Hypnotic Conversations: For Unleashing Potentials

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HYPNOTIC

CONVERSATIONS L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. -1-

© 2020 Hypnotic Conversations for Unleashing Potentials L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. No part of this may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, etc.) Without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Hypnotic thinking

NSP — Neuro-Semantic Publications L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., Executive Director ISNS — International Society of Neuro-Semantics® P.O. Box 8 Clifton, CO 81520 (970) 523-7877

Website:

www.neurosemantics.com

Sign up on the website for “Neurons” the weekly newsletter from Dr. L. Michael Hall. Free newsletter about Neuro-Semantics around the world. For Trainings in Neuro-Semantics, see “Trainings ” and “Trainers” on the website.

Audio and Video Recordings For a full range of recordings of this training as well as other cutting-edge Neuro-Semantic training, contact Tom Welch and his website: www.nlp-video.com.

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Hypnotic Conversations Preface

5

13. The Learning Conversation 114 The Receptive Curious Trance

The Idea and Concept 1. From Thinking to Conversing

9 10

2. The Process Conversation The Dynamic Reality Trance

18

Foundational Conversations 3. Self-Talk for Well-Being

25 26

4. The Power Conversation Owning Your Power

35

5. Intentional Conversations Getting Your Big Why

44

6. Possibility Conversations Escaping Limiting Beliefs

53

7. The Emotional Freedom Conversation Permission for Emotional Intelligence

65

8. The Pleasure Conversation Using Joy as a Way of Life

73

20. The Disciplined Conversation 165 The Mastery Over Self Trance

Integration Conversations 9. The No-Excuse Conversation Distinguishing Explanations From Excuses

81 82

21. The Secret Conversation

172

Bibliography Author

178 182

14. The Memory Conversation The Comprehension Trance

121

15. The Authenticity Conversation 128 The Getting Real Trance 16. The Relational Conversation 136 The Connecting, Bonding Trance 17.. The Leadership Conversation 143 The Inspiration Trance Making Dreams Real 18. The Resilience Conversation Getting the Bounce Back Within Your Spirit

150 151

19. The Persevering Conversation 158 Persistence as a Secret of Success

10. The Integration Conversation 89 Commissioning the Body to Feel Ideas 11. The Alignment Conversation Tapping into the Power of Congruency

98

Personal Development 12. The Listening Conversation Active Listening as a Trance

105 106

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PREFACE “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.” William James

I

magine a person talking and carrying on a conversation while lost in a hypnotic trance! On first blush—that seems really weird, and probably impossible. And yet it is actually a description of most “normal” conversations. It’s how we humans typically converse. As we talk and exchange information, we are mostly inside our heads seeing, hearing and feeling things in terms of our own memories, references, imaginations, and concepts. We then speak aloud from that trance state. If it is a similar trance for the person we’re talking with, we have an “understanding.” “I know just what you mean. Me too!” Of course, if they have a history of very different memories, references, imaginations, and concepts, the other person will not get you. They will not understand. “That’s a strange way of thinking,” they may think. Or they may say, “No, that’s not right, you’re crazy!” Then the two of you might argue about whose trance is the true one. Ah, a trance war! What’s mostly unknown, and mostly outside of conscious awareness of all parties when this happens, is that this is hypnotic thinking and speaking. Yet it doesn’t seem like hypnosis—not at all. It seems like just talking, that’s all. So to correct such arguments the first thing is for all parties—or at least one person— to become conscious of what’s actually going on and make some adjustments. Hypnotic Conversations is designed to expose the hypnotic nature of conversations. Once the spotlight is turned on and you begin to see the invisible hidden structure, you will have a multitude of ways of responding at your disposal. You will be able to have great conversations that induce the best kind of states (trances) which will then bring out the best kind of responses as you enable the unleashing of potentials and the development of resources (in yourself and others). -4-

Hypnotic Conversations

Preface

L. Michael Hall

With your words, you do things. But “Hypnosis is the epitome of what? This will be one of the mind-body medicine. It can questions we’ll explore in the enable the mind to tell the body following conversations, what are you how to react, and modify the doing with your words? With your messages that the body sends to words, you take yourself and your the mind.” New York Times listener places. But where? We will also explore: Where are you taking the person? With your words, you induce states and activate all sorts of inner processes. But what? In Hypnotic Conversations you will discover the answer to these questions. Here you will encounter many of the most basic questions and conversations— conversations about your self, your powers, capacities, responsibilities, interactions, emotions, possibilities, etc. Here you will find numerous trance inductions— all for the purpose of learning how to engage in hypnotic conversations that will enrich you as a professional communicator and empower you to be more intentional, precise, and elegant in communicating. This book, Hypnotic Conversations is a companion and follow-up book to Thinking Hypnotically (2020). While it can be understood without having read the previous book, it is best to think of this book as Volume II of the previous book. Conversations which you may think are missing in this book is missing are actually in Hypnotic Conversations: The Genius Trance (chapter 16) The Metaphorical Trance (chapter 17) Transformation Trances (ch. 18) The Crucible Trance (ch. 19) Healing Trances (chs. 20-21) Trances for Programming (ch. 22) The Creativity Trance (ch. 23). The first hypnotic conversations in this book are based on, and use, the basic patterns in APG (Accessing Personal Genius). APG is the flagship training of Neuro- Semantics.1 Afterwards, the conversations are common Neuro-Semantic patterns.

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Hypnotic Conversations

Preface

L. Michael Hall

Ch. Meta-Stating Pattern Subject— Theme Foundational Conversations based on APG patterns 3 4 5 6 7 8

Self Power Intention Beliefs Possibilities Emotions Pleasure

Self-acceptance, self-confidence, self-esteem Empowerment, ownership, responsibility Setting intentions, aligning attentions Transforming thoughts into beliefs Getting out of a limited way of believing Embracing and managing emotions as emotions Bringing joy and pleasure to all of life

Integration Conversations based on APG patterns 9

Excuses

10 11

Alignment Implementation

Distinguishing using reason to explain or to justify Integrating congruency Translating ideas into muscle-memory

Personal Development Conversations 12 13 14 15 16 17

Listening Learning Memory Authenticity Relational Leadership

Trancing for the ability to be present Receptive Learning Trance The Comprehension Trance The getting real trance. The Connecting, Bonding Trance Inspiring vision and values, collaboration

Making Your Dreams Real Conversations 18 19

Resilience Persevering

20

Discipline

Putting a spirit of bounce into one’s being Setting objectives and making changes and persisting Creating effective and joyous procedures

Trance Inductions Each of the following chapters ends with a trance induction. These can be used in two ways. First, you can use them as an induction with a single individual or a group. In doing that you will want to understand how to communicate hypnotically, how to use your voice and words in such a way that invites a person to turn inward. Here the conversation will be between you and the person’s inner (or unconscious) mind. Second, you can use them as a somnambulistic trance2 wherein a person may (or may not ) keep his eyes open and communicate by answering the questions. You then have a dialogue— a two-way conversation— in trance. The person may not, and probably will not, recognize that she is in a trance. -6-

Hypnotic Conversations

Preface

L. Michael Hall

It will seem more as an intensely focused conversation to the person which, of course, it is with any truly effective conversation. If our lives and personalities change and develop one conversation at a time, then knowing how to conduct deep, meaningful conversations (trance conversations) enable you to facilitate deep change. It will be change that will deeply and thoroughly impact the person’s life. Then the person can make the change and keep the change for the rest of his or her life.

End of Preface Notes 1. APG— Accessing Personal Genius, a three-day training for understanding and using the Meta-States Model by identifying and applying the meta-states in fourteen patterns. A book that describes these patterns is Secrets of Personal Mastery (1999). As a training APG is conducted by Neuro-Semantic Trainers in some 60 countries. Locate a trainer near you by visiting www.neurosemantics.com. 2. From somnambulism, walking while asleep, there are deep trances in which a person can have his eyes open and engaged in a conversation while in hypnotic sleep.

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THE IDEA You can think and speak consciously and unconsciously. Conscious speech is obvious— it’s what we typically think about when we think talking or holding a conversation. In fact, what does it mean to think or speak unconsciously or hypnotically? It means to access the larger-than-conscious-mind, all of the “intelligences” that we have which are beyond the limitation of our focused consciousness. It refers to accessing ideas, understandings, and learnings in the back of your mind where you have established the invisible structures for thinking and interpreting the meaning of things. It may also mean accessing “the wisdom of the body,” all of the neurological intelligence that keeps your heart beating, your lungs pumping, your endocrine system operating, etc. It is that intelligence that keeps your physiological well-being in good repair, constantly healing and renewing. Based on Thinking Hypnotically (2020), this book consists primarily of chapters about the kinds of conversations you can have with yourself or with others (inter-personally) whether you are a coach, a therapist, a parent, a leader. It is a series of conversations that are all designed for one thing— unleashing more and more of the hidden potentials within a human being.

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Chapter 1

FROM THINKING TO CONVERSING “As a man thinks in his heart, so he is.” Proverbs 23:7

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hen you know that a lot of your thinking is hypnotic in nature, then the next step in personal development is learning to converse hypnotically. In Thinking Hypnotically (2020) I detailed what it means to think in ways that we identify as hypnotic. Actually, most of our thinking is hypnotic in that what we refer to is not physically present. We are thinking about what happened in the past or what could possibly happen in the future, yet both the events of the past and of the future do not actually exist. They are inside a person’s memories and imaginations. What is more challenging than thinking hypnotically is sensory-based, empirical thinking. To do that requires that you stay present in this moment and in the here-and-now. Yet your hypnotic thinking stops that. Why? Because you are not here. You are somewhere else. If not in the past or in the future, you are in your mind constructing concepts about things or imagining solutions. This describe the typical human consciousness. Fritz Perls said that we are in our “computer mind” chattering away about all sorts of things that we construct, imagine, and hallucinate. His solution? “Lose your mind and come to your senses.” I wrote about this call for returning to sensory awareness in Executive Thinking (2018) as well as in many of the NLP books, Movie Mind (2002), Communication Magic (1997), etc. -9-

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Sensory awareness is the place where you will find the facts upon which you can then build up information and from information, build knowledge. The ability to return to the world of sensory awareness enables you for critical thinking as you can then ground your mental maps in reality. Hypnotic Thinking and Trance Whenever you go inside into your inner world of thoughts and ideas, you are in a hypnotic state—a trance. It could be a learning trance, creativity trance, loving trance, coaching trance, empowerment trance, appreciation trance or one of another thousand kind of trances. It could be a state that is mostly informed by your understandings and beliefs. It could be a wellpracticed state of mind-and-body so that you pretty much live in that state and from that state. After all, trances are trance states and there are hundreds, maybe thousands, that are incredibly powerful and ecological. In hypnotic thinking, you are above and beyond the here-and-now state of seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting the immediate references. You are awake to ideas— to understandings and beliefs. You are awake to references that are not immediately present—perhaps past references, perhaps future references, perhaps hypothetic references, perhaps to desired and longed for references. Whatever you are in reference to, it is not immediately present. Because of that, you are in a hypnotic or trance state. With regard to hypnotic thinking, it is far more extensive than empirical thinking. It goes far beyond just representing and coding what is present and holding that in mind. It goes to your meanings about things. It goes to your decisions about things. It goes to your permissions and/or prohibitions about things. In a word, it goes to all of the meta-levels of consciousness— levels higher (meta) to what is present as you think it over and think about it and construct all sorts of mental constructs about it. For that reason we call these levels— meta-levels. What you encode at the first level of representing that is immediately present, you do so using the basic sensory representation systems. You do it visually, auditorially, kinesthetically, olfactorily, etc. NLP calls this the VAK for short. Developmental Psychology refers to this as “representational constancy,” a skill that arises at approximately ninemonths of age. That’s when a child is able to “hold constant” in his mind

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representations. Before that, what the child “thinking” is characterized by “out of sight, out of mind.” Representational constancy is what enables you to take your world with you. Now you can think about things not present. If you could only think about what you can see or what is immediately present, mind or consciousness would be very, very limited. Conversely, with the ability to hold references in mind and think about them when they are not present, frees you to be able to create things in your mind. This is the basis for hypnotic thinking. From there you can imagine all kinds of things. You can shift and change your representations, invent solutions to problems, create concepts about things, figure out how things work, and throw diverse ideas together to innovate things un-imagined in previous ages. Hypnotic thinking is therefore the basis for all things human—culture, philosophy, theology, science, creativity, innovation, spirituality, etc. Yet as good as that is—it is not all good. After all, anything powerful can be powerfully mis-used, so can hypnotic thinking. This same capacity can also create all things pathological— worry, anxiety, mental illness, schizophrenia, manic-depression, personality disordering, etc. Hypnotic thinking can lead to all sorts of painful trance states— anxiety trance, depression trance, hostility trance, resentment, hatred, prejudice, etc. And given the relationship between mind-and-body, it can lead to all sorts of psychosomatic illnesses including the auto-immune system diseases. That’s the downside of hypnotic thinking—a downside that can be corrected and resolved by learning how to effectively and ecologically engage in hypnotic thinking. It is corrected by adequately integrating hypnotic thinking with empirical thinking. Then what you think inside is grounded in what is outside. And what is outside is mapped and correlated to what is inside. That was the design of the two books—Executive Thinking and Hypnotic Thinking. Speaking Hypnotically Now thinking is not a stand-alone phenomenon. As you think, so you feel, speak, and act. It’s inevitable. This is where hypnotic speaking comes in as a way to tap into the best resources of all things human and how to -11-

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correct the problems that arise from the mis-use of the power of hypnotic thinking. Once upon a time we humans thought of hypnotic language as something very special, very unique, very rare, and very mysterious. But no longer. As pioneering men and women studied the language of hypnosis and modeled experts in hypnotic language, we discovered that language, by its very nature, is hypnotic. Via language, we speak mostly about things not present. Via language, we speak mostly about ideas, concepts, beliefs, hopes and fears, and all sorts of references. The founders of NLP modeled the therapeutic language skills of Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir because they noted that just by talking they were able to bring about healing and renewal within people. From that research they created “the Meta-Model of Language in Therapy.” Starting from the premise of General Semantics (Alfred Korzybski) that “the map is not the territory,” they used the formulations of Transformational Grammar (Noam Chomsky) to identify classifications of language. These classifications identified where the map was vague, fuzzy, and not well formed. Then taking cue from Perls and Satir, they came up with a series of questions that could be asked that would enable a person to map more correctly, more accurately, and more fully. That gave birth to what is today called “The Meta-Model.”1 I included in Hypnotic Thinking a lengthy chapter on the Meta-Model which shows how language is inherently hypnotic and how to use the questions to de-hypnotize when a person is living with vague maps that create problems. The next step in NLP development occurred when the founders modeled the world renowned medical doctor, Milton H. Erickson, and his work in medical hypnosis. That led to “The Milton Model,” a set of linguistic distinctions for how to induce healthful and ecological trances for wellbeing. There’s also a lengthy chapter in Hypnotic Thinking about this model which details how to hypnotize, that is, to induce a trance state. Together, both models provide a way to both think and speak hypnotically. This means that there is a known and dependable structure to what is unfortunately called “hypnosis.” It means that by learning the language distinctions, and how to use those as well as behavioral distinctiveness, you can learn how to effectively hold hypnotic conversations. 2 -12-

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From Thinking to Conversing

Hypnotic Conversations All conversations— all of them— are hypnotic. The only exceptions could possibly be a conversation in a scientific clinic dealing with an immediate reference. Yet even then, the speakers will probably introduce some idea, concept, or hypothesis. Therefore anytime and every time you hold a conversation, you engage in speaking hypnotically. But ... and this is a big but ... most of the time, you are probably not doing it very well, very elegantly, or very effectively. You are probably not even aware of what you are doing hypnotically. Given that, the first change we will want to create is to become mindful of what we are doing and where we are taking our listeners. To change your conversations so that you do not mis-use this inherent power in language, you will first need to become consciously aware of what you are saying, the effects of your language, and the implications. With awareness you can then monitor your languaging skills, and with practice learn to become more intentional. This means becoming aware of what you are doing with your words and where you are taking your hearers. When you can do that, you become much more professional as a communicator. You become more effective in your own language constructs that define your inner sense of reality as well as in the language constructs you offer others as you seek to make yourself clear, influence others, and create healthy relationships. All of this occurs because “we live in the house of language.” And because we do, Wittgenstein noted that, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Henry Staten wrote, “Language is what bewitches, but language is what we must remain within in order to cure the bewitchment.” Similarly, the founders of NLP wrote in The Structure of Magic: "Magic is hidden in the language we speak. The webs that you can tie and untie are at your command if only you pay attention to what you already have (language) and the structure of the incantations for growth." (1975, p. 19)

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Hypnotic Conversations

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From Thinking to Conversing

Given this, it is in language itself, and the conversations that you have with language, that you can take charge of your thinking, your emoting, your acting, your relating, and your speaking. To that end the following chapters are dedicated. Conducting Hypnotic Conversations There are two central ways to engage in a hypnotic conversation. The one most recognized and most common is the induction. You lead the person receiving the trance in a “trance induction.” That is, you induce the desired trance as the person receives your words, typically of comfort and relaxation and then suggestions so that you take the person on an imaginary guided tour inside the mind. That’s one way to do it and you can see many examples of that in Thinking Hypnotically and the books of Milton Erickson.3 A second way is to engage in a conversation while the person is in a somnambulistic trance state. Many of the articles of Milton Erickson in The Collective Papers, Volumes I to IV are of this nature. He recorded the conversations he had with clients as they were in trance. He would collect information about their case, do a case study, and explore what they unconsciously thought about things when they were in trance. What does this mean? It means that a person can be in a trance state and carry on a conversation at the same time. Actually, most conversations are like this! This offers a second way to have a hypnotic conversation. To do this, begin by inducing a relaxation state—one of comfort and perhaps of pleasure. Invite the person to “go away” in his or her mind to a particular place that will be conducive for the conversation. The particular state will be one that will support the particular purpose of the conversation. Typically it will be a trance state of curiosity, wonder, learning, playfulness, imagination, releasing, intention, focus, excitement, etc. The basic prerequisite for the trance state will be one of inner focus so that the person leaves the outside world and goes inside. Strange as it may seem it could be a state of absolute boredom as you repetitiously say things that are of no relevance until the person transitions out of the here-and-now into a train of thoughts of her own choosing. Erickson did that frequently. Erickson also used confusion as a primary means for trance induction. You could say many things that have no seeming connection to each other, add -14-

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in ambiguities and non sequitors, and induce the person’s conscious thinking to be overwhelmed or defeated. If while doing that, you interspersed a few clear statements here and there (the interspersal technique) you begin to engage an aspect of the unconscious mind. Many other trance induction techniques are referred to in Thinking Hypnotically as well as in most of the books by Erickson as well as the NLP books on hypnosis.4 The key is to engage the person’s attention, direct a train of thoughts, and facilitate the person turning inward and leaving the outside world. Once you have done that, you’re ready to have a hypnotic conversation for the purpose of planting ideas that will create new opportunities, release hidden potentials, and give the person a new lease on life. The Thinking to Conversing Trance Conversation As you sit there listening to my voice, you can let your hands rest on your thighs and you can take a deep breath and relax as you let that breath out. Now when you take the next deep breath you can close your eyes and begin to lift one of your hands up as slowly as humanly possible ... Now as you do, let your mind think about a pleasant memory ... a simple pleasure — walking on a beach, playing in the ocean, watching a sunset, building a sand castle— something that you might have done as a child ... and as you enjoy those feelings because when you do things with joy whatever you’re doing is no longer work, but an expression of your passion and learning to use both your conscious and unconscious mind can be done joyfully as you unleash more and

more of your potentials.

Now as you find that memory and step into it as fully as you can , you hand can very slowly rise up while you realize that, in a moment, you also can rise up— in your mind— to use your highest executive functions for setting objectives and then courageously going after them. And as a balloon full of helium rises up, so your hand can float up ever so gently ... up, up, and away which allows a larger perspective of where you’re going in life and how you want to go... And when you hand touches your face, you can then drop down deeper into a trance, deeper than you’ve ever gone before ... now...

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As your hand drops slowly back to your thigh, and you drop down into a relaxing trance, you can allow a time and place where you experienced courage to come to mind— the courage to be true to yourself, to your values, to your hopes and dreams ... a courage that says, “just do it,” “just go for it!” and as you feel that courage and letting it grow, maybe doubling ... a courage that gets stronger and stronger as you float down fully into it ... this will give you the determination to complete what you start ... anticipating how you will become more resilient and more persevering in the weeks and months to come.

What and Where What you are doing when you engage in a mindful hypnotic conversation is facilitating change. Because we change one conversation at a time, when you learn how to use hypnotic conversations, you invite a person to come out from behind him or herself and get real. That’s how transformation occurs. The conversation enables a person to become the person she can become. What you are doing is enabling people to become aware that you and everyone else is already engage in hypnotic conversations. That part is not new. What is new is that such conversations can now be done with mindful precision. Where you are taking a person in these conversation is to places where they can tap into their reservoir of potentials and unleash their highest meanings and best performances. In this, these conversations are all about actualizing one’s best self and one’s best potentials. Post Hypnotic Suggestions Start a life changing conversation that focuses attention. Induce a trance state to make the conversation more authentic. End of Chapter Notes 1. For more about the Meta-Model, see the original books, The Structure of Magic, Volume I and II (1975, 1976) or the updated version, Communication Magic (2001). 2. The term “hypnosis” is unfortunate. See Thinking Hypnotically, pages 17-27. 3. For hypnotic conversations, read Milton Erickson’s books, they are excellent for that purpose. See Bibliography for a list of his books. 4. NLP books, The Hypnotic Patterns of Milton H. Erickson, Volumes I & II (1976).

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Chapter Two

THE PROCESS CONVERSATION The Dynamic Reality Trance

H

aving a conversation about process, what in the world is that? And why would you want to hold a conversation about process? Great questions and one great answer to those questions is this: Process counts more, a lot more, than content. And that’s because process is the hidden invisible structure behind experience. If process is more important than content, then what exactly are we talking about when we talk about process? As an application, let’s consider the subject of learning, a relevant subject given how reading and learning are inter-related, to define process more specifically. In the context of learning, content is what you learn which, obviously, is important. Content gives you immediate and critical information. Yet behind what you learn is how you learn—that’s process or structure. Now we can ask a whole series of questions. How aware are you of what you are learning? The subject and the content here is hypnotic conversations. How are you learning that content? What processes are you using? Are these the best processes for learning that subject? What are your best meta-processes for learning? Are you more a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner? -17-

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What have you learned about learning so that you can learn more effectively and efficiently? None of the questions about process discounts content.. Not at all! What we’re doing is locating the true and best position of content because regardless of whatever you’re talking about—you have to have content. It is inevitable and inescapable. Content gives you the empirical facts and grounds an experience in reality. Let’s relate this to working with a client in either coaching and therapy, my estimate is that a coach or a therapist needs about 20 percent content regarding the client’s story and details, and about 80 percent process. This means that more important than what a person may feel depressed about is how the person experiences and creates the experience of depression? That’s because when you know how a person does something, it gives you insight into that person’s strategy (or formula). And with that it is much easier to create effective and efficient interventions. If you only know what the person is depressed about, you still do not know how the person has depressed himself. Content is the subject matter and the details of a subject. It is therefore content which grounds whatever you’re talking about into empirical reality. Content gives you the necessary specific see-hear-feel referents so that you and the other person can know what you’re talking about. Content also enables you to know if the person has sufficient information about the subject. If that’s missing, then regardless of the amount of process, your conversation will not go any place or do any good.1 As we now move on to a process conversation, I’m assuming that you have well-grounded the conversation in enough details so that you have enough clarity about the subject to know what it is about. The Power of Process In the field of NLP, once we discovered that the way we communicate to ourselves and others (the process) governs the hidden and structure framework of the experience, that opened up the field of NLP and NeuroSemantics for modeling excellence in human behavior. By discovering and specifying the process behind which an experience comes into being, we can work with any experience at the structural level. 2 -18-

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That led to the basic process question that drives all modeling of expertise, “How do you do X?” How do you create resilience? How do you create depression? How do you make such excellent decisions? How do you put things off, even tremendously important things, to the last minute, and create great stress? How do you persevere especially in the face of so many distractions and discouragements? Among the most dynamic things of process is how it exposes the myth that “things just happen.” When we say, “I don’t know how that happened, it just happened,” we are actually confessing to the hiddenness of the invisible structure. Things do not “just happen.” There is rhyme and reason to what happens and how it happens. If a person doesn’t know— then that person doesn’t know. Being unknown and unconscious does not mean that there isn’t a structure, only that that person doesn’t know the structure or process. A great moment in the process conversation is the “Aha!” moment. That’s when a person suddenly (or slowly) gains insight into the process and says (or shouts), “Aha! That’s what I’m doing!” “Now I get it! I never thought of that before.” What is great about such a moment? You are no longer a victim of the experience. Once you know how something works, you are no longer in the position of being acted upon by the experience, you now know. You now know how you are participating in and creating the experience. Now you can begin catching yourself in the process of creating, generating, or contributing to the given experience. Beyond that understanding, now you can change it. It’s hard, if not difficult to change what you’re unaware of. Being unaware— unconscious— means that you are out of touch with your thinking, believing, deciding, framing, meaning-making, emoting, speaking, language, acting, etc. You really do not have insight into the way your responses invent your reality. And without that awareness of what you’re doing, you can’t change things. At least with awareness you are at choice point for doing something different. If you can’t change what you’re not aware of, awareness gives you the first step in change. Process gives you the power to recognize your response-powers, how you contribute to whatever you’re experiencing. Process gives you the ability -19-

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to initiate a new experience. Process enables you to model expertise around you so you can replicate it in your life. Some will experience this as extremely empowering. For others, the process conversation which brings awareness to one’s response-ability becomes a challenging conversation. The Inner Trance of Process You can distinguish content and process in another way and a way that relates to what is conscious and what is unconscious. Content connects you to the outside world, to the outer game that you play in your actions. It relates to the details of your story. Process connects you to the inside world, to the inner game that you play in your mind. As process moves you inward, it moves you into an inner focus—where you “understand” how something works. It’s in this way that process, and the process conversation, is hypnotic in nature. Now given that process itself is hypnotic in nature, a person can be in a fallacious trance— convinced that X behavior or experience is created by some Y-strategy. “His harsh tone of voice makes me feel afraid.” Yet that understanding could be completely wrong. In that case, the person probably needs first to be de-hypnotized from that erroneous trance and brought back to the grounding contents so she can then re-map things in a more productive way. The inner trance of process awareness refers to being of the systemic structures and dynamic processes behind the content. In that trance you are aware of the meta-levels that comprise your understanding of how something works. What makes up these meta-levels? It could be any one, or combination, of the following: You may be aware of the meta-programs that make up the process. You may be aware of the linguistics of the Meta-Model that make up a process. You may be aware of the cinematic features of the representations (the sub-modalities). You may be aware of the meta-states and meta-level of frames that make up the process.3 With regard to the processes that make up any given experience then, you will find a combination and over-lap of these meta-models. If we consider -20-

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learning, for an example, then when learning a specific content—there will be specific meta-programs, specific linguistics, specific cinematic code, and specific meta-states that will make the learning easier. The Process Trance Conversation Induce a light trance of learning and curiosity. Invite the person to be ready to step back and gain perspective over the content of the subject, as they will take a journey upward into the internal context or processes. As you take your next deep breath ... in your mind you can simply watch a flower blossoming and what color is that flower? ___ because as you observe it opening up, opening to reveal its beauty and fragrance ... so you too can open up. You can open up all of your beauty and fragrance as a human being allowing your conscious and your unconscious minds to open ... without any effort on your part because this will enable you to make new distinctions .. Distinctions between content and context that will forever change your life. If, in your mind, content is the story that you tell yourself, and the details of when and where and how ... then recall a wonderful experience, perhaps a time when you were on holiday and enjoying yourself and your family, or when you were engaged in a sport, or perhaps a time when you achieved something important. And your unconscious mind can choose something big or small, it doesn’t matter, because today you are going to have the unique opportunity to rise above that event and peak into the meta-levels of awareness that enable you to think about that positive experience and use it as a resource within. As you now settle on a positive experience, you can allow yourself to see what you saw, hear what you heard, and feel what you felt ... and to be there fully and to know that this is the content of your thinking and it’s important because it gives you a specific referent that you can use for feeling good, thinking about a competency that you have, etc. But there is more ... a lot more ... and that more is the hidden part of your mind ... so look around and you will find a staircase of steps ... it may be right in front of you, or it could be to your right or left, or it may be behind you.

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And when you see that staircase, you can go there and begin climbing up these stairs which are typically invisible because they are transparent ... although today you can see them and you can walk them ... and as you do ... notice that you come to a floor that is transparent — a floor that you can see through to the experience that you had which is now below you. And at this meta-level there are certain ideas, beliefs, understandings, even decisions that allow what you see below to occur. So as you now notice them, what is it that you believe that supports that positive experience? ____ and any other belief? ____ And what decision also supports you having that experience? ____ From this meta-position in this invisible meta-room overlooking your experience, I wonder what editing you do which influences how you have coded the experience? ____ As editor of your movies, have you made the experience bigger or brighter or closer? ____ As editor, did you make the sounds and words clearer or more compelling? ____ And you might also note what else you could do from this editing room that would enhance the experience? ____ Yet let’s not leave it here because the staircase goes up higher and as you climb the next set of stairs, you can move to yet another transparent floor. Here you can see things at the primary level through the filter of your meta-programs ... matching or mismatching, globally or specifically, inside or outside of the movie, and so on ... and here you can wonder about something else ... you can wonder “How much richer could the primary experience be if I shifted around some of my meta-programs?” and you can begin to do that now or leave that as a project for your unconscious mind at a later time. Because now we want to move to yet another level and view things through the lens of assumptive frames ... and as you do, what do you assume to be true or possible about that experience? ____ And what else could you assume that might open up other possibilities? ____ And this exploration into what’s in the back of your mind, into the processes that you use to record and encode and remember an event is just the beginning for opening up more of your unconscious -22-

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frames thereby giving you an increased range of choices— choices for unleashing hidden potentials and making your life the best it can be.

What and Where What you do in the process conversation is discover the hidden processes at the meta-levels that explains how you do what you do. How your client does what she does. And knowing that, consciously or unconsciously, enables both you and your clients to take charge of the processes so that they serve you and them well. Where you take a person in this conversation is beyond the see-hear-feel references in the real world to the world in the back of the mind. It is there that a person constructs his sense of reality. It is there that a person has choice for making that reality more effective and efficient. Post Hypnotic Suggestions Focus 20% on details (content) and 80% on process (context). When there’s a problem, check out the meta-process levels. Remember, there are scores of meta-level structures. End of the Chapter Notes 1. This discussion of content and process also explains why some in NLP have it entirely wrong about doing “content-free” therapy or coaching. That is dangerous because you may not have any idea what you’re talking about, what resources you are building for something. If someone’s problem is called “Y” and the person wants to “X” but “Y” gets in the way, you are on dangerous ground to just proceed. Most of the time, you will both be fine, but if the person wants to do something unethical (i.e., embezzle his company, murder his wife, cheat a friend, etc.), you could be a conspirator to a felony. If the person wants to do something stupid (i.e., sleep only three hours), again, you may be encouraging an unecological pattern. 2. See Thinking Like a Modeler (2019), NLP Going Meta (1997), Meta-States (1994/ 2012), and The Matrix Model (2003/ 2016). In addition to these basic modeling books, see The Structure of Magic, NLP Volume I, (1975-6), and Modeling with NLP (1998) by Robert Dilts. 3. All of these meta-levels are basic in the NLP Communication Model. In Thinking Hypnotically (2020) there are extensive chapters on the Meta-Model and Meta-States. For Meta-Programs, see Figuring Out People (1997/ 2005) and for the Cinematic Features (meta-modalities) see Sub-Modalities Going Meta (2005).

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FOUNDATIONAL CONVERSATIONS If you are going to have a conversation, whether with yourself or another person, you need certain foundations. You need to be not only okay within yourself, but valued, esteemed, and loved (conversation #1). You need to have the inner power (energy, vitality, strength) to take ownership of your life and responsibly respond from out of your strength (conversation #2). With a solid sense of self, you can then set your intentions so that you live purposefully and intentionally (conversation #3). That enables you to claim your own values and your biggest reason why for living meaningfully. Yet given both the social nature of human experience and that being human makes us “believers,” you need the ability to check out the well-being of your beliefs, escape limiting beliefs, and establish empowering beliefs (conversation #4). Within all of these conversations and experiences (self, power, intention, and believing) you have a whole range of emotions— positive emotions and negative emotions. Therefore you need to use your power, especially the power of permission, to gain emotional freedom and emotional intelligence (conversation #5). Finally, so that you don’t experience life as a burden or a lot of work, you need to use your powers to tap into the thousands of pleasures and metapleasures. You need to develop the capacity for moving through life with joy and delight (conversation #6).

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Chapter 3

SELF-TALK FOR WELL-BEING The way you talk to yourself will enhance or undermine your well-being. If you talk ugly to yourself with criticism, insult, and rejection— you make yourself unwell, unbalanced, and ineffective.

