The Turn of the Century? A bit of a pain…

Unless WordPress is very much mistaken, this is my 100th post so maybe it’s time to begin to accept that blogging has become more than just a passing fancy.

If all is indeed as it seems then on average, every time I post, twenty people make the decision to follow this blog, so by the time you get to read this one, there should be over 2000 followers. Check out the stats to see if I’m right – I know I will. After a comment like that, I have to make sure, really.

It all started off for me with a couple of long term marketing objectives in mind, prompted by the training I was undertaking and in particular, the use of looped metaphors, which as time has gone on you might find I’ve woven into the fabric of one or two posts you might have read previously. Check them out, they can be quite powerful because you lose track of what’s on the surface and hidden meanings somehow emerge without you really even thinking about them.

Given that pain management has turned up a few times in these one hundred posts, I figured it was about time I put some of the pain management techniques to a proper test and volunteer myself to myself as it were, as a guinea pig. As if on cue a great opportunity presented itself when one of my molars broke on New Year’s Eve.

We went out for a meal and the very first bite came with an unexpected crunch, as it does sometimes. So, to ensure that the rest of the evening wasn’t spoilt in any way by sensitive teeth, I quickly went through a couple of rounds of dissociation, and Escudero, as you do and duly spent the remainder of the evening eating, drinking and generally making merry.

As is always the case, my dentist couldn’t see me for three weeks, unless it was an emergency and as I was happily controlling cold and pressure sensitivity, I booked in and waited. Of course, by now, my cynical inner voice was telling me that the pain control techniques I was using were only being effective because the tooth didn’t actually hurt anyway. A bit of a Catch 22 seeing I wasn’t going to stop using them because I really didn’t want to risk proper tooth-ache either. So I carried on and periodically argued with myself about whether I was being effectively skillful or plainly self-delusional.

Anyway, off I went to dentist, practising pain relief techniques so that I could truly test them out and found myself following habit and protocol and quietly going along with the dentist’s “OK, let’s numb it up then shall we?”. I felt a bit of a fraud.

Mind you, being no stranger to fillings, I can honestly say that every single filling I have ever had, ever, has been pretty painful even with injections. There have always been those moments when I find myself groaning as drill bites harder and wishing it would all finish ten minutes ago please.

This time, I genuinely felt nothing at all. It was almost pleasant. I’ve never had that before. But then again, as Gill said afterwards, maybe this dentist is particularly good.

Obviously this left me with no option but to test it out for real. So I did.

As is appropriate with these things, I started with the easier option, stole a pin from the sewing basket, sterilised it and, yes, pushed it slowly through the back of my hand.

I have to say it was odd. Three things stick in my mind.

1. It didn’t hurt. Really. Not at all.

2. Watching the point of the pin reappear was fascinating.

3. It was surprisingly hard to pull it out again. And it didn’t bleed. Not one drop.

Now in the scheme of things, especially in the era of YouTube videos of well known people pushing skewers through their arms, this is small time stuff. But it’s my small time stuff. And when I can figure out the best way to do it, I think it might make a really good video convincer about the power of the mind. Maybe even help potential clients make up their minds about just how powerful hypnotherapy really is and perhaps help persuade them to get in touch.

On the other hand it might put them off. I’d love to know what you think.

Oh, and I took a picture of it on my phone. I didn’t post it with this as I’m not sure this is the right forum. Good call? Or would you like to see it?

Anyways, the longer this ride goes on, the more pleased I am that I made the decision to get on the Cognitive Hypnotherapy train and follow the tracks on the slightly weirder side of life.

I have no idea how far it might take me but I keep meeting fantastic people, helping a few others along the way and more and more folks seem to want to talk to me about it.

Long may it continue.

Somewhat Zen
© Tony Burkinshaw 2014

Related:

Pain relief mp3: Click Here

Meanwhile, back at the beginning…

Helen & I trained at the same time and she’s already found herself featuring a couple of times in this blog. As I recall, she didn’t mind at the time and seeing as she’s happy to appear in the flesh as it were, maybe she’s still content with me periodically lobbing her into the middle of these vaguely relevant ramblings.

This is an article Helen wrote for the latest issue of the Cognitive Hypnotherapy E-zine ‘Perception’. [I’ve added a link to it at the end if you fancy reading more, (or even subscribing). It’s entirely free and written for non-therapists, so it’s brilliantly lacking in jargon. Check it out, you might find you were glad you did.]

Interestingly, (this blog is still trying to get me to use that word I tried and failed to avoid using in a recent post), the weekend she’s referring to is the very same weekend which turned out to be the spur that transformed wishful thinking into the action which became Posts of Hypnotic Suggestion.

Not only that, Helen is the protagonist who featured in that post.

So without Helen, this blog may never have existed.

Thank you.

A Therapist’s Journey

I walked into the Cognitive Hypnotherapy training room, wondering what on earth I was doing there. The previous year I had given up my job as an Assistant Head Teacher of a secondary school when I had given birth to my daughter. In the early months of being a new mother I knew I wanted to work in an area where I could enable people to move forward in their lives. It was an aspect as a teacher I had loved, whether it was helping my students reach their full potential, teachers who needed support or parents who were going through difficult times.

