Session #225: James Tripp on Hypnosis Without Trance

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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 225 James Trip on Hypnosis Without Trance. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Lynette, your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business success. Here’s your host, Jason Lynette. Hey there, and welcome back to the program.

It’s Jason Lynette here with episode number 225, a rather significant number in this five year series that is now the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast. And this episode this week with James Trip is a bit of a special one, not just because of the significance of being episode number 225, but also because you can continue to listen to this program on your standard podcasting apps if that’s how you regularly listen to this program.

However, when James and I connected to have this conversation, We had the cameras rolling too. So you’re welcome to continue listening or stop right here, head over to YouTube or head over to the Facebook page for Work Smart Hypnosis. You can actually watch and interact with this conversation there too.

And James Trip is someone who I’ve known of for quite some time in the hypnosis profession, someone else who travels the world in teaching a really unique approach to how we work with hypnosis. So looking at that mindset, as he calls it, hypnosis without trance. Which, if that’s not a title that peaks your curiosity.

I don’t know what else will, but here’s a bit of a preview of where we’re to go. In this conversation, we’re gonna talk about how the work of martial arts informed the methodologies that now he brings to hypnosis, how it is that he can work with clients in a very non-formal way without the formal, close your eyes, let’s now begin the hypnotic proceedings, but simply to create phenomenal moments.

How do we actually become appropriately, let’s call it out weird in the process and utilize whatever natural trance experiences are there? How do we deal with success in the process? An amazing dialogue around how to deal with perceived, notice the word perceived failure in terms of how we work and really getting into the mindsets of even so far as professional growth, how it is.

We can take those things that we’re currently working with as practitioners. Completely harness what’s working right now, but then realize. Here’s something else that excites me, and now go off in that brand new direction. So there’s a lot of amazing takeaways in this conversation with James Trip here.

So take some notes. This is one you’re probably gonna come back to again, so you can find all the details, all the links we reference over at the show [email protected], whether it’s the YouTube channel, the upcoming training events, the Hypnosis without trance.com website while you’re there to check out hypnotic business systems.com.

This is the all access pass to my hypnosis training library. There’s no need to have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to growing your business and this amazing 21st century world. So you’re gonna get some done for you campaigns, some step by step tutorials to help you to go out there. And as I like to say, make it rain.

And with that, let’s jump directly into this phenomenal conversation. James, thank you so much for joining me for this outstanding chat. Here we go. This is session number 225 James. On hypnosis without trance.

What was that initial entry into hypnosis for you? Well, that’s an interesting thing because there’s two points that I could pick, and there’s a long period of time between them. So initially years ago, I was into martial arts and I was into some of the more interesting Chinese internal martial arts. And I had one teacher who was really into this empty force stuff, which is knocking people over without touching them.

Mm. Now, I was fascinated by this when I joined his class and I really wanted to experience it, and he wouldn’t let me. He said, No, your cheer isn’t strong enough to experience this. So he kept pushing me back, pushing me back, and I’d watch in week out his senior students being thrown around without any touch, and I was deeply curious about this and kind of skeptical at the same time.

Yeah. So I got these two things going on. So eventually after I’d been going for long enough and obviously showed that I was a. You know, intended to continue studying. He invited me up to this particular spot, which I could say was a spatial anchor in a lot of ways, cuz I’d seen this action happening there.

And then he drew my chi out and locked me up and threw me around and did all of this kind of stuff. And it was a really profound, really vivid experience. I mean, it was, you know, I was, it felt like it was really happening, it was powerful and I went away. But my, my brain says, but is that, is it really cheap manipulation or is there something else going on here?

So what I found is I could actually get a lot of these effects happening in myself. And the first time I experienced an arm levitation was me doing it to myself. Mm-hmm. , having my, she elevate my hand. And I thought to myself, Well, I can make it happen. Can I stop it? And yes, I could, I could step out of that reality as well.

I mean, when it was happening, it wasn’t like I was lifting my hand. It was complete, you know, that sense of non volition. But I triggered it off. So I thought to myself, Is this really chi manipulation or is it hypnosis? I don’t, I didn’t know anything about hypnosis at all, apart from what people learn from movies and, and that kind of thing.

So I went back and I asked him, I said, Look, is this really chi manipulation or is it hypnosis? And he said, Well, he said, Hypnosis manipulates the chi of the mind. I’m manipulating the she of the body. I so a nice, nice fudge . Nice. Uh, but kind of seeded this thing and, and thinking to myself, you know, there’s something going on here.

So that was my first experience. Now, I didn’t get into exploring hypnosis at that point, and that was probably at some point, I dunno, mid late nineties and then early two thousands. This is not particularly spectacular. I have to pause you there. To go back to that, that moment of being thrown without any sort of touch.

I, Is that something you were finally able to achieve on your own? To throw myself without any touch or to throw someone else or, Oh yeah. I mean, I, later on. This is an interesting thing cuz I became a martial arts teacher myself. Mm-hmm. and I would sometimes play around with these kind of things, but I also felt slightly disingenuous doing so because I wanted to teach people to really be able to defend themselves.

Mm-hmm. should it come to it. And a lot of what happens within the dynamic of a class, you can get some interesting psychological effect, a hypnotic effects happening, but they can also lu people into a, a misunderstanding about what might happen out in a street confrontation. Yeah. That person on the street is not the same person you’ve been practicing with.

Exactly. Yeah. You know, um, so I, I’ve got, I find it kind of interesting actually, I just talking about martial arts. I got into Russian martial arts system in the late nineties as well, and they do some interesting stuff psychologically that doesn’t require the same kind of prep and conditioning as the empty force stuff that you tend to see in the Chinese martial arts.

Mm-hmm. and I think it’s more based on psychological principles, like patent interrupts and this kind of thing. And of course it doesn’t always work. Mm-hmm. , so you’ve gotta be ready to have something substantial right behind it. But a lot of the time stuff like, you know, stuff that overlaps with some principles from Ericsonian work around pacing and leading and patent interrupts and this kind of thing you can see in a, in, in place within systemic.

And that, that stuff I would say really does work. I remember when I was running a class. On this regular weekly class in the early two thousands, I had this kid come along, he’s about 15 years old. He trained with me for about six months and he really got into that side of things. And I had a guy visit my class who was a, a self protection, close protection officer from the local police cons in half Ashire at the time.

So he thought he knew a thing or two about fighting, and he was kind of sparring with this kid. And this kid was doing stuff this guy had not encountered before, purely on the psychological end of things, pacing and leading pattern interrupting, just completely scrambling the guy’s brain and interrupting the access to, to what he had in terms of his own capabilities.

And this guy, this police guy, he was white as a sheep afterwards. He’s just, all the blood had drained out of him because it was, I assume it was just a massive rocking of his world. He never came back again. . It’s, I’m curious to ask that the pacing and leading applied to that environment, now martial arts is not my background.

Yeah. But in terms of physical movement, how would you define that? Pacing of le pacing and leading in that physical environment? Right. The way I would describe it best, I actually bring this into my hypnosis skills boot camp, cuz the way I teach in the hypnosis skills boot camp, at least when I have the space, is hugely influenced by the systemic training paradigm.

Which makes sense to me because martial arts is a skill and you know, the more you drill stuff, the better you get at it. And for me, hypnosis is a skill and the more you drill stuff, the better you get at it. So it makes sense that be an overlap in the training formats. However, in this instance, pacing and leading is to do.

You’re gonna move at the same time as somebody, you’re gonna flow with their movement as they come in. If you are flowing with their movement as they come in. If you’ve, and you learn to do this unconsciously, you can’t do this consciously, it’s too complex. You drop in with their breathing any sudden start, you do boxes, Do it.

