Latest / The Hypnotist / Anthony Jacquin on The Hypnotist on The Power of Self-Hypnosis

Transcript

Anthony Jacquin on The Hypnotist on The Power of Self-Hypnosis · The Hypnotist

• 0:09
  to cutting edge hypnosis with real clients facing genuine
• 0:13
  issues. Brought to you by the
• 0:14
  Hypnotherapist, Demanded by celebrities CE OS and even
• 0:18
  royalty Adam Cox, these recordings took place live from
• 0:22
  Evansville in London's world famous Harley Street.
• 0:29
  So get yourself comfortable and enjoy today's episode of The
• 0:33
  Hypnotist. Hi, it's Adam here and welcome
• 0:42
  to the hypnotist. Only today I'm not your
• 0:45
  hypnotist. We've got a very, very special
• 0:47
  guest hypnotist, Anthony Jaquin. Welcome to the show.
• 0:52
  Welcome. Thank you very much.
• 0:53
  Happy to be here. Great.
• 0:56
  Great to have you here. And I think a lot of people you
• 1:01
  know, particularly from the hypnotherapy world, are
• 1:03
  definitely aware of you. But for those people that
• 1:06
  aren't, give us a bit of an intro.
• 1:10
  So I've been a full time hypnotherapist since 2001.
• 1:14
  Actually got interested in this around 1995 when my dad pivoted
• 1:20
  his career and did some training, got fascinated and got
• 1:25
  me interested. So I played around a little bit
• 1:28
  with it when I was at university and, you know, normal workplace
• 1:34
  for a few years, but then I got serious about it in 2001.
• 1:39
  I worked with several thousand clients during that time, mostly
• 1:43
  one to one, helping them overcome habits, fears, blocks.
• 1:49
  It's a brief therapy. I, I typically see my clients
• 1:54
  for, you know, between well, four sessions is a is is the
• 1:59
  minimum, but you know, that's reasonably brief in the world of
• 2:03
  talking therapy. And I've been teaching people
• 2:07
  how to do this work for a long, long time as well, working
• 2:10
  alongside my father. And I've written a couple of
• 2:13
  books along the way. One called reality is Plastic,
• 2:18
  encouraging people to simply learn these skills and actually
• 2:23
  play with them outside of the therapeutic room and off stage,
• 2:29
  which I think did something to introduce me to the world of
• 2:35
  hypnotherapists out there because they appreciated the
• 2:40
  kind of practical edge that that book encouraged testing your
• 2:44
  work and that kind of stuff. And, you know, 20 years past,
• 2:49
  but recently I've written a book all about self hypnosis.
• 2:53
  So I'm, you know, this is, this is the world I, I live in.
• 2:58
  And it never stops. Surprisingly, it never gets old.
• 3:03
  I love doing this work. And ultimately, it's a tool that
• 3:08
  I wish more people were aware of and, and and made part of their
• 3:12
  life. I agree because there are some
• 3:14
  people that are just curious about hypnosis, but there are
• 3:17
  some people that get the bug and when they get the bug, they,
• 3:20
  they keep doing it and you find that there are, you know, it's
• 3:22
  like a hydra is you, you never find an end to it.
• 3:25
  It just kind of goes off in all these different directions.
• 3:28
  And, and that's what for me, it's so fascinating.
• 3:31
  Like you can't, it's not like a computer game that you can
• 3:33
  complete. Like once you think you've
• 3:35
  really understood it, another doorway opens up and there's
• 3:37
  this whole new level to to learn.
• 3:40
  Absolutely. And I sometimes warn people
• 3:44
  early on when they're at that curiosity phase of, you know,
• 3:48
  once this gets you, it's very difficult to to let go of
• 3:52
  because whatever else you're into, suddenly it seems obvious
• 3:59
  that this should at least play a part.
• 4:01
  You know, whether that's communication, sales, teaching,
• 4:06
  parenting, you suddenly become aware of of the real power of
• 4:11
  language. It could be your hobbies.
• 4:14
  It could be, you know, your sport, it could simply be
• 4:19
  personal development, personal exploration, but it it never
• 4:22
  stops giving. And, and as you said, we, we are
• 4:27
  often in a habit of thinking that's it.
• 4:29
  I've, I've got it, I understand it, but it's, it's one of those
• 4:34
  things where there is still some mystery is perhaps overstating
• 4:40
  it, but there is still a lack of consensus amongst the most
• 4:46
  learned academics who have spent decades studying this stuff
• 4:49
  about it's very nature. And of course that leads to lots
• 4:56
  of debate online and, and often people respond to that by
• 5:01
  getting more staunch about their beliefs about it.
• 5:04
  But for me, I, I, I know that, you know, my view and
• 5:09
  understanding of it has shifted several times along the way.
• 5:13
  Just as I've thought I've got it locked down.
• 5:15
  This is it. And I, and I, and I like that I,
• 5:19
  I'm, I'm unafraid to, you know, change my view or, or, or have
• 5:24
  my beliefs about it shifted and it's still happening.
• 5:28
  So yeah, and I think the evolution of it comes through
• 5:32
  experience and, and different perspectives, different
• 5:34
  understanding. And I think each time you look
• 5:37
  at it a different way, it's almost like a a bit of a shape
• 5:39
  shift. When you think about it
• 5:40
  differently, it then becomes different because you look
• 5:43
  through the lens of that new belief system.
• 5:45
  So it's it's this kind of evolving thing.
• 5:48
  For some people it is very simple and for other people it's
• 5:51
  it's really complex. And yeah, you're right, there
• 5:54
  are some squabbles online as to what it is.
• 5:56
  But whenever I get someone in, in one of my comments saying
• 5:59
  that's not hypnosis, I just replied to them and say, look,
• 6:03
  10 hypnotists can't agree what hypnosis are.
• 6:05
  So it's it is very subjective in many ways.
• 6:10
  Yeah, absolutely it is. And it's good to keep exploring.
• 6:15
  You know, if, if we want to encourage of clients to do that
• 6:19
  to our, our, our children to adopt that kind of attitude in
• 6:23
  life, then it's useful to keep an open mind, of course.
• 6:29
  Absolutely. And you know, I spoke to you
• 6:31
  about this at the UK Hypnosis conference last year, but you
• 6:34
  were actually the reason why the hypnotist show is called The
• 6:36
  Hypnotist because there's a, a partner in your book.
• 6:39
  Reality is plastic. And I think you're on Mike
• 6:41
  Mandel's show talking about your book.
• 6:44
  And Mike said, you know, for you, you tell people you can't
• 6:48
  be a hypnotist, you have to be the hypnotist.
• 6:52
  And I remember listening to that and it really kind of planted a
• 6:54
  seed of an idea. And that's where the show name
• 6:56
  came from. Why is it so important to be the
• 6:59
  hypnotist if you're a hypnotherapist or a hypnotist
• 7:02
  with your client? Yes, it's only, it's only like
• 7:07
  half a page in the book. And I, I need, as you know, to,
• 7:11
  to nod to part of my inspiration for that.
• 7:14
  So one of my teachers of hypnosis was a British stage
• 7:19
  hypnotist named Jonathan Chase, who wrote a book I'm very fond
• 7:25
  of called Deeper and Deeper the Art of Stage Hypnosis.
• 7:29
  And he had a paragraph in there essentially suggesting that when
• 7:36
  you turn up to a gig as a stage hypnotist that you need to be
• 7:43
  the hypnotist from the beginning, even when you meet
• 7:45
  your host or your talking to the technical team.
• 7:50
  I don't think you meant that in a, you know, be strange and
• 7:53
  mysterious and, you know, stroke your goatee beard and swing your
• 7:57
  watch. He simply meant that in terms of
• 8:02
  the relationship, you know that these people are going to have,
• 8:06
  you're probably going to be the only one they ever meet, right?
• 8:10
  It's still quite unusual, even with the abundance of therapists
• 8:13
  out there. So what I thought he was saying,
• 8:17
  the way I represented that or understood that at the time was
• 8:22
  that you are representing the industry.
• 8:26
  OK. So it wasn't just about
• 8:28
  confidence or attitude. It was actually about
• 8:31
  responsibility. But they'll see many comedians
• 8:35
  and they'll see many singers, but you may well be their only
• 8:39
  contact with a hypnotist. So step up and represent.
• 8:44
  OK. So that was part of it when I
• 8:48
  came to writing my book, which again was about impromptu
• 8:52
  hypnosis and, you know, really encouraging people to just have
• 8:57
  a go, have a have a play with this.
• 9:03
  I think it's important. It it, it is a bit of a kind of
• 9:06
  confidence game. Even if you're, you know,
• 9:10
  slightly agitated inside and feeling some nerves and all of
• 9:13
  that stuff. When you say to an individual or
• 9:17
  group of people, I'm a hypnotist, there is always a
• 9:21
  reaction, OK, The reaction may be covering their eyes and
• 9:27
  saying they don't believe in such things or whatever.
