We all see it, we read it in hypnotherapy and NLP forums, we hear inexperienced or just plain naíve hypnotherapists and NLP practitioners (in particular) say something along the lines of:

“Well my teacher told me past life regression works and the man I did it with experienced a fabulous change, so that proves it works.”

Or

“My teacher worked with lots of schizophrenic clients using hypnosis and I have used the swish pattern on a lady with it and she felt much better afterwards.”

Or

“My clients always tell me they feel better after a good cry, so that shows it is a really good way of letting go of unwanted feelings and getting results in therapy.”

Or

“My friend read about the law of attraction helping a man get rid of cancer and I feel a lot happier since I used it, so that shows it works.”

I could write thousands and thousands of words of people filling up discussion forums with this kind of useless subjective, anecdotal statements.

You see, very few of these people seem to possess any critical thinking skills and think of all scepticism as a bad, evil thing rather than a healthy way to apply common sense and examine real-life evidence.

In a nutshell, critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally. Importantly for hypnotherapists and other therapists, it includes the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking. Reflective practice should feature in any good quality hypnotherapy training and should form part of any hypnotherapists daily regimen when working with clients. Yet I encounter many, many hypnotherapists who could not offer up any kind of systematic process of reflective practice at all… I digress, back on to critical thinking… Someone who is a critical thinker, does the following :

- They understand logical connections between ideas. (i.e Do not agree with all complex equivalences or irrational causal relationships)
- They identify, construct and evaluate arguments. (i.e. Rather than just taking things personally, due diligence and consideration goes into how they present the information)
- They detect inconsistencies and common mistakes in reasoning. (i.e Noticing if someone offers up solely subjective anecdotal evidence to support their theory)
- They solve problems systematically.
- They identify the relevance and importance of ideas. (i.e They do not muffle creativity)
- They reflect on the justification of one’s own beliefs and values. (i.e. Don’t just carry on bloody mindedly believing in something because that is how you were taught it several years ago)

Being a critical thinker is not just about being able to regurgitate and accumulate information, not at all. A person with a good memory and who knows a lot of facts is not necessarily good at critical thinking. I mean, look at autistic savants (as seen in the film The Rain Man) for an extreme example. A critical thinker is able to deduce consequences from what he knows, and knows how to utilise information to solve problems, and to seek relevant sources of information to inform himself… Looking for proper evidence.

Many people perceive critical thinkers as being argumentative or being critical of other people, when it really is not the case. Although critical thinking skills can be used in exposing fallacies (or hogwash and bullcrap) as well as bad reasoning, critical thinking can also play an important role in cooperative reasoning and constructive tasks, particularly those employed in therapy. Critical thinking can help us acquire knowledge, improve our theories, and strengthen arguments.

In hypnotherapy, good hypnotherapists know Socratic questioning techniques and NLP practitioners tend to be taught the Meta model as a way of looking for precise information… We expose generalisations, distortions and deletions in people’s reasoning, we ask what evidence exists to support the reasoning with these kinds of questions asked of a therapy client… It is an inherent part of our work and these are the types of questions that critical thinkers apply to life and the world around us… If we apply them in therapy and see the benefits of them, why on earth do the same people not apply that sort of questioning and rationale to the principles that underpin their approaches to hypnotherapy or NLP or modern psychology?

I mean you are not going to necessarily do your client any harm if your approach to therapy is heavily punctuated with elements of the law of attraction, but you’d be far, far more effective if you knew the limitations of what you were doing, understood how your beliefs were affecting your therapeutic results and knew of empirical evidence that supported what youw ere saying rather than just having seen The Secret film or having some anecdotal evidence given to you by a group of people who all believe in the Law of Attraction.

For a hypnotherapist or any other kind of therapist, the ability to think clearly and rationally is especially important. Although critical thinking skills are not restricted to this particular field, being able to think well and solve problems systematically is an asset for any career or lifestyle.

It is more important today than ever. Just look at the modern world we live in. So much of what we do and how we learn relates to a global knowledge economy that is driven by information and technology. This modern world places increasing demands on flexible intellectual skills, and the ability to analyse information and integrate diverse sources of knowledge in solving problems.

