Hypnotist Ben White demonstrating the power of imagination

With a background in business analysis and customer relationship management, one could say I’ve been helping businesses get to grips and install better ways of thinking for a long time. Throw into the mix hypnosis, NLP, IEMT and Provocative Change Works and you find yourself reading about someone who achieves change with people individually and as an organisation. On this site, you’ll discover the personal side of Ben and if you continue reading, you see he’s pretty dedicated to finding the best way to enable you to tap into the inherent ability to change within all of us.

After my first hypnosis course I headed straight for my local post office and posted a note in the window: “Trainee hypnotist requires volunteers...” Needless to say I was literally inundated with three requests to help all of whom I worked with successfully. What a great start!

Hypnotically, I have trained with Freddy and Anthony Jacquin of the UK Hypnotherapy Training Collage on rapid hypnosis techniques as well as using hypnotic and NLP techniques with your children. This excellent series of techniques that will work with any aged child (really! I’ve used this stuff on my daughter since she was 1) to gently help in many areas from Attention Deficit Disorder to exam nerves and even simply family relations (Freddy’s branded the techniques: Potensharu).

I have studied body language and the now extremely popular Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and in 2009, I certified as a practitioner for an amazing technique called Integral Eye Movement Therapy created by Andrew T Austin. IEMT combines various NLP techniques with a structured interview approach to achieve some of the most incredible change work that simple counselling would take many many sessions to achieve.

I have trained with Norman D Vaughton (who studied with Ernest Rossi for many years) in Ideodynamic hypnosis. Norman’s approach also utilises one of my favourite techniques: Clean Language and is used to avoid polluting or influencing your processes with the my own expectations or presuppositions. The technique is therefore extremely respectful and gentle and yet very powerful in gaining you both conscious and unconscious insight and in generating lasting and sometimes dramatic change!

As you can see I’ve done quite a lot of learning!

What I am passionate about is that the power to change is within all of us and if you want to change: you can

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Simples.

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Look me up using the Find Me Online section on the right, or simply drop me an email direct.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Ben

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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.

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!

Anyway, checkout the video below:

Lots to think about and remember that unlike the Alexis, you can pause the video to read the summary slide

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.