• 9:29
  Or, or it it, it may be fascination.
• 9:32
  Very often it is as curiosity and a fascination that most
• 9:35
  people experience. So I simply saw it as a really
• 9:40
  important moment to to stand by what it is that you suggest you
• 9:45
  should do like any other professional.
• 9:48
  You know, if there was an emergency and a doctor stood up
• 9:51
  and said stay calm, I'm a doctor.
• 9:54
  We defer to that person to some degree because we expect them to
• 10:01
  know what they're talking about or we would expect to be in safe
• 10:04
  hands. So I wanted to encourage, you
• 10:08
  know, people to develop and, and, and work on themselves at
• 10:13
  this kind of confidence level in terms of their state, but also
• 10:16
  their identity when they step up to do this work.
• 10:20
  I think, I do think sometimes people take that be the
• 10:25
  hypnotist thing a bit too far in that, in that they perhaps see
• 10:30
  it as like you've got to be, you know, overbearing or, or the
• 10:34
  absolute authority, these kind of things.
• 10:36
  And there's no need for that. You can, you can still be
• 10:40
  yourself. Recently, I'm sure you've come
• 10:45
  across this book called Healing Beyond Pills or Potions, written
• 10:51
  by a doctor using hypnosis in the emergency room.
• 10:56
  And he has a wonderful line in that book just about human
• 11:01
  nature and how we respond in times of uncertainty.
• 11:07
  And, and he simply said, you know, it's really about being
• 11:13
  the one least uncertain. Human beings tend to look to and
• 11:17
  follow the one least uncertain. And I just love that he put it
• 11:22
  that way. He didn't say the loudest or the
• 11:24
  most confident or the, the, the, the, the biggest authority.
• 11:29
  He said the one least uncertain. If someone shouts fire and one
• 11:33
  person, you know, lacking uncertainty points to the exit
• 11:38
  you're going to follow, you're not going to ask, do they know,
• 11:41
  are they starved? So I guess that was really what
• 11:44
  it was about. And I underestimated actually
• 11:50
  how much those few paragraphs would resonate with people who
• 11:56
  were reading the book. It's often mentioned to me, you
• 12:00
  know, that that that that helped or that helped them in some way
• 12:06
  kind of cement their identity and turn up with less
• 12:10
  uncertainty. So and probably applies to many
• 12:14
  other place in life too. Yeah, that, that's how I took it
• 12:17
  because I, I looked at that almost like dilts logical levels
• 12:21
  that you can be a hypnotist and, and it's at the behavioural
• 12:24
  level, or you can be the hypnotist and it's at the
• 12:27
  identity level. And I think a lot of people
• 12:29
  treat their profession if they say, you know, if you are
• 12:33
  someone who are you, they might say I'm a father, I'm, I'm this.
• 12:37
  But quite often people will take their profession and that
• 12:39
  becomes inextricably linked to their identity.
• 12:42
  So for me it was like, if you're the hypnotist, it's you kind of
• 12:45
  embrace it at the identity level.
• 12:46
  And that doesn't have to mean you're a, you're a hypnotist
• 12:48
  when you're with your kids or you know the hypnotist when
• 12:51
  you're, you know, on holiday, you know, you're, you're, you're
• 12:54
  a holiday maker at that point. But when you're with a client,
• 12:57
  you know, being the hypnotist, I think it's it, it activates more
• 13:02
  of your resources when you, when you take that role.
• 13:05
  Absolutely. You know, I'm not, I'm not
• 13:07
  saying you yes, it's not anti other hypnotists or anything
• 13:11
  like that. It's simply about, it's probably
• 13:13
  about congruence. And as you say, there's, there's
• 13:18
  identity levels, behavioural levels, there's, you know,
• 13:22
  simply simply how you show up in terms of attitude and how you
• 13:26
  deal with the variety of responses that are going to
• 13:31
  appear when you get into your work.
• 13:32
  So certainly for most of our clients, we are the hypnotist.
• 13:39
  Absolutely even. If we know we're one of a a
• 13:41
  rather large bunch of hypnotists.
• 13:44
  And I, I've always been impressed with you in the sense
• 13:46
  that there is this willingness and courage to test your work,
• 13:53
  to go out there and do it. And I remember seeing some early
• 13:55
  YouTube videos of, I think you were in central London and, and
• 13:58
  you just had to kind of almost black things, you know, using
• 14:00
  hypnosis to, to, to do it. Where did that desire come from?
• 14:04
  Because there are lots of hypnotherapists that would be
• 14:08
  terrified to kind of even future pace or encourage the client to
• 14:12
  kind of test their work whereas you you dive into that.
• 14:16
  Yeah, well, like many hypnotherapists, I I got into
• 14:21
  this at the perhaps the height of of neuro linguistic
• 14:27
  programming encouraging us to model these three exquisite or
• 14:33
  to engage in modelling. They happen to to do that with
• 14:36
  three talented therapists, one of whom, as you know was Milton
• 14:41
  Ericsson. And therefore that what what
• 14:46
  became known as this kind of Ericssonian approach, or at
• 14:49
  least I would say now the traits that he became known for toward
• 14:53
  the end of his career started to really get embedded in
• 14:58
  hypnotherapy and much of the training and stuff that was
• 15:01
  going on. And while there is no doubt that
• 15:05
  he had genius and, you know, the decades and decades of real
• 15:11
  experimentation, part of the fallout from that was
• 15:15
  hypnotherapists really latched on to this permissive and
• 15:24
  awfully vague way of, of delivering.
• 15:27
  And I, and I love that stuff too.
• 15:29
  I, I, I enjoy the use of language and storytelling and
• 15:34
  metaphor. It's all good, but I feel that
• 15:38
  many of them dropped the direct piece and in some cases lost the
• 15:49
  courage to try and test their work and, and, and by that I
• 15:54
  mean give a suggestion and note the response, you know, and even
• 16:00
  test the response. So if you like hypnotherapists
• 16:05
  found comfort in delivering, you know, sort of very pleasant, but
• 16:12
  rather long winded sort of relaxation inductions and quite
• 16:19
  artful metaphors that kind of make you feel good.
• 16:22
  And you know that that it's very, it's almost sophisticated
• 16:27
  and stuff like that. But in terms of testing, like
• 16:32
  have you ever, have you ever tried to stick someone's hands
• 16:35
  together or have you ever told someone they cannot say their
• 16:38
  own name? There wasn't a lot of that going
• 16:42
  on. So I, I wasn't into magic or
• 16:47
  what's called known as mentalism at all.
• 16:51
  But like many people of of that generation, around the year
• 16:54
  2000, Derren Brown, a exquisite performer, appeared on TV in the
• 17:00
  UKIII didn't know what mentalism was, but it's kind of a magic
• 17:05
  that looks, you know, a bit like psychological influence.
• 17:08
  And sometimes it does use real skills.
• 17:10
  And there appeared to be some things on there that I was kind
• 17:16
  of familiar with because I used a lot of what's called idiomotor
• 17:20
  movement, idiomotor communication in my approach to
• 17:26
  dealing with therapeutic clients.
• 17:27
  So when Durham was on Radio One, sticking someone's hand to the
• 17:30
  table and doing various bits on his first series that kind of
• 17:36
  basically involved someone getting stuck or something like
• 17:38
  that. I, I just assumed, well, it's,
• 17:43
  that's hypnosis, that's what I'm doing.
• 17:44
  So it was early days for kind of Yahoo groups and things like
• 17:49
  that, but I found myself in a group and connected with some
• 17:55
  people who I'm still very much in touch with.
• 17:57
  And we were, we started trying to kind of replicate those
• 18:01
  stunts. I now accept that for a
• 18:05
  performer like Darren, you know, it's by any means necessary.
• 18:08
  It, it may look like hypnosis, but it may involve some magical
• 18:11
  methods or it may look like magic.
• 18:14
  And actually there's some suggestion involved.
• 18:15
  He's very good at, at blurring the line and, and I, I, I
• 18:19
  encourage anyone to check out his show.
• 18:21
  But we started to play with this, you know, again, we
• 18:26
  weren't stage performers. I certainly wasn't doing it in
• 18:30
  therapy that much. But we started to get together
• 18:33
  and hypnotise people and, and, and like everyone else, you
• 18:37
  know, we were, we were pretty scared at first.
• 18:39
  We were nervous about it and we'd walk around for a couple of
• 18:42
  hours before we plucked up the courage.
• 18:44
  But the the video you saw, which became known as Hypno Survival,
• 18:50
  was just in the midst of that very early days of kind of
• 18:54
  experimenting. ATV Company had an idea for a
• 18:58
  show. It never actually became
• 18:59
  commissioned, but it we made a pilot and I got to do about a
• 19:03
  dozen of these stunts on the street, telling a bar when I was
• 19:07
  Denzel Washington and getting free jinx and stuff like that.
