I was in the winners enclosure at the end of the final race when Frankie did his trademark star jump off his horse and I managed to record it all for posterity on my iPhone!

The only thing that could have made the day better was that I was attending a charity dinner where the guest speaker was the one and only Stuart Pearce.

Stuart is currently the England U-21 football team coach and many tip him to be a future England first team coach. For me, ‘Psycho’ was more than just a Nottingham Forest footballer, England left back regular, wielder of huge thighs, extreme freekick taker, bone crunching tackler, and virtual pacey left winger…

For me Stuart Pearce epitomised much of what I have come to value in life. Known as a real hard man, he was never dirty. He was hard and fair. This was something I wanted to ask him about last week when meeting him…

Pearce played in the European Championships for England 1992, we sadly failed to win any of our group games… But Stuart had a thunderous free kick strike the underside of the crossbar and bounce away from goal in a drawn game against France. Moments before taking the free kick, Pearce was headbutted off the ball by French defender Basile Boli, leaving a gash on his cheek. When England won the free kick Pearce immediately disregarded his injury and rushed to take it. The referee insisted on Pearce having the blood wiped from his face first, but Pearce soon returned and unleashed his thunderbolt, which failed to go in.

These days, players roll around crying and complaining and trying to get other players into trouble. That was never Stuart Pearces style. He just got on with things. When he spoke about this incident last week, he was still gracious, gentlemanly and firm with who and how he is and I just love that.

I could go on for hours about all the goals I watched him score, about the fact that he loves his punk music and that he has been an icon in my life, someone I strived to be like, you can read more about him at Stuart Pearce’s wikipedia page here.

I’ll cherish this photo.

Anyway, a very big thank you to Mr Mike Lawson, a previous student of mine who was kind and thoughtful enough to have bought the tickets for me and my guest to attend. I’ll be eternally grateful for the memories I have lodged up here in my memory banks.

Have a great weekend, I am running my hypnotherapy diploma this weekend and very much looking forward to it.

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

With Remembrance Day fast approaching and the United Kingdom’s ongoing involvement in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan always in headlines, the troubles homecoming heroes have in adapting to their return to civilian life is often overlooked.

Some members of the National Council for Hypnotherapy have decided to participate in a programme offering a free consultation/session to help homecoming servicemen and women cope with their return to civilian life after the stresses of warfare.

Such sessions, says the NCH chairman Paul White, will help with relaxation, removing anxiety, dealing with depression, processing traumatic events, dealing with loss, re-adjustment and building self-esteem.

Many returning servicemen and women have shown a high rate of stress.

Everyone reacts to stress in different ways and to different degrees. Some people have more stress than others. Some people handle stressful situations better than others. Each person is triggered by different stressful situations, depending on their own make-up.

“Stress is one of the biggest threats to people’s health, happiness, and well being,” says White.

“Stress may cause confused thinking, depression, over-eating, excessive drinking, reckless driving, high blood pressure, heart problems, and a myriad of other health problems. The symptoms of stress are sometimes insidious and undetectable, until one day you feel overwhelmed with life. Everything bothers you, from your work to your favourite pet at home. You may even start doubting your sanity. All of this results in the feeling of being out of control.”

Stress may be triggered by an event or episode.

Once a person learns to recognise stress triggers, they can learn to introduce new, alternative behaviour when experiencing a stress trigger.

Hypnosis will help a person recognise stress triggers and, while in the hypnotic state, be better able to see alternative perspectives and behaviours in stressful situations.

In essence, someone can learn to reprogramme thoughts and actions while in a trance state to help develop new behaviour in the waking conscious state.

John Barry, research psychologist with City University, in his summary on the Warrior programme (a charity based in the UK aimed at ‘connecting the disconnected’ including ex-army personnel) said the programme helped improve the psychological functioning of people suffering from the effects of traumatic experiences, especially those ex-army services personnel.

This programme uses cognitive behavioural therapy – recognised as one of the most effective treatments for conditions where anxiety or depression is the main problem; neuro-linguistic programming which can change, adopt or eliminate patterns of behaviour and timeline therapy, an internal process that allows unresolved negative emotions from the past to be accessed and resolved safely and swiftly.

Research by Eitan Abramowitz and others in 2008 into hypnotherapy in the treatment of chronic combat-related PTSD patients suffering from insomnia,  evaluated the benefits of add-on hypnotherapy in patients with chronic PTSD.

Some patients were treated with medication and add-on hypnotherapy as opposed to others receiving symptom-oriented hypnotherapy.