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ow do you talk to yourself? What kind of conversations do you have in the inner recesses of your mind? Are they the kind of conversations that you would want published so that family, friends, and colleagues could read? Isn’t it strange—the one place where you have absolute and total control to determine what is said and how, and yet a great many people talk shit to themselves! They way they talk to themselves, they wouldn’t talk that way to anyone else and they wouldn’t let others talk that way to themselves. If they talked that way to others, they’d get abruptly slapped in the face. Yet they say the worst kind of things, sick things and toxic things, to themselves. The first hypnotic conversation therefore should be one whereby you clean up your own self-talk. In the process, you will learn how to speak to yourself in a more kind and gentle way, in a way that validates you, respects who you are s a person, and a way that is healing and loving. Self-respect is an inside-out experience. It starts inside and involves your attitude to yourself as a human being. If you are looking for it to come from the outside, you will look for a long time.1 -25-

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Self-Talk Awareness While some people are very much aware of their self-talk, many are not. It’s not the case that they are not talking to themselves, they are. Perhaps they call it thinking and do so more visually than auditorially. They are nevertheless communicating to themselves. To become aware of your selftalk, what most people need is an opportunity to quiet oneself and begin to listen, really listen, to the information that one is processing. Those who will find this particularly challenging are those who are externally oriented. They may, in fact, be so externally focused that they may be completely unaware of what they are saying to themselves about things. To develop awareness, intentionally employ moments of silence. When something happens, stop yourself from reacting or even responding, count to ten, and use those moments of silence to notice the thoughts that flitter through your mind. Thoughts will flitter through! And thoughts can rush through the mind at astonishing speeds. Do this consistently for a week or two and eventually, with practice, you’ll start catching the stream of consciousness, the rush of thoughts, the ideas and images and words racing through your mind. The Internalization of the External Physically you develop habits with just about anything you do repeatedly, so that thereafter you lose awareness of what you are actually doing. Similarly your mind also develops habits— habits of thought— to which you also lose awareness. Such trains of thought become unconscious. Minds get into mental and conceptual habits—habitual ways to think, to believe, to process information. Then with lots of repetitions what and how you believe becomes unconscious. Where this becomes unuseful, unecological, and definitely limiting is when you have habitually heard and mentally repeated stupid things that parents, teachers, kids, etc. have said to you. This is where abusive language, toxic thought viruses, and mis-beliefs can get installed in one’s head and then endlessly repeat at unconscious levels. “You’re so stupid, you can’t learn anything.” “What’s wrong with you, you idiot!” “You’re such a bother, I wish we never had you.” “You’ll never amount to anything.” “Why can’t you be more like your brother.”

It is not uncommon at all for external talk like this to become internalized as one’s own self talk. “I’ll never amount to anything.” “Why do I always -26-

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mess things up?” Eventually this becomes what we call “an internal critic.” And given the environment in which you grew up, your internal critic may also call yourself by the crudest of names and insults. In the end, you may constantly be feeling attacked, insulted, violated, etc. and not even be conscious of how it is your own voice is doing it. We could say that you are in an unconscious self-critical trance—a state from which you need to be de-hypnotized. Here also is a message for parents. What you say, how you say it, and the implications of your words powerfully establishes some of the first self-talk in your children. This becomes especially relevant when you are in a negative state and utter angry words. The child’s uncritical mind doesn’t know that it’s their parent’s problem, that it is due to their grumpiness. They don’t have the critical skills to question and contextualize those words. More commonly, children will take the angry words of others as facts, as unquestionable truths, and install those voices in their heads. In this way, many post-hypnotic suggestions are set up that then become significant problems in the years that follow. The Voices in Your Head It is especially easy for children to internalize the external voices of parents and teachers. They hear a statement, they hear it repeated over and over, and inevitably they repeat it to themselves. In that way the content becomes ideodynamic suggestions in their mind-body systems— ideas that inform and govern the meaning frames that control their physiology and behaviors. Twenty years later, as young adults they might then hear “voices” in their heads and because they may code them in the voice of other people—they may come to fallaciously believe that someone else has “put their voices in my head.” Of course, no one has actually put their voice in your head. Inasmuch as it is your brain, you are the one doing it. They may not be aware of doing it. They may not know how they are doing it. But it is their brain and their “code” for the voices. At this point, awareness can begin to transform things. What voice do you have in your head? What is the voice or voices saying? Whose voice is that? Where is that voice? On your right, on your left, in front of your, from the back, is it surround-a-sound? Does the message of that voice help? Does it hurt? -27-

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Does the voice make you more resourceful or less? Do you want that voice? If not, what would you rather want to hear?

A nice NLP pattern for dealing with internal voices is simply to change the code. Change the tone, volume, location, source, and other cinematic features of the voice and both the voice and the message changes. The final three questions (in the list above) are ecology questions—when you use them, you are questioning whether the voice and the message is ecological for your mind-body system. These questions also invite you to step up to choice point and make a decision for or against the voice. This means you are the one who ultimately decides whether to listen to the voice or not. Self-Treatment Ultimately how you talk and communicate to yourself and the quality of the messages you send to yourself determine how you treat yourself and that determines how you experience yourself. How well do you treat yourself? Do you treat yourself with kindness and gentleness? Or do you treat yourself roughly and with insults? Do you treat yourself with love and respect? With appreciation and trust?

These questions are critical to your well-being because how you treat yourself will be the basis for how you treat others. It reminds me of the biblical text that says, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” That statement presupposes that you know how to love yourself, take care of yourself, honor and respect yourself. If you don’t, and you love others like you “love” yourself, your neighbors better watch out! How well do you know and accept that you are a fallible human being, one “liable to make mistakes,” and graciously appreciate what you do without pushing yourself to be flawless or perfect? How well do you forgive yourself when you do mess up? How skillful are you in treating yourself with hope, optimism, resilience, desire, etc.? All of these are facets of how you treat anyone, and in this case, yourself. Self-Confidence, Self-Efficacy, and Self-Esteem Confidence in your self (self-confidence) speaks about what you can do—your skills and competencies. Are you confident that you can do something— perform, act, pull off an activity? If so, how confident? Selfconfidence is a state wherein you trust yourself as you engage in an activity. -28-

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If you can do it, you have some level of self-confidence, if you cannot, then you will have little or no confidence. Esteem in your self (self-esteem) refers to you as a person, as a human being. It is about being, not doing. It is about being a member of the human race— as a sentient person. It is not a feeling, it is a judgment, an evaluation. How much do you “esteem” or “appraise” the value that a person has? Here it could be on a scale (0 to 100) or it could be unconditional. If on a scale, then it is conditional and that raises the question— conditioned on what? Money, fame, strength, beauty, speed, intelligence, family, etc.? Either way, conditional or unconditional—self-esteem is a concept. It refers to a mental construct about the value of a person, hence a belief and an evaluation. Conditional self-esteem means that you will never feel completely safe and free to be yourself because the conditions could change and/or be reduced. Unconditional self-esteem, conversely, means that you can rest comfortably in yourself knowing that your value as a person is unconditional and therefore unquestionable. It is a given. Efficacy in self (self-efficacy) arises from an interesting combination of unconditional self-esteem and multiple self-confidences. Now instead of basing confidence on a skill that you have historical evidence that you can do, you can base future confidence (self-efficacy) on your ability to trust yourself, use your intellect and social skills to make things happen in the future. Self-efficacy is about the future, not the past. It is based upon multiple examples of having become confident about a given skill so that you can draw a larger-level conclusion: As I have learned to develop Xn of skills, so I will learn this skill that I don’t yet have. I will figure it out. Conversational Esteeming I originally wrote the following in chapter ten of Winning the Inner Game. I quote it here as illustrating how to hold a trance conversation conversationally. It occurred while I was on a training recently in England and met a young woman by the name of Joyce. She asked to talk privately because she had “low self-esteem” and something I had mentioned in the morning session made her realize that she could “now change that frame.” I began by inquiring about her current matrix of thoughts and feelings. -29-

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“So what do you have to experience, do, or be in order to experience selfesteem? What conditions do you have to met or fulfill before you can legitimately view yourself as valuable and esteemed and as having honor and dignity?” “I’d have to make a difference.”

In what way do you have to make a difference, and to who? “Well, to the world . . . That doesn’t make much sense, does it? . . . Well, I’d have to do something important.”

You’d have to do what to make a difference and in what way? [Nervous laughter] “How did I know you were going to say that? ... Well I really don’t know, I just feel that I have to do something important so that I count.”

Okay, so if I’m understanding you accurately, then right now, Joyce, you are a worthless, good-for-nothing human being without any honor or dignity at all. Right? . . . And so it would be fine to treat you as such, you slut . . . you worthless good-for-nothing . . . “No!” she said almost shouting.

That’s a great big ‘No!’ I like that one. I bet you felt that really down deep inside, in your gut and in your bones! “Yes, I did,” she said now beginning to smile to herself.

So is there anything stopping you from just giving up this non-sense that you have to earn or deserve self-esteem? What about just acknowledging and accepting your value as a human being as a given, as part of your heritage for being human? What about starting from the frame that your worth is a given, then living your life from that position? “Can I do that?”

“Nope, just kidding.” I said teasingly. You’re right, you’re not allowed to do that. The mind-police would come and get you. They would arrest you and put you in some torture pit to punish you for not being sufficiently selfeffacing.” [Laughing] “So how do I just accept my worth or dignity as a given?”

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and esteem? How about a newborn baby? Here’s a human being that can’t produce anything, can’t carry his or her own weight, can’t earn anything in terms of self-confidence or competence. Isn’t able to do anything important. Do you value and esteem a newborn as inherently having worth and dignity? “Well, sure!” How do you know you do? . . . Just go inside your mind and notice how do you know that. And as you do, feel it fully, that sense of valuing and esteeming, that sense of appraising value and worth . . . How much do you feel that even now? “A lot ... I do feel it.” she said almost with a tone of surprise. Now feel all of that about yourself . . . Just do it . . . Feeling that unconditional esteeming . . . that you give so freely and naturally, that you give for no other reason than the baby is a human being . . . and feel that about yourself . . .

The Self-Talk Hypnotic Conversation After you have induced a comfortable trance state, giving the person several minutes to orient oneself to an inner state and setting the intention to develop a sense of self that will be grounded, centered, focus, confident, loved, etc., then you can begin the conversation. As you close your eyes and just drift away as you would when you are in a hammock swinging ever so gently in the trees on a warm summer day ... out in the yard, between some very big trees .. And the breeze is blowing warm air over you ... and as you feel sleepy and comfortable, you can listen to me with your conscious mind or not ... and you can listen with your unconscious mind or not because as you begin this process, you can wonder how you will separate the ‘being’ side of yourself from the ‘doing’ side, because while both are important, they are also very different and each provides you different resources for how to function as a highly valued person, a person whose value is unconditional, a person who knows that you matter no-matter-what, and that nothing and no one can take that from you... because as you take another deep grounding breath, that breath itself grounds you into your body and let’s you know that you are you and that you count ... you are loveable -31-

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... and you don’t have to prove anything ... and as you enjoy that feeling, how well is that settling deep inside? ______ How much will that change how you move through the world? _____ and while this new understanding of being unconditionally valuable may feel a bit strange and weird at first, like all feelings, it will habituate and give you a solid sense of self.

As a human being, you can now just be ... be yourself, be your real self, be all that you can be because developing is a process, a never-ending process and one that allows you to not only feel important, but to know that you are important ... and I wonder how you will walk and talk when you fully know that? How will you hold yourself, your shoulders, your head ... and how will you walk into a room and look around, how will you greet people when you come from this grounded place of your unconditional self-esteem? And yes ... you can begin to access those expressions now, can you not? So now with your eyes still closed, I want you to open the inner eyes of your mind to this new and exciting reality ... that you are already a Somebody ... and open your inner ears also to really hear that “You are a Somebody.” “You were born a Somebody.” It is yours by nature — a given. And if you have that depth of grounding in what is given, your value as a person, imagine ... just imagine how you will feel more free and more bold to experiment in finding out what you can do ... the talents that you can turn into skills, the skills that you can develop, the potentials that you can unleash ... because you have the fundamental responses or powers within you for developing all sorts of competencies. You have the mental response power to think and imagine and learn and know all sorts of things, and from that you have the emotional response power to feel what you know, to step into the corresponding state and to access the emotional energy to translate what you do into what you do. And in that expression -32-

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you have the linguistic and verbal response powers to say what you know and feel to both yourself and to others. And that leads to the behavioral response powers to act out and act on what you know and feel. What and Where Inside your inner world of communication, you think certain thoughts about yourself. In fact, you learned to think those thoughts about yourself from what people said to you and from the conclusions you drew about that. Yet that may be false thinking, untrue, cruel, and a cognitive fallacy. What you do with this conversation is enable someone to truly listen to his or her your self-talk (or your own) and provide a new opportunity— to update one’s self-communication. With this conversation, you also are able to enable a person to assert her innate dignity and establish a solid sense of unconditional self-value. Who a person is and how one thinks about oneself is ultimately our creation. The problem is that if you’ve been using old content that was provided by people who didn’t know what they were saying, it’s time now to take charge and treat yourself with the inherent dignity and honor that you deserve. Where you take someone with this conversation is into the inner trance of “self” and facilitate the re-ordering of things so that there is acceptance, appreciation, and esteem of self. Post Hypnotic Suggestions Elicit and live from the unconditional value trance. Your worth and value is a given— unconditionally. Talk to yourself as if your words and tone were being heard. To be kind and loving to others, be kind and loving to yourself.

End of the Chapter Notes 1. For more on self-esteem from the Neuro-Semantic perspective, see The Crucible and the Fires of Change (2010), Chapter 7. Unleashed! (2007), chapter 14.

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Chapter Four

THE POWER CONVERSATION Owning Your Power “The measure of a man is what he does with power.” Plato “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.” Abraham Lincoln

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he way some people talk, you would think they were born victims or slaves or nobodies. They talk as if they have no power, no personal authority, and no right to assert themselves. And when they talk this way, they sound pathetic— weak, ineffectual, worthless, taken advantage of by people, circumstances, organizations, and even society itself. They are the victims of life— or at least that’s the trance that they live in and operate from. What they don’t seem to recognize is their own inherent powers and their capacity for self-determination. If only they could end the victim conversation, both in their head and in their mouth, and initiate an empowerment conversation, and thereby claim their inner authority. Other-Referencing In terms of our perceptual filtering programs (meta-programs), we are all born using the other-reference filter. We do that, obviously, because at birth we have no experience to draw upon— nothing to reference. So we look outside to mom and dad, to teachers, to other kids, to television, etc. -34-

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in order to figure out what is what, what to do, what to think, and so on. Then, as our mental, emotional, linguistic, and behavioral powers develop, we have more and more of our own references to refer to and so we can do some self-referencing. “Locus of control” refers to the circle of authority that you either live inside of or on the outside of. When you began you did not live inside it. So you looked outside to parents and authorities. Eventually, however, bit by bit, you brought that “control” or “authority” inside to own your ability to think for yourself. The word “authority” tells the story. From author, it speaks about the ability to be your own author and to write your own script of life— your values, hopes and dreams, fears and angers, actions, ideas, opinions, etc. Now as the author of your life, it is possible for you to write a script where you keep looking outside to others for your values, beliefs, decisions, etc. You could do that as an expression of powers and so give away your power as well as misuse your powers. Self-Referencing This is also the story of the slow development to independence as a person as you become increasingly more self-aware, more informed, more competent, more able to stand up for yourself, and more able to know your own mind and values. Eventually you bring the circle of authority or control inside yourself so that you live more and more inside that circle. It is your right and privilege, it is your responsibility. This doesn’t mean that you no longer look outside. You do, and it is important. You look outside to others to check with your own understanding, to check with the ecology of your thinking, and to check how well it fits or does not fit with your social world. Looking outside means receiving feedback from others to stay both relevant and appropriate. That describes normal and desired human development over the years as a child becomes a young adult and moves from dependency to independence. But that process can be, and often is, interfered with and blocked. It is for many people. Instead of being given accurate information, they are given inaccurate information and instead of being encouraged to learn and stand up for themselves, they are discouraged. Parents never attending Parenting 101 punish children for acts of independence. They reprimand kids for acts

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or speeches of assertiveness. They tell them that they are dumb, stupid, inadequate, that they will never amount to anything, that they can’t do anything right, etc.

The Power Conversation

“Circumstances are beyond human control, but our conduct is in our own power.” Benjamin Disraeli

The result is a very negative and unresourceful trance state of disempowerment and inadequacy. In a powerless trance they live out the posthypnotic suggestions of being stupid, of sabotaging themselves, of living a self-defeating life, of assuming that they are helpless victims. Now as adults, they actually believe that they can do nothing, that nothing ever works out, that they are doomed to minimal success and happiness. Now they sing the old country song: “Doom, despair, and agony on me; if it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.” The Empowerment Process While all of that tragedy is occurring to people and inside of people, there’s actually an empowerment process also going on inside of them. Yet it is over-ridden by the over-arching frames of victimhood and learned helplessness. It is there, but hidden. What gives power to (empowers) each and every person is that, as a human being, you have the power to respond as your own unique person. You have certain response-powers. No matter what happens outside in the environment— you can respond! You can choose your own unique response to what happens. Whatever happens— you can think whatever you want to think about it. You can entertain ideas, opinions, judgments, understandings, decisions, memories, imaginations, and so on. Whatever happens— you can feel and emote according to what you are thinking about it. You can feel bad, sad, or mad. You can feel curious, fascinated, and interested. You can feel pessimistic or optimistic. You can associate any emotion to the experience. Whatever happens — you can speak whatever words you want to about it. You an use whatever linguistic constructions to formulate your thinking and feeling. Whatever happens — you can act however you want to act. It’s your actions and behaviors and it depends on what you choose.

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Of these four response powers, two are private and occur deep inside your brain and nervous system— thinking and feeling. Two are public and give you a way to make a difference in the world— speaking and behaving. The two private powers are absolutely within your control, the two public powers are also within your control although in extreme circumstances they can be constrained by outside influences (e.g., prison, hostage, concentration camp). Herein lies the source of your powers, your authority, your control, and your empowerment. All of your powers to do things arise from thinking, emoting, speaking, and acting. This is indicated by the word “power” itself—it simply refers to the ability to do. And what you can do, and always do, lie in the nature these responses. Therefore the more you embrace these powers, own them, cultivate them, develop them, protect them, etc., the more you will be empowered. The more you’ll be able to bring your authority (authoring your own life) into your circle of control. Then you will be living a life wherein you are in charge and selfdetermining. Limited and Fallible Control While you have these powers to do things, they are simultaneously limited and fallible. They are not infallible. All of these, as human responses, are “liable to error” or fallible. It is not “unlimited power” as one book title suggests. That’s the reason to cultivate and develop them so that they become over time more accurate, more reliable, more trustworthy. The key to that is to recognize them, embrace them, own them, and then develop them. This is what learning and personal development is all about. To become increasingly more empowered as a human being, you have to learn and understand about these powers, what they are, how they work, and then develop them through study, training, and practice. Do that and you will be able to make good use of these powers. Fallible warns that you could be mistaken. Mentally you could and do get things wrong. There are lots of ways that thinking goes wrong. Certain cognitive distortions arise in childhood development that have to be outgrown. Then there are cognitive biases by which you can be deceived into thinking something that just is not so. There are also cognitive fallacies that make up myths and mis-beliefs that undermine truth and reality. -37-

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Similarly you can go wrong emotionally, linguistically, and behaviorally. For this reason you need accurate, sensory-based and ongoing feedback so that we can tell what works and what does not work. In that way you can make in-the-moment corrections thereby avoiding getting off-track. Let’s Talk about Power Before you engage someone in the power conversation, there may be some myths and distortions to get out of the way. First, frame power in a positive way so it is seen as valuable and not fearful. Many people are afraid of power. They confuse power with manipulation, controlling people, abuse, dominating, etc. They may quote Lord Acton, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Obviously, this distorts the term as the idea prevents people from even setting the goal to be an empowered person. Because powerlessness equally corrupts people— it is not power or its lack that corrupts, but how people handle their powers. Some people, seeing the misuse of power, boomerang to the opposite side, wanting no power and fearing anyone’s use of power. Yet power itself is a neutral thing— simply the ability to do, to take action. In itself, it is not ethical or unethical, it is simply the capacity to take action. Power occurs in many dimenions— mental action (thinking), emotional action (emoting), linguistic action (talking), or behavioral action (acting, relating, etc.). In itself, it is not sinister. Yet anything powerful, as with any tool, can be mis-used, but mis-use does not argue against a thing itself. Then there is the idea of control. Control is often feared by people who has experienced someone trying to “control” their thinking, emoting, speaking, and acting. No one can actually control these activities in another person. A person may act in manipulative ways. A person may mock someone, laugh at that person, criticize them, punish them with unpleasant consequences, etc. as a way to get whatever response the manipulator wants. If the “control” works to get the person to not express his response powers, then the person may have learned (falsely) that expressing his powers is risky and dangerous. This kind of manipulative control is relational and political. Perhaps a parent manipulated you to do what they wanted you to do by threatening “others won’t like you.” “What will others say?” From that you may have then learned to do other-referencing and avoid self-referencing.

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There are extensive ways that people can manipulate ideas, consequences, situations, etc. The number of books on how to manipulate to get your way are essentially books on how to mis-use control. This is true for much that is published in the field of persuasion. Yet influence and persuasion do not have to be manipulative or unethical. That was, in part, the purpose of writing Inside-Out Persuasion (2017), namely, to identify healthy and respectful methods of persuasion as well as to enable people to identify the techniques that are manipulative.1 Another misunderstanding of power and control occurs when people misunderstand responsibility. The distinction that many fail to make is between responsibility for yourself, your thinking, emoting, speaking, and acting and responsibility to someone when you’re in relationship with. Between two independent adults, there is what you are responsible for and what you are responsible to. For is your accountability for your powers. You and only you are responsible for what you think, feel, say and do. This is your moral and ethical responsibility. To is your relationship to another person. The to identifies the conditions of the relationship, what have you agreed to give to the other person in terms of how you speak and what you do? What has the other person agreed to give to you in terms of speech and behavior? When you make a list— you have the conditions of the relationship and what can be negotiated so that the relating fulfills each person’s needs and wants. Imagine drawing a line between what you are responsible for and to whom you are responsible to. The for line pretty much ends at your nose. The to line is in the public domain as it identifies the expressions each person gives to the other. It makes up how we talk and what we do in relation to each other. Think of that line as the sanity line. If you try to take control of things beyond that line, you are over-responsible and it will feel like controlling, dominating, and manipulating to the other person. If you move the line inward, you become under-responsible expecting the other to take care of you and your responsibilities. The Use of Power— Problem-Solving Why do you need power? Is it not to solve problems? Is it not for the energy, strength, vitality, and resourcefulness so that you can do what you -39-

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need to do to achieve an objective or deal with an interference? Think back to a time when you were faced with a problem, something blocking and interfering with a goal. If at that time you used your mental, emotional, verbal, and behavioral powers to solve the problem, didn’t that feel great? Here then is a paradox about power. While we all tend to think life would be great, or at least a whole lot better, if we didn’t have any problems, if they would all just go away—we would also be deprived of activating our powers and tapping into the energy they evoke. Research has shown that people feel at their best, most alive, and even most fulfilled when they are stretching forth with their powers to solve problems. How about that? Another paradox— those we admire as the greatest of leaders became so by facing and solving the greatest of problems. Think Martin Luther King, Jr., Ghandi, Einstein, Walt Disney, Nelson Mandila, Abraham Lincoln. What if problems is the very context in which to bring out the greatness within you? Would you then be more open to facing and embracing problems and developing your problem-solving skills? Of course, what makes the difference is how you think about, feel, and respond to the problem. Here you have choices. You could choose to feel fearful and anxious or excited and confident. You could choose to whine and blame or access your best thinking state to wonder about solutions and to think outside of the box. Without a problem, there’s nothing to invent, nothing to activate your creativity. Without a problem to work on it is easy to get bored and complacent. How much power do you need to have within for you to rub your hands together and say, “Oh boy, a problem to work on!”? How much development of your inner powers do you need in order to actually hunt for problems to solve with passion and excitement as if it were an adventure? The Power Trance Conversation After you do an induction into a comfortable state, elicit a trance state of learning and curiosity, a fascination about locating the source of true power deep within. As you take yet another deep breath, notice curiously the power that the breath brings into your body .... that’s right. Notice how it energizes your whole body and neurology as you breathe in a robust breath and hold it ... and then release it. Because when you do this, you will discover that lots of energetic and dynamic things are -40-

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happening inside you— even now, and with every breath you are bringing oxygen into your blood stream which is carrying nutriments to every part of your body and with every exhaling, your body is able to expel toxins making it more healthy and energized. With each breath you are oxidizing your brain which enables you to think more clearly and creatively. And as you continue to do this, what comes to your mind when the idea of energy or power comes to mind? ____ How open are you to becoming more energized, more powerful, more in control of your life? Considering that, imagine that you take ownership of your most essential powers of thinking, emoting, speaking, and acting. As you own your eyes and your teeth, as you own your hands and feet, what if you fully and completely owned your thoughts, emotions, speech, and behaviors? How much richer would you experience your everyday life? How much more confidence would you have in your ability to take effective action in all of those domains? Because the ability to own, fully own , your responses is the beginning place for feeling that you are in charge of your life and you can make changes and adjustments to make things as you want them. So dream a dream right now of that kind of personal strength, the strength to fully own all of your thinking—representing, questioning, imagining, exploring, calculating, creating, etc. Dream a dream also about being able to fully step into and feel your emotions —joy, love, compassion, even sadness, fear, and anger, emotions of wonder and curiosity, because they are just emotions, motions in your body reflecting your thinking ... and are neutral, neither good nor bad, and yet you can make them useful and/or unuseful depending on how you manage them ... and so as you imagine managing them with emotional intelligence so that you have them rather than they having you ... how would that change the very quality of your life so that they energize your body, relax your body, prepare your body for various activities? Even the feeling of owning is a state that arises from your thinking and feeling so as you scan through life and identify some small things that you absolutely own ... what are they? And knowing that when you truly own something, it is yours, you can say so, you can say -41-

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“That’s mine!” And you can bring your hands and place them on your heart, “Mine.” And notice how saying “it is mine” fills your inner world ... making you richer and fuller and having something to share, if you so choose. And as you feel that ownership fully, you can apply it even more to your thoughts and feelings because what and how you think and feel is fallible, so right or wrong, good or bad— they are your thoughts. And saying that inside your mind, “Good or bad, right or wrong, they are my thoughts, my emotions... and I fully accept them because now I can choose which ones to keep and which ones to release.” And this power, the power to manage thinking and emoting is just the beginning, because you can do that also with your speech and your actions. “These are my words, these are my actions ... whatever they are, they are mine and by owning them I can now manage them, adjust them, develop them, and in taking charge, use them for developing the skills and competencies that I desire.”

What and Where What you do when you have an empowerment conversation with someone is activate his innate powers so that he can own them and then use that inner sense of power to take charge of his life. What you do is help someone discover her essential powers. And when a person discovers her inherent powers, it positions her for self-determination. Where you take a person is to his inner engine of power and authority where he can truly be the author of his destiny and write the script for his future. You take the person so she can begin a journey toward true empowerment— powering up so that she can tap into the energy and strength to face life’s challenges and achieve the visions of her heart. Post Hypnotic Suggestions You have four innate powers that no one can take away from you. Empowerment begins with fully owning your powers. No matter what happens, you have choice and can do something. End of Chapter Notes 1. The book, Inside-Out Persuasion (2018) surveys much of the misuse of “influence,” and argues for an ethical and non-manipulative way to touch the minds and hearts of others. Also see Political Coaching (2015). -42-

Chapter Five

THE INTENTIONAL CONVERSATION Getting Your Big Why “Every journey begins with the first step of articulating the intention, and then becoming the intention.” Bryant McGill You are the embodiment of your intentions especially when you align your attentions to your intentions and then translate them into actions.

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rance is the focus of attention. To entrance someone, grab that person’s attention and direct it in a direction so that they become completely captivated by it. When this happens, their attention narrows to focus and they become “of one mind” in their focus. Everything else takes second place and may even vanish away from awareness. Nor is this unusual. It’s actually pretty common—we become entranced in our attention when watching a captivating movie, reading a book that fascinates us, engaged in a conversation around a topic we care a lot about. Attention captivating trances, however, primarily deal with a person’s conscious awareness. What’s unconscious about a focused-attention trance is how things which normally enter into conscious awareness don’t. They vanish away, they disappear from awareness. In such concentrated states, -43-

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we cease to notice other things— time, others, noises, even pains in the body, etc. That’s one kind of trance state, a pretty basic one. A higher level trance state transcends attention as it goes to intention. If attention is what is on your mind, intention is what is in the back of your mind. It is in the back of your mind as your purpose, your motivation, your agenda, your reason for attending to whatever you are attending to. It is your why for focusing your attention as you are. This differentiates animals from humans. Animals live in the world of attentions. They are highly alert to their immediate environment and are therefore easily distracted by sights, sounds, sensations, and smells. We also began life that way. As little children, we also lived in the world of attentions. And often there were so many attentions that our “attention span” was quite short so we flitter from one toy to another toy. Then when put into a situation where we were asked, or forced, to “pay attention” to something that we didn’t want to attend to, didn’t understand why we should attend to it, we found ourselves highly distracted and attempting to attend to other things. Some call this “attention deficient,” yet there’s no deficient in attention in this. Not at all. If there’s a deficient, it is in one’s intention. And the intention deficient is a function of not having a big enough “why” for attending. “Why should I study grammar?” “Why should I study math, I don’t like it?” What a child probably wants to “pay attention” to is a video game, a television show, a sports event. It’s hardly ever the case that the child cannot concentrate, focus, and/or pay attention. The child can focus! It’s a case about what the child wants to, and is willing to, concentrate on. What the child needs, what you and I need, is a reason to focus on a given subject or activity. That brings us to intention. And that’s a level above attention. Attention is what is on the mind, intention is your purpose and agenda driving you to attend to something. It is your reason why. And without a why, there’s no energy and no motivation to attend to. That’s when and why “paying attention” is difficult and requires a lot of mental energy. Conversely, when you have a why, and especially a big why, you have— in the back of your mind— an engine driving you forward. You have a reason -44-

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why, a purpose, an agenda and that infuses you with energy and motivation. Then it is easy to focus, to get lost in something, to forget about time, space, and a thousand other things. In this, your powers of attention come together to become a powerful force of concentration when your attention is aligned with your highest intentions. That’s the secret. It’s the secret of success, the secret of motivation, and the secret of persistence and resilience. It is one of the greatest secrets in human psychology and experience. Namely, align your attentions to your intentions, especially your highest intentions. Intending, Valuing, Purposing, and Trancing They are all connected. To set your intention on something is to establish a higher frame about your attention. It is to orient yourself in a certain way. It is to establish a direction in life. “I’m going to lose ten pounds.” “I’m going to learn engineering.” “I’m going to be a great leader.” “I’m going to run for class president.”

To set an intention, to intend is to make a decision, to set a purpose, and to establish what’s important to you. It is to value. That’s why when you set an intention, you essentially set something as a value. Why lose weight? To be healthy. Why be healthy? To be fit and energetic? Why learn chemistry or math or computers or anything? To understand, to enter a field, to develop a career. Why be a great leader? To influence people, to make a difference, to create a collaboration that can achieve significant things.

What makes intention so dynamic is that it establishes your values and value system. All values are not the same and do not lie at the same logical level. There are values about values (meta-values). Because of this we can ask repeatedly, “Why is X important to you?” and thereby elicit a hierarchy system of values. Doing this makes explicit “ your reason why” something excites, inspires, and motivates you. If a person has too low level of a why— just to get by, just to make money, just to pay bills, just to have a job, etc., that person will not be able to access the kind and quality of energy of a high level intention. In this, intending, valuing, and purposing all lead to trancing out. Let a man or women set a high level intention in the back of the mind and watch out. -45-

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That person will change history! That person will be a dynamic of energy and influence and inspiration for many others. That person will be extremely focused (entranced) on one thing. And a person of one thing is always a factor to be dealt with, whether for good or ill. A strong compelling intention of one thing puts you on purpose so your life is a mission and you live from out of a highly focused trance. Your entire life is organized and oriented in one way and one direction. This describes the story of thousands of inventors, great leaders, and men and women who have changed history. Energy Flows Where Attention Goes An idea arose in the field of NLP when certain trainers were applying NLP to health and well-being. The idea was expressed in the line “Energy flows where attention goes.” This is certainly true of mental energy, emotional energy, and physical energy. It is why those in marketing and advertising work so hard to get your attention. In Neuro-Semantics, we added intention to complete the line, Energy flows where attention goes as directed by intention. Knowing that behind attention is intention, and knowing that intention is the engine, intention is what drives the attention so that you can take charge of this psychological dynamic and use it to create the life that you want. It also fits the philosophical idea, “A man (or woman) who has a big enough why can handle any how.” The Hallelujah “Why” Once, during a training in New York City on Meta-States and managing the higher levels of the mind, a lady came up and told me that she wanted to discover whatever has been missing in her life that keeps her spinning round and round and seemingly waiting on her purpose or passion to emerge. “I just have not had a big enough why. Now I realize why I have been going from one workshop to another, reading one self-help book after another, I’ve been looking for my why. So how do you find or invent a big enough why?”

I inquired about what she wanted to accomplish and some of her immediate goals. She then would express a goal, yet every single time I then expressed a confirmation of that goal by saying, “That sounds pretty important to

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you!” she would not embrace it. For the first eight times, she responsed with a weak and wimpy, “Well, kind of . . . but not really.”

I would then check. “So not really? It’s not really all that important?” “No, not really.” she would then confirm. What she had was a list of “should want to want” given to her by others.

“So what is an even more important goal for you?” Eventually we stumbled onto an interesting fact—she loved art and painting even though she had not painted in years. “So that’s really important?” “Yes, it is. But I feel strange in saying that because I let my real estate business, my home, my relationships with my adult children, and a million other things come first. So I guess it is not that important.”

