Tag Archives: Hypnosis

The Parable of The Trees

Everything Is Eventual

Once there were these two trees. They were regular trees, in a regular forest. But there had been a drought lately, and there wasn’t much water to go around. So the leaves on the trees didn’t become as green as they had in the past. They would still grow, but not as many as before, and they didn’t look as good as before.

The mood of the forest was one of general anxiety. Most of the trees weren’t as happy as they’d been before. They still talked about the same things that they’d talked about before, but their conversations didn’t seem to have the same level of positivism as they did before. And the conversations seemed to be about trivial things, rather than any conversations that easily lent themselves to the future.

These were particularly old trees, several hundred years old, and they had been through several droughts before, but this one seemed a little bit different. None of the ones that came before seemed to have as deep an effect as the current one. Sometimes days would go by and nobody would say anything, they would just let the wind slowly seep through what few leaves they had.

Which is how this story begins, on one of those days when there hadn’t been any conversation to speak of for a few weeks. One tree, who happened to be particularly young, compared to the other trees at least, finally couldn’t take it any more, and decided to break the silence with his nearest neighbor, who was much older.

“I’m thirsty.”
“We’re all thirsty.”
“How much longer do we have to wait?”
“As long as it takes,” the old tree replied, starting to get perturbed. He too, was worried.
“How long does it usually take?”
“Sometimes a few months, maybe even longer than a year.”
“Longer than a year?” the young trees fear was obvious. The other trees pretended not to notice, but somehow they felt the same fear as the young tree despite their age and experience.

“You can’t control the rains. They come when they come. All we can do is wait.”
“But what happens if they don’t come?” The younger tree was almost in tears.

A strong wind blew, as if the angered by the young trees immature demands on the weather.

“Can you control your leaves?” The old tree asked.
“Huh?”
“Your leaves. Can you make them any greener? By only your thought?”
The young tree paused, apparently trying this new concept out for the first time.
“No. I can’t.”
“Can you make the water from the earth seep up your roots any faster?”
The young tree didn’t try this time. He just shook his head.

“When the wind blows, do you have any choice but to bend?” he asked again. The other trees were listening with rapt attention.

“No. I just bend. I don’t have to think about it.”

“So it is with the wind, and the sun, the moon, and the rain. They happen when they happen, why we do not know. How we do not know. We only know that they happen, and it helps us.”

“But” the young tree started, but trailed off.

“Do you know what happens when your leaves fall?”

“No.”

“They turn into dirt. The dirt through which your roots grow to pull up the water that comes from the rains, which comes from the oceans far, far away. So you can grow more leaves. ”

The young tree looked to the ground, and his branches, and the sky, and finally back to the older tree.

“Will I turn into dirt?” He asked.

“All you see around you is part of the same substance. It came from nothing, and shall return to nothing. Some sooner, some later. Everything is eventual.”

The young tree didn’t understand.

“But, what about us, the trees. We will turn into dirt?”

“Yes. But not today.”

The wind blew once more, shifting the branches, blowing off the dry leaves, clearing the forest floor below. Then the skies opened up, and rain began to fall.

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How To Make The Right Choice

Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine over a cup of coffee. We had met while we were out shopping, not really met, more like bumped into each other. We both had a few minutes to spare, and there happened to be a coffee shop nearby, and so we decided to have a cup of joe and a chat.

We started talking about mistakes, and big mistakes that we’ve made in our lives. I don’t know how we got on that subject; I think she was concerned with her current relationship, that it may not be the right one for her. She is getting close to 30, and some girls feel some pressure, both internal and external to find somebody serious by then. I think she is wondering if she chose him because he was “Mr. Right Now,” instead of “Mr. Right.” I didn’t really want to get into some prolonged discussion about her boyfriend, but since she was veiling her conversation about him through general life mistakes, I was game.

Sometimes you can solve problems by addressing them structurally rather than specifically. If you get too involved in the particulars of a problem, you can lose the forest for the trees. That’s how therapeutic metaphors work. You hear some story that has the same structure to your problem, and by vicariously going through the metaphor, you can figure out a solution to your problem, oftentimes unconsciously.

That’s how Milton Erickson was able to heal people. He was a therapist that invented a strange kind of conversational hypnosis. People would come in and give him their problem, like bed-wetting or fear of elevators. He would them tell them a story that was completely different in content, but similar in structure, that had a happy ending. The people would leave, and discover a couple weeks later that their problem had been solved.

For example, if somebody was afraid of elevators, the traditional approach would be to talk about elevators, how they became scared of elevators, or to try and convince them of how safe they were using statistics. But a metaphorical approach would ignore elevators altogether, and focus on somebody who was afraid of doing something, and then by changing his focus on the positive outcome, rather than the thing he feared, he was able to overcome his fear. And after he overcame his fear of whatever it was, he realized how insignificant his fear really was.

Which is kind of what I suspect my friend was getting at. She wanted to discuss the possibility that she was making a mistake with her current boyfriend, without actually talking about her relationship. Talking about mistakes in general, I got the impression she was trying to find out if there was a general way to tell going into a potentially troublesome situation if you stick it out, and hope everything works out, or eject as soon as possible.

Sometimes you don’t need to make that decision, as certain actions are short lived. If you are playing on a particular golf course for the first time, and you choose a pitching wedge instead of an eight iron, you might come up short. You could consider this to be a mistake, but it is one you can learn from and do better next time. If you ever play this course again, and have the same lie, you’ll know to use your eight iron.

