Thursday, May 19, 2016

Why you should give what people already suspect.



As aspected is here another blog post.
You can now find now posts on this blog more regularly.

We love to anticipate new episodes of tv series. We love to find what we have suspected also.
That's why some people rather check what is going to happen in new episodes and don't mind spoilers.

It seems that we don't like surprises after all. Surprise!

Many popular tv series, and I think sitcoms most, have the same (ish) begin and ending.
Many popular series have the same structure for stories with just minor changes in the content.
Themes are reĆ¼sed with slight variants on it.

Popular Youtubers use the same greeting and goodbye in their videos.

The challenge is to offer content that is qualitative good..... every time.
Seth Godin's blog post can be as short as 2 to 4 sentences sometimes.

Even if you have not much content you can give, you can still give it on a regular basis and people will come back.

It's all about how you deliver the message.
No surprise there.

The best content is also not about the writer but all about the reader, as you might have expected already.

Have a great day.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

This changed the way I do hypnosis and coaching forever.



As with most decisions in my life, it wasn't a single event that contributed to the decision but rather a series of insights over time that brought me to a much deeper insight.

In an interview, Milton H Erickson said once: "Do not look at all those technique's people say I am using but rather focus on the willingness of the patient to change. "

With all the material out there discussing and demonstrating all his technique's it just seemed a matter of learning them all. Naturally, there are underlying principles that can guide you choose the right technique at the right time. 

Milton's advice seemed not practical at all to learn what he was doing.

Then I found another piece of advice Milton said to somebody that wanted to learn what he was doing. "Don't try to copy me as many do. Find your own way of doing hypnosis."

So in a way in order to be more like Erickson you have to be more like yourself and less like Erickson. That's right. 

It's like a Zen teacher telling his student to act more natural and in order to be more natural the student "tries"  to be more natural and in doing so fails to be more natural. 

I like zen very much If you didn't notice it yet. 
Zen teachers love to put students in a catch22 situation. 

I remember a difficult situation for myself when a fellow hypnotist asked me what I thought trance was. How that I would define trance. I didn't  know. 

Now I would say that there is no such thing as "a" trance. Just like consciousness is not a monolith but there are as many consciousnesses as that there are emergent properties for each way the brain has to let neuro networks communicate with other neuro networks that makes us aware of what just happened. 

But that doesn't explain yet how I define trance. 

And defining is the challenge. 
How a client defines his or her problems, how you define a good outcome for a coaching session, ext... It's not the problem that is the problem but how we relate to the problem. 

My problem was that I was not happy with how good I was in hypnosis.
Something was bothering me and I can be very critical at my own skills. 

I like to be as close to the source as possible to learn something and reading Stephen Gilligans, who was a student from Erickson himself, book: The Legacy of Milton H Erickson revealed something about Erickson's approach that I recognised. Something like a zen teachers mindset. 

There seemed to be 2 crucial factors in the way he communicated with his clients:
Or he put two classes or categories together of thinking
or he split one class, unit or category in two or more parts. 

Or in other words, he seemed to split or combine units of awareness and thinking. 

For example, he would make the problem a part of the solution. The symptoms as part of the cure. 
Or he would make you aware of how one seemingly single action were different actions that are orchestrated to make it seem as one fluent and seamless action. 

He would point out that there is a difference between thinking and doing and between doing aware and unaware. And every time you thought it was simple he could make it complex and when you thought it was complex he could make it simple, simple isn't it? 

But what does that accomplish? 

It makes our brain reevaluate and recalculate what it should include and exclude in a certain neuro-network. It makes our brain think outside the neurological "boxes" we made over time and create new ones. This demands more neuroplasticity than in our usual state of mind and that is exactly what happens when we enter a trance. 

Trances are, for me then, the states of mind that happen when we are in new territory, in every way you want to define territory, and the current neurological "box" or "boxes" does not contain the necessary resource or answer to the challenge presented in the new territory. So the brain has to reevaluate its borders and relationships between neuro-networks to come up with a sollution. 

