Here’s a map:

View Larger Map

As you can see, its very near Wimbledon, Earlsfield, Tooting and is on the Northern Line in to a big place called London.

If you live in the area, expect to start seeing Practitioner Of Trance stuff around and about!

I’ve taken a place with a consultation room, so you will now be coming to me

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’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.

There is a kind of standard statistic in hypnosis that (whether through suggestion or genuine experience) most hypnotists will agree on:

About 20% of the population is highly susceptible

About 60% of the population can be hypnotised

About 20% of the population cannot be hypnotised

Of course the actual numbers change by 5% or so depending on who you ask and which text book you’re quoting, but there is definitely agreement that some people are highly hypnotisable and some people are simply not worth the hours and hours it would take to create hypnosis making them, to all intents and purposes: un-hypnotisable (one of my early hypnosis subjects took 10 sessions before he was able to exhibit trance phenomena!).

This new research by Peter Naish of the Open University in Milton Keynes suggests that those people who are highly susceptible to hypnosis have a tendency to use the right side of their brains more than their left. The right side of the brain is the side that is typically associated with creativity, imagery and and the left with analysis and logical thinking. If you’re interested in what this might mean in other parts of your life, try a quick Google. I found this article which is very interesting (albeit somewhat student orientated), about how we should learn to study using the right (sorry) correct methods to match our hemisphere weighting…

This would agree with my experience that creative people tend to better at hypnosis than those who are more analytical and logical in the way they think and act. I have learnt that someone who comes to me for help (or while I’m doing street hypnosis) with colourful clothes or hair, an interesting clothing style or generally seem like they are happy to see where the wind takes them that they’re going to be great at hypnosis

My friend Parkey is an excellent example of someone who struggles with hypnosis because of his “analytical” brain and you can read the highs and lows of his journey to achieve hypnosis on his blog here. There is some good news for analytical people though: Find yourself someone able to do some transcranial magnetic stimulation on your left hemisphere which (temporarily) reduces left hemisphere brain activity. Apparently you’re much more likely to experience hypnosis.

One thing that amuses me about this is that scientists by their very nature, tend to be analytical people and this may explain why hypnosis research is not as frequent as it might be. After all, why research something that you can’t experience? Or at least not in the way that some of the highly susceptible people can…

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!

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

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

Being a cold December evening, the place was not quite as busy as it was at the last meet, but it soon filled up once the evening kicked off. As with last time, there were a good mix of magicians and hypnotists and one chap who specialised in balloons and arrived carrying a balloon man which instantly got the attention of all the people in the place! (tip: balloon man = people come to you)

I arrived a little early and wasted no time in getting chatting to the chaps running a little BBQ stand in the corner and lo-and-behold I had my first subject. Sadly though the English – Italian language barrier was I think, just a little too much to get any good phenomena out of him, but he said he felt wonderfully relaxed. Scratch one and on to the next.

Of course, no hypnosis course is complete without at least one somnambulist and this one had two! needless to say they had been thoroughly enjoying being on the receiving end of heaps of suggestions and fun all day and moving from the hotel to the bar was no excuse to stop. Soon there were guitar heroes and X Factor finalists in our midst as well as some fantastically crafty “magic” tricks.

As all the visitors to this bar had to walk past us where we were in the garden, we were able to open every group of people coming in and let them know that we were here if they wanted to go and get drinks and come back for some hypnosis experiences all completely free, safe and fun. Once we started doing this; like a conveyor belt, more and more people were coming outside to experience a little hypnosis and I think at one point I counted five separate inductions happening at once!

It was great to meet a few new hypnotists and see some cool stuff in action and I was even able to have a go at James Tripp’s “Hypnosis Without Trance” stuff also known as “waking hypnosis”.

Sadly, I had to head off before it got too late as it takes me an hour and a half to get home from the bar, so I left the team in full-swing with more and more people coming forward for an incredible experience. Next time I shall have to book myself a hotel so that I can properly enjoy it as reports afterwards say that it only got better after I left! I hope that’s not a reflection on my presence at the place