Hypnotic Storytelling

How does the unconscious mind go about connecting metaphors to real life, and how can we enhance control this process?

In a nutshell- “transderivational search”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the NLP lingo transderivational search is the process by which the unconscious mind connects ongoing reality with our past experience.

So if I ask you to think of a dog, then you probably don’t think of some archetypal concept of dog. You’ll have an image of a particular dog. And once you have that image it will be easier to think of other examples that match “dog” and it will be easier to connect that with the smell of dog, the sound of dog, the feel of a dog’s coat and so on.

Similarly you will have had the experience of listening to someone tell you a story. Immediately you bring to mind similar experiences you have had or you have heard about.

This is an automatic and hardwired process that is a fundamental part of how the mind, in particular the pre-verbal, unconscious part of the mind works. We don’t yet have a formal understanding of this kind of associative logic but modern cognitive science has come along way to understanding the process through exploring the behaviour of simple “neural networks”

There are lots of ways of enhancing this associative process. Image streaming and free association are techniques you can use to build flexibility and speed in your own unconscious process. In fact many of the practises of magic such as Kabbalah (no I’m not talking about the modern Maddonna sponsored movement- don’t get me started on that!!) are about developing this associative faculty.

Other than this kind of training you can enhance and control this process by:

1) creating your own library of stories
2) Understanding the essential, underlying structure of those stories
3) having a set of pre frame stories that you can tell while giving your unconscious mind time to do its magic

Hope that helps.

Robin

How do I make stories a natural part of my communication, without spending an inordinate amount of time learning/preparing/practicing?

Stories are already a natural part of your communication. If you reflect on the conversations you have every day then you’ll realise just how much time we spend telling stories, whether we’re telling our family what we did this week or sharing experiences with a new friend.

If you wish to improve your storytelling in day to day communication simply take some time to consider the stories that you already tell and begin to examine your own personal experiences- the remarkable, extra-ordinary and memorable things that have happened to you.

The key to hypnotic storytelling is being aware of the effect that your stories are having on other people and to begin to consciously choose stories that will influence your audience in positive ways. It’s all about your intention.

All the best

Robin

I’m a therapist but fallen into a lull, a wilderness accompanied by a crisis of confidence. I often used to work telling stories about stories about…

Can I tell you a story?

You know sometimes when you’re a bit lost and you don’t know
quite how you’re going to get out of the rut you’ve dug for yourself?
I’ve had that a few times

When I was 25 I went on a voyage to find my roots!
I was born in Tanzania and lived there for 4 years
before coming to live in England.

So I went back there for the first time on my 25th birthday.
And I remember I went to visit the house we used to live in
and something deep inside, a really physical memory in the gut hit me,
a sense of place and my feet lead me up through the rocks and cotton fields
behind the house up to Elephant rock, the place I used to play as a child
and as I stood on this immense granite rock overlooking Lake Victoria
I felt a sense of urgency and a rush of energy that seemed to flow
right through from my feet all the way out the top of my head
and I felt like I was looking out over the landscape of my live,
both the past and the future and it seemed for a moment that I glimpsed
the inevitability of certain patterns playing themselves out in my life, weaving their own story.
The places that I return to, the friends, the lovers I return to, the hobbies interests and games I return to.

In that realisation there was a sense of freedom: as long as you keep doing what you keep doing, you’ll keep getting what you keep getting. And when you change anything, however small or simple in what you do, you’ll change what your getting.

Now sometimes you have to be confident that its enough of a crisis to lull you out of the wilderness and while it can be wild being confident in a crisis, a crisis you got through already can lull you into a sense of confidence. And where does that get you?

What are the places and who are the people you return to? What gives you strength? Do you remember how to play?

Yours

Robin

Well the simple answer to this is ALL OF THEM!

Stories provide the ideal framework in which to use hypnotic language and embedded commands. They engage the conscious mind and involve the unconscious mind in understanding and interpreting. Stories are themselves hypnotic when they draw the listener into a state of focused attention where they are fully involved in the story.

Of course your story needs to be interesting and relevant and if you have an intention in mind then the story you tell will need to be “isomorphic” in some way with the current situation of your audience.