Yeah. Good boxes do it. Boxes will use faints and this kind of thing. But to set a faint up, they’ve gotta trick their opponent’s brain into thinking they know what’s going on. Mm-hmm. . And then change something. And then change it back. So basically establishing a rhythm, establishing a pattern, but then interrupting that, right.

And using that as the entry point. Right. Right now, and I suspect I’m, I’m, you know, I love the systemic cuz they really lean into that. But anyone who starts to get experience, say in sports fighting, in Ring craft, they’re gonna start developing these capabilities as well. I fought, fought this guy once who was a really good, he’s a European.

Kickboxing champion. And he was absolutely amazing at non physically, just through his positioning, timing, this kind of thing, putting people exactly where he wanted in the ring, it was insane, the level of skill that this guy had. But doing this, and of course it’s all nonverbal stuff and for me there’s a huge overlap with that and what’s going on with hypnosis.

I mean, yeah, look at the standard rapport strategies that if we’re in our head going, I need to sit like you are, I need to move. Like you are, we’re now so completely outta the process that we’re just so completely detached if we’re doing these things, because that’s what’s normal. That’s what’s the natural interaction.

That’s where we’re actually in sync with somebody. Right? Absolutely. And I think, you know, and that takes some skill with, with martial arts, you have to get out of your head. Yeah. Because if you’re in a sparring situation and you’re, and you’re all up in your head, It doesn’t last long. You’re being clipped, You’re being gotta be a fist in your head.

Yeah. . Yeah. So I, I think there’s, you know, that’s really good for helping people get into flow and start to build response sets and skill sets into the body. Mm-hmm. and, and for me, with hypnosis, I have the same view. I want response sets and skill sets in my body. I wanna be able to be in the moment with somebody, work with what’s coming up from them.

I see HYP notice as a co-creation with the person I’m working with. You know, we’re working together. Nice. It’s their urology that’s creating the experience and I can’t deny or reject whatever’s coming up for them that has to be accepted and utilized and led in a useful direction. Mm-hmm. . So a lot of that for me, the way I think about hypnosis probably comes from my martial arts background to a great degree.

Yeah. I love that concept of co-creation. Is there a, is there a story of, let’s say, working with a client where that really can be solidified in terms of describing how that process played out? Yeah. Um, there are actually, I was just, cuz I’m doing a lot of editing at the moment of old video footage and there’s a piece, I’ve got it up on YouTube.

The thing is about YouTube, the stuff gets lost on there. Yeah. It totally get buried. I’ve got like, I dunno, 300 videos, 350 videos on there. But there’s a, a piece from probably about six, seven years ago of me doing an amnesia with somebody and I’m running a sequence. Cuz in my approach to hypnosis, I’m known as the hypnosis without trans guy.

And what that means is I generally don’t bother with trans inductions. So just go straight in with some simple phenomenon. Usually an idiomotor phenomenon of some kind, and then ladder it up to progressively more challenging stuff. For example, amnesias or hallucinations, this kind of thing. So I’m working with this guy and I, he’s responding beautifully to, I think I set it up with a ick.

To start with. And he responds absolutely beautifully. He’s really in there. His foot solidly stuck. And then I go to segue into a name amnesia. And I set it up the way, way I’m doing it in my kind of standard way back then. And I said, So what happens when you try and say your name and it’s gone? Try and say your name and it’s gone.

He looks for me. He says, Andy . So I said to him, I said, That’s right. And where is that name now? He said, Where’s up here again? I said, That’s it. So we’ll take it all the way out, send it away. And, and it’s gone. And what happens when you try and see your name and it’s gone, Andy? So I went for about three takes with this and who, the name Amnesia wasn’t going at all.

So I kind of segued back into, cause I never unstuck the foot. You see this is a, this is a thing that I would do. I like. There’s the idea of nested loops from NLP and Ericson and stuff. I like to do nested phenomena. Nice. Yeah. So I’ll leave one open and then open up the other one. So I said, How’s that foot?

He said, Still stuck. I said, And the foot’s still stuck as the foot sticks and the name’s gone. Try and say that name, Andy. Right. So it is just, it is just not happening. And I untuck the foot and I said, Thank you very much. And I said, I’m just curious what, what was it like when the foot was stuck? And he said it was really powerful, really profound.

And, and he said these words, cerebrally, tactile nice or something like that. And, and I said, Right. And I just asked him all his words to describe the footstep. I said, So if your name were to disappear now in a cerebrally, tactile way, and I just fed back in, I’ve got this on video. Mm-hmm. , all the kind of language he’s used around the footstep.

I said, So what happens when you try and say that name and it’s gone now in a cerebrally, tactile way, and he’s gone straight out. So one of the things that I often do is I will explicitly ask for feedback. What’s happening for you? If something’s not going in the direction that I want first time? Mm-hmm.

I will get feedback from people and I will use what they offer in terms of feedback to create what you might call custom suggestions or this sort of thing. And generally speaking, that works very well. And I think a lot of people, one of the things I advocate is that people do this a lot of the time.

People learn a recipe and they follow the recipe and it doesn’t work, and they go, Ah. Or they get the phenomenon. And because they’ve got it now the intention is how quickly can I get out of it? Right? In case it doesn’t continue to work. But to engage in that dialogue, you’re actually driving them deeper into that phenomenon by getting their representations as to what that feels like.

Right. Yeah. And, and if somebody is experiencing it, I’ll, I’ll say, So what’s happening now? Mm-hmm. , because I like to hear Yeah. And when they give me the language of what’s happening, I feed it right back in with some, some intensifier. So I like to use phrases like, and becoming even more fully absorbed in this experience of and feed their Yeah.

Language back in just to kind of take them more in. So I, I’ve got this. One of the things, because I, I don’t tend to work with trans induction, people are often in an interactive state. They’re not sort of zonked out so much. So I keep the interaction going the whole time through. And that gives me a rich sea of material coming back from them that I can utilize to take them more fully into richer experiences.

I mean, even my simple rule is if in doubt I elicit the experience they’re having right now, regardless of what it is. And I will take them more deeply into it, whatever it is. So even if someone’s got an experience of. Like it feels like my hand is lifting, but then I wonder if I’m lifting it. For example, if somebody said that, I’d say, So notice wondering if you could lift it.

Nice. Whereabouts is wondering when you are wondering if you can lift it? And I usually will gesture up to their head cuz I know like it’s gonna be somewhere in their head and they’ll go well up here. And I’ll say, So it’s up and wondering and noticing, wondering now more fully. And I just take people like wherever they’re going, let’s go into it even more.

And that often creates the opportunity to kind of segue out into something else again. Yeah. Which, the beautiful ability to loop those moments and just continuously, I love that. The feedback, What they’re experiencing. The, the style of approach, this hypnosis without France, where did that originally come from?

Was it necessity? Was it curiosity? How would you describe it? It’s kind of curiosity as much as anything. And partly I’ll admit, just stylistic preference. Yeah. You know, I, it’s easy to say, Oh, this is superior because of that or that. Yeah. Actually, it, it kind of suits me more as mm-hmm. as a person and my character.

So the story is, is I, I originally trained in nlp. I was very much into NLP for about a five years slot, even before I officially did an NLP training. I was madly teaching myself and using everything that I learned. And then I did an NLP training and I loved it so much. I did my master practitioner afterwards and I wanted to use it to make a living cuz my other, my real job sucked and I, so I loved this stuff.

Oh, ask, what was that old? The old, my old job, I worked in local government. I was just doing upset, pointless stuff in local government. Yeah. And it was just not ever gonna go anywhere. So, you know, doing work that somebody had invented just to have work done because there was a person to do some work. I swear that was the way, the moment of losing all rapport.

