Weight management is an issue that seems to be affecting an ever-larger number of people. One reason is of course the availability of cheap high-calorie food wherever we go. Making matters much worse is the incessant advertising of these products by the food industry. Everywhere we go, there seems to be food. Hypnosis has been shown in many studies to be beneficial in weight management. Ironically, one of the reasons that hypnosis is so useful is because people with weight problems have already been “hypnotized” by the food advertising and by the food culture around them. Over the years, thousands of advertisements on television, the Internet, and billboards have been sending highly-designed messages into your unconscious mind. In addition, people around you may have been eating and living in ways that didn’t support health. These messages accumulate in your mind and have a large effect on your habits. While it probably isn’t possible to change the reality of the advertisements and the people around you, what is possible is to change your reaction to these stimuli. Through your hypnosis sessions at Standing in Spirit, you can start to move forward in the right direction by changing your response to food, and step-by-step beginning to introduce healthier habits of exercise and eating into your life. Weight issues tend to have pretty deep roots and may go back a long way in your personal history, so hypnosis can be a very powerful way of dealing with them. After all, it’s your unconscious mind that takes care of both your memories and your habits. If your conscious mind could manage your weight, then you would probably have solved this issue long ago. And one of the powerful things about hypnosis is that we are able to communicate directly with your unconscious mind. If you’re on this site,you’ve probably already tried a lot of other things to manage your weight and have finally reached a point where you really want to take control–that’s a good thing. For weight management, it generally takes a few sessions to get good results and to really get things moving in the right direction. As well as the sessions, I’ll also give you some additional audios that you can listen to at home, and teach you self-hypnosis techniques that will help you to relax deeply and to develop better habits of diet and exercise. Here are the prices: Session (about 90 minutes)：10,000 yen 3 Session Set: 25,000 yen 5 Session Set: 40,000 yen We can carry out the sessions in person in Nagoya city or by Skype. Please let me know if you have any questions or need any more information. All the best, Dr. Brian Cullen
Category: Blog
On the second day of the FAB4 conference, I did a 15 minute warmup session to get people started for the day. One of my own favourite state management activities is the COACH state which I learned on an NLP training run by Robert Dilts. Here’s an audio version. It’s a great way of getting into a good state (or actually set of states) for learning or coaching or teaching or whatever it is that you want to focus on during the day. And as with any state management tool, we can anchor it so that we can access it more easily in the future when it would be useful to have it. The COACH state chains together the four states of
Centered
Open
Aware
Connected
Holding (the previous four states by anchoring them)
Usually I use this activity with myself or others in a sitting position. Recently, however I saw a great TED video by Amy Cuddy in which she talks about her research with “power postures”. For example, sprinters when they finish a race will often hold their arms up high in a natural expression of confidence and strength after they cross the finish line. Her research suggests that taking this pose deliberately can induce these feelings of confidence and strength and she encourages people to do it before interviews or other stressful encounters. These power postures are not for the benefit of others to see, but for the benefit of ourselves.
Her idea that our posture affects the way that we feel is one that NLP has preached for years in the form of the presupposition: Mind and Body are one system. It really is common sense, but finally the consensus of science is coming to terms with the notion that we actually have bodies and what we do with those bodies will affect how well we can think and feel. The whole field of embodied cognition takes account of this by suggesting that we think the way that we think because we have the bodies that we have. Makes sense to me.
Anyway, in this warm-up session, I decided to incorporate some body postures into the COACH state in order to make it a more effective warm-up. Just to make it that little bit more interesting, I also wrapped the whole thing up in a story about a bear that I wrote a few years back.
The video is a little shaky because one of the student volunteers wasn’t quite sure how to work it, but I think the idea will still come across. Enjoy!
On July 6, I presented at the FAB4 conference in Nagoya. Actually, I was program chair for the conference this year and I’m happy to say that the whole event was a great success. Feedback from participants has been very positive. FAB4 is the fourth conference by FAB (the rather cool if strange name means First Annual Brain Conference). The theme of the conference is neuroELT – helping language teachers to learn from the fields of psychology and neuroscience. More details are available at the FAB website.
Some of the participants (and folks on Facebook who watched the video) were interested in getting a copy of the slides, so I’ve created a pdf file.
