It was explained to me once that it was like the brain is a black box and we don’t know what happens in the black box. At one end we can use hypnotic suggestions, coaching or techniques and what comes out of the black box, is the result, which gives us clues weather what we are doing is having the desired effect.

And you can work this way and still be a hypnotherapy genius. For a long time I did this learned what worked and what didn’t work and often acted intuitively sometimes with no idea as to why used a certain technique or asked a specific question. I just sort of knew what I had chosen to do would probably work.

However, we really do live in exciting times where neuroscientists are making discoveries in how the brain really works which can provide us with an understanding to help us use our skills even more effectively.

One of discoveries in neuroscience that really made a difference to the way I use hypnosis is reconsolidation theory.

Reconsolidation theory came from some experiments in memory consolidation by researchers Joseph LeDoux and Karim Nader.

In this article Ledoux describes the traditional understanding of the mechanics of memory (consolidation)

“Most neuroscientists, myself included, believed that a new memory, once consolidated into long-term storage, is stable. It’s as if every long-term memory had its own connections in the brain. Each time you retrieve the memory, or remembered, you retrieved that original memory, and then returned it.

Reconsolidation theory proposed a radically different idea—that the very act of remembering could change the memory.”

Ledoux and Nader researched this theory with a series of experiments on laboratory rats. The rats had been conditioned to associate a darken box with an electric shock and very quickly the rats learned to avoid the box, and became fearful and froze each time the box is introduced. When the rats where given a drug that prevented them from creating short term memories, the rats still feared the darkened box, because it was now in their long term memory and remained stable.

However if the rats were shown box just before they were given the drug, the rats would lose their conditioned response, they a forgotten that they were scared of it and the memory had been erased.

Our brains record an experience by firing of a sequence of neurons, which leaves them connected. This memory trace becomes more permanent as synapses connect it with other parts of the brain. This memory pattern is built deep in parts of the brain like the hippocampus and eventually migrates out in cortex.

What Reconsolidation Theory shows us is that not only do memories move from the hippocampus to the cortex during consolidation, but are also returned back to the hippocampus by calling them, at this point they become unstable and can be changed, in effect memory is plastic.

It’s a bit like opening a new word document on your computer so you can see it on the screen and then typing on to the new page. Consolidation could be likened to then saving the document to your hard drive.

Reconsolidation would be like opening this document from your hard drive so it appears on your screen at this point you can change the document so when you save it, it will disappear from your screen and be saved in your hard drive.

So how is this information useful?

As a cognitive hypnotherapist many of the problems I help my clients with, will often to be connected to how they perceive past events in their life, because our brains like certainty and will quickly create behavioural patterns to maintain this.

It’s pretty cool that when we recall a memory that is the reference experience for a problem we have later in life, the possibility exist to change the meaning of that experience so it is no longer a problem.

So when I’m working with a client and there is a memory or belief that is a problem for them in someway then I might:

Make the memory weaker by challenging generalisations that may underpin the beliefs that are connected to the memory.

If it is a positive experience amplify the memory to make it more powerful

Change the meaning of the memory by reframing it and therefore completely transform the impact it has in the clients life

In this great clip below, co-creator of NLP is teaching a class of Doctors basic hypnosis and NLP techniques for helping with insomnia.

What is Insomnia

There are many reasons people suffer with insomnia and it can be extremely distressing for the person suffering with it. Stress, worry, anxiety, and pain are common causes of insomnia, and after a period of time it is common for a person to worry at bedtime that they may have trouble falling asleep.

Even though sleeping is the most natural thing in the world, our mind and our bodies can become conditioned to not sleep by poor bedtime habits and sleeping patterns.