Those that study learning and brain development suspect this is how all learning takes places anyways. We make all kinds of small mistakes, and automatically correct them as we go along. A baby’s way to learn how to speak is to move their tongues around and make a bunch of random sounds until they figure out which ones get the right responses. Same with walking and learning all other motor skills.

However, some choices have much more impact than choosing a club. Like choosing a job or a marriage partner can have horrible results if you don’t choose wisely. And since most of us don’t get married a bunch of times or go through ten or twenty jobs in our lives, it can be tough to “learn” how to get married or choose the right career the same we “learn” how to walk or talk or approach the green.

The question is, and this is what I think my friend was getting at, is how do you know if your intuition is telling you that you’re making a bad decision, and how do you know when you are just nervous? If it were easy, nobody would ever get divorced or find themselves in a job they hate. But many people get divorced, or are stuck in terrible jobs or terrible relationships.

So the topic of the conversation was mistakes we’d made, and how we knew they were mistakes, and how we rectified the situation. One thing I learned, or one concept I was exposed to, was to future pace. If you are in a situation, and you think it may be a mistake, project yourself out into the future a few years, and see how it comes out. Imagine the best possible scenario, and the worst possible scenario, and the likelihood of both coming to pass. This is where intuition can be very powerful. Sometimes it’s impossible to make an accurate prediction of the future, but your intuition can usually do a pretty good job.

Project yourself out in the future and do a “gut check.” Is it an overwhelmingly good feeling a bad, feeling, or a “blech” feeling? If you’re make a decent decision and are just nervous, you’ll usually get a good feeling if you’re honest with yourself. But if you immediately think to feel repulsed at a possible future, the chances are you’re making a huge error in judgment.

This can be difficult, as many times we are afraid to look into the future, and only pay attention to the immediate pleasures of the present. My friend didn’t particularly like the idea of facing 30 and being single, so that was keeping her from facing the future at 35 or 40 having lived with this guy for that many years. But when she did take a peek into the future, her gut told her that it didn’t look good. So she was faced with making a tough decision.
Break up with her boyfriend, and accept an unpleasant present, or get engaged to him, as she suspected this was where her relationship was leading, and face an even worse future.

As emotionally uncomfortable as it is, many times the lesser of two evils is the obvious choice. But sometimes something pretty cool happens. By making a strong choice in the present, however uncomfortable, the future suddenly looks a lot brighter, giving you more resources and peace of mind in the present than you thought you had.

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Lunar or Solar?

Change Perspective

The other day I was talking to one of my neighbors, one of them that I don’t talk to very often. It seems that there is a local festival happening this weekend, and she was trying to explain its significance. Something to do with the lunar New Year. Every year the lunar New Year comes at a different time, and the length of winter is thought to be dependent on the arrival of this day.

It got me thinking about the overlapping of the two calendars, the solar and the lunar. The seasons are based on the earth’s rotation around the sun, and the lunar New Year is based obviously on the moon. The revolution of the moon around the earth has nothing to do with the revolution of the earth around the sun. They are two completely different physical systems, although they are nested. The moon/earth system is nested within the earth/sun system.

When you take the larger scale of time, based on the seasons and the sun, and compare it to the smaller system, it can seem entirely random. Some years the lunar New Year comes early, while other years it comes later. And over the years, humans have developed a rich mythology to describe the relationship between the two.

Of course, from an external and much longer perspective, they are simply two oscillating systems, one inside the other, and behave according to fairly simple physical laws. But within the system, you have all these stories and mythologies about dragons and spirits and whether or not you’re going to have a good crop based on how much moon you can see at a certain time of night.

Being able to switch in and out of an objective/subjective experience is beneficial helpful and a lot of fun. If humans were always stuck inside the subjective experience, of watching the moon dance across the sky, we would never have evolved past human sacrifices to ensure the crops would grow every year.

Advances in science continue to give us an objective, outside perspective so we can do away with hoping and praying to the gods, and to not only understand our natural environment, but to decipher it and plan accordingly. It makes life a lot easier if you know it’s going to rain with a certain degree of expectation.

On a personal level, this can be just as useful, but it can prove to be a little bit more difficult. If we look at our behavior from an objective viewpoint, some of our behavior that gets us into trouble can be pretty obvious. But it can be hard to do that. It’s very easy to stay within our own subjective experience and only see things as they show up in our own experience, without planning how to react.

One model in NLP is the ability to switch between the objective and subjective experience. One exercise I did at a seminar was particularly eye opening. It can help greatly if you ever feel yourself getting sucked into an argument that you suspect might not end well.

The exercise goes like this. You can do this with a willing partner, or completely covert.

While talking to somebody, try switching in and out of your “self.” During the conversation, imagine that you are above the both of you, and objectively watching the discussion, as if you are watching a debate between two unknown candidates on TV. Then switch into the other persons perspective, and watch yourself talking, and take the opposing viewpoint. Then switch back to an objective viewpoint, and then switch back into your own viewpoint.

This can be tricky and confusing to say the least, so it’s best to try this with a conversation that will allow for several pauses while you collect your thinking. Don’t do this while talking to your boss, or an important client at work.

It can be particularly useful to free yourself from a subjective viewpoint that isn’t as supportive as you think it is. You may even get a better perspective, and a few different ideas.

The more you practice this, the better you’ll get at it. I’ve known several sales people who perfected this technique, and were able to change their approach with clients during a conversation that resulted in them getting a sale, where before they wouldn’t have been able to.