There was a significant main effect of the hypnotherapy treatment, the team found, with PTSD symptoms as measured by the Post traumatic Disorder Scale.

Additional benefits for the hypnotherapy group were decreases in intrusion and avoidance reactions and improvement in all sleep variables assessed.

Modern hypnotherapy, concludes White, has become the most dramatically effective short-term therapy developed to date, which means that many problems and issues can be transformed dramatically using hypnotherapy.

Helping homecoming heroes re-adapt to life after the stresses and trauma of military duty is one of the services the National Council for Hypnotherapists can offer.

To find a participating NCH Hypnotherapists call the NCH Homecoming Heroes helpline on 020 8647 9357. For those that fanyc seeing me… Just get in touch via this website.

The National Council for Hypnotherapy is the UK’s largest independent, not-for-profit governing body for Hypnotherapy practitioners. The high standards it requires for membership ensures that all of our therapists must have achieved a certain level of training and demonstrated competence in practice. In addition all our members are bound by a strict Code of Ethics & Practice, which includes the requirement for Professional Indemnity Insurance. For more information visit their website at www.hypnotherapists.org.uk.

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

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

He loves my brand new M Series Sport BMW and wanted to see it… So I obliged… WHilst perusing my car, as the urban philosopher he is, he also explained to me an observation of his as we drove by the sea front near to where we live.

With him doing a lot of driving, he started noticing the skid marks on long stretches of road, in particular on our motorways.  On some of the longer country roads, he noticed that there was often nothing for miles except telephone poles hundreds of metres apart and all the skid marks pointed to the telephone poles.

He proceeded to tell me about some advanced drivers course he attended and how he recalled a lesson he once learned from a police driving trainHe was told to  “look where you want to go. Don’t focus on what you want to avoid.”

So he summised that if you look at the telephone pole, you will steer towards it.

We all knew that though, right?

Seeing as we were having one of those conversations, of course I had to draw some parallels… In life, if something goes wrong and instead of focusing on what we want, we focus on what we don’t want or fear “what a nightmare this is!” “Things are so awful!” Etc… Turning the focus away from what we fear and towards where we want to go takes practice.

We had a bit of a laugh at how old we sounded… I am guessing loads of you reading this will be considering this npotion rather old hat. I know it is one of those things I picked up at some of the very first and earliest of personal development seminars I attended. Despite this, loads of us, have been steering towards telephone poles for a long time.

The key here in my opinion and experience is not to think about the distant future… This about focusing on where we want to go right now. If the car starts to go out of control, focusing on the drive to the beach we have planned for next month won’t help us avoid the telephone pole, will it?

Dreaming of the future, while very enjoyable, is not steering our course in the present. By paying attention to where we want to go now, we are able to heighten our awareness of what is happening to us while we steer. This gives us critical information. If the car is skidding off the road, wishing that we were on the beach watching the waves won’t help us. Our ability to steer between the poles is increased by our willingness to be aware of right where we are. What is the feeling of our hands on the steering wheel? What is that vibration of the brake pedal under our feet? Are the brakes locking up?

My friend is right, as difficult as it feels some times, if we don’t aim where we want to go, we make it unlikely we will ever get there.

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

A press release from the Council states the following:

The ongoing furore over the appearance by British National Party leader Nick Griffin on the BBC’s Question Time has once again brought racism to the forefront of news headlines.

Racism is perceived to be at the very heart of the British National Party. It appears to be racism that separates it from any other political party; and it seems to be racism that attracts many of its members. Whilst the party has tried, in recent times, to tone down the words, the message is apparently unchanged.

The Council thinks it might have a solution. Here’s what they say:

“…The key to reducing racial bias — at least in a short-term, laboratory setting — is exposure to people in personalised ways that challenge stereotypes. And this is where hypnotherapy can play an important role.

Healing by a ‘cognitive’ set of attitudes and motivations (or an altered state of awareness) is among the oldest phenomena known to man and is found, in one form or another, in virtually every culture throughout the world. It could also be legitimately described as the original psychological therapy and somewhat more contentiously, as the basis for many of the more recent styles of psychological intervention.”

Here’s the rest of the press release I had to share with you all:

So, what is racism and can it be “cured”?

Now that Barack Obama, the first African-American president in United States history has taken office, researchers have shown that it may be possible to scientifically reduce racial bias.

The results are still preliminary and the real-world effects of reducing bias in a controlled laboratory setting are not clear. But despite this, the findings add to a growing body of research suggesting that science can battle racism.