I had come across hypnotherapy whilst I was trying to conceive through IVF and recognised its power to reframe the stories we all tell ourselves which don’t necessarily support us in achieving our goals.  Quite by chance I stumbled across the Cognitive Hypnotherapy website and really liked its approach of recognising the uniqueness behind each person’s issue and having a flexible enough approach to be able to get to the reason behind the presenting issue, rather than just deal with the concern itself.

Within fifteen minutes of hearing the founder of The Quest Institute, Trevor Silvester speak, I knew I had found the right course for me. His words were utterly inspiring, thought provoking and at times challenging. Weekend after weekend we were exposed to new concepts taken from a range of successful therapeutic approaches and slowly but surely the pieces of the jigsaw started to come together and we realised with excitement the potential for deep and significant work with future clients.

Quest is an amazing institute as it attracts likeminded people. All of us in the room were readily open to the new learning’s that we were being presented with and as the months went by we grew into a supportive group willing to give our time and energies to each other to help move our fellow students through difficulties and challenges, using the new techniques we had been taught.

I went to train to be a therapist, was pretty sure I’d make friends, but what I hadn’t bargained for was the therapeutic journey I would find myself on. One weekend we were taught how to do a specific technique and as always we had an opportunity to practice on each other. As I was shortly about to start another round of IVF I decided to be gentle with myself and not focus on anything too deep and meaningful. Instead I chose to focus in on how working as a therapist I could build in being part of a community into my working world. A fairly innocuous area of development. Or so I thought.

Unbeknown to me the strategy bypassed my conscious mind and went straight to the unconscious and revealed an issue that was so deep I had only had glimpses of it over the years and had never made any connections with a situation that happened when I was 22 months old and my inability to conceive naturally in the present day.

I was born seven years after my mother had last given birth and number three in the family. I was evidently a joyful and long awaited addition to the family. A few months later much to the delight of my parents they found they were expecting again. At 22 months old my sister was born with Downs Syndrome. The shock was enormous for my parents and sent reverberations throughout the family. This was in the late 1960’s when approaches and views about Downs was vastly different to thankfully how it is today. My mother in particular found her condition very hard to cope with and at some point after my sister’s birth suffered a breakdown.

My sister was in hospital pretty much continuously for the first two years of her life. My parents almost overnight were absent both physically and emotionally. Earlier than she had wanted she put me into nursery care as she simply didn’t have time to tend to my needs as well as my sister’s. Understandable when it would take over two hours to just to feed my sister at any given time. My parents whole focus obviously was taken up with the arrival of my sister and at 22 months old, bewildered by my parents obvious absence and lack of focus I began to internalise that I was no longer good enough, that the unit I had felt such an affinity with I no longer belonged to and perhaps I wasn’t as loved as I believed.

As the revelation of how this event impacted through the work that I did at Quest, I was able to recognise that throughout my life I had found myself always feeling as if I didn’t quite belong and that on the whole that nagging sense of not being good enough pervaded so many situations.  In my adult life I didn’t feel good enough because I didn’t have a boyfriend, so I got myself a boyfriend. Then I didn’t fit in because in my mind I didn’t have a good enough job, a good enough place to live, a husband, and the icing on the cake when I achieved all that was a child.

Two rounds of IVF following ‘unexplained fertility problems’ and holding my darling daughter I had a moment of peace. I had achieved what everyone else had so surely I was now good enough, surely now I would belong. To my surprise though that feeling didn’t last long as they returned  when  those around me who had their babies at the same time as me were all falling pregnant with their second baby. Once again the club I belonged to felt as though they were shutting their doors to me, just as my 22 month old self felt when the family dynamic shifted so suddenly.

Trevor had taught us that with a number of issues comes a secondary gain. I wondered what my gain was at being unable to fall pregnant naturally. When I asked myself the question I realised that my inability at falling pregnant kept me separate from others, it created a division which although I didn’t want was so terribly familiar. When we are driven by a negative emotion we tend to create exactly what we don’t want.

  The impact was hugely significant and a few months on and now a qualified Cognitive Hypnotherapist myself I continue on my journey of self-discovery using the techniques we were taught, as well as having regular therapy with another Cognitive Hypnotherapist to help me move into my preferred future world that I want to live in. I am learning to recognise my limiting beliefs and more importantly learn how to recognise that these are borne out of thoughts that simply aren’t true. I also recognise that now I have found this  path my road to peace is much shorter than my 43 year old journey to realisation.

My future is filled with a hope and exuberance which is spilling over into my present day. It’s a wondrous feeling. I have no idea whether my shifts in perception and beliefs will result in me having another baby. Whether it does or it doesn’t almost doesn’t matter because I have a growing sense of confidence that with a significant shift in how I view myself in my world I can only be a happier person, secure in who I am and what I have.  With this realisation and knowledge  I can see what a gift I can pass onto my daughter when she too faces her own limiting beliefs.

