The Guardian newspaper ran a piece this week in their business problems section, a sort of Agony Aunt self help section for wannabe
entrepreneurs, on the ethics of using Hypnotherapy to boost performance at work.

In “Is it OK to be hypnotised to improve my work performance?” a boss
has apparently suggested ‘Cognitive Hypnotherapy Treatment’ to his sales team to boost their performance.

Of course the author is a bit nonplussed and is questioning the ethics of being told he is sick or ill and needs ‘treatment’.

As always the worse thing here is the addition of the Suffix ‘therapy’ to the word hypnosis. Regardless of the origin of the word meaning to
give service, the common understanding is that therapy is what happens when you are broken and need to get fixed. That and the relentless and so far largely fruitless attempts by people in the therapy game trying to be ‘accepted’ by the established medical profession as a ‘clinical’
or ‘medical’ practice.

Now in the UK we have a wonderful duel aspect of our medical services. Whilst on the whole the average person will accept that the NHS works and saves lives etc, the majority of people largely distrust their doctors and hospitals with a grumbling passion we Brits are so bloody good at. In the States they seem to be even less enamoured of their medical professionals often portrayed, certainly on
the InterWeb if not by their TV shows, as money grubbing sawbones.

Personally I’ve always had a problem with my beautiful art of hypnosis being associated with something that for one it isn’t the only use of
our mind, and for two isn’t actually what the majority of hypnotherapists do. The vast majority of them actually do psychotherapy to someone with their eyes closed, and an even bigger majority do that from a converted bedroom or dining room on a part
time basis and have the audacity to join form and join ‘Professional’ associations.

Now the usual argument is that Stage Hypnosis gives the thing a bad name and that images like the one from Getty used in the Guardian
article of a
guy swinging a watch is the reason people have a bad image of the process and the people practicing it. But let’s look at the facts.

I went on a Google of hypnosis and hypnotherapy and whilst I found 1 case of an English Stage Hypnotist being found guilty of “A lack of
due care and attention” and being told to pay £6,000 in a civil case brought about by a disgruntled person who volunteered to go on stage and then blamed the hypnotist for feeling poorly six months later. He didn’t bother to defend the case so lost by default, the fact that her supporting hypnotherapist who brought the case to court was the infamous Derek Crusell who was involved with the campain aginst stage hypnosis and had also been the therapist on the more well know Paul McKenna case wich which Paul did defend and easily won because it’s silly thinking that taliking in an imaginary way like a Martian is going to cause full blown psychosis. But I guess that has nothing to do with anything.

I found Several cases of hypnoTherapists being Jailed for Cat to a few. And if I can find that most certainly the general public can. What I can’t find however is any public rebuttal in the defence of the slip ups. I know that wouldn’t actually kiss and make it better but it might go some way to show that hypnotherapy actually cared, even if it did come across as Volkswagen apologising for buying and still making the Skoda.

On the whole the general public’s view of hypnosis administered as a Therapy and its use as a form of recreation and a direct method of
personal development and experience enhancement is actually pretty accurate. And if that’s bad then hypnotherapy has no one to blame but
itself. They scream and shout that it’s the stage hypnotists who do what they do in front of thousands of witnesses, giving people the opportunity to romp about being kids again, that give hypnosis a bad image. May the Gods forbid it could be the fact that being hypnotised 1 on 1 behind closed doors and opening your most innermost self to a bloke who can’t even be bothered to rent an office and who has more letters behind his name than in it, might just be a bit scary.

Did you know that in the United Kingdom except for Northern Island Stage Hypnotists have to be licensed by your local authority for every public show and have to carry insurance where as anyone with no training other than a correspondence course, which lets face it is an expensive book, can set themselves up as a hypnotherapist?

I think it’s about time the therapy game stopped blaming everyone else for their image and started to clean up their own act. And I wish that the hypno’therapists’ who don’t actually hypnotise would call what they do Psychotherapy and stop giving the beautiful art of Hypnosis and the Hypnotist who practices it, such a bad image.

==========================================================

Mindset for weight loss.

People are fat. There are more fat people than thin people in nearly all of the westernised developed countries. And being as the majority
of the rest of the world doesn’t count Most people are fat.

The truth of course is that most people are normal. Because most people have the mindset to be just as they are.

It’s the countries that are inundated with reports news and personal development evangelists telling us we are inadequate and focusing our
attention on obesity that have all the problems.