When I moved into this office, I’m at the closing and I’m going, How much of this paperwork is to validate jobs rather than actually by the office? And all smiles went away and that was the end of it. . Right, right. So, you know that, that I was, I was that guy who had a job for, because there was the budget for a job probably.

Yeah. Although, I mean, look at, look at the beautiful correlation of that. That’s so much of the work of our profession. I’d say really up until the last 10, 15 years or so has been this procedural, this is the way you’re supposed to do it. You know, I mine is, I will make use of that deep trans state, but then come out of it, then have the interaction as that interlude.

and, and even to hear people in a meetup group go, Yeah, but you’re gonna wake people up if you do that. Mm. Having to go, Okay, let’s start over. . Yeah. Yeah. But just this nature that to, to break those norms and go, Well, what happens if I pull this element out? What happens if I pull this thing out? Does everything remain standing?

Could I make it even stronger without having this perceived foundation that I, I was told has to be there? Right. You know, step A has to go before step B, otherwise that’s not gonna work. Yeah, yeah. And try it. What happens when you do something different? Right. I mean, I love to try stuff, you know, so I had a guy the other day who reminded me that he’d never experienced any hypnotic phenomena until he worked with me.

And I said, Ah, how did, how did, how did I do that? How did we do that? Cause I couldn’t remember, I couldn’t remember the particular session with him. And I did this piece, and I remember doing it now, and it was an idea I was experimenting with. I think I did a thing with a phone. I said, What’s that? He said, Well, it’s my phone.

I said, So when you say the words my phone, where are those words? He said, Well, and, and I pointed his mouth. He said, Well, they’re coming out my mouth. I said, And where are they before they come out your mouth? And they said, In my head, I said, So notice them in your head and look at that and point to his phone and notice the space between the words and the ideas and that.

And as you notice the space go all the way into the space between the ideas and that, and staying in the space between what happens when you try and say, That was what, what, what that is when you’re in the space between, So I took him right into the space between now this was a pure experiment. I’m just curious.

Mm-hmm. , this seems like a good idea. Let’s play with it. Let’s see what happens. It’s a pure experiment. And I think one of the things for me is I’m, I’m really willing to, A lot of people who are in hypnosis, in the hypnosis game, they’re desperately afraid of things not working. They’re desperately Oh, absolutely.

Right. I, I, I don’t mind. I’m happy with whatever happens because I’m conducting experiments most of the time. I’m curious, what happens if we do this? What happens if we do that? What happens when, And sometimes what happens is people look at me like I’m an alien or something and go, You know, what the hell are you talking about, man?

You know, for goodness say, so I’m very happy to experiment and explore, which is not, let’s not say, let’s say it’s that therapeutic environment. You’re working with someone, you’re coaching them, and let’s say here comes the moment that the hand is on the table. Yeah. And try to lift it and they just lift it.

Yeah. So in that kind of situation, I’m just gonna say something like, Right, Because you’re not gonna believe your hand is stuck to the table. Just because I say, Are you nice? That will be crazy. And they go, Well, no. Yeah. And I’ll say, So you are able to bring a powerful skepticism and that is a useful thing, but what I’m gonna suggest.

Is this something you haven’t been bringing a powerful skepticism to yet? Which is Hmm. And I’m gonna go into the beliefs that holding their problem in place. So one of the ways I approach change work is I’m constantly looking to separate people from their beliefs about what’s going on. Mm-hmm. . So they’ve got space for new things to generate.

So if stuff, stuff I’m creating works, then that’s great. I’ll leverage the fact that it’s working. Yeah. If it’s not working, I will leverage the fact that it’s not working. Yeah. Oh, it’s that beautiful thing that the client coming in and chances are us and the stream of consciousness deal with what emerges style A as they’re coming in, they don’t know this is exactly what next step is supposed to be there.

So yes, it’s where I keep having to drill in for new students. It’s only a mistake if you say the word, Whoops. Yeah. It’s only a mistake if you go, well that’s not how it’s supposed to go. And I was gonna ask your opinion on something. There’s a beautiful thing that happens. In these moments of phenomenon, and I’ll give you a story to illustrate it.

I’m running a event a couple of years ago and I’m now suggesting this one person isn’t gonna be in the room. The more you look around the space, you won’t find them at all. And what’s happening is, and this is a guy who eventually became a friend, and now I can phrase that, he has the same twisted sense of humor that I do because his mind is filling in the gap to go, I’m gonna get to tease her tomorrow that she missed this demonstration she was talking about, which was never part of my suggestion, but I love that aspect of asking for the user experience, what’s going on there?

What does that feel like? What do you think is often going on where, let, let’s label it as that conscious, unconscious divide. If we wanna follow that model in terms of we’re now suggesting the space between, try to find the name for the phone. It goes further away. Try to find your name. What do you think is actually happening within the mind that’s making these magical moments happen?

Well, I mean, I have a model I called the hypnotic loop, which I’ve been using for a long time, and it’s not true. It’s a model. It’s a way of making sense of things. Yeah. But it’s a loop and it’s got beliefs at the top and then it cycles round to imagination and it cycles round to physiology and it cycles round to experience.

Now, I’ve looked at these labels and in a lot of ways I don’t like them. So belief could be any kind of understanding, any kind of meaning making that’s going on the imagination. The next point on the loop is any kind of movement of mind, any kind of mind flow, cognitive processing. Now we’re moving our minds all the time and creating our experience all the time moment by moment by moment, we’re just doing it along an unconscious set of rules we call reality.

And people will follow the rails of their own reality, how they’ve got them organized by default. They never think about it and they’re in an experience all the time and they swear how I’m experiencing this is how it is. , but the mind is making that experience. You speak to neuroscientists and say, Is the world actually as we perceive it?

And they’re gonna say, No, it’s not. The mind is making it up a certain way. As one neuroscientist said, I wish I could remember who it was. The world is Aus. So if you see that bus coming towards you, don’t take it literally what you see, but do take it seriously. Yeah. So you know, it doesn’t really look like that.

So we’re constantly making the world up and I think that when people are, people can choose to move their minds in different ways, they just usually don’t. They can also be encouraged to move their minds in different ways. They can be facilitated in moving their minds in different ways. And you don’t always need to set this up with hypnosis as well.

I, I’ve just, in January I stopped doing this. I’ve stepped back for me cuz it was taking up too much bandwidth for me. But I worked with military veterans for two years, almost all of whom had a PTSD diagnosis. Had a great number of these guys. I was not billed as a hypnotist for them. They just, they say you’re gonna meet James, James as a coach that can help you out with some of your experiences and going beyond them, I would regularly do things like you just sort of say, you know, so there’s a part of you that, that wants X.

And they go, Ah-huh. And I go, If I were to reach in now and take that right out, so it’s here now. A lot of these guys, there’s an interesting correlation. A lot of the guys with PTSD are really hypnotizable. Yeah. And I dunno what comes first, the PTSD or hypnotizability. I wonder if being naturally good.

Hypnotic subjects can unfortunately predisposed people. I mean, you look at the classic statement that here’s two people in an event and one takes on that condition, the other one kind of leaves, leaves it, and goes, Wow, I’m lucky. Mm. That there’s some level of receptivity that may suggest why this one, You know, and what was that predispose, What was that experience before that made them hold onto this?

Right. So to look at I, as much as I think we can look at any client and go, Here’s how they’re already doing hypnosis, so let’s utilize what’s there and shift it. Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean, I, I think that’s definitely in the mix. I, my suspicion is a tendency to be able to vividly absorb oneself in mind made experiences.

