But if you ONLY learn from your mistakes,

then you will learn very slowly. Learn from your mistakes certainly, and in addition seek a mentor, guide, teacher, coach. Regardless of what you do or aspire to do, there is someone who can help you move forward more effectively than you can even imagine (because you’re not there yet).

learn from those who have traveled the road ahead of you.

It’s rash to imagine that you can attain your best without wise counsel, support, and mentorship. If you feel that you have gifts to offer the world why would you deliberately hold yourself back from doing all you can from maximizing your ability to share them? Professional athletes have coaches, great spiritual teachers have mentors, and organizations have consultants.

Even the Dalai Lama has spiritual advisers to instruct him. The best athletes may have an entire squad of coaches and trainers. Leaders with the greatest responsibility and reach seek guidance from those whose perspectives they trust.

Why would you imagine that you deserve less, or could achieve your best with less?

The more creative and competent you are, the more this is true.

I have always looked for teachers that could guide me and help me move forward. I now invest a great deal to find teachers who will do more than that; who will move me forward, hold me accountable, and kick my butt (and my ‘buts’). Sometimes it feels scary. I have learned that when it does I am likely on the verge of a new and exciting opening, personally or professionally.

Two key principles make up the Psychology of Success. There are a multitude of details for how you achieve success, but here are two important principles, which when you apply them, puts success, however you choose to measure it, within your grasp.

My father had lived through the Great Depression, and when he spoke of success he meant that someone had made a lot of money. Much to his consternation, he was never very successful at making money himself, and in his later years came to depend on my mother. Like many people who never fully realized their dreams, he found ways to mask his disappointment. As a child I rebelled against his singular notion of success; in part because his disappointment was so painful to witness.

The dictionary tells us that the word success started its life meaning that something was concluded, something was done. Good or bad, intended or not, when a thing is finished it has arrived at its own successful conclusion. You could say the we all live the life of our dreams. Consciously or unconsciously we all strive towards our own desired outcomes, and we achieve them according to our own internal capacity (or otherwise) for inner congruence and focus. So, in the broadest sense, we are all successful.

Success now means something more specific; a desired outcome, rather than just any old conclusion. We always have a choice in how we do things. The criteria and the necessary actions for our success is something we must determine ourselves. Some people have the mindset that allows them to regularly fulfill specific goals and ambitions decisively — whether it’s to climb a mountain, or to be the first to climb a particular mountain, or to climb many mountains. Whatever our mountain might be, each of us, deep down, has our own measure for our own specific success, regardless of whether we attain it or not.

So, what does success mean for you? Is it an abstraction, or do you have specific goals, your own  specific mountain? Perhaps you have learned to live with disappointment. Perhaps you are afraid of failure, or perhaps you are afraid of success. What picture do you have of your life ten years from now, twenty years, fifty years? Maybe you have heard that you should simply let things ‘unfold by themselves’? You know, even a blank slate, or an open door, is effectively a picture too.

What about happiness? Is happiness the measure of your success? As a child, questioning my father’s correlation of success with money, I looked for an alternative to his version of success, and began to equated success with creativity, beyond mere happiness, towards ecstasy and creative abandon. I was a romantic even then! I was uncomfortable with, and confused by my father’s notions of success because he provided no role model, other than his own failure. I did not yet have any idea that I might be responsible for my own outcomes, let alone how I might go about achieving them.

Success implies measurement. It involves assessment and comparison. We measure ourselves against others, and against what was and could have been. You might say that looking for happiness by comparing yourself to others is madness. Yet, we do it anyway, out of habit, because it is how we first learned to live in the world. It is how we learned to make the choices that now define who we are.

On our journey from infancy to adulthood it was by comparing and judging ourselves against others  that we formed our core values and identity.

But success has very little to do with finding happiness outside of yourself by comparisons with others. Assessment is necessary, but judgment and comparison may be optional extras.

Assessment begins with having clearly defined outcomes. This is the first of the two principles of success. When you have clearly defined outcomes, you either fulfill your intention, or you learn that you missed something on the way. You ask yourself why, you can even go a step further by saying, “This is the best thing that could have happened.”  The mindset you create with that statement helps you put your next clearly defined outcome into action, whether it concerns the moment-to-moment details of your daily life, or addresses the big picture, call it your destiny.