“And yet art and painting seem like, feel like, a true passion for you?” I asked again seeking only to either confirm or disconfirm it. [“Yes” she said strongly] And do you have the talent for it?” “Yes! I’m actually very good at it.”

“So tell me, what’s so all important about painting?” Well, that did it! Talk about unleashing a torrent of passion. As she began talking, she became completely animated—fully alive, her eyes glistened. As I then continued confirmation checks, “So that’s really important to you!” with each confirmation she became more and more animated. That enabled me to simply keep checking the frame above that frame, “So how’s that valuable? What does that mean to you? How does that enrich your life?” As we had finished our talk (a hypnotic conversation) in that fashion, she discovered her great big why, a why that could set a fire ablaze in her soul and evoke her grandest dreams. It showed in her face and skin. It fully enlivened her and as a result, it set her out on a new chapter in her life— following her passion.1 Intentional Hypnotic Conversation After you induce a comfortably relaxed trance state, add some suggestions for curiosity, exploration, and fascination in discovering one’s highest values. When was the last time you experienced that day-dreamy state of mind ... when it seemed that you were drifting away into a dreamy -47-

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stae ... was it when you were driving on a long dreary highway, or listening to a long lecture, or when meditating, or listening to music ... and as you recall the day-dreamy experience, you can take a long deep breath and drift away again ... in your mind... Because in just a moment I want you to let your larger mind, your unconscious mind, bring to your awareness two or three things that you do which are really important to you. It could be with regard to work and career, it could be with regard to health and fitness, or finances and wealth creation, or relationships of love or friendship, it could be anything that your unconscious mind knows is important to you. And your unconscious can also bring something that you find easy to do or something that, while you know it’s important, you don’t find it easy to do. And as the images flash through your mind, count off three things ... just let them come to you now... Because the ability to reflect on yourself, your life, and what’s really important is a rare and wonderful opportunity to fine tune the things that really matter and knowing that’s what you’re about to do, you can take a nice relaxing breath ... and sit back to enjoy the process because you are about to choose ... to choose one thing that’s important to you, whether you are easily motivated to it or not, and you’ll begin to explore that one thing. So seeing what you see, hearing what you are hearing about that one thing, stepping in to feel what you feel with regard to it... just notice and wonder, really wonder, what is so important about that one thing? _____ Because in just a moment I’m going to invite you to step back from it and begin to notice the value that’s hidden within it, and that will begin taking you up into your intentions— the intentions in the back of your mind. But not just yet ...first we want to really ground this task or activity and make sure you have a vivid representation of it ... and it doesn’t matter if it is something that you do or don’t do, just as long as you see it ... hear the sounds of it ... feel it ... That’s your attention and you may find it easy or hard to keep your attention focused on it, you may know that you can get distracted from it even though it is important. So now, step back and consider why is that activity important to you? _____ and you can say it out -48-

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loud or just quietly in your mind. What is the value? ___ Can you state the value in one word? ___ And as you say that value now ... is it stated in the positive as something that you want and go toward? ___ If not, then reverse it ... turn it around ... so that you can state the value in the positive. If you say that your reason why is so that you don’t experience stress then when you reverse it, and turn it around, then perhaps you want to experience comfort or excitement when you engage in that activity. If your value is no debt, then perhaps the positive value is freedom from debt. And you can state it in the positive because that gives your unconscious mind something specific to move toward with energy and motivation. You will know that you are identifying the value of why something is really important to you when you can state it as a word or possibly two. Values are like that— in a single word they summarize what’s important—safety, health, well-being, development, love, responsibility, humor, achievement, contribution, making a difference, etc. And as you listen to these words, you will discover that they are nominalizations, and not emotions. Also as you do this, if you hear an emotion term like happy or relaxed, you know that that is a consequence of the value, a symptom of the value, but not the value ... so just ask again. If you hear calm, or joyful, ask “and what is the value or meaning significance that allows me to feel calm or joyful?” Because as you do this, you will be separating the consequence of a value from the value itself— and that’s the intention that you are wanting to discover... the intention that drives you. And as you identify one value, hold that value— repeat it to yourself, perhaps achievement and as you suck all the marrow from that word and enjoy it, step back in your mind yet one more time, and why is achievement so important to you? And as you ask this repeatedly, and why is achievement so important to you? you move higher and higher. And because your inner hierarchy of values is layered one value upon another, keep doing this step by step, five times, perhaps seven times, until you get to the highest values of -49-

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all— loving, contributing, having integrity, etc. And when you have

that value, why is it important in having that value? And when you get that value and experience it in just the way you want to, what does that provide you that’s even more important?

Now as you have now identified 5 or more levels up, take one of the highest values and step into it fully and as you do, let the feel of that value fill your whole mind and body ... let it move along every neuropathway in your body and enter into every cell so that you feel it at your very essence and core ... and let it move you emotionally ... that’s right. Be there and enjoy it. With that feeling now bring it back down to the attention that you started with— that activity that you saw and heard and felt —and this time feeling this highest value and letting it fill your eyes— look at that attended activity with all of this in mind. See it through the lens of your values ... see it through your highest intentions and notice ...just notice how the attention that you give it can now become fully aligned with your intention—your highest intention. And just be with this for a moment, letting it settle deep inside so that whenever you attend to that activity, your unconscious mind will access your hidden intentions. Now imagine if you moved out into the world with this value, this intention ... What would that be like? ___ what if this became your way-of-being-in-the-world? ____ would you like that? Are you ready to make that so?

What and Where What you do with the intention conversation is invite a person to move ever upward in her hierarchy of values to her ultimate or core intentionality. In doing this, you facilitate the person to identify his or her true values. This will provide incredible clarity for the person. You enable her to step in and experience her highest values. Knowing that “energy flows where attention goes as directed by intention,” you have a guiding principle for facilitating this with anyone who needs motivation or inspiration. Where you take the person as you do this is into her most authentic self, and doing that, can change everything. Now you can use the intentional -50-

thoughts in the back of a person’s mind to set the direction and orientation to bring out her best self. Now he can align his attentions to do service for his highest intentions. And when a person comes out from behind himself and gets real— life becomes much more dynamic and alive— the person becomes more fully alive/ fully human. Post Hypnotic Suggestions When you find your big why, you’ll never have a motivation problem. Your hierarchy of whys is, at the same time, your values. Align your attentions to your highest intentions and be unstoppable.

End of the Chapter Notes 1. This comes from Winning the Inner Game, chapter 11.

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Chapter Six

THE POSSIBILITY CONVERSATION Escaping Limiting Beliefs “If we all did the things we are really capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.” Thomas A. Edison All the possibilities of your destiny now sleep deep within you. You are here to discover and embrace those possibilities. Yet first you have to make room in your mind for this possibility.

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hen you know about hypnotic trances, and when you know about the Meta-States Model, you know that every belief is a trance. It’s inevitable. To believe is more than to think. You can think lots of things without believing them. If you couldn’t, you’d really be limited and in for a lot of problems. But you can. You can consider something, mentally try it on, even imaginatively step into it without believing it. So believing involves something more than merely thinking something. Yes, you have to think it, but if that’s all you do, you will not thereby believe it. To believe, you have to do something else. Now in thinking about something, you will use all of the “languages of the mind.” That is, you will see, hear, feel, smell and maybe even taste it. You -52-

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will use the sensory-representational systems. But whatever you see, hear, and feel will not be a belief, it will be what you develop a belief about. That’s why you cannot change a belief by merely changing the see-hear-feel components of the belief or their components (sub-modalities). These visual-auditory-and kinesthetic features of the belief (the VAK) ground the belief in something tangible. But the belief itself is not tangible—a belief is an understanding, concept, and construct about what something means. Beliefs exist in the mind, not “out there” in the territory. Given this description, a belief indicates that you are in an altered state— understanding, conceptualizing, and constructing a meaning. In other words, a believe is a meaning trance. You see and hear a meaning that you have invented. And there are many kinds of beliefs. A belief may be a meaning about what something is (identity belief), a meaning about how something works or functions (causation belief), a meaning about the significance of something (meaning belief), a meaning about the importance of something (value belief), and on and on. Beliefs are mental constructs of meaning about all sorts of things—intention, permission, prohibition, decisions, memories, imaginations, etc. And inasmuch as meanings are not tangible, so the beliefs that hold them in place in your mind are also not tangible. What then is a belief? A belief is a made-up understanding about tangible things— a mental state that a person creates, invents, and infers from an encounter with tangible reality. It is a mental map or model that you and I use to navigate the territory of reality. Therefore, you cannot see, hear, or feel a belief. Like meaning, it is something constructed within your consciousness as you believe some meaning about some idea. When you believe, you are in a hypnotic state of mind. This, first of all, means that you cannot change a belief by changing the cinematic features of the grounding reality (the VAK) which the belief refers to. Secondly, it means that to transform a thought into a belief, you have to get to the conceptual framing. You have to identify that structure. This refers to the hidden dimension within every belief. In the back of the mind you have to do something very specific if you are to upgrade a thought into a belief. Ultimately that means you have to alter the belief trance.

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What do you have to do? You have to engage a confirmation process to validate the thought as a belief. Animals cannot do this. An animal sees water, a mountain, a tree, another animal, a human being and what they see is what they see, what they hear is what they hear. They don’t develop conceptual understandings about those things. All they do is associative thinking— they associate liking / disliking; safe / danger; food / eater, etc. We do much more than mere associative thinking. We develop concepts and abstract understandings (trance) which is about concrete reality. Earlier I mentioned that some people believe that “power corrupts.” Others believe “creating wealth takes advantage of people.” “Anything not equal is unfair and unethical.” “Raising the voice is verbal abuse.” We don’t just see-and-see, hear-and-hear, we embed images and sounds inside of conceptual categories— our altered state. Then we confirm that mental -54-

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construct. “Yes, that’s true, children should be seen and not heard.” “That’s right, people won’t do what’s right unless they fear consequences.” What confirms and validates a thought? All sorts of things. Some people use repetition, if they hear something enough times—bingo! It must be true. Some use authority, “If doctor X says it, then it has to be true.” Some use emotions, others experience, etc. Yet whatever they use that convinces them that a given thought is true and valid, the confirmation process lies essentially in validating (or saying Yes) to a thought. “Yes, that’s true.” “Yes, that’s right.” “Yes, I agree that’s the way it is.”1 Now the thought is embedded inside of a confirmation frame. In all of these very subtle responses, responses that we hardly ever notice— we are bringing a thought of confirmation to the original thought. And that’s what transforms a thought into a belief. Now it is no longer just a thought, it is a conviction as an altered state about reality which then closes the matter. As a belief focuses your mind on one idea, it simultaneously closes off other information— which, again, is how we describe a trance. Beliefs and Truth Here’s something amazing about beliefs. You go through all the trouble to create a belief, to confirm and validate something as real, yet a belief does not need to be true to be believed. Isn’t that absolutely amazing?! This means that just because you confirm something and believe it, and if fully feels true—that process, in and of itself, does not confirm or validate the belief as true. It only validates and confirms that you believe it, that you consider it valid, that what you consider valid as one of your beliefs becomes one of your perceptual filters. The belief then defines how you see the world. To drive this point home, how many things have you once upon a time believed, really believed, and then later found out to be not true? As children, we all took on beliefs and constructed beliefs that we later outgrew. We were in a trance for awhile believing something and then we slowly stepped out of it. Our first childhood conclusions, calculations, and interpretations eventually gave way to more adult understanding. This means that all beliefs are relative, fallible, human, and liable to error. And given that, wouldn’t you say that it’s smart to review beliefs, check out -55-

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current data about things, and be open to updating and upgrading your beliefs? That’s what an intelligent person does. Intelligent people do that because it is easy and common to construct limiting beliefs that restrain your capacities, sabotage your best efforts, and get you stuck in unsolvable problems. If beliefs are not about truth, what then are beliefs about? Beliefs are about states that enable us to function effectively in the world. You and I build beliefs about what things are, how things work, their significance, and what we should do to be effective. To understanding yourself, others, and the world you construct mental maps (beliefs) that enable you to be well, to achieve your goals, to get along well with others, to develop your potentials, etc. So everywhere you have problems, feel stuck, don’t understand, etc. is potentially a place where you are suffering from an inadequate and limiting belief. Where there is unnecessary human suffering, there is probably a limiting belief and an altered state that doesn’t serve you well. And that’s a place for upgrading your beliefs. But now we have yet another problem—you have to use your mind—your thinking and believing — to change your mind. The very consciousness that you used to construct your belief, you have to use that same consciousness to change it. Einstein spoke to this doublebind when he said, “The kind of thinking that created the problem cannot solve the problem.” Commonly we speak about getting outside of “the box” of our thinking to think afresh or anew. But how do you do that? Transforming the Belief Trance Once you realize that a belief is a meaning trance state, and it works through the confirmation process, you understand that you can change a belief via the disconfirmation process. There’s a trick to this, however. It does not work via conscious disconfirming. That’s why it is next to impossible to argue someone out of a belief. In fact, typically, the more you argue with someone, the more they argue for their belief. That is, they confirm it. You can best disconfirm a belief by doing it indirectly. Rather than directly opposing it, ask about its ecology. Paradoxically, by embracing the belief

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and asking about how well it works, how much a person likes it, etc., the person is much more likely to unconsciously begin to disconfirm it. Does this belief always bring out the best in you? Does it enhance you as a person and enrich your relationships? Does this belief empower you and others for cooperation? Does the belief bring out your highest spiritual values? Would you want you children or grandchildren to believe this? Do you really like this belief and feeling this? Every no that these questions elicit slowly plants doubt and questions in the mind. Every “Well not really” disconfirms the value of the belief. And it is in this way that you can weaken the belief trance state and prepare a person to shift to a more empowering and enhancing belief. Believing and Possibility Thinking Here’s the situation— you have a belief, and you actually believe it, but it limits you. You think is it valid and real. You have data and/or experience that seems to confirm it, and yet it locks you into a position that causes you to be stuck or limited. It sabotages your best objectives and undermines your potentials. What’s a person to do? What can you do? Ideally, you step out of that kind of thinking and believing and consider other possibilities. That’s easy to say, but how do you do that? One way is, ironically, to fully embracing the thinking / believing and follow its logic to see where it takes you. Once you do that, you can ask the ecology questions to check if it is working or not. If it is not, and you say so, you thereby disconfirm the old belief. And in disconforming the old belief, give yourself a chance to step out of that kind of thinking and believing. To facilitate all of that—which is a lot—the following pattern provides a way to “think outside of the box.” It came originally from Steve de Shazar and his work in the field of Brief Psychotherapy. His “Miracle Question” provides a thinking pattern— a hypothetical thinking pattern — that allows you to escape the old frames and beliefs and give yourself a chance to get out of the old box. It facilitates mapping a new set of constructions without requiring that you believe it— only that you give it a chance as another possibility. “Suppose that tonight after you go to bed and while you’re sleeping, a miracle happens, and the problems that brought you here were -57-

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immediately solved, gone like that [snap fingers], now you have what you have longed for. Yet because you were asleep, you don’t know, and cannot know, that it happened or how it happened. How will you discover that a miracle happened? How will your loved ones? What will be different? What will you notice?” If a miracle happened and you were acting the way you want to, how would you be acting ... differently? When doesn’t the problem happen?

If a miracle happened tonight and you woke up with the problem solved, or you were reasonable confident you were on a track to solving it, what would you be doing differently? Hypothetically— a miracle would change everything! Natural laws would be suspended and something absolutely new would come into being. Now that’s pretty extreme. Miracles! Really. If someone isn’t ready to imagine that much, you can use other forms of this framing which will equally invite a person to suspend his current reality and enter a way of thinking. Then a person can begin to imagine something outside of the old frames. Let us say tomorrow you wake up and you have not decided yet about your job, but you are thinking you are on track to making an eventual decision, what are you doing differently? If I were a fly on the wall and watching you, what would I see you doing differently? What would I see that would tell me that you are feeling differently? How would someone in your family know? Let’s pretend the problem is solved and you are having better luck with things ... what are you doing differently? If this were the last session and you were walking out of here with the problem solved, or you were on track to solving it, what would you be doing differently?

This hypothetic thinking is also hypnotic thinking. To imagine, to pretend, to consider a what if, or to suppose that X happens, you have moved away from the external world and engaged in internally thinking about possibilities. This kind of thinking isn’t available to animals or those who only engage in concrete thinking. It is a trance that facilitates creativity so that you give yourself a chance to think outside of the box.

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The Possibility Conversation Begin by inducing a trance state of comfort and relaxation. Take a person away from the real world and invite them to be playful, even mischievous. Invite them to age regress so that they are five years old again and using their creative imaginative skills. If you ever imagined something as a child that wasn’t there, but it seemed like it was there, an invisible friend of pet, or that you were an astronaut or action hero ... let’s go there now as you stretch and relax ... imagining again ... as if for the first time. ... And now you have the opportunity to imagine a door. It’s a door that can quickly transport you to a place far, far away ... and as you close your eyes and imagine that door — a door somewhere nearby ... maybe to your right, maybe to your left ... on that door are these words: “When you were three, what did you see?” and what did you see ... when you were three? You didn’t see ideas or concepts. You could only see what was there — in sensory awareness, and now imagine playing in a part when you were three years old. What a mental get-away! And you can enjoy this mental get-away because it enables you to take a fresh look at things which is the fountain of creativity. Because sometimes in life we run up against things that block us from our goals and sometimes, just sometimes, we feel stuck, unable to move forward. We look and see others moving forward; we see them doing what we want to do—sell with elegance and grace, negotiate with a win/win attitude, write easily and prolifically, exercise regularly and joyfully ... those kinds of things, but when you start... it feels like you’re moving through deep quicksand, that you’re on a planet which has heavy gravity. And as your unconscious mind brings something like that to your awareness, what is it? ___ And now for a true get-away, would you like to use that to begin to create a new way to move through the world. Because the ability to notice, to just observe what you are thinking and believing that creates the blockage is only the beginning step for how to get free from that blockage. So just notice what you’re aware of when you feel stuck. You are stuck in what? ____ And how stuck do you feel even now by just thinking about it? ____ And are you -59-

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stuck in any other emotion or suffering any other symptoms? And how bad is this for you? _____. Now observing all of that, just observing, step back from that so that you can move above all of that because there’s something you must believe about this area of life ... and do you know what that is? ___ If so, what is the belief? ____ Regardless of whether or not you believe it, does that belief limit you? ____ And what else are you aware of? ____ Because you are able to step back and say what you believe, let’s say for the sake of argument that what you believe is true. If it is true, what would you believe about that? ___ What would that mean to you? ____ And you can enjoy the fact that in stepping back, you’re becoming able to just observe the belief system that you’ve been living in and that is yet another step to freedom. But we’re not done yet, so holding that belief that you have about your first belief, if that is true ... and I’m not saying it is, what would you believe about that? ____ Let’s do that two more times. Holding the belief that you become aware of that’s holding the previous belief ... you’ve probably noticed that with each level that you move up, things get worse. The belief becomes uglier, cruder, nastier ... but at this point that doesn’t matter— you can just observe and just notice. If that belief is true, what would you believe about that? ____ And holding that belief, suppose that’s true, then what? ____ By now you have moved many levels upward in a matrix of frames about the first belief and have identified beliefs about beliefs... so now you can step aside from all of that ... completely and absolutely step back so that you can see this whole set of ideas, probably toxic and limiting ideas ... and as you realize that you’ve been living in that matrix ... how many years? ___ and have you had enough of that? ____ Does this way of thinking help you? ____ Does it enhance your life? ____ Does it empower you as a person? ____ Does it enable you to reach your highest potentials? ____ Is it a reflection of your highest spiritual self? ____

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Now if your answers are “no,” then are you ready for a miracle? ____ Are you ready to step out of that box of thinking as you have and try on something else that might enable you to be your best self and reach your highest outcomes? ____ Great! So now as you close your inner eyes ... close it to all of those layers of beliefs, and imagine going to bed and sleeping the most restful and rejuvenating sleep ... that’s right. Imagine a sleep that will be like no other sleep... because in this sleep something surprising will happen ... something that will completely change things for you and what will even be more surprising is that you will not know what about that surprising change. Because when people sleep, and a miracle happens in the middle of the night, because they are asleep and unconscious, they will awake the next day without being aware of the miracle. And you don’t have to be aware ... They won’t know that it happened, or how it happened, or why it happened, they will only be aware that things are different. And so will you. And others in their life will be aware that, “Wow, what happened to you?” And so as you imagine this most marvelous night of sleep and imagine that a miracle happens ... unconsciously ... outside of your awareness ... so that you cannot know about it ... your unconscious mind can begin to make the adjustments within you to prepare you for the changes ... that occur unconsciously. And take all the time that your unconscious mind needs to prepare your mind and emotions, your nervous system responses so that you can wake up in a moment on the day after the miracle and wonder, really wonder, “What in the world happened?” Because sometimes surprising things do happen, things happen that we can’t explain, and all you can do is wonder ... wonder ever so curiously ... Now when your unconscious is ready, you can open your eyes and stand up and ... let’s just change chairs ... and as you sit down in this new chair ... if this was the day after the miracle and you wake up rested and surprised and unknowing what happened or why, what would first let you know that something miraculous has happened? What would be different about you? ____.

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And who else would become aware of the changes in you? Who else would be wondering what’s happened and “what miracle happened to you?” ____ What would be the differences that they would see in you? ____ And supposing, just supposing, this happened, what would you be feeling and thinking and believing? _____. And as you describe all of that, what do you think? ____ Do you like that? ____ Would you like to be operating from those emotions and those ideas? How much? ____

What and Where What you do when you believe is invent an understanding about something, an understanding by which you attribute certain meanings to tangible things. Then, as you confirm that understanding state, and go into an altered state, you use it as a map. You move from the tangible world to the intangible. As things change in the outside world, beliefs in the inside world can also change. Because beliefs are not dependent upon being true, they can change fairly easily if you know what you’re doing. As intangible and relative trances, beliefs are only as good as they are useful and practical so you can navigate the territory of everyday reality more effectively. Yet beliefs can create limitations—they can cause you to become stuck and unable to do what you want to do. Where you take a person in developing and/or changing beliefs is to the hidden structure in the back of their mind regarding that person’s confirmation and/or disconfirmation. And you do that so that the person builds a series of beliefs that makes their journey through life more effective and enjoyable. You take the person to a place where she can disconfirm the old belief and then set things up to shift her out of that world into a world of possibilities. This uses a different kind of thinking that the thinking that created the problem and often lets the person map out an entirely new way to do things. Post Hypnotic Suggestions Beliefs are thought-about-thought structures and can be changed. Because you are free to think without believing, you can test a thought before you believe it.

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Because beliefs don’t have to be true to be believed, choose beliefs that are ecological and support your well-being. When you find a limiting belief, use possibility thinking to escape the old belief. Where you experience a limitation, look first for a limiting belief.

End of the Chapter Notes 1. For more about beliefs and their structure, see the book Sub-Modalities Going Meta (1999/ 1005).

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Chapter Seven

THE EMOTIONAL FREEDOM CONVERSATION Permission for Emotional Intelligence “The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.” Oscar Wild

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iven the nature of the mind-body system, every trance is at the same time, an emotional state. It could be positive or negative. It could be a paranoid trance state of intense fear and it could just as well be a compassion trance state of love and care. It could be an emotional trance state that is in reference to something in the see-hear-feel world like an enraged, aggressive angry state when violated or a focused state of absorption in a subject that you are studying. It could be an emotional trance state that is in reference to an idea or concept— the emotional state of feeling either positively responsible for an action or negatively at fault and blamed for an action. Because they are emotional states, trances include the full range of emotions—positive and negative. Trances as emotional states are also experiences of energy. As your mental focus narrows in on an idea so you become enraptured by the idea, your bodily energies, as e-motions, arise to enable you to achieve the intentions that are inherent in that state via your behaviors. This is great and it is scary. While it is great as an energy -64-

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process, it can be fearful and scary. And that’s because you can become afraid of your emotions— a very unproductive meta-state that can have disastrous consequences mentally and physically. When Emotions Become Dangerous Because of the energy created within your body as your emotions, that energy can sometimes cause you to fear an emotion. The emotion activates your physiology so that the way you talk, act, and gesture becomes too intense, too strong, too much. It happens all the time. This is especially true of anger inasmuch as with anger, you can aggress toward others in a way that creates hurt that violates the person. You can misuse the emotion of anger and use its energy for abuse. It can happen also with nearly every negative emotion— fear, stress, distress, sadness, worry, anxiety, disgust, etc. Yet it can just as well occur with the positive emotions. Some of them can seem dangerous and threatening, especially when they are too intense— love, excitement, lust, desire, care, joy, etc. What seems to inevitably happen next is that for the sake of the family, the community, the society, etc., we begin to forbid the expression of certain emotions. After all, they can get out of hand, and someone can get hurt, feel imposed upon, intimidated, uncomfortable, etc. From there it is but a short step to forbidding the emotion itself. Families are especially great at doing this. Don’t you raise your voice to your father. Don’t you be angry, go to your bedroom and don’t come out until you can put on a happy face. Don’t cry or be sad, boys don’t cry, you’ll be a sissy. Don’t be sad, think of all the good things you have! Don’t let that go to your head, you’ll get prideful and “pride goes before a fall.” Societies engage in this forbidding, or tabooing, of an emotion as a way of controlling behavior, managing people, and reducing conflict. And superficially it works—at some times or for a period of time. But long-term it does not work. There’s a reason for this. Emotions do not go away by commanding them to go away. That’s not how emotions work. The thinking that creates the emotion is the key, and similarly, such thinking also cannot be commanded. “Now you apologize for your brother and tell him that you love him!” -65-

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What happens when, in someone’s mind, an emotion becomes dangerous? Lots of things. First, you have shifted from the primary level to a metalevel. You are now having second feelings—you are fearing your emotions. And whereas negative emotions at the primary level can help helpful, useful, and valuable, negative emotions at the meta-level are not. Fear of a dog energizes you to be careful. Anger at being threatened enable you to fight or flee. But when you bring fear or anger against yourself— against your emotions, now you are in a state or trance of self-attack. The energy of those emotions are attacking your emotions: fear of anger, anger about fear, shame about anger, worry about fear, etc. In primary emotional states, the energy goes out to the world to deal with the situation. In metaemotional states, the energy goes against you. Now your mind and body will pay the price. You may pay the price somatically—headaches, backaches, ulcers, amplification of negative emotions, etc. You may pay the price mentally and psychosomatically. Any idea or emotion which taboos, prohibits, or makes an emotion notokay sets a prohibition frame. Therefore the solution will be to turn this around and make the emotion itself okay. As paradoxical as it may seem, the solution lies in giving the emotion permission. This sets up a healthy meta-state structure: acceptance of anger, thoughtful about fear, calm worry, playful concern, etc. What is an Emotion Anyway? As already noted, an e-motion is motion in the body that creates the urge within for you to move out (ex-) from where you are. That’s why every emotion has an action tendency. Emotions give you energy to make changes and adjustments regarding your relationship to various people, events, situations, and activities in the world. Primary emotions relate directly to real-world situations and are directly felt in the body. Meta-emotions (meta-states) relate, not to the world, but to your experience. Now you are experiencing emotions in relationship to another emotion, to an experience, or to an idea —hence a trance. These secondary emotions occur level upon level and are seldom directly felt in the body. They are mostly felt in the mind as evaluations and judgments. Self-esteem is mostly a judgment, not an emotion—an appraisal about what you think and feel about yourself as a human being.

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Neuro-Semantically, an emotion is the feel of meaning. The meaning you give to something generates the emotion that you feel— which is derived from the meaning. So, as you appraise meaning, so you feel. Further, an emotion is the difference between your internal map of the world and your external experience of the world. As a more complex understanding of how we create emotions, the difference between map and experience models an emotion as the relational function of map up against territory. Map refers to your thinking, meaning, understanding, expecting, etc. It is your model of the world that you use to navigate (what and how you do things). Then when you are out in the world, what happens? Does your map accurately describe the situation? If yes, then no difference and therefore no emotion, no movement. If no, the map disorients you in the territory so that you are disappointed, shocked, and surprised, then the world doesn’t live up to the map. And not meeting the requirements of the map, you feel negative emotions—upset, frustrated, stress, angry, fearful, anxious, sad, etc. If yes, your map described the world and the world over-fulfilled your understandings and expectations, you feel the positive emotions— joy, happiness, contentment, pleasure, excitement, passion, etc. It’s like a balancing scale. What you experience in the world either lives up to or fails to live up to your understandings and expectations (your map about it). If it lives up to it— positive emotions. If it fails to live up to it— negative emotions. So an emotion is the difference between your internal mental mapping about the world and your external experience in the world. Texturing Anger for Emotional Freedom Some years ago and for several years, I did a lot of court ordered anger control with men convicted of domestic violence. I once had a client who, like most court-ordered clients, didn’t want to be there, didn’t think he was at fault, didn’t take responsibility, and didn’t want to pay for “counseling.” Eventually I learned how to handle such seemingly “resistant” clients. Prior to this particular young man of 21 years of age, I read through the court’s information folder and then when he came in, I pointed him to where I had coffee and tea, and initiated some small talk. I asked how long he had lived in our town and if he was married. He was. I said that at his age he would probably be starting a family before long and have children. -67-

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He already had a child! You do? Boy or girl? A little girl. Just a baby. And at that he reached for his wallet to pull out a picture of the child. As I looked at the picture and commented, “What a beautiful child! I bet she’s the delight of your life. Huh?” he glowed with pride and couldn’t help but smile from ear to ear. “Yeah, you bet.” he said a bit emotional. “And do you get to hold her and feed her very often?” I asked using a holding-a-baby-in-the-corner-of-my-elbow type of movement gesturing as if feeding the child and saying, “I don’t quite remember, I think you have to put their neck right in the corner ...” “Yes, that’s right!” he said proudly as he show me a little bit more precisely just how to hold an infant and feed it. And, of course, doing that and imagining that, he easily went into his proud-day-ofmy-new-baby girl state. I continued to ask more questions about holding, nursing, and feeding an infant from a position of curiosity and validation. I congratulated him and his wife on the new born and commented in an off-handed way what a precious and magical time of life having a newborn can be. When he was completely in a caring, tender, and loving state, I continued in an off-thecuff kind of way. “And looking at her and realizing what an absolute miracle this gift of life is ... and knowing how precious she is to you ... and as you feel such love and compassion, I wonder how things will be for you if you could keep these thoughts and emotions so they are present with you whenever ... some day in the future ... you get angry and you need to express some displeasure to this child . . . just imagine if you could do that with calm anger, with appreciative anger, respectful anger, or maybe better yet, loving anger. ... I’m sure your anger would have a very new and different quality to it—it would be calm, thoughtful, considerate . . . and loving ... and wouldn’t that be a tremendous resource for protecting your relationship with her and other relationships, and working through conflicts?”

The young man couldn’t talk. He choked up. It was as if his entire neurology was in over-drive, processing and re-processing how to map out this very new and strange, and yet appealing, way of being. Later he told me that these were not the kind of words he had ever heard before. These -68-

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were not ideas or concepts that he had ever entertained: loving anger, calm and appreciative anger. The conversation had framed a reality that, while he had never experienced, he wanted and hoped for.1 The Emotional Freedom Conversation Induce a trance state of comfort and relaxation and a curiosity about how emotions could have been mis-informed and mis-framed in the circumstances of life. As you take a deep breath and hold it and then expel it, this will be one of your most powerful somatic tools for handling emotions, so take another deep breath, that’s right ... and hold it ... hold it ... and release it ... and enjoy the feelings of releasing the breath. And you can continue to do this in this induction because one of the things that inevitably happens when you experience a negative emotion — you stop breathing. You begin to hold your breath and breath more shallowly so here, to reverse that, continue to breath deeply, hold it for a few seconds, and release it. Now as you continue breathing, identify one emotion that troubles you, an emotion that you don’t like, and that you tend to forbid in yourself ... and probably in others. And as you do, let your mind think about a specific time and place and person when you shut down that emotion and refused it ... that will serve as the target experience that we will work with. Now as you recall that situation so that you see what you saw then, hear what you heard then, and feel what you felt at that time... what are some of the first thoughts that come to mind about that emotion? ____ What do you say to yourself? ____ What images or other situations may come to mind? ____ What are you experiencing in your body and where in your body are you experiencing that? ____ Any tightening of muscles, tensing back or neck or stomach. ____ Any movement in your stomach? ____ And as you just observe this somatic experience to the situation and the emotions that arise, what are the thoughts that seek to shut down the emotion? ___ How do you forbid or taboo the emotion? ____ What is the worst-case scenario that you use to fear or hate the emotion? ____ As that information comes to mind— no need to -69-

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judge it— just notice it, just observe and wonder, really wonder— who created this taboo? ____ Did you or your parents or your teachers or is it a cultural taboo in your society? ____ You can also check out: when did the prohibition occur, why, for what, how old were you, and so on. Now for the magic of permission, as you try on giving yourself permission to feel that emotion, simply say to yourself, either quietly inside or aloud, “I give myself permission to be angry...” and then notice what happens. ... “I give myself permission to feel sad...” “I give myself permission to be embarrassed...” You may need to repeat this several times ... and then, what to notice is how well it settles. Does it settle? How well? How many more times do you need to say the permission? ____ If it does not settle then probably something is preventing it from “going in.” But what? ____ What inside you is objecting to the permission? ____ What fears, apprehensions, worries, ideas, etc. arise to interfere with the permission? As you continue to just observe and breathe in and out fully ... what do you think of that objection? It could be an old childhood warning that’s no longer relevant. It could be your dad’s way of thinking, your mom’s family background. If the objection has anything within it that seems legitimate, embrace that objection and add it to your permission. “I give myself permission to be angry, to feel angry, and not to hurt anyone.” “I give myself permission to be sad and to be a real man. ” Turn the objection around and frame it so that it no longer stops you from accepting and embracing your emotions as just emotions. And you can continue to do this, issue a permission that sets the frame that emotions are neutral and a normal expression of human beings... and let objections arise... and keep reframing the objections so that they are answered in an ecological way. And you can do that because you now know the process. Whatever arises from within is just human stuff and nothing more. And you can set yourself free to feel emotions, take note of them, utilize them when appropriate, and then let them go.