Yeah. Probably, you know, certainly if, if, if an event happens, if you wanna get haunted by the memory of it being a good hypnotic subject might be a good way of doing that. . It’s a positive way of phrasing it. . Yeah. So, so, you know, so I wouldn’t, you pull things out and. And do quite magical things and get feedback like going, What the hell is that?

How are you doing that? Mm-hmm. , what would be that reaction when you’d, when you’d reach in and grab, what would be their feedback in that moment? Because I’m looking, I’m looking at the, when I do something like that, I’m looking for the nonverbal tells that they are what I would call psychoactively engaged.

Cause if I, if I reach in and I pull this thing out and they’re just going, Wow. You know, and then, and they’re paying no attention whatsoever. But I, I reach in and I pull it out and I pull it on such a way that my attention is on it and I wanna see their attention following it. So I wanna know that they’re like looking at it.

And if they’re looking at it with eyes like sources, and I say, So when, what is it that you see? You know, and I ask, and I’m gonna. Get this, this interaction as I’m manipulating stuff. Mm-hmm. , I wanna see that they’re continuing to interact with the manipulations. Now that stuff was already organized in a certain way outside of consciousness.

So far as I’m concerned, they’re not used. What’s different is they’re not used to having somebody do this. They’re not used to having somebody take an element of their experience. And I bet so. Even, even more so in that environment too. Right? Yeah. So it’s, you know, it’s, it’s an unusual thing. I now start, you know, I’m, I’m thinking of one guy in particular who was just like, That’s, that’s incredible.

How are you doing that? Mm-hmm. . And I said, I’m not doing it. You are Yeah. Doing it, and you have this capacity to do this and do these things. And maybe up until now you’ve been perhaps more the victim of this capacity than the master of it. . So you know, I’m will start to demonstrate that they have choices in what they can do and maybe have them relate to their experience a little bit differently with the, the military guys.

In the two years that I was working with those guys, I think one time only I actually used the H word. Mm-hmm. , I mentioned hypnosis. Uh, but because of the way I work with this, this sort of hypnosis without trance, I don’t do the trance induction. It’s easy for me to do that. I don’t, you know, I don’t have to frame it as hypnosis because it can just sort of segue out from a regular conversation.

Yeah. Uh, I’m just gonna start working. I’m always paying attention to how spatially organizing the metaphors they use. So I’m often just gonna just start moving stuff about, or taking it or interacting with it. Yeah. I’d share there. There’s a beautiful. Thing that comes out of that. That years ago there was an issue, I was running into it sometimes with clients, this goes back like four or five years ago, where if I had given an unintentional transition, part of their mind flipped into to go, okay, this is where we’re now beginning the hypnosis, which in some ways that can be extremely beneficial.

And this point they were kind of now sitting there zoned off and not quite going the direction of the actual change process. Right? So there’s something to be said, and I don’t yet have clever language around this, but the power of the phrase that different is better than better to begin something in a slightly provocative format, whether it’s reaching in and grabbing it, whether it’s, uh, just hold your arm out for a second and just focus on the thing getting stronger as we chat for a few moments of just to give ourselves license that because they’re coming into an environment that’s different than what they’ve done before.

I don’t feel enough of us are really utilizing that as a real strength to really build that hypnotic state rather than think, Oh, in 45 minutes after we’re done chatting, then I’ll see if I can hypnotize this person. Yeah. Which is the beauty of that without trans mindset. Right. And, and I like to start to shift things and move things.

I love working with spacial organization. Yeah. Because you can, you can just weave it into conversation. Yeah. How so? Well, I mean, you know, there’s an example or e even like classic things, like somebody’s looking up, I say, So what is it you’re seeing up there? Mm-hmm. and the you up they go and do they look?

Do they look? And then I start interacting with that. Yeah. Up there as if it’s there. And this is one of the things that I do a lot and I encourage people to do when I’m training because cuz the way I work. I’m working eyes open a lot of the time. So it becomes much more significant when you’re working eyes open with people where you are looking.

Mm-hmm. and how you are interacting. So when I’m teaching people to do things, like even something like, uh, I often teach people to stick an object, a coin, a card, a pen, something like this, just a small piece. And when I’m teaching people, it’s eyes open, the person’s fixed on a point. Often people are staring the subject in the eyes, which is distracting.

It’s pulling them into this social right. And what I’m often teaching people is, look, there’s a time to get rapport and there’s a time to step back from social rapport and start, you know, getting them to get into rapport with something, with an experience. So I talk about taking a shared perspective, and I’ll teach people, look, where do you want them to look?

Where’s the action happening? You look there too. You see the action happening there too. , If I wanna get a hand sticking, I wanna look at that person’s hand and I wanna experience it sticking and I wanna relate to it as if it’s sticking with everything, all my nonverbals, everything I was bringing in that the entire experience suggestion, I go back to the, the classic quote from Jean Eugene, Robert Huan, who Houdini named his, became the namesake of and, and the quote was that the magician is the actor playing the role of the magician.

That if I’m thinking the coin is hidden, be behind this thumb. And it’s a matter of how I flip it out. So you make it appear, I’m now just the technician. I’m now basically a juggler versus if I’m looking at that pocket of air and I firmly believe that that coin is in that pocket of air and I just have to pluck it out, and that’s what makes it appear right?

If I’m believing that I’m now telegraphing that with everything in my presentation, the audience is more likely to go there with me, right? Absolutely. And this is a huge thing. . I mean, again, so I’ve got the martial arts in my background, but I also for a while was a semiprofessional closeup magician.

Mm-hmm. . So as a semiprofessional or as any kind of closeup magician, when you get into the skill of that, you start becoming acutely aware of where people’s attention is for a start. You know, really monitoring that moment by moment by moment. And you also become quite adept at leading people’s attention.

Mm-hmm. shifting it from place A to place B. And for me, this is all about nonverbal suggestion, shifting attention in this way. So going back to that point about in conversation, how do you start eliciting responses? You see a lot of people when they’re learning hypnosis, they worry, is it working, is it working, is it happening?

And my answer to that is stop asking, is it happening? And start asking what is happening Nice. And what happens when. So if I say to somebody, you know, and I direct their attention over there, does their attention go over there? This is a good piece of information for me because I know they’re responding to suggestion.

If they’re, if their attention is shifting as I’m directing it, they’re gonna be in on a conscious level. I unaware that I’m directing their attention in various ways, but I’m aware of what’s going on and I’m building a response set, and I’m monitoring whether they’re responding. And that’s gonna inform me as to whether I want to now go for something bolder
.
Am I getting the sense this is a responsive person? Am I leading this dynamic? Do I wanna go for something bolder and suggest something that is more outside the bounds of their anticipated reality? Mm-hmm. , one of the good things about formal hypnosis, I think, is it does create this border that says, You are now exiting.

Normal reality. Mm-hmm. , we are now entering the hypnosis zone, right? The same as the lights go down in the theater. Clearly. Now this thing is beginning right. And I, I think that can be a really useful thing in helping people transition, because I think my view as a hypnotist is, is, is I’m about taking people outside of their everyday experience into an unusual experience, into a strange experience.

And if they’re too bound up by the rules of what’s happening right now, then they’re not necessarily gonna allow that to happen. So a formal induction can act as an excellent markup. So we are now crossing the threshold. Or you can sort of take it a bit further and a bit further and a bit further. You can pace and lead it more.

And I think this, one of the things that, that is a skill that I took, took a long time to develop. Melissa Tears often points this out, is what I call a willingness to be weird. . Yep. . Because if you’re not willing to be weird, then all you’re doing is conforming to the rules of everyday convers. Otherwise you’re being weird.

And if you’re gonna conversationally start, or more eyes open without a clear marker like a trans induction, if you’re gonna start moving people into this crazy head space where strange things are happening, you have to be a bit bold. You have to be willing to break the rules of everyday conversation, but you don’t necessarily wanna break them to abruptly otherwise.