Having done this remarkable course, as well as experienced first-hand the powerful impact this work can have I now know what I didn’t know when I walked into that room almost a year ago. That Cognitive Hypnotherapy can and indeed does successfully help treat a wide number of issues by truly getting to the heart of the underlying issue and gradually and gently making the changes needed for people to let go of their limiting beliefs that have caused them so many difficulties in the past. I can only say that there is a whole host of therapeutic approached out here for people to choose from.

For me there is now only one choice. Cognitive Hypnotherapy has given me a future in so many ways I couldn’t even have imagined before I embarked on this incredible voyage and I thank each and every individual who has been part of it.

Helen Day

Related articles

• Perception Quarterly E-zine (Cognitive Hypnotherapy)
• and it might not be until you look beneath the drama (Posts of Hypnotic Suggestion)
• and it may not be until the third or fourth time  (Posts of Hypnotic Suggestion)
  

That’s better
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013

What a week that was !

I just had to let you all know. That was the BEST blogging week EVER

Just look at what I saw:

Best ever day for views: 186

Best ever day for visitors: 119

Over 5,000 views since launch on 28th August last year

I also got my 300th follower, Suburban Queen who blogs at loveleanne

Many thanks to all of you.

Networking with the other Plan B

It’s getting to the point where I need to step up the pace some more. If you’ve followed the story so far then you’ll be aware that I’d intended all along for this to be a slow burner. One where the momentum is gained gently but securely until it becomes self sustaining and with luck, which you’ll also know by now I don’t believe in so that means my start must by definition be unbelievable, unstoppable. That does scan. Honest.

I was thinking about the invisible trees, woods and which forest comment of my last post. It’s always a bit of a paradigm shift when you realise that the direction you’ve been heading in isn’t taking you quite where you thought. Slow burns are fine, especially if you really are developing a quality approach which will generate a flow of business in the future. But as is often the case, a couple of other seemingly disconnected paradigms went and drifted their shifty way across my path this week determined to make me include the word serendipity in this week’s musings. Apologies.

I came across an article, well not so much came across as got sent as a consequence of the marketing planners at my web-hosting web-hosts, about networks. It’s something I’ve been aware of for quite a while and as Albert-Laszlo what’s-his-face was integral to one of my Quest weekends last year, I suppose it’s more in the territory of my mindset than I realised at the time. The basic principle of the aforementioned A-L, (Barabasi), is that nodes in any network are by nature interdependent and the stability of a network when subject to attack or breakdown is based on the degree of randomness in its nodal connectivity.

In essence, if the nodes are evenly spread, with relatively even numbers of connections between them then whilst a breakage in one or two nodes may be overcome simply via bypassing even though there may be some overload to nearby links, if multiple nodes are affected then the percolation of overload from one to another reaches a critical level and can cause a cascade of overload to disrupt the flow. The overload becomes self-sustaining and Hey Presto! blackouts follow swiftly and we all end up without light and heating even though no further pressure is applied.

Interestingly, if nodes are concentrated in hubs where most nodes have few connections and a few nodes have many connections, then it is difficult for attack or breakdown to affect the the overall system unduly. As long a a signal reaches a hub, then the system will stay up because that hub passes the signal on to significantly large sections of the network and as the hub by definition takes a high load, temporary overload is more easily accommodated. This is why the original design of the World Wide Web was indeed the original design, and is still the basis of its current configuration, albeit quite a it larger in the nodal department if you get my drift. It ensured that global military and intelligence communication could continue throughout the network, even if multiple hubs were destroyed.

One of my strategies in developing my business along slow-but-certain burn lines, my aim is to find clients who are hubs. Clients who are willing and in a position to influence other potential clients into considering that I may be someone who can help. And my skills from my alter-ego world are invaluable here both in recruiting, in the nicest sense of the word, (though obviously that means grave-turning witch-finders are brought to the fore once more), them to the task and alerting them that they are both in the position and have the contacts to be those aforesaid hubs.

Bear with me, the relevance will turn up soon (ish).

The third idea to flutter past was in Skype conversation with Helen. We were talking about strategies, or ‘stradgies’ as an ex-exec of my acquaintance used to call them, (and presumably still does come to think of it), to build a successful practice and obviously a part of that is what actually determines whether you have indeed reached success.

One of my core drivers to achieve this success is not, as some would propose, continuous focus on my goal and working ever harder in longer and longer hours with my eyes never off the prize on a style beloved of purveyors of the 37-habits-of-successful-people-who-I’ve-met-personally and the like. I have to admit that at this point I went all Zen but then I suppose that’s bound to happen at a certain stage of working in any mind-based therapy so perhaps there’s some justification, however, the point I was making was that, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, success is pretty much ending up by ‘having’ more than I ‘want’. I am a firm believer and level one exponent of the art of reaching the goal of having more than I want by teaching myself to want less than I already have. It does seem to be working although it makes it more difficult when it comes to summoning up drive to develop a business. I guess there’s a difference between wanting less and having to put up with less.

And then of course, there’s those emails and tweets you get every now and then that are from those purveyors of habitually successful habit-prone entrepreneurs. The particular tweet that sparked the serendipity flare-up, (that’s twice in one post so I’m genuinely concerned now), appeared to be saying that whatever you do when aiming to be successful, set the bar very high and when you do jump, do it without a safety net or a back up plan of any kind.