Good critical thinking promotes such thinking skills, and is very important in the fast-changing environment. Examine the vast amount of quality research that hits the field of hypnotherapy, examine the tabloid journalism portrayal of these fields, examine the developments just in the last 10 years, let alone the last 100 years in these fields, examine key debates and underlying philosophies, examine the world of pseudoscience where people’s theories are marketed rather than peer-reviewed and whereby men in white coats posing as doctors offer up the only means of credibility… All I ask is to examine, look and apply critical thinking with all these things that are so very pertinent to the field of hypnotherapy, NLP and modern psychology.

Thinking clearly and systematically can improve the way we express our ideas. In learning how to analyse the logical structure of texts, critical thinking also improves comprehension abilities, and boy there are a LOT of texts in the field of hypnosis and hypnotherapy and so many conflicting viewpoints… Examine how those viewpoints are supported and who by and apply some critical thinking that is unbiased by your own previously held beliefs as much as is possible. Know how the beliefs you hold alters your perception of the information you are presented with.

I am offered up impotent resistance from those that say critical thinking is the opposite of being creative… More hogwash!
Critical thinking promotes creativity. To come up with a creative solution to a problem involves not just having new ideas. It must also be the case that the new ideas being generated are useful and relevant to the task at hand. Critical thinking plays a crucial role in evaluating new ideas, selecting the best ones and modifying them if necessary. Those that thrive in business are not just creative, they have a huge amount of critical thinking skills… Just watch Dragons Den on the TV for open displays of rational critical thinking in business, even when confronted with some brilliantly creative ideas.

Most importantly, as I alluded to earlier, critical thinking is crucial for self-reflection. In order to live a meaningful life and to structure our lives accordingly, we need to justify and reflect on our values and decisions. Critical thinking provides the tools for this process of self-evaluation. As a hypnotherapist, reflective practice is essential to ensure I improve and serve my clients needs the best – we do this with supervision and with our own reflective practice systems and means of examining the rationale behind the reasons for making certain decisions… This is especially important if we are not getting the absolute top results that we would like to be getting in our hypnotherapy work.

To think better or correctly and without too much imbalance or bias, we ought to have a basic knowledge of laws of logic, and the methods of scientific reasoning – which can be as simple as examining more closely the statistics that are shown in varying forms of media to support reasoning, for example.

Also, it would be useful to know something about what not to do if we want to reason correctly. This means we should have some basic knowledge of the mistakes that people make. This may well require some knowledge of typical fallacies… Go and listen to Brian Dunnings Skeptoid podcast for lists of common logical fallacies if you want to understand that more. Much research in the psychology world has shown persistent biases and limitations in human reasoning, just knowing this allows us to think critically when we hear reasoning.

Just knowing some basic principles that distinguish good and bad reasoning is not enough. We also need to practice and we need real-life examples of this. The difference between what we refer to in therapy as in vivo and in vitro. If I work with a client using hypnotherapy to overcome a phobia, it is all well and good that we work on the issue in vitro in the therapy room. We work on cognitions and imagined scenarios and target situations. At some point, that client needs to have real-life, in vivo experience that the phobia is conquered or at least improving.

Someone can attend a guitar playing class and learn about the basic theory, such as the fact that the guitar needs to be in tune, certain symbols in the sheet music mean you need to speed up the notes or play them softly. Though if we don not actually apply such theoretical knowledge through constant practice, we may never actually be able to drunkenly play Wonderwall at our friends party.

There are many ways of practicing, you can google online methods of how to apply critical thinking skills and have a good read about the subject at wikipedia and its recommended other sources. Then you can practice by not just accepting everything you have ever been taught as the truth. You can intelligently and politely question reasoning and statements your peers make in forums, you can examine the messages sent out in the media and so on and so on…

Finally, as well as developing your knowledge and practicing, we need to have an open minded approach and suitable attitude. If you look at the examples I gave at the beginning of this blog entry and those you read in forums, you’ll understand that people espousing these kinds of statements have an attitude that could be seen as inhibiting and/or limiting their critical thinking skills. You’ll see the kinds of attitudes that people have that hinder and scupper ones own ability to be a critical thinker. Take a look at these example attitudes that are quite common:

- An attitude of preferring to be given the correct answers rather than figuring them out for yourself.
- An attitude that insists on not reflecting or thinking a great deal about decisions, instead just relying on gut feelings.
- An attitude that refuses to acknowledge or review the mistakes you have made.
- An attitude that does not like to be criticised or challenged in any way.