But don’t worry. Thanks to the InterWeb and the invasion of McD KFC & PH followed closely by translations of all the nut case diets out
there the rest of the world will soon catch us up.

Now I’ll admit to having around 50 or so pounds more than someone my height should on average have. I do however have an excuse… I don’t care much. I’m more or less happy where I am and don’t have any driving need to go anywhere else. However I am still intelligent enough to understand the process that got me here and what to do to get out of it if I wanted to.

It’s Mindset.

I know, I know – what’s a MindSet besides Personal Development inspeak? Well basically it’s two things, your mood and your repeated habitual thoughts concerning something. It’s the pattern of thinks and thunks your head runs when you are subjected to a certain event, like looking at your scales or trying to run upstairs, or worse reading a menu or trying desperately hard not to have just one more mouth full.

It’s your mindset that actually decides what you choose and puts into your body. If that mindset says you want to feel satisfied and ‘full’
then that is how you will choose to eat. If your mind set is different today, such as when you are upset and ‘Can’t eat’, then the story
is different.

What you do is down to what you think about what you are doing. Mindset.

So how do you get the mindset to change what you do as far as eating is concerned? Of course being a hypnotist I’d say go see a hypnotist.
On the other hand having a traumatic event can do it as well but I suggest you don’t go for that one as it tends to sting a bit. What is
left is restructuring your mindset the way it was created. Over time by repetition by talking to yourself.

Self suggestion is undoubtedly what creates the mindset that keeps you where you are. If it’s that good you can use it if you want to
change.

Just focus your mind on what you want. “I am thin.” would do but if you take that beyond just having a normal body shape to what you
can do when you get there, it’s way more powerful. “I Move With Ease and Grace” is the phrase I chose for my audio download recording,
because it’s that, along with suggestions that confirm that you want to do this, that will create the right mindset for your desired
outcome.

If you can’t be bothered to formulate your own self suggestion and put it in a format designed to use music and words to help you talk yourself into a better body regime then I have of course done it for you. And it’s on the front of the site on the homepage special offer box.

After all it’s what got you here, so we know for sure it can get you somewhere else.

=======================================

HypnoGoggle

I Googled “Hypno” just to see what would happen and in among the usual tragic attempts to give me a video hypno-high and the expected
stopsmokingreducstress stuff I found a Brilliant looking space age set of rollerblades-come-lesiure-shoe a design company who’s site looks
like my kids attempt at a WordPress blog, and buried deep dooooown a bed.

Not surprising and not very amusing.

Now last time I reported on my excursion into google-masturbation, that’s searching for your own name, so I thought I’d try it with some
of the other guys I know in the hypnotist business in the UK.

Naturally Paul McKenna is pretty much in control of his name. Although the Paul McKenna Band, and the reader for Physics at Strathclyde
University do get a look in on page one and two.

Derren Brown who of course doesn’t do stage hypnosis except when he is on stage or the TV benefits from misspelling his first name and no
other DB did I see, and I went five pages down and gave up.

So maybe there’s a lesson there. If you want to dominate Google, misspell your name!

Smiles
JonChase

How to protect yourself from Political Persuasion NLP and Hypnosis.

NLP is Hypnosis when it works and unproven psychobabbling rubbish when it doesn’t. And if you live in Britain you are going to see and hear a lot of it over the next few months as we head towards that great British display of massive apathy which we call The Election.

It’s true, everyone who has to ‘speak’ is paying out huge chunks of the wages you pay them, to people like me, to learn how to use presupposition, visual anchors, embedded commands, Ericksonian language patterns and of course body language, to persuade and influence you to stand at a polling booth and choose them in favour of all the other people who apart from wearing a different colour tie or scarf are saying exactly the same thing with the same intent.

The thing is thanks to largely erratic training and the inevitable lack of finesse the vast majority of them end up sounding like a babbling-bush idiot and looking like something between a badly sown glove puppet and a Windmill. The scary thing is of course that it does actually work if you don’t know what you are looking or listening for.

Last night I sat and watched our PM – that’s prime minister, or president in everything but name for our friends in the sad position of not having any tradition older than the average pine tree. I watched Mr Brown on the news last night with his head poised at an angle that made him look like someone had removed a couple of vertebra, this apparently makes you look honest, as does the head
forward eyes up stance so favoured when you are an adulterating publicity seeking princess trying to convince people you are the personification of an angel.