You might just terrify somebody and they go, Well, it’s like what you, what you mentioned earlier about the mindset of the magician and the entire concept of misdirection is already misdirection. Because for misdirection to be effective, we have to be directing attention at all times. Otherwise, I’m in the middle of doing something and something off to the side suddenly falls over.

That’s a very false experience, but you’re right in terms of if I can get their eyes to move this direction, which, you know, looking at that one ahead, principle and magic, by the time the magician appears in the back of the audience after having disappeared on stage, there were so many elements that were a play to make that moment work and make it impressive to turn around and go, Oh, there they are, to look at phenomenon and, and tell me your thoughts on this.

Cuz I found that if I’m working in the mindset that I need to see that reaction is already there before I invite them to notice. Right. Yeah. That’s where I’m finding this greater efficacy of going. That thing is already stuck and to bring it into a sales principle to only ask for the sale when I know the person is willing to buy.

Yeah. Which really builds this, it builds this cool balance of this almost NOFA environment because I can see that arm is already stiff and rigid. I can see that their mouth is already salivating and they’re experiencing dryness, which now means I can say, become aware of that thirst for water. We can already stack it in such a way, but we’re, we’re, we’re pacing the entire experience.

So by the time we’re going for that magical effect, we’ve already got it. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, to me, that’s a smart way of working. I had a mentor years ago for coaching and his view, this is probably comes from the kind of world of sales, but he showed this fantastic video. You know, you sometimes. The camera goes around the arena at a sporting event and then zooms in on a cup or someone’s arranged to have something happen.

There’s this, the camera zooms in on this guy with, with his girlfriend and he pulls out a ring and gets down on his knee and officer the ring. And it’s like the camera zooms in and there’s obviously like thousands of people and everyone on TV watching there with the ring. And she just slaps him and runs off

And it’s like, get the result before you go for the result. . Yeah. The, the message is, and what, what my mentor was saying, he said, You know, you, you ask, you ask someone to, you know if they wanna be your client when you already know the answer. Mm-hmm. , that’s the smart thing, you know, they’re gonna say yes.

Just the same as if you ask someone to marry you. If you’re smart, you know the answer is already Yes. Ahead of time before you ask. Yeah. So I’m, I, you know, I love that idea. I’m a big fan of that. One of the, I often teach people little tells, like for example, if I’m doing a stick, I mention the stick that I do, I get someone to hold an object and I’m picking a.

I’m looking at the nail bed. So as I, I will say, I will give a suggestion. I’ll say, As you feel, your fingers gripping the card. And I choose the word gripping quite deliberately. I don’t say as you feel your fingers holding the card. Yeah, I say gripping the card. And I say, As you feel, those fingers gripping the card and gripping the card.

Now more fully, more solidly, I wanna see that nail bed go white. I wanna see the blood go out to the nail bed, which is what happens when somebody squeezes. And as I see that, I know they’re responding to the suggestion. I know I’m gold, everything’s happening, everything is good. I’ve done no challenge yet.

I’ve not set up any pass fail. I can see what’s happening right there. Same as when I do a ick. So if I’m doing a ick, I’ve got someone got their foot out in front of them and I place my hand lightly on their shoulder. Now I used to do this, so if they started to break the ick, I could physi physiologically disrupt them.

Not by pushing back, but by lifting up slightly. Mm-hmm. , But I haven’t done this for years because I stopped using it that way. I just used the light touch up there. So I, and I have them look at their foot and I say, as you feel that foot sinking more fully into the ground. As I say this, I feel the, the, the light pressure I’ve got get lighter because the, the direction of travel of their physiology is down there.

Their whole system is moving down into the foot that’s sticking into the ground. I know they’re responding, so I’m fine. There’s no risk in me saying, and it continues to stick more fully, try and unstick it as it sticks more fully into the ground. I know I’m good to go because the information was there before, you know, it was brought into the, the sphere of consciousness of either them or the, the observers or, or whatever’s going on.

So I, you know, I like to do things like that. And this is the thing, if people tune into this kind of thing, people are so often so concerned about the risk. It is pretty much risk free, right? Yeah. You know, you’re, you’re seeing that arm already extending and stretching and locking in place. Yeah. You know, it’s already stuck.

You’re seeing the eyelids squeezing all the way down, you know, you’ve already got that, right. Yeah. There’s, there’s no risk. And I think what happens, I’m guessing when people are learning, and I’m sure this was true for me as well, is people get often too hung up on the recipe. They’re trying to remember the words of the recipe.

They’re doing something I call, they’re in the get through zone rather than the get into zone. So they’re trying to get through the sequence or get through the induction or get through and everything’s erased to this point and they’re trying to get through all the steps and make sure they’ve ticked everything in the as they go.

So the solution to it be more in the moment to put more of these tells in the process. How would you define the solution? . Well, my, my principle is get into versus get through. Yeah. So if I’m teaching people to do some sort of stick, I’ll say, get into the stick, not try through, get through the sequence. If you are already getting into what’s happening and you’re getting the person into what’s happening into this moment of what is happening, you just keep taking people more and more into the moment of what’s happening.

And you know, that moment gets richer, that moment gets deeper. You become more, more committed in your responses yourself, in your directions. So for example, I’m looking at a ick, and I want them to get into that foot being stuck instead of me trying to get through a sequence of suggestions that’s supposed to magically lead to the foot being stuck.

So everything that I’m doing is supporting that. I’m getting into it. I’m looking down at their foot. I. Yeah, move my body in a way that says stuck because all the time I’m working with eyes open. Everything I do counts. Uh, so I panter mine a lot of stuff and, and that kind of thing because I’m getting into it.

Like if I’m doing a hand stick with somebody and their hand stuck down, by the time I know it’s stuck, I’m gonna say, Take hold of your wrist. Take hold of your wrist, and then I’m gonna go take hold of your really try. Really? Yeah. And I’m pantomiming the struggle at everything myself because all of this is taking somebody into the experience.

Like a magician takes someone into the experience. They’re not rushing to get through the trick. A good magician isn’t, They’re taking them into every moment, every part of the experience. Like if you value everything that you’re doing in a sequence, instead of seeing most of it as being about getting to this amazing point at the end, I think that creates a far richer experience and is more conducive to engagement for the person that you’re working with.

That’s my get into principle rather the get. Principle. So now that we’ve got them into that phenomenon, we’ve got them into that magic moment. How do you classically then make that pivot into the actual change process again? Now their, their eyes are open, something magical is going on. That’s, I love the word weird, , something’s going on that’s outside of the ordinary.

Wh what tends to be that pivot for you in terms of now linking that to why they’re in front of you, why they’re there for that coaching experience? Okay, so I mean, here’s the thing I’ll say right now, I, I’m not saying I don’t do that kind of phenomena work with clients, cuz I do occasionally. So it’s not true to say that I don’t, but it’s not a standard thing for me to do with people.

The, the times I’m usually doing that kind of stuff, most these days, I used to do it when I was doing that kind of stuff, when I was doing close up magic and doing street hypnosis and that kind of thing. Now I’m mostly doing that when I’m training people. Mm-hmm. , that’s, that’s the truth of it when I’m with a client, It’s much more likely that I’m just gonna start organically working with what they’re bringing, rather than me imposing something like a ick or a hand stick or an amne or something like that.

Unless I see a moment to creatively utilize that in a meaningful way. Yeah. Upfront. So in that case, I mean, one of the things that I might do is I might do a book and balloon test with somebody if I think they’re a good hypnotic responder. So I set them up book and balloon, and I see the hands dropping, and I’ll really lean into that and say, So, you know, and, and feel, You can feel that, right?