• 19:10
  And it does look very polished. But I have to admit that was my
• 19:15
  first time of doing those things.
• 19:18
  The thing in the bar, which is where I become Denzel, that's
• 19:21
  the first time I've walked up to someone and unannounced, you
• 19:25
  know, done a handshake induction.
• 19:27
  So it wasn't a well-rounded approach.
• 19:32
  But after that little shoot, we went out every weekend.
• 19:36
  There were three or four of us and sometimes we'd have cameras,
• 19:39
  sometimes we wouldn't. But we just started to develop,
• 19:43
  I guess you'd call it street or impromptu hypnosis.
• 19:47
  So a bit like you have a roaming magician who suddenly turns up
• 19:50
  at a pub or a party or a wedding.
• 19:53
  We started to develop this as a, you know, as a genre of, of, of
• 19:59
  hypnosis and it just taught us so much.
• 20:03
  And, and the, I've been doing this a long time, you know, over
• 20:08
  25 years. So I still can't look at a group
• 20:11
  of people and tell. Who's going to be responsive,
• 20:16
  who's going to engage, who's going to be good at it?
• 20:19
  So the testing element was kind of built in to the approach and
• 20:26
  the, you know, let's let's begin to play.
• 20:30
  So they're classic methods if you like, but rather than
• 20:34
  thinking them as suggestibility tests or waking hypnosis, all of
• 20:40
  those distinctions disappeared it, it's all the same thing as
• 20:45
  far as I'm concerned. It's one continuous kind of game
• 20:48
  of suggestion and the sort of amplification of those
• 20:52
  responses. And it seemed to be the message
• 20:57
  that a lot of people needed because I started training
• 21:03
  mystery performers, magicians and mentalists and stuff in, in,
• 21:07
  in that approach. But very soon there were
• 21:10
  hypnotherapists saying, you know, I've trained, I've got an
• 21:14
  approach. But I just, I never, I never
• 21:18
  suggest anything other than relaxation or the therapeutic
• 21:22
  change, which again is fine. You can do good and real work in
• 21:26
  that way. But I know 'cause I was there
• 21:28
  for a few years myself, I was sitting there thinking, you
• 21:32
  know, are they, they really hypnotized?
• 21:35
  And I know my client was sitting there thinking the same thing.
• 21:38
  Whereas if you just give people even a small experience of
• 21:44
  something happening then such as their their fingers twitching or
• 21:49
  their hand moving and that feeling automatic or even
• 21:54
  involuntary to some degree, then the client actually settles
• 21:58
  down. Because yes, it it still doesn't
• 22:02
  quite match up to how they thought hypnosis the experience
• 22:06
  would be. But they know something's
• 22:09
  happening, so they're. More condensed for them.
• 22:12
  To then engage with the other stuff rather than sitting there
• 22:15
  thinking, I can hear you. Is it working?
• 22:18
  Yeah. So, yeah.
• 22:20
  Is it. It was a simple stuff.
• 22:23
  It's the kind of thing you can learn, you know, in half a day
• 22:27
  or by reading a few chapters of a book.
• 22:28
  And what I encourage people to do is just just go and do that
• 22:33
  stuff to, to 50 different people.
• 22:37
  You don't need to call it hypnosis.
• 22:38
  You don't need to get to the induction.
• 22:40
  Just observe their responses and you're going to.
• 22:43
  It's going to teach you most of what you need to know about
• 22:48
  testing your work in therapy or or anywhere.
• 22:52
  Else so and I think the risk linked to it of doing doing
• 22:57
  something where it could fail actually gives an extra level
• 23:01
  and and being willing to kind of go outside your comfort zone.
• 23:04
  I remember many years ago I used to do workshops with
• 23:09
  arachnophobes and at the end that all hold tarantulas and
• 23:12
  when I met this lady who had a huge collection of tarantulas
• 23:14
  and she said, I'm looking for a hypnotist.
• 23:15
  Can you do this? I'm like, absolutely yes.
• 23:18
  Never helped a single phobic in my life.
• 23:20
  But but turning up and if there's a room full of people,
• 23:22
  you can't, you can't have ambiguity or uncertainty in that
• 23:25
  tonality. You know this will work.
• 23:28
  You know, when you, when you, when you pick up the tarantula,
• 23:30
  it's going to look like, you know, any other animal that
• 23:33
  you're not afraid of. And it did.
• 23:35
  And I'm like, pretty shit like this, this works.
• 23:38
  But there was a risk there because there was 20 people in
• 23:41
  the room and they might have, you know, turned around.
• 23:43
  There is and and and you know, respect to you if 100% of people
• 23:49
  got there and had that experience.
• 23:50
  But there's another truth here, which is the reality is in
• 23:54
  therapy, but it isn't always 100% results and and often the
• 23:58
  client, as much as we'd love it to be a complete about turning
• 24:04
  in session one, right? Sometimes there's more work to
• 24:06
  do. And sometimes they're as
• 24:11
  responsive to suggestion inside your room as they are outside
• 24:15
  it. And there's a whole bunch of
• 24:16
  people around them giving them negative suggestions in some
• 24:19
  ways. So the, the idea of something,
• 24:23
  you know, working or not working is, is one of the bridges that
• 24:27
  therapists have have to cross to and, and should face.
• 24:31
  So, you know, I may not always have a, a tarantula in the room,
• 24:36
  but when someone is in chronic pain or someone has a chronic
• 24:42
  fear that's predictable, like a like a phobia, then I test as
• 24:49
  much as I can in the room at the beginning of the session and at
• 24:53
  the end of the session, you know, thinking about that now,
• 24:57
  you know, where's the fear gone now?
• 24:59
  Between 0 and 10, yes, even that is suggestive in some way, but
• 25:05
  it's a very important moment. If someone's in chronic pain and
• 25:10
  you don't test, let's say you don't ask at the beginning, you
• 25:13
  know, where is that now? And then at the end you say how
• 25:16
  you feeling? They might just say it's OK at
• 25:18
  the moment or, or the fear, well, I can't really bring it up
• 25:22
  in this room. But if at the beginning you
• 25:25
  said, I tell you what, close your eyes, there's a spider on
• 25:29
  your leg between 0 and 10, how bad is that?
• 25:32
  It's normally 11 if it's a phobia, but you know, it's 10 or
• 25:34
  11. And at the end, you know, think
• 25:36
  about that Now, you know, imagine, you know, I mean it.
• 25:41
  Imagine there's a spider in this room right now.
• 25:43
  Where's the feeling gone? They often have this moment.
• 25:47
  It almost looks like confusion. But of I kind of hang on a
• 25:52
  minute as if I'm no, no, I'm going to get it in a minute.
• 25:56
  And that is an important moment. That's, that's an important
• 25:59
  moment to kind of ratify something has shifted, you know,
• 26:03
  and, and to give another suggestion, actually, you know,
• 26:05
  this is never going to bother you again.
• 26:07
  So I feel that, you know, I, I, I got into this at the end of,
• 26:14
  of it being about, you know, brief change.
• 26:17
  Most of the work I did in the early days with, with smokers,
• 26:20
  sometimes with phobias, often these things do respond very
• 26:24
  well in a single session and that's great.
• 26:26
  I want to, you know, reinforce that possibility that absolutely
• 26:31
  things can change like that. But over the years, I've really
• 26:37
  accepted the supporting my clients beyond that session as
• 26:42
  they go out in the real world, test it by themselves.
• 26:45
  You know, they say it's a fear of flying.
• 26:48
  They start looking up in the sky, they start thinking about
• 26:50
  going on holiday, They book a ticket.
• 26:53
  You know, all of these things can, can bring up something.
• 26:58
  It's not about feeling nothing, right.
• 27:00
  We can bring up even if you don't have a phobia, you can
• 27:03
  have thoughts about a long haul flight.
• 27:07
  You don't need to have a phobia to have a thought of about
• 27:10
  turbulence of, you know, I hope we're not crashing.
• 27:14
  It really is about whether we we fuse with it.
• 27:17
  It's one of the, the, the terms out there or not.
• 27:21
  And I feel that through following up and, you know,
• 27:29
  checking in with my clients and seeing what's come up in the
• 27:32
  last week that those rapid shifts become again, I, I guess
• 27:43
  become something that they really begin to experience as at
• 27:46
  the identity level and out there in the world.
• 27:50
  You know, it's not just I haven't had a cigarette for a
• 27:53
  week. I'm doing I'm, I feel great.
• 27:55
  It's no thanks. I'm a non-smoker.
• 27:58
  That's that's really where I want people to be.