For magnificent success, apparently, all or nothing is the order of the day. If you have a back up plan, it seems that you are telling yourself that failure is not only an option but expected.

So where does this paradigm mash-up take us? It’s now taking up residence in my head as a metaphorical explanation of success of the techniques I use and the solutions clients are able to construct for themselves.

Whether we’re talking pain management, stress difficulties or fertility issues, the-wood-for-the-trees and network-hubs are acting as the same thing in reverse. At the centre of these issues there is often a a core idea or nerve gateway or situation that is triggering an overload of perception that results in stress, pain, or body-system levels that are not endurable by the client in a normal healthy mode. We are unconsciously driven to adopt self-preservation strategies which result in stress-breakdown, chronic pain, inabilities to conceive. In this hunkered down protection phase the trees close in and we end up looking at a level of detail which ensures that we can’t navigate our way out of the proverbial wood.

If we reversed this process though, the trees in the wood idea becomes woods in a landscape of forests and clearings, hills, rivers and mountains. With care, you just might find a way of noticing that you aren’t even in the right wood and actually you need to climb a hill just over there and find the woods on the other side. You might not even be a tree dweller and should be living high in the mountains. Or fishing in the seas.

And here comes the back-up-plan idea. There really is no going back once your core idea has been grasped and turned on its head. The point is, once your unconscious is put in a position where it notices not only the wood but the entirety of its landscape, it can never forget. The change is quick. And it’s permanent.

Once you know how to view anew the stress overload, it simply becomes a way of dealing with what you can do and what you can’t do. If a task really is impossible, you now know that it really is impossible. And if it really is possible, then you can now choose the time and effort you are willing to put into it. Until you see this, there is no choice. No way out. That’s what stress does. But once you see it. It isn’t stress. It’s choice.

Oddly, pain follows a similar pattern. Pain is very real. Even though much chronic pain has no apparent medical or physical cause, it is still very real. It, well, hurts. A lot.

Pain follows hubs. Physically, nerves coalesce into bundles and pass through ‘gateways‘ along the spinal cord where the various stimuli are assessed against other stimuli  Stronger pulses get priority. If touch or temperature is stronger than pain, pain is relegated and doesn’t get through. If pain is stronger, pain wins.

Wood for the trees turns up here too. Gateways are not only affected by upward flow but by what is normally expected. If you are constantly in pain, the gateway is set to give priority to pain, even if other stimuli are stronger. This is one theory as to why simple touch can become painful and why chronic pain becomes less responsive to pain killers.

Again, having no Plan B, (which would after all be a pity, musically if nothing else), can be useful here. It is possible to teach your unconscious mind that gateways can be manipulated by downwards regulation. Once this is learned, and let’s face it, if any technique knows about teaching the unconscious, it is Cognitive Hypnotherapy, then you can consciously takes steps to get your unconscious to reset the gateways for you. Without a Plan B, the gateway can’t reset to pain because your unconscious has no doubt that the gateway should be set to give the sensations of touch or hot and cold the priority. If you doubt, it’ll re-open the gateway. Once again, Cognitive Hypnotherapy is adept at giving confidence in techniques you learn. You won’t want a plan b.

Without Plan B and with sufficient training, not only can you downgrade chronic pain, you can effectively anaesthetise the body. You can even carry out operations solely under hypnosis. It’s been undertaken for many years.

The unconscious can re-set how it is running the automatic functions and balances of the body. It can flip the core precept from protection to growth, allowing us to function in a healthier more fulfilling manner, allowing hormonal cycles to flow uninterrupted, increasing the potential to overcome unexplained fertility difficulty, reducing stress hormones and allowing the para-sympathetic nervous system to have a larger role leading to a sense and belief in your well being.

I’m pretty sure these days that I’m heading through my own wood to the mountains beyond. I haven’t quite left the trees behind yet, though. Maybe I need to find a quicker path. That’ll need some thought.

I definitely need to review the plan B situation. I can’t yet tell whether I’m currently running a well thought out exit strategy, or a whether it’s actually unconscious permission to fail. More pondering required.

As for hubs, I’m working on it. Right here, amongst other places. So if you know people who might be interested in reading this blog, why not let them know. And if you write your own blog, feel free to re-blog this one too.

If any of this particular post rings true for you, I’d love to know your thoughts and feelings about it.

And if it’s time to sort out the networks in your own tree laden landscape, you don’t need a Plan B.

Just come and see me.

It’s a delicate balance
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013

Media virgin? Not any more…

I might have mentioned in earlier posts that I was interviewed by a local magazine ‘Only Peterborough’ about Cognitive Hypnotherapy and the role it can play in helping couples undergoing IVF and other related assisted fertility treatments.

Well, the big day duly arrived and the March issue of Only Peterborough has hit the streets. Lo and behold there I am, smiling in a not-quite-hypnotic style at the readers, encouraging them to find out all about Cognitive Hypnotherapy and, coincidentally, me.