And they’re like, Yeah, yeah. And I go, You can feel it. It’s really apining. Right? It’s really happening. And they’re like, Yeah, I could feel it really happening right now. It’s real. That hand’s moving. Yeah. Yeah. I say, except it’s not. Mm-hmm. and I go pull the rug out from under. Yeah. I, I, I will literally pull the rug out from under them.

I say, except it’s not. , your mind made the whole thing, but didn’t it really seem real? Oh, I love that. Yeah. And they go, Yes. And then I, I anchor that up. And then later on they went, when they might start getting into the, their personal trance, that’s a problem. They go, I just can’t seem to do X, y. And I say, That’s right.

And that doesn’t that really seem real? And they, and they, Yeah, I see. It is, and I it is real. It’s just every bit’s real is that book. So now I’ve kind of got this, I’ve, I’ve said something about the vividness of mine. Made experiences. Yeah. I anchor it to the idea that that’s real. That’s real. So then I can use that to, to start, start busting their problem, trance.

Cause I tend to view people’s problems. It’s largely transits. It’s a particular, it’s it. That’s a reality. Their mind has made and become convinced is real. And they’re not seeing any other ways through or ways out. So I wanna loosen off their, their beliefs about what’s currently going on. Much of the time to create space to, to move new things in.

So I tend to use phenomena in, in a way that I would call meaningful or I, I attempt to, whenever I have a mantra that I say to myself, Make it meaningful. Yeah. Make it meaningful. Because a lot of the time people will get into hypnosis. They go, I’m a hypnotherapist, so I’m gonna do an induction. Why are you doing an induction?

Cause I need to put them into trance. Why? Well, so that the change work works. So they respond to suggestions. Yeah. But what if it meant something, right? Yeah. Right. What if this induction meant something? What would you share? No. Forget if we’ve had this chat when we connected before that. That’s kind of what got me out of the.

industry originally, that that was a hobby. I basically paid my way through college by doing magic shows. And the whole thing was, if I could really do this trick, why would I carry around a pack of cards? Right? Yeah. If I could really make money up here at my fingertips, why would it have to be 1890s Morgan silver dollars?

Oh, because they’re worn down smooth and they don’t make noise. It’s like, No, that’s the technique. . Yeah. So to look at hypnosis from the same mindset, Well, why am I gonna have you count backwards from a hundred and let the numbers go? Yeah. Well, you’ve been struggling with this issue most of your life.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could relax this issue away as if it wasn’t there before? I’ll show you how, and now we’re into that Elman counting backwards moment. But now we’ve motivated it, but also because we’ve dangled a carrot at the end of it as to here’s what this represents. I don’t have to troubleshoot that at moment anymore because now there’s a logical reason as to why we’re doing this.

Let’s call it out hypno stunt, because now it’s linked to the change. The same as, I love that nuance of going, you know, that’s not the pull the rug out from under. You can’t bend your. Yeah, you can bend it. Good. Yeah. . Yeah. Yeah. I, I, This, this is a, and I’m not saying it’s an easy thing, it’s, to me, it’s a process that never stops.

Yeah. It’s like a test that I keep bringing to myself because it’s easy to pick up bits of business from, people go, Oh, that’s a cool thing. I’ll start doing that. Okay, , but why? What does it mean? What are you, how are you using it? So I, I like to bring that back to myself, you know, What does this mean? What can I offer somebody, you know, I’m, what are, what are, what are you doing That experimentation?

How does that experimentation mindset come into it? I, I experiment a lot when I’m training people and I’m quite open about that. Yeah. Some, you know, I’ll often, I’ll say, uh, you know, at the end, particularly at the end of a, a session and there are some people that wanna hang on, I’ll say, Okay, we’ve pretty much finished up, but there’s something I’m curious about who wants to come up and, and try something.

So I’ll, I’ll do. I, I’ll try something out with people in that circumstance. I used to with people in my everyday life, friends and family and stuff like that, but they don’t want that, They don’t , they, they don’t want me to be kind of like trying to use them all the time as, as experimental thought out.

Although there was a phase in my life where that was a useful and necessary thing. Mm-hmm. , I occasionally play around with clients with that kind of thing, but I tend to allow myself to go into flow. I always have this thing where I, I part allow myself to go into flow, but I will disrupt that from time to time to stop myself going on autopilot and always tending to do the same things.

So I, I will bring new ideas in, but I do spend quite a lot of time in my own head playing with kind of geeking out about new possibilities and that’s when I go Right. The next client I see, I’m gonna just take. We’re still gonna do all the stuff that I do to help them up. Yeah. Just like do a little bit of, I’m gonna just try this idea out and see what I can get happening with this.

That that is one of those aspects that as I’ve done 200 plus of these over the last five years, that aspect of that willingness to go into a session and yes, let’s go in there and let’s give the client our full attention. Let’s go in and really help them facilitate this change. But also at the same time, to occasionally have the moment, mine was about six, seven years ago, going, I never do arm levitation just cuz I’ve not motivated it.

So this week, every session I’m doing arm levitation and I have to figure out why I’m doing it with that person. Yeah, yeah. And in the accidental, you know, side effect of that was going, Oh, here’s the way that I now handle a parts therapy Vari. That’s now logical is kinesthetic, gets a great reaction, gets the response in motion.

Yet it came from just that willingness to play. I think when I had Scott Sallan on years ago, he told the story of going, I was gonna tell every client that week the same metaphor story, but I had to make it work. Hmm, hmm. Just that willingness to, to experiment, but again, as long as I can make it fit within the context of this, I keep finding that as a, as a nuance between those that are still bound by protocol and process versus those that are much more, I love that, you know, concept of flow, of just getting into that experience and saying, I’m going to make this work.

Right. I think that’s a really interesting thing. I tend to keep on training and going to different trainings and this kind of thing because I’m always curious to learn more and I think it was a couple of years ago I went to to do a certificate in evidence based hip therapy practice. in cognitive behavioral hypnosis, I think they called it, but it’s basically a sort of C B T grounded hypnosis school.

And they were rolling out all manner of statistics about things mm-hmm. . And they rolled out this statistic that said, after three years of working with clients, therapists do not really get any better or more effective in getting results. It’s like that’s the end of their learning curve. So what they were kind of saying is like, after about three years of doing this, you’re gonna be as good as you as you are Really.

That’s as good as it’s gonna get. And I thought to myself, it’s inspiring. I’ve been, I’ve been doing this for years and I feel like I’m learning all the time. Right. I’m getting better all the time. But of course, the thing that the, the research was conducted with people who’d been taught to follow protocols rigid.

Now, of course there’s gonna be a, a drop off before you’re doing, is running the same protocol over and over and over. I can imagine that probably after three years, you’re probably about as good as you’re gonna get at running that specific protocol. Yeah. You’re becoming expert at that specific process as opposed to being, let’s call it client centered.

Yeah. Right. So, so I can get that they, you know, that would be, you’d reach the end of the track there. But of course this is a certificate and evidence based hippotherapy practice. So if you deviate, if you experiment, if you explore, that’s not evidence based anymore. Mm-hmm. . So it really struck me as to how stifling being caught up in that approach might be.

Well, what was chat about that because there, there is a trend right now. Of this dialogue of that, it has to be evidence based, which even that is a relatively loosely, you know, formed word that, okay, so here’s this research around mindfulness and because I’m bringing a mindfulness theme into my session, therefore now I’m evidence based yet find any data.

And yes, I love the anecdote that when you gather a lot of anecdotes, what happens? Well, it becomes evidence over time. And we don’t have any statistical data around. I love to see the clinical trial of a whole bunch of people with their feet stuck to the floor, not finding their name for the phone. But we can look at these magical moments and see that, yes, we are producing that.

