Monthly Archive for February, 2010

Hypnosis Mindset and Leadership

Dalai Lama embodies leadershipPeople associate hypnosis with weight-loss, quitting smoking, and overcoming fears, phobias, and other addictive patterns. But Hypnosis is part of everyday life. Hypnosis is a natural state of mind.You use it to make many of your decisions on a regular basis.

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’

Make yourself uncomfortable with NLP

arrow Eleven day Training Intensive

Condoning or Condemning?

Keeping things simple can be a comfort. But sometimes comfort does nothing to move you forward. It doesn’t challenge you, or help you to learn new perspectives, and create new possibilities for yourself.

I am talking about the assessments we make of others.

You ask yourself, “Do I agree with you?  Do I accept you? Am I safe around you?”

If  you conclude, “I disagree. I don’t trust you.” You might also inadvertently add “I don’t understand you,” “I don’t like you,” or even “Because your belief system and values are different from my own there may be something wrong with you.”

Sometimes the most interesting thing can be to spend time with someone who is completely different from you. It may challenge you. It may be uncomfortable and edgy. But it  may teach you something new about yourself and your own presuppositions and assumptions.

If you always need others to agree with, it may be because you lack confidence in your own perspectives; or it maybe that you’re just taking yourself too seriously.

If you have only two options:

  1. Agreeing, condoning, liking, approving, trusting, or
  2. Disagreeing, condemning, disliking, disapproving, mistrusting.

then you may be missing a range of other possibilities:

  • challenging your assumptions and strategies
  • refining your communication skills
  • deepening your empathy
  • getting over yourself
  • having more fun
  • learning to be more flexible
  • deepening your perspectives

In the world of NLP it is axiomatic that to help other effect genuine change it’s essential to respect their model of reality. Otherwise, how do you imagine you can genuinely communicate with them, let alone influencing them? Beyond that, it’s also to your benefit to do so.

Respecting others’ model of reality doesn’t mean condoning that model; but it does save you the aggravation of having to oppose it, condemn it, or persuade them they are wrong.

What sort of anxiety would lead you to spend all your time only with those who agree with you anyway?

Stretch a little. Spend a little time with people who make you uncomfortable and notice some of your patterns which, once noticed, you can change – if you choose.

You don’t need to know anything about Neurolinguistics, or NLP, to do this. It may just be an expression of you own evolving emotional intelligence.

arrow Eleven day NLP and Hypnosis Training Intensive at Manzanita Village

How You Change What’s Not Working


Transformational Change

Five questions about generative transformation

generative changeWhat 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