way to hypnosis, then engaging in what James calls the “Hypnotic Partnership” with the subject (although clearly I’m going to have to find another word to describe them now) becomes so much easier!

I bet that if budding hypnotists started with this as the frame around which to learn hypnosis, they’d find learning, practicing and engaging people in hypnosis sooo much easier!

I really can’t wait for the course and might have to start practicing this stuff before the date!

Right, I’m nearly back at Gravesend and I still haven’t gotten past chapter 2!

“So What.” you might ask.

Well…

As a change worker (it’s not entirely clear whether I can call myself a “therapist” under the new regulations), I need to make sure that my web based marketing material is accurate and truthful and does not mislead anybody who may read it. There are several pieces of guidance that may make you raise your eyebrow.

On Smoking Cessation Hypnotherapy

Holy smoke! So we can’t actually claim that someone has given up smoking even if they’ve told us that that they have. Seems like they don’t even want to believe the customers they’re so desperately trying to protect!

On Hypnotherapy

I have to say that this part I agree with and I’ve always maintained and included in my pre-talk on every hypnosis session that regardless of what we do in hypnosis, you will still need to make the conscious decision not to smoke. I don’t believe that hypnosis can help with the chemical side effects (cravings/withdrawals), it will help you deal with them when they occur, but it is not an effort free process on the part of the client.

On Weight loss through Hypnotherapy

And as an added extra, they immediately follow that with:

Interesting stuff. I wonder what that means for EFT and tapping…

If you want to read the full text on Hypnotherapy on the CopyAdvice (part of the ASA) website, then head to the CopyAdvice website though you’ll need to sign up (it’s free) to read it.

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.

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.