They report that when they switched into their clients viewpoint, they got some ideas on how to better present their product or services, as well as some interesting insights into how to overcome some objections, many times even before they came up.

I’m sure you can think of many different areas where it would be good to be able to flip in and out of your own subjective experience. Try this and have fun.

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What Is Beyond Our Five Senses?

More Than You Know

Once I was roped into going to this really strange seminar with a friend of mine. I say roped in because he had bought two tickets, or signed up for two people, and his buddy had flaked at the last minute. It was paid for, and although it was a two-day seminar at this hotel, it was local, so I didn’t have to travel anywhere. So I figured I had nothing to lose. So perhaps “roped in” is too strong a term to describe his persuasive efforts. Perhaps “talked into” would be a better term.

It was a weird combination of hypnosis and metaphysics. The guy who taught the seminar is a pretty widely know hypnotherapist, he has all kinds of self-hypnosis tapes and books out, a well as a pretty popular practice. He does seminars from time to time.

We started out doing some basic criteria exercises, where we spent some time doing some creative journaling to get to the bottom of what we really wanted out of life. Most people in attendance, myself included, were surprised to find out most of the stuff we think we wanted, wasn’t for the reasons we thought we wanted them.

One of the requirements for a “well formed goal” is to make sure you are going after the goal for your own reasons, and not or somebody else’s. Most of our goals, we found, were there because of beliefs and ideas that we’d all picked up somewhere along the line from other people. This one lady had a tremendous breakthrough. She’d been trying her whole life to get ahead in her career, and she found out it was only to try and please her father, who died when she was a young child. When she discovered that she was trying to please an imaginary person, or a memory of he father, rather than her own desires, it was a huge relief.

She said it was like this huge burden that was released, and she felt a lot more energetic than she’d ever felt before. When she uncovered her true calling in life, the thing that she really wanted to go after for her own sake, she nearly broke down in tears from happiness.

She wasn’t worried that what she wanted would require a complete career change, and perhaps some more education. Just finding a goal that was something that truly resonated with her on a deep level was enough to give her inspiration. And as a completely unexpected side benefit, this lower back problem, that she’d had for several years, had completely disappeared.

After that we moved on to uncovering some beliefs that were holding us back. This wasn’t so fun, as many of us in attendance found out we had some pretty crappy beliefs. The instructor said that one interesting thing about human nature is that we can really deceive ourselves into thinking that something unpleasant isn’t there, to save us the pain of confronting it. Because I few acknowledge it, and confront it and fail, it would be devastating. So many times we unconsciously choose to ignore these things. Which is why most of us, when we uncovered these beliefs that were holding us back, were a little worried that we wouldn’t be able to overcome them.

But then he taught us this powerful self-hypnosis technique to completely obliterate our self-limiting beliefs. I was lucky enough to be the “guinea pig” to go up in front of class and be hypnotized. I don’t remember too much of what happened, but it involved moving energy around and using this really cool visualizations. Then we later broke into pairs and guided each other through the same process. After we did that a few times, we were able to do it on our own.

Now, this wasn’t some instantaneous magic that immediately removed all of our limiting beliefs, but it gave us a meditative practice to do on a daily basis. And ever since then I’ve been doing it, at least in part, to slowly but surely chip away at all the limiting beliefs I’ve built up since childhood.
After we figured out our criteria, set some powerful goals, and removed the blocks, then we moved on into some pretty cool psychic energy work. Personally, I’m not big believer in psychic phenomenon. It think there has to be a physical or biological explanation for everything, but some of the stuff we did was pretty impressive.

One thing we did was learn to generate positive and negative charisma. When you generate positive charisma, people will naturally be attracted to you. I used to think that if you have positive charisma, guys would walk up to you and offer you money, and girls would walk up to you and offer you sex. But it doesn’t quite work out that way. What happens when you consciously generate positive charisma is people will feel a strong desire to be in your presence, but because you are the one generating charisma, they will kind of wait for you to tell them or guide them what to do.

If you were in sales, for example, and you generated a ton of positive charisma, a bunch of prospects would show up, but you would still need to go through the sales process and close them. But with positive charisma, it would be a lot easier.

Of course with negative charisma, you naturally repel people. Even if you tried talking to people they would do their best to ignore you, not respond, or simply jut walk away.

Now it’s one thing practicing these techniques in the seminar room, when everybody is “playing along,” but often times when you go out into the real world, it doesn’t quite work out as well. Which is exactly why he had us go out at night and practice these techniques around real people.

And let me tell you, I was amazed at how effective these were. I tried generating both positive and negative charisma in a large bookstore that evening. I went to a section where there weren’t any people, and did the exercise. Within few minutes there were about six people within a couple meters of where I was standing, where there was nobody there before. While this could have been a complete coincidence, I got the distinct feeling that every single one of these people was waiting for me to start a conversation with them. Their body language and posture all screamed openness. There were three women, and every one of them had their chests pointing straight at me, and their arms completely open. For those of you who study body language, this is a pretty strong unconscious sign of openness.

Next I went upstairs and did the negative charisma exercise. Again, I was shocked at its effectiveness. No matter where I walked, people would scatter like I had bubonic plague or something. Nobody even faced me, let alone made eye contact with me.