So what, what do you think that balances between that? Yes. Grounded in research versus that flow state of here’s what the client said, here’s how I fed back that, that beautiful term from before. The physiological, what was that, a card again? How he described Oh. It was brilliant. Rewind the audio. It was in there.
Okay. , but the, this balance between the research base versus now here’s something purely experiential and let’s call it environmental based on what’s actually happening in that space. Right? I think the problem comes about, people don’t see that there’s a difference between science on the one hand and art and craft on the other hand.

Mm-hmm. , now I’m all up for research. I love science, I love all that stuff. To me, the role of science for the clinician or the practitioner who is an artist slash crafts person, the relevance is, is you get stuff that feeds in that you can make use of. Mm-hmm. . Now imagine somebody suggesting there was an evidence based protocol for winning tennis matches.

We’d go, Don’t be ridiculous. There can’t be an evidence based protocol. It might be that science could produce some insight into more effective ways of training. Mm-hmm. , So like you look in sports, you get sports science, you know, it starts to inform training programs that people can use to develop their art and craft better.

But even the exception to the rule, I think it was in the strength world, Joe DeFranco talking about how every bit of physiological research suggests that pushing the heavy combine should make the football player slower. But he goes, I’ve got thousands of black and white composition notebooks with time trials that say otherwise, you know, in the clinic on paper it doesn’t make sense.

But in practical ability, here’s how it does. Right. And the latter, what he’s suggesting is true science rather than, rather than science. Culture based theorizing. Yeah. Cause a lot of the people, this is another problem you see, you’ve got science and then you’ve got craft and practice, but you’ve also got religion.

And a lot of people who believe they’re scientists or they’re scientifically minded, are actually, I believe, more religiously minded and their dogma is science culture. So somebody can be in love with science culture, but not think very scientifically. Mm. Or not act very scientifically because science is really about gathering evidence and looking at evidence.

It’s not about going, well, we actually know how things are, so we’re gonna theorize about what should be based that isn’t really science. So people can do like religious thinking. That sounds very sciencey. So this is, this is my, my, my argument on this. I think our goal ultimately also the, the goal of science is to find out what is mm-hmm.

It’s not to make differences in the world. That’s not what science is about. That is what craft is about. That is what. Action. That is what being a practitioner is about. It’s about getting results. Science doesn’t strive to get results. It, it strives to uncover truths. It’s a different process. So to take something that’s about finding out truth and try to apply it to getting results is a mistake.

It’s taking something from a category that doesn’t belong in. So I think, I think it’s great to do evidence. I think evidence informed yes, is is probably useful, but evidence based is too binding. It’s trying to say, Well, this worked in an experiment, which was about finding out. Truth, but now we need to creatively get a result with this individual, not with some generalized subset.

So I I, it goes back to something you mentioned earlier, that, you know, they’re coming in and my, my mindset is similar, that as soon as they’re reaching out to me, they’re identifying here is this trans state that they’re currently inside of that, because they’re seeking a service to help resolve it.

They’re identifying, this already doesn’t work for me, therefore, it’s our mutual responsibility to further break that thing that’s already broken and use that as the leverage point to go, here’s another way, here’s another experience. So I share a similar style at times of, you know, again, breaking the phenomenon to go, Well that was only because you wrapped your mind around that idea.

The same as what’s different now when you get in that car and you’re behind the wheel? Mm. Oh yeah. I, I know I can drive. Good. I got time. Let’s go outside. Which was a very interesting thing last week, . But to look at, you know, again, that I love that mindset of the informing of the process to go, here’s where we can use it to a certain extent, but at the same time, that mindset of delivering, let’s call it out, the hypnotic experience.

And that’s part of their, back to the scientific mindset. That’s why that person in some way is reaching out to a person who holds onto that role, that title of hypnotist. That’s part of that perceived dialogue, right? Yeah. And also that’s, that’s the thing, if someone is reaching out to you because you are able to hypnotist or a hypnotherapist, they’re not looking for C B T, they’re not looking for science probably.

I mean, sometimes you can weave that into the mix. I’m happy to bring scientific frames if I think that’s gonna be useful for people. But often they’ve already bought into a non-scientific version of things anyway. Mm. Yeah. So, you know, to me that seems like that’s the, the smart thing to leverage. I think the other thing about science is if we decide that the protocol is correct and right then the protocol becomes the thing that we follow and not the client.

And I’ve seen this a lot because with working with the organization, Rock Recovery uk, which I worked with for two years up until January, everybody we see everybody has been, almost everybody has been through the official military recovery units before they got medically discharged, you know, or as they were being medically discharged and or been through the evidence based protocols prescribed by the National Health Service in the uk, which are all emdr.

And I’m not knocking EMDR because I think EMDR has a lot of value within it, but I think when people are operating from rigid protocols and not really paying attention to how the client is responding, problems come about. So basically everybody that we work with almost has largely been failed by evidence based practice.

But at the same time, I’m sure there are people who go through that program, of course. And they see results to say that, Well, here’s why we have options, here’s why there’s two sides of this. Right? Right. And, and so I’m not, you know, I wouldn’t hold that up as evidence to evidence based practice is not good.

Yeah. We’re just gonna see the people that it didn’t help. But what that means is they want something very different from us, and what they get from us is flexibility. What they get is something very personally tailored, you know, rock recovery by themselves as the non-clinical. Alternative. Mm-hmm. . And, and that’s what we do.

So we will use anything I say we are not currently, I just step back from this recently, but, you know, whilst, whilst there and the, the team that is still there, we’ll use anything creatively that makes a difference. And it’s about paying attention to difference that’s being made. Is it making a positive difference?

Yes. Let’s do more, Do we need to change direction with this particular client? Do something different. Yeah. You know, and, and we’ve, we’ve done all sorts of things where we use anything from the world of hypnosis therapy, voodoo tales of, of Zen masters, or even getting someone a dog, which we did recently, which was transformative for this person.

But it was clear cuz the, the best time this guy had had in his life was when he was training a dog. He really enjoyed training dogs. He gave him focus, he gave him direction in life. He. And this is somebody who’d ended up being basically, largely a shut in a recluse. So we got him a difficult dog to train.

Mm-hmm. to get him back out, going out in the world, training the dog, having a focus, a sense of direction in his life. You know, there was no evidence based protocol. It’s just that he talk so much about, there seemed to be so much resource attached with his time training dogs that it just made sense.

We’ll get the guy dog that’s gonna help. Right. Yeah. So, you know, being able to just literally find out what’s gonna work for this client and tune into that, I think is, is a powerful thing. And in the mix, there might be certain things that have come from experimentation and experimental frameworks to go, well, here’s an idea to try.

Mm-hmm. . So I like the idea of evidence informed rather than evidence based. Yeah. And I’ll tell you what, before we, before we begin to wrap it up, I’d ask you a little bit more of a personal question, which comes to. You brought up, here’s something that you had been doing for a number of years and then decided to step away from it, and I’d imagine, here’s a thing that was working rather well for you, yet you saw other opportunities to follow.

How do you, how do you go about making that decision as to where that next step takes you? Well, I got into doing that work because a friend of mine who’s a long term friend of mine, had been asking me for literally years to come and work with their team. And I always had other things going on and I, when I, when he originally asked, I was going off traveling around the world, I said, Look, I’m getting traveling around the world for a year with my family.

So no, that’s not gonna happen. But when we got back and I decided I would do it, I would go and I would do this because I thought it would be an interesting thing to do. It would give me the opportunity to explore with a different client base where I’m not framed as a hypnotist up front. Right? Right.