Next we see the moment silence followed by the classic “Because” move. If you give a reason following the word “Because” it adds weight to your argument because people like to think you’re telling them everything. It doesn’t matter what comes after that magic word “I think you should do as I tell you Because it works that way.” Is an argument politicians use all the time if you really listen.

Actually politicians usually believe the above anyway so their impersonation of the spring loaded nodding dog you see on the parcel shelves of cars driven by people with the sense of humour of a slug, is being backed by Self Belief and Intent. A rare and powerful combination.

Next we watch the body. Mostly, and in the case of Mr Brown definitely, politicians are not oil paintings. Not of the Mona Lisa variety anyway, think more birds eye view of a badly executed pothole repair. It comes from all those years of stress as they toil to stop their erstwhile employers realising that they out number the occupants
of Whitehall Palace 500,000 to one and that they actually have a legal right to say ‘stop it’. All those years give the political visage the stickiness of a superglue sandwich and the flexibility of Michael Jackson’s death mask. Once they begin to smile or frown the chosen expression just stays there for hours.

Until of course they learn NLP and modelling, the safe face of suggestion and hypnosis. Then they realise that if you move something the eyes are attracted to the gesture and away from the face, especially away from the eye of the speaker where the true point of wanting to be in one of the highest paid jobs in the country can be detected. Then the focus is directed away from the obvious rubbish they are saying by the subconscious sign language which is, according to some of the experts, 90% of the communication mechanics between humans.

That is of course unless you are on radio, the telephone, txt’ing or typing and frantically misspelling in an InterWeb chatroom or on FaceSpace where our body language is replaced Neuro Linguistically by the use of embedded commands such as placing the call to action word ‘Now’ after a question, i.e., “When is Now a good time to give up all hope and enter the domain of despair you’ll live in for the next five years after voting for me?” And of course in writing and speaking by adding the dread exclamation mark to everything *!*. And I do mean Everything!

Actually the world communicates more now with video as the technology catches up with the fact that the human eyes are quite important. Most communication nowadays, especially in the UK if you are 16 and have thumbs more dexterous than Nijinski’s toes, is done without the ability to see the protagonists body. However most experts will tell
you that doesn’t matter, if you make the gestures anyway the listener will be able to detect them through the subconscious recognition of vocal tone changes in your voice. Which actually is probably true. It certainly works if you smile, people can and do ‘hear’ that for sure.

So how did this all come to the point where you should know how to protect yourself from it? There was a time of course when a great orator was simply that. Good at talking. Usually because they believed in what they were saying. They then said stuff in a certain way, moved their head and body just so. Clenched their fist or beat their chest. Or did nothing physically but changed the tone of their voice and spoke with absolute focus.

Back in the seventies, when I was watching the like of Robert Halpern on stage in Glasgow and the Amazing Kreskin on television and fuelling my own burning ambitions in hypnosis and total world domination, there was a movement of events which led to the idea that if you do and say what I do and say you become as good as me at what I do. Which may or many’nt be true. You’ll certainly not become better at what You do but that’s a different story.

This led to the phenomenon of people learning to be speakers and presenters rather than just believing in something and telling people about it with passion. At that time in the Americas, of which some States are United, NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming was developed, discovered or just plain invented by a linguist and a mathematician in California who were both very good at subconscious communication and suggestion. The force behind the ‘copy me become me’ school of thought was born. Or at least was wonderfully commercialised and corperatised so that the word Hypnosis didn’t come into the equation.

And this is what led to almost all speakers, especially of the trained variety, all looking like a cross between Ghandi, Hitler and Mother Teresa and sounding like the overly polite southern state psychiatrist which most of the really serious language patterns are based on, a guy called Erickson.

The thing that makes all this work of course is belief. No, not yours in their argument, what makes it actually work is their belief that doing this stuff means they are in control of your desires and decisions. Believe something strongly enough and you can rave and wave all over the place and regardless of any logic a vast amount of people can and will follow you. And like it or not if you don’t know what to look or listen for you too will be affected to some degree.
Sometimes even more so if you think you are critically analysing their drivel.

So, what do you do to protect yourself from the persuasion invasion already beginning to turn our tellies and papers into a mesmerising cock fight. Yes they are using the power that your inability of being unable to look away from the car accident gives them. So, how do you stop your mental process being directed and changed without your
knowledge?

