Tag Archive for 'los angeles'

Hypnosis Mindset and Leadership

Published in Conscious Leadership Training, Entrepreneur Tools and Hypnosis. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

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’

Published on February 24, 2010

Is NLP weird?

Published in NLP. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

NLP means neurolinguistic programming. Neurolinguistic Programming means transformational change. It consists of an array of powerful perspectives, tools, and processes developed over four marvelously creative and fertile decades. However, when the subject of NLP comes up with some of my friends who are not involved in the field, they often express misgivings.

  • A friend in Los Angeles told me today, "I met someone who does NLP. They were really weird. They kept looking at me in a way that was really intense and off-putting."
  • Other people tell me that NLP feels like a cult. Apparently they have encountered newly-certified practitioners of NLP who were so excited about the tools they had learned that they couldn't curb their enthusiasm.
  • Some people have experienced NLP as inappropriately applied sales techniques, used by unscrupulous sales people, to persuade customers to buy things they didn't need, or want.

No doubt there's truth in all of this. Anything that works well is going to have a downside.

For many of us, life is almost unthinkable without the convenience of cars and airplanes; yet both cause incalculable damage as pollutants, and kill people whenever they crash. Name anything you like, and you can discover ways in which it is misused, or causes harm – language, love, religion, food. At one time or another, everything has been used to gain power over others.

As for NLP, one of the misunderstanding common among beginning practitioners and clients alike, is that it consists of a series of techniques or patterns. There are certainly a lot of them. There are even books available with compilations of hundreds of such patterns. But this misses the main point. NLP is not primarily about techniques or patterns. If you imagine that this is what it consists of, then it's certainly going to be weird, and somewhat unsatisfying, a never-ending accumulation of strange exercises. So what is NLP?

More than anything else, NLP is – the mindset that recognizes that any behavior or internal mental state can be changed.

To be effective, an NLP practitioner must believe this in their bones, and they must then communicate it to their client, by whatever means are available to them. Only then can the tools and patterns be used effectively to cement the transformation that has already begun.

Are those patterns and tools necessary? Absolutely! But the initial acceptance of the possibility of unprecedented transformational is a prerequisite. Otherwise the tools are mere tricks; and the client will end up with yet another reason to believe that nothing can help them overcome the problems for which they came to see you.

As a hypnotherapist, my practice changed completely as soon as I recognized the vital importance of my explanation, and demonstration, of the power of the mind to effect previously unimaginable transformation.

Once the client has truly absorbed this, then the work begins. Once the reality of the possibility for almost unlimited transformation is understood by the client, then they can imagine a new destination for themselves. The rest of the work has to do with planning the journey, removing the roadblocks, negotiating the inevitable diversions, and undertaking the journey itself. Is it always as simple of that? Actually, yes.

There are, of course,  many different sorts of roadblocks, and many ways of approaching the journey, many possible roads to take; as many roads, in fact, as there are individuals taking that journey towards congruence and fulfillment.

And yes, it is that simple!

In the presence of an experienced hypnotherapist, or practitioner of NLP, you will not experience the weird feeling of being scrutinized. Instead, you will feel like you are having a conversation with a good friend who has your best interest at heart, and who also happens to have the skills to help you to embody those changes you are seeking. You will experience a feeling of being seen, and heard, and understood, and appreciated, and supported.

If not, look elsewhere.

It's as simple as that

. arrow April 2010 NLP certification program

Published on December 16, 2009

Can I be hypnotized?

Published in Hypnosis. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Three common objections to hypnosis

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

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)

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.

Sigmund Freud hypnotist

Published on December 11, 2009

Anxiety and Stress

Published in Anxiety and Stress and NLP. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

I live in Los Angeles. I used to experience anxiety of one sort or another much of the time. It felt like a part of who I was. As I look back it seems strange. Most of my anxiety was about things that never happened, worst case scenarios, projections of my own insecurity and paranoia. I owe this change in my mindset to hypnosis, and all that I learned about the power of my imagination in a series of hypnotherapy sessions I did with Caitriona last year.  M.E.E.

Anxiety is a misuse of your time. It’s something that comes about through choices you made about where you should focus your attention.

dark_cloud_anxiety

The Dark Clouds of Anxiety

This might be hard to accept when you’re in the middle of an anxiety attack, or when you’ve been officially diagnosed with anxiety disorder, or when your anxiety is complicated by depression.

Even so, anxiety comes about because of how you have learned to focus your attention, and how you choose to give certain meaning and weight to particular experience. This may indeed sound harsh if you have been trying in vain to find an effective treatment for anxiety, or have been given the run around by health-care professionals who are better at prescribing medications for anxiety than at helping you find lasting solutions.

But what you once learned you can unlearn. For example, although you may have learned long ago to process similar experiences in the same old ways, with the same old emotions — in this case stress and anxiety, how would it be if you learned new associations; so that when the pressure was on, instead of anxiety, you felt calm, focused, determined, and excited?

It is possible to learn to do this; and it’s easier than you think

The best solutions are often the simplest. Rather than complicated diagnoses and a lifetime of being condemned to live under a cloud called anxiety. This doesn’t mean you don’t have to a little bit of work to do.