Once you have that basic framework in hand then you are free to use all of the hypnotic language you know. If you have done your preparation then you will already know that certain key words and phrases have an important meaning for your listener. These are the most powerful hypnotic words you can use and they will of course be different for everyone.

Other than that it is hypnotic language PATTERNS rather than specific words that you will use in your stories and this is only limited by the extent of your knowledge and by the degree to which you have drilled these patterns to unconscious competence.

Some of the most important patterns include

Nesting loops
Presuppositions
Linkage phrases
Cause-effect
Complex equivalence
False choice
Embedded commands and so on.

We cover all the hypnotic language patterns in the Hypnotic Storytelling program and of course Igor Ledochowski’s best selling course “The Power of Conversational Hypnosis” is an ideal introduction to learning these patterns.

All the best

Robin

“I am a leftbrain thinker, who really stuggles to visualise. I have tried a few training programmes and always tend to hit that brick wall when I reach the point they say “remember how it was”, or” imagine a time”. Would the Hypnotic Storytelling prgramme get me beyond this?”

Hi, The hypnotic storytelling programme can help you with this: we use all kinds of exercises that are designed to build the flexibility with which you can create vivid sensory experiences for yourself.

But I’m not the kind of guy who would sell you a computer when what you need is a pencil.

People have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the flexibility with which they are able to use their imagination. Some people can hear a full 60 piece orchestra in their minds. Some people can vividly create images with the kind of quality and detail that others only get in dreams. This flexibility is a natural consequence of, inate preferences, training and good old fashioned luck.

You say you are a “leftbrain thinker” and logically you will realise that unless you have had a major brain operation then you have a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere and both of those work together ALL THE TIME ALREADY.

You already visualise all the time. If you have any doubt about that try this exercise.

Think of two people you know very well.
Who has longer hair?
Who is taller?

If you can answer these two questions then your ability to visualise is working just fine.

I would suggest that what you are struggling with is your EXPECTATIONS of what you think visualising should be.

When I reflect on my own internal images i find that for some memories I have very sharp colourful, still “eidetic” images- what they call a “photographic memory”. For other memories the images are much less clear, they seem to flicker, or just appear briefly. When I imagine something in the future usually the images seem transparent as if overlaid on a dark background. Other times I am not even consciously aware of seeing anything but I have a SENSE that I am imagining something.

When I work one on one with clients who say they have difficulty visualising then I will often say “Just pretend to imagine that …” or even “imagine that you can imagine .. such and such” The results are the same as a straight forward “imagine that you can …”

So my suggestion to you would be first QUIT STRUGGLING and realise that even though you are not yet visualising in the way that you would wish to, nether-the-less, those training programs will probably work anyway. Second, if you want to improve your ability to visualise then START TRAINING.

Here are a list of some techniques that you can use to develop your ability to visualise.

1) Sensory overlap.

Sit your self comfortably with your hands on your lap and look down at your hands. Close your eyes and feel the position of your hands, the weight, the temperature. Rub your fingers together. Do the same with your eyes open. pretend you can see your hands with your eyes closed. Keep moving between what you can feel and what you can see.

2) Image streaming

Close your eyes and begin to describe out loud what you can see. “I can see a mix of blurry red and black, the after image of the lamp shade, patterns of colours spinning like a disc, a flash of an image of someone I’m meeting later …. ” and so on. You will quickly find that the confusion of light and colour frequently resolves into surprising images.

3) Object contemplation.

I practise this by simply looking out at the world, closing my eyes and imagining what I’ve just seen and going back and forth between these two as I notice the differences. It’s easiest to start with something a bit simpler and bolder. Get some clean white paper and draw a big red square, a green triangle, a blue circle, a black oval- anything will do really but these examples have a particular esoteric significance which I won’t go into right now.

Take these shapes one at a time and practise looking at them, closing your eyes and recreating the image, looking at the image … and so on. Practise until you can hold an image of that simple shape in your minds eye for 5 seconds or more.

By the time you can do this you will be better at visualising than 80% of the population!!!