FAB4 – StorytellingandtheBrain (Slideshow)
Update: And here is the handout
StorytellingtheBrain (Handout including some key books and references)
I’ll write up the content as a paper when I get around to it. Funny – that just reminded me of an old round dish that my mother used to love. It was called a Round Tuit. There was a little message on it saying something like “For years people have been putting things off and tuits have been quite difficult to find. Now however, you have finally got a Round Tuit and everything will move forward easily.”
Ah better still – here’s an image of one. Gotta love Google images.
Recently, I have been learning a lot from Stephen’s Gilligan’s book, Generative Trance, and listening to his audios. In addition, I was lucky to take part in two webinars with him recently and have become very interested in his approach. Gilligan’s approach to hypnosis is highly influenced by his training with Erickson and he is well respected in the mainstream Erickson community.
Like most hypnotists, he believes that the Unconscious has much to offer in changing habits, behaviours, and in generating more fun and useful ways to live life. In traditional hypnosis, the conscious mind of the client is often considered to be in the way and standard inductions can be seen as a way of bypassing the critical faculty of the conscious mind. Even Erickson tended to talk primarily to the Unconscious mind.
Gilligan’s model is a little different. He suggests that we have three ‘minds’: A somatic mind, a cognitive mind, and a field mind. Each of these minds can be in three states of consciousness: primitive, ego, or generative. Ideally, we wish to raise all three minds to the level of generative in order to access all of our own resources. I’m not entirely convinced by Gilligan’s model and terminology, especially when he throws around words like quantum consciousness.
I’d prefer to keep the word ‘quantum’ fully in the sphere of physics until (and if) we establish that consciousness somehow does involve quantum mechanics. It may do, and certainly some have suggested (see the Wikipedia article) that quantum mechanics can explain the workings of the brain better than classical mechanics. The ideas in the Wikipedia article are disputed by many, and to me it would seem more pragmatic to leave out words like ‘quantum’ and to simply talk about levels of trance or something similar.
I’ve read through Gilligan’s book several times and continue to use his style of inductions with both myself and others. They work – I don’t really know why – and I’m continuing to try to figure things out a little better. I always find that it’s useful to have a fairly good understanding of why something works because we can then know what to change when it doesn’t work in any particular case. Additionally, when we understand what is going on, we can deliberately tweak things to make them better. I continue to learn!
And as part of that learning journey, I just came across an interesting interview with Stephen Gilligan on YouTube.
There are some lovely lines in the interview including a description of a radical younger John Grinder.
I met John Grinder who was teaching a course called Political Economy of the United States … long enough for him to espouse the radical overthrow of the United States Government by whatever means necessary.
Grinder and Bandler had just gotten together and had written The Structure of Magic. Gregory Bateson sent them out to meet Erickson saying:
If you guys really want to know about patterns of communication, he’s the man.
Grinder and Bandler took up Gregory on his challenge and did indeed learn about the patterns of communication of Milton Erickson. They wrote about them extensively in the two-volume series: The Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson. This is not the most readable book, but it laid the foundation for thousands of NLP practitioners to begin to use the Milton model and to get a quick start into the techniques of effective indirect hypnosis.
When Gilligan heard about when Erickson was doing, he says that it “opened up something inside him like a fire.” This led to a period of 5 years for Gilligan learning from Milton Erickson while he simultaneously studied at Stanford University. Interestingly, he did some of his research with Ernest Hilgard who was developing standards for very traditional forms of hypnosis. Then during the holidays, Gilligan would head out to Erickson’s house and learn the much more indirect forms that Erickson was using.
One formative experience for Stephen Gilligan was a Deep Trance Identification (DTI) with Erickson which was facilitated by Grinder and Bandler. Grinder had read about DTI in hypnosis journals and had learned that artists had dropped into a deep trance and been able to learn to paint like Rembrandt or other masters. Through DTI, their artistic capacity was significantly improved. They induced a deep trance in Stephen Gilligan and led him to have a DTI experience where he ‘became’ Erickson. Gilligan says that it was a “really deep profound experience”. He particularly noticed two things:
1. When I opened my eyes, everything was quiet and it was a very different experience than I had assumed that Erickson had. Because you read all these incredibly clever strategies that his mind must have been buzzing a mile a minute with all sorts of manipulation. But what I experienced was that everything was quiet.
2. When I looked around, everybody was already in a trance and that has been one of the most important experiences. It wasn’t that I had to put them into trance. They were already there. It was a great relief to realize that hypnosis is not something you do to people. It is something that you attune to in people and you just draw it out and bring their attention to it.