Hypnotherapy is great for help people break these poor sleeping habits and developing better more effective relaxation methods that help people get a good night’s sleep

Are you ready to get a good night’s sleep? If so, then book an appointment with me at my Southampton Hypnotherapy Clinic

Lenny Deverill-West DipCHyp, NLPract , MNCH (Lic)
www.startlivingtoday.co.uk
07841411951

BBC Radio 4 put together this documentary covering The Story of NLP. In this 30 minute show they interview the co-creator of NLP Richard Bandler and raise some questions around the need for scientific testing of NLP.

You can still listen to the show here and there is a synopsis below.

The Power to Persuade The Story of NLP

Thousands claim NLP has changed their lives, but what exactly is it and is there any scientific evidence that it works?

NLP – Neuro-Linguistic Programming – is a psychological approach originally developed in 1970s California by John Grinder and Richard Bandler. It was radically different from mainstream therapies of the time, offering its users fast results instead of the years of commitment required for psychoanalysis.

Today NLP has found its way into all walks of life, spawning numerous practitioners and schools and offering many different ways to improve, from curing phobias or depression to becoming a better teacher, athlete or manager. Its most prolific gurus are multi-millionaires and, in the case of Paul McKenna, household names.

But for all its commercial success and numerous devotees, NLP is seen by its critics as just another pseudo-science without robust evidence to support its claims. So does NLP genuinely help with powerful behavioural change, or can its achievements be explained by the placebo effect?

William Little, journalist and author of The Psychic Tourist, finds out for himself what it’s like to experience NLP techniques, meets those who have used it to change their lives and interviews its co-founder Richard Bandler, the charismatic exponent of so-called “persuasion engineering”.

Lenny Deverill-West DipCHyp, NLPract , MNCH (Lic)
www.startlivingtoday.co.uk

One of the things I regularly see clients for at my Southampton Hypnotherapy clinic is stage fright and fear of public speaking, so I wasn’t surprised to the headline ‘X Factor: Katie Waissel to have hypnotherapy in bid to beat stage fright’

One of the key things to remember with stage fright or fear public speaking is that you are supposed to feel nerves, they absolutely should be there. I was listening to Paul Mckenna on the radio recently taking about how Russell Brand and Roger Daltry are both people you would think exude natural confidence, yet the both listen to one of his CDs before going on stage. So everyone needs some help once in a while.

If you’re ready to overcome stage fright or fear of public speaking then book an appointment with me at my Southampton Hypnotherapy Clinic

Lenny Deverill-West DipCHyp, NLPract , MNCH (Lic)
www.startlivingtoday.co.uk
07841411951

One of the reasons each Friday sees a guest post, here at Coaching Confidence, is to have a mix of different approaches, techniques and opinions shared.

This week, Lenny Deverill-West talks about context. We invite you to consider how you use, or could use, context in your work.

Let’s Talk About Context

“A problem well stated is a problem half solved”
(Charles Kettering)

Lets talk about context specifically the importance of context when working with a client, which I have come to understand training as a Cognitive Hypnotherapist at The Quest Institute. One the things I do when I first see a client is a history take. I have noticed over time that often when client’s come back to see me after the history take, they have already begun to move forward with their issue, goal, problem etc.

I think the reason for this is clarity; once they understand specifically what the issue, goal or problem really is, their wisdom, mind or unconscious can set about solving it.

For me, a big part of getting clarity is in understanding the context surrounding what is stopping the client from having what they want. (Along with Structure, Process and Consequence, which I’ll save for another day)

What is Context?

Context is about when the client has their problem and why, which is normally connected to what they have interpreted about a past event.

I have always been fascinated that a lot of the events that shape our beliefs in adult life happened when we are children.

This was also true of a former client who I will call Bob (not his real name), Bob was literally gripped with fear about the prospect of giving a best man’s speech to friends and family who only wished him the best.

The reason for this was that during school he had reading difficulties, and he had been made to read in front of the class whereby he was laughed at by all the other kids.

Clearly this event actually happened but what this event has come to mean was made up when he was a child. I think it would be fair to say that getting laughed at by a bunch of kids would not have the same effect now as it did back then.