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As you imagine the emotional freedom that now awaits you in the days and months and years to come— you can wonder about how your emotional intelligence will increase thereby making you healthier in your body and more loving and appropriate in your relationships.

What and Where What you do when you hold this conversation with someone is transform old fearful forbidden frames about emotions for transformative ways to think about and manage emotions. Because emotions are inevitable, they are an important part of our humanity. Your emotions are also great because your emotions also make you more alive and energized. Emotions, as the feel of meaning, gives you a somatic way of registering your meanings and values. Where you take a person is into her inner world of belief frames (a trance state) about emotions that create unnecessary limitations and problems. You take him to a place for emotional intelligence. Wisdom lies in knowing that they are just emotions and that you create them. And as you create them, you can also learn how to manage them in effective ways so that they give you the energy for taking action, the motivation to stay inspired, the care to relate effectively to your loved ones and friends. Post-Hypnotic Suggestions Emotions are symptomatic of your thinking, beliefs, and meanings. Emotions arise to give you energy and vitality. Where there are troubling emotions, there are limiting beliefs, taboos, or other restrictive frames. Permission is a near-magical reframe for limiting emotions.

End of the Chapter Notes 1. From Winning the Inner Game (2000/ 2007), chapter 13.

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Chapter Eight

THE PLEASURE CONVERSATION Enjoying the Joy Trance

“I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.” Oscar Wilde “I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.” Rita Mae Brown

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leasure —primary pleasures of your body and meta-pleasures of your mind— you were made for pleasure. Both your body and your mind operates best when you experience pleasure—the simple and basic pleasures of joy, enjoyment, contentment, delight, and mindfulness. Pleasure represents another trance state—the state of inwardly delighted and joyful, the state of looking out of appreciating eyes, a state of positive vitality, and a state of optimism. The Neurology of Pleasure When it comes to the body, there are a thousand pleasure centers scattered throughout the body. It’s as if the body was made for pleasure. Interesting enough, there are also thousands of pain centers throughout the body. So -72-

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similarly, it’s as if the body was made also for pain. The fact is that the pain and pleasure centers enable you to know at the body level what’s good for you and what’s bad for you. This pain–pleasure duality enables you to move away from what triggers pain and toward what triggers pleasure—it is the most fundamental motivation system which is built into your very neurology and, as such, creates an inner propulsion system. 1 Now of these two, pain is the strongest and it “A bird doesn't sing is appropriately the strongest. Pain sensors let because it has an you know immediately and powerfully what answer, it sings because does not fit, what does not contribute and the it has a song.” strength of the pain stimulus enables you to Maya Angelou quickly move away from and avoid what is dangerous or hurtful. Given the nature of the pain triggers and our response, pain is not to be lived in or endured. It is to be used strictly as a warning signal. This pain process works best in you when you get the signal and then do what you need to in order to move away from the stimulus. The pleasure dynamic differs entirely from this. When a pleasure trigger is activated, it invites you to move toward them and embrace that trigger so that you live in the state of pleasure. Accordingly, the pleasure response is not as strong as the pain response. It is more gentle, more soothing and inviting. Why? Because pleasure is designed so that you can live in it. This system of the pain— pleasure duality not only moves you away from pain and toward pleasure, it establishes the basic behavioral development and learning process. With whatever you are doing behaviorally, pleasure reinforces it so that you are naturally motivated to want to do it again, and more often. Pleasure reinforces what you like and enjoy thereby making the experience more likely to re-occur. It anchors the pleasure experience and the behaviors that trigger the pleasure. Conversely, pain gets you to stop doing what you’re doing and so extinguishes the likelihood of repeating that behavior. Not only does pain do that, but also the lack of a pleasure response extinguishes whatever you are doing. If you’re getting nothing out of it, you are much less likely to keep doing it.

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The Richness of Pleasure Consider all of the pleasure centers and experiences that are wired into your neurology. There are all of the kinesthetic pleasures—the pleasure of touch, of stroking the skin, of feeling the warming of the sun on the skin, of movement (running, playing, jumping, rolling, etc.), of rubbing hands together, and on and on. There are all of the pleasures of smell and taste— the different smells of food and plants, the multiple pleasures of the tastes of different foods. There are the visual pleasures— the pleasures of the eye, beauty, color, symmetry, order, etc. There are the auditory pleasures— the pleasures of sounds, rhythms, tones, tempos, of music, the sounds of nature, and on and on. In terms of pleasure, there are ten-thousand different things that can induce the joy of life. You can pleasure yourself in multitudes of sensory-based pleasures which bright joy and delight, which bring wonder and humor into life. In is certainly not the case that the world is deficient of pleasures— they are everywhere. In the sensory-world there’s an abundance, no, an over-abundance, of pleasures that you can delight yourself in. And that’s just the sensory-based facet of life, then there are all of the metapleasures above and beyond the sensory ones. To discover these, you only have to ask a meta-pleasure question about any given sensory pleasure. Ask, “What is the pleasure that you derive from that pleasure?” Nor does that question stop after the first reflection. Whatever answer emerges, you can ask the question again, “And given that meta-pleasure, what is the pleasure that you find in that?” With this you can elicit a hierarchy of pleasures. Talk about a trance—a pleasure trance! Now the fascinating thing about meta-pleasures is that they comprise human values. Consider your answers to the sensory question: What is the pleasure of walking on a beach, enjoying the feel of the warm sun on your skin and feeling the warm sand between your toes? There’s a whole range of answers: relaxation, beauty, time alone with my thoughts, rejuvenation, etc. And what are these answers? Values. Here you will hear answers that are mostly nominalizations which code what’s important to us about that given sensory experience. How about that! Meta-pleasures are values. First we have a world of sensory pleasures and then pleasures-about-those-pleasures, metapleasures, which are in essence— values. This, in part, explains why -74-

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“values” reward and reinforce behaviors just as pleasure does, every value is a pleasure, a pleasure of the mind, a pleasure of meaning, of significance. Here again we find another fundamental division between animal and humans. Animals know sensory pleasures—movement, play, food, shelter, conquering, warmth, etc. What they don’t do is jump a logical level and construct a conceptual pleasure—a meta-pleasure. That’s what we humans do as we create these pleasurable trance states. And these pleasures, as higher logical levels, are therefore more powerful, more motivational, and more moving than the sensory- based pleasures. With this understanding we can now grasp the phenomena of addiction. It is almost exclusively a human problem. Generally speaking, animals in nature, when they have enough of a pleasure— quit. They eat until they are full and stop. They sleep until they are rested, and then they get up. They drink until thirst is quenched, and then they stop. There is a threshold and they don’t go beyond it. They listen to their bodies and so do not become addicted to the sensory pleasure. The exception is when we give them false satisfiers (our sugar-laden junk food) or introduce them to life in captivity. But not us humans. With any pleasure, we can so load it with metapleasures (constructed values and meanings) that we never get enough. Whereas animals have and listen to the natural thresholds for eating, drinking, sleeping, sexing, etc., we humans don’t listen to the natural thresholds. In fact, we can, and do, push through and past the thresholds until we damage ourselves, our health, and our sanity. That’s how pleasure can go wrong and how we then eat, drink, work, and so on in an addictive way. When we psycho-eat, that is, eat for psychological reasons (i.e., love, relaxation, good life, reward, etc.), the simple pleasure is semantically overloaded. In this way we create an addiction trance—a pleasure trance state that is not ecological and one difficult to resist.2 Pleasuring in Just the Right Way What then is needed is both the intelligence and ability to use the energy of pleasure in just the right way so it energizes you, keeps you appropriately motivated, and able to delightfully enjoy life. This means using sensory and meta pleasures to reinforce the behaviors and responses that will comprise a healthy and ecological lifestyle. To do that, you will want to embrace -75-

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sensory pleasures for what they are: food as nutriments, liquids for thirst and hydration, sleep for rejuvenation, sex for procreation and for bonding, etc.3 By relating to and using the sensory pleasures accurately for what they are, you will be far less likely to over-use them or under-use them. When you get to a threshold, you will stop. This requires that you do not load them up with too many meta-pleasures as well as that you attain the meta-pleasures in healthful ways. If you eat for love, eat because you’ve associated love with sweets, because mom said, “Mommy loves you so much, here’s a cookie,” you have to clean out that meta-frame and get love more directly, namely, from being in a healthy loving relationship. No amount of food or sweets will ever satisfy the desire for love. Psycho-eating, psycho-spending, psycho-working, psycho-drugging, etc. are illegitimate ways to handle these legitimate facets of life. In psychology we call them “secondary gains.” That is, a person misuses a primary pleasure to get a secondary gain from it. A person may smoke trying to be assertive, trying to relax, trying to be social, trying to be “a real man,” etc. These secondary gains are important to the person and legitimate needs, but they will not and cannot be fulfilled by smoking. That’s not within the range of satisfactions what smoking can provide. These pleasures as meta-pleasures have gotten associated with smoking so that in the psycho-logics of smoking, it seems that one is getting these pleasures which are in reality secondary to the activity. Yet, all in all, it is illegitimate and does not work. The solution? Identify the meta-pleasures that is semantically over-loading a primary pleasure, check the ecology of the pattern, remove the metapleasures from the activity, gain access to the meta-pleasures in some other healthy way, and then let the activity be what it is and only what it is. The other way to use pleasure in just the right way is to take time embracing and enjoying pleasures all the way up. Begin with the sensory pleasures and embrace them as satisfiers for what they can adequately and truly satisfy. Then embrace the meta-pleasures as your higher level values. Pleasure yourself every day so that your body and neurology fully feels the delight and joy of life. To miss out on pleasure is to miss out on the very vitality and joy of living.

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The Pleasure Conversation Induce a comfortable trance state, one of curiosity about pleasure, one of taking an adventure into pleasure. In just a moment, I want to invite you into an adventure... an adventure of pleasure and into pleasure, so as you relax in a joyful and delightful way, and to prepare for that ... let your unconscious mind search through your lifetime of experiences until it finds several moments of pleasure ... and as your unconscious mind engages in that search, the search doesn’t have to be for outrageous happiness, just quiet and little moments of pleasure, walking on a beach, feeling the sand between your toes, having someone massage your feet or your back, listening to beautiful music, staring up at the Milky Way galaxy and feeling a sense of awe and wonder... Because the ability to experience pleasure is an ability built into your very neurology because you have been wired for a thousand pleasures, pleasures of sights, sounds, sensations, and smells ... and because of this inner potential, you can live each and every day with joy and delight, a sense of being alive. And as you appreciate this realization even now, you can let a tingle run up your spine giving you a little tickle of delight. And because of this inherent potential of joy and delight in your neurology, you can live with more humor, more fun, more laughter ... humor, fun, and laughter that will make your relationships richer and your work more energized, because there’s nothing inherently valuable in being serious or forlorn, there’s nothing inherently effective or even useful in being stern or joyless. When you look at a stern and joyless person, they have that pained look as if they have a steel beam shoved up their ass ... So as your unconscious scans through moments of pleasure ... you can expand that search to activities and experiences that you thoroughly enjoy. And these may be things wherein you put forth lots of effort, even sweat and blood, but that you find fun— running a race, preparing for the Olympics, lifting weights, hunting, canoeing, swimming, skiing, all sorts of athletic activities. You can also scan through other experiences—rocking a baby, presenting a

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workshop, running a meeting, resolving a conflict, negotiating a win/win arrangement, and on and on. Because human beings have learned to enjoy all sorts of things and as they have, because they do it for fun, for enjoyment, they learn and accelerate their learning as they experiment and play with ideas or paints or machines. And as your unconscious choose one thing that you thoroughly enjoy whether you are skilled at it yet, notice all of the sensory-based factors of that delight. If it is soaking in a bubble bath— detail what you see, hear, feel, and smell. If it is baking bread in the oven, describe as fully as possible all that you see, hear, feel, and smell. Now in describing the sensory experience in detail undoubtedly invites you to go there and experience it fully because that’s how the languages of the mind works. And as you experience it, hold that joy constant as you step back from the whole experience, feeling it and yet gaining a meta-perspective of it ... and now notice, “What is so pleasurable about that pleasure?” And you can wonder, really wonder, what pleasure do you experience about that first level pleasure? ____ How is it valuable to you? ____ And you can let these questions, “What is so pleasurable about the pleasure?” and “How is it valuable to you?” echo over and over in the back of your mind calling forth more and more of the values that frame the primary pleasure. And of course, enjoy the process because as you do this, the pleasure will increase ever so delightfully and, you know, that will be really good for your health and your attitude. When you have identify one or two strong meta-pleasures, you can now journey upward on each one by iterating the questions over and over ... holding whatever meta-pleasure as a value that emerges and ask about its next higher level pleasure or value. And you can wonder, really wonder, what are the meta-pleasures that frame and outframe it and outframe it yet again in your pleasure matrix. And your unconscious mind can continue this process when you sleep and dream because letting the deepest part of your mind participate in joy and humor endows your deepest personality with humor and playfulness. -78-

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Now feeling what you feel, a basic delight and joy in life— what would you like to connect this feeling to, because you can, you can spread this pleasure around and connect it to things that you have not, so far in your life, linked to joy or fun. What everyday activities, shaking hands, getting dressed, fixing breakfast, etc., any small but regular activity that would make life richer if you would associate it with this feeling of joy ? And because you can now link the feeling with an activity, it is up to your creativity and choice about what to link up.

What and Where What you do when you facilitate this conversation is you enable a person to get in touch with the most basic sensory pleasures and use them. You are enabling a person to distinguish between pleasure and entertainment. When you and your clients know how to access the thousand pleasures which the human body is designed to experience, a person will need less and less entertainment, less and less distractions from work. Where you take a person with this conversation is into his neurological resources for a basic joy and contentment and then into the psychological resources for creating energy and motivation. The reason to do this is so you can experience joyful pleasure in whatever you do. Then you can bring fun and delight to any and every activity so that work no longer feels like work, but a pleasure. It becomes inevitably joyful. Post-Hypnotic Suggestions You are wired for pleasure and for meta-pleasure. Embrace sensory pleasures without over-loading them semantically. Let your meta-pleasures establish your passion, purpose, and direction. End of the Chapter Notes 1. See Propulsion Systems (2003). There are numerous propulsion systems built into our neurology and our mind–emotion systems. 2. The “De-Pleasuring Pattern” that is introduced in Meta-States Training (APG) is a central way to undo an addiction trance state. See Secrets of Personal Mastery (1997) for that pattern. 3. See Games Fit and Slim People Play (2001), Games Great Lovers Play (2005).

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INTEGRATION CONVERSATIONS While the previous conversations were designed to facilitate developing a solid foundation as a person, the following are designed to create an internal integration so that you fully own and experience your personal development. This addresses one of the biggest problems in human experience, namely, we know a lot more than we do. Intellectually we can grasp and understand things ... yet understanding by itself is not enough. We have to close the knowing—doing gap. We have to take what we know and integrate them into our deepest mind. Here again, hypnotic thinking and speaking comes in to facilitate this integration. We begin with distinguishing real explanations from false ones—excuses so that you can catch yourself from making excuses and then stop excusing yourself from excellence (conversation #1). Next, there is the mind-to-muscle pattern which is a linguistically driven process. Here you will use language itself to take something you know at a conceptual level and drive it into your neurology and close the knowing— doing gap (conversation #2). With the alignment conversation, you will have the opportunity to take something that you do, and do pretty well, but you know that you could do so with more power and elegance, the full range of your potentials. When you do that, you will begin experience the power of personal congruency (conversation #3).

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Chapter Nine

THE NO-EXCUSE CONVERSATION The Responsibility Trance . “Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” Sigmund Freud “The price of greatness is responsibility.” Winston Churchill “Choices may be unbelievably hard but they're never impossible. To say you have no choice is to release yourself from responsibility and that's not how a person with integrity acts.” Patrick Ness

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f hypnotic trances are internally focused states, then every meta-state is a trance state. Given that you think reflexively about your previous thought, emotion, or experience, when you access a mental-emotional state about another state, as you internally focus you access a hypnotic state —a trance. This is especially true when it comes to states about responsibility, choice, explanations, excuses, initiative, etc. In such states you operate from concepts and understandings that can be intelligently informed as explanation or can equally be used as excuses which thereby

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save you from responsibility, action, proactivity, persistence, even resilience. What enables this to work is something very good, something essential in human development and civilizations—reasoning. Reasoning from facts to a conclusion, inductive thinking, lies at the heart of the scientific attitude. When such reasoning is accurate and clear headed, it enables us to create new products and inventions. Even when we start with conceptual premises and deduce from that accurate conclusions, deductive thinking, provides yet another effective use of rational thinking. Reasoning from one thing to another enables you to develop hypothesis and theories about causation, processes, how things function, etc. From those hypotheses, you can then set up experiments and test to determine their accuracy and usefulness. Reasoning is scientific if it can be tested and refined whereas when an idea cannot be tested, and there’s no criteria that would prove it in error, it cannot be considered scientific. If a hypothesis cannot be falsified, then it cannot be scientific thinking. Then we have to conclude that it is purely a belief and a belief that is detached from the facts of reality. Clear-headed reasoning uses skepticism to test itself. It looks for feedback, looks for where it does not work (the Null hypothesis). We call this “critical thinking.” By stepping back from your reasoning, and checking out your thinking, quality controlling how you are thinking, enables you to think critically, and to keep improving the quality of your reasoning powers. In that way you can slowly develop explanations for why things are as they are, how they work, what improves them, what undermines them, etc. Now you have workable explanations that leads to new inventions, new developments, and improvement of civilization itself. Inadequate and Erroneous Explanations But all reasoning isn’t helpful. Some reasoning is not valid, correct, or accurate at all. Reasoning becomes unreasonable when it is flawed and biased. Sometimes the explanations we come up with are even worse than no explanation. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the “explanation” that people can be cured by blood-letting was an attractive “modern” idea. Yet it proved to be more destructive and dangerous than if there was no explanation for how to help. -82-

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This also happens at the personal level. At the individual level, such explanations are excuses, justifications, rationalizations, fallacies, myths, misunderstandings, mis-beliefs, biases, etc. And sadly, we all fall victim to these false ways of reasoning, some more than others. Why? Some of it is because of left-over childish thinking. One or more of the ways we thought as children may have so habitual that it now is our regular thinking pattern. Perhaps we still constantly personalize, or awfulize, or over-generalize, or use many of the other cognitive distortions.1 Then there is the human need to protect oneself and one way that we do that is through defense mechanisms. We use justification, rationalization, denial, projection (mind-reading), judgment, etc. for “protection.” But of course, it is a pseudo-protection. In fact, the more insecure a person is in one’s inner self, the more one will tend to default to one or more defense mechanisms. Then “reasoning” becomes incredibly flawed as we use all of our intellectual powers to intellectualize. This is a complete mis-use of reasoning and it gives the concept of being “rational” a bad name. That Which Evokes Excuses What triggers us to make excuses, rationalize away our actions, and invent false explanations? It might surprise you that the answer is a goal. Set a goal, decide on a course of action, plan a way to achieve an outcome, or have a goal set for you by your manager, a deadline to reach— and presto! we humans suddenly become incredibly creative in the excuses and rationalizations that we invent. When you have some action to do, that’s when to get away from that obligation or responsibility, you grab ahold of any “explanation” no matter how flimsy. “It’s too hard. I can’t do that! It’s too cold. It’s too hot. I’m not ready. It will take too much time. I can’t afford it, it costs too much. I’ve first got to do X. I’m too afraid. I’ve never done that before. I will make a mess of it, I always do.”

With excuses, you excuse yourself from the very thing you need to do. “Yes, I should read that chapter, there’s a test tomorrow, but I’m too tired. I know I should finish that project in the backyard, but there’s a ball game on TV. I know I need to exercise, but I’ll start that when I feel better. I know I should buy these cookies, but I deserve a little break, I’ve been under such stress.”

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Excuses are seductive because they relieve you of stress and pressure, that make life easier, they allow you to gain some immediate gratification, and they seem to sooth your mind. But excuses offer a pseudo-solution and in the long run, they not only do not work, they make things worse. When you make an excuse— which many people do not think they do because they think it is a legitimate reason—you excuse yourself from excellence and settle for mediocre. Reasons — Legitimate or Illegitimate? The distinction between true and false rationalization is that an excuse is an illegitimate reason. It is not a real reason, but covers up and/or pretends to be real. Legitimate reasons offers facts about the situation, the actual constraints involved that have to be taken into account. If you have a stress-activate auto-immune system disease and you have not been exercising regularly, then it would not be a good idea to set a goal to workout daily for one to two hours. If you only have saved up $200 and your line-of-credit at the bank is only $1,000, it would not be a good idea to plan for a business that would require $500,000. If it is not realistic in terms of time, money, personnel, energy, etc. to do something or engage in a particular activity, then it would not be legitimate to do so. By reasoning from the facts regarding whether something is ecological (fits your personal or business system) enables you to figure out if your decision to not do something is a real explanation or just an excuse. Both explanations and excuses are concepts. In the mind they are metalevel frames (hence, trances) governing how you interpret the actions and activities that you are considering. To flush these out further, ask a series of exploration questions about them: Is it realistic?” Then ask, “How realistic is it? To what degree? What is the probability that it would work and succeed? What is the probability that it would not work? What resources and factors would increase the probability? How much are those possibilities? What are the driving and restraining forces in the system? Once you chase out the kind of thinking that uses reasoning to create the understanding, you will know whether you have an explanation trance state or an excuse trance state. And that will then put you at choice point where -84-

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you can make an intelligent decision. Will you excuse yourself from your excellence with an excuse? Will you work with the explanation to find or create the resources you need? What will you do? The No-Excuse Trance Conversation Induce a trance state of calm clarity, one of clear observation wherein the person is see-and-seeing, hear-and-hearing, feel-and-feeling. To begin ... stretch out your arms as far as you can ... stretching, stretching, and stretching even further ...and as you stretch, release all of the tensions of the day. And as you notice these feelings, you can enjoy the pleasure of relaxing and letting go because to let go of things that interfere is also a wonderful pleasure. So stretch and release ... let go whatever is not really important and begin to let what is truly important to come into focus. With the clarity of your inner vision, there’s something that you want to do which is very important for you ... and as you think about that goal now ... just let it begin to take form on the theater of your mind so that you can see that goal ... in color and bright ... and hear what you would hear if you were fully experiencing it even now. Because your goal doesn’t have to be a big thing, it can be to lose ten pounds, or finish a report, to clean out the garage, or devote an hour playing with your children. When you see your goal ... see it so that it attracts you so that you say, “That is the future I want!” then go ahead and ... step into that future where you have reached your goal ... that’s right, move toward it and step right into it so that you feel what it feels like to be there, so that you let your body and neurology fully experience it ... and how compelling is that for you? ____ Do you need it to be more compelling? ____ More inspirational? ____ If so, just turn up the feelings and notice what happens. Now feeling all of the desirable feelings of reaching that goal ... let it pull on you as you step back to this moment ... stepping back further and further until you come back to today ... but you are now back here at today with the feelings of your desired outcome pulling on you ... pulling you into that future. And notice how that creates a creative tension within you, you are not where you want to be, and -85-

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where you want to be is still off in the future— a week, two weeks, maybe a month— whatever it is, your unconscious mind can now allow that creative tension to grow ... creating a discontent, a strong desire ... a growing strong desire ... to begin to move forward to that goal. As you are now sitting or standing in today and wondering what has to occur for you to reach that goal, you can imagine ... just imagine... That you take the first step forward ... one step toward your goal and as you do notice what you will need to do, what actions you need to take so that you can begin the adventure of reaching your goal ... And noticing that action, will you take it? ____ If yes, step forward. And keep stepping forward until you come upon an action that you need to take but that seems difficult or hard to take ... And be there silently, quietly, just observing. That’s right. Feeling the discontent of wanting to move forward and reach your goal and feeling also the difficulty of some action before you, is that an excuse? ___ Or is it a reason, a legitimate understanding that is stopping you? If it is, step back from it, imagine moving upward to a meta-level and identify what it is. What is the explanation? ____ What can you do to resource the activity or alter the factors? ____ What is the probability that the explanation is realistic? ____ What is the probability that it is unrealistic? ____ What is valuable about it that is legitimate and that you want to keep with you? ____ Any other value? ____ How can you satisfy that value and take action on moving toward your goal? ____ And your unconscious mind and keep doing this— cleaning out the reasoning to find out what’s valuable and what’s not, what valid and what’s not. If it is just an excuse, a silly and ridiculous excuse that you have used or are using to prevent you from moving forward or if you have cleaned out an explanation so that all that is left is an empty shell of an excuse, what is the excuse? ____ Is it just an excuse? ____ And as you realize this now, and as you move to choice point, what will you do? ____ Will you say yes to the excuse or yes to the goal? Will you say no to the excuse or no to the goal? ____ Because the choice is yours and yet because you are the kind of person who wants to actualize your potentials and become your best self, feeling the -86-

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compelling, inspiring feelings of the goal ... allow a powerful No arise within you that you an utter to the excuse. No way, I choose my

desired outcome.

And you can repeat that inside your mind or aloud, No way, I choose my desired outcome! you can enjoy the delight of knowing that you are the architect of your future and you can chase out excuses so that you can make things happen that are important in your life. From this day forward, you can make decisions— wise, ecological, and powerful decisions rather than excuses.

What and Where What you do in this conversation is enable someone to clear out the difference between a real explanation and an excuse. You enable the person to do some critical thinking and to use one’s ability to reason effectively. While great and wonderful goals are often sabotaged by petty and nasty little excuses, you can now make that a thing of the past. You can chase out excuses, distinguish explanations from excuses and develop an integrity that prioritizes your values and goals. Where you take a person in this conversation is into her meta-cognitive awareness of his thinking and into valuing so that he can ultimately be true to himself. You take her into her executive self wherein she sets an executive policy about how to act on her goals. Post-Hypnotic Suggestions Reasoning can lead to an Explanation Trance as well as an Excuse Trance, knowing the difference keeps you focused. When there’s something to do or achieve (a goal) there is the possibility of inventing excuses by which you can sell yourself short. When you make an excuse, you excuse yourself from excellence. To be responsible, amplify your vision and blow out your excuses.

End of Chapter Notes 1. For the list of cognitive distortions, see Executive Thinking (2019).

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Chapter Ten

THE INTEGRATION CONVERSATION Commissioning Body to Feel Ideas

Until knowledge is in neurology and available in behavior, it is just a rumor.

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hen it comes to trances, we are often in an unconscious state carrying out a set of actions that we over-learned. Actually any action repeated over and over habituates a response pattern so that what once took a lot of conscious attention can later occur without any conscious attention. From brushing your teeth, tying your shoe laces, to riding a bike, driving a car, typing on a keyboard to just about all sport activities and hobbies— the body can learn the set of actions required for a behavior or experience and now do it unconsciously. When this occurs, a trigger or stimulus usually sets off the unconscious response pattern. Usually by merely sitting on a bike will activate the set of unconscious responses for riding a bike. Putting your fingers on a key board will activate your program for typing. When the stimulus occurs the physiology and neurology that makes up the behavior takes over—micro-

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movements occur inside as specific neurons fire and activate specific neuropathways and release particular hormones and enzymes. What shall we say about this incredible—and still mysterious— process? We could say that we have commissioned our body to feel a learning or understanding. The body has learned a feeling response pattern regarding some process. A conceptual set of understandings, like the setup of a keyboard and how to program the fingers to “know” which keys correspond to the letters of the alphabet. Conceptual understandings about how to fly a plane, do heart surgery, repair a tooth, even read a book has been turned into a set of step-by-step processes which “the unconscious mind” has learned at the neurological level and can now run without the need for conscious attention. Amazing! How does something abstract and conceptual get into the body, get into the unconscious mind, so that it becomes an automatic program? How is it that when you first begin a new learning in a domain it requires every bit of your conscious awareness, but then sometime later, it operates as a autonomous program and as a skilled competency? In some manner you have set up a process whereby you enabled your largerand-outside-of-conscious mind to transform cognitive learning into neurological responses. You have commissioned your body to feel the ideas and the learnings. There’s layers of mystery in this. It begins with the mystery is how mind (a mystery in itself) is translated into muscle-memory (another mystery). What we know is that by learning something and learning it well, in fact, over-learning it (via repetition), that learning becomes integrated as an intact, autonomous behavioral program. As you have “programmed” your bodily responses, we could say that you conditioned them, shaped them, or installed them.1 Mind-to-Muscle Integration Nothing better illustrates the mind-to-muscle integration of our behavioral programs than typing. Typing is not natural. There’s nothing “natural” about the position of the letters on a keyboard. In fact, today’s keyboard was intentionally designed to slow down typing. In the early days of typewriters, the keys were mechanical. When you pushed down on a key for a letter, a long piece of metal with the letter on the end would physically -89-

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hit an ink ribbon and imprint the letter on a piece of paper. If a person typed too quickly, the long pieces of metal would get tangled up. So to slow things down, the letters were placed in specific positions to make it take a bit longer for one’s figures to reach keys that usually go together. The letters are not put on as keyboard in the order they appear in the alphabet nor on the best order for speed. The order is not natural. To know where they are involves an abstract understanding. You have to learn where the letters are, where the numbers are, and where the other linguistic symbols are. And that takes time and practice. I discovered this some years ago when my business partner sent me an email asking me how to do “right justify the margin in Word Perfect.” He had shifted from that program to another word processing program and for some reason he now needed that information. The amazing thing is that I did not know the answer—consciously. But when I put my hands on the keyboard and thought “right justify the margin” my fingers went “Alt.–Control–F4.” By watching my fingers (!), I learned afresh a conceptual learning that I had forgotten consciously. Yet my fingers knew. Talk about strange! “My fingers knew.” How do fingers know things? How can hands or feet know how to do things and what to do and the right timing? Via over-learning which involved conscious understanding and lots of practice, my fingers came to know how to use a keyboard, how to program various formats for writing different presentations. What I know and understand in my mind eventually was transferred and integrated into the muscle-memory of my hand and fingers. We refer to this as the mind-to-muscle integration and it is a trance induction which occurs all the time to everyone about all sorts of things. Accelerating Mind-to-Muscling Now for one of the most personal and even challenging questions which we all face. What do you know intellectually that you need to have available at the unconscious level? What do you know that you don’t do? What great ideas are you conscious of, understand, and perhaps even believe in, but you are not living those ideas? -90-

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Think about things that you know about relationships, loving, resolving conflicts, careers, creating wealth, handling money, negotiating, exercising, staying fit, eating healthily, and on and on that you are not living? What do you know that would make a truly transformative difference in your life that you would love to commission your body to feel and to live? Now imagine that you could get yourself to do what you know ... wouldn’t that be great? You would probably be experiencing a lot more joy and sense of power if you could do that. But how? Obviously, you can do that by over-learning. You can do that by giving yourself lots of practice, especially deliberate feedback with very specific sensory feedback. Levels of Consciousness You could also integrate the knowledge into neurology by intentionally linking the knowledge through the various levels of consciousness. After all between abstract understanding and doing there are many levels. There is the level of believing. There is the level of deciding and choosing. There is the level of emoting. There are numerous meta-levels. The levels of consciousness is a function of your self-reflexive consciousness. At the first level, the primary level, you think and feel X about some stimulus in the outside world. You think and feel fearful about a growling dog. That’s the primary state. Above and beyond that state would be the state that you have about that state. You could be angry at your fearful state. You could be curious about the fear. You could love the feeling of fear. That would be your first meta-state. Yet it doesn’t end there. If you feel upset about your fear, what do you think and feel about feeling upset about the fear? Ashamed, guilty, depressed, angry, fearful? In chapter six we saw how that thinking occurs at the primary state whereas believing occurs at the meta-state levels. In that chapter, I noted that there are all sorts of beliefs and meanings about things— and that gives us levels which we call decision, permission, identity, understanding, etc. What do levels of thinking or consciousness have to do with integrating knowledge into behavior? A lot! Sometimes at an abstract level you know something, but don’t believe it, or have not decided on it, or don’t permit it, etc. What we discovered in Neuro-Semantics is that you can use your linguistics to drive your knowledge into your neurology. That’s because it requires different kinds and intensities of neurology to linguistically represent knowledge. -91-

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Test this yourself. Think about something that you know. What do you know is true? “Health is facilitated by exercising regularly.” “Wealth is created by saving some money every payday.” Notice the simplicity of these statements. Such knowledge shows up as basic principles and can be coded as a truism. “Relationships thrive best when there is respect.” These are stated impersonally and conceptually. Notice what happens when you say one of these lines out-loud. Start your sentence with “I understand...” “I understand that health and well-being is facilitated by exercising regularly.” It doesn’t take much mental and emotional energy to say that, does it? As you do that a couple times, notice your physiology, your breathing, your stance, your emotions, your voice, your gestures. Easy to do, right? Now for something a bit more challenging. Now start the sentence with “I believe...” and state it as if you really did believe what you’re saying. “I believe that I can facilitate my health and well-being by exercising regularly.” Did you find that stating that out-loud takes a lot more energy? Did you also notice the differences that occurred in your body? What happened in your physiology, breathing, stance, emotions, voice, and gestures? Most people find that they experience a very different kind of physiological state. As they access more of a believing state, they have to use much more of their neurology. Next state it as a decision by starting the sentence with, “I will ...” (Or, I want to... I choose to...”). “I will facilitate my health and well-being by exercising regularly.” When you use the linguistics of believing and deciding, you use much more personal language and that requires increasingly more neurology. Here the language changes as it is coding things in process language in the here-andnow. And here, along with the statements, come various emotions— excitement, fear, curiosity, anxiety, hope, etc. And that leads to the next statement, “I am feeling...” “I am feeling excited as I think about improving my health and wellbeing by exercising regularly although I’m feeling some apprehension about whether I will stay with it.” The key here is welcoming, embracing, and noticing the emotions— the energy in the body that causes you to move and act. Here it doesn’t matter if the emotions are positive or negative—you can use either to get you -92-