By having clearly defined outcomes, by asking what lessons there are for you to learn, even when challenged by impossibly difficult situations, you are no longer a victim of circumstance. You are now living at cause, choosing your own life. And isn’t choice the key ingredient here, the key to your success? You move freely, assessing what you have gained or missed, and self-correcting as you go. You are learning  to say, “This is the best thing that could have happened!”

The second of these two principles for the psychology of success concerns how you focus your attention. Your focus can be like a zoom lens. You can magnify small details, or you can have a wide view. You can be specific, or you can be more abstract. When you move through varying degrees of abstraction and specificity, you evaluate your options in ways that are impossible when you hold to a single perspective.

By zooming out to greater degrees of abstraction you are often asking, “Why? For what purpose?” By zooming in to greater specificity you are asking, “How? What specifically .. ?”  You can even direct your awareness in another direction outside of your immediate range of view to find analogies, and a broader context. You ask, “What are other examples of this?”

Some people are caught in details, and never get to see the big picture. Others are lost in abstraction and never get to apply their larger vision. Many people rely on only one singular point of view. When you know the difference between the vision and the details, when you learn to move easily between the two, when you learn to take another tack to find new perspective, then you have an edge that allows you to give what meanings you choose to such notions as success or failure.

There’s another element, a theme more essential than any psychological principle of success. It has to do with the simple capacity to focus, to sustain awareness. Combine that with the principle of well formed outcomes, and the principle of choosing your level of abstraction, within a hierarchy of possible perspectives, it becomes the glue that allows you to navigate your life with a proficiency that will let you define your success entirely on your own terms.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hypnotic Induction

10:26 minutes

The unconscious mind is a boundless resource, and repository. Within it is everything you are not now considering …  yet …
including any new paradigm and possibilities for your own positive transformation.

Here’s a gift of a trance induction for
Mind-Body Well-being, Healing, and Transformation.

Note: do not listen to this while driving.

Comments

Your attitudes and mindset,
your ability to be effective as a leader,
your ability to lead yourself,
your ability to live ‘at choice’

… all this depends on your unconscious programming. In other words it depends on the beliefs that have been instilled in you by a process that is very much like hypnosis. Fortunately, mindset and attitudes can be transformed through the use of hypnosis far more rapidly, and with far greater ease, than is often understood or appreciated.

The hypnotic state is a doorway to your unconscious mind. Your unconscious mind is everything you are not currently aware of: for example, that meeting you are nervous about, your love of going to the beach, the excitement you felt on your eleventh birthday, an unkind neighbor, a tune that pops into your mind inexplicably. The unconscious mind is the ten-trillion things that you couldn’t possibly hold in conscious awareness at any moment, but which together make up the climate of your experience.

However, the unconscious mind is more than a memory-bank. Experience is determined by emotions. One person may love going to the beach, another person may detest it. Everything you experience is filtered through emotions and perceptions, and the subtleties of associations through which you make meanings from your life.

Imagine a child being told by his mother to clean his room. Perhaps his mother was having a difficult day and speaks sharply, “Can’t you tidy your room, what’s the matter with you?”

Somehow the child hears that there’s something the matter with him, and years later, on an unconscious level, he carries that message everywhere he goes.  He carries it to social gatherings, and job interviews. He may even carry it to bed. He may have conscious recollection of that day, long ago, when his mother was impatient with him. He may have discussed it in therapy. He may have learned that it wasn’t about him. But still the pervasive belief persists. It will continue until he registers a new truth about himself on an unconscious level as completely as he absorbed that first message long ago.

The amazing truth about your mind is that it can learn and change very quickly. How long did it take for that child to learn ‘there’s something wrong with me?’  He learned it in an instant, and a new truth can be learned at the same speed, but only if it is absorbed on the deepest level, deeply enough to supersede the old patterns.

