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

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.

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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.

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

Say for example, you wanted to be more confident in certain situations, we could build up a “confidence” anchor and attach it to a gesture such as a pinching your thumb and little finger on the left hand together. We do this by putting you into a confident state, firing the anchor (pinching the fingers) and repeating a few times (3 or more). Sounds simple, but it really is!

In the session I had this week, we used a memory revivification (basically using specific techniques to bring to life a previous memory and allow the client to really re-live it in their mind) to achieve the state of mind required by the client.

The temptation to get carried away in the creation of the state and max-out on the first or second run through was strong and it took quite an effort to hold back enough for the second and even more so for the third pass through. At one point in the second pass, the client was obviously completely engaged and was showing some fantastic signs of hypnosis: flushed skin, breathing rate change, twitching eyes and started to wonder how I would enhance the state or even match it for the third pass through!

Fortunately I managed it by getting the client to make their memory even bigger and closer than it had been before at the same time as raising my voice (which by the way is a big tip for those practitioners out there: increasing volume = increasing effect). So the three passes looked a little like this:

Pass 1

I asked the client to choose a memory where they were in the state that they wanted to achieve. I then asked them to run through it in their mind a couple of times to refresh it. Then, by asking questions such as “can you see each person individually” and “do you remember what you were doing before this memory”, I was able to get the client to solidify it in their mind.

Then I said that they should allow that state to start to build until they could feel it inside them now and that when I count to 3 the feeling will build and build until at 3, they should activate their chosen trigger (in this case a foot stamp) before coming back to the room.

Pass 2

The second pass, I asked the client to return to the memory focusing on the things that they focused on last time, but this time, I asked them to remember what they heard, what individual sounds could they hear, what was to their left, to their right, ahead and behind them. I asked them to focus on the colours in their memory and clearly see them in their mind. I asked them to remember what the floor felt like under their feet, what clothes they were wearing and how they felt.

Then I repeated the count to 3 before waking them and breaking the state.

Pass 3

As I said earlier, I was a little worried I’d over-egged pass 2, but I once again got them  to return to the memory, but this time make all the colours brighter and more vivid (and I named a few colours to focus on), then I turned to the sound and told them to make the sounds louder and louder until they were almost too loud and lastly that they should step completely into the memory making it massive and all around them so that they could turn around in their own memory and experience it in a 3D, surround sound, smell-o-vision experince before counting to 3 to set the trigger.

Needless to say, the client was blown away and he said that he was feeling amazing afterwards.

The point I am trying to make with this post is that a sense of scale and perspective is essential when working with any form of trance: from phobias where we ask the client to set out on a scale of 1 to 10 how much their phobia affects them, to creating anchors and remembering to increase the scale of the effect each time.