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moving, which is the reason for e-motions— to generate movement and actions. And if your linguistics have now activated the emotional energy to act, it’s time to facilitate some actions. “The one thing that I will do today to make this real in my life is...” This statement translates the somatic energy created by the beliefs, decisions, and emotions into some practical action and starts the ball moving. It creates momentum in making the change—and momentum, getting started, is typically the hardest part of initiating a new change. In all of this—you are using your linguistics to drive the idea down the levels of consciousness until it gets to the somatic level and then actualized in specific actions. The Integration Conversation Begin by inducing a trance state of comfort, but not relaxation. Aim for a comfortable state of learning and discovery, a state of anticipation and wonder at what new behavioral changes will be occurring. As you begin to access a relaxed state of calmness, give your face a chance to relax... move your mouth around, to the right, to the left, furrow your brow... let your face dance ... Frown, now smile... a bigger smile— and as you let that smile spread around your face, you can relax even more and feel joyful because you can wonder... And as you wonder, really wonder, it’s time for you to choose an idea, a really great idea that you want to commission your body to feel. It could be an idea like “Wealth is created inside-out as you give value.” Or, “Health develops with regular exercising.” Whatever the idea is—consider how to state it so that it is simple, direct, impersonal, and something that experts in that field would readily agree with. And as you find that statement, what would it be like in your life if that statement was your frame-of-mind and your attitude? ____ How big of a smile does that bring forth? Now as you find that statement, you can say it in your mind and then out-loud so that you can hear it. “Deep and rejuvenating sleep requires letting the worries and stresses of the day go.” And as you say it, start your sentence with “I know ...” Or “Intellectually it is clear that...” And as you speak it you can notice, really notice, what those words feel like inside, how your body and physiology responds -93-

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in saying it and to your saying it ... because languaging it in this way activates a critical part of yourself as a neuro-linguistic being, does it not? Feeling all of that kinesthetically, you are now ready for the next step and this one begins with the phrase, “I believe...” Because to state a belief is to commission both your mind and body because it is a command to your nervous systems ... and you don’t even have to believe it, just say it as if you did believe it ... so that you can get the feel in your body what believing it would feel like. And now as you do you will want to make your words more personal, “I believe that I can sleep deeply and awaken rejuvenated as I release all the stresses and tensions of the day.” And as you hear yourself, just in your mind, repeat that over and over, perhaps to find the right words ... perhaps in the process of trying on those words, when you are ready, you can say them aloud ... and again, really observe what the belief statement sounds like, what it feels like in your body, what other things are being arranged and re-arranged somatically at conscious and unconscious levels. And now saying it as if you really believed it, notice what happens then, what emotions arise. When you are ready, the next step downward into more and more neurology is your decision statement. Here you begin with “I will...” “I choose to...” “From this day forward, I’m going to...” and again, your actual words may shift and change some more as your unconscious mind finds the right words for you. “I will begin exercising regularly ... three to four times a week ... beginning with brisk walking and some light weights...” And here you will want to cleanly observe the effects that decision has in your physiology and emotions because it will. A de-cision makes a “cision” in things, a “cutting off” some things in order to add in other things, and you can just notice ... what those things would be ... and wonder ever so curiously how that will changes things in your world. And given that you’ve expressed this new belief and this new decision, what emotions have been and are being stirred within you? You can wonder about that and name those emotions ... maybe excitement, maybe fear, maybe hope and desire, maybe some anxiety and worry... And as you do, fully embrace the emotions as motions going on in -94-

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your body... movements indicating changes and the creation of energy and now you can say, “I feel...” and name the emotions that are emerging. With those emotions and the somatic moving that’s beginning, how would you like to put them to good use? What small thing could you begin to do today to actualize that energy and make real the belief and decision? Because by getting started and using this energy as momentum, you begin to feel the idea in your body, so begin the sentence with, “To make this great idea real in my life, I will ...” And then name some small simple action that you can do to get started. “The one thing I will do today and do regularly and consistently is...” Now with all of this in mind, let’s do a quick review. You are doing this one small action today because you are feeling what emotions? ____ And you are feeling that because you have decided what? ____ And you have decided that because you believe what? ____ And you believe that because you know and understand what great idea? ____ And knowing that you believe what? ... And believing that you have decided what? ... And that belief and decision has been activating what emotions in you? ... And the one thing you are doing to do today is what? Now as you let all of that come together and integrate, imagine that you have been commissioning your body to feel that great idea that you know. And you can thank your body that it can incorporate your ideas at an unconscious level so that it can become your way of being in the world.

What and Where What you do when you enable someone to commission the body to feel an idea is to transform the conceptual idea or understanding into a neurological program. You enable people to organize their neurons and neuro-pathways to operate so that the idea can be given behavioral reality. As each person has a conscious mind and an extensive unconscious mind of many, many facets which can run programs. One aspect of the unconscious mind runs breathing, keeps the body temperature at an equilibrium, knows when to release hormones in just the right way. There’s another part of the unconscious mind that can take what a person learns cognitively and consciously and incorporate it into muscle-memory so that -95-

one’s body “knows” how to perform that learned process without the person needing to be conscious. Where you take a person in this conversation is into the heights of thinking and then into the lower levels where thinking becomes a response pattern encoded in the person’s muscle memory. It translates the abstract trance into an unconscious behavioral pattern. This process lies at the heart of every expertise. Post-Hypnotic Suggestions Personal power comes with congruence as you translate great ideas into muscle memory. Over-learning enables you to program a response pattern into your very neurology so it becomes readily available to you. Because it takes more neurology (effort and energy) to say some things, you can translate what you know intellectually so you know it in your body Moving an idea from the mind to muscle memory frees your conscious mind to focus on new ideas.

End of the Chapter Notes 1. See the book, Achieving Peak Performance (2009) which is an entire volume devoted to the idea of installing what you know in your actions.

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Chapter Eleven

THE ALIGNMENT CONVERSATION The Personal Power of Congruency

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hat does it require to be congruent as a person? It requires that you know yourself— your values, your hopes and dreams, your goals and objectives, your strengths and weaknesses, your understandings and meanings. It requires that you align all of that with your speech and actions as you relate to others and take effective actions in the world. That’s a lot! Congruency requires an alignment between what’s inside with what’s outside. This means that you have to go inside (a trance state) and bring out that alignment so it organizes into your way of talking and acting. The Power of Congruency Robins has repeatedly said that the ultimate personal power is congruency. That’s obvious when you encounter a congruent person—what she says in her speech, is reflected in her behavior, speech and behavior, are united in a single message. Consequently, it is easy to trust her, to believe her words. By way of contrast, it is nearly impossible to trust or believe the person who says, but does not do. With each incongruency, trust is undermined. It -97-

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becomes increasingly more difficult to maintain a trusting relationship with people who are incongruent. Incongruency also activates another destructive process as it creates a state of cognitive dissonance. Leon Festinger, who developed and wrote extensively on cognitive dissonance, describe what happens when beliefs and behaviors differ—something has to give. Typically, beliefs will give way to behaviors. That is, how a person lives (acts) will exercise a dominating influence on one’s beliefs. In Social Psychology this is often used as a method of persuasion. If you therefore ask a person to do a very small thing, such as put a neighborhood watch sign in one’s window, once a person has taken that action, it is easier to get the person to do something bigger, i.e., contribute to a charity. He will now think of himself as a socially responsible person as his thinking shifts to correspond to his actions. Beliefs shift to correspond to your actions. What you do will thereafter influence your thinking and believing and this mostly occurs at an unconscious level. Act in a way that differs from what you think consciously, and your beliefs will tend to shift. The discontent, insecurity, and unpleasant emotions of cognitive dissonance moves each of us to bring about a sense of unity if there’s a division between our beliefs and behaviors. Most people find dissonance unpleasant and too disorienting to live with. They are motivated to end it, yet often to their detriment. Consequently, they adjust their thinking and believing to their actions or in some cases, adjust their behaviors to their beliefs. Often people will create a false consistency to end the dissonance. As they unify themselves to create an integration, the unity is a false one as it is designed entirely to end the contrasting and conflicting awarenesses. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Self-Reliance, spoke to this: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, -98-

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and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

The danger here is rushing and forcing a consistency without working through the differences. That’s when consistency can become “a foolish consistency” that fails to fully account for the complexity of things. To be truly and healthily congruent, we need to ask several questions: What facets of yourself do you want to be congruent? As you learn new things, things that require a change in your thinking or acting, how will your congruency show up? How long will you need to live with the incongruency after you learn something new? How well will you do that? How will you communicate or act when you choose to create a new congruency? Inside-Out Congruency Congruency is ultimately an inside-out experience. What you think and feel on the inside shows up on the outside in speech and behavior. This means making what’s inside —your thinking, believing, framing, feeling, etc. stronger and more robust. Then if there’s still dissonance, what you have chosen to believe and value will more strongly influence your speech and behavior.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

Then you’ll be able to handle the period of time when there’s dissonance. What you know, believe, and value may be slow in being transformed into action and your actions are not yet up to par with what you know. If you can tolerate the incongruence for a period of time, you will be able to patiently continue to practice new behaviors until the congruence comes. Congruence is not an on–off experience. Congruence is more a matter of degree. You cannot just turn it on in a moment’s notice. Often, like any behavior that has become elegant and smooth, it takes a lot of learning, feedback, and practice. Congruence is best thought about as a process and a matter of degree. It is also a process that can be applied to a thousand different activities. This highlights another basic understanding about congruence: congruence is not -99-

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a monolithic thing. A person is, or is not, congruent about a given activity at a given time. This explains why we can ask: How congruent are you with regard to win/win negotiations? How congruent are you in exercising regularly? How congruent are you about being calm and cool when you get frustrated or angry? It requires significant personal discipline over a period of time for a person to become mostly congruently about most activities. Only then can we say, “He’s a congruent leader.” Congruence requires ongoing work of aligning, and then re-aligning, thinking, believing, valuing, and so on with one’s behaviors. Think of it as a matter of degrees. When you do, you can then ask, “Am I becoming more congruent over time in the areas that are important to me?” As you take your car in to have the wheels aligned on a regular basis, so it’s also smart to take yourself into an alignment trance regularly to align your inside with the outside. As you drive your car over the road, the bumps and jars of everyday driving can slowly cause the wheels to get out of alignment. Yet you often do not notice. Sometimes it’s only when you look at the uneven wear on the tires that you realize that you need to realign the wheels. Similarly, the wear and tear of everyday life, the stress to get things done, the demands of others and so on, can cause your behaviors to get out-of-alignment with your beliefs. A final principle about congruence: Congruence is an ongoing process. That’s because every time you learn something new, you create yet another cognitive dissonance. Now there’s a new disconnect between what you believe and what you do. Consequently, that requires yet another new alignment in order to be congruent. Congruence is therefore a continal process that will never be done “once and for all.” The Congruent Trance Conversation After you induce a comfortable trance state, induce a commitment to oneself, a dedication to be one’s best self, and an openness to feedback for shaping behavior. As you stretch and yawn ... and prepare yourself to go away ... into a rejuvenating trance, and before you close your eyes— pick a spot to focus on... a picture on a wall, a glistening of light on a piece of -100-

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metal, a book — something, it doesn’t matter what it is, what matters is how you focus on it and how focusing them affects your eyes because the more you focus, the more your eyes will tire .. And want to close... but not yet, because it’s important to focus on the feedback loop between your eyes and the object and your eyes and the object ... because you are receiving feedback and this is the beginning of a new learning. As you feel that openness to receiving feedback and as you feel your own self-commitment to your own excellence, you can now begin to identify one behavior ... just one behavior ... that you do and do pretty well, but it does not convey the full range of elegance and power and grace that you know is possible for you. What behavior do you do, and it’s not a matter of learning it ... not at all. You know how to do it—it could be selling, or delegating, exercising, budgeting, planning, anything that is an important part of achieving your goals. And as your unconscious mind selects one activity to work on, you can know that once you learn how do this with one thing, your unconscious mind can do this with many other behaviors. And now step into that activity— when do you do it, where do you do it, how do you do it as well as you do ... step into the experience as fully as possible, seeing, hearing, and feeling it vividly. And as you hold this, notice the state that you are in, what you are feeling, what emotions are there, and how you have the capacity for doing this and even though this can and will become more elegant, fully embrace and enjoy this skill. Now as you can step back from the state and the behavior, you can notice the belief or beliefs that support this activity. What do you believe that enables you to do this? ____ What do you believe about the behavior, the context, your ability to do this? ____ And when you are ready, noticing the behavior that could have more grace and elegance, step back into the values that you hold about it. What are the values? ____ You value what....? ____ And you can fully step into those values ... that’s right and enjoy how important that behavior is and the value it brings to your life.

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And holding that state, beliefs, and values— and focusing on the behavior that you want to more fully express what you’re capable of expressing, step back into the identity that supports that behavior. Step into the you who you will increasingly become as you become more skilled and competent in that behavior. And as you do, take on that identity, imagine being that person and moving through the world being known with that identity. And how is that? ____ Now stepping back yet one more time, this time into the decision that needs to be made so that you develop that behavior in just the way you want to. What decision supports that action? ____ What choices do you need to make? ____ And decisively making that executive choice, as you step into it, notice how it feels and how it supports that identity, values, beliefs, state out of which the behavior occurs. When you step back from all of that, step back into a metaphor— a metaphor that captures what that behavior is like. What would you compare it to? ____ What image or sound or animal or movie or dance and so on is comparable to the experience you have when you take those actions? ____ And as you experience that metaphor, letting it set the frame for how you think about it, let it support your decision, identity, values, beliefs, state, and behavior. What you have now created and designed are a whole set of metalevels that align your behavior to many of the levels of your mind and so as you now bring these levels back down to the behavior, you can do it in a step-by-step manner starting with the metaphor that sets the frame for your decision, for your identity, for your values, for your beliefs, for your state and into your behavior. And be with that ... letting all of that which is in the back of your mind bring all of its richness to the behavior and just notice how your behavior will naturally become fuller and more robust ... as you move out into your world in the months and years to come.

Post-Hypnotic Suggestions What you do when you facilitate this conversation is invite a person to align his meta-levels is to make sure that any given response—a thought, a feeling, or an action is embedded within a set of frames that supports it -102-

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fully. This begins to eliminates cognitive dissonances. You enable her to check out the supporting frames above, beyond, and behind her actions to see if they are all aligned. Where you take a person when you engage in this conversation is into her hidden frameworks. There you invite her to refresh and/or create new supporting beliefs. When you and your client know how to align any given behavior to the higher levels of the mind so that all of a person can be of one mind about something, one’s personal power of congruence is dramatically increased. He now becomes fully congruent in that particular behavior thereby enabling him to be more trustworthy and others to have a solid basis for trusting him. Post-Hypnotic Suggestions Personal power comes with congruence between your talk and your walk. Aligning your higher level frames creates a robust congruence. When you learn something new, you become incongruent, again. Embrace your incongruence while aligning your beliefs, values, decisions, identities, metaphors, etc.

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PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT CONVERSATIONS Once you ground yourself in the foundational qualities and integrate those qualities within yourself— personal development can then really soar. Yet that’s not the ending, that’s just the beginning. In order to be fully alive and fully human, there’s many more capacities to develop. The listening conversation induces you into a trance of care so that you can truly hear yourself and others (conversation #1). The learning conversation then induces a trance of receptivity and curiosity and fascination so that all of life becomes an adventure— an adventure of discovery and insights (conversation #2). Yet you have to be able to remember what you learn, otherwise you will constantly be re-learning the same thing. So the memory trance will enrich your comprehension and start to build up a rich reservoir of resources that will multiple your ability to manage life effectively (conversation #3). All of the conversations are conversations about getting real and that’s because the ultimate power, the ultimate pleasure, the ultimate value is becoming an authentic human being (conversation #4). And when you are real—when you are ready to be real in relationships, you are able to connect and bond and create rich relationships (conversation #5). And when you are real—that gives you leadership competency. Who wants to follow someone inauthentic? How could you trust someone who’s not real. Being authentic enables you to inspire others to follow a vision that you collaboratively build (conversation #6).

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Chapter Twelve

THE LISTENING CONVERSATION Energetically Listening Trance "Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning." Albert Einstein "Education is not the learning of the facts, but the training of the mind to think." Albert Einstein

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t what level do you listen? When you’re with someone and exchanging information or ideas, how do you listen? Most of the time, most people, listen from an unuseful and ineffective trance state. What trance state? Often a state of disinterest, boredom, impatience to speak, or preoccupation. Often, we listen from a state of defensiveness. We are in a state of needing to prove ourselves, to be “the winner” or, at least, not made wrong. Sometimes, we hear something and it sends us back in history to another time and space and suddenly—we are no longer present. Actually, there are many ways in which we can learn to be very poor listeners. Sometimes we listen in order to catch something that we can build our case upon. We are

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not listening to understand or to learn, but to debate, to win, to put the other person down. The challenge then is to enter into such a profound trance wherein you can truly hear the person, can truly listen for the purpose of understanding, and provide not merely the space, but the atmosphere where the other wants to speak his or her truths knowing that they are safe with you. Of course, such listening is rare and requires lots of discipline and practice. If you set the aim to listen with utter intensity and focus and care—that’s a very different trance state from where we humans usually operate. Now the deep, empathetic, and seeking-to-understand listening trance state is actually a very powerful state. On the surface it may not seem powerful. In fact, it may seem passive and weak. After all, seemingly you’re not actually doing anything. You are just listening. Just being present. Just following the line of thought and emotion of the other person. Yet that’s not exactly true. You are doing something. What’s new and different, even strange, is that what you are doing is mostly internal rather than external. Intense listening is very active, but not in an outward way. The intensity of the activity is inward as you are staying with a person’s ideas and words, following the track of the person’s way of reasoning and thinking, and holding in mind the movie scenarios that arise and curiously wondering how they fit together. You are stepping in and out of those bits and pieces of movies to get a feel what life must be like for the other person. That’s a lot! I invite you to read that description again and consider all of the skills and competencies required in order to be able to do that quality of listening. Qualities of True Active Listening To be able to truly listen, you have to truly care. And that caring cannot be faked. Sure there are numerous techniques like precisely listening to the words so that you can repeat them verbatim— an acknowledgment. There is the technique of inquiring about words that can have multiple meanings so as to develop listening accuracy (clarity check). You can train yourself to listen for value words, belief words, meta words, profiling personality words (meta-programs), predicates, representational systems, and much more. Yet in the end, if you really do not care and respect the person— you will never truly be a good listener. -106-

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How do you care about another person? “When I am getting ready to This is where the experience gets risky, reason with a man, I spend you have to extend your heart and want one-third of my time thinking the best for that person. The Greeks had about myself and what I am a word for this— agape. It is usually going to say and two-thirds translated “love,” yet it is not attraction or about him and what he is going to say.” lust. It is “benevolent good will.” This Abraham Lincoln requires an investment on your part. It requires that inside yourself, you put yourself out there for that person so that when that person doesn’t do well, it hurts you on their behalf. You feel less for it and your heart aches on behalf of the other person.1 This describes what we mean by the word vulnerable. Being vulnerable to another person may involve letting that person see your heart, your care, your weaknesses, your struggles, etc. Or, it may mean letting the other see your heart. When that happens the other person generally starts to settle down and feel safe in your presence. It’s as if your very presence becomes a safe space—a crucible— a confidential place where the other will not be judged and so can speak freely. True intense inner listening means that your presence and consciousness is not judging or evaluating the other person. That’s not your agenda or purpose. Your agenda is to be for the other person, on his side, present for her, and emotionally available. You make space and time for the other— you hold the silence so that there’s no anxiety about moments, or even long minutes, of silence. You listen even to the other’s silence. Susan Scott, in Fierce Conversations (2002) describes this fierce attention as a deep authentic listening and says to do that, “Be here, prepared to be nowhere else.” The Listening Trance and Strategy What is the trance that entails that kind and quality of listening? What factors are operational in that kind of a trance state? Obviously, there are many: care, agape benevolent good will, vulnerable, presence (present for the other), accepting (not judging), emotionally associating, etc. No wonder such intense listening is so rare! To be able to do all of that, you have to get over yourself. You have to put your own needs, wants, and agendas aside. That’s what makes being present possible. And that presupposes a -107-

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pretty solid sense of self— a self that is “okay” and doesn’t have to get all of the attention and love. When you turn inward with a strong focus of care, good will, acceptance, vulnerability, and presence for the other— you begin to access the listening trance state. That’s the description of the inner experience. Yet to get to that place, you have to begin with self-esteeming yourself as unconditionally valuable. That will get your ego investments out of the way so that the listening is not about you, not even about you being a great listener, but about the person. It’s about her story uncontaminated by how it might remind you of things in your story. Then comes the training in the listening techniques— what to listen for, how to make sense of things, detect patterns, check out uncertainties, watch for authenticity moments, track the person’s way of thinking, search for strengths and potentials unknown by the person, and much more. And when you have done all of that, you’re still not done.2 Next comes training in how to communicate that you are listening so that your listening becomes a rich contribution to the person. Listening, without giving it back, actually fails to fulfill the purpose of listening. Some of what you may give back is silence, some are reflections of the person so that the other can catch a glimpse of himself in your eyes. It’s like the reflections in a mirror. Without a mirror, how would you know what you look like or how others see you, or how you come across? You may mirror back to the other what you’ve seen and hear in language or in movement and gesture. Your accurate, sensory-based, and precise feedback to the other evidences that you’ve been there for her and have been listening. The other senses that you “get” them. Deep Authentic Listening Given that we usually listen with only one ear and our other ear scanning the environment so we don’t miss anything, most of our conversations do not get very far past a causal, “How are you?” Fine. “How are things going?” Great. “Anything new?” No, all is about the same. “Great talking with you.” Yeah, me too. To deepen the conversation and make it real, we have to ask personal questions and get to the heart of things—the meanings that a person is -108-

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creating and experiencing. The following are adapted from the WellFormed Outcome pattern. 1. What’s the most important thing for us to talk about? 2. That sounds highly significant for you. How is that significant? What impact is that currently having on you? What impact do you think it will it have? 3. That sounds really important to resolve. Why is that so important for you to solve that? You sound pretty intentional about that! How strong is your resolve for doing something about this? 4. What ideas have you been playing with in dealing with it? What’s your evaluation about those ideas? 5. What do you have to do in order to achieve your dream? What would be one thing you could do today to begin momentum to your desired outcome? 6. What, if anything, could stop you or block you from doing that? What resources do you have for handling that block? The Listening Trance State Induce a relaxing and comfortable state so that the person releases the tensions and stresses of the day and gets into a passive state of receiving. Because your body is a vessel— a vessel of breath, you can breathe in ... and you can breathe out ... repeatedly and as you do, you can notice how your body is like a vessel holding the breath. With every breath that you breathe out you can let go just a little bit more of any stresses in your mind or tensions in your body ... breathing in and out ... and letting go more and more ... because we’re going to go for a truly rare and wonderful trance experience, one not often experienced by humans— a trance state of intense and passionate inner listening ... and the design is to enable you to unleash more of your potentials for listening, for hearing more and deeper than you have ever before ... now. Now as you anticipate this listening trance, it’s important to begin by releasing your worries and concerns ... to release your stuff so that you’re truly free to be present to the other. Then it won’t be about you ... the listening will be through you. You will become the kind of listening partner that enables the other to feel safe with you and

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protected by you. And you... you get to be the vessel, the means by which the other can hear himself as never before. So as we begin, release anything and everything that’s part of you and your investments— your values, your goals, your hopes and dreams, your reputation ... because it is not about you ... now is it? And you can do that because your value as a person is a given, it is unconditional so that you have nothing to prove, nothing to hold onto, nothing to defend. You are important, lovable, and highly significant as a human being. And knowing that, you can feel a sense of awe of your own value so that you are here to listen... just listen. And who are you listening to? A human being— a sentient being of mystery and wonder, a person who like all persons needs to be loved, cared for, valued, and understood. A person, no matter what personal hells he has gone through deserves to be cared for and protected. A person, no matter what bad habits she’s learned or what ugly language he has developed— is, at his or her core, a human being like you. In fact, there “but for the grace of God,” go you. And so letting your heart flutter a bit ... move and be moved ... let a sense of care, even the care that you’d give to a beloved pet...arise so that you step into a circle of care and feel it throughout all of your

body.

So with every breath you take in, you can let your benevolent good will increase, your mature attitude of truly wanting the very best for this person ... because wanting the best for a person enables you to listen much more carefully, thoroughly, and understandably. This is a care for someone as a member of the same human family and a kind of care that frees your love for people so it is uncontaminated by your own ego-concerns. Do you feel open and vulnerable when you stop ... and just listen to this person? Does it elicit in you a sense of vulnerability as a human being as well ... because as you listen, you know that you too are fallible and mortal as is this person. This too is part of listening, listening from your own humanity. So breathing humanly ... and being ready to be an open and vulnerable human being as you listen

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... you can now anticipate the experience of being present for the one you are listening to. Being present to someone, to what the person is saying and experiencing and being present for that person, as a person, refers to holding the space so the person can feel safe and accepted. Because believing, as we do, that people have all the resources that they need, that they have hidden potentials to rise up and handle the life situation they are facing, we understand that when you hold the space for someone by listening, it enables that person to find his or her powers and potentials. Now to all of this all you need to add are the skills of listening, the ability to hear and repeat what you hear, the ability to listen for specific clues about how the person is thinking, feeling, and operating, the ability to listen for various linguistic markers in the person’s speech which will reveal about what kind of person the speaker is, his or her personality needs and so much more.

What and Where What you do in listening is clear out your own ego-investments so that the conversation you facilitate and hear is uncontaminated. You empty yourself so that you don’t impose on the other person. What you are doing here is developing specific abilities for deep authentic listening. You are learning to listen for the person’s heart so you can see a person for who he or she is. You can hear the real problem or challenge and you can hear the resources that the person has for handling the challenges of life. Where you take a person when you truly listen is deep inside that person’s inner world of meanings, emotions, intentions, memories, hopes, dreams, fears, etc. You invite the person to speak his truths openly and freely. You allow the person to air out old hurts and rise above them. Post-Hypnotic Suggestions Real listening requires getting your self out of the way and giving yourself to the service of another. You can’t truly listen if you don’t care about the person. Extend your heart to care, then you’ll list as never before.

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Listening to understand is transformative— it will change you as it will change the other. To effectively listen, make yourself open and vulnerable.

End of the Chapter Notes 1. This is empathetic listening and can, at times, include sympathetic listening as you step inside of the person’s movies, and then back outside. 2. The skill we spend more time developing in the Meta-Coach System is listening— we have identify two dozen behavioral skills by which we can measure the actual quality of one’s listening. See The Meta-Coaching System (2015).

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Chapter Thirteen

THE LEARNING CONVERSATION A Receptive Curious Trance “We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.” George Bernard Shaw “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” Eleanor Roosevelt

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o think is to learn. That’s because when you use your mind and intelligence to think— to consider, to wonder, to explore, to question, to doubt, to represent, to create, and to believe —you are learning. Is there a difference between thinking and learning? If there is a difference, what is that difference? Thinking is the more basic function— and includes any and every use of your mind whereas learning tends to be a smaller category of those things that you think, which you classify as information or knowledge that you’ve learned. That is, what you consider is a right understanding about things, what you consider true and useful information. The difference between them is very similar to the difference between thinking and believing (Chapter 5). As we use thinking to create beliefs so we do the same with learnings. Whereas thinking only involves one response, believing and -113-

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learning involve two responses, one response (learning) at a higher level than the other (thinking).1 First you think, then you decide or choose that what you think (the content of your thinking) is something that makes sense and that offers you an insight. Therefore you do not learn or consider something a learning (an understanding) just because you thought it, that is, entertained the thought. Many thoughts are entertained; fewer are learned. Now while we think in order to learn as any student studying to pass a course can tell you, you can learn things without conscious thinking. You can learn something unconsciously. Your body can “know,” that is, learn something by mere association. “Associative learning” refers to how you connect two things. If two things occur one after the other, it is common for you to “think” that the first one (X) leads to the second one (Y). X leads to Y. X equals Y. Yet, as we know, this may be mere correlation without causation. And again, this doesn’t have to go through conscious awareness.2 Pavlov’s dogs learned to associate the bell (X) which the experimenter rang just before offering the meat or meat powder (Y). Dogs do not naturally salivate to bells. But when they learned that the bell signaled the coming presence of meat, they learned to salivate at the sound of the bell. Associative learning. Similarly in human neurology, things get connected. The Learning Trance Whether you are engaged in unconscious associative learning, or learning in a conscious and intentional way, learning is a trance state. Learning occurs inside a person and is not an external reality. You never walk down the street and find some learning on the sidewalk. It’s not an external tangible thing, it is an internal process and experience. Actually it’s easy to recognize this inasmuch as you may often find yourself in a situation where you need to learn something, but find yourself not in a learning state. What then? You are not in a state of mind or emotion or even physiology that supports the activity of learning. By contrast, you’re always in a state where you think— have thoughts. Learning, however, requires certain conditions and that is especially true when we consider a robust and effective learning state. There are many states that work to prevent that. If you’re upset, angry, fearful, lustful, -114-

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regretful, fatigued, etc., you are not in the right state to learn in an effective way. In these states, your thinking itself will also be far less effective than usual. Nor is there a singular learning state, there are many. It depends on what you are wanting to learn. Sports and action-oriented situations require more kinesthetic readiness. Mathematics and philosophy require more quiet receptiveness and linguistic skills. What’s common with most learning states is interest, curiosity, fascination, openness, a strong intention to learn, skills that fit with the nature of what to learn (music, art, architecture, chemistry, geography, history, etc.). And as there are many learning states, there are also many learning strategies. Not all strategies will work equally well. It depends on what you are learning; it depends on where you are in your learning development; it even depends on the environment in which you are learning. Essentially every major intellectual domain will have its preferred learning strategies. 3 Learning and Meta-Learning First there is the learning trance— a state of openness and intentionality, then there is meta-learning. This refers to the ability to learn about your learning capacity. It includes learning how to improve your learning, expand it, add new tools and processes for learning, and how to frame your learning in such a way that you do so with joy and playfulness, with focus and concentration. It’s not enough to learn, to be a great learner, you have to learn about your own learning— how you learn best, what helps, what hurts, how to hold your learnings in mind, how to translate your learnings into practical action (implementation), and how to comprehend what you learn. The ability to use meta-learning to improve your learning enables you to identify and update beliefs about learning that might be sabotaging your best learning efforts. Limiting beliefs about learning itself are easily created, and often arise accidentally from whatever became associated with learning during school years. Sadly and tragically, many children link up learning with boredom, with being lectured at, with being dumb or stupid, with pain and punishment, etc. This linkage could occur simply because of the way a teacher or a school structured the learning experience. A teacher -115-

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wanted everyone to sit still, be quiet, not to ask questions, not to question her, not to cause him any trouble. Result: kids are turned off about learning. Then there are the beliefs that kids construct about learning (a meta-level state of belief) that may have been accurate at that time. “Learning is boring.” “Learning is dangerous, you have to have the right answer or you’re punished.” “Learning is not fun, it’s a necessary evil.” Other beliefs may be completely wrong and disastrous. “I’m just stupid and cannot learn X.” “I’ll never get it, it’s impossible to learn X.” All sorts of limiting beliefs can be, and are, developed during childhood, even during college years, that set people up to not know how to enter a positive, exciting, vigorous, and joyful learning trance. The idea of intentionally learning as an adult strikes them as preposterous. “I learned everything I need in school. Why do I need to keep learning?” Becoming a Continuous, Life-Long Learner What we call “education” during the school-years is actually only how you begin to learn. It creates the foundation so that you can actually operate in the world as an excellent learner. School in the early years, and the schooling that leads to University degrees, is only a preparation for life. When you finish that, you are only at the beginning. Now you are ready to learn. Now real learning begins. Perhaps in the fifteenth century you could learn all that you would need to know in order to live and thrive. But no longer. Most of what people will need to know when they finish their schooling has not yet even been discovered. Most jobs do not yet exist. And with things moving and changing so quickly, with information increasing at an exponential rate— what’s more important than what one learns is the ability to learn and to keep learning. This positions the importance of meta-learning. What schools need to shift to, in addition to the basics that will not change, is the how-to-learn and how-to-unlearn processes. If a person can enter into a learning trance at will and accelerate one’s learning— then regardless of what’s discovered; or how much change occurs, that person will be able to stay on the cutting edge of relevance. If one can enter into a learning trance and clean out old learnings so that they will not get in the way and prevent the new learnings from going in and “taking,” then that person will be recognized as a life-long learner. And as organizations need to become -116-

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learning organizations (Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline), so individuals need to becoming ferocious learning machines. Qualities for the Learning Trance Recognizing the contrasts to the learning trance helps to highlight the qualities that comprise a robust learning state. When a person is not learning, that person is closed to new information, rigidly holding to what is already known, presenting self as “a know it all,” un-curious about things, dogmatic, and defensive. Let’s now contrast this with a healthy learning state. To be an excellent learner, you need to be open and non-defensive about ideas and information. Ideas are ideas, they are not statements about your person or character. The excellent learner is curious, intensely curious and fascinated about life and the world. The person is full of questions even doubts, but willing to try on new ideas, give them a chance, see where they will go, and then think through the assumptions and presuppositions behind the ideas. An excellent learner can vigorous debate ideas— and can easily take either a position for or against the idea. The Learning Trance Conversation Access a light trance wherein you feel comfortable and relaxed and alert and fully present to one’s current situation. Elicit a state of playfulness and fun. As you take in another breath, breathe it in wondering ... really wondering what will you learn, what new insights will you develop, and how much will that improve the quality of your life? Because the ability to think, and to think about your thinking, is the foundation to become an excellent learner— you who can think things through and accelerate your learning. And you can imagine how that will keep you on the cutting edge of today’s world. And learning is what you have been doing all of your life ... in fact, you were born with the ability to learn in a ferocious way ... to ask questions and to figure things out. So, speaking to you as a child ... let yourself float back graciously and effectively because we now want to fully reclaim your capacity for learning. As you float back, you can go back to when you learned language ... because you did so automatically and unconsciously ... you heard your parents and

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others talking and you learned to talk ... and if they spoke a second language, you picked that up also. And even before you went to school, you learned to tie your shoe strings, you learned to ride a bike, you learned lots and lots of things — eating breakfast, what you like and don’t like to eat, going to restaurants, how to get along with others, and on and on. Then at school you learned the alphabet ... a – b – c – d — e you learned how to write the letters, and how to spell words, and how to pronounce words ... and now you have learned reading so well, that you cannot not read. You look at words on a page and— faster than you can blink— you know the word and its meanings. And as you think about learning, you might notice now how it is based on how you think— how you represent things visually, auditorically, kinesthetically, even with smells and tastes. You have learned about strawberries ... and you probably can smell a strawberry, and can you taste a strawberry? Can you see a strawberry? Because it is by representing things that you learn what they are. And then with words, you learn to classify things, you learn to put things in various categories so that you can handle them ore effectively. Because a strawberry is a fruit— I wonder what other fruits do you have in that category? And just by asking that question, “What fruits do you have in your category of fruits?” you probably began accessing what you know, what you have learned, about fruits. In other words, you access what you comprehend about that. And as you realize that your comprehension of things is how you store your learnings within your mind. Ah, yes, you are a learner ... and you can become a lifelong learner and a learner who continually becomes more skillful and competent in learning. Now as you step back from your learning, you can begin to notice how you learn best, what enables you to best learn, and how you can accelerate your learning. You can also notice any and every limiting belief that you might need to unlearn ... that is, to just let go because while it may have once made sense, it no longer does. And breathing out that limiting belief ... frees up new space and capacity inside ... -118-

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and as you do this whenever you come across a limiting belief, it will make your more and more a great learner... As you now imagine how you can use learning as your filter for moving through life, you can stay focused on your objectives. And when something blocks your way, when you get feedback that you’re off-target, or when problems arise, you can feel good while you learn as you wonder what will you learn, and how will you adjust your approach. With learning as your way of being, you know it is just a matter of time before you figure things out ... and you can feel great joy in continually improving, can you not?