The best bit of all is that I didn’t write a single word! It is all the work of Kim Hughes the magazine’s Features Editor. It goes without saying that I think Kim has great taste and superb insight into issues that need to be aired for the benefit of the local populace, (but then me being me I’ve gone and said it anyway).

The link below is a copy of the article itself reproduced by kind permission of Only Peterborough [available in all good shopping outlets in, you guessed it, Peterborough (UK)]

‘Only Peterborough’ article

As the more astute amongst you might have noticed, I’m quite pleased. Not only (pardon the pun) is it useful from a marketing point of view, it also gives really good information and whether people do choose to contact me or not, this means that they are in a better position than before. Nice one Kim.

So all in all, my marketing campaign has begun, my website and contact details are out there in the inter-web, even appearing on my latest Google Alerts email, (other good search engines etc.):

and… finally…

I am no longer a media virgin thanks to Kim & ‘Only Peterborough’

somehow it all comes together
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013

Exciting times & the breakfast of champions

So in a way, everything has brought us to this point.

My training throughout last year; the start of this, my first ever blog discussing the weird and wonderful things I’ve learnt; all the way through to graduation and launching myself headlong into a new career as a Cognitive Hypnotherapist: [with actual paying clients, I might add!]

So here I find myself, new business up and running and gently progressing through its soft-launch, as the marketing strategists amongst you might recognise, shortly after my return from a short-break in down-town Marrakech to announce some exciting milestones.

• My blog has just had its 4000th view: many thanks indeed.
• My article for Perception Ezine (Spring issue) has been accepted.

and…

• Today is the launch of my Cognitive Hypnotherapy website!

Here’s the link to Tony Burkinshaw Cognitive Hypnotherapy. So if you have the time and the inclination, I’d love it if you’d take a look. Something I firmly believe in and try to live by is that feedback is the breakfast of champions, so if you do take a look and find that there’s anything you’d like to say, (or indeed that you think I need to hear), please comment in the box below.

It would be great to hear from you whether it’s good, bad or just plain ugly, although obviously I prefer the good! I’ll listen to what you say and may well make adjustments as I go.

Onwards, upwards and perhaps slightly sideways…

Related Article:

Perception Ezine (cognitivehypnotherapy.org)

Advertising, Pain and Time Travel (postsofhypnoticsuggestion.wordpress.com)

• Hypnosis got me pregnant! (swns.com)

I refuse to be grateful…

For some reason, society expects that we learn from hardship. That we grow in some deep and meaningful way.

And when have learned and grown, we are expected to make a virtue of our growth and add to the pressure on everyone else to do the same. Maybe it’s society’s way of feeling better about other people’s suffering. In some magical way, if it’s making them a better person then it must be OK. We can look the other way until the butterfly emerges.

But if you don’t learn and grow or if your own journey hasn’t let you achieve it yet, you’re supposed to keep your head down. Keep quiet. Don’t rock the mythical boat.

All this does is add to the hardship. Not only are you going through a massively tough time, you’re supposed to be undergoing a deep and meaningful transformation leading to peace and enlightenment or some such. And if you’re not, then you begin to feel it must be your own fault for not making the most of the opportunity. Opportunity? I think not.

For those who have grown, who have achieved remarkable things despite and in many cases because of their personal hardship, very well done indeed. I’m very happy for you. Genuinely.

Sometimes though, what is really needed is compassion and understanding. An acceptance that not everyone can excel. Just think about it, if everyone did excel, then it wouldn’t be excelling would it? It would be ordinary.

Sometimes, just dealing with it and struggling to hold yourself together is all you can do.

Katherine finds herself in just such a position. Read her blog. You’ll see what I mean.

Sometimes, it’s important to let the world know that what it expects isn’t fair.

And maybe just be there in case you can help.

Click here to read Katherine’s blog

It isn’t easy
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013

Brick Walls, Brighton and Poang Chairs

As Friday’s go that was an interesting one. Pointless but interesting.

Well, maybe pointless. It all depends on how you feel about limiting beliefs. Which is of course, where Helen comes in. If you live on the South coast of England, within reach of Brighton, you’re future’s looking bright. You’re within easy access of Helen and her new therapy room. More on that to come. Helen was one of the first people I talked to when I began my Cognitive Hypnotherapy journey all  those months ago. She’s even the reason that this blog exists, or at the very least the reason that it began when it did. If you’re interested, click here and read these two posts, it’ll explain it.

Anyway, we learn quite a bit about limiting beliefs as Cognitive Hypnotherapists and more to the point, we learn how to find them and what to do with them when you’ve brought them out into the daylight to see how powerful they are.

I already knew a fair bit about them anyway from my days as a sales manager having spent many hours on courses and many more using them to encourage members of my various teams to reach their ‘full potential’, which I’m pretty sure is going to become a topic for a whole post if its own fairly soon. What exactly is Full Potential? I mean how do you know when you’ve reached it. What if you’re already there. And what if you don’t want to reach that particular pinnacle? Does that make you a failure or just someone with a different sense of what’s important to you than whoever it is encouraging to reach higher than before for whatever it is they’ve managed to convince you is important enough to need to be reached. Usually via a book they wrote specifically for the purpose, signed copies available at the back of the room.