Gilligan sees ‘utilization’ as the most important aspect of Ericksonian hypnosis. He also learned that ‘life is to be enjoyed’ – a message that he got strongly from Erickson.
We’ve got this little opportunity and the meter’s running. We could waste it all worrying or trying to be something we’re not and then at the end of our life we would look back and realized what was the point.
Erickson was already old when Gilligan studied with him:
I knew him when he was an old man he had suffered tremendously – he was in absolute pain every day – he usually had to do four or five hours of deep pain control this was a guy who in a very deep real way enjoyed life.
And when Erickson was sitting cutting vegetables for the family dinner and totally engaged in the activity, Gilligan quotes Erickson as saying “I always enjoy discovering what I can do and I take great pleasure in that.”
There’s a whole lot to be learned from Milton Erickson and the extensions of his work by Stephen Gilligan and others. I have found that it helps me into deeper states of trance than other methods. I still have no real idea how it is achieving this despite reading Gilligan’s books and notes. I could quote him further and will do so in future posts, but there is something going on that is much deeper than the words. Keep learning!
There’s a whole lot to be learned from Milton Erickson and the extensions of his work by Stephen Gilligan and others. I have found that it helps me into deeper states of trance than other methods. I still have no real idea how it is achieving this despite reading Gilligan’s books and notes. I could quote him further and will do so in future posts, but there is something going on that is much deeper than the words. Keep learning!
Recently, I did a conference presentation at PanSIG 2013 in Nagoya, Japan. Presenting with me were Brad Deacon, Ben Backwell, and Sarah Mulvey. We had a lovely session sharing some basic language patterns that teachers can use to connect with their students more closely, to create motivation, and to instill beliefs that will help students to learn more easily.
Here is our handout from the presentation. It’s not quite the same as being there, of course, and we hope to see you at a future presentation. In the meantime, please feel free to enjoy this taster or to pass it on to teachers who can use it usefully to help students to learn.
130515_PanSig2013 – Handout – Effective Language Patterns in the Classroom
This is an interesting fast-paced video by Robert Dee McDonald talking about his Destination Method.
I watched a webinar of Robert in the NLP Planet online conference and found his ideas interesting. I first heard about him through his work on the Tools of the Spirit book which he authored with Robert Dilts. I have used several of the processes in this book and found them useful (even if just a little bit weirder than even the average NLP process!)
In the Destination Method, Robert McDonald suggests that change can occur at many different levels and that the higher levels (e.g. Spirit and Soul) affect the psychological levels. People familiar with Robert’s Dilts’ model of Neurological Levels may like to note the similarities and differences. A screenshot from the video is shown below which includes the levels in the Destination Method.
This is a paper that I published recently in the proceedings of the Pansig2013 conference. My co-authors are Avril Matsui-Haye and Sarah Mulvey. A download link and the abstract are given below. PanSig2012_Metaprograms Abstract: This paper presents the concept of metaprograms as a useful tool for exploring critical thinking skills and literacy development. Metaprograms can be defined as mental processes which manage, guide and direct other mental processes. The first four metaprograms are more commonly known as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a common personality assessment tool in schools and workplaces. This paper presents a comparison of data from the U.S. and Japan on the MBTI in order to highlight the differences in cognitive style between different cultures. This is followed by a practical activity showing how metaprograms are useful in examining and discussing people’s cognitive and social strategies. PanSig2012_Metaprograms
Research Databases and Websites
- NLP Research Database
- Inspiritive (seems to be not updated after 2006)
- A University of Surrey NLP Research database
- The Wikipedia page on NLP. I talked to a guy involved with Wikipedia and he mentioned that this page is the site of lots of conflict. I also talked to Steve Andreas, one of the most respected figures in NLP. Steve tried many times to create a more balanced page, but seems to have given up now. It’s a pity because Wikipedia is the first page that many people see when they search for NLP.
Some useful books
Links are to Amazon
- Bolstad, R. (2002). Resolve. Crown House Pub.
Sarah and I just had an article published in HLT (Humanizing Language Teaching). It’s titled “Language Patterns and Embedded Suggestions for Motivating Learners.”
You can access the article freely at: http://www.hltmag.co.uk/dec12/sart02.htm
About 8 years ago, I started to deliberately incorporate NLP language patterns into my EFL patterns, and it has made a radical difference in levels of student motivation. Over the last few years, we have introduced some of these ideas at language teaching conferences around Japan including JALT, PanSig, and ETJ. This current article is a pretty straightforward use of the Milton Model – a standard NLP model based on the language patterns of Milton Erickson.