“Any time you can get people to treat people as individuals, you reduce the effect of stereotypes,” said Brown University cognitive scientist Michael Tarr. “It won’t solve racism, but it could have profound real-world effects.”

Tarr’s findings overlap with other results suggesting that the key to reducing racial bias — at least in a short-term, laboratory setting — is exposure to people in personalised ways that challenge stereotypes.

And this is where hypnotherapy can play an important role.

Healing by a ‘cognitive’ set of attitudes and motivations (or an altered state of awareness) is among the oldest phenomena known to man and is found, in one form or another, in virtually every culture throughout the world. It could also be legitimately described as the original psychological therapy and somewhat more contentiously, as the basis for many of the more recent styles of psychological intervention.

Although such altered states have been known for thousands of years, the term ‘hypnosis’ (from the Greek ‘hypnos’, meaning ‘sleep’) was only coined in 1841 by James Braid, a Scottish surgeon and remains a somewhat less than accurate description of the experience, as the hypnotic state is, in most respects, entirely dissimilar to sleep. He defined hypnotism as focused conscious attention on a single dominant idea or mental image, accompanied by heightened expectation.

Renowned psychologist Hans Eysenck found that, by means of careful statistical analysis, measures from many hundreds of subjects indicated those who suffered from phobia, anxiety, depression, and related problems, tended to be considerably more responsive to hypnotic suggestion than average.

This includes people perceived to be racist. He also discovered that cognitive-behavioural therapy could change racist views and other prejudices in a large sample of another study.

What is racism really? Is it a fear, a phobia or associated with certain personality types?

Often it is the result of one’s attitudes towards others which are formed during childhood.

If someone is taught to be racist from an early age by a family member, for example, these attitudes are likely to stick with the person throughout their life. Often racists are unable to explain why they hate people of a different skin colour, nationality or culture. Racists commonly use people of different ethnic backgrounds as ‘scapegoats’ on whom to blame their problems and make sweeping generalisations about these groups of people.

Often the best way of explaining these types of phenomena is to draw distinction between ‘feelings’ (emotions) and cognitive processes; is it indeed the case that racists feel threatened, feel hatred and they feel an innate superiority to other ethnic groups and it is these feelings that make racists able to make sweeping generalisations without supporting evidence or intellectual rigor.

Hypnotherapy, recognised by the British Medical Association as a valid modern medical treatment since 1955, can be used to modify a subject’s emotional content, behaviour, and attitudes, as well as a wide range of conditions like dysfunctional habits, anxiety, stress-related illness and pain management.

Eysenck wrote an important analysis of experimental data on hypnotic suggestion in his book Dimensions of Personality (published 1947).

The fifth chapter, ‘Suggestibility and Hypnosis’, looks at evidence relating to the classification of different types of suggestion and the relationship between suggestibility and personality types.

His research led him to conclude that it was necessary to make a distinction between two main factors or types of suggestion. And he found a third.

He said primary suggestion, associated with traditional hypnosis, was a direct command or instruction given to the subject in which the response desired is explicitly stated. In essence, it is the power of mind over body.

Secondary suggestion, he says, is suggestion by indirection or indirect methods, leading to a manipulation of the subject’s beliefs and expectations.
Then Eysenck adds a third category, prestige suggestion.

This form of suggestion employs the authority, charisma, or ‘prestige’ of the hypnotherapist to influence the client.

Many experimental studies demonstrate the tendency of individuals to imitate the attitudes and opinions of others whom they admire or identify with. The prestige, traditionally attached by many to medical practitioners whom they trust, can lead to a social compliance and suggestibility.

In a study on the causes and cures of prejudice using 6,796 male subjects aged between 45 and 55, Eysenck and other researchers found that all sources of prejudice correlated positively together and that each was related to personality.

Importantly, the team found that attempts to change personality through a type of cognitive behaviour therapy led to significant changes in prejudice.

While it took more than two hundred years for hypnotherapy to become incorporated into medical treatment, modern trends show a greater acceptance of this treatment.

Only three years after Britain recognised hypnotherapy as a valid medical treatment, the American Medical Association gave its approval in 1958.

The challenge now would be for Nick Griffin to perhaps visit a qualified hypnotherapist and seek a “cure”…

The National Council for Hypnotherapy is the UK’s largest independent, not-for-profit governing body for Hypnotherapy practitioners. The high standards it requires for membership ensures that all of our therapists must have achieved a certain level of training and demonstrated competence in practice. In addition all our members are bound by a strict Code of Ethics & Practice, which includes the requirement for Professional Indemnity Insurance.

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