As usual, it is neccesary to say that this is only one defenition of trances and that "the map is not the territory."

This relates to whole brain learning and even to Provocative changeworks/coaching/hypnosis ext...
When a client expects that provocative coaching is aggressive being gentle and easy is what could be the right provocative action to get results. It challenges what we believe to be right, right? 

As a fellow hypnotist and friend (Michael Perez) revealed to me: "Erickson did not say "That's right" every time he wanted to reinforce an action that he wanted to promote in the client but especially when the client did the reverse of what he expected." 

So many clients just want to please the coach or hypnotist but Erickson would encourage the reverse.
The client, in that case, had to reevaluate what was "right" and "wrong" in this new situation. 
That person is trying to be natural. (natural according to who?) 
Until just like the Zen student, that person figures out that there is nothing to figure out, hehe. 

I just needed to laugh at this. Humor is just one way to reveal to yourself that you can act outside the catch22. 

Have fun :D 

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

My beef with self-help books



"Did you see the girl with the telescope?" 
What is the difference between feeling safe and being safe?
What has this post to do with why birds sing and where trees grow? 

We come back later to these questions. 

I was asking for feedback about a book I wrote but didn't publish.
It was a self-help book.... full of exercises. I thought people would love a practical book instead of all those books full of fluff and almost no practical use. 

I was wrong. 

A good friend of mine pointed out that people use self-help books like talismans. 
They read it once and keep it close to feel empowered. 

I wonder if I asked people how many self-help books they read that really helped them, how many or few that would be. Even if they felt it helped there is a big chance that it was only a good feeling and nothing more. 

That's what I fear most....

Thinking you are fine while the house is burning down, in a manner of speaking. 
Thinking you made it while you still are unsafe. 
It's something that makes for great horror movies. 

That's not what I want to share with people even if it sells very well. 

The truth is that exercise is almost always necessary to create change because the best changes that stick are habits. You can make exercises fun by making it games and you can scale them down so it gets easy to start. 

Rewards are overrated because we feel the most rewarded by internal sources like the feeling you have when you overcome a challenge or when you have finished something. 

Willpower is overrated because it works like a battery. It works fine until it is exhausted and then you feel less motivated than even before because you feel you failed. It's not reliable. 

Many self-help books deal with problems on a superficial level instead of a systematic level that sees you also as a part of a system, in an ecology. We operate on many levels and systems at once. We are whole and a part of a whole at the same time. 

How we define ourselves and what are goals are is dependent on who is with us at that time. It is dependent on the groups we are part of and the peers we have. 

My beef with many self-help books is thus that it is self-centered. 

My second beef is that it tells you it's going to help you. 
I am not even sure that this post is helpful. Better double check that and see if it has value for you.

It's not because something is useful that it is useful for everybody. Every situation is different. 

You see, I have given you the responsibility to make sure you get something out of this.
How can anybody learn something or progress when the responsibility of that change is given to somebody else? 

Until there is ownership of the results and progress no meaningful changes can be made. 
That's why quitting smoking or start sporting or changing any other lifestyle or habit is not likely to stick when you do it because other people asked you to or pressured you into it. 

There is some structure in giving information that helps people process it better and that is slicing it in bite size bits. That is why this blog post is in divided into paragraphs of max 3 lines. 

We learn and remember more when there are a few open related questions made before the material that is presented or material to learn. It helps us look for structure and helps us focus therefore more. 

Did you see the girl with a telescope in your mind or did you see yourself looking to the girl through the telescope? 

How do we check if we have accomplished something?

How do we look for greater patterns when a simple correlation seems not present?

It's all about relationships and feedback. It's about seeing the bigger system to understand a subsystem and zoom out to find the greater ecology. 

What is needed to remember, understand and apply what we learn is thus in short: 

  • Open questions before the material.
  • Bitesize information.
  • Exercise.
  • Ownership of decisions and progress.
  • Understanding how we operate in multiple systems at once.
  • Understand that how we relate to things changes how we define things.
and 

  • Summarise what is learned. 

Those are a few things that could help you.... help yourself. 

Have a great day!