So when I’m finding out the context I’m not really interested the facts so to speak just what the event meant to the client. And I’ll use a combination of the following questions to get to the “why now?” to establish a pattern between the past and the present.

Do you always have this problem?
Are there times when it’s better or worse?
What is different about those times?
Have you always had this problem?
What was different before you had it?
What was happening in your life when this problem started?
What is happening in your life when you have this problem that is similar to when the problem began?

*If you’re not keen on the word problem, you can use barrier, issue or whatever else you would prefer.

I know that exploring the ‘why’ is frowned upon in some coaching circles and with good reason. So the idea is not to dwell on why something happened, but just to discover the significant event connected to the client’s problem in order to reframe the meaning of it.

Context Mapping

Context Mapping is about finding the edge of the problem, at what point does it tip and what other contexts does it map across to. Are there other situations that make them feel the same way?

So if we go back to Bob, Bob would only start to get nervous if he had to talk in front of four people or more. At three people he was fine, but in front of four he would get a horrible feeling unless it was close friends and then he was ok again.

As hypnotherapist I was able to use key information to create a suggestion aimed at producing a type of trance phenomena known as negative hallucination, which is really just way of getting the client not to notice something. In the case of Bob not to notice how many people are in the room, by drawing his attention to their ‘friendly faces’.

And as you begin talking, you might be surprised at how calm and relaxed you’ve started to feel as you’re only aware of the friendly faces looking back at you.

Exception Mapping

Bob actually came to see me for “no confidence” as he put it, now I don’t think I have ever met anyone who experiences their problem all of the time.

So Exception Mapping is about discovering the exceptions, when they don’t experience their problem. This is useful because like Bob people will often gerneralise their problem. E.G. I’m not confident is actually I’m not confident talk in front 4 or more people.

The exceptions to the rule let you know how big or small a problem is and understanding what is different about those times is another key piece of information that you can use.

Ok so next time you’re working with a client take some time to understand the context surrounding whatever you’re working on. If context is a key driver for their issue, it would make sense to use context interventions.

The interventions you can use will depend upon your background, I have found that techniques that get people to see a situation differently work particularly well. If you are familiar with NLP/hypnosis terminology then Meta Mirror, Coaching, Reframing, Metaphor and Timeline Reframing are just a few but there are many others.

About the Author/Further Resources

Lenny Deverill-West is a Cognitive Hypnotherapist, NLP Practitioner, Coach and Corporate Trainer based in Southampton.

Lenny spends most his time seeing clients at his Southampton practice and is also developing trainings courses and Hypnotherapy products that are due out early next year. For more information about Lenny Deverill-West visit www.startlivingtoday.co.uk.

Often it comes down to a one of two things, and the first one is when people say something like ‘I always seem to meet the wrong guy (or girl)’. Now it’s very unlikely that this person only meets the wrong people, and often people use words like ‘always’ to generalise their whole experience, linguistically these words are known as universal quantifiers. Usually what it comes down to is the person’s tendency to create their world from the outside in, meaning that they are looking for love to come from outside of them , in the this case from the ‘wrong kind of guys (or girls)’. And it’s when people are coming from a place of need that it sets up a pattern where they are looking for love to come from outside of them.

Michael Neill uses a great story around this which goes, there are two girl friends chatting over coffee and one of the woman has been telling the other about her lastest failed relationship and complaining that she never seems to meet the right guy and her friend who has no doubt heard this all before replies, ‘honey it’s not that you’re meeting the wrong guys, it’s that you’re sleeping with them!’.. Which makes the choice nice and simple and that is, you go out with people you like and you don’t go out with the people you don’t like

Creating your world from the inside out is a wonderful and effective mindset for going into and being in a loving relationship. It’s about understanding that you don’t have get love from someone, because when you think about it you create those feelings internally and actually you bring that love to the relationship. When you get that you never have to come from place of need, you’re going to find your relationships are going to improve because you will naturally gravitate and be around those people who want to share in this rather than use it like a bargining tool.