This seminar really opened up my mind to what is possible when you tap into some of the metaphysical energies that are surrounding us all the time. That was about five years ago, and ever since I’ve been interested in that kind of thing. Hypnosis, NLP, and all kinds of esoteric metaphysics. While some of it is complete nonsense, a lot of it isn’t. And the stuff that isn’t can have a powerful and profound impact on your life, and everything you want to accomplish.

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How To Access Genius Level Creativity

Imaginary Friends

I was having lunch with an old friend of mine the other day. I hadn’t seen her since just after she had her baby. That was four years ago. I can’t believe how fast time flies when you’re doing the same routine day in and day out. If you don’t and look up from what you’re doing, life can zip right by without bothering to take you along for the ride.

She was telling me about how her son has all these imaginary friends. He has normal friends as well, he goes to this kindergarten three days a week, and he gets on well with the kids there, but while he’s at home, and his dad isn’t around, he’s always wandering around talking to people that aren’t there. When my friend asks him about them, he acts like she’s the one living in an alternative reality. He can see them, why can’t she?

She wasn’t too worried, but seeing as he’s her only kid, and she’s never experienced the “imaginary friend” thing, she started checking around to find out how normal it was. Maybe her house was actually filled with ghosts or something, and he could see them, and she couldn’t. If that were the case, she would need to learn to communicate with them so they wouldn’t keep him up past his bedtime.

She was telling me she did all this research, and actually went to see a specialist in child development. What she found out was both interesting and relieving. Her kid was normal, and her house wasn’t filled with ghosts. At least none that she or he could see.

What he told her was how the brain develops as we grow older, and one way that the brain switches between externally focused and internally focused. All of this has overlap with other areas of brain research, but part of it is particularly useful for understand how children develop, and how they are often in their own worlds, which seem to them as real as these words you are reading now.

The brain has four basic categories of brainwaves. The brainwaves are made up of all the electrical impulses pulsing throughout the brain at any given time. Every time you have a thought, conscious or unconscious, several billion neurons fire off in particular orders. The sum total of the firing of neurons, and the resultant wave of electrical impulses can be measured. They range from very slow, long brainwaves, to fast and short ones. Each category is associated with a different “type” of brain activity.

Most adults alternate between beta and alpha. Beta is the fastest, and is what most people experience when we are awake. Externally focused, thinking about the things around us and how to deal with them. Extremely high levels of beta are thought to be an indication of stress and anxiety. (An indication, not a cause).

The next is alpha. (An interesting side note, alpha is not the fastest, even though it’s called alpha. It’s called alpha only because it was the first one they discovered.) Alpha is associated with daydreaming, drifting off into imaginations about the past or the future. Artists and creative thinkers find alpha particularly helpful, as this is where they get a lot of their inspiration. When you kind of “zone out” in the middle of something, you have slipped from beta into alpha.

The next one down is theta. This is where all hallucinations, hypnosis, and deep meditation occur. During theta you can have wild ideas and thoughts. When you are falling asleep at night, and you drift from thinking about normal, every day thoughts, and catch your thoughts drifting seemingly on their own, with you just watching them, you’ve slipped into theta.

As adults, it’s very hard to be in theta and stay awake. Theta is that brief space between waking and sleep. Advanced meditators can hold this state for a while, but it takes some practice. Theta is though to be where genius ideas come from. Edison used to sit in a chair in a dark room, holding a weight in his outstretched hand. As soon as he drifted into sleep, and into theta, he would drop the weight. This would wake him up, and he would immediately write down as much as he could. This is how he came up with so many creative ideas. It wasn’t that he was smarter or more creative than the rest of us, it was just he effectively used his brains capacity to slip into theta, and exploit all of the genius level thinking that occurs during that phase.

Other scientists and inventors have used dreams, which are also in the theta brainwave state, to come up with ideas that have literally changed the face of science and industry.

One of the things that child development researchers are starting to discover is that when kids are growing up, they are in theta state a large portion of the time. Much more so that adults. Their brains are growing, and learning, and theta is the natural brainwave state to be in if you are learning about your environment for the first time. Learning how to walk and talk is one thing, but kids also naturally learn complex things like values, beliefs handed down with their parents, and complex emotional issues. They believe that theta is the perfect brainwave state for building strategies in the brain for dealing understanding and dealing with reality.

This may be why thinking of a problem just before bed is particularly helpful. Even though you may not remember, while you’re in the theta state just before sleep, your brain can come up with some pretty creative solutions to your problems, as Edison and others can attest to.

For most adults thought, accessing theta is only achievable through long practice of meditation. Unless we consciously practice in a regular basis, theta only comes with sleep, and unless we program ourselves before sleep to solve problems, the usefulness of theta is only useful to children.

But recently there have been discoveries that theta brainwave states can be achievable by listening to specific sounds. Sounds that we listen to have a profound impact on our brainwaves. With properly engineered sound, and focused concentration, theta is easily accessible by anyone with a CD player and pair of headphones.

It really is possible to tap into that same genius level creativity that Einstein, Edison and others have used over the years to solve problems, and come up with some astounding ideas that have changed the course of human history.

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Watch Out For Cracks In Reality

Saved By An Old Woman

The other day I was wandering down town, not really wandering, just kind of maybe shuffling along. Shuffling doesn’t quite describe it either, shuffling is what drunken people do that don’t have a destination. While I didn’t have a destination, I wasn’t drunk, so maybe I’d better choose another verb. Staggering? No, ambling? Not sure if that’s a word. Meandering. That’s it, I was meandering down town the other day, and I saw this strange looking man. He had this peculiar feeling about him, and he was looking at me a bit strangely. I wasn’t sure if he was going to introduce himself as a long lost pal, or pull out a knife and kill me where I stood.