• 28:00
  Yeah. So, yeah, there's a lot, there's
• 28:03
  a lot to it. But as therapists, we should be
• 28:07
  unafraid of of testing our work. And and if nothing happens,
• 28:13
  that's a response too. You can just say that's
• 28:16
  interesting and you you find another way to do it.
• 28:20
  You know, it becomes feedback loop, process of elimination.
• 28:24
  A lot of the hypnotherapists that I, I know studied with your
• 28:28
  Academy, you, you and, and your father.
• 28:31
  Where did the idea of the Academy come from and and what
• 28:33
  level of impact have you had over the period of of running
• 28:37
  that Academy? Well, my dad started it with
• 28:41
  someone else in 1999. It's quite an amusing story in
• 28:45
  that my dad used to do a lot of group quit smoking sessions.
• 28:50
  You know, every week he was seeing 2030 clients 1:00 to
• 28:54
  1:00, but he'd be doing groups between 50 and even 200 people
• 28:58
  at a time. And it was guaranteed as well.
• 29:02
  We ran that model at the time. If you don't quit, you don't
• 29:05
  pay. There was no catch.
• 29:06
  There was nothing to listen to for 21 days.
• 29:08
  It was just call a free phone number and if you haven't quit,
• 29:11
  you can get your money back. And a hypnotherapist who smoked,
• 29:15
  funnily enough, snuck into my dad's session thinking this must
• 29:19
  be some kind of con or something.
• 29:22
  He got hypnotized. He quit smoking, didn't even go
• 29:25
  there to quit smoking, but he quit smoking and he called my
• 29:28
  dad and asked for training. And that relationship one way or
• 29:32
  another, you know, turned into them starting something together
• 29:36
  and working together. He's no longer around.
• 29:40
  Actually, he, he, he, he tragically passed away.
• 29:43
  But at some point in, in my first, you know, four or five
• 29:46
  years, I got involved and we started teaching and then doing
• 29:53
  it internationally. So in terms of impact, I mean, I
• 29:57
  guess half the people who do our professional hypotherapy
• 30:01
  training on you to it, they're curious, they're looking for a
• 30:04
  school and the other half have trained, you know, often
• 30:08
  they've, they've done more courses than I have and they're
• 30:11
  just looking to continue to develop their skills.
• 30:15
  Are schools known for having a real practical edge, even though
• 30:21
  now most of our training's online, you practice everything
• 30:24
  we facilitate, you know, hypno circles between lessons so
• 30:28
  people can practice and it just seems to, to go down well.
• 30:32
  I, I, I even today, you know, some of the much bigger and,
• 30:38
  and, and well established schools still lack the bits that
• 30:45
  enables you to actually feel confident as a hypnotist.
• 30:49
  They give you an approach. You can help people, but if
• 30:53
  someone says, oh cool, can you show me something?
• 30:57
  They still feel that fear again that I, I felt too in the early
• 31:00
  days of like, no, you know, this isn't the right place.
• 31:03
  It's not quite enough. And I want people to let go of
• 31:07
  that. I'd like them to be able to do
• 31:08
  this work with groups. I'd like them to be able to do
• 31:10
  it in any environment. I'd like them to be able to do
• 31:14
  therapeutic work as the aeroplane is coming in to land.
• 31:18
  If you happen to be sitting next to someone who's nervous about
• 31:20
  the landing and you can just get into it.
• 31:23
  So we've been lucky enough to teach, you know, all over the
• 31:27
  world, Australia, US, Brazil, my favorite place.
• 31:31
  I think you're a fan too. And I just love, you know,
• 31:36
  sharing what's good and practical and, and real from our
• 31:41
  own practice with an interested, engaged audience.
• 31:47
  It's a absolute privilege, I know, to be able to, you know,
• 31:52
  talk about the thing you love to people who enjoy hearing about
• 31:56
  it. But when I go to places like,
• 32:01
  you know, India, I've talked there a few times and, and in
• 32:05
  Brazil as well, it's, there is a ripple effect like, you know,
• 32:13
  it's, and, and often you do. I don't want to, I don't want to
• 32:22
  generalise because there's so much good work going on in, in
• 32:25
  both of those countries. But sometimes some of the, the,
• 32:29
  the beliefs about it and around it are still quite rooted in
• 32:38
  some of the more mysterious explanations and in some cases I
• 32:42
  would say misconceptions. So when you can bring something
• 32:48
  that's modern, it's not dogmatic, it's not telling them,
• 32:51
  you know, in absolutes, this is it.
• 32:53
  This is what it is. There's still some room for
• 32:55
  mystery, but it feels like you're, you're delivering
• 33:01
  something of, of real value that could have an impact, you know,
• 33:05
  beyond your own lifetime if some of those ideas kind of make it
• 33:09
  through. So, yeah, it's, it's good, good
• 33:13
  to work with my dad as well. You know, it's working with
• 33:15
  family. There are, of course, some
• 33:18
  challenges. We, we can trigger each other
• 33:20
  the wrong way now and again. But the fact that we've been
• 33:23
  able to travel the world together and, and see places
• 33:26
  that we'd never seen and share what we both love, you know, is,
• 33:35
  is a good thing for both of us. Yeah.
• 33:37
  Absolutely. And tell me about the transition
• 33:40
  that you've made because obviously writing this book on
• 33:42
  self hypnosis seems like as the thinking has evolved, this seems
• 33:48
  like more important now than maybe it was, you know, back in
• 33:51
  the NLP days and the kind of more performative, you know,
• 33:54
  impromptu hypnosis days. How did that transition come
• 33:57
  about and what are your core beliefs about self hypnosis now?
• 34:03
  Yeah, well, in those early days, I not, not to bring up the the
• 34:09
  hypno theory debate, but in those early days I was most
• 34:12
  certainly a statist. I was very much about, you know,
• 34:16
  hypnosis is a specific state and that it enables us to get past
• 34:23
  the conscious mind and speak to the unconscious and all of these
• 34:27
  things. I think all of that language can
• 34:31
  still be useful, but it limited me in terms of my own
• 34:39
  application of self hypnosis because in terms of subjective
• 34:44
  responsiveness to trance based suggestions, I was, I'm afraid
• 34:50
  to say, not a very good subject, not not the worst.
• 34:53
  I was willing. I wanted to have the experience.
• 34:56
  I would get some of these idiomotor movements but tell me
• 35:00
  I was stuck or tell me I was hallucinating.
• 35:02
  And unfortunately it didn't seem to work.
• 35:05
  So because of that, I just didn't engage that much with
• 35:10
  self hypnosis. It wasn't a big part of my
• 35:13
  therapy work either. I would, I would give people a
• 35:18
  suggestion to be able to, you know, trigger their own kind of
• 35:23
  relaxed in a focus state. But it didn't go much beyond
• 35:26
  that. As my views about the nature of
• 35:31
  hypnosis shifted and I, I let go of many of those things which I
• 35:37
  previously perceived to be sort of essential pillars of
• 35:42
  hypnosis. It suddenly it started opening,
• 35:45
  opening up to me again. Because first of all, I would
• 35:48
  look at any of our problems, any of our responses that we wish to
• 35:54
  be free of as a, as a decent enough demonstration of self
• 35:58
  hypnosis. Like you are imagining something
• 36:01
  and your body is responding automatically, your brain has
• 36:04
  responded already without you really needing to be involved.
• 36:07
  So there was that. The second thing I've got to
• 36:12
  credit Adam Eason because early on, like I used to run a, a
• 36:18
  hypnotism conference myself before the UK hypno convention,
• 36:22
  about five years, we had a thing called change phenomena.
• 36:25
  And I got to know Adam. You know, we had him as a guest
• 36:28
  speaker and then we had him back.
• 36:29
  We had him back again. And he'd been through this
• 36:33
  himself. He'd already made the shift from
• 36:36
  being something of an Ericksonian laced state theorist
• 36:42
  to beginning to talk about self hypnosis as a skill.
• 36:47
  And that was a fundamental shift.
• 36:49
  It's like, OK, so this is not just a trait that you've either
• 36:53
  got or you haven't. This is a skill.
• 36:55
  And therefore, it's something that I can improve and I can get
• 36:59
  better at. And you know, that that that
• 37:04
  continued. And even now I'm fascinated with
• 37:08
  some of the work of, you know, Zoltan DNS.
• 37:11
  They're, they're kind of shaking it off even more in just in
• 37:14
  2024. In fact, my book starts with a
• 37:18
  quote from a paper by Dell in 2024.
• 37:21
  Just saying, human beings have a natural freestanding ability to
• 37:26
  alter their experience. They've been doing this for
• 37:29
  thousands of years and it's only culture that happens to call it
• 37:33
  hypnosis or self hypnosis here. So there was that and there was
• 37:39
  also a, a, a recognition or I guess that a, a, a distinction
• 37:45
  between using self hypnosis to kind of wake up from a lifetime
• 37:52
  of self hypnosis to, to see where things have affected you
• 37:56
  and how beliefs have been taken on board.