Psychologists and philosophers learn critical thinking as an inherent part of their learning and education. If a hypnotherapist would like to be as respected and credible as those kinds of peers, then surely critical thinking needs to be a part of who and how they are and not just blind following, assumption-making and believing in anything and everything based on anecdotal evidence or pseudoscience like the stuff offered up in What The Bleep Do We Know and so on…

Have a fabulous weekend folks… I’ll be back on Monday :-)

Ps. I am still giggling that I got a computer generated image of a shiny poo in my blog today!

© Adam Eason Personal Development — visit Adam-Eason.com for great articles, interviews and more on hypnosis and personal development.

Yesterday, following several weeks of jumping through hoops and adjusting and tweaking a few things, our training school here became a government approved learning provider for anyone seeking out a career development loan.

Basically, what this means is, if you are resident in the UK and really wanted to attend the diploma offered by this school, and the only thing holding you back was an inability to afford the initial course fees, you can now apply for a government assisted Career Development Loan (CDL).

If you are interested in this do get in touch with me in the first instance and we’ll assess your initial suitability for the course. If we think you are a prime candidate for the course, I’ll give you our official learner provider number to use with your application. Then do please also visit this page on the official website to get more information and your application for a CDL.

The website states the following important information:

“Like any loan learners need to repay the money they borrow but, with a Professional and Career Development Loan, the YPLA will pay the interest on the loan while the learner is in learning and for one month afterwards. Even when a learner starts to repay the loan to the bank, the interest rates for repayments are set at a fixed, competitive rate of interest, compared with most other personal loans.”

Ok, so I promise that tomorrow I’ll be more interesting… Well, as interesting as I usually am (or am not as some of you may tend to think!).

© Adam Eason Personal Development — visit Adam-Eason.com for great articles, interviews and more on hypnosis and personal development.

You cannot do such a thing if you do not know yourself.

Do you watch Heroes? Well the first season baddy Syler, slowly became one of the good guys and his special power is that he can find out how any person ticks… Including himself. It is a gift that is very much valued among the other super heroes… And probably would be even more so if he did not take the tops of peoples heads off too!!!

Many schools of thought think that the single most important being in the realm of personal development is…

Yourself.

This is all about getting to know you and knowing how to move your own development forward. Very few of us ever actually realise what is in that mirror.

The most critical variable for your success in achieving what you want is you. You knew that though, didn’t you?

Many people I work with therapeutically, as well as many of my students or people within audiences have waited for something to happen… Lightning bolts to fire up their backsides from high above… Don’t tend to happen very often… Although if you stand in the middle of a golf course in a storm pointing your metal umbrella at the thunder cloud, you may increase your chances…

It is easy to assume that external circumstances have to be just right for you to make the breakthrough you want in life, but in fact, even if the circumstances are favourable, you may well only be able to take advan­tage of them if you are in the right frame of mind.

Investing in Yourself

I think this is probably the single most important thing we can do, at every level. Many people have learnt to put other people and their needs first, and keep only the remainder of their attention for themselves. In my experience as trainer and therapist it needs to be the other way around.

Only if we nurture ourselves adequately will we have enough resources available to nurture others. You can’t make a journey if the petrol tank is empty – and if you start off when petrol is low you may run out.

Investment can happen in many ways and at many levels. Consider how much you invest in yourself in the following ways:

- Time on your own

- Relaxation

- New stimuli

- Presents and treats

- Fun

- Off-duty activities

- Doing things you like

- Being with people who make you feel good

- Praising yourself

- Appreciating your uniqueness

- Spending money on yourself in ways that enhance your life, your skills, your opportunities

- Honouring your needs.

Having a therapist or a coach is of course one way of investing in yourself. There are some things that really require the help of others, but how about you also learn to be able to coach yourself. So how good a therapist are you towards yourself?

- What is the first improvement you can make then in coaching yourself?

- What might you do next?

Well that is what this blog is all about. Lets start with this unusual notion:

Building Rapport with Yourself

Most people don’t think about needing to build rapport with themselves, only with other people. When there is rapport, then you have more influ­ence, and suggestions can be offered, and are more likely to be accepted. This is true with other people, but it’s also true for you. So you need to estab­lish this approach with yourself if you are to help yourself most effectively.

I spend much time writing up self-hypnosis techniques for you here and I shall be doing in the coming weeks to help enhance our theme… However, it is a much tougher task to gain real success with self-hypnosis if you have no rapport with yourself!