But before I describe the strange looking man, I need to explain why I was meandering down town in the middle of a sunny weekend afternoon. I had originally gone downtown to catch a movie, but as it sometimes happens, the times they list on the movie page are not the same as at the actual theater. To make matters worse, the movie I had intended to see not only started at a different time, but instead of being in English with Japanese subtitles, it was dubbed in Japanese.

Of course if I read a synopsis of the movie before hand, and paid close enough attention, I’d be able understand enough of the dialogue to make out the basic plot. But that would require brainpower, and that’s one of my main reasons for going to the movies, so I can shut off my brain for a couple hours. Not completely shut if off, I still need to be able to work my mouth and my hand so I can stuff my face with as much popcorn as possible.

But there I was, ready to spend a couple hours of brain-free relaxation, when my plans were thwarted by Internet inaccuracy. I wasn’t going to give in without a struggle. I was determined to expend a little brain energy as possible.

I can be frustrating when you are expecting one thing, but then something else entirely shows up in its place, and despite really liking this thing that you have here in front of you, you were maybe expecting something else. And no matter how much you try and convince yourself that this is OK, part of you continues to wish that you’d gotten the other thing that you’d expected in the first place.

Kind of like if you were expecting to go on vacation in Hawaii, but you got on the wrong plane and ended up in Alaska. Alaska is a cool place, and had you planned on going there, you’d likely enjoy it. They have some cool stuff in Alaska. But since you were planning on Hawaii, you wouldn’t be able to fully throw yourself in to your suddenly determined by fate vacation in Alaska. Not to mention that you’d probably be pretty cold, seeing as how all you had was a grass skirt, a surfboard, and a couple of ukulele’s. And to add insult to injury, instead of getting lei’d by a cute Hawaiian girl, you’d get hit in the face with a snowball by some angry alcoholic Eskimo. Which would suck under any circumstances.

I was just about to try and ignore this strange guy, and turn into the shop I happened to be standing next to, when he called out my name. So he did know me. I turned, wondering where I knew him from. When he started to approach, he did the strangest thing. It was odd, and I looked around wondering what other’s reactions would be, as most people don’t do what he was doing right there on the sidewalk.

Either nobody seemed to notice, or they just pretended they didn’t notice. Or maybe part of them noticed, but another part of them didn’t notice that they noticed, like some strange form of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is an interesting thing. Some say it’s the brains way of keeping everything in order, and not seeing things that are right in front of you, because if you acknowledge certain things, you would have to go through a lot of mental recalculation to re figure out your model of reality. And that can be time consuming. So the brain has evolved this mechanism for shutting out certain parts of the reality.

Those that study Freud say it’s to protect the ego. People that have bad habits, for example, don’t see them as being bad, at least to the extent that they do them. If we were to look at them objectively, or if we saw another person with the same habit, we’d be much more realistic in our judgment of the habit. But because that would require making a hard decision about what to do, we tend to ignore it.

But that only goes so far to explain why all those people ignored this guy, who pretended to know me, when he started doing what he did. People don’t usually do that out of context, and especially when they are alone. I certainly hope that I didn’t cause this strange looking man that pretended to know me to start to do that. I checked again to everybody that was walking past this guy, within a couple feet of him, and they didn’t even turn their heads. I started to think maybe I’d slipped through some crack into an alternative reality, I even started thinking that was why the movie times on the Internet were different from the real movie times.

I started to really get nervous. Everything that I thought was absolutely true was turning out not to have any corroborating evidence. What if reality really was a fiction of your imagination, and you can only succeed in life so long as you find enough people that have an overlapping hallucination? How do you know that red really is red? I started to panic, when this old lady stopped and started to lecture this crazy guy. As soon as she started to lecture him, other people turned to look, and started whispering amongst themselves. He apologized, and said he’d got carried away. He kept motioning over toward me while he was talking to this old lady, and for some reason, I stood where I was, a bit curious, and relieved that reality was still intact. But before I knew it, the man apologized once more, bowed to everybody that has stopped to watch him receive the shellacking from this old woman, hopped on his unicycle, and rode away.

Of course, I was left standing there, absorbing all the residual curiosity from the now very interested crowd. What I did next is another story.

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The Power Of Perspective

Are You In, Or Out?

I remember once I was talking to a friend of mine in a bar. It was about halfway between afternoon and night, and there weren’t that many people there. We had met earlier by coincidence, and decided to hang out for a while. He started telling me these problems he’s having with his girlfriend. He says that he’s having the same problem with his current girlfriend that he’s had with all of his previous girlfriends. Right when they get to the “serious commitment” stage, he starts to do all these stupid things (stupid according to him) that he claims that he doesn’t know why he does them, and they invariably lead to fights. These usually continue until the relationship breaks up.

I asked him if he does these things intentionally, and he said that he didn’t. He said they were little things that added up over time, like showing up late or flirting with other girls when they were together. Eventually she would put him on the spot, because to her it would seem as if he wasn’t taking the relationship seriously. He would always claim that he was, she would press him, they would fight like that for a couple weeks or months, then they’d break it off. It was always her that broke it off, saying that she wanted something serious, while he didn’t seem like it, despite his objections to the contrary.