• 37:58
  And when, you know, prodded even just a bit, just questioned,
• 38:04
  examined, they'd often wobble and kind of fall over a little
• 38:07
  bit. So using self hypnosis is that
• 38:10
  way as a kind of skilful practice of really just
• 38:14
  utilizing your attention and harnessing your imagination to
• 38:18
  provoke responses. Again, another quote from the
• 38:22
  Healing Beyond pills or Potions book.
• 38:25
  When it comes down to it, he just says hypnosis is just ideas
• 38:30
  provoking responses right now. I know we move from very narrow
• 38:36
  to very broad definitions, you know, quite quickly in this
• 38:39
  world. But I guess I have quite a
• 38:41
  broadview of self hypnosis. To me, it's like any means
• 38:45
  necessary the, the intention, if you're intentional and skilful
• 38:49
  practice of using your imagination and your, your
• 38:57
  attention to shift your experience.
• 39:02
  All of that stuff kind of added up to a, a, a big recognition in
• 39:05
  me some years ago, probably 7 or 8 years ago now, now, now I can
• 39:11
  get involved with this game. Now I really can turn this upon
• 39:14
  myself. And I rapidly shifted as a
• 39:20
  subject. I became a much better subject.
• 39:23
  I, I became someone who can hallucinate on demand with the
• 39:28
  recognition that semi transparent realities are good
• 39:32
  enough. It's really about our
• 39:33
  relationship to those things. We don't need real as real to be
• 39:38
  able to feel, you know, and trigger an emotional response in
• 39:42
  ourselves. So I started applying it and
• 39:47
  applying it with my therapy clients in the sense that I
• 39:50
  started seeing my clients to say for a minimum of four sessions
• 39:54
  and often the last couple of sessions, empowering them,
• 39:58
  equipping them with some self hypnosis tools.
• 40:02
  And from the outside looking in, yes, some of that looks like,
• 40:07
  well, you've, you're just asking them to change their posture.
• 40:09
  You're asking them to take a breath.
• 40:11
  You're asking them to imagine things differently.
• 40:13
  And I'm like, yeah. Because that's what it's made of
• 40:18
  for me right now. So yeah, I, I, I, I lean much
• 40:26
  toward a kind of non state view of things.
• 40:29
  I, I, I, I don't think we need to be black and white about it.
• 40:32
  But I see the state change, which is of course what many
• 40:36
  people will expect and in terms of their therapeutic journey,
• 40:40
  what they need. I see that as a suggested effect
• 40:46
  rather than this must happen before we give suggestions.
• 40:51
  So any notion of sleep trans or deeper to me is the same as
• 40:55
  magnets, lighter stuck. It's a case of, you know,
• 41:01
  figuring out, you know, what is it, where, where, where do you
• 41:04
  want to be? What state do you wish to show
• 41:06
  up in? And giving people some
• 41:11
  confidence in their ability to do that themselves, that's
• 41:16
  that's another real pay off here in terms of psychological traits
• 41:23
  that could add up to something really useful.
• 41:27
  It's not just a case of do I get hypnotized or not.
• 41:32
  The research is pretty clear. Learning this stuff yourself,
• 41:35
  teaching yourself to do this is actually the optimal way to do
• 41:41
  it. A bit like meditation.
• 41:43
  You could sit in a meditation group and be guided on a lovely
• 41:47
  journey every week for a year, but you might still lack a sense
• 41:51
  of self-control, self-reliance and self efficacy.
• 41:55
  Whereas if you, if you're curious about this and you want
• 41:59
  to begin to develop these skills as I did, then sit with it every
• 42:04
  day, spend some minutes on it every day.
• 42:07
  And when you experience things that are problematic, you know,
• 42:11
  maybe you're nervous before a presentation or you've got a, a
• 42:14
  bigger audience to speak to or something, then be interested in
• 42:19
  that in exactly the same way. Like, you know, interesting.
• 42:24
  I, I'm feeling something. What is that?
• 42:26
  What is that thing without the story?
• 42:29
  What, how, how would I actually describe that?
• 42:30
  And before you know it you will be doing self hypnosis rather
• 42:35
  than sitting wondering am I to answer question.
• 42:38
  Because I, I went through the, the journey, I used to do lots
• 42:42
  of self hypnosis and I used to use my inner dialogue as the
• 42:45
  hypnotist and, and kind of take me.
• 42:46
  And I always found that I couldn't make it the same
• 42:51
  experience that I was giving my clients because at some level I
• 42:55
  had to be consciously aware of my inner dialogue.
• 42:57
  And then the recipient of that. How I prefer self hypnosis now
• 43:01
  is to think of something I want to change, record the hypnosis
• 43:05
  and then listen to my own voice as a recording.
• 43:08
  Is there in your experience an optimal way when people do self
• 43:14
  hypnosis to really experience self hypnosis?
• 43:16
  Yeah, I think there is. I mean, what you're describing
• 43:21
  is a is a perfectly valid way of doing it.
• 43:23
  And it's, it's how many self hypnosis books and, and
• 43:26
  trainings and things encourage you to proceed, which is to
• 43:32
  create the disembodied hypnotist right to, to.
• 43:35
  I'm going to, I'm going to write a script, I'm going to record it
• 43:38
  and then I'm going to listen to it because that's how I can sort
• 43:42
  of passively receive it or, or engage with it, you know,
• 43:46
  however you want to put it. There's no question that, that
• 43:52
  that can have an effect, but it's not what I encourage.
• 43:57
  What I, I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll give you a glimpse of the, the,
• 44:03
  the, the approach in it in a while.
• 44:05
  But what I personally do now is, let's just say it's more of a
• 44:13
  technique that you may have recorded and delivered.
• 44:16
  What I do is concentrate on things that I know well enough
• 44:22
  that I can, the best way I can put it is imaginatively journey
• 44:26
  my way through. So if you, if we take a
• 44:30
  technique like even even something like the rewind or my
• 44:36
  dad's arrow technique, you know, or, or revisiting and
• 44:40
  reassessing a past event, whatever you may be most
• 44:42
  familiar with, I could make a recording and I could sit back
• 44:46
  and let my own voice guide me. But, but the reality is most of
• 44:50
  these techniques have common elements like dissociation.
• 44:55
  You drift out of your body or you see yourself on a screen.
• 44:58
  A, a facing, there's normally some symbolism.
• 45:02
  There's normally a meeting or, or a going through, right?
• 45:06
  So personally, now I, I, I'm not speaking to myself or, or
• 45:13
  listening to a recording when I do self hypnosis.
• 45:16
  I am simply engaging my imagination, which is not, you
• 45:21
  know, special. Yes, I do.
• 45:23
  I don't have afantasia, but I think we can do this in any
• 45:28
  sense, you know, a felt sense, whatever.
• 45:32
  But I just journey my way through techniques.
• 45:37
  I use idiomotor work as as feedback on myself.
• 45:44
  So I'm a big fan of The Swan by Bob Burns and Mirroring Hands by
• 45:53
  Ernest Rossi and Richard Hill, which there's not a lot of
• 45:57
  content. There's more a curious interest
• 46:00
  of if I, if I can just, if I can just be present and let go of
• 46:09
  the resistance to this agitation or this uncomfortable feeling or
• 46:12
  this conflict for a while. And instead, you know, just try
• 46:15
  to be spacious enough that I could allow this stuff to come
• 46:19
  up. That can be helpful.
• 46:22
  If I symbolize it with movement or the meeting of these two
• 46:26
  hands or whatever it might be, then that can also be useful.
• 46:30
  And if I want to get more specific, like the dialogue of
• 46:36
  speaking to parts of ourselves or the the symbolism and
• 46:40
  dissociation of the arrow or whatever it may be, then if I
• 46:46
  can do it via idiomotor kind of stuff, then I'll do that.
• 46:50
  But if I can journey my way through the technique, I tend to
• 46:54
  do it that way that. Makes sense, it's.
• 46:58
  A slight shift, but it's it makes it easier for me to apply
• 47:03
  on the fly. Yeah, right.
• 47:05
  It's it's, it's the structure and the sequence and the the
• 47:08
  exploration of it rather than long in a dialogue narrative or
• 47:13
  yeah, or anything else. Is is going, yeah, I mean going
• 47:15
  with that. You know, an example would be
• 47:17
  sometimes, you know, sometimes I have to speak on stages and, and
• 47:22
  I've done plenty of speaking for perform.
• 47:24
  It might be in a different country, a different culture.
• 47:27
  And I'm, I'm human. Some stuff can come up.
• 47:31
  I might, I might find myself reading over and over my intro
• 47:35
  20 times thinking, you know, my brain saying this is this is the
• 47:38
  bit you've got to get right. So I might be getting a bit hot
• 47:41
  under the collar and feeling of some nerves.