Which takes me on the this excellent metaphor of the ‘Magical Kitchen’ by Don Miguel Ruiz in his book The Mastery of Love. I have pasted the fully story below because it really captures why people put up with so much crap in their relationships and gives a way of ‘being’ in relationships.

Imagine that you have a magical kitchen in your home. In that magical kitchen, you can have any food you want from any place in the world in any quantity. You never worry about what to eat; whatever you wish for, you can have at your table. You are very generous with your food; you give your food unconditionally to others, not because you want something in return from them. Whoever comes to your home, you feed just for the pleasure of sharing your food, and your house is always full of people who come to eat the food from your magical kitchen.

Then one day someone knocks at your door, and it’s a person with a pizza. You open the door, and the person looks at you and says, “Hey, do you see this pizza? I’ll give you this pizza if you let me control your life, if you just do whatever I want you to do. You are never going to starve because I can bring pizza every day. You just have to be good to me.”

Can you imagine your reaction? In your kitchen you can have the same pizza – even better. Yet this person comes to you and offers you food, if you just do whatever he wants you to do. You are going to laugh and say, “No, thank you! I don’t need your food; I have plenty of food. You can come into my house and eat whatever you want, and you don’t have to do anything. Don’t believe I’m going to do whatever you want me to do. No one will manipulate me with food.”

Now imagine exactly the opposite. Several weeks have gone by, and you haven’t eaten. You are starving, and you have no money in your pocket to buy food. The person comes with the pizza and says, “Hey, there’s food here. You can have this food if you just do what I want you to do.” You can smell the food, and you are starving. You decide to accept the food and do whatever that person asks of you. You eat some food, and he says, “If you want more, you can have more, but you have to keep doing what I want you to do.”

You have food today, but tomorrow you may not have food, so you agree to do whatever you can for food. You can become a slave because of food, because you need food, because you don’t have it. Then after a certain time you have doubts. You say, “What am I going to do without my pizza? I cannot live without my pizza. What if my partner decides to give the pizza to someone else mypizza?”

Now imagine that instead of food, we are talking about love. You have an abundance of love in your heart. You have love not just for yourself, but for the whole world. You love so much that you don’t need anyone’s love. You share your love without condition; you don’t love if. You are a millionaire in love, and someone knocks on your door and says, “Hey, I have love for you here. You can have my love, if you just do whatever I want you to do.”

When you are full of love, what is going to be your reaction? You will laugh and say, “Thank you, but I don’t need your love. I have the same love here in my heart, even bigger and better, and I share my love without condition.”

But what is going to happen if you are starving for love, if you don’t have that love in your heart, and someone comes and says, “You want a little love? You can have my love if you just do what I want you to do.” If you are starving for love, and you taste that love, you are going to do whatever you can for that love. You can even be so needy that you give your whole soul just for a little attention.
Your heart is like that magical kitchen. If you open your heart, you already have all the love you need. There’s no need to go around the world begging for love: “Please, someone love me, to prove that I’m worthy of love.” We have love right here inside us, but we don’t see this love.

This is my first Blog entry for my first Blog and as it is only recently 2010 I thought I would kick off with something around creating a great 2010.

I started training with the Trevor Silvester at the Quest Institute in Cognitive Hypnotherapy and one of the techniques we have learned on the course is what Trevor calls Timeline Reprocessing.

One of the cool things about Timeline Reprocessing is that it enables clients to go back significant emotional events (SEE) and gain new insights and understanding of those SEE. In many cases this is life changing and transforming as the clients are able to leave behind the negative beliefs that have held them back in life. Which is what main protagonists in the at least two of most famous Christmas stories, Scrooge in A Christmas Carol and Jimmy Stewart’s character in It’s A Wonderful Life, were able to do.

The thing I love about timeline is, this idea that you can go back in time and pass new insights and new learnings down to the younger you and it has the effect of changing your present perspective.