He claimed he has no idea why he does those things, and only starts to do them when the relationship is beginning to get serious. To an outside observer, it seemed to me to be a clear case of unconscious self-sabotage. Part of you wants something, part of you doesn’t, for whatever reason, so you are conflicted at a subconscious level, and this comes out in your behavior. It seems to me that my friend, despite his conscious objections, doesn’t quite feel ready yet for a serious, committed relationship, on a deep unconscious level and it comes out in his behavior. He is in his late twenties, and a serious committed relationship to a guy that age usually means giving up the single life for good.

I asked him if he really wanted that kind of relationship, and he said he really did, but he didn’t know why he was doing these things. I am by no means qualified to give advice on this, but it seemed clear to me (especially after a couple beers) that he had some issues regarding commitment that he needed to deal with before was able to go into a life long relationship with both eyes open.

I haven’t really known this guy for that long, and I didn’t really want to ask him about his childhood or if his parents were divorced, but I suspect something happened to him earlier that made him feel extremely and deeply conflicted about committing to one person for life.

I was reading this book recently about psychology, and the author was talking about this thing called cognitive dissonance. This is the amazing ability of people to be incredibly self-deceptive. Scientists, namely evolutionary biologists suspect this arose out of the need to constantly deceive one another. Back in the day (before agriculture) when people lived in small groups of a couple hundred or so, it became really important to be able to detect “cheaters” in the group. People that wouldn’t contribute their fair share would pose a serious threat to the safety of the group, so humans developed this uncanny ability to detect when others are lying, through body language and facial expressions.

So, the more we developed a sense for detecting liars, the better we got at deceiving. In order to better deceive our neighbors, we had to be able to deceive ourselves, so we wouldn’t give off any subconscious clues. It’s been time and time again that one measure of a psychopath is somebody that can tell a lie, knowing it’s a lie, and get away with it.

So we have this automatic capacity to easily deceive ourselves, not only to lie to others without getting caught, but also to lie to ourselves to protect ourselves from facing inconvenient truths about ourselves. Keep in mind that this is always happening unconscious. We don’t go around telling lies on purpose.

A good example is when two people meet in a bar, and “hook up.” In the moment, they really believe that they are “right” for each other, and that there is at least the potential for a relationship. In reality, the urge to have sex is so great, that the reality of the situation is ignored, and self-deception allows one or both people to believe that this encounter is more than it really is.

Many people know somebody that has been in an abusive relationship, one that is obvious to outsiders that they should get out of. But from the inside, they convince themselves that it would be better to stay. If they were to leave, they may have to face the thought of being alone, or rejected, or worse.

The secret is to be able step in and out of your own personal situation, and see things from different perspectives. In NLP they call this “associated” and “dissociated.” People that can see themselves objectively in a situation are “dissociated” while people that are seeing themselves from a person, subjective point of view are “associated.” One is not better than the other, but it can be extremely helpful to be able to switch back and forth to get a better understanding of the situation that you’re in.

People that are stuck in an associates state are the people that are stuck in abusive relationships, or people like my friend that always ends up self sabotaging himself without knowing why. People that are stuck in a dissociated state are people like Spock (who is a fictional character), and psychopaths who have no conscious or feelings or morals.

When you study NLP, you learn how to do this at will, so you can be in any situation, and check it from a dissociated viewpoint, to make sure it’s healthy and empowering, and then switch back to an associated viewpoint, so you can enjoy it as much as possible.

If you’re interested in learning how to use NLP in your own life to increase happiness, wealth, and positive relationships, click on the link below. This is a basic course that shows you exactly how to use NLP to structure your thinking so that getting what you want out of life is automatic.

Success with NLP

Success with NLP

How To Easily And Powerfully Persuade Others And Get What You Want

Four Simple Steps

If you have ever wanted to learn some powerful Jedi skills of mind control, then this article is for you. I’ll give you a couple simple tricks that will work powerfully to persuade somebody, whether they be a friend, stranger, client, or a target of your romantic interest. These can work either through repeated meetings, or after only a one-time encounter. The following are designed for face-to-face communication. Persuasive writing will be covered in future post. One word of caution, these are very powerful, and can easily be abused. The sad truth is that many people don’t have much resistance to these, and as P.T. Barnum is famous for saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” So long as you are always shoot for a win-win outcome, you should be OK. Now that I’ve got the standard disclaimer out of the way, let’s get started.

Step One – Determine Your Outcome

This is the most often overlooked, yet most important step. Without a specific outcome in mind, you will never get there. Many people fail to choose an outcome simply because they fear the pain of coming up short. They hope they only end up someplace halfway decent. Sometimes you get lucky, and you. Other times you go home empty handed. Think of how you’d like to end the interaction. A sale, the other person carrying out your task, one of your kids cleaning their room, or that guy or girl at the bar going home with you only after a couple hours of conversation. The more specific outcome you choose, the easier it will be to construct your strategy.

Step Two – Develop Rapport

Much is written (and misunderstood) about this simple concept. Rapport is simply a deep feeling of familiarity with somebody. When you feel similar to somebody, whether you’ve known them for an hour or ten years, you are much less likely to put up any mental resistance to their ideas. The more similarities you can find with this person, the better. Beliefs, history, background, hopes, goals, whatever you can find. The easiest way to quickly develop rapport with someone you’ve just met is through mirroring of body language and speech patterns. Sit how they are sitting, (or standing) and talk like they are talking. Slow and relaxed if they are slow and relaxed, or fast and abrupt if they are fast and abrupt.