Firstly don’t watch. Close your eyes or turn around. Body language is great when people can see it and pretty useless otherwise. Secondly listen for the words ‘Now” or any word that signals they are talking to You, You and Your are the obvious ones. And of course don’t forget the reason words like Because. I’d bet a pound to a penny that whatever comes before that word is dubious and after the word is a lie.

Thirdly move to an island in the south Pacific until after the
elections returning with the honest statement that no one can blame you because you weren’t even at the scene of the incident.

Fourthly? Vote for the raving loony party who are usually too poor or too crazy to use this stuff and who promise that when they get in they are taking everyone on holiday to the Bahamas for two weeks on the falling over fluids. Which for me is more believable than what the other lot will have you believe.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Can we cure M.E.?

I read today that a woman in Britain was set free from the murder charge with which she had been given after assisting her daughter to commit suicide after suffering from ME from the age of 14 until she died at the age of 31.

I’m not interested in the morals of the case. People decide to do stuff and if the persons involved all know what they are doing and are not innocent or incompetent or just too plain stupid to make decisions then I figure it’s their life, their choice

What does interest me about this case is ME or Myalgic
Encephalopathy/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome or basically just feeling sick and tired with no apparent reason.

Now I have personally never dealt professionally with ME. Although I suspect I may have under a different label. Its symptoms which vary considerably to the point where there really are no specific ones and being labeled with the condition is what’s left after the medical diagnosticians fail to reveal anything and everything else. So in medical terms it stands for ‘No Idea’.

I have however read about similar states in very old books. In many books written before 1939 when the ME tag was added so that it could be filed more neatly, conditions of the spirit and body which seem unerringly similar to the dread ME were around. Everything from being possessed by a lazy spirit, through Ague and Morbidity right through to Hysteria. Yet, except for the possession theory, they all agreed that the root cause of the malaise was emotional or of the spirit!

Now don’t get me wrong here. If you have ME it is very real. Just because something is said to be all in the mind doesn’t mean that it does not affect the body, that would be stupid. The smallest emotion affects the body. That’s its job. Otherwise fear wouldn’t make you run away or freeze and amusement wouldn’t result in aching ribs and crying. And trust me I do know what it feels like to be consistently uncomfortable in some way and tired for most of the rest of the time. having a neuromuscular condition myself. So I empathise. What I am doing however is wondering about the cause and of course, the possible remedy of what is a totally debilitating condition.

On the UK ME association site – there’s an association for just about everything now isn’t there? On that site -
http://www.meassociation.org.uk/ – in the section marked
Complementary treatments the only mention of anything dealing with the mind is that of the ‘Lightening Process’ a combination of NLP, Hypnotherapy and Life Coaching.

Sad really because I have no doubt that even if hypnosis can’t get rid of the thing itself it can undoubtedly help to combat the effects at an emotional level which could make the difference between life being so unbearable that it stops being an option and getting enough from your existence that you at least enjoy more than you suffer.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Google Masturbation

And now – this being the first of the Weekly Wednesday Wisdoms – to set the format for my meanderings I will have a look around the InterWeb for something Silly, unbelievable, disgustingly cute, terribly bad or just sodding amazing.

Something designed to fill your head with Dopamine
and make you smile. And just for the look of the thing I shall apply the eye of the Hypnotist to whatever we may find. . . if you have any suggestions where I should go then leave them below if there is a space for comments or go to TheHypnotist.co.uk and drop some graffiti off there.

Now this may or may not make you smile but it certainly made my grin chin appear. I Googled the name Jonathan Chase and pressed ‘I’m feeling lucky!’ and it went right to My site!

That’s it. I can retire now.

Now I am more ‘important’ than a Gay Actor, a Photographer and a General.

It’s hard. Well it would be wouldn’t it? This is Google Masturbation after all. Being number 1 on Google’s ‘lucky’ search is like having a penis extension without the cost of buying a Bugatti Veyron or a Range Rover.

It means you is ‘Da man’, or it means that everyone who shares your name hasn’t got as good a search engine optimisation programme as you.

Either way it made my day.

See you next week.

Smiles
JonC

You can change your mind and live Happily Ever After. Use Dopamine and grease your mental wheels by enjoying yourself. Inspirational? I hope so, let me know, leave a comment.