So what is Quest?

After much searching, both of the soul and the internet, I found The Quest Institute. To be fair, it was actually the first thing I found but I didn’t trust my instincts and kept looking. After all if it looks too good to be true then it probably is. At which point, if you’re me, you start to wonder about ambiguity especially if you’ve heard of Milton Erickson or NLP. Does the ‘probably is’ phrase refer to the too-good-to-be-true thing being too good and therefore untrue or does it really mean that despite it looking too good, it probably is true? If you get my drift. Confusing? At least it was in my head.

So I kept looking. I’m not entirely sure where the desire to look at hypnotherapy came from, other than I had seen a hypnotist in the mid-eighties in a ‘look into my eyes you are getting sleepy…. deeper ….. deeper’ kind of way and the redundancy counselling I had last year gave me one of those ‘What Career You Should Do Next’ questionnaires. Apparently I’m best suited to Architectural Photography or Hypnotherapy.

Unfortunately I’m a Chartered Financial Planner.

Nevertheless, I kept looking until I found a cut price Hypnotherapy training course which I was about to sign up for on the principle that if I didn’t know whether hypnotherapy was for me then the less I spent on finding out, the better. However that part of me which insists on taking one last look before jumping, took one last look. And the last look I took was at Quest. Why was that my last look? Because when you’ve found what you’re looking for, you stop looking.

I should have trusted my original instincts. Something I am much better at doing now that I’m 60% of the way through my training as a Cognitive Hypnotherapist – with The Quest Institute.

So, to get to the point: What is Quest?:

Trevor and Rebecca Silvester are a husband and wife team who formed The Quest Institute in 2001, originally to promote the use of Cognitive Hypnotherapy and NLP for people with serious illness. Along the way they evolved into something broader by recognising that they could bring the benefits of their approach to a much wider audience by training competent and ethical practitioners, and supporting them as they built their practices.

… and more to the point, what’s Cognitive Hypnotherapy?

Cognitive Hypnotherapy is an approach that derives from the most recent research on how the mind works. It involves an active relationship between client and therapist where the client is skilfully guided to find the underlying cause of their problem, and assisted in restructuring their unconscious so that the problem disappears.

Cognitive Hypnotherapy draws on techniques from NLP,
Cognitive Therapy, Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, and
the latest research from Evolutionary Psychology and
Neuroscience. This is assimilated within the outstanding
approaches of the most effective Hypnotherapists of the
last 50 years, including Milton Erickson, Gil Boyne,
Stephen Wolinsky, Rubin Battino and Tad James.
This synthesis forms an approach geared towards
achieving results in the shortest possible time.

I’m fascinated by it. If you’re interested in finding out more about Quest, the web address of The Quest Institute is:

http://www.questinstitute.co.uk/

If you would like to know more about Cognitive Hypnotherapy, there is now an excellent Website designed with non therapists in mind. Check it out. It’s really good:

http://www.cognitivehypnotherapy.org

I’d recommend it. If nothing else, it’s an interesting read.

If you’d like to find out more about my practice in the UK, simply follow this link:

http://www.tonyburkinshaw.co.uk