Get off the soap box and stop the mini-rant… Sorry.

However, during our time at The Quest Institute we spent time uncovering each other’s beliefs of the limiting variety, working out what they meant and trying to swap their underlying pressures for a more positive and beneficial drive into our respective futures. Mine, not unusually, revolved around my not being my father, as you may recall from earlier ramblings. Thanks to the helpful and really rather skilled guidance of my stand in course tutor Sarah, (Muriel wasn’t around at that particular point), and later on for more of the same with Katy, I am happily convinced these days that I am indeed not my father.

Thanks to the miracle of Facebook, (don’t forget I am a relative latecomer to social media and to this day remain surprised that Facebook, Twitter et al do actually contribute something helpful rather than simply being a repository for angst of the teenage variety), I picked up a multi-friend message from Helen that she needed a colleague to practice on prior to a client meeting. The particular practice she had in mind was values elicitation. Now this is a relatively simple concept but quite difficult to execute well so practice seemed like a good idea and always being one to step up to the mark when it suits me, I did indeed do that very thing in the style of Mr Omally from previous posts, seeing as it did. Suit me, that is. Keep up.

For those who read my last post, (a prescient phrase, if ever I heard one), you’ll be aware that whilst not becoming a Buddhist monk and divesting myself of all things material, I am attempting to find a less accumulative path into my future by downsizing my expectations whilst upgrading my personal satisfaction of life experience. Basically, do less but do it well. Expect less but enjoy it more.

The fly in this potentially relaxing ointment is that I seem to be doing a certain amount of self sabotage. I have a natural procrastination, as you know, which I find works well and means that I do what needs to be done by the time it needs to be done, to the standard it needs to be done but I do it as late as is possible because my best work is when done in when I’m really focussed which I find difficult to achieve if there is plenty of time between now and the end goal. My plan is to fill up that spare time with fulfilling things, even if sometimes those fulfilling things turnout to be rather trivial. So far so good. This part is working well.

My particular difficulty is that I seem to be becoming more and more inefficient. Work is spreading out to fill up those times when I had thought I would be fulfilling trivialities from going to the gym in the middle of the day, through re-decorating the hallway, all the way up to staring blankly at scenery simply because it makes me feel good. Try as I might, I seem to be doing everything I can to ensure that I don’t get to enjoy the slowing down, even though that slowing down is actually happening pretty much according to plan and duly slowing down nicely thank you.

Enter stage left Helen’s request for a guinea pig to practice on.

In yet another nod towards modern communications which I’ve been assiduously ignoring, this practice took place via Skype, being my second ever Skype call, (the first being my interview with Bex to get accepted for Quest in the first place). After the obligatory pleasantries and catching up as is necessary on these occasions, including a Skype-eye view of Helen’s new therapy room complete with obligatory Poang chair, (I use one as well which is now some 25 years old, on its 4th cover and as comfortable as ever. I heartily recommend them in a blatant attempt to see if anyone with the remotest connection to Ikea’s product placement budget is reading this), Helen slickly kept me on track and proceeded to, I have to say really rather skilfully, elicit some values out of me. It was relatively painless.

As a well trained AD, (Audio Digital, which now I come to think about it I’m not entirely sure I’ve explained properly anywhere on this blog even though it crops up quite frequently, so if you think that I should dedicate a post to a more detailed explanation of preferred representational systems, leave a comment below and I’ll see what I can do), I don’t do emotions very well. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel them. I do. It’s more of a superhero version of boys don’t cry although to be fair as it’s not gender sensitive, many find themselves living in a girls don’t cry world as well. Appropriately for this blog, hands up if you noticed the cure…

One of the ways I know when something is accurately near the mark is when my AD tendencies go on high alert and I find myself ‘not emoting’. I don’t mean just not showing emotion, more of an absolutely not showing this particular emotion that’s threatening to break through and destroy my world. As any AD knows, if an emotion does escape and leak through the protective barrier, all manner of world ending scenarios ensue.

Meanwhile back in the land of desperately trying not to get to the point, we got to the point. No matter how I clothed it, disguised it, wrapped it up in camouflaged weasel words, Helen kept teasing the same underlying beliefs from pretty much all of my work related values which she had so adeptly got me to tell her.

Now, beliefs come in two flavours. Towards flavours and away-from flavours. Towards beliefs are great. Really healthy. If your life is based on towards beliefs, everything you do is moving you into growth. The garden is rosy. It’s wholesome, rewarding, life affirming and all those other platitudes you hear but which in this instance aren’t platitudes at all. They’re the real thing. Not like Coke.

Away-from beliefs are something that most of us suffer with. Away-from beliefs are beliefs of the limiting kind where you spend your life trying not to be something. Or someone. In time honoured fashion, if you try to avoid something it can never leave your field of view, (after all, how else would you know you were avoiding it), and more often than not, in a don’t hit that tree style, you trundle off into the future, dutifully hit the tree  thereby becoming the very thing you wanted to avoid. Limiting beliefs drive you into protection mode. Not good. Not good at all.

So. Helen derived all my values into one underlying belief. Almost inevitably it was away-from. Limiting.