We are also involved in several research studies to provide more quantitative evidence to support the use of these language patterns. One of these focuses on reading speed. Over the last year, I have been running an experiment with two classes based on systematic measurement of their reading speed. One class is the control group, and I try to avoid using NLP patterns and stick to ‘traditional’ pedagogy (that is surprisingly difficult when you are very familiar with NLP) and the other class gets heavy use of the patterns. Although the full results won’t be available until February, it is already clear that there is an enormous quantitative difference between the two groups as compared to the original baseline reading speeds. We’ll be sharing the results as they become available.
In the run-up to the Modelling Success workshop on December 15-16, I’ve been polishing my own modelling skills in a series of interesting modelling projects. I’ve given a few details below about two of these projects and plan to be adding more information on the site about these and other modelling projects over the next few months.
A Successful Language School Owner
How does a school owner attract clients or new students? Because of the increasingly difficult job market, more and more foreigners that I know in Japan are deciding to set up their own language schools and finding that attracting private students is not as easy as it might appear. When I modelled a successful language school owner recently, his core beliefs included the willingness to keep standing out from the competition, to be willing to experiment, and to learn from feedback–perhaps not surprising, these are beliefs that would support almost any business in today’s rapidly changing marketplace.
It is so easy to fall into habits or to fail to re-examine our habits and working patterns. NLP is all about creating richer maps of the world, and to do that we need to keep the presupposition in mind that “there is no failure, only feedback.” Like the school owner, we can all benefit greatly by experimenting, making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, and enriching our maps of the world in the process.
By modelling the skills of a successful school owner or any other role-model who has a skill that we admire, we can take a short-cut in this process by learning from other people’s experience and mistakes. We can then take on the useful aspects of their map of the world into our own map.
A Highly Effective Communicator
Some people are just simply better communicators than others – naturally … or is it natural? Is it something that we can learn? In NLP, we believe that skills such as communication can be learned and that modelling is a rapid way to achieve this.
Of course, modelling also happens naturally. People take on the accents, speaking styles, and communication styles of their parents, peers, and of the society around them. Clearly, some cultures promote different kinds of communication and this is a big influence on any particular person’s communication style because a person will naturally model the prevalent communication style.
For example, in Japan communication is often carried out rather indirectly, and one of the classic distinctions in Japanese communication is between tatemae and honne. Tatemae is the external mask that is worn whereas honne represents the true feelings or beliefs. In some countries, to hold differences between tatemae and honne might be considered to be a lack of sincerity. In Japan, while this could sometimes be true, it is more common that politeness and group harmony trumps ‘sincerity’. Indeed, in many circumstances, stating what you truly believe would be considered to be quite rude, poor communication, and even demonstrate a lack of ‘sincerity’. Japanese people (and foreigners who have lived a long time in Japan) naturally take on this communication style. ‘Sincerity’ can be a culturally-dependent word, but for most individuals in any particular culture, their map of the world does not allow for other interpretations of such a word. This can lead to inter-cultural misunderstandings.
In modelling an excellent communicator recently, a core belief that emerged from his map of the world was the need for constant calibration. By calibration, he means constantly noticing the response of the other person or people involved in the communication (both verbal and non-verbal responses), and then adjusting his own words and body language as appropriate. In NLP, this useful belief is encapsulated in the presupposition that “the meaning of your communication is the response that you get to it.” While we cannot directly change another person’s response, we can tailor our own communication to help achieve the response that we want. Through deliberately modelling a range of good communicators, we can learn to develop flexibility in our own communication so that we can communicate with any person in exactly the most appropriate way, not simply the ‘natural’ way that we have learned.
By deliberately taking control of our own patterns through modelling (rather than simply accepting the maps that we have ‘naturally’ or accidentally acquired), we can learn to better appreciate other people’s maps of the world and also to continually develop our own rich maps of mind which can support a rich tapestry of communication and life.
***
For the recent modelling projects, I have been using a variety of NLP tools including the Experiential Matrix, a model developed by David Gordon. In the Modelling Success workshop on December 15-16, you can learn to use these modelling tools to identify and take on the skills of people that you admire.
©Copyright 2012 by Dr. Brian Cullen
www.standinginspirit.com