Building rapport with yourself is just like building rapport with some­one else. It takes careful attention, and a genuine respect at a deep level. Often people act in ways which undermine their respect for them­selves. Sometimes, for instance, instead of just being critical of a specific behaviour they jump to having a bad opinion of themselves as an entire person.

When one person builds rapport with another, lots of modern personal development has shown that they need to start from ‘where the other person is’. We step into their world and find common ground as we proceed.

That’s how it occurs naturally; and that’s how it can be done deliberately. This means acknowl­edging the other person’s position and what’s important to them, and showing that acceptance verbally and non-verbally. It means accepting how you are at this moment, rather than leaping in with judgements or suggestions for change.

Exactly the same applies if you want to establish rapport with yourself. Start from where you are — warts and all. You certainly don’t have to pre­tend that everything about yourself is wonderful, great or marvellous. No needless whooping or razz-ma-tazz is called for!

Rapport fails with unrealistic praise as on unrestrained criticism or unleashed ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’. We know we aren’t perfect: but we need to be reminded that we’ve been doing the best we can at times… And reminded of the good we do and are being…

I tell all my students as often as possible that the really effective helpers are those who act on this respectful assumption that we are doing the best we can. Equally, this is what works when we coach ourselves. That best can probably be improved, once we know how. Even when things are going well it’s important that you maintain this respectful, purposeful, supportive rela­tionship with yourself.

Honouring Different Parts of Yourself

Do you sometimes use the phrase ‘a part of me wants this and another part of me wants something else’? Do you sometimes feel like there is a part of you pulling you in a different direction to another part of you?

This is a very common experience and may indicate some lack of internal rapport. In its more extreme forms, it can reveal a conflict between different values, goals or interests you may have.

Ultimately, we all need to find ways to create harmony within our­selves. We can utilise the ability we have to interact with ourselves internally to enquire, respectfully, what each part wants, to track those wants back to their deepest intent and to help each part of ourselves recognise that it is valued for its attempts to achieve something important for us. If you actually do this, you’ll be surprised at how much informa­tion you get, sometimes in words, sometimes in images or sensations.

One of these well-intentioned parts is what Gallwey called Self 2, which he recognised as playing a highly sig­nificant role in our internal dialogue. This internal voice tells us how we should be doing and what we ought not to be doing; it exhorts and some­times bullies us; it frequently criticises, reminds and belittles us. But it is also, in its own way, trying to do its best for us. We need to establish rap­port with that moralistic, judgemental voice just as much as with any other part of ourselves: we need to enquire what it is trying to achieve.

Often it is to save us trouble, embarrassment, failure or pain; but we don’t have to stop at that. Sometimes we need to take issue with that voice and continue the dialogue rather than meekly giving in; sometimes we need to explore other ways of achieving the same aims; sometimes we just need to refocus our awareness on what is actually going on, because it may be rather different from what that part fears or foresees.

Dealing with that voice is an important part of developing an effective developmental role with ourselves.

Next time you notice, by tuning in to your internal dialogue, that you’re giving yourself a hard time, pay attention to what is being said and then step back and evaluate it. Is it reasonable, useful and credible? What effect does the tone in which it is being said have on you?

Frequently, simply changing the tone and volume of such internal dialogue enables people to benefit from the content of what’s being said without feeling bad any more. Or disputing what was said inside your head and saying something else, more progressive, for example.

Have a think about how you relate to yourself and whether you truly have rapport with yourself… Then take an honest look at the person in the mirror…

Click here to view the embedded video.

© Adam Eason Personal Development — visit Adam-Eason.com for great articles, interviews and more on hypnosis and personal development.

I decided that as it is September tomorrow, I’d get myself some box-fresh, shiny white DC trainers to wear… People have been blinded in the corridors here:

During the Bank holiday weekend, I went with my niece and nephew to Farmer Palmers and loved it so much, I decided to buy myself a tractor and here is a picture of me driving it to work this morning:

So yes, a time of new beginnings in many ways… My intensive hypnotherapy diploma course completes in September and I ready myself for the new monthly hypnotherapy diploma intake that starts soon too… We have plans afoot with the members area here with lots of webinars planned, we have the local GHR hypnotherapist peer supervision group here in Bournemouth next week and all kinds of other things that are really exciting me as we look forward.

It is the end of Summer, the beginning of all the cool stuff that can happen and I am looking forward to hearing about all your cool stuff whilst sharing plenty of it myself too.