A great way to find powerful evidence of this is to visit any coffee shop or restaurant, and scan the crowd. You’ll easily be able to spot friends and lovers that are in deep rapport simply by noticing how well their body language is matching up.

If you’re worried about putting the cart before the horse, don’t worry. This is a case of form following function as well as function following form. Mirroring body language leads to feelings of rapport, just as feelings of rapport leads to mirroring of body language.

Step Three – Elicit Criteria

Find out what is important to them. What do they want? The biggest secret in sales, seduction, or any other form of persuasion is that the quickest and easiest way to get what you want, is to first help the other person get what they want. This isn’t some new age, rendition of the golden rule; this is simply the best and most effective strategy. When finding out what they want, be interested, and be sincere. The closer you can keep the context of their criteria to your outcome, the better. If you are selling cars, and your outcome is for them to buy our car, you’ll have much better luck in asking them what’s important to them in a car than asking them what’s important to them in a vacation.

The more criteria you can elicit, the easier it will be to persuade them. For one, they’ll usually be in a good mood, as it’s uncommon in today’s me-me-me world for somebody to feel their wants and needs are the focus of any extended conversation. And the more “vague” criteria you can elicit the better. Vague criteria are anything that sounds like it’s not defined that well. Happiness, safety, comfort, value are examples of vague criteria.

Step Four – Leverage Criteria

This is where you simply show them that by doing what you want, they will get what they want. If you’ve done a good job in eliciting their criteria, this part will be pretty easy. If you are selling something, the easiest way to do this is by giving examples of previous customers, and use their criteria in the examples.

If they value “comfort” and “safety” you can tell them about a customer who just last week bought the very same product, and couldn’t wait to call you to thank you, and tell you comfortable and safe they felt when using the product. It’s best to be a little subtle when doing this. When you describe your example in an “oh, by the way,” kind of structure, it doesn’t feel like they are being sold something.

The more stories you can come up with about your product filling the same criteria in other people, the better.

If you are using this for more personal persuasion, that is you are trying to elicit strong emotional feelings in another person for you personally, the leveraging of criteria doesn’t need to be so explicit. You’ll find that simply by slowly and carefully eliciting their criteria (for an ideal relationship partner, for example) that they will start to unconsciously connect those criteria to you, provided you aren’t being too pushy.

One thing about human beings is that we are all a walking collection of unmet wants and needs. When you can develop rapport, elicit a few of those wants and needs, and fulfill them in a way that really satisfies the other person, there is no limit to what you can get them to do.

Just remember to leave them better than you found them, don’t’ get then to do anything they’ll later regret, and you’ll be fine.

Are You Really Paying Attention?

Instant Partner

The other day I was hanging out with a friend of mine on this lake. Not really on the lake, next to it. There was this restaurant with an outdoor bar near one of the shores, or edges, or whatever you all the border between the lake the land.

We were watching all the people that were jet skiing, water-skiing, and boating. There seemed to be quite a few recreationists using motorized assistance in their recreational endeavors. There wasn’t much wind, so we didn’t see any wind surfers. There were a few swimmers, but for the most part, everybody had some kind of mechanized tool to assist them in their recreation. Then we saw something particularly strange. Something that both my friend and I had to do a double take, stop mid way through our conversation, and ask each other to verify what we’d just seen, to make we hadn’t slipped into some shared hallucination.

It’s kind of like when your brain is on autopilot, and starts to use your stored memories of what is going on around you to create the representation of reality, and then something completely upsets the system. They’ve done plenty of high level studies, using brain scans and cat scans and all kinds of other scans and when we are awake and conscious, up to fifty percent of everything we see, feel, hear, taste, and smell (all the data coming in through our five senses) is generated internally. Like when you go back to a web page without refreshing your browsers. You’re really looking at the website as it really is, only the way it was when you first surfed there five or ten minutes ago.

Like if you have a Yahoo! Email account, and you go to the Yahoo! Homepage, you’ll see so many messages in your inbox. Then if you surf someplace else, and then come back to Yahoo, you might not see any increase in mail, even though your buddy just sent you an email. Once you refresh your browser, you’ll see the new mail.

Scientists believe the brain works in the same way. If you are in a familiar environment, and the things around you aren’t changing all that much, your brain will start to rely on your stored memories to create what you think you see around you, rather than what is actually going on. So when something strange or out of the ordinary happens, your brain has to refresh it’s browser, and that can be a weird feeling.

Especially if that strange thing happens quickly, before your brain can refresh itself to catch up on what is really going on. Your brain doesn’t like to work very hard (or maybe that’s just me) so it will usually defer to stored memories whenever possible. It doesn’t like to continually “see” what is really going on unless it has to.

Many experiments bear this out. This is a reason why eyewitness testimony is the weakest link in any criminal case. One example of this is an experiment where they had a “criminal” come in and steal a professor’s briefcase during a lecture. Later, when they interviewed the students, the description of the “criminal” was all over the place. Some said tall, some said short, there wasn’t even any agreement on what ethnicity he was or even what color clothes he was wearing. Everybody seemed to base what they “saw” on their own experience with criminals, be it in real life or from watching criminals on TV.

There are all kinds of cool optical illusions that make use of this seeming limit on the brain. But is it really a limitation? What the brain in accuracy and detail, it more than makes up in speed. Our brains have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to deliver split second life and death decisions based on quickly changing data. Those that had slower brains, that sat around to contemplate things, didn’t last very long.