People often say that hypnosis performs miracles. If you imagine that the attitudes that inform your behavior have to take a long time in order to change, then hypnotherapy is indeed miraculous. The power of hypnosis is the power to access your unconscious mind. Perhaps you have been disempowered by repeated vain attempts to effect change through willpower, conscious strategy, and reason. You may feel that you have a long way to go before you can truly transform old limiting beliefs, but you do not need more information or skills. When you’re ready to effect change, the last thing you need is more time! What you require is very simple. When you can access the same open mind you had as a child at the moment when you heard those fateful words, then you can learn your new truth, “there’s something right with me.”

A skilled hypnotherapist will guide you towards your own natural ability to remember deeper truths about yourself. She will help you access your capacity to write your own scripts, reprogram those old programs.  The truths you recover predate the time when trauma hijacked your original innocence, capabilities, and joy.

Hypnosis is like finding the light switch after fumbling around in a dark room for years.

Sometimes all you need to find that switch is permission from your own unconscious mind. Hypnotherapy is a miraculously effective way to gain permission from, and access the power of, your unconscious mind, to bring about radical positive permanent change.

Hypnotherapy Hypnosis in Los Angeles ‘when you’re ready for change’

Transformational Change

Five questions about generative transformation

What is Transformational Change? Transformational change is generative change. Personal change comes about in many forms and for many reasons. Most change, most often, is to accommodate outward circumstances. It is remedial. We react rather than truly respond. We react automatically, based on what we already know, rather than looking for new, and possibly transformational solutions. So often we struggle just to extricate ourselves from present difficulties, rather than looking for new ways of doing things which will support us in an ongoing way to transform our sense of what is truly possible. Transformational change is regenerative change. You can even call it generative in that it allows you to come to entirely unprecedented perspectives, with unprecedented capacities for innovation and solution based responses to hitherto intractable problems.

Is Transformational Change permanent? By implication transformational change means a permanent shift. Transformational means never being the victim of circumstances again. It means using skills that allow you to recognize that everything you experience from this moment on can be taken as a lesson, a guide, and even a gift. When you make this perceptual shift, whenever you face a new challenge or a disappointment,  instead of asking “Why is this happening to me?” you will ask “What can I learn here?”

What aspects of my life does Transformational change touch. Were does it fit in? Is this a spiritual practice? Is it psychology? Is it learning new communication skills? Is it learning to navigate relationships more skillfully ?  Is it business coaching? Is it personal development? The answer is yes. It is all and any of these. The more you live not just as the accumulated effect of everything that has touched you, but as a cause, as someone who lives at choice, the more you instinctually appreciate that everything is interconnected and part of single integrated whole. As you live by this systemic perspective, releasing old patterns of though, feeling, and behavior become second nature to you. Why would you need to entertain negative emotional states again?

Does Transformational change take long? Does this work of effecting transformational or generative change take a long time? Here’s a parallel question. If someone shows you a shortcut that will cup your daily commute in half how long will it take you before you use it  every day? When you’re ready to change, change happens very quickly.  The foundation for this work can be undertaken in a couple of days  of intense one-on-one focused process that will transform the way you think and feel, and in addition will give you the tools to maintain and deepen the transformation we co-create together.

Do I have to meet with you in person? You are welcome to do that, and I personal enjoy working face to face at out Los Angeles office, or at our retreat in the mountains, however we can meet equally well by telephone.

I hope this answers some of your questions about transformational change. If you would like to schedule a complimentary no-obligation conversation with me please contact me directly

Tel +1-310-339-1660
Email  info@caitrionareed.com

… and then around January 15^th,
or March 1at (if you’re lucky) it’s all a memory?

Maybe not. But if you do, here are five possible reasons why.

1. Because you’ve done it before, and have entirely negative associations with your January 1^st resolutions. You’ve become used to failing at them, you may even expect to; at least on an unconscious level.
2. You have no real strategy. You may join a gym but you have not sat down and worked out exactly when you’re going to get there, made an appointment with a trainer, set up a schedule, and developed a long term strategy.
3. You have not made yourself accountable, or if you have it’s with people with whom you have shared your New Year’s Resolutions before, and who have come to expect you to fail at them. Of course, expectations like that are contagious.
4. You’ve set yourself up using negative associations – lose weight, stop smoking, stop doing this or that, abstaining, ceasing, and desisting. It would be better to imagine your future year by using positive terms and associations.
5. Deep changes can’t be accomplished by an act of will alone. Something inside must change too. My work as a hypnotherapist in Los Angeles – World capital of New Year Resolutions (just kidding, I have no idea!) -  tells me that people change when they start identifying internally with the new behavior, and with their new self. Then the steps to get there are simply a question of time and strategy.