How do I get to use my skills when I don’t have that framing? . And that was an interesting thing because it changes a lot. So for me that was an interesting thing to do developmentally and brought new challenges from which I grew. And then there was a certain point, and I’m purely selfish with this, it was difficult to stop doing that work.

My own growth curve I think had I had stopped paying so many dividends, you know, the 80 20 principle, I got my 80% gains from my 20 20% work and it was starting to become dominant and taking over a lot of bandwidth for me. It was difficult to leave cuz it’s valuable work. There’s a lot of people in need there and the organization I’m working with who keep good records and have an uncommonly good have been externally audited because we’re using voodoo.

Basically the funders insisted we are externally audited by a, A team comprising a clinical psychologist and psychiatrist who were blown away by the fact that we were getting results way above what we should have been getting statistically. So I’m aware it was valuable work, but I also was aware that it was, it stopped being aligned with the direction of travel for myself and my family and what we wanna create out there in the wider world.

And it was taken up too much of my bandwidth. So it was a hard decision to come to. But I decided I would step back for a while and I’m still technically stepping back at the moment and once I got some other things in place, I may start to do maybe a day or two a week back there or, or maybe not, I dunno, we’ll see how it unfolds.

But for me, I’m constantly evaluating. What it is that I’m creating. Mm-hmm. in the world for myself, my family. I became a hypnotist and a hypnotherapist for a time within a broader context of my life, which was about moving my life forward and engaging Generatively with the world I didn’t get into to it to help people as such.

I got into it because it was fascinating to me, and I’ve had an interest since I was 19, on how do you do life better? Mm-hmm. , how do you create more of what you want in the world in terms of fulfillment, reward, this kind of thing. So that’s where my heart really lies. So I’ve, I’ve sort of shifted back towards that
.
There’s some business projects I want to get realized, but also there’s a broader system of thoughts and thinking and method that I’ve been putting together for literally years, which is more about, I dunno what you might call creation dynamics, creating what you want in the world, which starts with. As the subtitle of my YouTube channel goes, Use Your Mind to Shape Your Life.

I’m talking about moving our own minds to actually start generating the effects we wanna generate out there in the broader world. That’s what really interests me, and it has so many parallels with hypnosis, and hypnosis informs it, and hypnosis is a, a huge part of that. But it, for me, hypnosis sits within that.

Yeah, it’s a related thing. And I wanted to get out of being focused on working with these individuals with very challenging circumstances to stepping right back, back fully into myself as a creative force in my own life. And now I’m doing, I’m engaging back more into doing coaching work with people who are looking to become creative forces in their own lives as well, generating the kind of results that they wanna generate habitually in terms of fulfillment and reward.

And that’s kind of what I’m into, where my developmental age is and where I want to spend. My precious energy because it’s a finite quantity and I wanna use it to shape my life as I wish it to be. What’s that beautiful discovery that just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to do that exact thing the rest of your life, Right?

And and to harness, here’s the experiences that help to create, here’s the learning, the advancement of your own methods that came from doing that yet to go. Yeah, but I think it can go to this other audience now and that’s what excites me. Yes. That I think a lot, I meet a lot of people who are even, are successful in the work that they do, but that level of comfort is often that biggest danger.

Rather than going, Well, let me test this out, see what happens. If it goes fantastic, if not, let’s go inside of that experience. What will that inform you? Let’s use all these hypnotic principles back upon ourselves to go, Well what can I now turn this into? What can I now use this for? Right. And, And that’s, you know, what you’re saying there is so.

Resonant with where I’ve been at recently is, is a huge realization for me that part of my unconscious programming, the unconscious hypnotic tru that I’ve been living through, is the idea that got installed in me when I was young. That I needed to be some kind of professional. I have a profession, a, a craft that I do.

And a number of years ago, I had a mentor of mine say to me, he said, Stop being a working class hero and start being the creative genius that you are. Nice. And at the time, I, I was like, I, he saw something I couldn’t see in myself and I, and I sort of said to him, I said, Look, I’m not that much for working class hero.

I’m actually quite a lazy guy. And, but he was talking about paradigms and, and I was operating from this paradigm of like, I’ve got to have a profession. I am a professional x, I’m a professional coach, I’m a professional change worker. I’m a professional hypnotherapist. Instead of thinking in terms of actually what are the differences that I wanna create in the world.

Mm-hmm. . , you know, in terms of, of the broader world out there and my own, the life within my family and this kind of thing. And what, what is it that I wanna bring into the world that wasn’t there before? And that’s the real shift that’s happened for me is, is grounding fully in this idea that I’m here to bring difference into the world and a variety of different ways, rather than to be a h therapist or a coach, or a trainer or a whatever.

So that’s, that’s the kind of big shift and that point that you made about like, what you’re good at isn’t necessarily what you ought to be doing. You know, I have been caught in the, the fact that I have got uncommonly good results doing change work. For the last few years particularly, this particularly shows up within the the rocks recovery context because every single client is followed up by the organization.

And if you don’t get good results, you don’t stay working with the organization. So, So I know I’m good at doing that, but it isn’t really where my heart lies. Yeah. And that’s, That was the thing. It’s moving to that point of going, Actually, I’m better off doing something that I might not even be as good at, but it’s where my own developmental edge lies.

It’s where my passion lies to discover more. So as a creator in my own life, I have a track record of success, but it’s an area where I have so much more to learn and I’m constantly up in the game. So I have a fresh level of enthusiasm for that. So that’s totally where I’m at right now. Beautiful. James, this has been fantastic.

Yeah, it’s really good to connect because we’ve never really had the opportunity to more, I, That was the comment of going, How have we not talked? I know we’ve been around each other, but it’s where my favorite conversations in the series have been. The ones where this is the first time actually chatting after nerding about nerding out about YouTube and Facebook.

Before we hit record here, I know you’re gonna be at Hypno Thoughts Live 2019. What’s the, what’s the presentation that you’re doing there? I’m actually doing two presentations there. I’m doing one on nonverbal suggestion. Mm-hmm. , and the other one is on hypnotic improvisation. So having thought about, well, what is it that I think that I, I’m not saying I uniquely bring, but what are the areas I think I have.

I tend to lean into more than a lot of other trainers, is definitely the improvisation side and the nonverbal suggestion side. So I decide I would specialize on those. And my post-conference workshop is on both of those nice hypnotic improvisation and nonverbal suggestion. And the website they can check out is Hypnosis Without Trans.

What’s the extension off that? That’s a.com Hypnosis without trance.com. So yeah, I, I need to update the events page on there. , I’m right there with you on that problem. ? Yeah. And what’s the, we’ll link to everything over in the show [email protected]. You mentioned your YouTube channel there a couple of times.

Where should people go to check that out? So my YouTube channel is called James Trip Chaos Wave. Nice. Which has a whole story in and of itself. The subtitle of the channel is Using Your Mind to Shape Your Life. So there’s a lot on hypnosis, nlp, various other mind tech things. Originally it was a strict hypnosis channel, but it’s evolved across time and it’s gonna continue to evolve cause I’ve got some really cool.

You stop in the pipeline that’s gonna be coming through there. Awesome. Yeah. So we’ll put uh, links to everything in the show notes [email protected]. James, any final words before we wrap it? No, really enjoyed this, so thank you for having me on here, Jason, and I look forward to seeing anyone who’s at Hypno thoughts and having conversations, and we’ll get to have a deeper conversation still, I think, at Hypno thoughts.

Jason, let out here once again, and as always, thank you so much for interacting with this program, for leaving your reviews online for especially sharing this one on your social media streams. Whether it’s the podcast, whether it’s the video broadcast of it too. Once again, head over to work smart hypnosis.com.

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