Those that had quick brains that decided when to run and when to fight, lived long enough to pass on those genes. So today we are left with a brain that is incredibly fast, but sometimes makes errors in reality detection. Sometimes we have to force ourselves to “refresh our browsers” to see what is really going on around us, rather then relying on assumptions and guesses.

Which is kind of what my friend and I did at the lake. It only happened because there was a momentary lull in our conversation, and we happened to be looking out over the lake at the same time, and toward the same spot. There was this guy on this Jet Ski that would jump out of the water, and then dive back in. He would dive completely under the water, Jet Ski and all, and then come back up a few meters later. Not such a big deal, as I’ve seen this in Jet Ski shows before.

But what we both saw was that this guy a was on a jet ski, by himself, and jumped up in the air, and then dove into the water, like normal, but when he came out there was a girl on the jet ski with him. As soon as we both saw that, we completely lost track of our conversation, and then asked each other if we both saw what we think we saw. After we verified that we both saw the same thing, we then focused intently on the water, specifically the area of this strange occurrence.

We weren’t exactly sure, but this “couple” did a few more tricks, and then both rode to the side of the lake, and as they did so a bunch of people were clapping and taking photos. It appeared to be some kind of show that was sponsored by a liquor company, who was hosting a big lakeside party that evening.

Had we been watching the whole show, it might not have been impressive as it was. But to watch one guy go under water, and come up with some girl on his jet ski is pretty cool thing to just happen to notice in the middle of some conversation about something that I can’t even remember.

Don’t Keep Your Intuition On Ice

False Feedback Loop

The other day I was waiting in line at the ice cream shop down the street from my apartment. I don’t usually buy ice cream, especially during winter, but something told me that buying ice cream might be a good idea today. I can’t exactly put my finger on what it was, or what caused me to think of ice cream, let alone evaluate whether it would be a good choice or not, but there I was.

I noticed the girl standing in line behind me was wearing a shirt that said
“San Diego,” on it, and nothing else. San Diego is popular for a couple of tourist attractions, the San Diego Zoo, and Sea World, to name a couple, but her shirt only said “San Diego,” and nothing else. Since the ice cream shop we were standing in line in was a long way from San Diego, I was curious.

I asked her if she was from San Diego, and she said no, that she got the shirt from a friend. The friend had gone there on a trip and had brought it back as a souvenir. She kind of gave off vibe that she wanted me to follow up on the conversation, despite not giving any obvious openings, so I pressed on.

I asked her what her friend did it San Diego, and she told me that it’s actual her husband, but at he time they hadn’t started dating yet. He was involved in the Navy and some secret nuclear submarine program down there. I asked her if her husband was in the navy, and she said that she couldn’t say. So much for my intuition about her desire for further conversation. I tried one last time, and asked her where she was originally from, and what she told me next was completely unexpected.

I remember once I was taking this seminar on intuition. Or rather it was on hypnosis, but there was on section that was specific to intuition. A good hypnotist can develop an intuition about his client, as many times the session will depend on feedback given by the client that isn’t altogether obvious or blatant. Hypnotists that can develop a good sense of intuition can have much more success with their clients.

There are a few different schools of thought on intuition. One is highly esoteric and metaphysical, and says that there is some higher “super conscious organism” that everybody is connected into. All dreams, psychic abilities, and intuitions depend on being able to “tap into” this superconscious realm of knowledge. It is widely believed that this is a huge storehouse of information, of everything that has happened, and everything that will happen. And it is completely accessible to anyone, so long as they know how to open themselves up to it.

Another school of thought is purely based on biology and evolution. Intuition is a highly developed aspect of communication that is just as unique to humans as spoken language. Most people are aware that human communication goes way beyond the verbal. Studies have shown that as much as 90 percent of communication is non-verbal. This is where intuition kicks in. Because the amount of voice tone, facial expression and subtle cues given off by body language extremely numerous and complex, being able to process them all consciously would be impossible. So the brain developed a way, over thousands of generations of evolution, to interpret them all subconsciously, and then deliver a final “feeling” to the conscious mind. Since feelings can only give us a directional “push,” and not any specific guidance, they can be difficult to interpret.

Hunger, fear, lust, nervousness are all general feelings that generally point us in the right direction, but don’t give us specifics on how to get there. That is left to our conscious, thinking brains. The same goes with intuition. Our subconscious reads the vast amount of information about any particular situation, and then presents a vague “feeling” to our conscious brains. This can be difficult to interpret, especially if you are someone who has been brought up to believe that “feelings” are too wishy washy to be paid any attention to.

But taken in light of the massive computational abilities of the subconscious mind, these feelings can be very valuable, when interpreted correctly. Sometimes it really is a good idea to “trust your gut.”

She told me that she was originally from Jordan, and that she had a PhD in nuclear engineering, which is where she met her husband. She had come to the United States on a student visa, and had met her husband in school, where they both studied nuclear engineering.

She then apologized, and told me that she mad mistakenly took me for one of her classmates. But when she started speaking to me, she realized I wasn’t him, because I spoke with the wrong accent.

So it turns out that her intuition about me was completely incorrect, which in turn gave me an incorrect intuition about her. Kind of a false intuition feedback loop. But the good thing was our false intuition feed back loop had self corrected by the time it was our turn to order our ice cream cone. Actually, I got an ice cream cone, and she got a sundae, but that’s another story.