• 47:43
  So the difference is even if it was 5 or 10 minutes beforehand,
• 47:48
  I tend to just sit down. I just stop.
• 47:57
  It's really my first port of call.
• 48:00
  I, I, I use the mini mindfulness practice of Jon Kabatzin.
• 48:04
  Stop, Stop what you're doing. Put everything down.
• 48:10
  I take a breath. I I, I tend to slow my breathing
• 48:13
  down. I'm a big fan of 6/6 breathing.
• 48:15
  It's the simplest, easiest. It's slowing your breathing
• 48:18
  down. It soothes the system.
• 48:20
  The science is very clear. It supports it.
• 48:23
  Stop, take a breath. OK, I might ask a question.
• 48:30
  If I had to present with this, could I?
• 48:38
  And I wait and, and the answer's normally yes.
• 48:40
  It might be a little voice saying yeah, but I don't want
• 48:42
  to, you know, I don't want to go out there sweating or read
• 48:45
  enough. It's like if I had to.
• 48:47
  So there's, there's a fair bit of, you know, honest enquiry.
• 48:54
  OK, then I'll get into a technique.
• 48:57
  So then I might just say, you know, put my hand up and say,
• 49:00
  OK, then if, if, if my creative mind's willing to look at this,
• 49:07
  that ham will move. OK, then then go ahead, look at
• 49:13
  it. OK as that as that kind of
• 49:15
  three-step process happens. I was a big fan of Ernest Rossi
• 49:20
  early on. And you know, 15 years of
• 49:24
  working with Ericsson, wrote up all of his work, wrote the four
• 49:26
  volume set about this great master.
• 49:30
  When you read his books, you read his technique.
• 49:33
  It's kind of like magnetic hands with less words, right?
• 49:37
  It's just, it's just, OK, let's can we create some space where
• 49:41
  the system can self organise? Now you've actually given it
• 49:47
  some kind of target. So I'll, I'll do that kind of
• 49:50
  thing while that's happening, you know, can my mind identify
• 49:55
  the changes? It's almost inevitable my brain
• 49:59
  is going to produce some content, right?
• 50:02
  So it will be reminding me, yeah.
• 50:04
  But last time that, you know, that the crowd were drunk or you
• 50:07
  had that Heckler or, or, or. Yeah.
• 50:09
  But you know, these are really important people who are in the
• 50:11
  audience. So it's producing in the way
• 50:13
  that it does. I see all of that as just
• 50:16
  automatic, you know, the noise the brain is making.
• 50:20
  I don't, I don't think of it as I am thinking.
• 50:22
  It's just like, you know, the brains producing these thoughts.
• 50:26
  So if, if, if some of that content it's about the past,
• 50:32
  then we've got tools that are kind of well suited to revisit
• 50:35
  and reassess. If, if some of it is about the
• 50:39
  anticipation of what could, well, we've got tools for that.
• 50:43
  And if it's just, you know, I'm experiencing this overwhelming
• 50:48
  feeling right here, then I normally use the arrow technique
• 50:51
  because it's very good for these present moment feelings.
• 50:54
  So is that self hypnosis? Well, it is in my view, there
• 50:58
  was no effort to do an induction.
• 51:02
  There was, there was no mention of that.
• 51:03
  There was no deepening. There was no, am I in a trance
• 51:08
  or not? It's just a case of begin.
• 51:11
  Where you're at right now is evidence you're already engaging
• 51:15
  imaginatively. Your attention is already
• 51:17
  narrowed. So let's start there.
• 51:20
  And yeah, it's made a it's made a big difference to me.
• 51:24
  So that that's kind of why I wrote this book.
• 51:27
  It took me a long time to, you know, write something that I
• 51:34
  feel I would be at a stand beside, which is is quite
• 51:37
  important to me. I could have turned out a book
• 51:39
  on self hypnosis many years ago, but it took several years of
• 51:43
  experimentation and sharing this stuff with clients to really
• 51:49
  think, no, this is this is my approach, this is the system and
• 51:53
  and I want to share it. So yeah, there's many ways that
• 51:58
  that to do it. You know, as I said a moment
• 52:01
  ago, by any means necessary to alter your experience and your
• 52:06
  perceptions. One more phrase you may have
• 52:09
  heard, but I'm sure you'll enjoy is strategic self deception.
• 52:15
  It's like if, if I'm going to have an inject, I don't know, a
• 52:19
  cannula, a procedure that there's going to be some pain
• 52:22
  involved more than likely, right?
• 52:27
  What can I do? Can I dissociate?
• 52:29
  Can I imagine my arm is made of rubber?
• 52:31
  Could I just distract myself? All of those things are valid
• 52:34
  approaches to strategically creating some self deception so
• 52:41
  that this procedure is is more useful.
• 52:44
  And yeah, just just that really in terms of attitude, it's not
• 52:52
  about getting to the truth of it or anything else or being
• 52:55
  completely anaesthetized. Quite often it's just am I
• 53:01
  emotionally involved with this or not?
• 53:05
  And if I am, you know, is that, is that optimal?
• 53:08
  It's OK to feel something if you're no longer interested or
• 53:13
  bothered by it. And, and, and that's a pretty
• 53:16
  broad lane for us all to to be able to operate in.
• 53:21
  So we'll make sure the Amazon link is in the in the show notes
• 53:24
  here. So if anyone's interested, give
• 53:26
  us the name of the title of the book again now.
• 53:29
  The book is called Alter Your Experience, the Art of Self
• 53:34
  Hypnosis, and for those of you who've got an Audible credit,
• 53:40
  I'd encourage you to get it on Audible because I voiced it and
• 53:45
  there's a whole bunch of bonus chapters in there.
• 53:49
  I even made an album in the process.
• 53:50
  To be honest, I've never made or published music before, but I
• 53:56
  wanted to create something unique and, you know, ended up
• 54:02
  working with a really talented musician to create some what
• 54:07
  originally were just going to be some background sounds for the
• 54:09
  chapters and like cues the different parts of the book.
• 54:13
  But yeah, I made a little album called, what's it called, the
• 54:18
  Starlight Path, the book of Starlight.
• 54:21
  So if you if you want some, it's kind of like meditation music
• 54:27
  meets Goldie's metal heads basically without those hog
• 54:32
  called drum and bass beats. But it's a bit kind of Spacey
• 54:36
  21, you know, Space Odyssey kind of meditation type vibes.
• 54:40
  But mostly slow, mostly at 60 beats per minute, which is a
• 54:46
  great fit for 6/6 breathing, which I also encourage in the
• 54:51
  book. So we'll, we'll make sure all
• 54:54
  these links, the, the music, the Academy, your your books, you're
• 54:58
  going to leave us with a little bit of an experience.
• 55:01
  So tell us what you're about to do.
• 55:03
  Yeah. Well, in the book, the first
• 55:08
  section, I share what I, what I sometimes call my 7 steps to
• 55:12
  self hypnosis. And we don't really get to
• 55:16
  giving ourselves suggestions and still Step 5 because the way I
• 55:20
  design the process is that often step one is enough.
• 55:24
  Like you can spend a it's simple.
• 55:26
  You know, I can teach for it right now.
• 55:30
  And if not, Step 2 is often enough, right?
• 55:32
  So you can spend a lifetime mastering the skills and at some
• 55:36
  point in the book, I I say, you know, if I had a wish for this
• 55:40
  book, it's just that you spend some time with these first three
• 55:44
  steps. OK, So what you're going to hear
• 55:48
  really is how I engage in self hypnosis.
• 55:53
  And yes, I guess I'm going to be guiding you to some degree here
• 55:58
  today. But, you know, just pay
• 56:01
  attention to your inner experience and, and see what
• 56:05
  comes up. So to give it, to give it some
• 56:10
  value. I, I guess if you're listening
• 56:13
  to this, you could think about something that currently feels
• 56:19
  stuck or caught in a loop, You know, something that is perhaps
• 56:23
  causing you some agitation at some level or a situation you,
• 56:28
  you just don't seem to be able to get past.
• 56:31
  So we could we could get our target in mind, something like
• 56:35
  that. OK.
• 56:38
  And you can sit comfortably, but I'm not going to, I'm not going
• 56:42
  to guide you into a trance. So you could even do this if you
• 56:45
  were driving or operating heavy machinery, it would be OK.
• 56:49
  But I guess for our purposes here, just settle in for the
• 56:53
  next few minutes, OK? The first thing I want you to do
• 56:59
  is stop. When I'm doing this to myself, I
• 57:03
  clap my hands. OK, so I would I would like you
• 57:08
  to do the same and say out loud, stop.
• 57:15
  Stop what you're doing. Put everything down.