All the best

Robin

I am a student of hypnosis, and have an interest in understanding NLP but find that part heavy going from a technical point of view, this may be due to my father when i was a child, although clever enough he always wanted better and was quite forceful with it, to a point where i think i created a blockage when it came to exams, written work and technical stuff. And although with perseverence i have completed full time studies at college and in work enviroments, i must confess it doesn’t get any easier.
I wondered perhaps if you have any advice you may care to offer?

I was just talking to a friend of mine yesterday. She was preparing for a maths exam today and her maths teacher had told her that everything was fine, she knew the material and she had no problems with the exam. But she told me, “Everytime I sit down and look at the page it’s like I have this physical sensation as if a blind is coming down in front of my eyes and I just go blank”

It reminded me of a story that my flatmate had told me. She said that when she was a child, one day in maths class she had been really pleased with herself because she had finished the maths assignment before anyone else and she was pretty sure she had got all the questions right. She was so pleased that she went to the front of the class and handed over her maths book to the teacher. There she stood, in front of the whole class, holding her breath she was so excited, hopping from one foot to the other.

Well her teacher must have been in a bad mood that day because he marked her assignment and noticed that she had got one of the questions wrong. And do you know what he did? He threw the book at her and shouted at her to do it again!!

Can you believe that? When I heard that story I was so angry I wanted to go back in time and find that teacher and give him a piece of my mind!! I wanted to take that exercise book and stick it … well lets leave that unsaid. I just couldn’t believe that anyone could be so thoughtless and unkind.

And it got me thinking about all the teachers I’ld had in my life- the ones who had been really supportive and had encouraged me to be my best; and the bad ones who seemed to have no idea about how children learn- or they just didn’t care.

Well I was lucky. Both my parents were teachers who had a love of learning so I had two really good models to help me on my own educational journey. But it also taught me early on that teachers were human too. And sometimes they had good days and bad days. And they could only do the best they knew how based on what they’ld learned and how they had been treated.

And the fact is that most of my teachers at school, when they were children, had been taught to memorise lots of information under the threat of the slipper or the cane. So its not surprising they didn’t know any better. In fact the best teachers I had were people who had come to teaching later in life, after they had had some life experience in business and industry, or after they had brought up their own families.

I was talking about this with my friend Rosie. Now Rosie had been really bright at school and had won a scholarship when she was 14. But then things went a bit crazy, she had some family difficulties and not surprisingly her school work suffered.

Rosie loved writing and her Dad was a writer and she told me that as she was growing up nothing she did was ever good enough, he would always find some fault or compare what she did to something that was better. Of course he wanted to inspire her, to show her how to do better. But the lesson she got was, she just wasn’t ever good enough to please him. Because her dad didn’t realise that when you are learning something new, you need encouragment and appreciation for what it is that you are doing well. The more encouragement and appreciation you get, the better you feel and the easier it becomes to stay motivated and to start to realise for yourself what it is you need to learn next.

And I already new just how smart Rosie was; just how perceptive. I mean she nailed my character and my habitual patterns right on the head very soon after she met me. She’s creative, intuitive. She has everything it takes be a great writer. All she needs is the encouragement and appreciation to do what she does well and to start to delight in that.

Like my flatmate, when she realised that her fear of learning and her feeling of not being good enough was down to this stupid, angry teacher: well first she got mad. Then she got sad. Then she got determined. She decided that she wasn’t going to let this experience from the past hold her back. She asked me to do a session with her and all I had to do was take her back through all the positive experiences, all the amazing things that she had managed to acheive even with this silly handicap from the past. We added in some other positive resources like confidence and excitement and curiosity and a sense of play and when she was feeling really good we anchored those feelings to the situations in which she wished to learn things in a new way. She rehearsed these feelings and imagined succeeding in the way that she wanted to.

I can tell you, she’s racing ahead now- unstoppable!!

Well with my friend who was preparing for a maths exam today it was even easier. I just told her that story and she laughed at me and said- “I know what your doing, you sneaky magician you!”

And I said “That’s right. And just because you know what I’m doing doesn’t mean you can’t not laugh your way through that exam does it?

Realise just how amazing it is that you have accomplished so much in your life already, even though you’ve had to struggle. Start to belief that learning will get easier for you. It’s not who you are, its just what you learnt. You can learn to do it in a new way.

Yours

Robin