But what if you want to change your perspective about something that hasn’t happened yet? Like say in the next 12 months?

Today’s Challenge

Imagine it’s 12 months from now and your sitting there looking back at what a great year 2010 was?

What was it that made 2010 so great?

What did you create in your relationships, family, business, job and anything else that is relevant to you in 2010?

How did you do it?

What was the very first thing you did? When did you do it?

If you could give the January 2010 You some advice that would help them create a great 2010 what would that advice be?

When you have played around with the above questions and written down your answers you should have plenty of ideas to get your 2010 moving in right direction. It might even be nice to review them a year from now.

Lenny

Happy reading

Take the day off from striving and struggling for success – and have a wonderfully average day instead…

“Happiness and a meaningful life come from making differences. But this is the most important rule to follow: always make the differences you can make, not the differences you would prefer to make but can’t.” – Lyndon Duke

I was talking to my friend and mentor Steve Chandler once when he said to me “have an average day!” A bit taken aback, I asked him what he meant. After all, isn’t the idea to have “great” days, or even “exceptional” ones?

He then told me the story of one of his mentors, a man named Lyndon Duke who studied something called “the linguistics of suicide”. After receiving a doctorate from two separate universities, Duke began analyzing suicide notes to look for linguistic clues which could be used to predict and prevent suicidal behavior in teenagers.

What he learned was startling – that the enemy of happiness was what he called “the curse of exceptionality”. In a world where everyone is trying to be exceptional, two things happen. The first is that nearly everyone fails, because by definition if too many people become exceptional, the exceptional becomes commonplace. The second is that those few who do succeed feel even more isolated and estranged from their peers than before.

Consequently you have a few people feeling envied, misunderstood and alone and tens of thousands of others feeling like failures for not being “______ enough” – “good enough”, “special enough”, “rich enough” or even “happy enough.”

When I was in the midst of the thickest cloud of my own suicidal thoughts at university, I remember wishing I could run away from my Presidential Scholarship and hide, perhaps changing my name to “Bob” and taking a job at pumping gas at a full-service station somewhere in the midwest. Only in my fantasy, sooner or later people would start to notice that there was something special about me. They would begin driving miles out of their way to have their cars filled up by “Bob the service guy” and exchange a few words with him, leaving the station oddly uplifted and with a renewed sense of optimism and purpose.

Before long, someone would discover how exceptional I was and I would have to run away from their expectations all over again. I was, to my way of thinking, doomed to succeed.

Delusions of grandeur? Quite possibly. Depressed, hopeless and miserable? Absolutely!

One of Lyndon Duke’s major breakthroughs came when he was dealing with his own unhappiness and heard the sound of a neighbor singing while mowing his lawn. He realized then that’s what was missing from his life – the simple pleasures of an average life.

The very next weekend, he went to visit his son who was struggling to excel in his first term at university. He sat him down and told him about his revised expectations for him:

“I expect you to be a straight “C” student, young man,” Duke said. “I want you to complete your unremarkable academic career, meet an ordinary young woman and if you choose to, get married and live a completely average life!”

His son, of course, thought Dad had finally flipped, but did take the pressure off himself to be quite so “exceptional”. A month later he phoned his father to apologize. He had gotten “A”s on all his exams, but it was OK because he had only done an “average” amount of studying.

And this is the paradoxical promise of the “average day” philosophy – the cumulative effect of a series of average days spent doing an average amount of what one loves and wants to do is actually quite extraordinary!

Let’s put this thought together with another one of Duke’s discoveries – that many of the young people he studied felt as though their lives had no meaning and made no difference to the world or anyone in it. As a practical philosopher, he realized that the meaning of our lives actually *comes* from the differences we make with them. And that those differences need not be huge to be profound in their impact on both ourselves and others.

When we combine those two ideas we have what may well be the ultimate goal for a happy and productive life:

To be an average, happy person making a bit of a positive difference

and having a happy, average day.

