How to use hypnotic stories without coming across as strange and manipulative.

January 9, 2012

Several people asked a version of this question: How do you use hypnotic stories without coming across as a complete douchebag? Well for a start there’s an important point to get clear about here.  If you are deliberately using a story to influence someone, to get them to change their mind about something then you ARE being [...]

The Four Essential Elements Of Compelling Stories

December 14, 2011

The Last Bee Video

December 9, 2011

  I thought I’d quickly finish off the “Bee” series of video’s before getting round to answering some of the questions that have been coming in. In this video I talk about how stories are used to deliver “lessons” and how the same story can be used to illustrate different points depending on how it [...]

Using stories in social situations 1

September 22, 2011
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  In this penultimate video in the Bee series  I take a look at using stories in social situations. One of the most useful purposes of stories in this context is that they act as a vehicle or routine for you to demonstrate your personality.  It’s the amount of emotion, passion, humour and energy you [...]

Using stories in therapy 1

September 16, 2011
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  A story about therabee. I know it’s a really bad joke but I couldn’t resist it.  As those of you who have been paying attention to the last couple of videos will notice I am talking a lot about this silly little bee.  There’s a good reason for that.  You see useful stories don’t [...]

Stories and Archetypes

September 9, 2011
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An archetype is a symbol or pattern that stands as a prototype or “typical example” of a set of characters or stories.  You’ll come across the term in many places including the psychology of Jung. Joseph Campbell wrote about stories and archetypes in his work on “The Hero’s Journey”. Now some people will tell you [...]

Where do stories come from?

September 1, 2011
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One of the most common questions I get asked is “Where do you get your stories from”.  The simple answer is it’s just stuff that happens.  Anything that happens to you can be turned into a useful story, it’s just a question of how you look at it, how you tease out the tacit messages [...]

Lies, Lies and more Damn Lies- The Truth about Storytelling

April 7, 2011
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I should tell you straight. I’m a liar, a cheat and a trickster.  It’s my job.  Specifically, in the context of this blog you should know that I consistently change names, gender and the specific details of case histories in order to protect the identity of my clients.  And in my sessions with people I [...]

The Dark Side of Hypnotic Storytelling.

March 3, 2011
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When I first became fascinated by what you could achieve by combining the power of hypnosis with the power of storytelling I used to talk about what I was learning with a great friend of mine. He hated it. He hated the mechanistic way that hypnosis and NLP talked about communication. He hated most of [...]

Using Stories to Overcome Fear.

February 19, 2011
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One of the most useful ways you can use stories in a business or personal context is to overcome peoples fear of change. In the context of change we can identify three stages. 1) The current situation 2) The change process 3) The desired end result. Both the change process and the end result can [...]

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