What and Where What you do when you engage in a learning conversation is enable a person to become aware of his innate capacity for learning. It is, in fact, a higher level learning—a meta-learning that can shape the person’s future. What you do is enable a person to identify any limiting beliefs or memories that may be interfering with the person’s objectives so he can now let them go. He can also unlearn them by pulling them apart (fragment them) so that they have no influence on his learning capacities any longer. Where you take a person with this conversation is inside to how a person develops an understanding or insight about how things work in the world. You are taking a person into a new identity— she is a learner, a ferocious learner, it is in the human heritage and destiny. Post-Hypnotic Suggestions If there’s a human instinct, it is to learn and to learn how to learn. Learn to continually gain new resources, insights, and creativity. Because learning involves meta-levels, it’s a trance of receptivity, curiosity, and wonderment. End of the Chapter Notes 1. For an extended analysis of thinking itself, see Executive Thinking (2019). 2. Associative learning lies at the heart of many cause-effect statements and complex equivalences. These are dealt with extensively in Mind-Lines: Lines for Changing Minds (2005). 3. For more on learning strategies, see Restore the Joy of Learning by Don Blackerby and Meta-Cation by Sid Jacobson.

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Chapter Fourteen

THE MEMORY CONVERSATION The Comprehension Trance “Sometimes, I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.” Arthur Golden “Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.” Saul Bellow

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f there is any phenomena that is undoubtedly a trance state, it is memory. The ability to remember something is the ability to hold in mind an event (episodic memory), abstract information (semantic memory), procedural information (muscle memory), linguistic memory, etc. This is the ability to go inside and recall what one has learned or experienced. Because what you remember is from a previous time, it is therefore no longer present, it is only remembered. That is the only reality it has. Further because memory has a time sequence, we have both short-term memory and long-term memory. The first type of memory occurs for a few seconds although with training can be extended to many minutes (even half an hour). From short-term memory, some items are transferred to long-term memory. Mostly this transfer occurs when you give an item a lot of -120-

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meaning, significance, and value. The more meaningful the item, the more likely it will be transferred to long-term memory. Transfer to long-term memory also depends upon the original exposure. That is, if you were not conscious and aware when something happened, you will not have encoded it and so you will not remember it. If you were only partially present, and preoccupied with something else, you also will not have made a strong impression in the first place, so when you try to recall an event, you will only be able to recall what you encoded in that original impression. Your memory of any particular event can be no stronger or detailed than how you originally encoded it. If you want to transfer to long-term memory, come into sensory awareness and make more vivid representations in the first place. Notice the colors, the sounds, the sensations and represent it in as many of the sensory systems as possible. 1 The transfer to long-term memory is also dependent upon the referent system that a person uses in thinking about and storing information. Similar to how you store files on your computer—if you have a good filing system, it will be easy for you to find and retrieve files. The more effective, useful, and relevant that system— the more likely that an item will be stored and then re-accessed. That system could be a mnemonic device (technique) that a person has learned. Or it could be the quality of how a person has set up the mental categories in his mind. Here language also plays a key role as language itself offers words for categories.2 With an effective set of categories, a person can generate an effective system. Yet another factor in long-term transfer goes to the quality of one’s sleep. That’s when much of the transfer occurs. Finally there is the transfer to long-term memory that occurs when an experience is especially emotional. That creates the “lightbulb” effect as when one remembers everything that happened in the split-second of a car crash. People report that time slows down and they remember in vivid color and sound every moment of the experience. It was as if the memory was seared into one’s mind. The Memory Trance There are numerous memory trances. Some that everybody experiences from time to time are slow time trance and fast time trance. In each, you experience psychological time in contradistinction to chronological time. In one you are so engaged in an activity that when you look up, you are -121-

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amazed at how much time passed. For you, because you are so fully engaged and present to something—it seemed like but a moment. On the other hand, when you typically are engaged in something that you find boring or dreadful, every minute seems to take an hour.3 As a trance state, this state governs what you remember, the quality of your memory, the extensiveness of it, and how well you can trust your memory. Because information and memory is state-dependent, you not only recall what you recall, but the state in which you encoded that information. That’s why re-establishing the state in which you learned something, or experienced something, tends to bring back the whole of that memory. And the more distinct that state, the better your memory and its recall. What are the best states to be in for remembering? Given the nature of state-dependency, the primary answer is—the state you were in when you originally learned or experienced something. Other than that, there are numerous states which support memory—interest, intention, curiosity, learning, alertness, etc. Trance or hypnosis have long been used to enable a person to recall what may have passed out of conscious awareness—and yet remain as information within one’s larger outside-of-conscious mind. By inviting a person to go back in one’s mind, and recalling the situation and different items in that original, one can often begin to recall what had been forgotten. The problem with human memory is that it is not like the memory of a computer. Not at all! With a computer, you store information and “save” it, and it stays there in the same format that you used when you put it there. The human brain doesn’t work that way. That’s because as you keep learning and experiencing, what you learn and experience today influences what you learned at a previous time. Often current learning unconsciously updates the memory so that when you call it forth, it is not the same as when you stored it, although you may think it is. Even the process of recalling changes the content of what you remembered. Research has demonstrated repeatedly that we can “install false memories” and fairly easily. The questions you ask when you inquire about items of the memory can bias a person’s memory.4 We can get a person to try on an idea in such a way that the person doesn’t know that he is unconsciously changing his memories. What we now know in the neuro-sciences is that -122-

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memory is constantly changing so that it does not, and cannot, stay the same. This inevitably affects memory recall in trance. This explains why its so important to be extremely careful about the questions you ask or the statements you make in your trance conversations. You can unintentionally alter the person’s memories without even being aware of it. You can install things in the memory that you do not intend to install. Of course, this can also become a source for healing and renewal. It can be a way to address hurtful and ugly memories that diminish a person and undermine effectiveness. As a trance phenomena, a trance conversation about the past, and about a person’s memories can either enable or disable. It can bring new resources into a person’s life or diminish resources. Generally, in the trance conversation, you will want to call forth things that will support and enable the person and not have the person go deeply into painful memories. Factors about What we Remember Let’s start with the realization of the fluid nature of memories and how what a person remembers tends to be the experiences upon which a person builds concepts, ideas, understandings, and beliefs. Knowing that, the memory conversations need to focus on what to build on and how to build upon those experiences. Others can be forgotten. Forgetting events, information, conversations, etc. that are done and over, and that do not contribute to a person’s well-being, is one of the gifts of the human brain. It’s good to be able to forget things. Here amnesia can enrich a person’s present day and future life. The fluid nature of memory means that it is a construct— from the day you encoded information, ideas, or events— you constructed it. It is your invention. Therefore you will want to run an ecology check on whatever you develop. After all, well-being and the capacity to function resourcefully should be your ultimate goals. In Hypnotic Thinking I mentioned that the NLP “Movie Rewind” pattern is designed as a trance induction to take the emotional charge out of an old memory. If you cannot even “think” about something, but just thinking activates fear, anxiety, distress, etc., then the rewind pattern facilitates you -123-

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to get some psychological distance from the memory. Then you can at least think about it with perspective and today’s resources. Another NLP pattern for changing past memories is the Change Personal History pattern. In that pattern, the conversation enables a person to access resources “I wish I had back then.” By accessing them today, setting an anchor for quick re-access to those resources, you can go back to the event, go back fifteen minutes prior to the event, drop down into that memory with all of the resources you have today, and re-code the memory.5 These, and other patterns, provide a way to fulfill the audacious statement of Richard Bandler, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” The reason for that is that whatever memory you have, it is a construct— and as a cognitive invention, you can change. You can update it. You can replace it. You can completely eliminate it. The Memory Trance Conversation Begin with a light learning trance as you invite the person to comfortably and playfully go away into a space wherein the person can begin to tap into his or her powers for remembering what’s important and releasing what is not important. Do you remember how to relax and breathe yourself into a comfortable trance? You do? And can you do that now? ... That’s right, just breath your way all the way down... if you remember the process, then you can recall it as you do it once again because by noticing it, intentionally noticing it, you refresh your memory. And as you anticipate a journey inward, this time into your rich reservoir of memories, you can begin to wonder how much more precise and accurate can your memory become, how much more useful and practical, and what changes will begin to occur that will empower your memory capacity. Because it is the ability to remember which enables you to establish a strong hold on yourself— who you are, what you have experienced, what you have learned, what you value, and what you want as you move forward into your future. Now floating back on the wings of time and relaxation, let yourself ever so gently float back to when you learned the alphabet because -124-

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when you learned the letters ... you not only learned them, but you remembered them... you remember them right now ... a — b — c — d — e — and because you remember them so thoroughly, so completely, you use them to read, to understand, to write, to think. What an incredible use you have put to something that you learned that seemed so simple ...so basic ... And as you learned and remembered the letters of the alphabet, you can wonder how many other things like that can you learn and remember today? Because it is this ability to see, hear, feel, smell, and taste .... to sense things and encode them in your mind that allows you to remember what you want to remember ... and to forget what’s not important. So imagine this ability that you have— the ability to encode vividly and to impress upon your thinking and learning — imagine it as a tool that you have in your tool chest. Perhaps encoding information vividly is like pressing raw material so that it forms an imagine in your mind that will be there as long as you want it. Or you might imagine encoding and remembering like taking a Polaroid picture — when you pull the film sheet from the camera, it is indiscreet, fuzzy, and still formulating but within minutes, the image begins to form and as it does, it becomes more discreet, clearer, and brighter. Or you can imagine your encoding and remembering as a skill— a competency that can get stronger and more effective with good information and practice. As you imagine yourself practicing taking a quotation or poem or process and impressing it vividly upon your mind and the repeating it until it becomes so familiar and so wellknown that you “know” it and cannot forget it, and in doing so you develop your memory muscles. And as with any new skill that you give yourself to and develop over time, if there are any old beliefs about your memory, old ideas that people or society have deposited with you that are not supportive or helpful, you can just notice them and release them to float away as a helium balloon just floats away when you let go of the string ... and you can watch those old ideas and dysfunctional beliefs float away never again to bother you. -125-

What and Where What you do in this conversation is invite a person into her meta-frames about encoding and remembering so she has an opportunity to update her ideas and/or change her beliefs. Then the person can choose how to think about the process of remembering. Does the person think of himself as “a person with a good memory?” Would that be helpful? Does the person know how to use his intentions and decisions to support her memory, “I can and will remember and get better at remembering?” Where you take a person in this conversation is into a memory trance, a meta-cognitive trance made up of ideas, beliefs, decisions, and identities about memory. You also take the person into his meta-memory to enable him to build processes that expands his capacity for remembering. Post-Hypnotic Suggestions Remember to keep your learnings, understandings, and great idea. Embrace your capacity to remember to expand and develop that capacity. Remember what enhances you as a person and re-sources you with experiential knowledge, not every memory is a useful trance. Because it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, so use your capacities for memory to program in great memories.

End of the Chapter Notes: 1. A good training for memory vividness is basic NLP training. See the book MovieMind (2002) for a basic book on NLP without the jargon. 2. About how language and words set categories for our minds to store things and remember things, see Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987) by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. 3. See Adventures in Time Lines (1997) which includes descriptions of fast and slow time. 4. About installing memories by asking simple questions, see Ellen Langer’s work on this, Mindfulness (1989). 5. For more about different kinds of time, including fast and slow time, see Adventures in Time-Lines (1997) and also The Sourcebook of Magic (1997).

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Chapter Fifteen

THE AUTHENTICITY CONVERSATION A Getting Real Trance “Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” John Wooden

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ow can authenticity be a trance? Isn’t being real and authentic something that you do in the outside world as you relate to others? And, of course, the answer is yes— being authentic is indeed something that shows up in the outside world as you present yourself as you are— without hiding behind a mask or a persona. And yes, to be real, to know yourself authentically— that’s also an internal state involving an internal focus of knowing yourself as well as the understanding and courage to be yourself. Authenticity is also more. The more refers to how it involves your development as a human being and your maturity. And that’s because you are not born real or authentic, you become real. Being fully real as a person, in fact, takes a lot of personal development, discovering, and practice. This factor of authenticity further explains why it involves an inward focus, a special and unique trance state by which you become increasingly -127-

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comfortable in being yourself and coming out from behind every image that you’ve built up about yourself. The Challenge of Authenticity The fact is, it isn’t easy to be yourself. Kermit the Frog said, “It isn’t easy being green.” Well, it isn’t easy being human. Being human means being aware of and open to being fallible and being mortal. Fallibility speaks about how “liable to error” you are. Regarding all of your responses, how you think, how you feel, how you speak, how you act, how you relate— everything you do is imperfect and suffers various weaknesses. That’s the very nature of being human. You make mistakes. You misunderstand and get things wrong. It takes decades to learn to become clear and precise in your thinking and even then, you don’t always get it right. And sometimes, the smallest thing can throw you off —a moment of distraction, a frustrating emotional state, not feeling well, a burp in your career. Being human means being emotional which is primarily a function of your thinking and meaning-making yet also a function of your body, your health, what you eat, what you drink, the quality and frequency of your exercising, and a thousand other contributing factors that can turn your emotions up or down. Here too you are fallible, emotionally fallible, and are likely to not know what you feel or manage what you feel very well. Then there is the fallibility that shows up in speaking and acting. You misspeak and often you do not even “hear” that you spoke a wrong word. You can mis-hear what others say. And whatever you do in terms of actions and behaviors– every behavior could be better. It could be smoother, more elegant, done in a more timely manner, done more effectively, done more efficiently, done more cooperatively, etc. In all of these aspects of life you are fallible. An interesting facet of life is that as babies and small children, you didn’t have any problem with being fallible. Without knowing any better, you unconsciously accepted that you were fallible and began try to eat, crawl, walk, etc. without any concern about making a mess or falling down. You learned through the fallibility of constantly falling and getting up and because of the fallibility. Then you began to “know better.” Then you and others began to put “shoulds,” “musts,” and “have tos” on yourself so that you began to feel bad for being fallible. Then being fallible became a shameful thing, something to be -128-

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embarrassed by, something to avoid, and something to hide and cover-up. And with that inauthenticity arose. As a human being you are also mortal. As a person who are capable of dying at any moment, you are not immortal. You do not live forever, you are limited in time to the here-and-now with no guarantee of tomorrow. Yet here also at first you are barely aware of your mortality. For the most part, children and especially teenagers seem to be unaware of how easily and quickly life could be extinguished. They live as if there’s no end point. They take risks that are often life-threatening and sometimes without any awareness of the dangers they step into or how close they came to dying. Getting real about the inevitability of death and it’s ever-presence requires the development of some abstract thinking. “I too will die.” And that requires some long-term thinking— “Doing this today will lead to what? What are possible consequences of doing X?” Yet long-term consequential thinking doesn’t develop during the first two decades of life. Actually, to authentically come to terms with your mortality is what enables you to truly live. “Real to What?” Limitations of Authenticity If we are not born authentic, how do you explain the “authenticity” of small children? They don’t pretend to be something they are not. Does that mean that they are “real?” True enough, they are “natural” and unassuming, and yet they are not “real.” As long as they cannot be inauthentic, they cannot choose to be authentic. To be real also requires being conscious and selfconscious and therefore having a choice and choosing to be oneself. As children don’t know anything else, they do not actually have a choice. A small child can jump out of the bathtub and run out in the yard in his birthday suite without the slightest hint of embarrassment. He’s being “real” as in “natural.” Authenticity takes time and personal development. That’s because it takes time to “know oneself” and accept oneself. Knowing and accepting oneself are psychological steps of development that does not happen “naturally,” it requires choice and willingness, and then skill. Being real is always in a context which is why we have to ask, Real to what? What does it mean to be real to your thoughts, real to your emotions, real to your words? What if your thoughts, emotions, or words are wrong? Would you then be authentic if you are real to false ideas, feelings, and actions? -129-

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Authenticity includes values— and specifically human values. Suppose someone wants to be “real to making money, lots of money.” Suppose someone wants to be “real to being popular at all costs.” Question: If a person is real to inauthentic values, is that person real? In asking, real to what? you identify that authenticity is governed by human values which are healthy and ecological. Authenticity is also to be governed by your best understanding about being psychologically well in all aspects of your humanity. Further, because becoming real takes times, a lot of time, authenticity requires being real to long-term objectives, consequences, and long-term thinking. A person could be real to a short-term goal and feel good in the short-term while being destructive to self and others in the long-term. In this, authenticity has a temporal dimension. Accordingly, many people are “real to their immediate emotion” without any regard for long-term consequences. If he is angry, he might think he’s being authentic because he’s blowing up, yelling, cursing, and perhaps becoming violent. That’s not human authenticity. That’s a grown man having a childish tantrum. It’s the same with being “real is a short-term pleasure.” “But I like it, it’s real to me” is no justification if that pleasure will undermine your health, finances, relationships, etc. Caveman authenticity, wanting what you want, when you want it, regardless of the consequences, is actually a pseudo-form of authenticity. This spotlights that authenticity, paradoxically enough, involves discipline, restraint, and self-control. To be authentic sometimes requires not doing, or giving yourself, to what you would like to do or what would come “natural.”1 Natural is not a description authenticity. These are not synonymous experiences. What comes natural may be biological, or could be learned in a given social context, and comes inevitably as a consequence of the assumptive frames in that arena. What is authentic is, more often than not, quite unnatural, it is a victory over your biological reactions or learned impulses. In this, authenticity is also not a synonym of being spontaneous. Being spontaneous and doing or saying whatever naturally comes to mind can be either healthy or unhealthy. The fact that something is said or done spontaneously, in and of itself, does not indicate that it is real. Sometimes -130-

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in being real, you do not say what you would otherwise spontaneously say. You hold back to be real to the larger situation. The Authentic Trance If authenticity operates as a personal development trance, what’s involved in this trance? Obviously mindfulness (consciousness), choice, discipline, maturity (personality development), sense of inner control (empowerment), courage, self-autonomy, perspective, ecology, etc. That’s a lot! Who would have thought that to get real would involve so much? Authenticity then, like self-actualization, isn’t something that occurs early in life. Rather it generally takes several decades. Abraham Maslow once commented that he had not met anyone living a self-actualizing life prior to fifty years of age. Authenticity may take a similar time frame given that it requires a lot of personal development. Only then can you come out from behind yourself and make your conversations and your life real. Hiding versus Authenticity If we ask, “What’s the opposite of being authentic?” the obvious answer is being inauthentic. Yet that does not actually answer the question. All we have done is substitute one word for another. If being authentic is coming out from behind your masks and being yourself, showing yourself, then the opposite is hiding. It is covering-up, it is pretending. We mostly hide behind our personal P.R. (public relations image). We create a persona or public image based on whatever we can use to present ourselves. It could be a title, a job, a relationship, a title, a position, an achievement, knowledge, strength, beauty, money, power, name-dropping (who you know), etc. Like all of the pseudo-forms of self-esteem in which a person bases her “value” on such temporal things, so we can hide our true selves behind many of these things. When we are asked, “Who are you?” we seldom speak about who we are but usually what we do, what we have, what we have done, who we know, etc. We hide so that they do not see “the real me,” but the “me” bolstered up with these external garments. Yet when we relate to each other via our ranks, positions, and titles, we end up not truly knowing our true self. And worse, if this is perpetuated long enough, you may end up not knowing yourself. What often results from this is what is called “an identity crisis.” -131-

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Yet an identity crisis is really an authenticity crisis. A person is crying out to know who he really is, what he is really about, who he can really become. You can hide from yourself. Many do. Therefore the call for authenticity is the call to come out from behind your personas and masks and get real. The Authentic Trance Conversation Induce a relaxed and calming state, perhaps of deep breathing and muscle relaxation and plant suggestions that you’re going on the ultimate human adventure of becoming a real live human being. There’s a delightful story that Margery Williams tells for children in her book, The Velveteen Rabbit, How Toys Become Real (1926). To really hear the story requires a vivid imagination, so as you float away into a child’s bedroom, perhaps being a child again, perhaps being one of the characters in that story, you can allow your creative imagination to go wild as you listen to two toys in that child’s bedroom talk about what it means to be real. So if you’re ready to pretend and imagine, here we go. It was late one night in a child’s bedroom, late meaning that it was time for all boys and girls to be sleeping and during this particular night something magical happened. “What happened?” you ask. What happened was that a skin horse and a stuffed rabbit sat up and began talking about what it means to be real. Because, you see, toys aren’t real in the way that people are real. The Skin Horse began by saying, “Real isn’t how you are made; it’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real.” The Rabbit was quite astonished by this and asked, “Does it hurt?” because little rabbits know about hurts, about dangers, about predators. So what the Skin Horse said didn’t settle well with the Rabbit at first. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “Yet when you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt.” And while Rabbit didn’t fully understand that, he continued to ask questions. “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up, or bit by bit?” Now being wound up bit by bit was how things worked with

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most toys and that’s very different than having an on/off button. The Skin Horse then answered, “It doesn’t happen all at once, you become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real, you can’t be ugly, except to the people who don’t understand. And as you imagine yourself becoming increasingly real— authentic —you can consider the changes that will be required. As you become real, you become more self-accepting of what is given and what you can’t change, more self-appreciating of what gifts and talents you do have, the opportunities that you have, and more esteeming of your self as a human being unconditionally accepting all of your fallibility and mortality ... Because you know that as you own your mistakes, you become more authentic and that enables you to make the most of what you do have. Becoming real means distinguishing what you feel in the moment, what may feel natural, and choosing to live by your highest values in honor of the life you have and the path that you are on. And that takes courage, and as you step into the state of courage, the courage to stand up for yourself, the courage to stand up to your family and friends, your culture, and anything that would invite you to sell yourself short because you want to be accepted, you know that courage enables you to use restraint and discipline so that you can be real to your highest humanity, your values and your visions in life. As you imagine the journey to becoming more and more authentic, you can see your “images”—the ideas that others have of you, even your achievements, titles, positions, etc. as sometimes good roles to play and sometimes as barriers behind which you hide. Yet the courage to become real is the courage to come out from behind those lesser images of you to be your real self seeking your highest self. And as you do, you can feel the freedom that it offers you, the inner power it offers, the responsibility, and the possibilities, because -133-

becoming authentic is actualizing your highest self and your best performances. So in a minute, when you awaken to the real world again, you can do so in a new and fresh way. You can bring with you the courage to be authentic. You can bring with you a renewed appreciation that, unlike a toy, you were made to be real— to become ... fully alive/ fully human. Because when you are real, you can’t be ugly, you can only be beautiful ... so now arise to your authentic beauty.

What and Where What you do in the authenticity conversation is invite someone into one of the most scariest places of all— just being oneself, a fallible and mortal human being with all sorts of potentials for inventing your best self. This is not an easy conversation and it is certainly not a comfortable one. Nor is everyone ready for it. It is a conversation that requires lots of courage, lots of commitment to the human vision of actualizing oneself, and a confrontation with everything that would invite a person to sell themselves short for some acceptance, being liked, not being criticized, and “peace.” Where you take a person in this conversation into their inmost sense of self. You take them through and behind the social, cultural, business, family, and individual images that they have built over the years of life and you usher forth an existential challenge to become real. Post-Hypnotic Suggestions Real is not how you were made, real is what you become. Embrace this as the human adventure par excellence. Come out from behind yourself to make your life real. Authenticity is being real to your nature as a fallible human being. Enjoy the freedom to be you without masks and cover-ups. End of the Chapter Notes 1. For a whole book on this subject, see Get Real: Unleashing Authenticity (2016).

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Chapter Sixteen

THE RELATIONAL CONVERSATION The Connecting / Bonding Trance “Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.” William James “Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust and hostility to evaporate.” Albert Schweitzer

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re you in a trance state, a hypnotic state, when you are in relationship with someone? Is that possible? If a trance involves an inward focus, how would trance even apply when you are speaking with another person, interacting, communicating, planning, etc.? All of that seems externally oriented. How does it make sense that you might be in a trance when in relationship? While relating to another person, upon first thought, may seem to be the very opposite of trance, yet most people are actually in a trance when -135-

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speaking or connecting with another. What explains this? Namely, they are seeing and hearing the other person in terms of their internal filters— their memories, their assumptions, their beliefs, their hopes and expectations, etc. And to that extent, they are inside and not present, not here in the moment, they are in their own trance state. This explains why most people do not listen very accurately or carefully, why many find it so difficult to gain rapport with others, and why there is so much low level “communication.” They are not present in the here-and-now world. Instead they are down inside themselves in a trance world of their own making. You can hear it linguistically if you just listen to people talking at each other. What they say to each other involves cognitive distortions and illformed sentences that create distress and misery between them. They mindread each other’s intentions and emotions as they start sentences with, “You are ...” “You think...” “You feel...” Then inferring what they think is implied by the other person, they speak about all sorts of things which the other person has not said or implied. This generates mis-understandings and mis-communications. As a result they then argue about what they mean and what they think the other person means. It’s an argument that goes nowhere since it is not grounded in specifics. They speak in ways that imply judgment, that impose beliefs and values, and that discount what the other person says. With such communications, the relationship quickly goes south. It feels unsatisfying to all. It feels as if everyone is on different wave lengths. Why does this happen? How does it work? It indicates that people are operating from inappropriate and ineffective hypnotic states. It operates from people being inside, and hallucinating according to their filters, rather than coming into sensory awareness and being able to cleanly see and hear each other. Virginia Satir categorized four dysfunctional communicational/ relational styles— blamer, placator, distractor, and computer.1 Accessing Better Hypnotic States If we humans are often in the wrong trance state when relating and communicating well, what’s the solution? Simple—we need to dehypnotize ourselves from the wrong states, stop them from occurring, and elicit the right states.

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Where do these wrong states come from? We learn those wrong states. We learn them in our original homes as we model dad and mom, as we pick them up from friends and colleagues, from teachers and mentors. Those who are raised in dysfunctional homes are especially handicapped in this regard. They have not experienced psychologically healthy people relating and communicating in loving and respectful ways. They have not experienced people working through differences and conflicts, seeking first to understand each other, then collaboratively negotiating win/win arrangements. Instead, they have learned to listen to defend themselves or to defeat the other person. They have learned to communicate from a state of fear, anger, suspicion, and defensiveness. They have decided that “life is a jungle” and the victory goes to the top-dog. They are determinatively set to never be the under-dog. They use a power-lens as they view people and relationships, “Who has the power?” They play an inner game of suspicion, envy, jealousy, and paranoia and so see other people as dangerous enemies. What’s needed in this situation is a whole new set of premises. By adopting new assumptive frames about oneself and others— you can elicit better states and better trances for interacting, connecting, and bonding. What would be some of these premises? Interesting enough, the NLP Communication Model, following the lead of Family System Therapist, Virginia Satir and Gestalt Therapy developer Fritz Perls, NLP began with such a series of presuppositions about relationships. Behind all behavior is a positive intention. When people do what they do, they do so from positive intention, even if it isn’t immediately obvious. The behavior of people makes sense to the maps from which they are operating. The behavior is only “irrational” or “crazy” when we don’t know the map that the person is using. People have all the resources they need to be effective— if only they can access and sequence those resources. Limitations in people are functions of limiting mental maps. The person is not the problem. People communicate from state to state. Beyond Satir’s four dysfunctional states (blamer, placator, computer, distractor) is the healthy state—the leveler. Leveling refers to simply asserting oneself, leveling with others, being open and transparent. People cannot not communicate. We are always sending messages, verbally and non-verbally. Silence is not the lack of communication -137-

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—it could be communicating honor and respect, patience, even love and it can also be communicating anger, fear, disgust, etc. When what you are doing doesn’t work, and you have tried it a sufficient number of times, do something different. These communication premises are, at the same time, relational premises. There’s a reason for that. Namely, to communicate is to relate and to relate is to communicate. These two nominalizations (communication and relationship) are two sides of the same thing. You relate by what and how you communicate. And what you say and how you say it creates the quality and nature of how you relate.2 The conversation is the relationship. Given this, you can more deeply understand any relationship by identifying what and how you communicate. This takes us to the words used, the ideas sent, the tone and tempo, behaviors, context, etc. Relationships are, in the end, a function of what we say to each other and what we do. That makes relationships conditional— they are conditioned on the quality of our speaking and behavior. If what you say and do does not fit for another person, does not meet his or her needs as a person, the “relationship” will not be working. Those involved will not feel fulfilled or satisfied. Instead, feeling dissatisfied, they will seek to correct it or leave it. 3 The Relational States What state, or states, do you need in order to be effective in relating, connecting, and bonding? The list is pretty obvious and well known— interest, care, love, empathy, sympathy, kindness, patience, gentleness, magnanimity, forgiveness, playfulness, humor, joy, etc. Then, from such states, there are a whole set of skills— abilities by which you connect and bond. These also are pretty obvious— listening, paying attention, spending time, inquiring about the person, patiently accepting the person’s fallibility and humanness, communicating at multiple levels (practical issues, personal issues), seeking to understand, working through conflicts, etc. The Relational Trance Conversation As you induce a relaxed and comfortable state, add to it suggestive qualities for being the best person you can be in relation to others. A long, long time ago, when you first entered into this world, you entered it through the experience of another person ... your mother. During that the time you were inside your mother’s womb ... -138-

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growing every so slowly as you were becoming a human being, and while you did not know it at the time, you became you through another person. Today you can know in a way you never could have known it then, that it is through relationships that we become ...

become more human, become our real selves.

As you breathe in that awareness and let it settle within, you can also become aware that it takes a long time to become capable of being a healthy person in relationships. You began learning it in kindergarten when you learned how to “play well with others.” And you kept learning it through receiving love and care from others, from learning to become a friend, learning to be a team player, learning to follow, learning to lead, and for nearly two decades as you learned to stand up on your own two feet and become an independent person— the independence wasn’t an end goal, but a means goal. You became healthily independent so that you could then become healthily inter-dependent with others. As you now review consciously and unconsciously the history of your experiences with others—you have learned many things about how to effectively relate— how to love and care and show interest, and listen and support, and there may be many things that you learned that undermine your ability to effectively relate— perhaps impatience, lack of understanding, feeling insecure, uncomfortable with your emotions, intolerant of things others do that you don’t like ... and on and on. Effectively relating is a pretty high level skill and not one that comes without effort and change and lots of practice. ... and guidance. So as you imagine approaching a castle.... a magical castle ... a place where you can learn how to “play well with others,” how to get out of your own self and attend to the interests of others, imagine walking across the draw-bridge and being welcomed into the castle of love by a wise magician who is prepared for showing you the way. And you can wonder ... really wonder ... “What will I learn here? What changes will I go through in my learning? And how will my very character change when I return home?”