But that work involves simply applying the mind-skills and mindset you will learn through hypnosis and NLP. Much of that learning is through the power of your unconscious mind. So it’s about as hard as learning to ride a bicycle. After a day or two you may wobble from time to time. Within a week you’ll be amazed, delighted, and thrilled that what once seemed almost impossible has become a natural skill.

dark_cloud_anxiety

Published on November 28, 2009

N L P

Published in NLP. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) is a synthesis of the work of Milton Erickson, and Virginia Satir. Add the work of Fritz Perls, Abraham Maslow, Gregory Bateson, Buckminster Fuller, then add the synergistic skill of John Grinder, Richard Bandler, and several others who in the late nineteen-sixties created an explosion of creativity and innovation, and you have a recipe for confusion and misunderstanding!

Forty years after its creation, NLP still does not fit into any easily recognizable category, and continues to develop in new and exciting ways that are often misrepresented, and even more often misunderstood.

What distinguishes NLP from conventional forms of psychotherapy, (itself so diverse that it’s hardly possible to speak of it as a singular field) is that it begins by asking an unusual question.

Rather than asking why things happen or why people behave in certain ways, NLP asks, “How?” Knowing why you do certain things, or why you have a certain problem, can be very helpful in effecting change; or it might be of merely academic interest.

By ask how you arrive at questions such as:

  • How can I develop motivation, focus, clarity?
  • How can I loose weight and keep it off?
  • How can I become a non-smoker forever?
  • How you I act, think, feel differently to achieve better results?
  • How can I model excellence in others to achieve it in myself?
  • How can I fulfill my goals?
  • How can I communicate more effectively?

Simple enough! Why then are there so many misunderstandings about NLP?

Neurolinguistic programming explores and models

  • effective communication
  • optimimum internal representations and perceptions to achieve excellence.

It has become very effective at both. Which is why some people have come to see that NLP is nothing more than a way to help unscrupulous sale people sell to unwilling customers even more effectively. Or else it has come to be seen as a series of patterns and techniques that automatically produce magical results.

Unfortunately, NLP has been so impressive in achieving results, and so enthusiastically received by some, that it has come to be perceived as something of a cult. Also, because some of the patterns and techniques are relatively easy to learn, it is often practiced without the skill that is required for it to achieve the best results.

NLP is more than clever sales techniques, more than procedures and techniques learned by rote. It is more that a system for person change because it is infinitely adaptable, continually asking how certain results are achieved, drawing as few fixed conclusions as possible. Because is asks how and explores patterns you might call it a meta system, a lens to explore other systems, and to change the behaviors, attitudes, and emotions that have limited you from achieving the results you want.

Published on November 22, 2009

Weight Loss through Hypnosis

Published in Weight Loss. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Weight watchers may be focusing on the wrong thing. When you watch  your weight going up and down, up and down, where is your focus? On not being overweight, on not being fat. Your unconscious mind doesn’t understand ‘not’. It’s very child-like in this respect, which is why using hypnosis may be ideal. because hypnosis is learning to talk to that child inside that we refer to as the unconscious mind. It’s the child-like part of us that is at the center of  all our learning and habitual behaviors.

Weight loss and weight control is a concern for just under one third of the population of the US. That’s how many people are officially obese, give or take a few million.

your ideal weight

Since special weight-loss and diet programs are a 40 billion dollar a year industry you might conclude, as many have, that diets don’t work.

Watching your weight is like my asking you to not remember the sound of fingernails on a blackboard. You’ll think of it anyway and it will probably put your teeth on edge. And even if you are now thinking of a hot fudge sundae instead, you had to first think of the sound of the blackboard in order to not think of it. Now if I ask you to stop thinking of that hot fudge sundae, you may start to think about the fingernails on the blackboard again.

Focusing on your weight, your diet, or on not going to the refrigerator between meals works in the same sort of way. You go round and round inside your head and rarely achieve any results.

Weight control programs, short-term intensive weight loss boot camps, fat farms, will power, fasting … you name it, none of them have permanent lasting success for most people; and the reason is simple when you understand what does work.

What works? It’s the combination of simultaneously changing:

  • your attitude
  • the underlying emotional issues
  • your diet
  • your lifestyle, and how you exercise i.e. doing exercise that’s fun
  • and the way you bring awareness and mindfulness into how you live

Easy, you say? Yeah right!

Actually, if you learn to live with a positive mindset and bring focus to what you do – especially eating – it is a lot easier than you might think.

Mindfulness and focus are important. When you learn a few simple hypnotic techniques you will learn to get out of your own way, and trust your unconscious mind to help you on the road to good health. A balanced diet, comes from  balance life. A balanced life comes from congruent values, confidence,  and a positive attitude. Obsessing about what you can or cannot eat, chronic anxiety and habitual stress won’t help you. By learning simple steps towards maintaining clearer focus you will make more deliberate, conscious choices day by day, and moment by moment. Mindfulness helps the hypnotic process, and the hypnotic process makes it easier to be mindful.

Thinking, controlling, depriving yourself doesn’t work. Hypnosis can help you find an alternative because it gives you new inner strategies, and an unconscious impetus  that moves you towards effortless awareness and inner congruence.

When you are nourished by your life as a whole, and feel satisfied, fulfilled, and safe, why would you need to abuse your body with excess weight and unhealthy food? When you work with your unconscious mind, and when you realize that it wants you to be healthy, there’s no stopping you.

That’s why hypnosis has been the most effective path for anyone who is ready to stop watching their weight, and minding their diet once and for all. When you’re ready to live your life fully and joyfully, effortlessly maintaining  your appropriate ideal weight, you will discover that hypnosis can bring you the simple permanent ongoing solution to eating-disorders, losing those few pounds, or obesity that you’ve been looking for.

Published on November 19, 2009