• 57:23
  And I know some of us really don't like being told what to
• 57:26
  do, but I'm not telling you what to do.
• 57:28
  This is an invitation. I'm going to extend it to you
• 57:32
  one more time. Stop.
• 57:36
  Stop what you're doing. Put everything down, and if
• 57:42
  you're happy to or wish to, you can allow your eyes to close.
• 57:47
  This is not really a state of eyelids with the eyes closed.
• 57:51
  I'd like you in a moment, I'll guide you into it to begin
• 57:55
  breathing in a particular way, where you breathe in through
• 57:59
  your nose slowly and gently for six seconds, no holding, and
• 58:03
  then out through your nose for six seconds.
• 58:05
  We're just going to do this four or five times.
• 58:08
  So begin inhaling 23456, exhaling 23456.
• 58:22
  Do it again 2, 3456 and exhaling in the same way.
• 58:31
  Place one hand on your stomach and as you inhale you should
• 58:36
  feel your stomach rising and as you exhale you should feel your
• 58:44
  stomach falling. It's not a deep breath, it's not
• 58:48
  a full breath. Do it again.
• 58:50
  Just imagine breathing is about your nose and your stomach
• 58:55
  rather than your mouth and your lungs.
• 59:01
  Now just let your breathing find its own relaxed pace.
• 59:05
  You don't need to think about that anymore.
• 59:10
  And I'd just like you to recognize yourself as being
• 59:15
  present. Of course, you'd have to be to
• 59:18
  have this experience and being aware, and I know you're aware
• 59:24
  of a variety of things. You can hear my voice, you can
• 59:31
  feel your body supported right there.
• 59:36
  And once again, let's just bring up that thing that was causing
• 59:40
  you some stuckness, some loop or some impasse in your life.
• 59:47
  And we're just going to sit with the experience as it is to know
• 59:54
  that you're safe. And in case anything comes up
• 1:00:04
  from the past, I want to encourage you just to let go of
• 1:00:10
  what's past. And that doesn't mean your brain
• 1:00:12
  won't remind you of things, but just imagine it's of no interest
• 1:00:18
  to us now. So just let go of what's past,
• 1:00:25
  and if this thing looks out into the future, perhaps there's
• 1:00:32
  something you're anticipating. What could happen, what might
• 1:00:35
  happen again, It's not about never having that thought.
• 1:00:39
  But right now, imagine we could just gently turn away from it.
• 1:00:44
  What I imagine actually is I'm sitting back in a chair on a bed
• 1:00:48
  and there's a window on either side of this room and there's
• 1:00:51
  one in front of me and I can gently pull the curtain across
• 1:00:54
  on the on the past. It can carry on out there and I
• 1:00:59
  can gently pull the curtain across on the future.
• 1:01:06
  And I'd also encourage you to even let go of what's happening
• 1:01:11
  now. I know there may be a feeling,
• 1:01:14
  but as we could draw the curtains on the window in front
• 1:01:19
  of us and even what's happening now, it's going to go the same
• 1:01:24
  way as everything else, just for a time.
• 1:01:35
  You don't have to change anything.
• 1:01:42
  The system will settle itself. And imagine you don't have to
• 1:01:51
  figure this out. I know it's tempting, especially
• 1:01:59
  if that's the way you're inclined or your therapist.
• 1:02:03
  Perhaps you want to get to the bottom of it, but right now
• 1:02:06
  that's of no interest to us. So you let go of the past and
• 1:02:11
  what may happen and even what's happening now and understand you
• 1:02:17
  don't have to figure this out and you don't have to change
• 1:02:22
  anything. Just rest.
• 1:02:29
  Just rest and know what is good and true and real about you.
• 1:02:41
  Because I know you say I, and I know you say I am, and this
• 1:02:49
  character is present and aware within all of your experiences.
• 1:02:59
  And I know it's clear to you that your thoughts and feelings
• 1:03:03
  are always changing, always coming and going.
• 1:03:10
  But you are not coming and going.
• 1:03:18
  If I asked you, you know, what were the thoughts and feelings
• 1:03:22
  in your mind and body at this time yesterday or a year ago,
• 1:03:31
  it'd probably be a challenge. What if I ask you, do you know
• 1:03:38
  what you will be thinking three thoughts from now?
• 1:03:44
  You'd surely have to just sit and wait.
• 1:03:51
  And I know you understand everything that's ever had your
• 1:03:56
  knees knocking in the past. It's gone.
• 1:04:04
  You are present, you are aware, and you are enough.
• 1:04:19
  I wonder where you can reach inside of yourself to know you
• 1:04:29
  can do this. You will get through this.
• 1:04:37
  I've done it. You've done it before.
• 1:04:47
  Maybe this is just a decision. And because that decision comes
• 1:04:57
  from you, you can enjoy that tenacious resolve to stick with
• 1:05:03
  your decision. You can do this.
• 1:05:08
  You will get through this. You have the resources you need
• 1:05:16
  to lock this in. Just bring your attention back
• 1:05:19
  to your breathing and I want you to take this away from you, this
• 1:05:24
  66 breathing. Breathing in through the nose.
• 1:05:29
  Not a full breath, not a deep breath, just a conscious breath
• 1:05:33
  that you can take any time and out for six, take one more and
• 1:05:49
  then come back to the room. How you doing?
• 1:06:00
  It's a nice experience. There you go.
• 1:06:05
  So we just played around with a couple of, I'm getting a bit of
• 1:06:07
  an echo now. We came around with a, a couple
• 1:06:10
  of simple exercises, the stop exercise, I actually only use
• 1:06:15
  half of it, but this was made famous by John Cabot Zinn who
• 1:06:20
  introduced mindfulness, if not to the world, to Silicon Valley.
• 1:06:25
  And I just find it so valuable to, to again as as a skill.
• 1:06:33
  Can you do this in the, in the midst of chaos?
• 1:06:35
  Can you do this in a, in an urban environment?
• 1:06:38
  Of course you can. You don't have to meditate.
• 1:06:41
  You don't have to do mindfulness.
• 1:06:42
  You can stop, stop what you're doing, put everything down.
• 1:06:47
  Hopefully you can see what I mean when I say sometimes that's
• 1:06:51
  enough. Sometimes just carrying around
• 1:06:54
  this little Oasis is enough. And the second thing we did
• 1:06:59
  there is based on what's known as the six words of Tilopa, who
• 1:07:06
  is, who is some sage who lived about 1000 years ago, who had a,
• 1:07:11
  a student, you know, who's keen to learn everything and
• 1:07:14
  understand his true nature. When it came down to it, he gave
• 1:07:18
  him these 6 words of, you know, just just right now, just just
• 1:07:23
  let go of what's past. You don't have to clear your
• 1:07:27
  mind. You don't have to never have
• 1:07:28
  that intrusive thought, but just imagine it's of no interest.
• 1:07:33
  The same with the future and even what's happening, which is
• 1:07:35
  my favorite step because we often get caught up in that, you
• 1:07:39
  know, I'm, I'm yeah, but I'm panicking at this, but I can't.
• 1:07:43
  It's so intense. It's OK.
• 1:07:48
  Stop trying to figure it out. Don't immediately go into
• 1:07:52
  change. And and I guess a lot of this
• 1:07:54
  stuff, you know, we, we could call it letting go of
• 1:07:59
  resistance. I'm also a big fan of acceptance
• 1:08:04
  and commitment therapy. You know, where they, where they
• 1:08:07
  really suggest that so many of our issues are experiential
• 1:08:13
  avoidance, which is a, a fancy way of saying we're resisting
• 1:08:18
  the possibility of feeling that OK.
• 1:08:21
  And we, we, we build up more and more strategies to not build
• 1:08:25
  something. It takes a bit of courage to go
• 1:08:28
  the other way and to say, oh, OK, you know, go on.
• 1:08:32
  Then I, I sometimes sort of playfully say, you know, go on
• 1:08:38
  swing your best punch, like whatever it is you're trying to
• 1:08:41
  do or set up, go ahead. And there might be a kind of
• 1:08:44
  little short lived little kind of Arc there, little tingle of
• 1:08:48
  something, but it tends to subside when you stop resisting
• 1:08:55
  it. It it has a shorter shelf life.
• 1:08:58
  Feel like adrenaline, you know, and, and rest, you know, what
• 1:09:04
  does it mean to rest in this right now?
• 1:09:07
  So it's a small thing, but most of the time if I'm engaging in
• 1:09:11
  self hypnosis, that's where it begins.
• 1:09:13
  Before I get into if you like therapeutic techniques, I just
• 1:09:17
  start there. No, it's, and I remember you,
• 1:09:22
  you walked through this, I think UK hypnosis conference last last
• 1:09:25
  year and, and hearing again, it's already different in my
• 1:09:29
  head to how you explained it. I think because time has has
• 1:09:32
  kind of passed. But it is so useful just to
• 1:09:35
  yeah, kind of stop, re evaluate, you know, be present in the
• 1:09:39
  moment And and it and it does change, you know, because you
• 1:09:43
  start, you start taking it from that kind of unconscious pattern
• 1:09:46
  into the surface and you can start thinking a bit
• 1:09:49
  differently. Yeah.