In doing this, you create the kind of “exceptionality” that can be shared by everyone.

Have fun, learn heaps, and have an average day!

This tip is from Michael Neill please check out his new website dedicated to having an average day here.

And there were a few for reasons for this:

It’s really difficult for ideas to flourish when the people are being creative, realistic and critical all at the same time. Which is one of the things Walt Disney worked out and as result set up 3 storyboarding rooms for his artists and writers the first being the Dreamer Room, where all ideas can flourish and no criticising is allowed, the Realist Room, how those ideas can be made possible again no criticising and the Critical Room where Walt himself would constructively criticise what had been created and they would move round all 3 of these rooms until a finished product was produced. This has also become know as the Disney Strategy (Dilts) .

If you spend long enough, you can talk even the best ideas off the table. There was an Oscar nominated behind the scenes documentary released in 1993 called The War Room which was about the Bill Clinton for President campaign. There was one bit in the movie where all the spin doctors and Clinton himself would get together to discuss how they were going to run their campaign to get Clinton into the White House and then by the end of the meeting they would have rubbished every idea they came up with no matter how good. What they did to get around this was to have a rule, and that was if an idea was still on the table an hour into the meeting then just go with it. Knowing that sometimes the idea itself isn’t that important because whatever the idea is you’ll just find a way of making it work.

On the subject of being overly critical of good ideas I was reminded of some advice I was once given, sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness instead of permission. I was talking to a Team Manager a few months ago who was telling me her frustration at manager meetings when she came up with what she thought were innovative and great ideas around improving her teams performance, only to be met with replies of ‘that won’t work’, ‘we tried that before and it didn’t work’ and ‘that’s not possible because of xyz’. Which would result people doing exactly what had been done before whist expecting the result to change, which was also Einstein’s definition of insanity btw. My answer to this was unless you’re like one wage slip away from the sack and it’s not going to hurt anyone, then sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness instead of permission because results trump permission any day of the week. Also, how would the meeting go if you said would you like me to show you how I improved my team’s performance?

Challenge

Put one of the following into practice:

Make your next creative project painless and productive by moving through the Dreamer, Realist and Critic roles individually until you have a finished product.

Implement one idea you have had but for some reason talked yourself into thinking it would never work, knowing that you’ll just find away of making it work.

Instead of telling deaf ears how your great idea would work for them, think about how you could get them to want to find out how you are getting your great results

Here’s the thing it’s not the job or what’s on the outside that makes someone passionate or love what they do, it’s how you create passion on the inside and has nothing to do with the job that you do. I have met teachers, senior managers, trainers and charity workers who are passionate about what they do and you’d probably expect that given their line of work, however I have also met cleaners, waitresses, estates agents and insurance sales man who are equally if not more passionate about what they do.

So what’s the difference?

People who really enjoy their work and are passionate about what they do, no matter what it is, tend know the difference that they make in the world. For example a cleaner doesn’t ‘just’ clean the loos at work, they ensure the hygiene of 100s of people on a daily basis so those people can just go about their jobs and an insurance sales man doesn’t just sell insurance for a living they get the opportunity to let people know about something that could potentially take care of their families for the rest of their lives if something unforeseen should happen to them.

If you have never read The Starfish Story, it really sums up how anyone can make a difference to someone or something

One day a man was walking along the beach

when he noticed a boy picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean.

Approaching the boy, he asked, “What are you doing?”

The youth replied, “Throwing starfish back into the ocean.
The surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them back, they’ll die.”

“Son,” the man said, “don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish?
You can’t make a difference!”

After listening politely, the boy bent down, picked up another starfish,
and threw it back into the surf. Then, smiling at the man, he said…”
I made a difference for that one.”

Homework

Write down what is that you do for a job

Now write down difference you make to your customers, colleagues, your business, the world and notice the energy that creates on the inside

A Video of The Startfish Story