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With those questions in mind, you notice that the first thing the magician does is ... strange as it is ... embrace you with a warm hug. And at first you feel a little awkward thinking “I don’t know this person,” but the magician whispers to you a single word. Touch. And you wonder, really wonder, what that’s supposed to mean. Yet before you draw a conclusion, he signals you to follow him to the courtyard where there is lots of activity— kids running and playing, adults engaged in vigorous conversations, business people trading their wares, a musical trope singing, a mother carrying a young child... and as your eyes are filled with the images and sounds of so many activities, the magician, having moved up quietly besides you whispers yet something else — “loving purposeful activity.” After staying in the courtyard and walking around looking at all of the vigorous activities going on, you notice that the magician has motion to you to follow him down a corridor ... and you do ... a bit suspicious, “Where does that go?” and as you follow you climb several cases of stairs and enter into a room with an exalted ceiling and majestic purple curtains. As you look around the room it is simple ... and quiet ... very quiet ... so quiet you can hear your own breath. And here the magician sits down on a simple chair ... signaling that you can sit on a chair or on the beautiful carpet ... and as you do, he whispers, “Solitude.” After what seems like a few minutes, but which was actually nearly an hour ... he stands and walks across a high wall that overlooks the surrounding country-side where you can see the village and the farms that stretch out beyond the mountains ... and beyond that is the bell tower ...which you climb up and up ... covering many stairs until you get to the tower itself which points to the heavens ... and as you both stretch your necks upward, you hear — “Intentionality.” And when you awaken from this imaginary trip to that imaginary land and doing that imaginary activities, you can wonder about it all with the words that you heard— touch, loving purposeful activity, solitude, intentionality. Because these are the words of relationship– and you can now breathe them in ... that’s right ... breathe them into yourself so that they become yours.

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What and Where What you do in the relational conversation is explore what and how you relate, to whom and why. You explore the nature of the relating and its quality and you seek to understand how best to be caring, attending, listening, receiving, giving, etc. Where you take a person in this conversation is to the meta-cognitive place of understandings and beliefs— the person’s mental frames that comprise one’s inner game about how to be a great lover, an excellent friend, an effective colleague, loving parent, etc. Post-Hypnotic Suggestions Expect that each person is in his or her own personal trance. Elicit the best relational state so you operate from a great trance state when you relate. Intimate relating requires intimate communicating. It’s nearly impossible to relate better and deeper than you communicate.

End of the Chapter Notes 1. See The Structure of Magic, Vol. II; Changing With Families (1976), People Making (1972) by Virginia Satir. 2. About how communicating and relating are two sides of the same thing, see Communication Magic (1997/ 2001). 3. See Games Great Lovers Play (2004).

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Chapter Seventeen

THE LEADERSHIP CONVERSATION The Inspirational Trance “You don’t lead by hitting people over the head, That’s assault, not leadership.” Dwight D. Eisenhower

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imilar to how listening, communicating, and relating hardly seem like trances, so also leadership. At first blush, a leader leads people to do things in the real world, so how could that possibly involve a hypnotic trance? What kind of a trance would that be? Of course, as with the other activities, while there are things that do involve external actions, most of what leadership involves is an inward focus wherein leader and followers are envisioning a future that meets their values and thereby captivates their hearts. And, that’s the trance state of leadership. That leadership, not only involves a trance, but is a trance, consider what’s required to truly lead people. After all, what does a leader lead? The hearts and minds of those who follow the lead. The focus on external behaviors does not distinguish leadership from dictatorship. Dictators command and control behaviors and do so through fear, intimidation, threat, etc. Yet when a person complies with demands for external responses that is not following, that is merely complying.

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True Leadership Because true leadership wins the minds and hearts of people, that requires that a leader engages in something essentially psychological in nature. It requires that the leader spends time listening and calibrating to what people think, understand, value, and care about. It requires leaders spend time in dialogue so that meaning can pass through leader and followers. That’s what dialogue means— the logos or meanings within the minds and hearts of all persons involved and how it goes through (dia-) us so that together we co-create a vision and set of values. The leader facilitates this intimate level of communication and then leads out, taking the responsibility to make the vision happen. This distinguishes real leadership from the pseudo-forms of leadership— bossing, controlling, holding a position, having a title, designated as the one in charge, etc. Leaders lead out by going first, they model what they are promoting, and believe in and care about enabling (empowering) people to work together collaboratively. Even in the twenty-first century, there is still too much of the old nineteenth century military model of leadership that we today summarize as “the command and control model.” When people are educated, independent, and enlightened about the importance of living up to their visions and values— the old command and control approach doesn’t work. People will not put up with it for very long. They will leave. They will go elsewhere. Leaders who consistently think that “the problem” is that people won’t follow completely misunderstand that leaders have to earn the right to be followed. They have to learn that leadership is a gift bestowed by those following. They have to understand that leading is about serving and empowering. The Shared Trance of Leadership If a leader is the person who catches a vision and then communicates it, she has to communicate it in such a way that it awakens the hearts of those who hear. He needs to speak in such a way that it inspires people to want to be a part of it. The leader first leads via vision so that what the leader speaks about, and how she speaks about it, is itself motivational. This is where many confuse managing with leading. Managers manage the system and direction which the leaders set. They enable the system to work and so they manage the system, the money, the processes, the system problems, etc. They hire for performance and provide both training and coaching for better performance. -143-

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It is the leader who sets the direction by establishing the vision and the frames that set the system in place. After that they need men and women with managerial skills who can detail and coordinate personnel, budgets, time, etc. to make it happen. As John Kotter demonstrated long ago, there’s a critical difference between leading and managing— a distinction many leaders still have not learned.1 Far too many so-called leaders are actually managers promoted to a level of incompetence which is why they are still managing or as is so often the case, micro-managing. The essential competence of leadership is that of vision catching and vision communicating and when a leader does that, then the people within the business or organization experience inspiration. If there is the lack of motivation, there is a lack of leadership. It’s the leaders job to inspire people with the vision of the organization and people are inspired when they see what’s in it for them. Here again many so-called leaders don’t get it. The only vision they set is a vision for themselves. And even worse, often it is a vision that is entirely self-serving and ego-enhancing. They want their company to be the best, the first, the fastest growing, the most profitable, etc. And why? Because then they will be able to think of themselves as the best, the first, the greatest. What they forget is that that is not motivating for people outside of the C-suite. Who finds it inspiration to go to work so the CEO and stockholders are the best, the greatest, or who make the most profit? True leadership operates from a shared vision. Leaders who know what they are doing and do it well create a collaborative partnership with every person in the organization. That means that the trance also is not just the trance that the leader is in, but the shared trance that includes everyone in the business who makes the business work and succeed. And if it requires a shared trance, then leaders inevitably and inescapably need to know how to carry on a visionary trance conversation. This goes far beyond putting out flyers, bullet points, talking points, a vision statement, etc. This is not really a new idea or concept. For decades cutting-edge thinkers in the field of leadership have been urging leaders to accept the mantle of servant leadership.2 They have asserted that its time to turn the organizational pyramid upside-down so that the customer is CEO so that the whole organization is structured to serve the customer.3 This has given birth to the idea of “internal customers.” That is, that each level in a -144-

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business is there to serve the level below it. It is there to support, empower, encourage, inspire, etc. those who they oversee and manage. Even the words “leader,” “follower,” and “leadership” inform us that it is a relational dynamic. For someone to lead, someone else must follow. So these relational terms have to go hand-in-hand to describe the full system. That means that we need to think in terms of leading—following. There’s no leading without following. If no one is following, then there’s no leadership regardless of position, title, authority, etc. As John Maxwell expressed it, “He who thinks he leads, but looks around and sees no one following is simply out for a walk.” Because of this, the right to lead is a gift of the led. The Nature of the Shared Vision In the shared trance of leading—following, both those leading and those following share a vision and a set of values. To achieve the greatness of the vision, all must be captivated and engaged by the vision. In fact, as with any trance, engagement is the key. Engagement is the sign of a hypnotic trance state and employee engagement is a sign that the leaders have inspired people to enter into the shared vision. Where there is low level employee engagement, there is probably no shared vision. 4 Consequently the shared vision begins with leaders winning the minds of people. People see and understand the vision. They mentally grasp and comprehend what they are doing together. They get it. They are not merely complying and going along. Mentally they can make a good case for the vision and for what they are doing together. The next step is winning their hearts. That’s more difficult, but achievable. Here people not only get it, they care about it. They are emotionally moved by it. They feel the inspiration of it and so it shows up in their motivation. Their values motivate them. They need very little extras or entertainment to feel motivated. The work itself is motivating. They will stay with it even when offered more money to go elsewhere. It has been said that people don’t care about what you know or what you can do until they know that you care. That is true with a vengeance when it comes to leadership. You have to care and you have to communicate that care. After that comes the highest level, winning their spirits. When a leader can do that, then the leader is developing the next level of leaders because these -145-

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are the people who go the second mile, who support the leader, whose attitude is positive and proactive. These are the people who are completely on board and the ones that you have to chase out of the building late at night. These are the ones you have to say, “Go home!” Winning a person’s spirit so that he is on-board, committed, shares the vision, goes the extra mile, etc. means communicating a committed attitude. This goes to why the leader is leading. If it is solely or mostly for money, the leader will not ever be able to win the spirit. The leader has to show the attitude that she wants in the way she lives her life and leads. The Leadership Inspirational Trance Conversation Here begin by inducing a light trance for yourself and for the group of people who are part of this conversation. Here you will want people conversing with eyes wide open while their minds are on the vision and the values. Before we begin, and as you close your eyes, just notice what happens when you close your eyes because when you close your eyes, your eyes ... actually relax. Did you notice that? If not, then open your eyes and look around ... that’s right ... and now close your eyes, did you notice how your eyes were working a moment ago, bringing in information and now your eyes can relax that effort and how do your eyes now feel? You are also doing something else, when you close your eyes, you are changing your brain’s waves, from beta to alpha ... and you can now relax into an imagination. Imagine a major urban city somewhere in the world, New York City, Hong Kong, London, Paris, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney and imagine entering into a skyscraper—the home of an international organization where there are many, many floors and the higher you go up, the higher you go up in the hierarchy of that company, if you are in an elevator, you go up floor after floor until you reach the Csuites where the senior managers work and eventually unto the penthouse where the CEO has his or her office along with a board room. Now as you imagine that, you can let your creative imagination do something that’s completely wild and crazy, something utterly unexpected, imagine that all of the floors are turned upside-down so -146-

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that the first floor is that of the CEO and above that the senior managers, then as you go higher and higher, you reach the front line people. Given that re-arrangement, imagine if a business carrying on business in that manner how that would change the culture of that business. What would happen if the top leaders were not removed from the customers? ____ What would happen if all of the leaders were the foundation for all that goes on above them? ____ And as you let your imagination take you away from today’s world, let it now take you into the presence of a true leader —a it could be Ghandi, it could be Martin Luther King, Jr., it could be Nelson Mandella, Mother Teresa, there’s a great many true leaders who have gone before us ... people who have won the minds and hearts and spirits of many others. These are the people who think in terms of shared vision and so speak about the vision and ask questions—lots of questions—about what others in the organization think, their perspective, and how they think things could be better. And notice how it feels to be in the presence of someone who brings you into his confidence and treats you with a sense of honor ... and what does that do within you in terms of wanting to be a part of the vision? And as you turned things upside-down before, now you can turn things inside-out as you step into the shoes of that leader because by stepping in fully and completely you can take on her way of thinking and feeling as a leader, her way of communicating, questioning, and dialoguing. And as you do, notice how wanting to serve changes your attitude and enables you to think in terms of the other as well as yourself.

What and Where What you do in the leadership conversation is to distinguish true leading from commanding, bossing, managing, and dictating. What you do is to begin defining what it truly means to lead and how to lead. You enable leaders to understand that they have to earn the right to lead, it is a gift and it is bestowed by how one treats those who follows. Where you take a person or a group in this conversation is to think systemically and ecologically about what would enable the group or company to be a humanizing organization, a place where people do not -147-

become stressed out or burned out, but who work out of the love of a vision and of making a difference in the world. Here you take a person to what’s called a self-actualizing company or community and begin to imagine the possibilities. Post-Hypnotic Suggestions Decide that you will earn the right to lead. When you serve and empower, people will follow. Remember, leadership is not about you, it is through you. Induce a shared trance between leaders and followers. The right to lead is the gift of the led.

End of the Chapter Notes 1. See John Kotter, A Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management (1990). 2. Robert K. Greenwood, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. (1977). 3. Forler Massnick. The Customer Is CEO: How to Measure What Your Customers Want —and Make Sure They Get It. 4. See Unleashing Leadership: Self-Actualizing Leaders and Companies (2009). Chapter is on the subject of engagement— what causes dis-engagement and how to lead for engagement.

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MAKING DREAMS REAL With all of the hypnotic thinking and speaking that creates a solid sense of self, integration of self, ongoing development of one’s best self, now you are ready to make your dreams and visions real. You have accessed your highest intentions (chapter five) and escaped limiting beliefs (chapter six), you have eliminated excuses (chapter nine) and relationally you have developed leadership skills (chapter seventeen). You have turned great ideas into lived actions as you have mind-to-muscled great principles (chapter eleven), now all that’s left is to actualize your dreams so that they become real in the outside world. First of all, to make your dreams real requires resilience— the ability to bounce back from any set-back or knock-down. Life may throw lots of challenges at you, but within you there is the ability to manage your thinking (reasoning, explanation) so that you frame things in such a way as to spring back to life (conversation #1). Making dreams real also requires persistence, to persevere, to keep learning, to adjust, and to keep figuring out how to do it (conversation #2). And with that, you develop the self-mastery of joyful discipline since discipline is, ultimately, the pathway to mastery (conversation #3).

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Chapter Eighteen

THE RESILIENCE CONVERSATION A Trance for Bouncing Back “Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.” Nelson Mandela “A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.” Christopher Reeve

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hat is it about those special people that we look up to who go through personal hells and yet who come through it seemingly untarnished? What is it that enables them to get knocked down, sometimes over and over again, and yet always get up, shake off the dust, and go for it again with a spirit as fresh and brilliant as the first time? What makes it possible for a person to suffer a set-back, even life-threatening setbacks, and not only do they never give up, they do so with grace, passion, and love. These are the questions about resilience—the unique and special state (trance) wherein one does not take counsel from the outside world, from the events or circumstances of life, but from one’s own inner spirit of vision. How do you put yourself in a trance state which is so powerful? This is no -150-

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ordinary trance state. It is a very special one—a trance state so robust that even extraordinary misfortunes of life cannot defeat it. What makes up such a state? What’s required to induce and maintain that kind of trance? The Ordinariness of Resilience For all of the incredible extraordinary nature of resilience, it is at the same time very ordinary. Our bodies, yours and mine, are uniquely endowed with a special quality of resilience so that when we suffer bruises and cuts, falls and hurts— the body immediately goes to work healing and repairing itself. Self-healing is the body’s built-in resilience program. The ordinariness of the healing resilience of the body, in fact, is so ubiquitous that we hardly notice. You suffer a cut on your arm, you fall and scrap off some flesh ... and a week later the cut is healed and new skin is replacing the old. The physical set-back is addressed and you are back—ready to return fully to what you were doing. How does that innate resilience work? It works by the inevitable and inescapable potentials of your immune system and the “wisdom of the body” for self-repair. To a greater extent than most of us imagine, resilience is built into the ongoing functioning of our body. In fact, everyday the body is constantly renewing itself, taking in raw materials and converting it into cells that will replace other cells. It’s estimated that almost every cell of your body is completely replaced and made new every seven years. Talk about a picture of rejuvenating resilience! What about the mind and what about a person’s spirit, is there an innate resilience built into these parts of our personality? Are there potentials within us, which we could learn to tap into, which would then release a constant renewing and rejuvenating of our attitude—of our mind and spirit? And if there is, how can we tap into that trance state in order to operate from it as we move through life? 1 The Heart of Resilience As with every state and every trance, specific qualities make it what it is. Those qualities are the variables that make the state possible, that are both necessary and sufficient in order for the experience to emerge. Yet not all variables are the same or of equal importance. Some variables are absolutely essential to a strategy. Other variables are more peripheral, good to have, but not essential. Some variables make up the heart of the -151-

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experience. What then are the qualities for resilience and what are the central variable or variables? Central to everything about resilience is the person’s meta-level explanation about the set-back. How you interpret the events thereafter determines everything else that happens. It is the meaning you attribute that makes, or breaks, resilience. Set-backs and knock-downs are “bad” things which then elicit the essential existential question. “Why do bad things happen to good people?” But, of course, that’s a why question, and for the most part, there’s really no satisfying answer to that question. And because there is no satisfying answer, asking that question itself can become a way to perpetuate feeling and staying knocked-down and defeated. In fact, asking the why question will mostly perpetuate non-resilience, victimhood, and the lack of coping, much less, mastering the situation.2 Actually the trance of “Why did this happen to me?” is a particularly destructive and self-sabotaging trance. If you ask that question, you will mostly be dissatisfied with the answers you find— frustrated, and when perpetuated, then angry and eventually depressed. You will induce yourself into being a victim— thinking like a victim, feeling like a victim, and acting like a victim. For a great many people, giving up the why question will be one of the first steps for resilience. And for some, the hardest step of all. The ultimate victim trance answers the why question with three really disastrous answers that lock in the knock-down. It says that the cause of the traumatic event is me—it is personal. The trauma is everywhere—it is pervasive. And the trauma is forever—it is permanent. Martin Seligman, in Learned Helplessness (1975), formatted the structure as internal in source, general in space (everywhere), and permanent in time. That highlights the misery and victim producing formula: personal, pervasive, and permanent With this formula a person codes the meaning of the trauma as personal, pervasive and permanent and thereby lock oneself into the trauma. Then there’s no escape! How can you escape from yourself (personal)? How can you escape when it is pervasively everywhere (pervasive)? How can you escape when it is permanent and forever (permanent)? That’s one hellish trance state! -152-

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A much better trance is the resilience trance. While Seligman called it Learned Optimism (1990), it is not so much about optimism as such as it is about a new way to frame the hurtful event and the freedom it creates. The change in format is that the “bad thing” or set-back is structured as external in source (not personal), specific in space (not pervasive), and temporary in time (not permanent). This trance operates from an entirely different formula, succinctly summarized in the three words— that there then. This explains the “bad” thing as that—the source is some specific or particular person or event, not you. The trauma is there—in a given environment or situation, not everywhere, and it is then—at a given moment in time, not forever. And just as personal, pervasive, permanent creates a prison of no escape, that there then frees you from such a prison. Resilience and Meta-Level Meaning-Making When it comes to the robust and rejuvenating trance state of resilience, meaning is the key. Here like life itself, the quality of the meanings that you appraise and attribute to an event determines the quality of your resilience or lack of it. And given that meaning itself is an inside phenomena, something that does not occur externally, the meaning-making process itself is a trance or hypnotic state. For it, you have to develop an internal focus as you set a frame for how to understand or interpret something. What are the meanings that induce and activate the resilience trance? Some are meanings about yourself— “I am more than what I experience.” “My unconditional value as a person means that my value is not conditioned on money, looks, health, friends, reputation, etc.” Some are meanings about time— “I will get through this.” “This too will pass.” Some are meanings about your abilities and competencies— “I can develop the skills needed to cope with the current situation.” “I can learn how to handle things.” Some are meanings about your social context— “I can find friends, colleagues, and helpers who can support me through this.” A great many meanings are needed for a healthy resilience trance. There are as many meanings needed as there are facets of the set-back situation. Therefore depending on the kind of set-back a person has suffered, and what’s been involved, specialized meanings will be needed. For a financial set-back, you may need new and updated resilient meanings about money, -153-

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budgeting, saving, investing, risk-taking, trusting, etc. For a marriage setback, you may need updated resilient meanings about marriage, the opposite sex, differences, conflict, patience, forgiveness, understanding, etc. For a health set-back, you may need new and updated resilient meanings about health, well-being, exercise, eating, lifestyle, etc. Whatever factors play a role in creating a set-back or a knock-down, you may need new and updated resilient meanings. That’s because an event is only a set-back when it is so defined and perceived. Someone has to name or categorize the event a “set-back.” Otherwise events are just things that happen. What it means to you, or more accurately, the meanings you give to it is what determined if it is a set-back or something else. Meaning is the key. If meaning is the key, then so is your ability to reframe meaning. The more your capacity for this, the more flexibility of mind (in contrast to rigid and inflexible thinking and believing), the more your ability to create new and updated resilient meanings.3 The Resilience Trance Conversation First induce a state of comfort and relaxation. Induce a sense of exploration and a willingness to go to places that may be uncomfortable all in service of making transformational changes that will free one from being lockeddown in a set-back. You may want to start with an away-from induction— moving away from the limitations, misery, and ineffectiveness of staying in the non-resilient state. As you continue to find that comfortable place, imagine that it lies within a golden bubble ... a bubble of energy and power, a bubble of safety because this is the bubble of unconditional self-esteem and ... as you step into it and begin to feel that sense of safety and protection, here you know that you are fully human and don’t have to do anything to count, to be a somebody, to be valued and loved. Imagine stepping into your bubble ... moving through it quickly or slowly ... and then from within it — looking out on things resting assured and curious, really curious about what you will do and how you will manage things when things don’t go just exactly as you would prefer.

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Now inside of this golden bubble ... and I don’t know how big your bubble is ... I only know that it can expand and grow so that within it there is a higher level atmosphere so that you can move upward in the bubble to the place where you construct meanings ... it may be a white billowy cloud that floats above you or a meta-level balcony where you can go for a larger level perspective of things. And that’s where you can set frames of meaning that will make you and your responses stronger and more robust. Now because, as you well know, resilience is the bounce that you get when you know that whatever happens, no matter how much of a loss it is or a disturbance or disappointment —it is just an event that’s happening at this moment, it will not last, and it is not everywhere, but just in a specific place and area, and best of all, it is not about you, but perhaps about an action—what you did, what you said, what you experienced, some expression of you but not you. And you—the meaning maker, you always have it in your power to give meaning to the things that happen. “What does it mean?” That depends on your flexibility of consciousness and your creativity and you know how to give new meanings to things. Because meaning is an inside job, it is in your hands ... your mind to decide what significance to give to things and you know that by using the magic formula of that there then you can defuse an upsetting event. And as you think about framing things with the magical word that to contain a set-back, it is not about you, but that and only that. And you can see how that by framing the situation with there, you put it into a specific place so that it does not spread to everywhere. It is there and there is stays, can it not? And when you utter the temporal term then, you further contain the knock-down to a specific time, then and not forever. And as you say those three trauma limiting words, that there then ... feel the freedom that it gives you, feel how it sets you free from the prison of feeling like a victim because now you know that you will never again accept that small and limiting place of being a victim. Instead you can bounce up and down inside your bubble ... bounce with energy and vitality, bounce with a curiosity about how you can and will make things better and move on from the set-back. And -155-

feeling the bounce in your mind, your emotions, your speech, and

your behavior, you can bounce right out of the restrictions of limited thinking and pessimistic feeling and look at the world as a world of possibility given the inner resilience that you are building.

What and Where What you do in this conversation is draw out the person’s innate ability to be resilient by changing his way of explaining things. When you do that, you are enabling him to distinguish between events and meaning. There may be specific meanings about some given thing, yet mostly the meanings are that person’s interpretations about self, time, and space. Where you take the person in this conversation is inside to the assumptive frames that govern her way of making sense of set-backs and knock-downs. With a powerful intention to become highly resilient, then with your big why for living with love and contribution, she will be able to handle any how. She will figure out the how. That’s because a person has attained an inner freedom by not semantically loading a set-back with negative interpretations. Now that person can own and release his inner potentials for making his mind, spirit, and attitude fully resilient. Post-Hypnotic Suggestions When a set-back occurs, code it with that there then. Events are just events, as the meaning-maker you get to determine what it is. Whatever set-back occurs, you are a Somebody. This too will pass.

End of the Chapter Notes 1. That there’s an inherent adaptive process within us has been discovered in the research on happiness. When people have been asked to predict how happy or depressed they would be if certain undesirable misfortunes occur, people predict a much gloomier future than what those who actually suffer the misfortunes. 2. The question about why bad things happen to good people is the domain known as theodicy. 3. For the skill and art of reframing, see Mind-Lines: Lines for Changing Minds (2005).

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Chapter Nineteen

THE PERSEVERING CONVERSATION The Never-Say-Quit Spirit Trance “Persistence, persistence, and persistence. The power can be created and maintained through daily practice continuous effort.” Bruce Lee

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f resilience is that inner state of mind (trance) which enables a person to always come back from a set-back and try again and again, then a critical aspect of resilience is persistence. Here persevering in an area of endeavor plays an equally essential part for the incredibly robust attitude of resilience. They go together—resilience and persevering. You can’t have one without the other. It is resilience that activates, mobilizes, and inspires you with the inner bounce energy to persevere. Otherwise persevering would be hard, difficult, a lot of work, and probably unpleasant. Without resilience, you would be “gutting it out.” But what if, just what if, you could persevere joyfully and with vitality? What difference would that make? How would that enliven resilience? It would make all the difference in the world, would it not? Then, sticking with your goal as a long-term project or, even more so, sticking with an -157-

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objective that is designed to become a lifestyle, and not just some ad hoc actions you’re engaged in, and then set them aside—that would then be quite doable. And if you could develop a perseverance trance state so that when you start something, you know deep inside yourself that you will finish it— imagine the sense of self-trust and self-confidence that would then emerge. Persevering then would become part of your sense of self— part of your character and characteristic way to move through the world. The Dimensions of Perseverance Perseverance involves persisting in two different dimensions. First, it is persisting in the effort you put forth in pursuing your goal. Second, it is persisting to do what you do in the face of difficulty and/or opposition. The first dimension of persisting requires ongoing self-motivation and selfinspiration in order to overcome the dulling effects of boredom and sameness in any situation that requires long-term effort. Often you do not persist because you do not see any immediate results. That’s why you get discouraged. You start questioning whether your efforts are working, whether it is worth continuing. Or you do not persevere because you become fatigued and run out of energy. The second dimension of persisting does not fight against boredom or fatigue, but opposition and that requires a robust commitment to yourself and your vision. It requires the ability to take a stand, and stand fast in the face of the opinions of others and/or the underhanded activity of some who would seek your defeat. That takes an especially strong stomach to handle the opposition especially when there are personal attacks. The Critical Role of Perseverance If you have resilience, and you can bounce back after a set-back or a knockdown, but do not persevere, then in the long-term your resilience would not make any difference. If you have a brilliant idea and a plan superior to everybody else, but you do not persist in your efforts—in the long-term it also amounts to nothing. It’s resilience that empowers you to persist and perseverance gives resilience its vitality and joy. Perseverance describes the personal power to keep working on your goal, to hang-in, and to keep expending effort. Those who are best at persevering are those who both expect, and even anticipate, the challenges that will arise if you are to stay the course. They realistically know that there will be problems, difficulties, and even opposition. So when they encounter such, -158-

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they are not shocked or surprised. Expecting it, they are more emotionally prepare for it. What drives such perseverance? A persistence that does not quit requires an attitude of passion and commitment so that you become absorbed in the process of making it happen. The vitality arises from the values that you know are inherent within your objective. Perseverers keep their vision fresh as they keep learning and growing. They keep developing their skills and they become tenacious by the intensity and purity of their vision. Obviously all of this describes an incredibly robust inner attitude, it is not for the faint of heart. It is for those inwardly strong and energetic. The perseverance trance state is one of definiteness of purpose, strong desire, self-reliance, definite plans, accurate knowledge, and collaboration with others. Napoleon Hill said he interviewed and modeled “the secret of wealth accumulation at the request of Dale Carnegie.” That led to two decades of interviewing and studying. What’s fascinating is his final conclusion about the secret of success. “A twenty-year research of hundreds of well-known men, many of whom admitted that they had accumulated their vast fortunes through the aid of the Carnegie secret. ... I had the happy privilege of analyzing both Mr. Edison and Mr. Ford, year by year, over a long period of years and therefore, the opportunity to study them at close range, so I speak from actual knowledge when I say that I found no quality save persistence, in either of them, that even remotely suggested the major source of their stupendous achievements. ... persistence, concentration of effort, and definiteness of purpose were the major sources of their achievements. ... Those who have cultivated the habit of persistence seem to enjoy insurance against failure. No matter how many times they are defeated, they finally arrive up toward the top of the ladder.” (pp. 16-17, 164, 154, italics added)

How about that! Persistence functions as an “insurance against failure.” You cannot fail if you don’t quit. Defeats would then become for you just bumps in the road to success. Almost of a century later, two other researchers, Thomas Stanley and William Danko, engaged in a longitudinal research of “the wealthy in America” and came to a similar conclusion. -159-

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“How do you become wealthy? Here, too, most people have it wrong. It is seldom luck or inheritance or advanced degrees or even intelligence that enables people to amass fortunes. Wealth is more often the result of a lifestyle of hard work, perseverance, planning, and most of all, selfdiscipline.” (1996, pp. 1-2, italics added)

The secret is sticking with an objective so that you use continual feedback in real time which then enables you to keep improving and do so until you reach your goal. The bottom line is that you have to keep at it and not let it go. And the best way to do that is to access a trance of perseverance. Qualities within Perseverance The most essential variable within the state of perseverance is effort. And what is effort? We are talking about action, initiative, and proactivity. It is extending and using your actions, using your mind to think, to learn, to decide, using your emotions to care, to face fears, to feel. Effort can be mental, emotional, linguistic, behavioral and/or any combination of these. Effort can feel easy and natural or it can feel unnatural as a strain against the grain as you fight inertia. It can feel like stretching forth to doing something new and different as you get out of your comfort zone. Effort is often your own victory over your attitude and mood. Another essential facet of perseverance is refusing to get discouraged as you hold the vision in your mind. Beyond long-term ongoing effort, boredom, opposition, here’s another important factor—dealing effectively with plateaus. Almost every aspect of mind, emotion, speech, and behavior that you work on developing will develop quickly at first and then level off. And sometimes the leveling off will typically become a plateau. This presents a great opportunity for mis-understanding. Many immediately assume (yet falsely so) that they have reached their peak, growth is over, “This is as far as I can go.” They confuse a plateau with the end of growth— a disastrous confusion. A plateau is just that—a plateau. Typically it is a place for integrating what you’ve learned or achieved and/or even recuperating from the previous efforts you’ve put in. Often when you reach a plateau when developing a skill, that’s when the body integrates what you’ve been learning. It is as if continuous improvement stops as the body (and/or mind) focuses on integrating the previous growth. Knowing that nearly everything plateaus helps with accepting and embracing that experience and using the time of -160-

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the plateau-ing for integration and learning. When it comes to expending energy as you put forth effort, it’s the nature of mental, emotional, and physical to oscillates, to rise and fall, to surge forward and to hold back. Keep Track (or Score) for Persevering The state of persevering toward an objective means persisting doing what you need to do and doing it consistently, regularly, and systematically. As you do that, you will need constant feedback from your actions as lead measures so you know what’s working, how well it’s working, and what’s not working. Without that vital information, without knowing, “Is this working or not?” it is difficult to stay with it. In-the-moment, real-time feedback keeps people inspired and motivated because they can see the cause-effect relationship between what they do and the results that they get. Such feedback enables you to correct things in the moment thereby saving you lots of time. Keith Sutherland says that it takes four times longer to correct things later (2014, pp. 99-100). Of course, using such information in the moment requires people to be ruthlessly honest and not fearful of bad news.1 It is the very process of keeping track or monitoring what you are doing that enables you to stick with the process of achieving your objective. By effectively monitoring, you can then keep adjusting, learning, correcting deviations, and following through. You can see this dynamic by thinking about any sport—what if you’re playing a game and you don’t know the score? For most people, it takes the spirit out of them. Why? Because they think “it doesn’t matter, we’re not keeping score.” People play differently when they keep score— they play more intensely and are more engaged. Keeping score helps with perseverance. Yet in keeping score you have to keep the score in perspective, the goal is not the score you get at any given moment. Instead the score is a means to an end. Scoring or not scoring lets you know what is working and what is not working. Keep score so that you can keep shifting and altering what you do so that you can get closer to the real objective. The Perseverance Trance Conversation Induce a state of comfort and relaxation. Invite the person to slowly and delightfully transition from the awake state to the outside to an internal state -161-

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of self-focus. Invite an awareness of the tension in the body and how one can release the tensions. As you take a deep breath and sit back from your everyday life, you can sit forward inside yourself in anticipating building up a state of robust perseverance so that when you set a goal, you can fully trust yourself that you will persist and make it happen. So letting your unconscious mind think of an ecological goal that is part and parcel of your vision for life, what you know is part of your mission in life, you can breathe in the values of that vision ... letting it energize you and create a strong powerful vitality within. What are the values? ___ and as you say them within your mind ... and maybe aloud ... you can feel the vitality that arises from within you. And as you feel that vitality, imagine letting that vitality become an engine, the energy for your efforts as you initiate the required actions that with persistence will take you to reaching your objective. And as you step into the feeling of constantly and regularly taking action, push out the time line so that you see and feel this vitality keeping you on task so that boredom, difficulty, plateaus, and opposition will not and cannot stop you, but that you persevere through these factors that would stop you in your tracks. Imagine seeing that overall track that takes you from the present to the desired outcome and as you do ... see it as a graph line that goes up and down, that oscillates up and down, that hits plateaus for integration and that then heads up again ... see that line and now, just for the fun of it, step onto that line and imagine walking the line ... moving from now to then, moving through the ups and downs of activities because this is the way it is when it comes to almost everything that develops, it goes up and down ... and that’s just part of the process, is it not? As as you walk that line imagine getting in-the-moment feedback, information — good or bad— that tells you how you are doing, when you are on target, when you are off task, when you are deviating so that you can make adjustments in real time... and as you do embrace the power and vitality of feedback, see it as a lead measurement with a sense of joy and delight.