• 1:09:51
  And you know, I know we often say be present and it kind of
• 1:09:54
  becomes another practice, but the bigger recognition is here
• 1:09:59
  is no, you are, you are present whether you like it or not,
• 1:10:04
  right? You may get caught up in those
• 1:10:05
  thoughts about the past or the future.
• 1:10:07
  You may get carried away with the story, but the reality is
• 1:10:10
  right now you can check in. You're you're already ready for
• 1:10:14
  inspection. There's no belief required.
• 1:10:17
  There's no, I'm not asking you to believe in anything or
• 1:10:20
  breakthrough to something. Just stop, check in and kind of
• 1:10:25
  breath, you know, can, can help. And then I mentioned Howard
• 1:10:31
  there. I, I always encourage people to
• 1:10:34
  check out the his his willingness ladder.
• 1:10:39
  There's a moment within that process where you essentially
• 1:10:44
  say to yourself, you know, I am willing to have these thoughts.
• 1:10:49
  I'm willing to, to have this feeling.
• 1:10:51
  I'm willing to have this experience.
• 1:10:54
  It's, I know in conversation it almost sounds like nothing, but
• 1:10:59
  I've seen it over and over again be a transformational moment for
• 1:11:04
  clients, especially when they have a fear, something that
• 1:11:09
  they've spent their life, often decades, desperately trying to
• 1:11:14
  insulate themselves from. And yet here it is.
• 1:11:17
  It's still knocking, knocking at the door.
• 1:11:18
  They know it's right there. So there is some art to, you
• 1:11:25
  know, enabling people to feel safe enough that they can open
• 1:11:30
  up to what feels like a vulnerability or, or agitation
• 1:11:33
  or discomfort. But I'm a yeah, I'm a real
• 1:11:38
  advocate for that now. I guess that's probably been the
• 1:11:40
  biggest shift in my work in the last 10 years is this
• 1:11:45
  recognition that of course, resistance can often prolong the
• 1:11:50
  issue and, and that actually sometimes as a therapist, we can
• 1:11:58
  find ourselves playing the client's game in that.
• 1:12:00
  I'm going to, I'm going to show you how to become, you know,
• 1:12:03
  stronger, more confident, more resilient.
• 1:12:07
  And it's not always the way I know it can provide relief.
• 1:12:12
  Sometimes there are so many ways to help people, but I really
• 1:12:17
  feel that sustained change is essentially being, you know,
• 1:12:25
  real resilience is being spacious enough.
• 1:12:29
  But thoughts and feelings can come and go.
• 1:12:33
  That's what they're going to do anyway, right?
• 1:12:35
  So rather than trying to clear your mind or trying to feel at
• 1:12:38
  peace at all times, it's just just let's just see, let's just
• 1:12:43
  see what happens with this. When you do this stuff with
• 1:12:47
  clients, it, it can be a, I can easily spend a session just on
• 1:12:52
  these kind of skills and I do frame them as skills.
• 1:12:56
  And they're also very simple mini practices that you can give
• 1:13:03
  us homework just this week. I just want you to, you know,
• 1:13:06
  when that stuff comes up in the morning, you know, rather than
• 1:13:09
  immediately distracting yourself, just pause for a
• 1:13:13
  moment and not to fix it, not to change it.
• 1:13:15
  Just stop and see, see if you can allow it to kind of, you
• 1:13:21
  know, burp its way out of the system.
• 1:13:23
  And sometimes that's what happens.
• 1:13:25
  It bubbles up without resistance.
• 1:13:29
  It tends to, it tends to stop showing up as often or as
• 1:13:32
  intensely because you've said, go on then, you know, like,
• 1:13:36
  what's the message? And is that I think there's an,
• 1:13:40
  an act metaphor of trying to, if you try and keep the inflatable
• 1:13:43
  ball under the surface of the water, you're investing so much
• 1:13:45
  effort to do that. If you just have to float and
• 1:13:48
  you know it's sometimes allowing it is is easier.
• 1:13:52
  Try, try and keep a beach ball, you know, under, under the water
• 1:13:55
  in the pool. It's and you know, I guess in
• 1:13:59
  that case, very obvious, obvious.
• 1:14:01
  But often resistance is, is quite subtle in that it's not
• 1:14:07
  that you're necessarily recognising you're conflicted or
• 1:14:11
  it's effortful, but it, it's a low level resistance that's,
• 1:14:16
  that's just become the default, the habit, the way of surviving,
• 1:14:21
  really the way of the way of operating.
• 1:14:24
  And it's probably carried you through a few moments and it
• 1:14:28
  seems to make sense and that perhaps you need to get better
• 1:14:31
  at that. But yeah, I tend to encourage
• 1:14:37
  people to go the other way early on.
• 1:14:38
  And as I say, sometimes it it's sometimes it's, it's a
• 1:14:44
  revelation to that, that it's not that bad.
• 1:14:48
  It's just even the descriptive stuff, you know, if you, what is
• 1:14:53
  that without the story, you know, without the history, What
• 1:14:56
  if you had to really tell me about that?
• 1:14:59
  How, how intense is that compared to a headache?
• 1:15:03
  Oh, well, it's not as bad as a headache.
• 1:15:04
  Well, I don't know, compared to pins and needles.
• 1:15:08
  Well, it's not, it's not really that you know, it's just that I
• 1:15:11
  know it's there or it's just a heat.
• 1:15:14
  So that's when we can get, you know, we've the, the naming and
• 1:15:17
  labelling is, is part of the next step to just sit with it
• 1:15:23
  now to, to now you've stopped now you've taken a moment out.
• 1:15:28
  Now let's see what's there. And so that naming and
• 1:15:33
  labelling, you know, people have been doing this for thousands of
• 1:15:35
  years and, and finding it useful.
• 1:15:37
  So suddenly, rather than I am phobic of public speaking, it's
• 1:15:43
  I just feel this heat, I spy it. OK.
• 1:15:46
  So can we allow that heat, you know, see what happens And it it
• 1:15:53
  often can't support itself without you leaning against it
• 1:15:57
  essentially so. That's fascinating, Anthony.
• 1:16:02
  It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the the show
• 1:16:04
  today. If people are curious to learn
• 1:16:06
  more about you. Do you have a website, social
• 1:16:08
  media? Where?
• 1:16:08
  Where's it best for people? To, to find you.
• 1:16:10
  So my personal website if you want to engage with me and you
• 1:16:14
  know, make changes or anything is Anthony Jack quinn.com.
• 1:16:20
  The training in hypnotherapy, if you have an interest in that
• 1:16:23
  kind of thing, whether you're curious or a professional
• 1:16:27
  practitioner already is Jack Quinn hypnosisacademy.com.
• 1:16:32
  I run that with my father Freddie Jack Quinn, who, you
• 1:16:35
  know, literally has seen 10s of thousands of clients and we only
• 1:16:39
  teach what we actually do and where else on Instagram.
• 1:16:44
  I guess I need a few more followers.
• 1:16:46
  I'm not that prolific on social media, but my personal Insta is
• 1:16:52
  HH addict, HH the letter H OK HH addict.
• 1:16:59
  And yeah, I often share, you know, just from travels and
• 1:17:04
  different bits and pieces around the world.
• 1:17:07
  So you know, connect with me, my e-mail if you I'll receive all
• 1:17:11
  of those emails via the websites, but it's enquiries to
• 1:17:14
  anthonyjacquin.com and any questions I'd love to hear from
• 1:17:18
  you. Amazing.
• 1:17:20
  Well, it's been an absolute joy to have you on the show today.
• 1:17:23
  You take care and I'm sure I'll bump into you soon.
• 1:17:27
  Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of The
• 1:17:31
  Hypnotist. If you've enjoyed this episode
• 1:17:34
  or got some value from it, please give it a five star
• 1:17:37
  rating and review. And maybe you know someone that
• 1:17:41
  would also benefit from this particular episode, in which
• 1:17:45
  case share the episode with them so they can also get the benefit
• 1:17:48
  too. And if you would like to listen
• 1:17:52
  to this episode where it's just the hypnosis, so no intro, no
• 1:17:57
  outro, no explanation, just the hypnosis and completely ad free,
• 1:18:02
  there will be a link in the description where you can
• 1:18:04
  subscribe at a very low cost and only get access to the hypnosis.
• 1:18:09
  So if that's of interest, please check that out.
• 1:18:12
  Thank you again for being a regular listener of The
• 1:18:16
  Hypnotist and I'll see you again soon for more.