I have to say, this surprised me. Especially as I thought that I had put that earlier revelation that I really am not my Dad to bed in reversal of roles I’d not expected. I don’t even think about that one any more. I’m happily treading my own path. Or so I thought. It turns out that there is one more demon to put to bed. And it makes me sad.

My father died in the late Eighties, a long time ago now. I have very fond memories of him and there have been many times when it would have been great to still have him around. I was 27 when he died. He was 57.

I’m 53 this year. Guess what my limiting belief has turned out to be.

Pretty much everything I value about the work life balance I’m trying hard to carve out of my past and into my future is based on dying at 57. As limiting beliefs go, that’s quite a limit. If I look out into my future, there’s a great big brick wall not very far away. And it’s getting closer. Oh dear.

All my life people have told me that I am like my father. In many ways and hopefully the good ones, although that might be a little conceited, I suppose I am. Having been through this in some depth with Sarah, (no not my sister, the other one), and Katy I am really quite at ease with that now. But it turns out that the prospect of dying at 57 is chuntering away underneath everything I’m doing.

I’ve rationalised my drive to work less now but to do it for longer in a retirement planning argument that goes something like this. Being a retirement specialist, my alter ego knows that my pension is unlikely to be enough for me to fully retire at 66. That means I’ll have to work part time for a while after I do retire. So if I have to do that, why not start doing it now? In many ways, my reduced expectations and consequently reduced work load are a form of early semi-retirement. I quite like that.

However, if my core driver is that I am living with this like-father-like-son narrative causality, then what’s the point? Why bother? What’s the point in trying to semi-retire now in exchange for a fulfilling part time career running into my late 60’s and 70’s if it all grinds to a halt in four years time anyway?

And that’s the key to all this. Now it’s been uncovered I’ve got the opportunity to re-evaluate it and flip it on its head. Reverse the polarity so to speak. Here’s what I really believe. In essence, I’ll die when I die and there’s nothing I can do about it. It absolutely will happen. Life’s only certainty is that it will end. In many ways that’s kind of liberating.

Instead of living with the cloud of something that has nothing to do with my reality, I can just be. Do what I want to do because it’s the right thing for me to do and not because I’m worried that what happened in someone else’s past must therefore happen to me. No matter how close they were.

So here I am. For now. And hopefully for a very long time to come. Time will tell. Nothing else.

Knowledge is a powerful thing. Naming the beast can indeed slay the beast and given time, not only slay the beast but make it so that the beast never even appeared. Change the story. Rewrite it. It’s never too late.

On the off chance that your future exists as a client of mine, or indeed of Helen’s, what does this have to do with fertility issues and pain management? As it happens, potentially quite a lot. If your core beliefs are limiting, then you’re driving yourself into protection not growth. Your mind and body are hunkering down and concentrating on keeping you safe just in case the bad thing happens. There’s no point in growing. Growth takes energy and if you’re in protection mode, you just might need every ounce of energy you have to survive. At least, that’s what your limiting beliefs are telling you. Down at your core, where it really counts.

If this is where you are, then discovering and dealing with core limiting beliefs can flip you from protection into growth and release the energy you do have. Whilst that may not solve the particular difficulties you face, (although in many cases it can), it absolutely has to help. If your core belief is positive when it used to be negative, you are back in control of you.

And that means that you have become the driver of you. So even if your issues remain, you are now the focus, the key, the centre of your own life. You’ve just given yourself the opportunity to grow.

In the meantime, I’ve got a wall to dismantle. Does anyone need some second hand bricks?

that’s been there a while
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013

500 likes and counting!

What a great surprise this morning!

WordPress have just told me that my blog has had over 500 ‘likes’ since it started in September last year.

Thanks everyone. I really appreciate it.

…and if you’ve not read it before, why not check it out? People seem to like what I’m talking about…

Advertising, Pain and Time Travel

I should have known that somewhere along the way bureaucracy would stick its oar in and give it all a good stirring up.

Fortunately my alter ego is extremely well adapted to living in a heavily regulated world so it’s not going to cause me too much hassle. Nevertheless it would have been nice, (cue subterranean groan from erstwhile Witchfinding English teacher), to be able say what I wanted to say simply because I believe it to be true and because I believe it would have encouraged potential clients to call up and seek help. Which I believe I can give, (as in provide, rather than as in gift – I have to earn a living after all).

Of course in our relatively comfortable and over-safe environment, centralised protection and oversight is the order of the day so we have to abide by rules, (if only they were more like guidelines a la Black Pearl), designed to reign in those of an over-persuasive nature and whose primary belief is that your money should only be temporarily described as such whilst sliding gracefully into its rightful place in their pockets.

The downside of all this is that I had, by now, written the drafts for my web pages and have to say, thought that were taking shape pretty well. They said what I wanted them to say, in ways that would encourage potential clients to act but at the same time discourage those who wanted a quick fix whilst someone else solved all their problems for them. Unless of course they realised that this was indeed their problem and it was this belief in dis-empowering externalised solutions which they wanted to solve.