The first few days of January are not necessarily the best time to implement new behaviors and habits. Then again, it’s never a bad time to make positive changes to your life, through hypnosis, or by whichever means you choose.

Even in Los Angeles – original  home of the “hip hypnotist” – people seek hypnotherapy solutions as a last resort. Pain management, phobias, addictions, weight loss … there is a long list of problems for which hypnosis is typically very effective.

Sigmund Freud - hypnotist

People are afraid of failure.

• “I can’t be hypnotized.”

• “Will you make me behave like a chicken?”

• “I tried it. It didn’t work?”

Hypnosis is a natural state of mind. We are all in a trance of one sort or another much of the time. The trick is to use the state of hypnosis, or trance, to your best advantage. Anyone can experience the pleasant state of hypnotic relaxation, and everyone can benefit from it when it is used by a skilled practitioner.

Stage hypnosis is usually performed as comedy. While it demystifies hypnosis, it also inevitably misrepresents the power of the hypnotic process. Your choice to volunteer as a hypnotic subject for a stage show may indicate a certain willingness to goof around. When you approach a hypnotherapist to help you effect change in your life, you have something very different in mind.

Unfortunately, as in all professions, there are some poorly trained or ineffective practitioners of hypnosis who advertise themselves as hypnotherapists. Hypnosis is an art, and hypnotherapy is a collaboration between artist and patient/client. It is not a question of it (hypnosis) working. It always works. The question is whether the power of that work is communicated, prepared for, executed, followed up etc. in a way that fully addressees your issues and needs.

Pat Collins, the 'Hip Hypnotist' (with Lloyd Bridges)

There is a lot of misunderstanding about hypnosis. Hypnosis. or trance is a natural state of mind. To paraphrase one of the greatest hypnotists of all time, Milton Erickson, “Everyone walks around in a trance of disempowerment. The work is to change that to a trance of personal empowerment.”

There are very few things that produce rapid permanent positive change as effectively as hypnosis, and those that do usually have elements of hypnotic trance built into them. Even Sigmund Freud, who began his career as hypnotist, acknowledged that hypnosis was the single most effective modality to help bring about permanent positive transformation.

Everything you’re not conscious of is your unconscious mind. Everything you are not focusing on, everything you’re not aware of, all your habits ….

Because we have automatic associations with and responses to certain things, the unconscious mind can be a liability, or anally in helping you achieve your goals.

Hypnosis is learning to communicate directly with your unconscious mind.

Question: There are many critics out there of hypnotherapy, a practice you are clinically licensed to facilitate. Much of the criticism surrounds the very real danger of the hypnotist planting “hidden suggestions” in a client’s mind or the possibility of false memories arising. I wonder if you would agree that these are real dangers and if you could describe how a competent hypnotist can steer clear from these entrapments? In addition, what are the benefits of hypnotherapy as you see it?

Caitriona Reed: I have found that those who criticize hypnotherapy usually have very little exposure to, or practical understanding of, what hypnosis is. In my experience “”hidden suggestions” are just as likely to be planted by a charismatic religious teacher (Buddhist or otherwise) as by a hypnotherapist. More so in fact, as the hypnotherapist is likely to have more specific understanding of what they are doing in this context.

My understanding is that both the teaching and practice of the Dharma, as well as the use of trance in a clinical setting, both have as their goals the awakening of personal accountability, personal empowerment, and healing for the student/client. In the words of Milton Erikson, our work is to “transform the trance of disempowerment into a trance of empowerment.”

It may be helpful to understand that both hypnosis and meditation are inductive rather than deductive processes. In other words, they seek to use capacities of the mind that are beyond the reach of the merely rational.

There are of course differences between hypnosis and meditation, though many of those differences may be merely contextual. Without question, for hypnotists, as for Dharma teachers, integrity is an essential requirement. In addition, it is important to understand that “there are many roads to the ocean.”

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For the text of the complete interview Please go to Sweeping Zen