Ok, back blogging in earnest tomorrow, am feeling a tad rusty after the extended weekend so just breaking myself in gradually this week.

© Adam Eason Personal Development — visit Adam-Eason.com for great articles, interviews and more on hypnosis and personal development.

Whether you agree with either side, or neither side, are you intelligent enough to see and understand both sides?

I can’t hear what you are replying from my bank Holiday bolthole here in Bournemouth – I say bolthole, because I will be using my running machine in my home gym rather than running outside this weekend due to the awful weather! Even though I can’t hear your reply, I assume that most of you said ‘yes’ in reply to the question. I mean, if you weren’t intelligent enough, you’d probably not be reading this in the first place, eh?

So if the answer that most people give is ‘yes’ – why do you not get treated as such?

Why is it that so many teaching establishments in the personal development and hypnotherapy world are so goddam dogmatic about what they teach? Let me give you some examples:

- Psychoanalytic schools of hypnotherapy very rarely teach their students the issues surounding duty of care, informed consent, the reconstructive nature of memory and risks of retraumatisation when teaching regression therapy (I regularly meet hypnotherapists trained by regresion dominated organisations that haven’t a clue what retraumatisation is, or that the memory reconstructs the past, often in a far different way than the initial experience – science demonstrates this to be true by the way, it is not an opinion).

- NLP training schools rarely point out the scientifically proven flaws in eye-accessing cues or the validity of representational systems (I have met people and seen people with YouTube videos claiming that the cues are set in stone for everyone, whereas research shows they do not; for them to be useful, you need to calibrate each individual uniquely).

-Why do those that teach that hypnosis is some kind of altered state rarely ever illustrate the nonstate viewpoint of hypnosis (I met several people from an Erickson hypnotherapy training course who had not even heard of any such debate as the state vs nonstate that is central to the field of hypnosis).

- Conversational and Indirect hypnosis trainings often state that what they do is better than direct or authoritative styled hypnosis… Yet offer no evidence to show us how or why… because there is virtually no evidence to suggest as much. It may be a lovely, subtle and elegant way to communicate, but the efficacy as far as therapeutic gain is concerned is no higher than those using more direct methods.

Please note, these above points are not my opinions. They are facts with evidence to support them.

When teaching these subjects, why not highlight the limitations of that which you teach too? Isn’t that progress? Isn’t that how we develop and enhance this field? To build upon what we know, to challenge and improve what we do, to have a rounded, fully open-minded understanding of the entire subject and not feel the need to dig our heels into one small aspect and defend it by suggesting it is better than everything else, regardless of any evidence to the contrary?

Is it because those that teach this stuff do not know the other side of these things? Is it because they are scared of being challenged and being seen to be left wanting? Do they just know no better, were taught that way and therefore espouse the way they were taught as the right option… Like it is the law? I mean, what if you trained 10 years ago and have not kept abreast of developments and not done any relevant CPD (continued professional development)? Worse still, what if your CPD is being conducted by people who know no better? Who offer up one dogmatic approach?

Eeek!

Maybe this is why we work in a field that has so many conflicting viewpoints and stances. We seem to perceive the  field in so many different ways, with a seeming inability to adopt other stances and approaches and so many of us arrogantly assume we know best and just stick to what we know without even understanding (or even knowing about in some cases) the other side.

I think it is important, especially for hypnotherapists, to be able to see (at least) and ideally fully understand both sides to a philosophy, a debate, a theory and so on. It shows intelligence. It shows you know your subject and your field. The field of hypnotherapy, as with many, many other fields, has a proliferation of this kind of phenomena… Whereby people teach something that they insist is the best and only way to go, blissfully unaware that there could potentially be more to understand and benefit from. If nothing else, we owe that to our clients who are investing in our services to be offered the most effective solutions to enhance their well-being.

I wrote last week about the need for a tidy balance between enjoying the art of hypnosis and responding to developments in research and evidence base. I think a similar balance needs to be struck in how we approach our own knowledge base. It is basic Yin and Yang for those wanting a more liberal way of illustration… and I hope you demand that you be taught in a way that accepts that you are indeed intelligent enough to be taught both sides of any theory or subject matter.

It is bank holiday weekend here… I am having some time out… And so I’ll be back next Tuesday and I hope you have a wonderful weekend :-)

© Adam Eason Personal Development — visit Adam-Eason.com for great articles, interviews and more on hypnosis and personal development.