I had deliberately set about writing in a somewhat forward style, telling it how it is so that those who find themselves dealing with the issues I am intending to focus on are encouraged to come along and see me. And then, helpful soul that he is, Sean, (good Cognitive Hypnotherapist by the way), made us aware of the requirements of the ASA, (that’s the Advertising Standards Authority not the Amateur Swimming Association even though they use the same T.L.A. and who may be even more interested in the benefits of cognitive hypnotherapy than those advertising chappies, you never know, call me if you are), as regards what you can and more to the point can’t say about such areas as hypnotherapy. On first reading I was not happy.

So, after a mild bout of swearing, most unlike me, I gave it some thought. And once I’d thought, I realised that I wasn’t actually angry about the restrictive nature of their requirements after all. I was just peeved that my carefully crafted words, whilst saying pretty much exactly what I wanted to say, were not up to standard. Bugger.

I’d have to start again and I wasn’t looking forward to it. First off there’s the need to promote my skills to potential customers, ensuring that this meets with the ethical standards of the National Council for Hypnotherapy, then there’s the need to make sure that the web pages get read at all, (enter good old SEO), and now overlaid onto that is the need to do so both in the letter and spirit of advertising regulation.

At this point my alter ego stepped up to the mark, told me not to be such a child and damn well get on with it. Annoying as it might be, the ASA’s requirements are a flea bite compared with the leviathan that is the soon to metamorph Financial Services Authority in whose delightful shadow (warming glow?) I have basked for many a year.

So I began the task of re crafting my words. Much as I hate to say it, it’s been really useful. I’ve had to call on much of my skill in sales training, coaching, NLP and hypnotherapy. After all, words matter. Ideas and how they are organised allow people to follow your route towards a point where they can make an informed decision about whether they want to get in touch and take steps to improve where they are in life. Equally importantly, those same words and ideas lead those for whom I am less likely to be the best next step to the conclusion that it is best to log off and search elsewhere.

Much as I’d like to be all things to all men, (and women, let’s not be sexist here especially if one of my prime focusses is fertility), I’m not daft enough to believe I can help everyone nor is it likely that I or my style of therapy is going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Web pages can do a great job of helping potential clients work out whether they think there could be a good fit in terms of both style and content. If so, hopefully they’ll get in touch. Equally, if not, then I hope they find someone who’s better positioned to help them.

The basic premise of the ASA position is that if you can’t prove it, you can’t advertise it. And they’re quite rigorous. They even pulled up the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine recently for promoting Hypnotherapy in a leaflet The ASA decided that the hospital’s own evidential studies weren’t robust enough to allow them to make the claims they were making. Interestingly, they did concede that the evidence showed that hypnotherapy can help people cope with the effects of chronic pain. Cool.

So with all this flowing around inside that grey matter that fills my head, I found myself discussing my new hypnotherapy venture with a financial services colleague, sceptic that he is. When I recounted the outcome of a couple of my volunteer clients, (a complete reduction in severe hayfever symptoms and also alleviating chronic back pain to the point where the client no longer uses any pain relief at all), he simply asked how did I know that it was Cognitive Hypnotherapy which did the trick. Couldn’t it just have happened anyway? Could they still have hayfever and a bad back but were effectively just ignoring them? Interesting.

The short answer, I suppose, with my regulatory head in place, is that I don’t know, not for sure. As a Cognitive Hypnotherapist, I’m well versed in the tendency of the human brain to see co-incidence and perceive it as cause and effect. It’s the basis of many a distorted reality tunnel at the end of which lurk phobia, anxiety and all manner of normal everyday terrors. All I know for certain is that clients have come to me, I have treated them, showed them how to treat themselves, and then they have left feeling better.

There’s even another part of me which doesn’t really care how it works. Does it really matter whether there has been substantive change in their physical situation or whether it is simply a change in perception. If you get even vaguely existential about it, what’s the difference? I mean, if you have a bad back and currently need pain medication, does it make any difference whether your back is actually less bad and therefore doesn’t hurt, or whether your back is unchanged but you’ve just stopped thinking it hurts?

Either way, it doesn’t hurt any more, eh Morpheus?

In many ways what I believe is unimportant. In reality, it’s what you believe that matters. I haven’t had anyone come and see me as a volunteer or paying client who has not had some degree of scepticism about the whole hypnotherapy thing. Hell, I was sceptical myself at the start of the course. But if by the time we finish, you find yourself living in a world which you perceive to be better than when we first began working together, then that is a decent enough measure of success to be going on with, isn’t it?

Of course it does help if I really do believe in what I’m doing, otherwise I’d just be a charlatan.

I do believe, by the way. Just for the record.

Here’s the exiting bit. Evidence is being gathered. Proper, scientifically robust, evidence-based research. It takes time to do this well. Time to gather sufficient evidence to be meaningful, whatever the result. Time to get it analysed. Time to get it assessed and published. Time to get it accepted.

Unfortunately, I can’t travel in time to find out how it all went.

But one of the key trance phenomena is Time Distortion. I’ll just have to wait.

After all, I’m a Cognitive Hypnotherapist. Not a Time Lord.

Watch this space.

Who’s watching who?
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013

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