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As as you embrace and use all of these factors of perseverance, you are becoming— in your inmost self— more and more a persevering person, it is who you are. You persist. You keep at it and stay on task and you make your dreams come true. And you can now feel that sense of self-trust and self-confidence. You can trust in your ability to persist and to persevere and that it’s just a matter of time and effort and commitment ... and you will achieve your objective.

What and Where What you do in this conversation is enable a person to think long-term as he enhances his vision with a perspective which is long enough to keep at it. Here you enable her to reframe obstacles, plateaus, and anything that would evoke getting discouraged and quitting. When a person knows that persistence toward one’s goal is a central secret of success, then accessing a perseverance trance state enables you to become the kind of person who transforms dreams into actions. The trance itself accesses and integrates the qualities of investing effort, taking initiative, and being proactive so you don’t just talk and never produce, you close the knowing —doing gap and you make things happen. Where you take a person in this conversation is into the inner world of how the person thinks about the objective. You take the person inside to facilitate expanding and enriching the inner game so that she operates with both resilience and perseverance. Post-Hypnotic Suggestions Resilience and perseverance go hand-in-hand, you need both. Put in the effort and the energy to persist to achieve your goals. Perseverance is refusing to get discouraged as you keep yourself inspired. Long-term thinking enables perseverance.

Notes at the Chapter End 1. See Keith Sutherland’s book, The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time (2014). 2. See Achieving Peak Performance (2009) and the Neuro-Semantic Training, Unleashing Productivity.

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Chapter Twenty

THE DISCIPLINED CONVERSATION A Mastery Path Trance “Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.” Jim Rohn “There is no magic wand that can resolve our problems. The solution rests with our work and discipline.” Jose Eduardo dos Santos

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hen it comes to taking on a goal in seeking success in any longterm process, to determine how you’re doing, and the likelihood of success, are you disciplined or undisciplined? If you are disciplined, you act in an orderly and structured way. Otherwise you go about things in a haphazard way with your fingers crossed hoping that it will work. Do you engage in the required actions in regularly and consistently (disciplined)? Or do you just muddle your way doing whatever strikes your fancy or what you feel like doing? Do you know and follow a dependent procedure for getting things done (disciplined)? Or do you put aside procedures for being spontaneous and free-spirited? While there are certainly times and situations that call for trying something new, for being spontaneous, for refusing convenience, for throwing caution to the wind—most of the time the goals we set and the success we desire are -164-

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not like that. Most of the time others have gone before us and there are dependable and proven ways to get things done. Others have already pioneered the path for how to achieve a particular objective so it is no longer a big mystery or rocket science. They have left behind highly effective procedures and all we have to do is learn them and follow them. We simply need to learn the discipline of that domain and become disciplined in implementing it. The Wonder of Discipline As suggested in the last sentence, discipline can refer to a field of study (the discipline of medicine, the discipline of law, etc.) and it can also refer to a state (being disciplined). What’s problematic about the word is that as a verb, it can also convey something very negative such as punishment. “The boy needs to be disciplined.” “She is going to be brought before the tribunal and disciplined.” “If he had been disciplined as a child, he wouldn’t be going to jail.” Ah, the wonder of the word and idea of discipline! It spans from something very negative (punishment, pain, deprivation) to something marvelous and awesome (a field of study, an experience of mastery). No wonder the term can evoke a whole range of diverse responses within us. No wonder any given individual may hate it and another love it. Used as a noun, discipline refers to a structured procedure, a course of action, a regimen, and/or a planned way of operating. If you think about the discipline of a master craftsman, then you might be fascinated and absolutely curious about his regimen and how it has enabled him to develop his expertise. You might want to model it so you can replicate it. If you think about an exercise discipline that you once engaged in, you might dread having to go back to that again. Interesting enough, the word discipline and the word disciple arise from the same source. A disciple of a master in any field follows a discipline because the discipline is the way of the master and the way to mastery. It is the methodology that allows you to make your objective real and gives you an orderly way to succeed. Perhaps we can attain greater clarity about discipline by looking at its opposite— being undisciplined. What does someone confess to when he confesses to being undiscipline? What ideas and images come to mind? -165-

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Typically we think of someone who “Seek freedom and become cannot stick to his objective, he’s up captive of your desires. Seek and down, on and off, and discipline and find your undependable. Would you want an liberty. ” undisciplined doctor work on you? Frank Herbert Would you want to take your car or computer to an undisciplined technician? Undisciplined is the life of a young child or adolescent before one has learned to harness one’s energies, intelligence, emotions, and behaviors in a focused way. Where there is the lack of discipline, there is generally the failure of attention, intention, decisiveness, practice, commitment, cooperation, collaboration, and other rich qualities of a mind that is focused and determined. Obviously, the state of being disciplined is an internally focused trance at its best— and one that can be a joyful and full of passionate vitality. To be disciplined is to be in a trance— to be so inwardly focused that external activities do not distract you from your purpose. The Rich Components of Discipline If the trance state of being disciplined is a way to unleash your potential and your best self, if it is the pathway to mastery in your chosen area, if it facilitates the development of expertise, then what makes it so powerful? What is it about this trance state that enables it to transform us into apprentices to mastery? What are the components within it? The discipline trance first and foremost operates from a clarity of vision and purpose. If the undisciplined are unclear, don’t know where they’re going, don’t know what they really want, then the disciplined are the opposite. They know what they want, where they are going, and have developed a clear vision that inspires them. They see and embrace a long-term objective that’s highly meaningful to them. Whether an athlete preparing for the Olympics four or eight years hence, whether a business woman orchestrating a ten-year business plan, whether a student imagining stepping into his desired profession, disciplined people are visionary and clear-eyed. With the clear-eye vision, disciplined people then develop a singular focus of attention that enables them to do what’s necessary to get what they want. This is the trance. They live purposefully because they set their highest -166-

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intention on what they want to achieve. They have a strong focus that stays so focused, they do not deviate to other interests. Explore the quality of their focus and you will find that it is their high quality focus that maintains their consistency and regularity. Do they get bored? Hardly. How could they? They keep refreshing their vision and their intention almost on a daily basis and because they do— they keep focused. They know who they are, what they are about, and where they are going. Part of their discipline lies in how they engage in self-encouragement and self-inspiration. Another ingredient that keeps the focus is the discipline of their decisions. For all of the small daily decisions that they make to keep aligned with the vision, they make consistent choices that match and fit the larger level decisions. Here they do not waver. Here they have made some metadecisions about their decisions. That is, they have set some decisions aside from being re-decided, and will not let some things even come up for reconsideration. The athlete who wants to win at national and then international meets simply does not go through the distressful daily decision, “Should I exercise today?” That decision is not even on the table. It’s been decided. As a writer, I never go through the agonizing decision, “Should I write something today?” “Maybe I should take a day off, should I?” Having to decide over and over and over consumes a lot of energy and distracts focus. Discipline involves certain meta-decisions which, in turn, saves you from wasting energy. In your meta-decisions, you make resolutions that bind together their actions and segments of time all in service of your larger purpose. Maintaining the discipline then requires yet another ingredient— stubbornness (or steadfastness). This is the ability to stubbornly refuse to let anything get in the way of the goal. After all, there are a thousand seductions that can and will arise to distract you. There are a thousand other options, tempting options about other good things you could do. And there are those deceptive little linguistic phrases that can blind us in the moment, “Just this time...” “One time away from your regimen won’t hurt anything.”

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This is where the ability to “make up your mind” and stubbornly hold to your visions, your values, your decisions, and your lifestyle is what leads to actualizing the state of discipline. What’s implied in that is the ability to put vision above comfort. That’s why we say that the disciplined are those who are comfortable in stretching out of their comfort zone. They know excellence and expertise does not lie in comfort, but in stretching, in pushing, in demanding a little bit more of yourself. Again, the temptation is to give in to the call of comfort, “But I will be uncomfortable if I do that!” “Why does it have to be uncomfortable? I want to be relaxed.” Athletes do not get to the Olympics with that attitude. Scientists and researchers do not create great breakthroughs with that attitude. World-class leaders do not change their industry or the world thinking that way. The Disciplined Trance Conversation Induce an inward focused trance state— one of excitement, passion, and anticipation. Take the person on a guided tour so that they feel increasingly like a pioneer, an adventurer, an explorer of new worlds. And as you let these words register deep inside, let them penetrate deeper and deeper still so that you begin to identify with them and let them define the kind of person you are— pioneer, adventurer, explorer ... because the ability to envision a great outcome, to see what many others cannot see is only a rare and unprecedented opportunity to make a difference in the world and in the lives of other people that will leave the world a better place. And you have a dream, do you not? You have an objective that you would like to make real ... And what is that dream? ____ As you give yourself to that dream right now, go there, see and hear and feel it, because this is the beginning of any adventure, creating a clear mental image of the outcome. And it will never be finished it will always become more refined, more explicit and more detailed as you take each and every step toward it ... yet you can and will begin here, with the vision. And within the vision are values, that’s inevitable. And what are the values of your vision? ____ Why is it important for you? ____ Why is it important for others? _____ and you can begin to collect the values and maybe a hierarchy of values.

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Here you have stepped up, perhaps layer upon layer, in your intentionality so that you have accessed one or more of your highest intentions in living life as you do and in becoming the person that you can, and will, become. And as you do, notice the inspiration that this brings— the inspiration that puts hope in your heart, that puts a lift in your walk and talk, that prepares you as you anticipate the days and weeks to come as you go through the process for making it real. And it is that inspiration that can keep you on track— focused so intensely, can it not? Because now you have a pathway to the future, a pathway that you can walk, a mastery pathway that will lead you to incorporating the expertise that you need. It is the pathway of discipline of a master in the making ... and you can wonder where the pathway will take you. ... and yet what’s most important are not all of the options that may arise, but the disciplined approach that you have adopted and your daily decisions, the small and seemingly inconsequential decisions, but the decisions that are critical in keeping you on track for the greatest adventure of all— moving forward to your vision. And here you get to use your stubbornness so that you can stubbornly refuse to be thrown off the track, stubbornly refuse to think short-term, stubbornly refused to be seduced by immediately short-term pleasures and exceptions because your internal inspiration and vision keeps you focused. And you are an explorer — a pioneer going first.

What and Where What you do in this conversation is enable one to discover a procedure of specific actions that comprise the pathway to mastery. What you do is enable one to develop an appreciation of following a precise strategy. Discipline can not only be joyful and fun, it needs to be joyful and fun. Then with these qualities, the discipline naturally becomes long-lasting and enduring. Where you take a person to in this conversation is into his or her inner mind of understandings and beliefs about following a prescribed procedure. The person establishes a higher level intentionality so that the discipline, as the -169-

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pathway of mastery, involves what enriches anyone who has mastered a field. It gives them a love for their vision, objective, and discipline so that it seems like play rather than work. Post-Hypnotic Suggestions Embrace the discipline of a focused procedure. Discipline offers the freedom to master a domain. Use discipline to become a master-in-the-making. A meta-decision about a big thing can save you from the agony of indecision over many little things.

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Chapter Twenty-One

THE SECRET CONVERSATION Understanding the Meta-Structures

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hat is really going on when it comes to hypnosis, hypnotic states, and hypnotic conversations? To answer that, I’ll refer to three definitions of “the unconscious mind” which I quoted in Hypnotic Thinking (2020). These three definitions provide some powerful pictures of the hypnotic process and of the unconscious mind. One is the background knowledge, another is context, and thirdly, meta. First, in the Gestalt Psychology foreground/ background distinction provides a basic definition for the unconscious mind. John Burton (2009) notes that what is in the foreground is conscious—you are aware of it. It is front-stage. What’s in the background is unconscious, you are not aware of it. You are not aware even though it plays a significant part of the mental context as it highlights what’s in front. “The ground is what the individual ignores but this ground is fertile in rich resources that can provide a solution. ... you could think of the figure as being the conscious mind, while the ground represents the unconscious mind.” (2009, p. 30)

Second, the unconscious mind as context. What is in the background serves as the context for what’s in the front of the mind. Learning always start -171-

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with learning some specific content. Later that content (i.e., being told to be quiet at school when making noise) may come to operate as context (i.e., “school is where you are criticized and embarrassed”), as the frame (i.e., “learning things is stupid”) for interpreting things. Wolinksky has even suggested that “the concept of context” is much more useful than “the unconscious mind” because it does not compartmentalize mind as the conscious/ unconscious split does (1991, p. 59). Context gives us a picture of an environment or landscape in which something occurs— that’s what is usually unconscious. Third, what is outside of awareness is meta (at a higher level) to the content, hence a meta-level or a meta-structure. The term meta-level gives a picture of a hierarchy, as a series of levels. This is how Ernest Rossi used these terms in a conversation with Milton Erickson at the end of their book on Experiencing Hypnosis (1981). These three phrases for “the unconscious mind” provide an understanding of the higher (meta) or hidden (background, context) conversation that “hypnosis” works with. This is where the real conversation— the hypnotic conversation— occurs. Thinking of it in this way will facilitate you working hypnotically with clients and colleagues in your communications. Rossi’s Summary of “Experiencing Hypnosis” Erickson and Rossi interestingly enough closed their book (1981) by recording Ernest Rossi’s comments to Erickson. “The therapist is always working with a frame of reference rather than the actual words. In hypnotherapy, when you are talking to a patient, you are actually addressing his frame of reference. (p. 255)

This states the idea directly. While you are speaking to another person and talking about whatever you’re talking about (“the actual words”), what you are really talking about is at a higher level to the words. You are working with the person’s frame-of-reference. One is the obvious conversation, the other is the secret conversation. It is in this sense that hypnotic conversations are multi-level conversations and engaged in something hidden from plain sight. “A patient is a patient because he does not know how to use his different frames of reference in a skillful manner; I believe these frames of reference are actually meta-levels of communication. Bateson (1972) has described meta-communication as communication (on a higher or -172-

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secondary level) about communication (on a lower or primary level). Similarly, we may view a frame of reference as a meta-structure that gives meaning to words on the primary level. The meta-levels are usually unconscious.” (p. 256, italics added)

Multi-level communications occur at two levels— the primary and the meta-levels. Behind the primary level words and ideas is a meta-structure and it is from that level that the person “gives meaning” to words and events. This governs how he interprets things. This is where the real conversation actually occurs— it occurs in and with the person’s beliefs, decisions, memories, imaginations, intentions, permissions, and all of the other meta-level structures. “You are always dealing with these unconscious meta-levels of communication, since they are the determiners of meaning on the primary level of consciousness. These meta-levels of communication were found necessary by Whitehead and Russell in their monumental work, Mathematica Principea (1910), to resolve many of the paradoxes that arose in the foundations of logic and mathematics when we were limited to only one primary level of discourse.” (p. 256)

Question: What determines the meaning on the primary level? Answer: The unconscious meta-levels. And that’s what has to be communicated to, addressed, and reframed for change to take place. It’s at that higher level that paradoxes can be resolved and people can get out of limiting perspectives and beliefs. “... Psychological problems have their genesis in the limitations of a consciousness that is restricted to one primary level of functioning.”

Rossi here comments on the problem of only communicating at the primary level. It is too limiting. Such conversations are too shallow. And that’s because it is governed by the higher frames-of-reference and so those frames have to be addressed since they set up how you interpret things at the primary level. “I now suspect that you [Erickson] are doing the same thing with hypnosis. Consciousness on a primary level is stuck within the limitations of whatever belief system (frame of reference, meta-level of communication) is giving meaning to its contents. Consciousness at any given moment is limited to whatever is within its focus of awareness, and it can manipulate only those contents within its focus on its own level. Consciousness cannot reach up and change the meta-structures, giving meaning to its contents; contents on the primary level cannot alter -173-

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contents on a secondary level above it; it is the secondary or meta-level that structures and gives meaning to the primary.” (p. 256)

Communicating only at the content level (the primary level) is too limiting because it does not enable you to change the frame. It has a problem— it “cannot reach up and change the meta-structures.” The order of influence is from above to below. The higher governs and determines the lower. This was Bateson’s conclusion as well and why hypnotic communications focuses from the top–down or inside-out. “Thus we may say that a patient is one who experiences the locus of his problem on the conscious or primary level, since he cannot make the contents of his conscious everyday experience what he wants them to be. He comes to the therapist and is really saying— “Help, help me with my meta-levels, my frames of reference, so that I will experience more comfort (adaptation, happiness, creativity, or whatever) on my primary level of conscious experience. I cannot change my own conscious experience because it is being determined by meta-structures outside the range of my own conscious control. So, Doctor, will you please work with my meta-structures up there so I can experience some relief down here?” (p. 256)

“Please work with my meta-structures up there...” is what your client would say if he could articulate his actual problem. But he can’t. He may not even know that the frame is the problem. Yet that is what is implied by the state of stuckness. “I’m stuck in my thoughts and ideas and emotions and I don’t know how to get un-stuck.” The problem is always with the metalevel frames-of-reference. The problem is always the frame and never the person. “Please work with my meta-structures up there!” “With your [Erickson] indirect approaches you are attempting to deal with structure on these meta-levels rather than the primary level of conscious experience. The patients usually do not know what you are doing because they are limited by the focal nature of consciousness to the contents on their primary levels of awareness.” (p. 256-257)

When clients are stuck, they are stuck in content. That’s what creates the limitations and it is what prevents them from seeing the frames that are imprisoning them. Hypnosis or hypnotic conversation offers one way to get to the meta-level structures (the frames) and escape the limitation of conscious awareness.

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“At present you are doing this someone as an art form. To make lefthemispheric science of this in the future, I believe we would need psychologists trained in symbolic logic to analyze the paradigms whereby you deal directly with a patient’s meta-structures. ... alternatively, we may find that these meta-levels are actually right-hemispheric styles of coping that have a peculiar logic of their own in the form of symbols, imagery, and all the non-rational forms of life experience that have been intuitively recognized as healing.” (p. 257)

Hypnotic thinking and speaking today mostly shows up as an art form rather than one that’s strictly governed by a scientific approach. But that could change. Today we focus the secret conversation on the “symbolic logic” (which includes psycho-logics) which the client uses. We use that language to gain access to the client’s paradigm and the client’s meta-structures. Communicating to the Meta-Structures What is deep inside a person, and usually outside of conscious awareness, is the meta-structures. We recognize these structures by numerous terms— beliefs, understandings, values, permissions, memories, imaginations, decisions, etc. In brain anatomy these are the higher functions that occur mostly in the frontal lobes. In the Meta-States Model, all of these metaterms (and there are over 100 of them) refer to how we humans build up multiple layers of constructs as we mentally map out our sense of reality. 1 At the primary level we are conscious. We are aware of the see-hear-feel referents around us and it is here that we have certain content. Say someone rolls her eyes as we talk and then when she responds, she talks quickly and directly. At the sensory level—that’s what is there. But how do we take it? What interpretations do we give it? We may take the rolling of the eyes as “dismissive.” We may take the direct talk as “a commanding tone,” as being “bossy” and “unthoughtful.” Whatever you assume that the empirical events mean reflects the secret conversation in the back of your mind. It is your inner world of your metastructures. It is your frames-of-reference which you use to interpret and translate the primary level experience. If a conversation is to be effective in enabling change, it must go to that level. And while we can do that consciously or unconsciously, hypnotic speaking does this unconsciously.

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As you work with the many conversations in this book and the previous one (Thinking Hypnotically, 2020), you are learning to engage in multi-level communicating. This will expand your ability to frame, deframe, and reframe, thereby increasing your communication, persuasion, and leadership skills. And, you can keep the conversation a secret or not. That’s your choice as well as the choice of the person with whom you’re communicating and the nature of your relationship. On to the Secret Conversations When you can recognize and communicate with the meta-structures that govern your mind or the mind of another person, you are in a position to have real conversations that will make a difference. Now you can communicate at multiple levels and get to the heart of things— the person’s meanings and how a person constructs those meanings. This is the heart of Neuro-Semantics and the focus in Meta-Coaching— going beyond the surface conversation and make the conversation real. We do that by fully embracing the primary level words and concerns as we begin. That grounds the conversation in real life. Then we move beyond and behind and above that level to the inner level of meaning construction— to the person’s semantics. That takes us into the person’s matrix of frames upon frames— the mental-emotional context of that person’s sense of reality. And that’s where and when the magic begins. Post-Hypnotic Suggestions Go to the meta-structures for the real conversation. The person is never the problem, the frame is the problem. Behind the actual words are the unspoken premises hidden away in the frames— touch that and magic occurs. End of the Chapter Notes 1. See Neuro-Semantics: Actualizing Meaning and Performance (2011) for a detailed list of 104 meta-levels. Neuro-Semantics and Meta-States: Mastering the Higher Levels of Mind (1994/2012) provide in-depth analysis of the hidden meta-structures.

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Fauconnier, G.; Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think. NY: Basic Books. Frances, Raymond. (2011). Never Fear Cancer Again, Deerfield, FL. Health Communications, Inc.

Hall, L. Michael. (1997). NLP: Going Meta with Logical Levels. Grand Jct. CO: Neuro-Semantic Publications.

Freedman, Jill; Combs, Gene. (1996). Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities. New York: W. W. Norton.

Hall, L. Michael; Bodenhamer, Bobby G. (1997/ 2005). Figuring Out People: Design Engineering with Meta-Programs. Wales: UK: Anglo-American Book Company.

Kershaw, Carol J. (1992). The Couple’s Hypnot i c Dance : Ericksonian Strategies for Marital Therapy. New York: Brunner/Mazel Publishers.

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Lakoff, George (1987). Women, Dire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Rossi, Ernest; Ryan, M.O. (Eds.) (1986). Mind-Body Communication in Hypnosis, Vol. III. New York: Ivington Publishers, Inc. Rossi, Ernest; Cheek, David. (1988). Mind-Body Therapy: Ideodynamic Healing in Hypnosis. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Langer, Ellen J. (1989). Mindfulness. New York: A Merloyd Lawrence book, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

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LeGault, Michael R. (2006). Th!nk: Why Crucial Decisions Can’t Be Made in the Blink of an Eye. New York: Threshold Editions.

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Lipton, Bruce. (2005). The Biology of Belief. Santa Rosa, CA: Mountain of Love Elite books. Miller, James Grier (1942). Unconsciousness. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Watzlawick, Paul. (1978). The Language of Change. New York: Basic Books. Wilson, Timothy D. (2020. Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unc onscious. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Wolinsky, Stephen. (1991). Trances People Live. CN: Falls Village: Bramble Company.

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L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. L. Michael Hall is a visionary leader in the field of NLP and Neuro-Semantics having been a modeler of human excellence for 30 years. Searching out areas of human expertise, he continues to model the structure of that experience and then turn that information into models, patterns, training manuals, and books. With his several businesses, Michael is also an entrepreneur and an international trainer. His doctorate is in the Cognitive-Behavioral sciences from Union Institute University. For two decades he worked as a psychotherapist in Colorado. When he found NLP in 1986, he studied and worked with Richard Bandler. Later when studying and modeling resilience, he developed the Meta-States Model (1994) that launched the field of Neuro-Semantics. He co-created the International Society of Neuro-Semantics (ISNS) with Dr. Bob Bodenhamer. Learning the structure of writing, he began writing and has written more than 60 books, many best sellers in the field of NLP. Applying NLP to coaching, he created the Meta-Coach System. This was codeveloped with Michelle Duval (2003-2007). He co-founded the Meta-Coach Foundation (2003), created the Self-Actualization Quadrants (2004) and launched the new Human Potential Movement (2005) which is now one of the Professional Tracks of Neuro-Semantics. In terms of creativity, Dr. Hall has created a dozen major models in the field of NLP and Neuro-Semantics, hundreds of patterns, and including the serial books, more than 75 books. He has created a board game for learning Meta-Programs, the Neuro-Semantic and Meta-Coach communities. He has also co-created the NLP Leadership Summit. Contact Information: P.O. Box 8 Clifton, Colorado 81520 USA (1-970) 523-7877 Website: www.neurosemantics.com

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Books by L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. NLP and Neuro-Semantics: 1) Meta-States: Mastering the Higher Levels of Mind (1995/ 2012). 2) Dragon Slaying: Dragons to Princes (1996 / 2000). 3) The Spirit of NLP: The Process, Meaning and Criteria for Mastering NLP (1996). 4) Languaging: The Linguistics of Psychotherapy (1996, spiral). 5) Becoming More Ferocious as a Presenter (1996, spiral book). 6) Patterns For Renewing the Mind (with Bodenhamer, 1997 /2006). 7) Time-Lining: Advance Time-Line Processes (with Bodenhamer, 1997). 8) NLP: Going Meta—Advance Modeling Using Meta-Levels (1997/ 2001). 9) Figuring Out People: Reading People Using Meta-Programs (with Bodenhamer, 1997, 2005). 10) SourceBook of Magic, Volume I (with Barbara Belnap, 1997). 11) Mind-Lines: Lines For Changing Minds (with Bodenhamer, 1997/ 2005). 12) Communication Magic (2001). Originally, The Secrets of Magic (1998). 13) Meta-State Magic: Meta-State Journal (1997-1999). 14) When Sub-Modalities Go Meta (with Bodenhamer, 1999, 2005). Originally, The Structure of Excellence. 15) Instant Relaxation (with Lederer, 1999). 16) User’s Manual of the Brain: Volume I (with Bodenhamer, 1999). 17) The Structure of Personality: Modeling Personality Using NLP and Neuro-Semantics (with Bodenhamer, Bolstad, and Harmblett, 2001). 18) The Secrets of Personal Mastery (2000). 19) Winning the Inner Game (2007), originally Frame Games (2000). 20) Games Fit and Slim People Play (2001). 21) Games for Mastering Fear (with Bodenhamer, 2001). 22) Games Business Experts Play (2001). 23) The Matrix Model: Neuro-Semantics and the Construction of Meaning (2003/2016). 24) User’s Manual of the Brain: Master Practitioner Course, Volume II (2002). 25) MovieMind: Directing Your Mental Cinemas (2002). 26) The Bateson Report (2002, spiral. 27) Make it So! Closing the Knowing-Doing Gap (2002). (Out of Print) 28) Source Book of Magic, Volume II, Neuro-Semantic Patterns (2003). 29) Propulsion Systems (2003, spiral). 30) Games Great Lovers Play (2004). 31) Coaching Conversation, Meta-Coaching, Volume II (with Michelle Duval & Robert Dilts 2004, 2010). 32) Coaching Change, Meta-Coaching, Volume I (with Duval, 2004/ 2015). 33) Unleashed: How to Unleash Potentials for Peak Performances (2007 Vol. III). 34) Self-Actualization Psychology (2008, Volume IV). 35) Achieving Peak Performance (2009, Volume V). 36) Unleashing Leadership: Self-Actualizing Leaders and Companies (2009, Vol VI). 37) The Crucible and the Fires of Change (2010, Volume VII). 38) Inside-Out Wealth (2010). 39) Benchmarking: The Art of Measuring the Unquantifiable (2011, Volume VIII). -182-

40) Innovations in NLP: Volume I (Edited with Shelle Rose Charvet; 2011). 41) Neuro-Semantics: Actualizing Meaning and Performance (2011) 42) Systemic Coaching: Coaching the Whole Person with Meta-Coaching (with Pascal Gambardella, Ph.D., 2012, Volume IX). 43) Group and Team Coaching (2013, Volume X). 44) Executive Coaching: Facilitating Excellence in the C-Suite (2014, Volume XI). 45) Political Coaching: Unleashing Self-Actualizing Politicians. (2015, Volume XII). 46) Collaborative Leadership, with Ian McDermott. (2016). 47) The Field of NLP with John Seymour and Richard Gray (unfinished). 48) The Meta-Coaching System (2015, Volume XIII). 49) Get Real: Unleashing Authenticity (2016, Volume XIV). 50) Inside-Out Persuasion (2017, Volume XV). 51) Creative Solutions (2017, Volume XVI). 52) Executive Thinking: Activating Your Highest Executive Thinking Potentials (2018). 53) NLP Secrets: Untold Stories (2019). 54) Thinking as a Modeler (2019). 55) Thinking Hypnotically to Unleash Potentials (2020). 56) Hypnotic Conversations for Unleashing Potentials (2020). Volume Books Books written in weekly installments to the Neuro-Semantic community (Neurons), to the Meta-Coaches egroup (Morpheus), to the Neuro-Semantic Trainers egroup (Framers). These are now PDF books on the Neuro-Semantic website. Neurons began as the Meta-Reflections in 2008 and each year consists of another book. 1) 2008. 2) 2009. 3) 2010. 4) 2011. 5) 2012. 6) 2013. 7) 2014. 8) 2015. 9) 2016. 10) 2017. 11) 2018. 12) 2019. Morpheus began as the Meta-Coach Reflections in 2009. 2) 2010. 3) 2011. 4) 2012. 5) 2013. 6) 2014. 7) 2015. 8) 2016. 9) 2017. 10) 2018. 11) 2019. Framers is the Trainers’ Reflections which began in 2010. 1) 2010. 2) 2011. 3) 2012. 4) 2013. 5) 2014. 6) 2015. 7) 2016. 8) 2017. 9) 2018. 10) 2019. Other books: 1) Emotions: Sometimes I Have Them/ Sometimes They have Me (1985) 2) Motivation: How to be a Positive Influence in a Negative World (1987) 3) Speak Up, Speak Clear, Speak Kind (1987) 4) Millennial Madness (1992), now Apocalypse Then, Not Now (1996). 5) Over My Dead Body (1996). Order Books from:

NSP: Neuro-Semantic Publications P.O. Box 8 Clifton, CO. 81520—0008 USA (970) 523-7877

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Neuro-Semantics as an Association In 1996 Hall and Bodenhamer registered “Neuro-Semantics” and founded The International Society of Neuro-Semantics (ISNS) as a new approach to teaching, training, and using NLP. The objective was to take NLP, as a model and field, to a higher level in terms of professional ethics and quality. Today Neuro-Semantics is one of the leading disciplines and movements within NLP as it is pioneering many new developments and demonstrating a fresh creativity similar to what characterized NLP when it was new. Dr. Hall is known as a prolific writer, having authored 60 books in the field of NLP, many of them best sellers through Crown House Publishes (Wales, UK) and many of them translated into numerous languages: German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Norwegian, Portuguese, etc. www.neurosemantics.com

The Meta-Coaching System As a complete and comprehensive coaching system, the Meta-Coaching System began in 2001 when L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. modeled four expert coaches. He then applied the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Neuro-Semantic models to the burgeoning field of Coaching. As a systemic model, the Meta-Coaching System enables a professional Coach to answer the question: How do you know what to do, when to do it, with whom to do it, how to do what you’re doing, and why? When you can think strategically as a Coach, you will be able to recognize where you are with a client and what to do. Having a theoretical model that answers the why are you doing that? question saves your coaching from being a grab-bag of tricks so you don’t have to coach-by-the-seat-of-your-pants. To meet this rigorous criteria, the Meta-Coaching System is based on eight models— models which are based in Cognitive-Behavioral, Developmental, and Self-Actualization psychologies. The design is to give Meta-Coaching a credible scientific basis. Then as a coach you will not fall back on what you “feel like” on a certain day, your “intuitions” (which may be your own unresolved issues), or some trick that you have picked up on a weekend training. Today Meta-Coaching standards are the highest in the field of Coaching as it offers specific behavioral benchmarks for every one of the 50 coaching skills. It also has developed a Benchmarking Intangibles Model for how to generate rigorous benchmarks for any value or skill. The Meta-Coaching System also has an accountability structure to the ethics and standards which governs every licenced Meta-Coach. There are now 16 books detailing the curriculum of Meta-Coaching, and several more in the works. The Meta-Coaching System is inclusive of other systems as Meta-Coaches around the world in 70 countries are often on the board of ICF and many other Coach training programs. Trainings in MetaCoaching occur every year dozens of times in every continent.

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Meta-Coaching Series In the field of Coaching, the Meta-Coaching System is a leading model in framing the process of effective coaching in a highly systematic way. The design is to provide a Professional Coach the ability to know what to do, when to do it, how to do it, with whom to do it, and why to do it. The design also is to establish the field of coaching in the unique psychology for psychologically healthy people who want to change and develop, namely, Self-Actualization Psychology. To achieve that Dr. Hall has committed to writing the models and processes in a series of books that comprise the curriculum of Meta-Coaching.

Volume

Meta-Coaching Series Title Model

I: II: III: IV: V: VI:

Coaching Change Axes of Change Model Coaching Conversations Facilitation Model Unleashed: Self-Actualization Self-Actualization Quadrants Self-Actualization Psychology Self-Actualization Volcano Achieving Peak Performance Meaning–Performance Axes Unleashing Leadership: Axes of Leadership Self-Actualizing Leaders & Companies VII: The Crucible The Crucible Model VIII: Benchmarking Intangibles Benchmarking Model IX: Systemic Meta-Coaching The Matrix Model X: Group & Team Meta-Coaching Group Trust Spiral XI: Executive Coaching XII: Political Coaching XIII: The Meta-Coaching System XIV: Get Real: Unleashing Authenticity XV: Inside-Out Persuasion XVI: Creative Solutions The Neuro-Semantic Precision Funnel Meta-Coaching also based on the following Books: Figuring Out People (2006) The Meta-Programs Model Secrets of Personal Mastery (1997) The Meta-States Model Winning the Inner Game (2007) The Meta-States Model The Matrix Model (2003) Neuro-Semantic Systems Model Communication Magic (1999) The Meta-Model of Language

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